Black Flag: A Taskforce Story by Brad Taylor Page A

big-ass bear of a man to a vodka-drinking contest, and the image would be complete.
    Sotto voce, Jennifer said, “This place looks like the cantina in
Star Wars
.”
    I chuckled and said, “Wrong movie. Come on. We’ve got thirty minutes before the meet. Let’s see if we can blend in that long.”
    We found a table in the corner, and I checked my phone, seeing I had lost service yet again. The cellular infrastructure inside Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was pathetic to say the least. It was making our surveillance effort very difficult, but in truth no harder than it had been for our commando forefathers who worked through the Cold War. It just meant we had to go old-school.
    I keyed the radio strapped to my leg and leaned into Jennifer, as if I was talking to her. “Knuckles, you staged?”
    “Yes. We got a box. You send the photo and trigger, and we’ll do the rest.”
    “Roger all.”
    Jennifer glanced at her watch and said, “This guy is cutting it close.”
    “I know. He’s not stupid. He’s aware of the curfew, and he’s going to use it.”
    Nobody was allowed to walk around after eleven at night in the capital, but really that was a crapshoot. A lot of people did, and the police then usually picked on the westerners to fleece for bribes. Or other unsavory things. There had been reports of them arresting women, taking them to jail, then extorting sexual favors. It would make a surveillance effort after the witching hour very, very hard.
    “What if he doesn’t show? Are we going to push it and try again tomorrow or head to Gonur?”
    “We still have forty-eight hours. One more night. If he doesn’t show then, we’re leaving for Gonur. We can’t blow off the contract. This was just a freebie anyway.”
    Gonur was a four-thousand-year-old archeological site set in the middle of the Kara-Kum desert, and we, as the proud owners of a company called Grolier Recovery Services, had been hired to help a team of experts take a look at the dig. Well, at least that’s what the government of Turkmenistan thought.
    In reality, we were a cover corporation using counterterrorist operators as employees, all working for an organization so removed from the traditional US defense and intelligence infrastructure it didn’t even have a real name. We simply called it the Taskforce, and it had sent us to Turkmenistan to identify a wealthy Saudi Arabian who was funding the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, our cover took precedence over the mission, so if we didn’t locate the contact, we were looking at spending a few days sweating in the desert. Something Jennifer would love. She enjoyed anything and everything dealing with old crap.
    She waved her hand in front of her face, trying to clear the smoke, while she surveyed the bar, looking for our linkage target. She said, “I can’t believe Pedro would meet a rich Saudi in this dump. Why not in a mosque? Or any number of coffee shops? The intel seems off to me.”
    Pedro was our nickname for a terrorist affiliated with the IMU. He was all set to be removed from the playing field in Uzbekistan when the Taskforce learned he was meeting a contact in Ashgabat. They decided to see if we could identify the contact, implant a collection device in his personal effects, and try to swim upstream to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the end state being identification of the money man.
    I said, “The mosques here are all owned by the government. In fact, the government monitors everything here, like it’s still part of the Soviet Union. He’d need someplace noisy. Someplace that self-defeats the bugs all over this damn country.”
    Which was why we wouldn’t be doing anything overt against Pedro. Much easier to take him down when he returned to Uzbekistan. Our mission was pure snoop and poop. No high adventure.
    I went to the bar, happy to see a smattering of Europeans, including one old couple clearly forcing themselves to enjoy the “culture.” Jennifer