CODENAME TARRAGON

Stefan Moglyubin in the Second Chechen Campaign was attached to an FSB unit called “Wolverines” that specialized in assassinating Chechen separatist leaders who were just asking for it. They’d plant bombs under cars and set up sniper’s nests on the top of any buildings that weren’t already rubble.

Moglyubin was known as “Cold-Blood” in his unit because as they were clearing a city block in the siege of Grozny in 2001 or some Godforsaken year, he shot several fleeing civilians in the back with his AEK-971, including a pregnant Chechen woman. It wasn’t an accident, not by the stretch of anyone’s imagination. He shot her because she ran and honestly he felt like killing someone, and it couldn’t be explained away to their commanding officer Dzhinin. Moglyubin got chastised for it but it was very soft as Dzhinin was known to be a limp-wristed fairy who would never dare to cross his own men.

Moglyubin spent his down time in Chechen operations reading comic books. Yeah sure, Batman and Spider-Man and Wolverine but he liked to stray away from all that from time to time. He was an intellectual. One of his favorites was Tintin in the Congo. Where Tintin, who was this Belgian kid, went to the Congo to educate all the backward savages with the big lips and shoot every animal in sight. Groo the Wanderer was another favorite with the intricately detailed drawings with tons of hidden by-play and with the witch Arba who like many women Sergio Aragones drew was easy on the eyes, slim with big tits, holding a magic frog. He had a Metal Hurlant from the late 70s with the pages stuck together because there was a story by Richard Corben in it that was full of sex. These books circulated throughout the Wolverines unit but he always got them back, you don’t steal from Cold-Blood. Moglyubin couldn’t read English or French so he just looked at the pictures and filled in the dialogue himself.

2006, the year they kidnapped Maria Gravelle in Copenhagen there were protests throughout the Muslim world over some Danish cartoons dishonoring the Prophet Muhammad. People were dying by the scores in protests in Nigeria and Malaysia all through that year and Moglyubin read the news and thought it was a riot. Dumb idiots. He laughed at them and their protests. If he had to describe himself he would say that he was a free speech radikalny. Anybody should be able to draw anything and if whole parts of the world didn’t like it they could eat hot dogshit. And as for retaliating against Denmark they could taste anti-terrorist steel. 

The kidnapping of Maria, once they hustled the girl into the car they’d left Moglyubin on the streets of Copenhagen. He figured he was off for the night when they left him stranded and went to a nightclub downtown where he got into a fight with two guys he knew just enough Danish to call sodomites, he broke one guy’s hand like a pretzel and knocked the wind out of another with a blow to the windpipe. They were punks and he knew they would take their lickings like men even though they weren’t men, meaning they wouldn’t go to the cops which Moglyubin appreciated. When he caught up with Klorofil halfway across God’s creation they’d already killed the Turk and were figuring out how to dispose of the corpse and Moglyubin was thankful that they left him out of it because he’d had a long night already and he was sick of Klorofil’s shit like he was the rooster of the operation.

The way he first met Yevgeni Klorofil was a odd story. They were introduced to each other on an operation in Thailand assigned by the SVR, an assassination operation which was why Moglyubin was put on board. The target was a spy codenamed TARRAGON who was in Phuket staying in a resort on the beaches. This was a few months before the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 unleashed a wave of death and turned the beach into a field of bodies bloating and ballooning in the sun. TARRAGON would only be in Thailand a few days. Moglyubin found out that Klorofil knew the man from his travels, they were friends in that they moved in some of the same circles. The kind of friends that kill each other one day. 

Moglyubin asked Klorofil why they were killing this man but Klorofil never answered in detail. Instead he said, “TARRAGON is an opinion maker. One that Russia wants silenced. To paraphrase, ‘One does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it. One applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.’ You, Stefan, are the oilcan.”

Klorofil lured the man to a location on a busy street in Phuket and Moglyubin’s job was to administer a slow-acting poison to his kway teow or noodle soup when he wasn’t looking. TARRAGON was a tall rangy American man with tattoos and a face that had seen tough times, and he was with a fast party girl who annoyed everybody but probably gave head like a champion. Klorofil, once they were seated around a card table set up on the busy street choked with tourists, and once the food had been ordered, managed to take TARRAGON off to talk privately about world affairs while they pretended to look for cigarettes. Moglyubin was left to stare at the party girl who had gross dyed-red Kool Aid hair. She sneered at him and went off to find the two others. The noodle soup came along with the rest of the food and Moglyubin quickly applied a few drops of the N14, a toxin undetectable but which would cause lethal heart attack symptoms within ten hours. He’d studied the instructions from SVR Central which said that three drops would kill any man. TARRAGON was a heavy smoker so it was thought that the heart attack would be plausible. When he and Klorofil returned with the party girl in tow, Moglyubin gave Klorofil the signal that the toxin was in place. They talked. Moglyubin and the dumb girl stayed silent. Klorofil who knew upwards of nine languages engaged TARRAGON in all kinds of conversation and laughed a lot while TARRAGON’s weathered face stayed stonier than Easter Island. He ate the kway teow though. But so did the party girl. They shared. Collateral damage, Moglyubin thought, although he knew Klorofil would be angry because two concurrent deaths would indicate foul play to even the thickest Thai policeman, and they would have to plug up all kinds of holes.

After the meeting Klorofil said goodbye to the doomed couple, and the two Russians got the fuck out of the country. They caught a plane, covered their traces and went to Vietnam. And waited. Through his careful professional probing a day later Klorofil got wind of a strange case of a Thai prostitute dropping dead of a heart attack at a trance party in Phuket. They found other party drugs in her system so it was pretty open and shut. No news of TARRAGON. SVR Central wanted to know what happened.

It was a gloomy atmosphere when Moglyubin returned to their Saigon hotel room after an excursion to buy cocaine, to see Klorofil sitting by the phone in the dark and smoking. Moglyubin didn’t know Yevgeni Klorofil well at all, but he could tell the man he looked at was in a monstrous mood. 

“How much of the toxin did you put in there?” Klorofil asked.

“Three drops. Enough to kill a horse.”

“TARRAGON lives.”

“Bullshit.”

Klorofil got out his secure SVR smartphone and started fiddling with it. Moglyubin waited in the hotel room with his teeth in his mouth like an idiot. Klorofil got up and angrily thrust the smartphone at Moglyubin. “This isn’t current, but it’s him.”

Moglyubin watched the video on the small screen as there were shots of some Third World street scene, something like where they’d eaten in Phuket. It was a TV show, well-produced and edited. Moglyubin was about to ask what the fuck when he heard it. The voice. TARRAGON appeared on screen, talking to the camera in indecipherable English as he made his way through the busy street with another man. TARRAGON towered above all the little brown people. They approached a vendor. Ordered a taco and a beer.

The host of the show ate the taco.

“His real name is Anthony Bourdain,” Klorofil said. “We’ve been trying to stamp him out for years, as well as a fuckload of other intelligence services.”

“Anthony Bourdain?” Moglyubin asked, astonished. “How do I know that name?”

“You didn’t recognize him? I thought you were playing it cool when we met him. I was giving you credit for subtlety. Now I know it was your stupidity.”

Moglyubin handed the phone back to Klorofil who threw it onto the bed in disgust. “He’s alive. He’s in transit to god knows where to shoot his show.”

“He should be dead.”

“No kidding. We thought the poison would bring him down. We were wrong. It turns out he eats whole snakes and pig anuses in Namibia. He eats street food all over the world. SVR didn’t count on the fact that he can stomach anything.”

“Why him? Why kill him?”

“He’s an operative, you stupid fuckface!”

Moglyubin stood, his face showing no ripples. “You must be joking.”

“No joke. A freelancer. He has excellent cover. He’s a journalist who travels all over the world. He’s like a chameleon. He’s done untold damage to governments all over the world, including us.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Who would suspect him?”

It was true. TARRAGON slipped in and out of foreign countries, meeting all varieties of people in all manner of circles. He was a celebrity so everybody wanted to meet with him. Two years later, in the summer of 2006, just as the Russians were kidnapping the American bitch in Copenhagen, TARRAGON was filming an episode of his show “No Reservations” in Beirut with his crew when the 2006 Lebanon war just “happened” to break out. Bourdain met other spies partying at Sky Bar on the first night of Israeli bombing, then spent a week at the Royal Hotel hobnobbing around the pool while the airport was being bombed and everyone was trapped. He avoided active kidnap plots and exchanged tidbits about Hezbollah activities with shady individuals in back rooms at the hotel before being exfiltrated on the beach by the US Marines. It was too outrageous to suspect. And all true, Klorofil assured him.

TARRAGON and Klorofil continued to casually bump into each other in various locales around the world as the years went on. TARRAGON was always careful around the Russian. His appetite had vanished. Maybe he knew about the noodle soup from the first. He was a brave, no-nonsense man and more than once he leveled with Klorofil and confessed he worried one day he would buy it at the hands of someone like Klorofil who would make it look like an accident or suicide.

by Jesse Hilson

Jesse Hilson is a freelance reporter living in the Catskills in New York State. His work has been published in AZURE, Maudlin House, Pink Plastic House, ExPat Press, Misery Tourism, Rejection Letters, Windows Facing Windows Review, Murderous Ink Press, and elsewhere. His novel BLOOD TRIP is being published in April 2022 by Close to the Bone. He can be reached on Twitter and Instagram @platelet60