Frozen Conflict (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  That wasn’t going to help if he went in through the gate, though. Then there would be no disguising the fact that he was with the group inside, and was therefore a target for whoever was watching the house. He was already mentally adjusting his route as he came alongside the first running car.

  There were two men sitting in the front. One was pointedly watching him, while the other one watched the safehouse gate. He took that picture in out of the corner of his eye; if he stared back at the idiot eyeballing him, he’d definitely be made. So he just shuffled along, his eyes focused on nothing in particular, letting his awareness open up, taking in details he might not have otherwise seen with his peripheral vision.

  The guy who was watching him followed him for a few paces, until he came in line with the gate and kept going. Then, he could almost feel the man dismiss him. Just some hapless pedestrian, out late at night in the snow. A bit out of the ordinary, perhaps, but not relevant to their mission.

  He got a decent glimpse of the guys in the front seats of the van as it pulled up next to the other running car. He was now pretty sure they weren’t cops. The Moldovan police wouldn’t have this many undercover men committed to one suspected arms smuggler. At least, he didn’t think so.

  Cops or bad guys, it ultimately didn’t matter. Getting rolled up by either one would mean the mission was blown. So, he kept going, passing the safehouse by without a second glance, his arms folded, holding his shopping bag with its illegal contents close against his chest.

  He got to the end of the street and continued following it around the corner. There were no running cars on this stretch; all the parked vehicles had thick coverings of snow over them. So, whoever was watching the house was focused on the front, apparently. Good.

  He kept going past the next compound and found a narrow alley between the fences. Hoping that he wasn’t being watched from behind, unwilling to risk his “harmless local” act, he simply turned into the alley without looking around.

  Only once he was a couple paces away from the street did he alter his pace, breaking into a jog. The snow was piled fairly deeply back in the alley, so it wasn’t a fast jog, but it was going to get him away from the street more quickly than his shuffling walk would have.

  He came to the end of the alley and swore in Georgian, clamping his mouth shut on the curse. He couldn’t afford that kind of slip. He needed to stick to Russian while he was out here. But that didn’t solve his problem, either.

  The next compound shared a fence with the one to his right. Which meant there wasn’t an alley leading toward the safehouse. He was going to have to cut across a yard.

  He didn’t dither or dawdle. He’d been in too many scrapes. He just put the handles of the shopping bag in his teeth, which immediately began to ache from the weight, put his hands up on the top of the fence, and started over.

  It briefly occurred to him that if the neighbors had dogs, this could turn out very badly. But the back yard was empty, aside from the piles of junk under the snow. He dropped softly to the ground, crouched by what looked like a dead refrigerator, and listened.

  There was no sound. The snow was muffling anything past a couple dozen yards, anyway, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t been followed. Taking the bag out of his teeth, he hurried across the yard toward the back fence, which butted up against the safehouse’s brick wall.

  There was another junk pile, obscured by a thick blanket of snow, right up against the fence, which would make it easier to get over. He tested it with a hand first, to make sure it wasn’t about to collapse with a catastrophic clatter as soon as he put his weight on it, and something shifted. Screw that. He moved a few feet over, reached up, and clambered up over the compound wall.

  I’m actually really glad those guys don’t have guns right now. There’d been no way to call ahead and announce his changed route. If it had been him, somebody climbing the back fence would have been cause for alarm, gunshots, and a breakout drill.

  But the safehouse was silent and dark. Unwilling to go around front, he ducked into the narrow space between the house and the brick wall and reached up to knock on the nearest window.

  After a long moment, it cracked open. “Xbox,” Wade whispered.

  Javakhishvili grimaced. I can’t believe I’m about to say this. Next time I’m picking the passwords. He hadn’t figured Wade to be the nerd to come up with their challenge and pass. “PC Master Race,” he replied.

  The window rasped the rest of the way open, and Wade reached down a big hand. Javakhishvili handed the shopping bag up, then grabbed the sill with both hands and did a pullup, dragging himself through the window.

  “That challenge and pass is stupid, have I mentioned that?” he muttered, as he picked himself up off the floor.

  “That’s what I said,” Curtis replied.

  “What have you got?” Brannigan asked, ignoring the byplay. For once, Flanagan hadn’t responded to Curtis, and the smaller man had glanced over at his friend’s stony face with some consternation.

  “There are at least three vehicles surveilling the house,” Javakhishvili reported. “Two sedans and a van that pulled up as I was approaching. I don’t think they’re cops.”

  Brannigan nodded. “Childress spotted the two cars an hour ago.”

  “Opposition?” Hancock asked. “Or do you think Gorev’s pulling a double-cross?”

  “If I had to pick between the two, I’d say Gorev,” Javakhishvili said, brushing at his wet hair. “They’ve got that ‘mafiya’ look to them.” He’d been around the Bratva enough over the years to be able to pick out certain indicators.

  “Can we get out the back?” Santelli asked.

  “They’re not watching the back,” Javakhishvili replied. “I think so.”

  Flanagan was digging into the shopping bag. “Damn, Herc, where’d you find these?” He pulled the two Tokarev TT-30s out of the bottom of the bag.

  “There are always places to find useful things at odd hours, if you know where to look,” Javakhishvili said with some self-satisfaction. He’d managed to sniff out one of the local arms dealers, in a seedy part of town just outside the industrial district, and score two of the old Soviet pistols, along with four magazines and fifty rounds of 7.62x25mm Tokarev ammunition. It wasn’t a lot, but it was more than they’d had, and of somewhat more use than a couple of broken chair legs and a bike chain. There was also vodka, Kvint, cigarettes, and some hastily forged documents in the bag, along with eleven bus tickets.

  “I got us passage to Rezina,” he said, “the town just across the river from Ribnitza, where our target is. Buses don’t go across into Transnistria these days, so we’re going to have to work something else out there, but I didn’t figure that trying to take that GAZ out of here was going to work all that well, especially after the cops saw it.”

  “Good thinking,” Brannigan said, reaching for the wad of tickets. “When does the bus leave?”

  “That’s the thing,” Javakhishvili said. “Not until ten in the morning. Which means we’ve got eleven hours to kill.”

  He’d barely finished speaking when Childress’ voice came down the stairs from the loft. “Uh, guys?” he called. “We’ve got company. And they don’t look like our fat cop and his friends, this time.”

  Brannigan hurried to the window, glad that they’d decided to leave the lights off. There was no way that their unwelcome visitors could see inside, even if they had been in the yard. Unfortunately, all he could see was the brick wall of the compound fence outside. Childress could see over the top.

  “Talk to me, Sam,” he called up the stairs.

  “Looks like about half a dozen,” he said. “I can’t see what they’re carrying, but I think they’re armed.”

  “Do they look like cops or paramilitaries?” Santelli asked.

  “Are there paramilitaries in Moldova?” Bianco whispered, but Flanagan shushed him.

  “No, they look like regular dudes,” Childress said. “Most of ‘em are short, but there’s one fuck
ing monster in the lead. He might have a pistol. I think at least one or two of the others have Krinkovs, but I can’t be sure.”

  Brannigan grimaced as he looked around the room. The AKS-74U, known colloquially as the “Krinkov” in the West, wasn’t a particularly accurate or reliable weapon, and he’d heard that it was pretty roundly hated by the Spetsnaz who were issued it. But in close quarters it didn’t have to be that accurate.

  “All right,” he said. “Give me one of the Tokarevs.” Flanagan tossed him the pistol, then slid two magazines across the table. Brannigan snatched the weapon out of the air, pulling back the slide and sticking his pinky into the chamber to check it. It was too dark inside the house at that point to do a visual press-check. Hancock had already stepped forward and started jamming one of the magazines from the disintegrating cardboard box of 7.62x25. Brannigan started doing the same.

  “Here’s the plan,” he said. “Two guys on the stairs, with improvised weapons. We flip the table and put it…” He looked around the room again in the dark. “There, between the post and the stairway.” That would put the table right in the natural walkway toward the stairs leading up to the roof. “Joe and I will be behind it with the Tokarevs. We engage anyone coming through the door, then fall back to the steps if and when we run dry. Everybody else will be up in the loft, with whatever heavy stuff you can grab, in case the first four of us can’t stop ‘em.”

  He quickly slapped a magazine into the Tokarev’s grip, racked the slide, and carefully press-checked it, feeling for the round with his thumb, as the gate outside creaked, announcing their visitors’ approach. “Move.”

  Chapter 8

  Footsteps scraped on the step outside the front door, and a voice murmured in the dark. It didn’t sound like Romanian to Brannigan’s ears, but he couldn’t be sure. He crouched behind the overturned, heavy timber table, the Tokarev leveled at the doorway. He’d have to rely on instinct honed by years and years of pistol shooting; the old Russian semi-automatic didn’t have night sights. He could only see the vaguest suggestion of a glint of light off the worn slide in the faint glow coming in the curtained windows.

  The door shook under a heavy impact. Brannigan kept his breathing slow and even, his finger resting right on the outside of the trigger guard. That hadn’t been a knock. Someone had just tried to kick the locked door in.

  There was a crack from the door on the third blow, and then the jamb gave way on the fourth, the door shuddering open, revealing the silhouette of a big man holding a pistol extended in his fist. There was a muttered curse in what sounded like Russian or Ukrainian, and the man started fumbling in his coat pocket for something.

  Brannigan didn’t give him a chance to find whatever it was. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  He’d fired Tokarevs before, and they generally had decent triggers. This one was an exception. The trigger pull had to be ten pounds if it was an ounce. He had to concentrate to keep the gun from wobbling as he squeezed, his big hands clenching around the grip. It seemed to take an eternity, as the big guy in the doorway found the flashlight he’d been looking for and flicked it on.

  The trigger broke just as the light blazed.

  Flanagan’s pistol must have been in similar shape, because both Tokarevs barked at almost the same instant. The reports were deafeningly loud inside the house, and Brannigan’s ears were immediately ringing.

  He’d pointed, rather than aimed, and as such he’d made sure he was pointed roughly center-mass. He saw the big man jerk as the bullet tore into his chest, a fraction of a second before Flanagan’s shot blasted through his skull, snapping his head back and sending him toppling backward off the step, falling into the guy who was waiting right behind him. The two went down in a heap with a muffled flurry of now unmistakably Russian profanity.

  Flanagan was already shooting again, rapping a fast series of three shots out the door. Brannigan’s angle was bad; he couldn’t see what Joe was shooting at, but he had his own concerns. The man who’d been knocked over by the big man’s corpse was trying to crawl out, and in the dim glow of the city lights reflecting off clouds and snow Brannigan could see the Krinkov he was trying to bring to bear.

  Brannigan stood, leveling the pistol with both hands, just able to make out the sights silhouetted against the slightly lighter background through the door. He fired, the pistol’s flat bark only making the ringing in his ears worse and further deadening any sounds. The struggling man jerked as the bullet hit him; his head had been the only reliable target, so Brannigan had aimed at it. He’d hit, but the guy was still moving. He fired again. Dark liquid sprayed across the snow, and the man shuddered and went still.

  A sudden burst of automatic gunfire raked the side of the house, punching through the window and the plaster. He and Flanagan both dropped flat as the bullets cracked and buzzed through the living room; the house clearly wasn’t all that solid, though the walls were certainly providing enough resistance for the 5.45mm rounds to start their vicious tumbling, from the sounds of it. A bullet smacked into the table only inches from Brannigan’s head.

  He knew he had to move, had to get ready for the rush that had to be coming. Whoever Gorev had sold them out to clearly hadn’t been ready for them to be armed. That was a panicked mag dump if he’d ever heard one. But he doubted that they’d run away. No one had ever called the Bratva cowards.

  He rolled to his right, away from Flanagan and toward the edge of the table. There wasn’t a lot of space between the table and the steps that he found his back against, but there was enough. He leveled his Tokarev at the door just as another figure appeared in the opening, a compact, blocky submachinegun held ready, the wire stock tucked into the man’s armpit. There was at least one more behind him.

  Both Blackhearts fired at once, their bullets crisscrossing through the submachinegunner’s torso. He jerked, but stayed on his feet, spraying bullets at the table. Splinters rained down on the two mercenaries, but the man hadn’t really seen where they’d been, not before getting hit twice had thrown him off. He’d effectively been spraying blind.

  Flanagan put another round in his head, and he fell on his face, the submachinegun thumping heavily against the floor beneath him. Then the next two tried to come in the door at the same time, firing as they came.

  They didn’t have any better idea of what to expect or where to shoot than their dead comrades had. The volume of fire was nothing to sniff at, though, and Brannigan had to get flat as more bullets chewed up the questionable cover of the table and smashed bits of plaster off the wall behind him. Some were doubtless going through and smacking into the brick of the outer fence on the other side of the wall.

  Staying as flat to the floor as he could, no longer able to aim, he stuck the pistol out and cranked off the last four shots in the magazine, at roughly ankle level. He was awfully aware of just how few rounds he had left, but his options were a little limited at that point.

  At least one bullet struck home, as one of the two men collapsed with a scream. He mashed the trigger of his Krinkov spasmodically as he fell, and bullets sprayed across the room, thumping into the table, the walls, the ceiling…and the man next to him.

  Blood sprayed in the dark, spattering against the doorjamb as three 5.45mm rounds tore through the second Mafiya shooter’s chest and neck. He staggered back against the jamb, holding a hand to his suddenly spurting throat, gurgling faintly, and started to slide down to the floor, as the other man thrashed in agony on the floor, grabbing his mangled boot.

  The shooting had stopped. Brannigan had rolled back behind the table as quickly as he could as soon as the Tokarev went empty, slamming in his second and last magazine and working the slide. It stuck a little, but he got it in battery, only then really noticing that the gunfire had died away. The gate creaked again as somebody made a run for it.

  “Holy hell,” Flanagan breathed next to him, finishing his own reload and coming up to a knee. Aching, his side twinging a little where the bullet scar pulled tight
, Brannigan slowly did the same. His heart was pounding, and his breath was rasping in his battered ears. He had to agree with Joe’s assessment.

  I can’t believe that worked.

  Gomez and Wade were already off the steps and moving around behind them, splintered chair legs in their hands, advancing on the wounded shooters heaped in the doorway. Flanagan got to his feet, advancing with Wade, his pistol leveled at the one who’d been shot by his buddy. The man Brannigan had shot in the foot or lower leg didn’t have a hand on his weapon anymore. He was entirely off in his own little world of pain.

  The one bleeding out from his neck looked up as Flanagan and Wade approached. It was too dark to see his expression. But he still tried to lift the PP-2000 submachine gun as the two men got closer.

  Wade was already moving in on him, the chair leg raised. But Flanagan lifted the Tokarev and drilled him with three shots, as fast as the trigger could reset. Flanagan was a shooter. The muzzle barely twitched from recoil.

  The dark hid the carnage. But the PP-2000 hit the floor with a heavy thud, and the dead man slid down the wall to an awkward, contorted rest.

  “Ow,” Wade commented. He’d been right on-line with Flanagan’s muzzle as he’d fired and had caught a good bit of the Tokarev’s muzzle blast. The noise wasn’t as bad as a rifle’s, but it was bad enough.

  Brannigan grabbed the splintered, bullet-chewed edge of the table and lifted himself up. “Drag that guy in here and shut him up,” he said, indicating the wounded man, whose cries of pain had subsided to whimpers. “And the corpses and the weapons.” They may have just had a bit of a windfall, if they could move fast enough to make it count.

  Gomez dropped the chair leg and picked up the wounded man’s Krinkov. When the mobster realized what was happening, he made a grab for it, but Gomez calmly put a boot on his wounded leg and the man screamed. Gomez stayed in place long enough to check that there were still a few rounds in the shorty AK-74’s magazine, then reached down and grabbed the man by the jacket.