By morning, he would have the elusive Pauline Bellerose within his grasp.
By morning, he would have a cache of military secrets to deliver to Moscow, secrets that would never make the cold, winter trek to London.
He would succeed where others had failed.
The Colonel pulled his Makarov pistol from its holster, aimed the barrel toward the heavens, and fired once into the air.
The blast echoed like thunder above the sea.
His shock troops immediately rose out of the sodden embankment amidst the wetlands and positioned themselves in the middle of the coastal roadway.
Krupin watched the headlights grow larger.
Yellow eyes in the night.
Blurred.
Patched with mud.
One more bend in the road and he would have the lovely Pauline Bellerose.
So what would he do with her first?
A wicked grin worked its way across this face.
The Renault slammed on its brakes and spun sideways, coming to rest at the edge of an open field.
The engine whined and groaned, but the tires could not find their traction in the mud and the marsh.
Rainy Night 21
ROLAND SAND FIGURED the Russians would be waiting for them around the bend of a coastal road while the moon lay hidden behind clouds swollen with rain.
It’s just that he didn’t know which bend, and there had been so many of them since departing Odessa.
He had fully expected for some sort of a Russian blockade to stop the car back down the highway closer to the city.
He had been wrong.
The Russians had waited until he reached the coast.
It was so much easier to throw his body into the sea.
Who was Sand?
Don’t know.
He was never here.
He heard glass breaking in the window beside him, and the barrels of two AK-15 assault rifles were jammed past the splintered glass and through the shattered fragments.
No one spoke.
The night turned silent.
Even the wind faded away.
It was so quiet, Sand thought he had gone deaf.
He knew death was passing on ghostly feet across the marshes.
Death never spoke loudly.
Death was a whisper, the thin line between light and dark, and the dark would never end.
Alastair Reagan glanced at him and shrugged. “I guess it’s time to pay the piper, old boy.”
“The price is too high,” Sand said.
“It always is.”
Sand stared past the windshield, covered with raindrops and a spackling of ice, and saw the face of Valery Dernov in the cracked glare of the headlights.
He was holding a pistol and torch.
He looked quite pleased with himself.
We do meet again, Sand thought.
Last time, it was on your terms.
This time, it’s on mine.
The Colonel motioned for both men to step out of the car.
A shock trooper ripped open the back door.
He grabbed the wooden casket, and it slid slowly to the ground.
The trooper grabbed Pauline’s arm and jerked her roughly out of the Renault.
She fell to her knees on the pavement.
The trooper slapped her with the back of his hand.
Blood from a busted nose splattered on the road, red amidst the white foam of a caustic rain.
He was grinning broadly.
She whimpered.
Her eyes were wide with fright.
“What do we have here?” the Colonel asked.
He wiped the spittle from his mouth with the back of his glove.
Sand’s voice never faltered. “The young lady has had a death in the family, a sister, and we have come to help her provide a decent burial.”
“Where?”
“Vylkovo.”
Valery Dernov laughed loudly. “I’m afraid you are no longer on a road headed to Vylkovo,” he said.
“It was difficult driving through the rain,” Sand said. “We must have missed the signs.”
Dernov laughed louder this time. “Surely you can come up with a better story than that,” he said. “I doubt seriously if there is anyone’s dead sister lying in the casket. I think it is more likely that I find a collection of our military secrets that you are foolishly attempting to smuggle out of Ukraine. We hang thieves, you know. Small rooms. No windows. No lights. Just a wooden beam and a rope. We make smugglers suffer terribly before they feel the noose around their necks.”
He turned to a shock trooper.
He pointed to the casket.
“Open it,” he said.
The trooper ran to the jeep and returned moments later with a crowbar.
Slowly and methodically he pried the lid loose from the casket, then kicked it onto the marshes.
Dernov aimed his torch into the open box.
He did not see the collection of military secrets.
The light touched only the face of a woman.
Dernov arched an eyebrow in surprise.
Rain dripped off the brim of his hat.
He started to speak.
The words did not come.
A single bullet caught him just below the chin, and, in the darkness of a Ukrainian night, removed the back of his head.
Daemon sat up amidst the sheet music, a Beretta in her hand.
It was small.
It was deadly.
The troopers stared in curious fascination as Dernov crumpled to the ground.
They watched him quiver once, his head soaked in a puddle of rain.
They waited a moment too long to react.
It might as well have been a lifetime.
It was.
They would not see life leave his body.
They would not see morning.
Sand instinctively fired two shots in rapid succession.
The shock troops sank too their knees.
They were dead before the mud seeped into their open mouths.
Death had never been a stickler for dignity.
The Colonel reached for his pistol.
His hands were wet.
He muttered something.
It sounded like a curse.
Sand didn’t know.
He didn’t speak the language.
He fired once more.
Close range.
His long coat flared.
He grunted.
Death was the same in any language.
Sand had wanted the Colonel to know it was over before it was over.
The echo of gunfire was lost in the sound of the sea slamming wildly against the shoreline.
Colonel Krupin only had time to see the fire blister the night from the end of Sand’s Walther PPK.
His eyes were filled with questions.
They were still open when the questions were answered.
Then there was only silence.
It was the whisper of death.
Sand had heard it before.
Reagan was breathing heavily as he turned and looked down at Daemon.
She smiled as she sat up and ran her fingers through the curls in her hair.
“How can she still be alive?” Reagan asked. “I saw you shoot her.”
Sand smiled. “Do you know how the one they call Daemon has stayed alive so long behind enemy lines?”
Reagan shook his head.
“It’s because she’s a fine actress.”
Sand shifted his gaze to Alistair Reagan of British Intelligence. “Now the question is what to do with you, old boy.”
The Brit’s eyes were cloudy.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“It’s time we put an end to your little charade,” Sand said.
Reagan clenched his jaws.
Blood drained from his face.
Sand saw his lips move.
Maybe it was a prayer.
Maybe it was a confession.
&
nbsp; Maybe it was a goodbye.
“When did you know?” Reagan asked.
“I realized something was wrong at the Odessa train terminal.”
“How did you know?”
“It was our little encounter with the late Valery Dernov,” Sand slowly began replacing the spent cartridges in his clip. “You told him we had return tickets for five-thirty. I checked the schedule. There was no train leaving at five-thirty in the afternoon. Then tonight, back at the shabby little hotel beside the docks, you told me that, if there were no hitches on our plan, we would be arriving on the coastline near Vylkovo about five-thirty in the early morning, give or take a few minutes. You had given the Russian the time of our departure a good twelve hours earlier, and I was too ignorant to realize it. He was waiting for us just as you knew he would be.”
Reagan squared his shoulders.
“I’m not a traitor,” he said with as much authority as he could muster. “I’m a businessman. This has nothing to do with politics. I sell information. That’s all. And somebody, it seems, is always willing to buy it.”
“You betrayed your country,” Sand said softly.
“Great Britain is not part of this war.” Reagan was adamant.
“Great Britain can forgive you.” Sand tightened his grip on his Walther PPK. “I won’t.”
“Why not?”
“You betrayed me.”
Reagan took a deep breath.
His chin was trembling.
“You will kill me now?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“We are going to leave you here to explain this mess to the Russians.”
“That’s a death sentence.”
“It’s one hanging over all our heads.”
Reagan turned and headed toward the road. “You might as well shoot me in the back. I won’t be here when the Russians arrive,” he said.
“They’ll find you,” Sand said softly.
“Not this time.”
“Maybe not.” Sand shrugged. “But you’ll hear footsteps for the rest of your life. And Reagan?”
“Yes.”
“They’re loudest in the dark and when you’re sound asleep.”
Reagan slipped away and into the rain.
The fog wrapped around his shoulders like a funeral shroud, a cold gray weave in a cold mist.
It erased his image from the face of the earth.
But it would not hide Alistair Reagan forever.
Nothing would.
Sand took the lady’s hand and helped her out of the casket.
The jazz singer was wiping the dust off her coat.
She grabbed Daemon and held her tightly.
She choked back a tear.
“I thought you had been killed,” she said.
“It was the ugly one’s idea.”
“When did he tell you?”
“While you had left us in the catacombs to go collect your sheet music.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Pauline, her voice lost in the wind.
Daemon smiled. “A secret works better when it remains a secret.”
Pauline’s lipstick was a bright crimson against a face grown suddenly pale, perhaps even ashen.
Her eyes were darting from the departed out toward the Black Sea.
She clasped both hands together beneath her chin.
She wasn’t praying.
It was too late to pray.
“How are you planning to get us out of here?” Pauline asked Sand.
“We have a rowboat.”
“Where?”
“About two miles outside of Vylkovo,” he said. “Unless no one has moved it, the boat is tied in a canal that empties into the Black Sea.”
Pauline nervously rubbed her hands together. “But the Russian said we were no longer on the road to Vylkovo.”
Sand winked. “The Russian did not have a propensity for the truth.”
He saw a touch of fear crawl back into the jazz singer’s eyes.
“You’ll never be able to take a rowboat through those waters around the point and to Romania,” she said.
In the distance, the sound of a ship’s horn cut through the night.
Not even the pounding surf could drown it out.
“I don’t think we’ll have to.” Sand glanced at his watch. “Five-thirty,” he said. “Right on time.”
Across the waters, he saw a faint crease of daylight, no wider than the blade of a saber, appear beneath the low hanging clouds.
“It must be resurrection morning,” he whispered under his breath.
“What do you mean?” asked the jazz singer.
“Sometimes,” he said, “the dead don’t stay dead.”
He winked at Daemon, placed his arm around Pauline’s waist, and the three of them climbed into the Russian sedan.
Two more miles.
That’s all they needed.
Two more miles and a boat.
They rode along the coastline toward the canals of Vylkovo to begin their journey into the light of a new day and toward home.
The rain erased any trace of their footsteps.
Only the dead remained on a dark and rain-swept marshland, the dead and a single piece of Sheet music that Sand had left behind.
November Rain.
That’s what it was.
He thought Guns ‘n Roses had sung it.
He wasn’t for sure.
He couldn’t remember the roses.
Only the guns.
Thunder banged against the sky as if it were a hammer on a cold tin roof.
Novels by Caleb Pirtle III
Secrets of the Dead
Conspiracy of Lies
Night Side of Dark
Place of Skulls
Back Side of a Blue Moon
Bad Side of a Wicked Moon
Lovely Night to Die
Last Deadly Lie
Friday Nights Don’t Last Forever
Jokers Are Wild
Dead Man’s Hand
Selected Nonfiction Books
The Man Who Talks to Strangers: A Memoir of Sorts
Confessions from the Road
Gamble in the Devil’s Chalk
XIT: The American Cowboy
Callaway Gardens: The Unending Season
This Great Land
No Experience Required: Jackie Sherrill and Texas A&M’s 12th Man
Kickoff Team
Echoes from Forgotten Streets
Visions of Forgotten Streets
About Caleb Pirtle III
Caleb Pirtle III is the author of more than seventy-five books, including the acclaimed Lincoln Ambrose series of historical thrillers set against the backdrop of World War II: Secrets of the Dead, Conspiracy of Lies, Night Side of Dark, and Place of Skulls. His historical novel about the discovery of oil in East Texas during the 1930s, Back Side of a Blue Moon, recently won the Beverly Hills Book Award for Historical Fiction Southwest and received the Best of Texas Book Award for Historical Fiction/Small Town.
Pirtle grew up in the oil fields of Kilgore and is a journalism graduate. He became the first student at The University of Texas to win the William Randolph Hearst Award for feature writing. His work at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram won several awards from both Associated Press and Texas Headliner’s.
When Governor John Connally established the Texas Tourist Develop agency, he hired Pirtle to serve as TTDA’s first communications director. Pirtle served for almost a decade as travel editor for Southern Living Magazine and later spent twenty-five years as editorial and production director for a custom publishing company in Dallas.
Pirtle has traveled many back roads during his career as newspaperman, magazine editor, and author. His collection of people and their stories has been published in a memoir of sorts, The Man Who Talks to Strangers. He writes about those whose paths he crossed – from the homeless to celebrities, from country music stars to death row inmates, from farmers who struck it rich overnight w
hen oil erupted to farmers who dug for oil and only found dirt and a few worms at the bottom of the hole.
As he had learned while writing numerous travel and historical nonfiction books, “What happens is never as important as the people who make it happen.” His XIT: The American Cowboy, The Unending Season, Spirit of America, Echoes from Forgotten Streets, and The Grandest Day were all award winners.
Pirtle has written two psychological thrillers, Last Deadly Lie, the chilling tale of a church torn apart by greed and lust, and Friday Nights Don’t Last Forever, the story of a star high school quarterback whose world crumbles around him during the ills and evils of college football recruiting.
His first two contemporary thrillers in The Quiet Assassin trilogy are Lovely Night to Die and Rainy Night to Die.
He and his wife Linda launched Venture Galleries, a Website devoted to connecting readers, writers, and books. The site, now called calebandlindapirtle.com, has supported indie authors by promoting more than six thousand books. Caleb and Linda have also spoken at numerous writing conferences and for writing organization across the country.
Caleb Pirtle III would love to hear from you. You may contact him at [email protected].
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