by Jack Carr
Reece stepped outside and grabbed the railing of the deck for balance, taking deep breaths of mountain air while suppressing an urge to vomit.
Oliver Grey was in Russia working for the mafia, working for a man whose son was a senior intelligence official with a penchant for hunting humans. That same son had called a contact at the CIA to betray his father’s, and Grey’s, plan to kill him. Why?
Reece waved to a worried-looking Liz on the dock, then picked up the sat phone to call Raife via the landline at the main ranch house.
“Hanna?” Caroline Hastings picked up on the first ring, a hint of panic in her usually steady voice.
“No, I’m sorry, Caroline, it’s Reece. Is Raife there?”
“He couldn’t wait. He’s in the air on his way to Romania to look for Hanna. She hasn’t answered her phone or any of our emails. Vic has the embassy trying to track her down but Raife doesn’t trust them. He just couldn’t sit around and wait.”
He could tell she had been crying.
Reece paused. “I would have done the same.”
“I know.”
“Is Vic still there?”
“Yes, but he’s about to return to D.C.,” the Hastings matriarch answered after composing herself.
“Good. Please tell him I’ll meet him at Langley. I don’t want to cause another commotion by flying back to the ranch with LE still combing the place. How’s Katie?”
“She’s a strong woman, Reece. I think it’s all still sinking in, but she’s fine.”
“Please give her a hug for me and tell her I’ll meet her at her place in Alexandria tomorrow. Can you get her home for me?”
“We can certainly handle that.”
“Thank you. I’m so sorry I brought this on you, Caroline.”
“Where is all this leading, Reece?”
“Russia.”
CHAPTER 53
Iasi International Airport, Romania
THE FLIGHT FROM DULLES was well within the eight-thousand-mile range of the G550, but it was still almost 5:00 a.m. when they finally landed. The combined flights had exceeded the crew rest requirements for the two pilots, but, given the emergency nature of the trip, they were willing to push it. Despite the creature comforts of Thorn’s Gulfstream, for Raife, rest was an impossibility.
Raife rented a car as rapidly as was possible in Romania from a man speaking passable English and headed directly for the farm where his sister lived, driving the small Opel sedan as fast as he dared.
His parents had tried to contact Hanna several times during the past twenty-four hours without success and the embassy personnel had predictably been unable to track her down. A sense of dread permeated Raife’s very being; his instincts were usually correct.
The navigation app he was using was next to worthless in this area, so Raife had to rely on a paper map that he kept in his lap as he drove. Just like the old days. The sun was beginning to rise, illuminating the small farmhouses and villages that dotted the rolling hills, the local residents already moving into the planted fields to bring in the harvest. It was a simple, meaningful existence, and Raife quickly realized why his baby sister had fallen in love with it.
He pulled the sedan off the road and compared the small brick building and nearby barn to a photo on his iPhone. This was the place. Not wanting to disturb anything or anyone, Raife left the car near the road and walked toward his sister’s temporary home on foot. He walked around the barn and saw that a small pickup truck, presumably belonging to Hanna, was parked outside.
Maybe she was home, and her internet was just down?
As he walked farther, he saw that the door to the small home was open. A burst of adrenaline surged through his body as his mind put the pieces together.
He was unarmed, a requirement to clear Romanian customs. The old wooden door creaked as Raife pushed it open. A chair was on its side, and blood was visible on the tile floor. Raife pushed the horror of the moment from his mind and put his tracking skills to work. The fact that her body wasn’t here meant she was probably still alive. He pulled the small pack from his back and retrieved a pair of nitrile gloves from the first aid kit inside.
At first glance, it appeared the droplets of blood on the tile floor led outside but, upon close inspection, the pattern indicated it was leading inside the home. The bleeding had begun outside. Raife went down to his hands and knees and used a small but powerful LED light to search for evidence. A kitchen knife had slid underneath a table and appeared to be covered in blood. Hanna had fought, and for a slight moment a sense of brotherly pride broke through the pain. The beam from his light found a strand of hair that appeared to belong to his sister on the floor, an arm’s reach away from the knife.
Raife backtracked outside and searched the soft dry ground. He paced the area with his eyes on the ground, stopping, kneeling, then going prone, just as Melusi had taught him back in Africa.
The tracks will tell the story. Let them speak.
After twenty minutes of study, those tracks had given their testimony. A vehicle, a van by the looks of it, had stopped by the road and two large males wearing work boots had stepped out. One set of boot tracks led to the back of the home, where he’d knelt next to the door. The other set of tracks led to the front door. It swung outward and he’d positioned himself on the hinge side so that he would be hidden when it opened.
A woman wearing high-heeled boots had traded places with the driver and driven the van up the driveway toward the home. The tracks led to the door, where she’d likely lured Hanna outside. The man had probably pounced on his sister from behind in the darkness, and, based on the greenish hue of the blood trail, had taken a knife to the guts for his trouble. Hanna had been subdued just outside the back door. The drag marks left by her feet led to the van, which indicated that she’d been unconscious, either knocked out, drugged, or both.
Where would they take her? That was the psychology of tracking; learn from the spoor and anticipate your prey’s next move.
Raife needed to get inside the head of whoever had taken her. The tracks were only a few hours old, but Raife didn’t have any leads as to where they might be headed. He was in an unfamiliar land, didn’t speak the language, and had no local network on which to rely.
Raife walked back inside the farmhouse, and this time his eyes were up, looking for anything he’d missed on his first pass. He didn’t have to look far.
A piece of paper was on the small kitchen table, torn from a notebook. On it was written a URL of seemingly nonsensical letters, numbers, and symbols followed by two additional sets of similarly random alphanumeric combinations without the URL designation.
A user name and password. The Dark Web.
Feeling a vibration, Raife reached in his pocket and answered the phone.
“Tell me,” he said.
“It’s not good. Did you find Hanna?”
“I’m at her place now. She’s been taken.”
Raife heard his friend pause on the other end of the line.
“I know who did it and where she is,” Reece said.
When Reece was finished relaying the information he’d learned from the interrogation of Dimitry Mashkov, Raife’s eyes moved back to the paper in his hand.
“He’s hunting her,” he said.
“Or, he’s using her as bait. Come back, and I’ll talk to Vic about mounting an operation to get her out.”
“There’s no time for that. He wants me, or he wants you, probably both. See what you can do about it through official channels. In the meantime, I’m going to book a hunt.”
CHAPTER 54
Medny Island, Russia
ALEKSANDR SAT AT HIS desk in his fortress on Medny. The island was first sighted in 1741 by Vitus Jonassen Bering, a Danish cartographer employed by the Russian Navy. It wasn’t until a few years later that Yemelyan Basov explored and hunted the island, bringing back a host of valuable furs to Kamchatka and on to trading posts throughout Russia.
Aleksandr looked at a seal
pelt on the wall.
Fitting, he thought.
Native Aleuts had moved to the island in the late 1800s and set up a whaling station. Relying on harpoons, they hunted whales and seals until the government moved the settlement to neighboring Bering Island. It was a frontier post with Cold War military significance up until 2001, when it was abandoned.
The Zharkov family dacha on the Black Sea would not do for what Aleksandr had in mind so, when the opportunity presented itself, the entrepreneurial young intelligence officer had leased the island from the government. He needed a remote outpost to partake in his most dangerous of games. Siberia was remote. An island in the Bering Sea was even more so.
Hunting the woman from Montana had ended in a most unsatisfying manner. He hadn’t been able to feel the pleasure of releasing his arrow into his quarry. She’d also managed to kill two of his best dogs. No matter, Sergei had others to take their place. Luckily for him a plane was about to land at a remote strip in Kamchatka. There, six new prisoners from the Central African Republic would be transferred to an Mi-8 transport helicopter for the flight to Medny Island. They would provide ample opportunity to sharpen his skills before the ultimate chess match.
Americans were so easy to manipulate. Hanna Hastings had served her purpose.
Aleksandr had received word that an American had arrived in Romania and traveled to her farmhouse. It wouldn’t be long before he put the pieces together and connected via the Dark Web using the note left on his sister’s table. The trap was baited. Now it was time to wait. His prey would come, and Aleksandr would finally put himself to the test against the most worthy of adversaries.
He felt like more tea. “Sergei!” he called out.
Where was that mongrel half-breed? Probably out training the dogs or practicing with that old bow of his. Sergei and all those who carried the blood of his people remained stuck in the past, aboriginals fretting out a meager existence much as they had for centuries. They had not adapted to the changing environment. They had even attempted to defend themselves against Russian colonization with bows and spears. The result had been catastrophic. Where disease and war failed, alcoholism and forced migration picked up the slack. Sergei, whose Koryak blood had been diluted through breeding and the ravages of a war the world knew little about, still favored the ancient bow of his people over the modern crossbow that Aleksandr carried on their hunts. Aleksandr scoffed at the thought. The Siberian native had been conscripted into the Russian Army. There he’d excelled in the ranks of the spetsnaz, serving with distinction in the Second Chechen War, putting down the insurgency using the tactics and techniques that had earned them the respect of the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan campaign. Sergei’s unit had been responsible for the targeted assassinations of Chechen separatist leadership. By any means necessary. In the Russian Army, he’d learned an appreciation for the Russian martial art of Sambo, to which he continued to devote himself with zeal. Aleksandr couldn’t fathom why the huge Koryak dedicated so much time to unarmed combat. After all, his size seemed sufficient to deal with anyone reckless enough to fight him hand-to-hand. It seemed to be the one vestige of his time spent with the spetsnaz that he carried forward into his work for Aleksandr. He’d spent months building a baidarka, a kayak made of driftwood with a deck covered in seal and sea lion skins. The fool even hunted from it in the tradition of his people. He knew the dogs, though, and, much like the canines whose company he kept, he was loyal to the man who fed him. For that, Aleksandr would allow him his little bow and kayak.
A light on a computer used for only one purpose roused him from his musings.
Aleksandr hovered over a Tor network icon and depressed his keypad before entering a twenty-eight-character password and entering the world of the Dark Web.
The platforms that hosted illicit activity on the Dark Web changed as international consortiums of law enforcement built cases on a virtual battlefield. Silk Road, AlphaBay, and Hansa were but a few of the cyber auction houses whose specialties catered to the dark side of man. Weapons, child pornography, human trafficking, and illicit drugs were the mainstays of the realm, traded for with bitcoin cryptocurrency, moving people and destroying lives at 50 megabits a second. The Dark Web was where Aleksandr offered a specific service to a discerning and niche customer. It was where Aleksandr offered the hunt of a lifetime.
To those who had adorned their walls with most every species the planet had to offer, a few longed for one more trophy, one they wouldn’t be able to brag about at cocktail parties in polite society. They yearned to experience the hunting of man.
Marketed via the Dark Web, the prey were described as prisoners destined for execution. These hunters would be fulfilling a civic duty. For $500,000 USD in bitcoin, rich Russians, Europeans, and Americans had traveled to Medny for the experience that had thus far eluded them in life.
Aleksandr ran his tongue along his bottom lip as he read the email.
“It is so nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. Rainsford.”
PART 3 THE KILL
“I am still a beast at bay…”
—Sanger Rainsford, The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
CHAPTER 55
Boundary County, Idaho
United States/Canadian Border
REECE WOULD HAVE PREFERRED to somehow bring Dimitry’s body back to the Hastingses’ property and leave it where a bear could dispose of it. Dimitry dying in the firefight at the ranch made a lot more sense than him sustaining life-threatening wounds there, then wandering a hundred miles to a property coincidentally owned by Tim Thornton. But, with law enforcement still combing the crime scenes, Reece and Liz had no choice but to dispose of the body in the deepest part of the lake.
“I think the chair’s a goner, buddy,” Liz said as they contemplated how to clean up the cabin.
“I’m afraid you’re right.”
Donning surgical masks from the med bag, and using bleach from under the sink, they cleaned off the leather chair as best they could. The tarp and towels went into a trash bag along with the coffee grinder, French press, and baking tray. Reece dismantled the chair with an ax and wrapped it in trash bags as well. When they were done sanitizing the crime scene, they loaded it all into the plane.
With Thorn’s G550 somewhere in Eastern Europe, and wanting to get things moving as quickly as possible, Reece had Liz drop him in Billings. Liz borrowed a van from the Corporate Jet Center and took her “trash” to a landfill. Reece was able to catch a commercial Delta flight to Minneapolis that connected into Washington–Reagan National.
After spending several months of solitude in a rural and isolated environment, it took Reece some time to adjust to the sights and sounds of the modern world. His mind had adapted to the natural order of the wilderness and rebelled against his reentry into society. By 10:00 p.m., he was relieved to be stepping through the doorway of Katie’s condo in Old Town, Alexandria.
“I told you it wouldn’t be long,” he said.
Katie had beaten him to Virginia by thirty minutes and, despite the late hour, she made coffee while Reece caught her up on the developments of the past forty-eight hours.
“How are you feeling?” Reece asked.
“Like I’m grateful that I wasn’t kidnaped by a psycho assassin who likes to wrap women’s heads in det cord.”
“Thank goodness for small favors.”
“I’m okay, Reece. I just keep thinking about how lucky we were that Caroline Hastings is such a great shot, and that you showed up when you did. And…”
“And, what?”
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder if life with you is always going to be this way.”
Reece nodded.
“I’ve wondered the same thing myself. Before we delve into that, though, I have an important question to ask: Do you have any honey?”
“Ha! Oh yeah, I forgot you take your coffee like most of my old sorority sisters.”
Returning to the table with honey and a small carton of half-and-
half, she watched as Reece doctored his brew.
“I have something to tell you, Katie, and I need your help to think it through.”
“What is it?”
“Raife’s little sister, Hanna, is missing. She was working in Romania and, not long after we were attacked, someone took her.”
“What?” Katie whispered in disbelief. “The same people who were after you?”
Forcing the rational side of her brain to restrain her emotions, she closed her eyes and processed the news.
“How can I help?”
“Well…”
“Hold on,” Katie interrupted.
She picked up her iPad and phone, depositing them in her bedroom before closing the door. She then unplugged the LCD television hanging on the wall of her living room. Satisfied, she picked up a legal pad and sat back down.
“You’re as paranoid as I am.”
“It’s not paranoia if someone’s really after you,” she said.
I’ve heard that somewhere before, Reece thought.
“Here’s what we know. Oliver Grey was a CIA analyst who went off the grid several months ago. It turns out he was working for Vasili Andrenov, a former colonel in the GRU. He recruited Grey near the end of the Cold War and kept him on retainer even after the fall of the Soviet Union and Andrenov’s ouster from the new Russian government.”
“He’s the Russian billionaire who was blown up in Switzerland last year?”
“That’s him. Grey helped plan the operation that killed the Russian president and attempted to kill ours. After the follow-on chemical attack in Odessa, he went underground and ended up in Argentina.”
“I thought they only hid Nazis.”
“They’re branching out. Anyway, after that, he makes his way to Saint Petersburg, Russia, and started working for someone named Ivan Zharkov, who runs one of the big crime families in the bratva, the Russian mafia.”