He finally reached the top, peered down the road, and spotted the shooter to the left, his attention still focused on the SUV.
Tucker sank back and whispered in Kane’s ear. “WAYPOINT, COVER, QUIET CLOSE, TAKE ALPHA.”
He repeated the complex chain of commands.
While Kane’s vocabulary was impressive, he also had an amazing ability to string together actions. In this case, Kane would need to cross the road, find cover, close the distance between himself and their target—then attack.
“Got it, buddy?” Tucker asked.
Kane bumped his nose against Tucker’s. His dark eyes twinkled with his answer: Of course I do, you stupid ass.
“Off you go then.”
Kane sweeps on silent paws across the cold pavement. On the far side, he squeezes into the deep brush, frosted brittle by the winter. He is cautious not to rattle the grasses and branches of scrub bushes. He finds the ground is a mix of ice and mud and keeps moving, slowly at first, testing the placement of each paw.
Growing confident, he moves faster.
A wind blows across the road, carrying to him the scent of his partner—as familiar as his own. It is warmth and heart and satisfaction.
He also catches a whiff of his prey ahead: the sour ripeness of unwashed flesh, the tang of gunmetal and oil, the rot of bad teeth. He fixes every slight movement with minute movements of his ears: the scuff of boot on pavement, the creak of a strap of leather, the wheeze of breath.
He moves along the edge of the road, staying hidden, weaving the darkest path.
At last, he draws even with his target. He drops low and shimmies to the road’s edge, watching. The other’s back is to him, but he turns every few fetid breaths to look around, even back toward where Kane hides.
Dangerous.
But the command burns behind his eyes.
He must attack.
He shifts his back legs to best advantage, firing his muscles for the charge to come. Waiting for his moment—
—then movement to the left.
His partner steps out of hiding, onto the road’s shoulder. He moves wrong, tilting, stumbling. Kane knows this is false, a feigned flailing. He picks out the glint of steel held at his partner’s hip, out of sight of the other.
Across the road, his target turns toward his partner and focuses fully upon him. Kane feels a surge of bone-deep approval and affection. The two are a pack, one tied to the other, working together.
With his target distracted, Kane bursts out of hiding.
Tucker stared down the barrel of the submachine gun, trying his best not to flick his gaze toward Kane, as his partner charged across the pavement.
This had been the dicey part. Much of it depended on the enemy not killing Tucker on sight. Once Kane had reached his vantage point across the road, Tucker had limped out of hiding, stumbling forward, weaving and dazed, looking like a disoriented crash victim. He held his Magnum against his thigh and kept that side turned away from the shooter.
As expected, the man had spun toward him, swinging his Bizon up.
Time slowed at that moment.
Tucker lunged forward, leading now with his Magnum.
He had to put his full faith in Kane. The pair had worked for so long together, the shepherd could read Tucker’s tone and body language to infer much more than could be communicated by word or hand signal. Additionally, Kane also took in environmental cues to make astute judgments on how best to execute any orders.
All that training came to a perfect fusion now.
Kane never slowed and closed the last ten feet with a leap. Seventy pounds of war dog slammed into the man’s side, and together they crashed into the dirt. Even as they landed, Kane’s jaws had found their mark, closing down on his target’s exposed throat with hundreds of pounds of force.
Still on the run, Tucker knee-skidded to a stop beside the man, pivoted, and fired an insurance round into the shooter’s hip.
He switched the Magnum to his left hand, snatched up the Bizon with his right, and leaped over Kane. He landed on his butt in the grass and began sliding down the ditch’s steep embankment.
He took in the situation below with a glance, fixing the position of the three remaining enemy combatants.
One to the left, twenty feet away . . .
One kneeling at the SUV window . . .
One standing at the bumper . . .
The grass whipped Tucker’s face, and rocks slammed into his buttocks and thighs. As he plummeted, he aimed the Magnum at the man beside the bumper and opened fire, squeezing the trigger over and over again. His first shot went wide, the second caught the man in the leg, and the third in the sternum.
One down.
Tucker turned his attention next to the kneeling man, who lay directly below him. He tried to bring the Bizon to bear, but he was sliding too quickly and hit the bottom of the embankment first.
At the last moment, he kicked out with his legs and flew, body-slamming the second man against the side of the SUV. Pain burst behind his eyes—but he had the other pinned, now underwater. A blind hand rose and slapped at him, fingers clawing. Then a mud-covered face pushed out, gasping, coughing. As the man tried to gulp air, Tucker shouldered his face back underwater.
He held him down, while he swung his Bizon and pointed it toward the far side of the SUV. The third enemy appeared, still about ten feet beyond the SUV, out in the open. Tucker fired a burst of rounds. His aim was wild, but it forced the other back out of sight.
By now, the man under him had stopped struggling, drowned.
Tucker crouched up, certain the last man would come charging at him.
Nothing came for a full five count.
He heard rustling in the grass and looked up to see Kane picking his way down the embankment.
With his partner coming, Tucker sidled along the edge of the SUV and took a fast look past its bumper.
The last man was stumbling away, his back to Tucker. The Bizon hung loosely from his right hand. His feet splashed heavily in the water. Out in the open, he knew he was defeated.
“Damn it,” Tucker muttered.
He couldn’t let the man go, but he refused to shoot a victim in the back.
“Stoj!” he hollered and fired a burst into the air. Stop!
The man obeyed, but he didn’t turn around. Instead, he dropped to his knees and threw his weapon to the side. He placed his hands on top of his head.
Kane reached him, but Tucker held him back.
“Stay, pal.”
Tucker walked down the ditch to where the man was kneeling. He realized the man was a boy of about nineteen or twenty.
“Turn around,” he ordered.
“I will tell no one,” the boy begged in heavily accented English.
Yes, you will. Even if you don’t want to, they’ll make you.
Tucker was suddenly tired, spent to his core. “Turn around.”
“Nyet.”
“Turn around.”
“NYET!”
Tucker swallowed hard and raised the Bizon. “I’m sorry.”
18
March 15, 10:10 A.M.
Along the Volga River, Russia
As ugly as the Marussia SUV had been, Tucker had no complaints about the vehicle. In the end, it had saved their lives.
That, and the soft mud at the bottom of the ditch.
Tucker turned his back on the overturned vehicle. The others wobbled along the shoulder of the road. After extracting them from the SUV and doing a quick triage, he managed to rouse Utkin, who helped him with Anya and Bukolov.
In all, the group had sustained bruises and a smattering of cuts and abrasions. Bukolov suffered the worst, with a dislocated shoulder and a slight concussion. Tucker had managed to pop the old man’s shoulder back into place while the doctor was still asleep. The concussion would take time and rest.
But now was not the time to stop moving.
Tucker led them to their new car, their attackers’ dark blue Peugeot 408. Aside from a dent in the fr
ont bumper, the sedan remained unscathed. Whoever had rammed them off the road knew what they were doing. Tucker searched the car for transmitters or GPS units but found none.
As Anya helped Bukolov into the car, Utkin pulled him aside.
“What is it?” Tucker asked, wanting to get moving.
Utkin acted rather furtive. “You’d better see this.”
He slipped a cell phone into Tucker’s hand. It was the only phone they had found amid the attackers’ possessions.
“Look at the photo I found in the digital memory.”
Tucker squinted at a grainy image of himself on the screen. He was seated at a computer workstation, his hands frozen in midair over the keyboard. With a sinking feeling in his gut, he recognized the location. It was that dingy Internet café in Dimitrovgrad.
Someone had taken a picture of me.
Not knowing what to make of it, Tucker e-mailed the photo to his own phone, then deleted the original. He scrolled to the phone’s address book and found it empty; same with the recent calls. It had been sanitized. Frustrated, Tucker removed the phone’s battery case and SIM card and crushed them both with his heel. He crossed the road and threw the remains down into the ditch.
He took a moment to consider the meaning of the photo. Clearly someone had been covertly following them. But how? And who? He glanced to the overturned SUV. Could there have been a hidden tracer planted on the Marussia?
He didn’t know . . . couldn’t know.
In fact, there were far too many unknowns.
He faced Utkin. “Have you shown the others this photo?”
“No.”
“Good. Let’s keep this between us for now.”
A few minutes later, they were again racing south along the Volga River.
Aside from a desire to get off the main road and put some distance between themselves and the ambush site, Tucker had no immediate plan. After ten miles, he turned off the highway and onto a dirt road that led to a park overlooking the Volga. He pulled in and everyone climbed out.
Utkin and Anya helped Bukolov to a nearby picnic table.
Tucker walked to the rocky bluff above the thick-flowing river. He sat down, needing to think, to regroup. He let his legs dangle over the edge and listened to the wind whistle through the skeletal trees. Kane trotted over and plopped down beside him. Tucker rested his hand on the shepherd’s side.
“How’re you feeling, buddy?”
Kane thumped his tail.
“Yeah, I’m okay, too.”
Mostly.
He had cleaned the gash on Kane’s head, but he wondered about any psychic damage. There was no way of knowing how the shepherd felt about killing that man on the road. His partner had killed in combat before, and it seemed to have no lasting impact on him. While for Tucker, that particular onion was more layered. After Abel’s death, after leaving the service, Tucker had come to appreciate certain parts of the Buddhist philosophy, but he knew he’d never match Kane’s Zen mind-set, which, if put into words, would probably be something like Whatever has happened, has happened.
As he sat, he was torn between the instinct to run hard for Volgograd, and his desire to take it slow and cautious. Still, many things troubled him. It was why he had stopped here.
Four men, he thought. Why only four?
Back at the ambush site, he had checked them for identification and found nothing but driver’s licenses and credit cards. But the tattoos they bore confirmed them as Spetsnaz. So why hadn’t the enemy landed on them with overwhelming force? Where were the platoon of men and helicopters like back at Nerchinsk?
Somehow this current action reeked of rogue ops. Perhaps someone in the Russian Ministry of Defense was trying to snatch Bukolov without the knowledge of their bosses. But for now, that wasn’t the most pressing question concerning Tucker.
He knew the ambush couldn’t have been a chance accident.
So how did the enemy know where to find them?
He pictured the photo found on the phone.
What did that mean?
Utkin joined him, taking a seat at the bluff’s edge. “Good view, yes?”
“I’d prefer to be staring at the Statue of Liberty.”
That got a chuckle out of Utkin. “I would like to see that, too. I’ve never been to America.”
“Let’s hope I can get you there.”
“So have you figured out a plan? Where to go from here?”
“I know we have to reach Volgograd.”
“But you’re worried about another ambush.”
It didn’t require an answer.
Changing the subject, Utkin waved an arm to encompass the river and region. “Did you know I grew up around here?”
Actually Tucker did. He’d read it from the man’s dossier, but he remained silent, sensing Utkin wanted to talk, reminisce.
“It was a tiny village, along the river, about fifty miles south. My grandfather and I used to fish the Volga when I was a boy.”
“It sounds like a nice childhood.”
“It was, thank you. But I meant to make a point. You wish to reach Volgograd, yes?”
Tucker glanced over to him, crinkling his forehead.
“And you wish to stay off the highway,” Utkin said.
“That would be good.”
“Well, there is another way.” Utkin pointed his arm toward the river below. “It worked for thousands of years. It can work for us now.”
11:01 A.M.
Tucker had one last piece of business to address before moving on. He asked Anya to stay with Bukolov at the park. He instructed Kane to guard them. For this last chore, he needed Utkin’s help.
Climbing back into the Peugeot, Tucker headed out into the tangle of the remote river roads. He followed Utkin’s directions. It took less than an hour to find the abandoned farmhouse tucked away in a forest.
“This was once part of an old collective,” Utkin explained. “It’s at least a hundred and fifty years.”
Tucker used the remote to pop the trunk.
They both stared down at the bound figure inside, his mouth secured with duct tape. He was the last of those who had ambushed them, the boy of nineteen or twenty.
“Why did you let him live?” Utkin whispered.
Tucker wasn’t exactly sure. He simply couldn’t execute someone in cold blood. Instead, he had clubbed the kid with the butt of his gun, bound him up, and tossed him in the trunk.
The boy stared at Tucker and Utkin with wide eyes. They pulled him out and marched him toward the farmhouse. Utkin opened the front door, which shrieked on its hinges.
The interior was what Tucker had imagined: knotty plank walls and floors, boarded-up windows, low ceilings, and layers of dust on every surface.
Tucker pushed the boy inside and sat him down on the floor. He peeled the tape from the boy’s mouth.
“Can you translate?” he asked Utkin.
“Are you going to interrogate him?”
Tucker nodded.
Utkin backed up a step. “I don’t want to be a part of any—”
“Not that kind of interrogation. Ask him his name.”
Utkin cooperated and got an answer.
“It’s Istvan.”
Tucker took the boy through a series of benign personal questions designed to massage his defenses. After five minutes, the kid’s posture relaxed, his rat-in-a-cage expression fading.
Tucker waved to Utkin. “Tell him I have no plans to kill him. If he cooperates, I’ll call the local police and tell them where to find him.”
“He’s relieved, but he says you must beat him. For effect. Otherwise, his superiors will—”
“I understand. Ask him his unit.”
“It’s Spetsnaz, like you thought. But he and his team had been assigned to the Russian military intelligence.”
“The GRU?”
“That’s right.”
The same as the Spetsnaz at Nerchinsk.
“Who did his unit report to at the GRU?”
“And what was their job?”
“To track down Bukolov. His group was told to intercept our car here.”
“By Kharzin.”
“Yes, the order came from Kharzin.”
This guy must be one of Bukolov’s mysterious Arzamas generals.
“And once they got hold of the doctor?” Tucker asked. “What were they to do?”
“Return him to Moscow.”
“Why does General Kharzin want him?”
“He doesn’t know.”
Tucker pulled out his cell phone and showed the grainy image from the Internet café to their captive. “How and when did you get this?”
“By e-mail,” Utkin translated. “Yesterday afternoon.”
“How did they know where to intercept us?”
Utkin shook his head. “He was just given the order.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Let’s find out.”
Abruptly, Tucker pulled the Magnum from his jacket pocket and pressed it against the boy’s right kneecap. “Tell him I don’t believe him. He needs to tell me why Kharzin wants Bukolov.”
Utkin translated Tucker’s demand.
Istvan started jabbering, white-faced and trembling.
“He says he doesn’t know,” Utkin blurted, almost as scared as the kid. “Something about a plant or flower. A discovery of some kind. A weapon. He swears on the life of his son.”
Tucker kept the Magnum pressed against the guy’s kneecap.
Utkin whispered, “Tucker, he has a son.”
Tucker did his best to keep his face stony. “A lot of people have sons. He’s going to have to give me a better reason than that. Tell him to think hard. Has he forgotten anything?”
“Like what!”
“Is there anyone else after us? Anyone besides the GRU?”
Utkin questioned the boy, pressing him hard. Finally, he turned and stammered, “He says there’s a woman. She is helping Kharzin.”
“A woman?”
“Someone with blond hair. He only saw her once. He doesn’t know her name, but he believes that she was hired by Kharzin as some sort of mercenary or assassin.”
Tucker pictured Felice Nilsson. She was old news. “Go on. Tell him I already know about—”
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