by David Stone
He sighed heavily, turned, walked out of the thicket, crossed the road, and went in again on the far side. The stand of trees here was dappled and silent as well, as if waiting for something to happen. He stood there for a long moment, listening.
“Mandy? It’s Micah. Are you here?”
A rustle forty feet to his left, and Mandy, rising up out of a little hollow filled with dead leaves and pine needles, got to her feet, needles and leaf bits clinging to her hair, her jeans, and her leather jacket. “Yes, I’m bloody here.”
Dalton walked over to her, started to help her brush the needles off, but she smacked his hand away, handed him the SIG, pulled the leather jacket off, and then her turtleneck sweater, Mandy frantically running her hands all over her body, swearing like a trooper.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, picking her jacket up.
“Go to ground, you said.” To his damaged hearing, her voice was sounding as if it were coming through cotton. “And didn’t I just? Something was eating me! Something crawly and horrid. Can you see anything?” she said, turning around and brushing at herself.
“Yes, I can,” he said, his voice too loud in his own skull, “And it’s all quite lovely.”
She stopped, gave him a look through her tousled hair.
“Bugs, I mean, you toad! God, I hate nature. We’re not paving it nearly fast enough! Soon the whole bloody planet will be infested with bloody nature. ‘Go to ground,’ he says! Chipmunks go to ground, Micah. Next time, you go to ground and have crawly things climb up your bum. I’ll be happy to stand around and shoot people. Have I got anything horrible crawling on me? Stop leering, you pervert. I mean it. Have I?”
“Nope. You’re bug-free,” said Dalton, keeping the grin under control as he shook out her sweater and her jacket, handing them back in the appropriate sequence. As her head popped up through her turtleneck, her hair in a state, she nodded toward the road.
“How did it go? I heard that hand cannon of yours. I trust you were of some practical use out there? I certainly wasn’t.”
Dalton was about to tell her what happened when they heard the sound of the chopper’s engines beginning to whine.
“Dammit,” he said. “Vukov!”
Dalton, followed closely by Mandy, ran back out to the edge of the highway, getting there in time to see the rotors spinning, smoke rising from the Kamov’s exhaust. Even at two hundred yards, they could make out the face of Vukov through the windshield.
Dalton, dumping his empty magazine, ran back to the truck where the dead kid with the belly wound was lying, found a spare mag in his pocket, smacked it home, released the cocking lever, set the fire selector to single shot, got the butt up against his shoulder and his cheek on the stock, and started firing methodically at the chopper, taking his time, adjusting after each shot, the weapon kicking back into his shoulder. He was putting out aimed fire at a target that was right in the middle of the AK’s effective combat range. And he was getting hits. Yellow ricochet sparks flickered off the fuselage of the Kamov as each round came in.
Armored, thought Dalton.
Now the rotors were at full speed, and the chopper was off the ground, banking hard to the left, showing the underbelly of the cockpit.
Dalton switched to full auto and put out another ten rounds, walking his fire onto the rear slope of the cockpit floor. He saw the airframe judder from hits, but Vukov tilted his machine forward, full military power, and clawed his way into the sky, gaining distance with every cycle, the prop wash shaking the tall grass and whipping the tips of the trees into a lashing blur.
Definitely armored.
Dalton, frustrated, angry with himself—I should have chased him down— emptied the rest of the magazine into the rotors, which ought to have been shredded by the rifle fire. But somehow the Kamov held steady, going straight northeast toward Staryi Krim, shrinking into a small brown dot that finally, after a flash of sunlight off the tail boom, disappeared into the blue.
Mandy walked over and stood beside him, looking around at the dead men on the ground, at the flatbed truck sitting in the middle of the road, its engine still ticking over, at the litter of spent shells scattered all over the highway.
“Christ, what an ungodly mess,” she said. “What now? We sit here and wait for Triple A?”
Dalton looked across at the Lancer, jammed up against the pines, tilting crazily, both doors wide open.
“Can you see if the car will start? I’ll police up the shells, dump the bodies in the truck, drive it back to that side road.”
She looked down at the spray of blood and brains in the middle of the highway. “And . . . this ghastly stuff?”
Dalton looked down at it, gave her a haggard smile.
“Roadkill.”
AFTER some fiddling with the wiring, the Lancer, to Mandy’s delight, started on the third try, coughing to life, something metallic clanging loudly under the hood. She popped the fairing and jerked a piece of plastic grillwork out of the cooling-fan housing. The rounds had chewed up the headlights and the hood, and a large hole had been punched into the windshield-wiper tank. The engine block had a shiny groove carved into its side, but the slug had not come in at a direct enough angle to break through three inches of steel. This was a very lucky Lancer, she decided, putting the car in gear, backing it out into the highway, and heading back down to the side road after Dalton.
She found him standing by the driver’s side of the car, his hands full of papers, some of them bloodstained. He looked up, his expression grim, as she pulled the Lancer into the cut.
He came over to get in on the passenger side and was still riffling through the papers as Mandy backed the Lancer out, turned east again, heading for Staryi Krim. The front suspension was unsteady, one of the headlight housings was clattering in the wind, and there was a large, crab-shaped bullet-star crack in the middle of the windshield, but the car was still working. And they were still alive. Mandy looked at the dashboard clock and was surprised to discover that the whole encounter had lasted about fifteen minutes.
“What have you got there?” she asked, keeping an eye out for the Kamov, half expecting it to pop up above the tree line.
Dalton looked up from the papers in his hands, smiled across at Mandy. Mandy thought he looked ill, sick at heart,
“They were kids. Back there. Poor, bloody kids. Look at this one,” he said, holding out a black cardboard ID case with a color photo of a bony-faced, big-eared boy with a broad, snaggletoothed smile.
“His name was Giorgy Medic. If I can make out the language, he was seventeen. Makes you feel like a shit, killing kids. The one at the side of the truck, he was still alive when I got to him, but he’d been hit in the belly with a forty-four. A miserable death, unless he got medevaced out.”
Mandy did not have to ask what Dalton had done. She would have done the same, or she hoped she would have. They drove on a while in silence, a mile later passing a faded sign:STARYI KRIM 2 K
Dalton was still looking at the kid’s ID.
“Interesting,” he said, holding the card out. “He’s from Sid. That’s a little town near Belgrade. Sid is where most of the Skorpions came from. The Medic family had a lot of people in the Skorpions. Slobodan Medic was the one who ordered the massacre at Trnovo, in Srebrenica, in 1995. The Skorpions even made a video. Walked these Muslims into a little wooded clearing, shot them in the back with their AKs. Talking and smoking and laughing as if it were some kind of office picnic. See this?”
He touched the image in the upper right corner of the ID card, a black flag with red lettering in an arc above a bright green scorpion.
“That’s the banner the Skorpions fought under in 1995. They were still using it at Podujevo in 1999. And they’re still around.”
“What does the other little flag mean?”
She tapped a small rectangle in the upper left-hand corner of the card. “Looks like some sort of symbol. Maybe a clenched fist?”
“It’s on all their IDs—at lea
st, the three bodies I searched. The Skorpion banner and this thing. I’ve seen it before. Galan had it on the computer at his flat. He said he was finding it on some KLA websites. He mentioned it in his note to me. He thought it was some sort of unit crest for the Skorpions.”
“It means something to them if they’re putting it on their military ID cards.”
“I’m a little worried about how far ahead of us these guys are. They were waiting for us, had an ambush all laid out.”
“You had to expect that.”
“I expected them to make a move in Kerch. Not here in the middle of the damned peninsula.”
“Even without Galan’s attempt to reach Irina Kuldic, which is why they killed him, the Russians—”
“Kirikoff.”
“Kirikoff. Yes, he had to know that once you found out about the Russians taking Levka and the Subito you’d come to Kerch anyway just to find out why. He’d got a snootful of your style last winter in Istanbul. He would expect you to come back at him, which, by the way, is exactly what you are doing, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I know. Predictable as hell.”
“I think someone in Sevastopol was put there to watch for you. You’re quite memorable. If Kirikoff knew you were in Sevastopol, very likely headed for Kerch, it would make sense to set a trap for you out on a lonely road somewhere. What he didn’t count on was you killing three of his men and chasing the fourth into the wild blue yonder with his arse shot full of buckshot. But he knew you’d be coming. It’s your idiom, isn’t it, dear boy?”
“Seems to be,” he said, rubbing his cheeks with both hands and sighing. “But what else can I do? I’m all out of pixie dust. And God’s not returning my calls.”
“Mine neither,” said Mandy with a smile. “But Satan keeps in touch.”
“He would, wouldn’t he?” said Dalton. “Since he’s a relative. I keep thinking about the Kamov. Not very many of them around in the Crimea. Too expensive for this area. Can’t be more than ten in the whole peninsula, and most of those would be down around the resort areas. Yalta, Sevastopol, Balaklava, Jasper Beach.”
“So why keep one around here? In the middle of nowhere? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Yes. You’d have to have a damned good reason. It’s not just the machine itself. Choppers need a lot of maintenance, as much as three hours for every hour of flying time. The operational range for a Kamov Two-Six is about three hundred miles. That’s one-fifty out and one-fifty back home again, unless they have a FARP—”
“Micah, did we not agree on a no-acronyms policy?”
“Sorry. A forward area refueling post. Someplace at the other end where they could count on getting fuel. As we’ve seen, fuel is an issue around here. There’d have to be some sort of central support base, a supply depot, spare-parts warehouse, technicians to do the work, a hangar to keep it out of the weather.”
They rounded a turn, and a few outbuildings started to appear in the prairie grass. “Welcome to Staryi Krim,” Mandy said, shaking her head. “Christ, what a hole.”
And it was, at least on the outskirts. As they rolled at high speed through the town—a bullet-pocked Lancer draws attention—they passed block after block of squat stucco-walled housing roofed in corrugated-tin sheets, with shabby wooden outhouses scattered about, packs of stray dogs and feral cats prowling through threadbare yards fenced in rusted chain link.
There were very few people out: a few peasant farmers pushing carts full of cordwood, more two-wheeled, rubber-tired carts pulled by undernourished oxen, here and there a run-down market stand, a vodka bar, sodden drunks littering the steps out front.
Things improved slightly when they got into the old part of the town, where the main street was lined with neoclassical buildings, white marble or painted to look like it, Doric and Corinthian columns holding up Greek temples, and, at the top of the stony street, a large drum-shaped church.
The area around the church was packed with locals waving colored banners. A balalaika quartet on a podium was playing something polka-ish, damsels in dirndls were flashing their petticoats, huddled villagers were clapping in time. It was a street party or celebration of some kind, which they dodged by taking a back lane and skirting the town center. Soon they were into the slums again. More butt-ugly Stalinist housing and lots of Stone Age plumbing. Then Staryi Krim petered out like a drunkard’s tale of woe, and they were back in the high-desert prairie again.
As they cleared a steep pass, the Crimean Peninsula opened up in front of them, and they saw in the hazy distance a cluster of office towers and apartment blocks beside an arc of glittering blue, the Black Sea port of Feodosiya, about twenty klicks away. On their extreme right, far away to the southwest, there was a jagged line of snowcapped peaks on the horizon, the Crimean Mountains.
“We’re up pretty high now, aren’t we?” asked Mandy.
Dalton gave her a sideways look.
“Yes, Mandy. We certainly are up pretty high.”
“Sarcasm,” she said, “is the last defense of the witless. What I meant was, I’ll bet we can use the BlackBerry.”
“I can’t. I can’t turn mine on. And I haven’t had a chance to pick up a black cell anywhere. Why?”
“I have mine,” she said, turning it on. “And I’m pretty sure nobody has my SIM card cloned. Look,” she said, flipping the device faceup. “There’s even a good signal.”
“Is your GPS off ?”
“Really, Micah,” she said with a tone. “I was thinking about what you said, about the Kamov Two-Six needing a service base?”
“Yes? What have you got in mind?”
“Poppy’s man in the Ukraine, Earl Ford? He has aerial photos of the entire peninsula. They take them to identify geological formations that might have coal, iron ore, bauxite seams in them. What if I call him and ask him to send us whatever photos he might have of this area? What was the operating distance of the Kamov?”
“A normal one, I’d say three hundred miles. The one we tangled with was armored, so that would bring it down to, let’s say, two hundred miles. There and back again, if we assume no refueling depots on the perimeter, so they have to go back to home base before they run out of gas. That would still mean a radius of one hundred miles. Basically, if we’re using here as the center, that’s the entire Crimean, from Sevastopol to beyond Kerch.”
“Worth a try, no?”
“Not really. Not without some way of narrowing the limits.”
“Then narrow them, Micah. What else would isolate this particular chopper? You said it had armor. Anything else?”
Dalton gave it some thought.
“Markings. I didn’t see any. No registration numbers. No corporate logo. Unmarked choppers would draw some attention, even here in the outback. The Ukraine’s not some Third World backwater like Toronto. They have a very good civil-aviation authority. Just like everywhere else, each airframe has to carry a registration number. Sooner or later, someone would report an unmarked chopper.”
“Maybe someone already has?”
That stopped him.
“This Ford guy, he got clearance for Poppy’s Lear to land without the usual red tape, right? That means he has friends in the local government. Do you think he’d be willing to ask around, see if anyone knows anything about an unmarked brown Kamov Two-Six operating in the Staryi Krim region?”
“Yes. He would. That’s worth a try, at least.”
Mandy picked up the phone, tapped in a few numbers. Dalton watched the road unwind, bringing them down toward the sea again. Mandy got the receptionist, identified herself, and asked to speak to Big Bear. In a moment she was put through.
“Earl . . . Yes, everything’s fine, sweetheart . . . No, really, just fine . . . Pardon? On the road near Staryi Krim . . . Yes, yes, it is a beastly little piss pot . . . Now, the thing is, Earl, I was wondering if you could do us a simply massive favor?”
She laid it out for him, described the Kamov in detail—dun brown, no markings at all, cargo box
not fitted—leaving out the fresh bullet scars on the cockpit belly. She got a few clarifying questions, which she answered, and ended the call with, “Thanks, Big Bear. Do love you!”
She turned to Dalton, her face bright and happy.
“Finally I get to feel like something other than cargo.”
“He’ll do it?”
“Yes. He has a man at Simferopol Airport who has access to official records, incident reports, flight-path filings, airframe registrations. Earl says this man knows most of the Kamovs in the Crimean. He’s going to call him and see what he can get.”
“How long?”
“Minutes, he said. Hello, what is this?”
Her voice trailed off, and her face took on a look of puzzled concentration. She studied the screen for a time.
“Okay, this is interesting. I have the news feed for the BBC. It seems our old friend Ray Fyke has made the news.”
“Ray? What the hell has Ray done now?”
“Apparently, he’s gone to war with the Mossad.”
“The Mossad? Show me.”
“Pull over and read it,” she said, handing Dalton the BlackBerry. He found a turnout near a bridge, pulled in, and parked.
BRIT SAILOR CLASHES WITH ISRAELI SECURITY TEAM IN TEL AVIV: REUTERS:
What was initially reported as fight in a beachside bar in Tel Aviv has taken on international significance after it was leaked that the three Israeli men who were injured in the incident were actually members of the Mossad, Israel’s counterpart to the CIA. The confrontation, which took place at Joko’s Beach Bar on Tel Aviv Boulevard yesterday evening, began when a British citizen, later identified as BRENDAN
FITCH, got into a loud disagreement with three unidentified males, two of whom then brandished firearms.
Fitch proceeded to overpower and disarm all three men. According to witnesses, Mr. Fitch, slightly injured in the affray, then left the bar in the company of a young woman and disappeared into the suburbs of Tel Aviv. So far, no arrests have been made.