by David Stone
“In the officers’ wardroom, drinking vodka, charming all my boys. Do you wish to say go inside and say good-bye to her?”
“No,” said Dalton in a soft voice. “We don’t do farewells.”
THE boat, a gray lap-strake cutter with a powerful and virtually silent electric motor, slipped away from the Velosia, the towering bulk of the cruiser fading quickly into the fog. Davit twisted the throttle, and the cutter shot forward, the sharp bow rising, seawater hissing and curling along her wooden sides, a gurgling sound coming up through the slanting floorboards.
Davit sat on a bench at the rear, the control stick in one hand, his pistol, a Polish P-64 he had probably retained from the Russian occupation, in the other. Dalton, in the bow, watching the shadow of the beach come slowly closer, had his Anaconda, three autoloaders and a slender, double-edged fighting knife he had taken from the BDS agent back in Venice.
The air closer to the mainland smelled of seaweed, mud, and salt. The twilight had passed into night, the amber lights of Anapa shimmering in the north, ahead of them only the glow from the Bospor Clinik Spa, and a few faint halos from the yard lights.
In a few minutes, the cutter—long and narrow, high-peaked bow—hissed lightly over a sandbar, grating along the keel, broke free into a tidal lagoon close to shore, skimmed across it, and ran up onto the beach, crunching gently into the gravel. Dalton was out over the bow before it settled, jumping onto the coarse sand and tugging the boat ashore. Davit clambered up the centerboard and stepped off the peak, carrying a thin rope with a mushroom anchor on the end of it.
He walked a few yards up the beach and set the anchor into a dune, driving it in with his boot. In a crouch, he turned and looked back at Dalton, tugged his watch cap low over his head, and led the way up the slope. There was a wooden barrier, and a set of stairs and a walkway that rose up and over the barrier dune. At the top of the walkway, less than fifty feet from the front steps of the spa, they saw a wide wrought-iron fence blocking the path. Dalton came forward, set himself, vaulted it, landing lightly on the other side.
He walked a little way up toward the house, watching it, hearing Davit’s soft footfalls coming up behind him.
“What do you suggest?” he whispered, close enough for Dalton to smell the little shot of vodka Davit had taken just as they stepped into the cutter.
“Check the perimeter, and then cover the back. Stop anyone who tries to leave. Bogdan, listen, don’t close in with Vukov. Don’t go anywhere near him. Stay well back and shoot him where he stands. Shoot him a lot. Head shots. Then reload and shoot him some more. If you hear gunfire from inside, kick in the door and come fast. Watch out for trip wires, anything like that. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Davit, a flash of white teeth as he smiled. And then he was gone, slipping away over the dunes and disappearing into the darkness.
Dalton came slowly up to the front steps, pistol up, studying the approach. No motion detectors visible. No pressure plates that he could see. From the house itself, silence.
He tucked the Anaconda into his belt, gripped one of the porch pillars, and climbed rapidly up it. Reaching the edge of the upper deck, he lifted himself up by his hands, trying very hard not to make the boards creak with his weight, and kicked up his leg.
He got his toes wedged on the outer lip of the deck, eased himself up and over the railing and down onto the deck itself. He was in a small, fenced-off area with two slatted chairs and a small round table. The chairs and the table were thick with salt rime, and the decking half covered with dried leaves and beach grass.
There was a large glass door, a sliding panel. He ran his fingers all around its rim and lower lip looking for an alarm. Nothing. He stepped in close, put his ear up against the glass. The glass was cold to his skin.
He listened carefully, breathing shallow. A low, murmuring vibration, more felt than heard. Voices, coming from some distance away. Not inside this room but near. Toward the rear of the second floor, very likely in the clinic.
He got a grip on the handle of the door and put his other hand flat against the upper portion of the slider. He lifted up, the door moved slightly, making a faint grinding sound as the aluminum frame lifted from the track. He strained under the weight, going slowly, hardly breathing, first an inch, then another. There was a hiss and a click, and the glass door came free in his hands.
It weighed more than he thought, and he almost dropped it as he shifted it out of its track. A rush of stale air poured out through the open frame: smoke and burned coffee, household cleaners. He placed the sliding door gently against the fence separating this unit from the one next door, stepped back, and pulled the pistol out of his belt again.
The window curtains were lifting in the sea wind, and he brushed them out of his face as he stepped into the dark, chilly little room, his boots brushing softly across the hardwood floor. He could just make out a single bed to his left, a low dresser beside it, a lamp with a small shade, and, beyond, a door, hooks in the door, a robe hanging from one of the hooks.
The room smelled stale and unused. He ran his glove across the surface of the dresser, held it up in the faint light coming from the yard lights below. A thin streak of dust.
He crossed to the door, stood there for a while, letting his eyes adjust to the changing light. He touched the door. It was warm, heated from the hallway on the other side. He recalled the floor plan, guessing that he was about halfway along the upper hallway. If he opened this door, the entrance to the clinic—a large, central complex with a reception desk, a waiting area, and some treatment rooms behind it—would be about fifteen feet to his left.
He put a gloved hand onto the knob, turned it slowly, felt a click. The door opened a crack, and a shaft of light cut through the gloom, along with a waft of warm air, smelling of floor polish and something medicinal—rubbing alcohol or some other antiseptic.
He eased the door open, blinking as the light grew, leaned out into the hallway. It was a long corridor carpeted in beige, with light green walls and harshly lit with overhead fluorescent squares running in rows down the full length. Music was coming faintly from behind the frosted-glass walls of the clinic, a few feet down the hallway.
Dalton stepped out into the hall and padded softly along it until he was near the clinic. The main door was closed, but he could see faint light coming from somewhere beyond the darkened reception area.
Here, the music was louder. And the murmur of voices that he had heard earlier was louder as well. It was a radio playing. Some sort of Russian soap opera? No, more urgent. Staccato, hectoring, urgent. A newscaster was delivering the latest word from Moscow in that shouting, cadenced manner that Dalton had come to think of as the Blitzer Bark. From down the hall behind him, there was the sound of a toilet flushing, a door being jerked open,
Dalton spun around, lifting his Colt with his right hand. Vukov stepped out into the hallway about thirty feet away. Booted, in faded jeans, a white T-shirt stretched across his chest, massive pectorals sliding like steel plates underneath, the shiny, ridged burn scars rippling over his forearm muscles and his biceps swelling out as he tugged at his zipper, looking down as he straightened his belt, he heard the solid metallic click as Dalton thumbed the Colt’s hammer back. He looked up, saw Dalton standing in the hallway, and stretched his lips wide.
“Slick,” he said in a thick Serbian accent, his voice a rasping whisper. “How’s tricks?”
Dalton had a steady sight on a point between Vukov’s bulging pectoral plates. The trigger, incised with grooves for good contact, felt dry and cool under Dalton’s finger, the wooden grip solid in his hand. He felt . . . nothing . . . just a great soothing calm spreading through his chest and belly.
Kill him, said a voice, not his own, down in his lizard brain.
Kill him now.
No.
We need what he knows.
He won’t talk. No matter what you do. Kill him.
“On your knees,” Dalton said.
Vukov stre
tched his leathery lips, showing a set of yellow teeth, and shook his round, earless head, his lidless eyes two narrow slits, a bright black glitter inside them.
“Can’t,” he said, slapping his left thigh, where Dalton could see a large bulge under the jeans. “Nearly broke my thighbone with that fucking cannon. One hundred fucking meters, not possible. You hit me anyway. No, to kneel is . . . No. I can’t—”
Dalton shifted the muzzle a tick, pulled the trigger, the blast a deafening explosion in the narrow hallway. Vukov jerked backward, going into a low crouch, his hands up in front of him reflexively as if to ward off the incoming slug. For the first time, a flicker of fear in these eyes? He put a hand up and felt the side of his skull, touching the raw furrow the round had carved along his temple as it hurtled past to bury itself in the wall at the end of the hall.
Behind him, Dalton heard a shrill shout, a woman calling out. “Aleks!” The sound of glass sliding on glass. “Aleks!” At the same time, a muffled shot from the back of the house, two heavy thuds, wood shattering. “Aleks!” Dalton had the muzzle centered on Vukov’s face. Vukov was still in a low crouch, his hands out on either side, palms up. His eyes suddenly flicked to a point just beyond Dalton’s left shoulder. Dalton pivoted, saw a shadowy figure, a girl wearing some sort of a nurse’s uniform. She was aiming a small stainless pistol at him. Dalton and the woman fired at the same second. Dalton’s round struck her in the hollow of the throat. He felt a heavy blow to his hip bone. In the girl’s throat, a huge red flower opened. She gaped at him, falling. He spun around. Vukov was charging straight at him, but too slow, a stumbling lurch with his damaged leg. He was still ten feet away when Dalton lifted his pistol, sighting on Vukov’s ruined face, Vukov skidded to halt, lifted his stumpy hands in the air.
“Okay. Okay. No shoot. Okay?”
“Down,” said Dalton through gritted teeth. “Now.”
Vukov dropped to his knees, put his hands out, and flattened face-first on the floor, spreading his arms and legs out wide. Dalton stood over him, aimed the Anaconda at the back of his bald, distorted head, his finger tightening on the trigger.
Kill him.
He heard a voice behind him, weak but steady.
“Don’t shoot him yet, boss. Please.”
Dalton, without turning his head away, keeping the pistol fixed on the back of Vukov’s skull, said, “Dobri?”
“Yes. Is me. Good to see you, boss.”
“You sound like shit. They hurt you?”
“Not . . . not so much.”
Heavy boots on the staircase, and Davit slammed through a door at the far end of the hallway, his pistol out, his face a slab of pale rock. He took in the picture. A large, apelike man spread-eagled on the ground. Dalton, blood running down the front of his jeans, standing over the prone man with a pistol zeroed on the back of the man’s skull. Dobri Levka, a few feet behind Dalton, in striped pajamas and paper slippers, shackled, his ankle cuffs attached to some kind of long silver chain, his face a black-and-blue horror, one eye battered shut, his lips caked in dried blood. And a dead girl in a bloody heap in front of the clinic doors.
“Hey, Bogdan,” said Dobri, smiling through dry lips. “Got vodka?”
“Dobri,” said Dalton in a flat, hard voice, the pain from the wound in his hip starting to make itself known, his chest filling up with cold fire, “Tell me why I can’t kill this . . . thing.”
“My boat,” said Levka, coming to stand at Dalton’s shoulder. “The Blue Nile. They put it on big cargo ship ten days ago. I think they going to do something terrible with it.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” he said, blinking down at Vukov through one puffed-and-purple eye. “But maybe this thing does.”
DALTON held the gun on Vukov as Levka—rail-thin and haggard, unshaven, his thick hair matted and filthy—used his own shackles to cuff Vukov up and bind his ankles while Davit radioed for a Zodiac and a shore party. When Levka was done, Dalton reached down, grasped Vukov by the back of his jeans, and jerked him to his feet. As Vukov stood upright, he looked down at what was left of the girl in the doorway and then grinned at Dalton.
“You put nice big hole in Maya, Slick. Maybe you should fuck it while is still warm.”
Bogdan Davit stepped in across Dalton and slammed Vukov on the side of the skull with his pistol, knocking him back down to his knees. He put a boot on Vukov’s chest and shoved him backward onto the floor. Two of his sailors appeared at the top of the stairs. He said something short and direct to them in Ukrainian, held up a hand, making them wait for a moment longer, stepped in again and kicked Vukov hard in the crotch, hard enough to move him back a full yard. Vukov made no sound, but he turned slowly onto his right side and folded into himself as much as he could, his breathing going short and sharp.
Davit sighed, nodded to his men, who stepped in and gathered Vukov up like a sack and hauled him down the stairwell. Davit turned with a satisfied air to Dalton and Levka.
“Okay. Daring midnight raid. Prisoner rescued. Shots fired. Dead girl on the floor. One CIA agent with bullet in his hip. Lights coming on in the town. The Gulag opens up before us. I hereby declare this invasion of Holy Mother Russia officially over. Yes?”
BACK on the Velosia, steaming for home, Dalton, his hip bone aching and a hole in his flesh where the ship’s doctor had plucked out a .22 slug, hobbled down to the supply room to have a talk with Vukov. He found him sitting on a metal chair, the chair chained to a ringbolt in the bulkhead, Vukov chained to the chair by a waist belt and ankle shackles.
Vukov looked up as Dalton opened the door, tilted his head back, and stared up at the overhead light inside his wire cage, laughed softly to himself, and then lowered his eyes and fixed them on Dalton as he pulled up a box and set it down in front of Vukov.
Dalton pulled out a pack of Sobranies, lit up a pink one, inhaling the smoke, staring back at Vukov.
“Cigarette?” he asked, lifting up the pack.
“Yeah. I like cigarette. Even faggot cigarette.”
Dalton stuck one into Vukov’s mouth, lit it, sat back, and watched as Vukov sucked the smoke in and expelled it through his nostril slits. The effect was demonic. Smoke rose up between them.
“So. Slick. Time we have nice chat, eh?”
“Your man, Branislav Petrasevic. The man I killed—”
“Kill three, Slick, but who is counting?”
“The other two were boys. Half trained.”
His troll’s leer appeared again and his yellow teeth. He spoke around the cigarette, holding it in his teeth.
“I like to work with troubled youth. Like Boy Scout leader. Hey. You bring that big gun? Fucking good gun. You damned good shot. One hundred meters. Right in fucking leg. Surprise shit out of me. Maybe one day, I buy one too. What kind is?”
“Colt Anaconda. Forty-four caliber. Two thousand euros, retail . . . Petrasevic said I was the one who burned you.”
Vukov nodded, his heavy skull rocking forward, his lipless mouth stretching wide.
“Yes. Is you.”
“Where?”
“In Podujevo. You know Podujevo, Slick? Is where you barbecue all those people. In Podujevo.”
“You were there?”
Vukov rolled his head around on his thick neck, lifted his shoulders in a shrug, his muscles sliding under his T-shirt. His hands were folded together against the chain waist belt, his fingers curled slightly. He was breathing slowly and steadily, a machine.
“I was in mosque.”
“In the mosque. Bad decision. Not bright.”
He laughed.
“No. Not bright. In come rocket. I am in tunnel. Pow! Flames come and eat me all up. Now I am monster. You do this, Slick. Girls. I bet all girls like you, Slick. Pretty boy like you. I was pretty boy too. Girls, they all love me. Now not so much. Now I want girl, I pay or I just take. So. What happen to the Miklas whore? I not see her. Got new bitch now? Very fine. I would do her with big grin. Maybe some day, she get real dick,
yeah? The Miklas girl, she not like you so much after she find out about Podujevo?”
“No. Not so much. How did you know I was in Podujevo?”
Vukov showed his teeth.
“Is for me to know.”
Dalton suddenly made the connection.
Colin Dale, the retired U.S. Army officer, the KGB mole that he and Mandy had hounded into the light last winter.
“Kirikoff’s mole. Colin Dale. He would have known. He told Kirikoff. Before he died. Kirikoff used it to recruit you.”
Vukov shrugged it off.
“Maybe. So what? Dale is dead. You execute him. Right on beach. All this means shit to me. Is politics. I am fighter.”
Dalton looked at Vukov for a while in silence.
“You were a Skorpion.”
His eyes grew wide and his skin changed.
“I am Skorpion.”
Dalton shook his head, a sideways, mocking smile.
“Not to us. We called you the Whack-a-Moles. It was like hunting gophers. You pop up, we take off your head. It was fun.”
Vukov sucked on the cigarette, shaking his head slowly.
“You believe in God, Slick?”
“I try. Doesn’t always work.”
“Believe in Jesus Christ, who die for our sins? Who gives us eternal life in Heaven? You believe in Him?”
“I’m a Christian.”
Vukov leaned forward into the haze of his own smoke, his great round head seeming to float inside the cloud, bodiless.
“Then you should kill Muslims. Not Christians. This is the big war, Slick. This is true crusade. There is no peace with Islam. They know this. Soon, or late, one day they know we will all go back under the boot. Is in their Koran. You know what Dhimmi is?”