Again Swagger considered.
“I saved best for last,” said Stronski, so pleased with his success. “Comrade Bukhov, very professional, very thorough, as I said, includes offices that he had found penetrated, and chief among them was that belonging to Yatskov, senior KGB and supervisor of Kostikov and Nechiporenko in Mexico City and first interrogators of Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Swagger let out an involuntary sigh. “That means that CIA had access to whatever Oswald said the last day, when he was so distraught and pulled the gun. He was in Yatskov’s office.”
“I suppose that is conclusion you could draw. I only tell you what the records say about wire operation at the embassy at the time.”
“What it proves,” Swagger said, “is that someone in the Agency could have known about Oswald’s hit on General Walker. It is not proved, but it cannot be ruled out.”
“You’re the genius. You’re the–” He went still.
Swagger picked it up immediately.
“Two,” said Stronski in the same even tone, “coming from around the bushes behind us, heavy coats, I cannot see hands. You have that pistol?”
“I do,” said Swagger, his mind gone instantly tactical. Was this a setup? Had Stronski betrayed him? If so, Stronski could have pulled a pistol and finished the job in one second. He wouldn’t have placed himself in the kill zone. In an odd way, a clarification had been issued. On the point of bad action, Swagger felt a wave of inappropriate enthusiasm. He could not help but smile.
“You laugh. Swagger, you are crazier than even I.”
“This is the only shit I was ever any good at,” said Bob, still smiling. He scanned for threat, immediately seeing two men, also in heavy coats with obscure hands, coming at them from the same direction that Stronski had come, from the Tretyakov, maybe moving with a little too much energy for so early on a sunny Moscow morning in such an out-of-the-way place.
“Two,” he said, “my twelve o’clock.”
“And two more make six, heading in from other entrance, just passing by Dzerzhinsky’s statue on the right. Are you hot?”
“I’m hot, but no reload.”
Neither body posture had altered, neither man had swiveled his head or signaled sudden anxiety through tensed body. In fact, Stronski laughed, and as he did, he reached over and shook Swagger’s arm in mirth, and Swagger felt something heavy slide into his jacket pocket and knew it to be an eighteen-round magazine for his GSh pistol.
“No cover here,” said Stronski, laughing, “and they’ve got baby Kalish, I’m sure. On three, draw and fire, then break around the bench, run straight back to cover.”
Swagger knew what was back there sixty feet or so: Stalinland. Row on row of stone Joe, wisdom in his eyes, sagacity on his face, mustache flowing like the Don, hair thick as the wheat fields of Ukraine.
“I lay down fire, you move. Get into the Stalins. Good cover, you can move, will stop their rounds, you can get shots. We’ll see if they have guts to come against our guns when we are on the sights and shooting calmly.”
“Let’s kill some bad-asses,” said Swagger.
“On my one, three, two, one–”
- - - -
It happened so fast after such a long wait. The Izmaylovskaya kill team had sat in a Mercedes limo behind the Tretyakov, a glossy black beast of a car with three ranks of leather seats, smelling of new car and also of perfume, as if someone had a woman there recently. But not now. Two men in the front, two in the middle, two in the rear. Very tough, very good men, had done wet work all their lives, first in Spetsnaz, then for the mobs, and now as dedicated Izzy hard guys. It was a great life, and they had everything that the kid code-named Petrel Five dreamed about, blow, chicks, and bling. They had bleak faces and small dark eyes and wide Slavic cheekbones and frosts of gray hair, and each weighed over two hundred pounds. Each could bench his weight and was expert at Systema Combat Sambo, an advanced Russian and deadly martial art. All had scars, mended limbs, jagged knuckles, memories of death in cold or faraway places or, more recently, in back streets or nightclubs. To see them was to fear them, and the exquisitely tailored dark suits they wore over dark shirts – some black, some chocolate, some dark blue – warned the world to step aside.
Each carried what is commonly but incorrectly called a Krinkov, or “Krink” in the vernacular, the preferred weapon of choice of the late Osama bin Laden and perhaps the instrument he was reaching for when SEAL Team 6 popped his balloon. (These men had done a lot of that sort of work themselves.) It was a short-barreled AK-74 variant with a large, almost bulbous flash hider, a folding stock now cranked tight along the left side of the receiver, and a wicked, curving plum-colored mag of thirty 5.45-mm high-velocity steel-cored cartridges. It was secured by shoulder sling under the heavy Armani overcoats they wore, and in each voluminous pocket were a few more mags.
The news came to the team leader when he answered his cell in perfunctory language, without drama or excitement; they were professionals at this, none of it was new.
“Oleg, we’ve got a confirm. They’re on the bench at the Dzerzhinsky statue. You set to roll?”
“On our way, Papa Bear,” said Oleg, tapping the driver hard.
Behind him, he heard the sound he loved best in the world, which was the klack of bolts being racked as they were slid back to turn the gun hot and ready. He himself made that wonderful adjustment, feeling the slight vibration as the bolt slid back, permitted a cartridge to pop into place, then rammed it home to the chamber, the firing pin held tense by the trigger. His fingers inspected while he called out the commands to his team, as he had done in the mountains so regularly: “Bolts back, safeties off, full auto engaged.”
“All positive,” came the ragged response.
The heavy car gunned to life but did not jump into the traffic. As in all action, smooth is fast, and the Izmaylovskaya driver was an equally experienced pro. He slid arrogantly into the traffic, accelerated, made the proper turns while obeying all laws, and in a few minutes pulled up to the margins of the park.
Oleg spoke into his phone. “Papa Bear, we’re set. Still a go?”
He heard Papa Bear speak into another phone and then come back with “Yeah, he’s still got them sitting there like birds perched on Felix’s cold nose. Go rock their world.”
“Showtime,” he said to his boys.
The car slid to the side of the road, and two men slipped out. They’d hold a few seconds, the other two two-man subteams would get out at two other spots around the perimeter of the Park of Fallen Heroes, they’d coordinate the walk-in, and then they’d converge on the bench. All would go to guns, the shooting would be over in seconds, and in the stunned silence, they’d return to the patiently waiting limo, which they knew would go unseen by any of the hundreds of witnesses in the roadway, including Moscow police or militia.
The car deposited the second team, turned a corner, and drove fifty yards to deposit the third. The driver began the heavy labor of a U-turn meant to move him back and place him at the exit to the park closest to the bench, out of which, if all went well, the six shooters would soon emerge.
All did not go well.
- - - -
Pistol up, two hands, front sight, front sight, front sight and press, the jerk of the recoil snapping the pistol up a bit, its slide in super-time hard back, a spent shell a blur as it spun away, and then Swagger found the front sight again and followed up with another to the midsection, cranked right a degree or so, and hammered two more nines into the partner, who was unlimbering his Krink, and watched that one blur spastically while his nervous system announced he’d taken hits and he staggered, the Krink dropping but not falling as the strap held it.
Swagger heard the reports behind him of Stronski, his own GSh-18 rapping as he fired a suppressive spray, having more targets and not being able to aim after the first.
Swagger’s old legs drove him off the bench and behind it, and he was stunned to see that though he’d hit and slowed them, the two
on his side had not pitched to the earth. He fired again even as one of them, in a lurching move, jerked on the Krink’s trigger and chopped up a cloud of dust and debris at his own feet.
“Go, go, goddammit,” yelled Stronski over his own new dialogue of shots; Swagger was too excited to feel his age and ran like hell, low, with first a zig and then a zag and then a zig and was in seconds, it seemed, absorbed by the formation of Joes in Stalinland. He fell behind the nearest, went prone, and shooting with the earth as his sandbag, fired at the smears of men to the left moving and shooting, scattering as they looked for cover, their chopped-for-handling assault weapons jerking arcs of unaimed fire into the air to cascade wherever. Stronski ran, and Swagger held on the head of a man who’d wisely dropped to kneeling to steady his front sight for an aimed shot, but Swagger fired first, careful on the press, and saw a splat of gas-inflated shirtfront to mark a hit high in the chest; the man staggered to his knees, dropped his weapon, and seized it again. Swagger fired, and the man went sluggishly, reluctantly to earth. He seemed so disappointed.
Swagger looked back. One of the first two he’d hit was down, finished, but the other – though his black shirt, now wet and heavy, clung tightly to his chest – staggered ahead, weaving the Krink with one hand, bull-crazed by his job and meaning to finish before he bled out. Holding carefully, Swagger managed to press one off that blew a jet of mist from the man’s broad forehead. He fell like a toppled statue.
A strange ripping sound went stereophonic on Swagger as a spray of stone or marble frags lacerated his cheeks and hands. He turned and saw that two of the original four to the left had taken positions behind the bench and were laying out fire into the fleet of Stalins, ripping through nose and mustache and wavy Georgian hair, blowing out all-seeing eyes, ripping the comfy pudge of sanctimony that in some variations bunched the Boss’s cheeks. One Joe split radically in two, its lesser half dropping to Earth; another, of porous material, simply evaporated into a fog of dust as, hit centrally, it shattered.
“Go back, go back,” screamed Stronski from an adjacent Joe head, and Swagger, usually the yeller of orders in such situations, obeyed, crab-walking back a rank to find another stout stone Joe behind which to crouch even as he heard full-metal jackets hum through the air and was aware that, around and behind him, the whole world was dancing and crumbling to the jig of velocity. Situated and alive, he rose, and though he could see only flashes and that thin scrim of burned chemistry that accompanies multiple smokeless powder discharges screening the bench, fired the last five shots of his mag at the bench, hearing the protest of punctured wood as his bullets bore into the bench slats.
Stronski, under that distraction, scuttled backward, hooked behind a Joe, and slammed a new mag into his GSh. Swagger’s, similarly hors de combat, received the same treatment, and dropping the slide on a fresh eighteen, he hoisted it before him to hunt for targets. He heard Stronski yell in Russian.
“I call them fucking gutless Izzy dogs, tell them to come visit me in the Joes and I will kill the rest of them and fuck their asses when they are dead, hah!” he translated in the next lull.
A new fusillade ruptured the blasphemy, and more stone fragments sang as they pranced from the various Joes that the high-velocity bullets pockmarked.
“He’s coming around,” yelled Swagger, seeing that the two on the bench were covering for a brave guy, cutting right and hoping to ease among the Stalins from that flanking point of entry. Swagger rose, guessing the gun smoke, floating debris, and floating slivers of grass and brush would give him a little concealment, and set to intercept. He dropped back a row of Joes, cut right, ran low, paused as he waited for the shadow of the gunman, then stepped out on the diagonal and fired twice into the approaching killer’s heavy chest, then fired a finisher into center forehead. It was not pretty, but it was final. The gunner went down hard, headfirst, feet flying up with such force that a Gucci loafer popped off one. Swagger scurried, leaned forward, and retrieved the Krink, deftly unlinking the sling catch.
Swagger rose and, as steadily as possible, emptied the mag, about fifteen remaining rounds, into the bench where the last two bad boys hid, this time rendering it further useless under splinters and dust. One of them rose to run, and Stronski leaned into a sight picture to take him. He fired once and his pistol jammed, its slide stuck halfway back.
Swagger swung to take the runner down with the Krink, not remembering it was empty, and pulled on nothing. He dropped it, shifted the pistol to his right hand, and suddenly felt a horse kick in his hip as a pelting spray of frags and superheated dust flew upon him.
He rolled left into the fetal, locked his elbows between his knees, and found the man who stood over the defenseless Stronski and pressed just as that guy got another mag into his Krink and was about to massacre the sniper. Swagger hit him in the eye, blowing it out, and the man twisted like a dancer and corkscrewed earthward.
Swagger turned back on peripheral motion and settled in for a shot on the surviving gangster now fleeing, saw civilians across the street behind him, possible friendly-fire casualties, and opted not to shoot. The big guy, all athlete and amazingly fast, made it out an exit and dove into the open door of a sleek black limo, which burned rubber on the acceleration.
“Dump guns, get out of here,” commanded Stronski.
“You’ve been hit.”
It was true. The left side of Stronski’s white silk shirt bloomed the dark spread of blotted blood.
“It’s nothing, you go, get out of here. Do it now! I am fine. I cannot run much.”
Swagger dropped the pistol, pulled his watch cap low, and started to walk forcefully away, crossing a street, finding an alley, cutting down it, finding a broad boulevard. Police cars roared along it, looking for a turn to the park, which, as it developed, was not accessible from that thoroughfare. Two passed within feet of Swagger, but in them, youngish men seemed alarmed and unaggressive, unwilling to get any closer until they were sure the shooting had stopped.
Finding a small restaurant, Swagger tried to look cool. He said, “Koka,” and waited as the drink was brought, hoping no one noticed that he was hit too.
CHAPTER 12
Reilly e-mailed her boss at Foreign. “Seems to be a big shoot-out downtown here. They say five dead in an assassination attempt. Some mafia deal. Interested?”
She heard back in a bit.
“Sounds routine. Happens here all the time. Pass, thanks. Stay on that Siberian gas thing for the time being. Maybe if Putin comments on shoot-out, set up a Sunday thumbsucker on Russian mafia-getting more violent? Think about it.”
So she went back to tap-tap-tapping. “. . while concerns about the danger of cold drilling for natural gas under the Siberian tundra continue to rise after last month’s blast, Petro-Diamond spokesmen argue that the explosion was a fluke. Moreover, they say the billion-dollar energy firm will stick with recently announced plans to expand drilling operations beyond the Nebeyaskaya range in the Arctic Circle.”
Her cell rang. She saw the number was local but didn’t recognize it. “Hello?”
“Hey,” she heard Swagger say.
Normally able to handle cops as well as grieving widows, angry generals, and romantic drunks, she was momentarily nonplussed by the voice, arriving as it did from a man who’d vanished ten days before.
“Where are you calling from? Why are you here? I thought you’d left.”
“I’m in the parking lot. I’m under your car, actually. Flat on my back.”
“What?”
“I seem to be bleeding. I made it here on the Underground. I had to get flat or even this small wound could empty me.”
“Jesus Christ, Swagger. You! You were in that gunfight. I should have known.”
“I think I’m the missing bodyguard.”
“And that was Stronski?”
“Stronski and Swagger, the two of us, both old guys, against the world. How is he?”
“They say the purported target is all right. Wounded
, but expected to recover.”
“Very good news.”
“Okay, stay there. I’ll come down and get you. I need to get you to a medical–”
“No, no. It just tore through some muscles and skidded off the steel ball I have for a hip. That’s all. Bandages will do fine. In a few days, maybe you can dump me at the embassy, and I’ll be all right. Some corpsman will sew me up. The FBI will verify me, and they can ship me back more or less in one piece. I don’t want any police interviews, believe me.”
“Swagger, you have such a talent for getting yourself into bad shit.”
She got down to the dark lot to find him wriggling out from underneath one of the small Chevys that the Post provides its reporters in Moscow. Once he got himself upright, he was able to move without much more of a limp than he normally had, though looking closely, she saw the small bullet hole and a dark stain that suggested some blood loss.
“No arteries, no veins. Like a whack from a baseball bat. My whole side’ll be purple for a month, but once the laceration heals, it’ll be fine.”
“You’ve been shot!” she said. “It can’t be fine!”
“I’ve been shot before. Please, it’s not a big thing. My main worry is Stronski now.”
“He’ll be all right.”
The small elevator took them up seven flights. They turned through a metal door that could have guarded a bank vault and walked into a spacious double living room apartment laden with sofas, icons, books, textile hangings, art, all of it in splendid taste. Swagger had nothing to compare it to; he had never seen such a den of the mind as opposed to the body, but he imagined it as the kind of place some sort of fancy professor might keep.
“Nice,” he said. “Lots of books. Bet you’ve read ’em all.”
“Not hardly. The office is through the door down the way; it’s another apartment, rigged for business with our computers, which are tied in to the Post’s in Washington. It’s like I’m twenty-five feet away from my boss, not four thousand miles.”
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