by Brad Taylor
Hannister turned from the window and said, “I want you to find Mikhail. I want you to stop that attack. Buy me some time.”
Kurt started to say something, but Hannister cut him off. “I’m not done. Stop that attack, and then find me Simon. Get him in our hands. Give me something to use against Putin.”
Kurt nodded, saying nothing.
“You can do that, right? Tell me you can. President Warren created the Taskforce. He trusted you. Tell me that trust wasn’t misplaced.”
Kurt realized the president of the United States was waiting on him to say only one thing. Wanting to hear nothing but confidence.
He said, “Yes, sir. I can do that.”
But he didn’t believe it.
68
Working with the dim light of a candle, Kirill peeled off the makeshift bandage affixed to Mikhail’s ear, saying, “What the hell happened?”
Mikhail flinched at the touch, then kept his head still. “I got shot, okay? I got fucking shot.”
Oleg said, “Shot how? What’s going on?”
Knowing he could in no way intimate that the Russian apparatus was against what he was about to order the Night Wolves to execute, he said, “A disagreement with the seller of your product. I handled it, but it wasn’t pretty.”
His flight from the historical Jewish Ghetto was still fresh in his mind, and he knew he’d narrowly escaped by the sheer luck of the club being nearby. He’d raced through the throngs of dancers, searching for a way out, and had stumbled into a storeroom. He’d run to the back and crouched down, finally noticing blood on his right shoulder.
He’d remained, hiding in the corner, the fear of Shoshana actually getting her hands on him more terrifying than anything he’d faced in the room with the Russians.
After ten minutes, he’d begun to believe that Shoshana had given up. He’d cautiously explored the storeroom and found a bathroom. He looked in the mirror and saw that Shoshana had shot off his right ear, the lower portion simply gone, nothing but yellow, bloody gristle right below the ear canal. One inch to the left, and he’d have been dead.
He’d taken a wad of hand towels and pressed it to the wound, letting the clotting blend with the paper like a giant shaving nick. When he had the bleeding under control, he’d spilled out of Club 70 through a back door, running into the night.
He’d eventually slowed, getting lost in the concrete and steel of Warsaw, mildly surprised to realize that he still held the briefcase. He’d thought about his next move, the most urgent being to get away from the demon Shoshana no matter what it took, his primordial brain retreating to a fight or flight response. Once he caught his breath, out of danger, he reconsidered his options, and realized they were very few.
He now had not only Shoshana—attached to some American agency—chasing him, but he had the Russians as well. Putin was on the hunt to stop Simon, and Putin now knew who he was, and his ferocious bloodlust rivaled Shoshana’s. As Simon had learned once before.
He’d decided that the only course available was to continue the mission. If he ran now, he’d be running for the rest of his life, but if the plan succeeded, he just might be able to survive.
He’d begun walking east, sticking to the shadows. He crossed the river, entering the suburb of Praga, the buildings becoming seedy and worn. He reached a narrow cross street named Brzeska and turned south, entering a ghettolike apartment area. He traced the addresses, warily keeping his eye on a pack of youths sitting on some steps. When he passed them, they rose and began to follow him.
He reached the end of the street, the youths still behind him, and realized he’d passed the apartment the Night Wolves were holed up in. He wasn’t going to find it with a memorized address alone. He abruptly turned, confronting the men behind him. In English he said, “Can I borrow your cell phone?”
Taken aback, the leader said something in Polish, pointing at the briefcase. Mikhail said, “I don’t speak Polish.” He pointed at his ear, and they finally noticed the bandage and blood in the darkness. He held his hand to his other ear and said, “Phone.”
Remarkably, the teenager handed him one. Keeping his eye on the group, Mikhail dialed and spoke. In short order, he saw a man coming out of a building a block away. The man waved, and Mikhail recognized Kirill. Into the phone, he said, “I see him,” then hung up, handed the cell back, and speed-walked up the street the way he had come.
Now relatively safe, Mikhail had begun to calm down and reassess. He needed to get another cell phone, and he definitely needed to talk to Simon about what had occurred, but first things first: He wanted a proper bandage on his wound.
Pulling off the final piece of paper towel from Mikhail’s damaged ear, Kirill said, “Is this disagreement going to cause us problems? Are you being chased?”
Remembering the shootout, Mikhail said, “No. The men I fought with look worse than me, I promise.”
Kirill began to apply a real bandage, asking, “Is that briefcase the product?”
“Yes. Do you have explosives and weapons?”
“Explosives, yes, but we don’t have any weapons. We go back for that tonight.”
“You don’t have guns? How are you getting weapons in Poland? They hate your ass here.”
Kirill scoffed and said, “Yeah, they ‘hate us,’ but the old Soviet black market systems are still in place. Four blocks from here is the Bazar Rozyckiego. A flea market that sells everything. Out front are T-shirts. In back is whatever we need.”
“You trust it?”
“Yes, because it survived in the old Soviet system. Today, it’s even easier. In the new world, they’ve fallen on hard times and are willing to deal. The black market isn’t as big now, and because of it, they don’t care about nationality. Only money.”
Mikhail nodded and said, “We need to talk about the target. How we’re going to do it.”
Oleg said, “Yeah. It’s about time. We don’t even know what the target is.”
“It’s really just like your mission in Belarus. Another airbase, this time in Lask.”
“We’re setting that bomb off on a Polish airbase?”
“Yes, but just like in Belarus, the target is different. The Americans have a squadron of A-10 close air support aircraft there. You will penetrate the base, find them, then emplace the bomb. Once it’s on the ground, set the timer for however long you need to escape, and leave. It’s actually easier, because you won’t be in direct combat. You’ll be gone before it goes off.”
“How are we going to penetrate? In Belarus, we pretended to be Russian military. That worked because we are Russian. There’s no way we can pretend to be American. Or Polish.”
“I know, but there’s someone who is going to help us. An American. Hand me your phone. I need to contact Simon. He has the information I need.”
Kirill did, saying, “An American is going to get us on the base? Why?”
Dialing the phone, Mikhail said, “Because you’re going to kidnap his family tomorrow.”
69
Amy Tatum was stymied yet again in her attempts to get the hot water working in her apartment. The provider who’d shown up spoke no English and, after a discussion that went nowhere, had left, taking his equipment bag with him.
She went back into the bathroom and looked at the plywood that he’d haphazardly screwed into the wall, his makeshift temporary fix after creating a hole about four feet square. He’d done the same thing on the outside wall, but had left that open, the bricks piled up on the short patch of grass outside.
Frustrating, but there was nothing she could do about it. At least it wasn’t wintertime, because they’d end up freezing in the apartment. She picked at the plywood, seeing it wasn’t even properly attached, and began to regret following her husband here.
It was nothing like Germany, where the population was used to Americans and actually seemed to
enjoy their presence. She knew when she’d married her husband that it would entail foreign assignments, but this was sliding into “a bit much” territory. The fantasy of seeing the world was taking a backseat to getting some basic services.
Unlike just about every other American military member in Poland, her husband had been permanently detailed here. A “PCS” move, in military jargon. The pilots her husband protected came and went on rotation, but her husband—the commander of a US Air Force base security unit—had been assigned for a year. They’d told him it was an unaccompanied tour, but he could bring his wife if he was willing to pay for her moving expenses out of pocket. He had, and now she was regretting it.
It wasn’t like her last home, where there were multiple American families she could bond with, learning how to operate in a new society and having a small bubble to fall within when she was overwhelmed. None of the other married men in her husband’s command had brought their spouses, and they all lived in an apartment complex in Lask, forty minutes away. She had nothing to anchor against, and her fledgling attempts at learning German at their previous duty station helped not a whit here.
But it was only for a year, and she was already four months into it.
She heard the doorbell to their small apartment ring, and thought, What now?
She went to the door and looked out the peephole. She saw two men, both rough, but not alarmingly so. She thought about her hot water and opened the door. She said, “Can I help you?”
The first showed a pistol in his waistband. The second, in heavily accented English, said, “Yes. You can.”
She stumbled backward, her hand to her mouth, and both men entered. One stood at the door, waving down the street. The other said, “My name is Mikhail, and I know this is scary, but we mean you no harm.”
Three other men entered the small apartment, all staring at her. She broke for the bedroom, but the man called Mikhail had expected this and cut her off. She tried to scream, and he clamped a hand over her mouth, saying, “Shhhh. Stop it. We aren’t going to hurt you. If I remove my hand, will you remain quiet?”
She nodded.
When his hand dropped away, she said, “What do you want? We don’t have any money.” She was petrified about the answer, her mind conjuring horrific fantasies. His answer confused her.
“Simple, really. We want you to call your husband.”
70
It was after eleven A.M. before we managed to leave Warsaw, but at least we were moving forward instead of sitting around our hotel room waiting. It took time, as all counterterrorism analysis did, but the Taskforce had finally completed their inspection of the phones and had necked down what they believed was Mikhail’s handset, finding a couple of promising leads: first, a document detailing the military record of a United States Air Force captain named Devon Tatum. We had no idea why it was on the phone, but in the research, they’d found that he was currently the base security commander for the US squadron at the airbase in Lask, Poland. The same airfield that housed all US airpower in the current standoff with Russia.
In my mind, it wasn’t too hard to figure out why: That bastard had decided to help the Russians.
The second lead was the cell number that had sent the document. Metadata analysis had provided a general map of its movements, and it mirrored what we knew of Simon Migunov. To cap it off, the phone was currently located in Vienna, Austria—the last place Simon had stated he was going.
Even with all the might of the Taskforce, the analysts could only get a general location of Simon’s handset, with nowhere near the fidelity required for an interdiction. They’d done their best to locate him through entry control points and hotel databases, but had come up empty—meaning he was using an alias. Kurt had asked if I could run split-team ops—wanting to use the ISR package inside the Rock Star bird just like we’d done in Warsaw, and I’d said of course—if I could use the Israelis.
He’d relented, saying I had probably planned the problem to get the Israelis back into action, and I’d sent Knuckles and Retro to Vienna with a twofold mission: one, neck down the location of the phone, and two, interface with the FBI tactical team that was currently spinning its wheels in Vienna, giving them the information for arrest.
Knuckles had worked with the FBI on a previous mission, so he was the natural choice—although that mission had ended with him wounded and most of the FBI team dead—and Retro was the best on my team working with technology. He’d been the one who’d pinpointed Mikhail’s phone in Warsaw, and he’d jumped at the chance to do the same in Vienna.
While they were spooling up to leave, we’d had to plan just what the hell we were going to do about Captain Tatum. The easiest choice would have been to simply order his chain of command to detain him, but Kurt and I both knew that was fraught with risk. For one, it would be damn near impossible to wade through the inertia of the chain of command without him being alerted. Questions would be asked, resistance would be presented, and, in the end, he wouldn’t be arrested simply because we’d found his data on a phone. We didn’t know what he had planned, or how close he was to executing. If he got wind of the inquiry and fled, we’d lose our only lead.
The second problem was compounded by the first: The only way to guarantee his detention by his chain of command or host-nation forces would be to spell out our fears—and that alone might inflame an already tense situation. If word spread that we were attempting to interdict a Russian team intent on sabatoge, it might lead to rumors of Russian bogeymen being found everywhere—especially after the “spontaneous uprising” in Crimea had turned out to be interspersed with Russian Spetsnaz commandos—which might be enough of a catalyst for exactly what we were trying to prevent: Poland going nuts against Russia.
Working through the problem on a conference call with the Taskforce principals, Kurt had said, “We’re wasting time pole-vaulting over mouse turds. Just drive down there and get him. How far is it from Warsaw?”
I said, “It’s only about two hours. That’s not the problem. How can I access the base? I’m a civilian. The Polish police on the gate will never let me in, and if you start coordinating with the American forces on the base, we’re back at square one by alerting him. He’s the one that will do the coordination. And before anyone mentions it, sitting outside hoping he leaves isn’t a recipe for success.”
Kurt said, “All we need is a reason. Some plausible deniability.”
Kerry Bostwick, the D/CIA, said, “I can help there. The CIA is debating putting some UAVs on that airbase. We did a site survey a week ago, and it would be easy to plan a ‘follow-up.’ You know, maybe check out the security situation.”
I said, “That would be perfect. I’d have to coordinate with the base security commander. You got someone on the airfield right now that can meet me?”
“Uhh . . . no. They’re all forward, getting their jihad on for US intelligence.”
And then I remembered. “That’s right! You jerked Brett Thorpe off my team as soon as the president ordered the Taskforce stand-down.”
“Where is he?” Kurt asked.
“Offhand, I don’t know,” said Kerry, “but he’s either in Poland or Ukraine. Either way, I can get him to Lask before Pike arrives. He’s definitely less than two hours away by plane.”
I said, “Give him my cell. We’re rolling.”
With Aaron’s knowledge, it took a little under two hours to reach the road leading to the Lask airbase. Well, that and the fact that he drove like a lunatic. Apparently, there weren’t a lot of police in the Polish countryside, and I found myself with both hands on the steering wheel just trying to keep up with his vehicle.
When he exited the S8 expressway, he pulled over, letting me take the lead. I drove about two miles down a battered piece of asphalt and saw a Mercedes van. Standing next to it was an African American fireplug of muscle with a decidedly irritated expression.
Brett Thorpe, the man we called Blood.
I pulled up next to him, rolling down the window. I said, “You need a lift? I doubt any Poles are going to help out a man with your demeanor.”
He shook his head and said, “I swear, when they told me I was pulled from my assignment to help someone get on a military base, I knew immediately it was your sorry ass. You realize that I’m actually doing something important, right?”
I said, “Get in. Nothing is more important than what you’re about to do.”
71
Captain Devon Tatum hung up his cell, aggravated. His master sergeant saw the look on his face and said, “Trouble?”
“It’s Amy. She’s got a problem with the Polish plumbers and wants me to come home.”
“You still working on the hot water issue?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He rubbed his face and said, “I should have listened to you, Fitz, and come over here unaccompanied.”
Master Sergeant Fitzgerald laughed and said, “I tried to warn you. Bringing your wife sounds like a good deal, but without the support infrastructure from big Air Force, it’s always a pain in the ass.”
“Yeah, not to mention the commute.”
“Head on home. Nothing happening around here, anyway. I can handle the briefing tonight if you need me to.”
Devon put on his cover and said, “No, that’s okay. The last thing I need is someone asking why I’m helping my wife instead of attending a squadron update on base security. I’ll be back before then. An hour or two max.”
“Okay, sir. But if you need the time, take it. One less briefing you have to attend, and I’ll get the pleasure of not listening to you bitch about cold showers.”
Devon smiled and said, “I appreciate it. Call if anything comes up. I’ll come straight back.”