Assassin's Run

by Ward Larsen

  In the end, the sergeant decided it wasn’t worth the risk. He was already on a tight schedule, and it was time to leave Davos. The local police might be plodders, but they weren’t stupid. In time they would make connections, discover that a man with a heavy East European accent had been at the store last night buying climbing gear. When that happened, he needed to be far away. To the positive, they now had a second suspect to track down, a man who’d probably claimed to know the first.

  That would confuse things nicely.

  He collected his few possessions and headed into the hallway, closing the door of his prepaid room quietly behind him. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced—it might very well be Slaton. Quick-stepping down the main stairwell, he tried to remember what Mossad called their assassins. Every service had their monikers, and it came to him on the first-floor landing. Kidon. Hebrew for bayonet.

  His midsized Audi was in the basement parking garage. His gear, including the weapon, was already secure in the trunk. He fired the car to life, and moments later the big garage door lifted to present a serene Davos evening. He surveyed every sidewalk and road before pulling out, his attention more acute than at any time since he’d arrived. It wasn’t the police he was looking for.

  As the sergeant set out at a measured pace toward Zurich, he gave the new developments considerable thought. When the road began to straighten, and with Zurich on the horizon, he placed the expected call.

  It was answered immediately.

  “I am leaving Davos,” he said in Russian. “But there may be a complication…”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Slaton woke well rested, having taken a room in a small and peaceful rooming house on the outskirts of town. The prices were reasonable, the staff pleasant, and when he went downstairs in search of coffee that morning he encountered a full breakfast buffet in the homespun dining room.

  He had given thought to shunning a room altogether to spend the night in the Mercedes, whose rear seats reclined. It would have made sense had he been on the run, but in that moment he remained in the clear. For once the pursuer instead of the pursued. After a good night’s sleep, followed by a full meal, he was sure he’d made the right choice.

  He settled his account, and on stepping outside discovered that the promised break in Switzerland’s early winter had not yet come to pass. The temperature hovered near the freezing point, and a drifting mist had claimed the mountains. The steel October morning gradually took its grip on Davos, turning black silhouettes to gray and slowly adding angles to muted shapes. The one bit of good news—there was no new snow. Had that been the case, his morning’s work might have been greatly complicated.

  Slaton had spent the previous night mapping out a route on his new topographical map, and he set out in the Mercedes with a particular road in mind—by no coincidence, the one that led farthest up the mountain. He found the road easily, and was encouraged to find pavement for the first half mile. At that point it digressed to a gravel service road, but one that was well maintained. Two months from now it would all be impassable, but today the snow was thin, the patches of ice few. A frigid stream was intermittently visible on his left, wending through a forest that had been caught in the middle of its annual defoliation.

  The Mercedes climbed ably, its four-wheel drive put to good use. Where the gravel road came to an end he found a locked gate, and beyond that, as promised by the map, was the head of a hiking trial. Slaton pulled the Mercedes into a small level area, a makeshift parking apron likely cleared for summer hikers.

  He went to the tailgate and collected his gear. Heaving the backpack in place, he put his skis over one shoulder and set out on the trail. There were two general schools of off-piste skiing. One involved purists who invariably started at the bottom of a mountain and climbed every step. Having no need for self-validation, Slaton took the more practical approach—he started with the highest traversable road, then added as much elevation as possible using prepared surfaces. Only where man-made paths ended did the skis and poles come out.

  He climbed at a steady pace, his breath going to vapor in the still morning air. The trail was wet, but there was little ice, and footing was not a problem. After thirty minutes he encountered a scenic overlook, and using the map, Slaton took a moment to orient himself. He looked down toward the ski area and easily spotted the point on the lower run, still marked with yellow crime scene tape, where Romanov had met his end.

  He shifted his gaze upward to his objectives. He had discerned three, all chosen yesterday during his dusk survey of the upper mountain. The first would be the easiest to reach: roughly two thousand yards from where he stood, a gray-granite outcropping of boulders situated well below the upper lift station. The other two points involved more climbing: a pair of rock ledges near the summit, spaced roughly five hundred yards apart. By Slaton’s estimate, any of them might have concealed the killer who’d struck Romanov.

  Of course, there was no guarantee of success. If he didn’t find what he was after, he would undertake a second survey from high on the mountain and try again tomorrow. It was all little more than conjecture and analysis, meaning there was a fair chance he would fail.

  The only way to know for sure: climb a mountain and start searching.

  * * *

  Where the trail became lost in snow, Slaton donned the touring skis. He climbed at a steady pace, his heart rate and respiration accelerating. Halfway to the first objective his legs were burning, and his lungs strained in the thin air. When he finally reached the field of boulders, he paused, leaning heavily on his poles.

  He looked downhill, and as expected saw a clear line of sight to the spot where Romanov had come to rest. By his shooter’s eye, nine hundred yards. More telling, however, was what he did not see. Snipers invariably set up shop long before their targets were expected to appear. Patience was requisite when hours, even days, had to be spent concealed in wait. After any engagement, successful or not, the general rule was to clean up, leaving as few traces as possible of one’s stay. Spent casings, food wrappers, water bottles, flattened grass. To the greatest extent possible, the hide was to be put back to its original state—except in the rare case when a shooter was advertising his presence. To erase the evidence left behind was not merely a defensive measure, but part of the greater psychological war. It enhanced the sniper’s mystique.

  But while a sniper might hide his presence from a casual observer, or even a trained detective, it was far harder to conceal from a peer. Slaton knew every nuance, the signs that were hard to erase. As he evaluated this potential hide, he was struck right away by one glaring disadvantage. Without cover overhead, there was no way anyone could have approached the outcropping, let alone remained here for hours, without leaving marks in the carpet of snow. And once those marks had been made, nothing short of a fresh three-inch snowfall would put things back to a natural state. Which hadn’t happened.

  He surveyed the field of boulders carefully, and the terrain all around. He saw not a single boot print or ski trail. There were no impressions or detritus in the various granite nooks. Wanting to be sure, he spent twenty minutes going over the area, and in the end he was satisfied—no one had been here yesterday.

  He looked up the mountain toward the other two conceals he’d identified. They were roughly the same distance from where he stood, both a climb of perhaps two thousand vertical feet. One of the ledges would be significantly more difficult to reach, the terrain below steep and rugged. Yet in that site Slaton saw one notable advantage—proximity to a snow-covered run that offered a quick escape.

  That’s the one I’d have chosen, he thought.

  The mist was thinning, the day getting warmer. Slaton looked down over Davos, then out across the Alps. It was a magnificent view, snow-capped peaks in the distance brilliant against a deep blue sky. He took a water bottle from his pack, drained half, and set out uphill. His neck craning upward, he dug his skis hard into the fast-softening snowpack.

  * *
*

  The air distance from Moscow to Ouarzazate, Morocco, is twenty-five hundred miles. Zhukov felt as though he’d been transported to another world.

  His transition had begun in Casablanca. He’d arrived there the previous afternoon, and spent the night in a hotel that had been arranged by Petrov’s staff. It was called Hotel Le Doge, sixteen rooms in Casablanca’s bustling Art Deco quarter. He’d been told it was a five-star property, and Zhukov found no reason to doubt it. His room had been spacious and clean, with furnishings that might have been brought straight from Paris. The walls were trimmed in royal blue, complemented by veils of silk that billowed around a four-poster bed. For a Special Ops grunt who’d long been happy for a dry sleeping bag, and nothing short of ecstatic for a tent, it necessitated a degree of adjustment.

  But adjust Zhukov had.

  The posh treatment ran through the morning, a sumptuous breakfast brought by a waiter who refused to let his coffee cup go dry. Then, finally, reality had intervened. Zhukov packed his bag, bid an attractive concierge goodbye, and returned to the airport. For his connecting flight, the previous day’s business-class seat on a Boeing was supplanted by a decidedly more narrow space on a dusty thirty-seat turboprop. For the first time in his life he had asked a ticket agent if an upgrade was available, only to be told that the airplane was small and therefore offered but one class of seating. Zhukov, who’d grown up under Communist rule, smiled and told the agent he understood. He’d of course endured far worse in military transports. All the same, yesterday had been nice.

  Am I going soft? he wondered.

  After a bumpy forty-minute flight eastward, his two-day conveyance was complete. The chilly terminal buildings and jetways of Sheremetyevo seemed barely a memory as he descended a wobbly set of stairs to a tarmac baking in unseasonable heat. Gone were the snow-covered sidewalks and sunless Moscow sky, in their place only barren red desert and a hammering sun.

  Is there any temperate place in this world? he wondered.

  With the airplane unloaded, twelve passengers ambled en masse toward an earthen terminal building. In terms of size, the place wasn’t much bigger than the first army barracks Zhukov had called home, and he was struck by its unusually thick walls and decorative turrets. He thought it a conspicuously defensive architectural style, and wondered what narrative that suggested about the people who lived here.

  The passengers around him wore an eclectic mix of clothing, casual Western brands layered with traditional shirts and colorful vests. Zhukov himself wore a casual jacket and trousers. He could scarcely remember the last time he’d donned a proper uniform—one more degree of separation from his previous existence.

  Immigration had been endured in Casablanca, and with no luggage to claim, his passage through the terminal building took less than a minute. He had been here twice before, and outside he pulled to a stop along the familiar red-and-white striped curb—as far as he knew, every paved street in Ouarzazate was lined in similar fashion, some vestige of French colonial oversight. Looking up the only road—there was no need for separate arrival and departure lanes—Zhukov saw but one vehicle.

  The beaten Toyota Land Cruiser was parked a hundred meters away and began moving immediately. It might have been either red or brown, but dust had muddled the issue, and when the SUV pulled to a stop directly in front of him Zhukov peered through the open passenger-side window. He recognized the driver right away—the same young man who’d collected him on his last visit, five weeks earlier.

  “Hello, Colonel,” said Muaz in English.

  Zhukov dropped his rollerbag in the back, then took the front passenger seat. “Good morning, Muaz. Thank you for being prompt.”

  The young Moroccan smiled, and steered toward the main road. He was a spindly kid of Berber extraction, with walnut skin and a mop of unruly black hair kept in check by a maroon fez. No more than twenty-five years old, his knobby limbs were the perfect complement to the perpetually crooked grin that attested to Muaz’s most prominent trait—his unfailingly positive nature. It had always been a mystery to Zhukov how the poorest people in the world often seemed the happiest. He decided his own experiences had denied him a valid statistical sampling—the non-Russians he’d dealt with overseas, particularly in recent years, often regarded him as either protector or paymaster.

  “The traffic is not a problem today,” Muaz remarked.

  Zhukov looked up the street. He saw one other car moving. He glanced at Muaz and saw the grin. “Yes, very funny,” he replied in a monotone. Zhukov idly regarded the Toyota’s interior. It had once been refined, but the color of the leather seats had faded and there was a side-to-side crack across the dash. The sun and heat doing their relentless best.

  “Have there been any visitors to the airfield since I was last here?” Zhukov asked. This had been his parting mandate to Muaz, a request to keep an eye on things—reinforced with a healthy wad of euros.

  “Only one group from India.”

  “Engineers?”

  “No, I think not. They talked about building a hangar of their own and performing test flights—a project that would take many years.”

  This made sense to Zhukov, and he wrote it off as harmless. It was, ostensibly, the reason the place was here. The airfield had been carved from the desert, high on a plateau overlooking the Sahara. It had been given the name Tazagurt in honor of a kasbah, long gone to rubble, that had once stood sentry on the nearby twin peaks. With a ten-thousand-foot runway, one hangar, and three support buildings, the facility was three years into a five-year plan. Russians, Zhukov knew, always loved their five-year plans.

  The Tazagurt project had been specially licensed by the Moroccan government, and was funded as a joint venture between the Russian Office of Technology and Development and its corporate overseer, RosAvia. A relatively new aerospace design bureau in Russia, RosAvia was fast rising to join the likes of Sukhoi and Tupolev. The sales pitch behind the undertaking had been part politics, part business. Russia, under president Petrov, was doing its best to establish footholds in new corners of the world, competing with the traditional Western powers and a newly emergent China. In this case, as a practical matter, the weather in Morocco was fair almost year-round, offering test pilots and engineers relief from harsh Russian winters. Also, because Tazagurt’s main runway had an elevation of four thousand feet above sea level, it was an ideal location for the certification and testing of airframes in high-altitude, high-temperature conditions. This was the basis of the slick PowerPoint presentation that had been given to Moroccan authorities: Tazagurt was an eminently logical location for an aerospace design and test facility.

  Zhukov’s reasons for being here, however, were far more oblique.

  Muaz drove south through the town of Ouarzazate, and it was much as Zhukov remembered, the dominant color being a ferrous red-brown hue. This was yet another universal theme taken from his travels: in underdeveloped countries, the hue of buildings was invariably the same as the earth upon which they were built. The geometry of the structures here, however, seemed less in harmony with their surroundings, rounded architectural edges that contrasted with the jagged mountains beyond.

  The township soon fell behind, and in no time they were swallowed by the desert. Zhukov saw a landscape that was nothing less than lunar. He was not the first to notice it. Had they taken the main road from Ouarzazate in the opposite direction, they would have encountered Atlas Studios. By land area, it was the world’s largest film studio, and had served as a backdrop for the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and Game of Thrones. Atlas’ sets were favored for scenes demanding one overriding characteristic—absolute desolation. Zhukov could see what lured the directors here. Brown dirt and rocks ran to the horizon on either side, barren topography that showed no sign of civilization, the only marks being those drawn by water and eons. Indeed, the only human element in sight was what stretched out before them—a lone ribbon of asphalt reaching into the hills.

  Twenty minutes later the RosAvia ha
ngar appeared on the horizon. Soon after, the main runway came into view, its grooved concrete shimmering like a mirage in the rising heat. The entire complex was surrounded by a fence, which seemed superfluous in such a remote place. Zhukov told anyone who asked it was meant to keep the hyenas off the runway.

  Nearing the main gate, he took one last look at the Anti-Atlas Mountains beyond. They looked raw and untouched, the colors and textures vivid. No different from what had existed for a million years. It was that desolation that had brought him here, every bit as much as it had the Hollywood moguls. The primary difference—Zhukov intended to leave no record whatsoever of his work.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The climb took nearly two hours. Slaton countered the frenetic terrain with a steady pace, as unrelenting as an incoming tide. When the temperature began to rise he removed his jacket, the Alpine air refreshing in its crispness. Even so, as he neared the crest his body began to protest. He was straining with each step and his form faltered, skis dragging and edges catching. His heart seemed on its redline, pounding from the combination of exertion and altitude.

  When he was roughly a thousand feet below the summit, the snow deepened noticeably. In months to come, as the base became thicker and less stable, the possibility of avalanches would have to be considered when moving off trail. Fortunately, that wasn’t yet an issue.

  He rounded a thick stand of trees, and the ledge he’d spotted from below finally came into view. Right away Slaton was encouraged. He noticed subdued chevron impressions in the snow, much like the ones he was making now, only less fresh, having gone through one day’s cycle of heating and cooling and wind. Closer still, he recognized a single set of ski tracks leading down to the nearest groomed run. This could be what he was after. On the other hand, it might only be the signs of an adventurous ski instructor who’d gone off trail.