by Ward Larsen
Slaton intervened decisively.
With both hands on the rifle’s barrel, he ignored the pain in his shoulder and raised it over his head. In that same instant the Russian’s head broke the surface. Slaton swung down like a lumberjack trying to part a log in a single blow.
He missed the man’s head as it came out of the water, but no such precision was necessary. The gun weighed twenty-eight pounds, and was traveling on a moment arm of nearly five feet. The steel stock crashed into the Russian’s neck with all the certainty of a sledgehammer, crushing bone and tearing sinew. The man crumpled instantly, stunned to stillness. Slaton’s second blow was far more exacting, and probably fatal. The Barrett’s stock caught him flush on the crown of his head.
The Russian went still in the water, facedown in a fast-diffusing cloud of red. Never one for half-measures, Slaton leapt into the pool and held the man’s head under until he was sure. Absolutely sure. There was one flutter of movement, likely no more than an involuntary spasm. Then nothing at all. Slaton retrieved the handgun before scrambling out of the pool. With the gun poised, he scanned the villa for any sign of Ovechkin. He saw nothing.
Dripping wet, Slaton pocketed the gun, which he recognized as a Sig Sauer P320, and recovered his phone. He jumped up, knocked the UMP off the light fixture—it took two tries—and rushed into the villa. He was barely through the seaside French doors when a car engine fired to life out front. He heard the engine rev and the squeal of tires. Slaton burst through the front door with the UMP poised, but saw what he expected—a flicker of white disappearing up the driveway.
Ovechkin was gone.
The tan sedan remained, and Slaton checked the ignition. No keys.
He took a deep breath, ratcheting down. He lowered the UMP, reconnecting the damaged sling and putting it across a shoulder.
As the adrenaline ebbed, he regarded the two vanquished guards. Then his eyes drifted to the equipment case near the car’s trunk. It wasn’t an exact twin to the one he’d seen on the promontory, but seemed similar in size and shape. He walked over, unlatched the lid, and after a brief pause threw it open.
There, cradled in solid foam, was the rest of the system. A thick optical lens that was connected by an umbilical to a processor of some kind. Two heavy batteries and a tripod stand, the rectangular feet of which matched the impressions he’d seen beneath a rock ledge on a Davos mountainside. And to one side, an ordinary ammo box. Slaton picked up the ammo box and opened it. What he saw inside was anything but ordinary. There were three shaped-foam cutouts, and one of the spaces was empty. The other two contained plastic cases the size and shape of a fifty-cal round. He opened one and saw a pristine example of the mangled projectile he’d recovered in Davos.
Slaton repackaged everything, then stood wondering what came next. He glanced up at the truck on the distant hill. It hadn’t moved. He then considered whether the CIA might be able to track, or even intercept Ovechkin. He decided it was worth a try.
Slaton checked his phone.
He saw eighteen missed calls.
SEVENTY-ONE
Boris Tikhonov had spent most of his adult life indoors, yet as a child he’d summered often at his family’s modest dacha deep in the game-rich Urals. That being the case, he knew gunfire when he heard it.
The shooting had begun a few minutes ago, a rapid-fire exchange of different-caliber weapons. Then it ended as abruptly as it had begun. The reports of the shots arrived muted inside the heavily insulated truck, but he suspected it was sourced from the villa Zhukov had pointed out earlier. Tikhonov drummed the fingers of one hand nervously. The colonel should have been back by now—he’d gone off over an hour ago, promising to return in time to view the intercept. The combination of those circumstances—unexpected gunfire and Zhukov’s disappearance—did not bode well. It was even more disturbing in light of what was about to take place.
Tikhonov got up from his workstation and went to the driver’s cab. Through the front windscreen he could just make out the villa’s red tile roof, yet there was no sign of activity. He hurried back to his workstation, stopping on the way at a small equipment cabinet. There he removed a 9mm semiautomatic. Tikhonov thought it a reasonable precaution given how unpredictable things had become. Zhukov. RosAvia. Great sums of money transferred. A mysterious Russian who’d shown up in Tazagurt last night on a private jet. The engineer had no hope of understanding it all. No more than he understood the reasons behind the crime he was about to commit. The atrocity he’d been coerced into performing.
Back in his seat, he set the gun on the console and concentrated once more on the MiG. The jet was forty miles east, and closing rapidly. Tikhonov had been told to fly a high-speed, low-altitude profile, which implied an intent to avoid radar coverage. He could only manage that to a point—if he went too low he might interrupt the integrity of his own signal and lose control of the drone.
He referenced the target on his monitor. The 747 would arrive in just over ten minutes—well within the window Zhukov had been promised. Whatever the colonel’s source of information, it was proving accurate. He wondered who exactly was on the big jet. Zhukov had never entrusted him with that information. Tikhonov tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, and as he did a surge of acid spewed in his belly.
He looked worriedly at the door behind him. Where the devil did the colonel go?
He checked the MiG. Thirty-eight miles.
Tikhonov again referenced the 747.
Performing a bit of mental math, he nudged the throttle forward ever so slightly.
* * *
When Slaton finally returned the CIA’s call he got no greeting whatsoever—only Director Coltrane’s voice bellowing across the Atlantic. “No time to explain! We have a crisis and need you to intervene immediately!”
“Intervene?” Slaton repeated, feeling as though that was what he’d been doing since well before dawn. “Intervene in what?”
“One of the MiGs you saw last night is airborne and approaching your position. So is a Boeing 747 carrying the entire Saudi royal family. We think the MiG is going to take down the bigger jet.”
“You mean shoot it down?”
“No. The MiG is configured as a drone—we believe whoever is operating it intends to crash it into the bigger jet. You’re the only one in a position to stop it.”
Sniper that he was, Slaton naturally thought of the Barrett. Newly bloodied, it was laying on the stone terrace. “If you think I can shoot down a jet fighter, you have a bit too much faith in my marksmanship. How could I—” His thoughts locked up midsentence. He looked at the nearby hill. “The truck,” he said.
“We’ve been watching it and think it’s our only chance! We’re almost certain the MiG is being controlled through that vehicle. You need to move—these airplanes are getting very close!”
Without hesitation, Slaton did exactly that.
The tan sedan would have helped, but there was no time to search for the keys. He struck out on a sprint up the long paved driveway. “How much time do I have?” he asked, trying to hold the phone steady.
A pause, then, “Six and a half minutes.”
The top of the hill was a mile away, a steep climb all the way. “What’s the quickest way up?” he asked.
“There’s a service road along the north side of the hill. It’s slightly longer than a straight climb, but it’ll be faster than fighting the terrain.”
Slaton saw a section of the road on the hill above him. He cut across rock and scrub to reach it and began driving upward, his lungs straining for air.
“Four minutes,” he heard Coltrane shout over the line.
At a bend in the road Slaton got a clear view up the coast. There was no mistaking what he saw—in the distance, a Boeing 747, identifiable by its distinctive upper deck. The jet was flying low and slow, as if making an approach to a runway. But there were no runways here.
Slaton pocketed the phone and sprinted flat out. He was gasping with every stride when he reached th
e top of the hill. His injured shoulder throbbed in pain. The truck was fifty yards in front of him, and he saw a door midway along one side. An integral set of exterior steps had been lowered like an invitation. There was no time for reconnaissance, no time to study alternate ingress points.
How many people are inside? he wondered. Two? Ten?
He paused long enough to palm a fresh mag into his weapon, hoping the UMP hadn’t been damaged in the fall from the roof. The 747 was almost abeam the villa, the scripted words Saudi Arabia clear on its tan-and-white fuselage. A sudden roar from behind caused Slaton to spin around. He saw the MiG hurtling in like a thrown dagger.
Heading straight for the Saudi royal family.
With the UMP ready, he curled his finger over the trigger and ran toward the truck. He flew up the steps and battered his good shoulder into the door. It slammed back with almost no resistance. Slaton crouched with the UMP ready. The interior was dark, but he sensed movement to his right. He rotated his weapon and saw a huge man turning in a chair with what looked like a handgun. Slaton sent two rounds into his head from ten feet away. The massive man collapsed in his chair, then tumbled to the floor with a grunt.
Slaton spun left and cleared the rest of the place.
He saw no one else.
The MiG thundered overhead, the pitch of its engine altering as it passed.
Slaton rushed to the workstation, ignoring the dead man on the floor. He saw a control panel that reminded him of an airliner’s cockpit. There were instruments and lights. Countless buttons and two joysticks. A monitor showed a view that could only be sourced from the MiG—the 747 centered in crosshairs.
For an instant Slaton was heartened to see that every switch was labeled. In the next he was stymied—the labels were all in Cyrillic. He considered using the UMP to annihilate the entire panel. Instead he began reaching for one of the joysticks, not sure how it worked or what effect it might have on the jet. Before he could touch it, a lone red-guarded switch caught his eye. It was labeled in Cyrillic like the rest—but with one of the few Russian words he’d ever had the occasion to learn.
Взрывчатка.
Explosives.
Slaton flicked up the guard and slapped the switch.
In the front window an instantaneous flash of light overwhelmed the rising morning. It was followed by the sound of a tremendous explosion.
SEVENTY-TWO
Slaton had no idea what had happened. The team watching from Langley could do nothing but sit helpless as, fifty miles above Morocco, a state-of-the-art infrared satellite lens blinked like a human eye trying to stare at the sun.
They would all learn the specifics in days to come. In cruel irony, the attempt on the king’s life was captured in high resolution, and from a dozen different angles, by the photographers he himself had commissioned. Yet in that moment, as the cataclysm played out over Slaton’s head, everyone feared the worst.
The 747 was directly above the cape to the south, just coming into view for the flock of waiting photographers, when the MiG reached its closest proximity. It would later be determined that the drone was 143 meters away, and on a perfect collision course with the widebody’s central fuselage, when it exploded in midair—at the detonation of the self-destruct charge Tikhonov had installed as a precaution. From the Saudi point of view, it would have been far more useful had the self-immolation occurred ten seconds earlier. As it turned out, the MiG was traveling at such a high rate of speed that in spite of its obliteration as a functioning machine, a large number of fragments carried on to reach the Boeing.
Fortunately, the king’s pilots were the king’s pilots for a reason. Drawn from the most elite ranks of the Saudi Arabian Air Force, the two senior officers were among the most steady and highly trained aviators on earth. So it was that, when remnants of the MiG’s third stage turbine punctured a wing spoiler actuator on the 747, the resulting loss of hydraulic pressure in system number two brought barely an intake of breath on the flight deck. No fewer than twelve pieces of the MiG penetrated the plane’s hull at various points, but because the big jet was at very low altitude, the loss of cabin pressure was a complete nonevent. The most pressing concern arrived in the form of a slab of the MiG’s vertical tail which sailed straight into the outboard port engine. The engine immediately caught fire and began disintegrating, throwing off shrapnel of its own that damaged an adjacent fuel line running to the inboard port engine.
It was at this point that the king, who’d remained on the flight deck for his sightseeing excursion, heard a most unprofessional word from the seat in front of him.
The pilots became a blur of motion, working levers and silencing warning bells. Checklists were run while the captain fought the controls to keep the jet airborne. In short order the crew secured the number one engine, little of which remained on the wing, and were able to coax the number two engine to keep running, albeit at a reduced power setting. With a bit of rudder thrown in to keep the behemoth flying in nearly a straight line, the hulking jet passed beachside of the king’s new palace within seconds of the prescribed moment. Less according to plan was the picture it presented: the Boeing limped through the air in a decidedly uncoordinated dance, black smoke trailing one of its engines and fuel vapor streaming from another.
And that was exactly what Slaton saw when he stepped outside the control vehicle. From the highest hill on the coast, he watched the massive jet claw for altitude and begin a very gentle turn seaward. It rolled out on a northerly heading, certainly making for the nearest emergency airfield. When Slaton lost sight minutes later, the jet was marginally higher and still trailing smoke like a barnstormer at an airshow.
* * *
Slaton started back toward the villa, a host of new aches and pains governing his pace. After trotting downhill, he reestablished contact with Langley and explained what had happened.
When he finished, Coltrane said, “I’d like you to wait there at the scene.”
“Why?”
“We’ve dispatched a team from our embassy in Rabat. With any luck they’ll arrive before the Sûreté Nationale. We’d like to go over the place before the police get involved.”
Slaton didn’t respond for a time. “Did the royal family land safely?” he asked.
“A few minutes ago—a military airfield near Casablanca. You just saved the House of Saud from annihilation. I think the king will be surprised to find out that it was a former Mossad man who—”
“Actually,” Slaton interrupted, “I’d like to keep my name out of this mess. Completely out.”
“All right … I think I understand. We owe you that much.”
“No—you owe me a lot more. And I’m going to start collecting right now.”
Slaton explained what he wanted.
Before Coltrane could respond, the line went dead.
* * *
In fact, the CIA squad from Rabat beat the police to the scene by thirty minutes. They discovered three bodies at the villa, along with one in the truck on the nearby hill, and began taking pictures immediately. What they didn’t find was one weary and severely bruised kidon. Slaton was gone, as was the tan sedan.
In fact, the operations center at Langley, still referencing their satellite feed, had noted his departure. When the duty officer inquired whether they should track the car, the director’s answer had been unequivocal.
“No, let him go.”
In time, detailed reconnaissance images of the villa would be compared to onsite photographs taken by the embassy team. After painstaking analysis it would be determined that, aside from Slaton and Ovechkin, two items had gone missing from the villa. One was a large rectangular shipping case. The other was a fifty-caliber Barrett sniper rifle.
SEVENTY-THREE
The back-slapping at Langley was still under way when a junior technician, who’d begun coordinating with Moroccan first responders, stumbled upon reports of a second calamity: the RosAvia complex in Tazagurt was falling victim to a raging fire. By th
e time Ouarzazate’s distant fire brigade reached the facility, there was little left to salvage. More disturbing news soon followed: a number of bodies had been found amid the charred wreckage.
The improbable timing of the tragedy escaped no one at Langley, and their bleak outlook was confirmed when evidence of accelerants was found. Another body was discovered near the runway, on the roof of a curiously equipped van—a victim whose demise had nothing to do with fire and everything to do with two 9mm hollow-point bullets.
All too late, Director Coltrane ordered yet another retuning of the agency’s priorities. In the frenzy to prevent the destruction of the House of Saud, all regional surveillance assets had been directed toward the Atlantic coast. The NRO quickly retrained its nearest bird eastward, and analysts scoured RosAvia’s tarmac for the small business jet that had arrived twelve hours ago carrying a single Russian.
The jet was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
In the following days, Moroccan authorities issued a stream of disturbing press releases.
In his grave initial account, the minister of foreign affairs announced that an attempt had been made on the life of the king of Saudi Arabia. By grace of God, the plot targeting the monarch’s jet along the southern Moroccan coast had been foiled. Great credit was given, and rightly so, to the king’s pilots, who had skillfully brought the damaged plane to safety. The specific nature of the attack was characterized vaguely as a “drone incident,” and requests from the press for amplification on the point were shot down for reasons of national security, no mention made as to whose secrets were in jeopardy.
The minister also linked the tragedy at Tazagurt to the attack. He noted that the facility, run under license by the Russian corporation RosAvia, had been integral to the plot. Yet the extent of that involvement would be difficult to measure: all thirteen employees had been killed execution style, and the hangar and outbuildings had burned to the ground. Little remained of the few aircraft inside. The minister also mentioned, perhaps through clenched teeth and with a degree of pith, that RosAvia representatives were responding dutifully to investigators’ questions from their distant Moscow headquarters. At the end, he left no doubt that the inquiry would be a long and arduous one. Subsequent updates did nothing to dispel that notion.