Slingshot

by Matthew Dunn

  More light, but this was brighter. Vehicles emerged from outhouses in the farmstead. The men in the complex ran to them and entered. Those who had attacked the perimeter from outside the farmstead retreated; within seconds they were heading toward more vehicles that had been hidden out in the heath. Mikhail ignored them, focused on the multiple vehicles leaving the farmstead, and muttered, “Bastard!”

  His reinforcements weren’t due here for another two hours. If he called them now, it would take them at least twenty minutes to get here, probably longer. He watched the convoy. It was heading away from the farmstead on the road he’d driven in on. In approximately five minutes, it would be driving within one hundred yards of his hidden vehicle.

  Mikhail decided the only thing he could do was wait for them to pass, get in his SUV, pursue the convoy, order his remaining assets to search the farmstead and dispose of their colleagues’ bodies, and tell his four-man team of shooters that they needed to be ready to intercept the convoy. He reached for his cell phone and ran to his vehicle.

  Twenty-Four

  One of them is on the phone. Engines are running. Vehicles are rolling.”

  Adam turned on the ignition. “We’ll take point.” He kept his headlights off, watched the two Russian SUVs emerge back onto the highway, drove off the hard shoulder, moved behind a civilian vehicle, then turned his lights on. “Shit! They’re driving at pace.”

  “Stay on them. I don’t care if they see us.” Will gripped his handgun, glanced over his shoulder, and saw Roger and Mark’s vehicle race out of the gas station. “Something’s wrong,” he said into the phone.

  “Yeah, I’m getting that feeling.” Mark accelerated. “Don’t think it was us that spooked them. There were nineteen other cars in the gas station.”

  Roger added, “It was the cell phone call that did it.”

  Will looked around. “Do you think they’ve got a countersurveillance team out? Maybe they spotted us; the call came from them.”

  “Nah. I’ve been looking since Berlin. There’s no team.”

  “Then most likely the call came from Mikhail,” Will said. Adam was now driving at nearly one hundred miles per hour. “But this isn’t premeditated. There’s been a change of plan.”

  Mark’s SUV moved in behind Adam’s. “They must know we’re pursuing them. Let’s just hope they think we’re kids, looking for a race.”

  Will placed his pistol into his jacket and held his assault rifle with both hands. “Nice thought, but I doubt they’re thinking that right now.”

  The Russians’ vehicles were forty yards ahead of them, increasing speed, moving in between other cars.

  “Exit’s coming up. One hundred yards. They ain’t slowing. Fuck!” Adam yanked the steering wheel down as the Russian team took the exit at speed. Taking the corner, he shouted, “They’re trying to lose us.”

  Roger’s vehicle was only feet behind, its tires screeching as it entered the bend. “They’d have been better off going into Hanover to do that.”

  “Exactly.” Will wrapped the assault rifle’s strap around his forearm. “They’re heading to an assault. Standby. Most likely they think we’re cops. They’ll try to kill us if they think we’re going to get in their way.”

  They were now on a minor road, straddled by countryside.

  “Multiple oncoming headlights.” Adam downshifted and braked hard as the Russian vehicles did the same. “Eight vehicles, all together. All look like SUVs.”

  Will stared at the approaching convoy, his mind racing. “That’s their target, and that’s our target!”

  The convoy was now ninety yards away. One of the Russian vehicles sped alongside it, reached the end, turned and stopped so that it was blocking the road. The other did the same at the head of the convoy, which was now trapped between the two vehicles.

  As Adam brought the car to a halt twenty yards away from the nearest Russian vehicle, the Russians leapt out of their cars and began opening fire with machine guns at the convoy. Immediately, men inside the vehicles returned fire.

  Will jumped out of the car, took aim, and fired a grenade. One of the convoy vehicles exploded. As he reloaded the grenade launcher, he shouted in Russian, “Here to help! Here to help!”

  The two Russians nearest to him were using their SUV as a shield, taking turns to break cover and fire rounds toward the convoy’s fuel tanks. Those at the other end of the convoy were doing the same. Hundreds of rounds were striking their cars; the men in the convoy were firing through windows.

  Will fired again, and a second vehicle exploded. Roger ran past him, his body low, heading straight toward the nearest Russians while shouting, “Friend. Friend.” Adam, Mark, and Laith were either side of the road, firing controlled bursts into windshields.

  Will saw movement. “Roger! Down! Grenade!”

  As the CIA officer threw himself to the ground, the Russians’ car lifted off the ground before crashing back down. Shards of metal tore through the two Russians, killing them instantly.

  Roger crawled toward the Russians’ destroyed vehicle and dived for cover as more rounds struck it. He shouted in English, “Hit them from their flanks,” and repeated the instruction in Russian. He stood, exposing his upper body to the hostiles, and fired a sustained burst of rounds into the vehicles.

  One of the Russian men at the end of the convoy broke cover and was shot in the head and chest.

  Laith and Adam sprinted down one side of the convoy, Mark down the other. The last remaining member of the Russian team ran out from behind the car while firing his submachine gun. Bullets from the convoy smashed a large hole into his chest.

  Will sprinted, jumped onto the hood of the first ruined vehicle, then leapt onto the roof of the second vehicle and began firing through the roofs, while the rest of Will’s team attacked the line of cars from the sides. Will leapt to the next SUV, continued firing down into the vehicles’ roofs, and moved onward, repeating the drill until he was standing on the last car in the convoy. After firing controlled bursts into the driver and passenger areas and the trunk, Will shouted, “Cease firing.”

  He jumped down and began searching each SUV with his colleagues.

  Everyone in the convoy was dead.

  Police sirens.

  Will felt sick with frustration and failure as he called out, “We need to leave right now!”

  Mikhail used his binoculars to watch Will and his team run to their vehicles and leave the scene. He waited a few seconds, then gunned his car and drove fast to the destroyed convoy. Exiting the vehicle, he ran along the convoy, glancing inside each SUV, ignoring the distant sound of police sirens. After he checked the last vehicle, he kicked it hard and shouted, “Bastard!”

  Schreiber was not in any of the vehicles.

  He’d tricked Mikhail by sending out a dummy convoy.

  And that could only mean he was now loose, traveling toward the Black Forest. But Mikhail had no idea where in the vast region Schreiber was headed.

  He ran back to his car, pressed hard on the accelerator, and chased after Will’s team. Following the big MI6 officer was his last remaining hope. But he’d have no hesitation in killing the operative if he got in his way.

  Twenty-Five

  An icy early-morning wind buffeted Simon Rübner as he knelt down and used a trowel to dig through the Black Forest mountaintop’s soil. Momentarily, he wondered if he was in the right place, whether the code’s numbers had been altered when in the SVR or CIA vaults. His tool struck metal, he wiped away soil, and he sighed with relief.

  The metal box was in the hole.

  He stared at it.

  Many people had gone to enormous lengths to get him to this place, but none of them had sacrificed as much and worked as hard as he had to ascertain the location of the DLB. It had started six months before. He’d been toying with leaving Mossad to earn a more lucrative salary in the private sector and had made some discreet enquiries with prospective employers. He later learned that one of them was a cover company ow
ned by Mr. Schreiber. Over the course of three weeks, he was interviewed by twelve men and women. They’d told him nothing about their backgrounds, but he could tell they were all former intelligence officers because they asked him precisely worded questions that were designed to not only define whether his responses were consistent but also to subtly elicit a portrait of his character. He could see what they were doing and they knew it. So he’d played it straight and told them that money was his prime motivator and that legalities had never been particularly interesting to him in his line of work. At the end of his twelfth interview, the female interviewer told him that she was recommending that he be advanced to the final interview and that if he was successful he would be hired. Two days later, on a Sunday morning, an elderly, diminutive gentleman knocked on the door to his home in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. He introduced himself as Colonel Kurt Schreiber and said that he was there to conduct the final interview.

  Simon was totally unprepared for the interview and had to ask his wife and teenage daughter to go out for a few hours to give them privacy. He sat with Mr. Schreiber in the living room until midafternoon. At the end of the session, he was mentally exhausted. The German had barely spoken, instead had sat motionless, his eyes flickering behind his rimless glasses, with a slight smile on his face and an expression and demeanor that suggested immense intellect, focus, perception, and cruelty.

  Simon had guided him to the front door, at which point Mr. Schreiber turned to him and said that he would pay him one million dollars per year with performance bonus on top and that he was to resign the next day. Simon had instantly accepted. The other jobs he was considering had salaries less than a fifth of what the German was offering.

  After he’d given his notice with Mossad, he’d taken his wife and daughter to New York. Upon landing at JFK, he’d told the immigration officer that he was a private investor looking to set up a business in the States. The officer grilled him for fifteen minutes before telling him that he and his family needed to wait in a room until a decision had been made as to whether he could enter the country. Two hours later, another man entered the room and asked more questions before obtaining all of Simon’s contact details and letting him go.

  Of course, the delay of entry had allowed Immigration to contact other U.S. agencies and ultimately the CIA, who would have given U.S. Immigration assurances that they and the FBI would keep their eyes on the known Mossad officer and would use him for their own benefit.

  He put his family in a Manhattan apartment and took possession of one of Mr. Schreiber’s dormant but legal companies.

  Four men from the CIA approached him ten days later, saying they were from a Belgium consultancy called Gerlache and were seeking to establish a partnership with a company that could provide information to U.S. companies seeking to set up operations in the Middle East. He’d accepted, and at first their requirements from him were unremarkable. He took their money, telling them that he needed the cash to support a wife and daughter who drove him crazy with their shopping sprees and that the daughter wanted them to stay in the States so that she could attend one of the fancy and expensive East Coast universities.

  It was exactly what they wanted to hear.

  And accelerated their decision to tell him that they had affiliations to U.S. political entities, knew that he was an Israeli intelligence officer, and wanted him to pass them Israeli secrets.

  He’d pretended to be shocked and confused. He told them that what they were asking of him would make him a traitor, but that he’d become reliant on their money. They gave him assurances that no one would ever know about his secret work for them and that they would pay him double. He agreed. They had him hook, line, and sinker.

  Or rather, he had them hook, line, and sinker.

  They could barely contain their excitement when he started feeding them the names of Israeli agents operating in the West. But he did it slowly on the pretext that he had to discreetly get the information from Mossad files, whereas the truth was that Mr. Schreiber had told him to get all the information before he resigned.

  He knew that the CIA officers were telling him the truth when they said that he’d become the Agency’s top Israeli agent. And he was sure that his work for the officers had done wonders for their careers. It came as no surprise to them when he said that Mossad was likely to post him back to Israel unless he could convince his masters that he’d recruited a U.S. spy. They said they’d play the role of that spy and would give him U.S. secrets that should placate his employer. Everything they gave him was low-level crap that Mossad already knew. He played along with that for a while but one day said that he needed much more or Mossad was going to order him to find a better spy. He told them that he needed the identity of a Russian SVR officer who was on the Agency’s books. This clearly unsettled them, but a day later they met and supplied him with the name of Lenka Yevtushenko. They said they’d set up an introduction to the Russian and that in return he’d better give them a whole lot more names and details of Israeli operations on American soil.

  He was sure that the four CIA officers had given him the name of the SVR officer without authorization to do so.

  He gave Yevtushenko’s details to Mr. Schreiber, who approached the Russian and said that he had to steal the code or else Mr. Schreiber would tell the SVR that he was a CIA spy. Yevtushenko was petrified and said that his ability to travel was tightly restricted but that he would do the theft if Mr. Schreiber could help him get out of Russia. Mr. Schreiber agreed and told him that he was to use a highly effective Polish exfiltration route, but under no circumstances was he to go anywhere near the Polish embassy in Moscow as it would be under surveillance. He gave him precise instructions. Yevtushenko walked into the small Polish consulate in Saint Petersburg, said that he needed to speak in strict confidence to someone in the consulate who was familiar with intelligence matters, and was told that there was no one like that there but that he should liaise with their embassy in Moscow where there were professionals who could help him. He said he had to escape to Poland with a secret, that he couldn’t go anywhere near the Moscow embassy, that time was running out. Some urgent calls were made to the embassy; everything was arranged for him. That afternoon, he stole half of the military grid reference from the SVR vaults and used the Polish exfiltration route to enter Gdansk.

  At the same time, Simon and his family flew to Europe, having no further use for the CIA.

  Mr. Schreiber had anticipated the possibility that Yevtushenko would be pursued by the SVR and had asked Simon to arrange for a deniable team of private contractors to confront not only the Polish ABW and AW officers who’d be waiting for the SVR defector in Gdansk, but also any Russians. Mr. Schreiber also put in place a team of his own men to take possession of Yevtushenko and the code.

  Simon lifted the dead-letter box out of the soil, held it in front of him, smiled, and muttered, “All that effort to find you.”

  He opened the box, placed a folded piece of paper inside it, sealed the container, and returned it to the hole. After covering it with soil, he stood and looked at the Black Forest’s magnificent vista. Tomorrow, Kronos would be standing on this spot.

  Later that day, Kronos would meet Mr. Schreiber, who would give him the instruction to kill the treacherous bastard who was due to testify under oath in two weeks’ time.

  Men had ordered Mr. Schreiber to stop that from happening.

  Because nobody could ever learn the secret behind Slingshot.

  Twenty-Six

  Betty Mayne sat at the kitchen table, watching Sarah attempt to peel and slice two cloves of garlic. It had taken Alfie two days to succeed in getting Sarah to accompany him to the nearest town to buy groceries. Today she’d reluctantly agreed, largely because her husband James had jokingly told her that if she didn’t go he could finally tell all their friends that he’d become the dominant partner in their relationship. It was now evening, the blue sky darkening into dusk, and Alfie was making his usual rounds of the hunting lodge’s g
rounds, setting his traps, watching and listening, having a smoke in the icy, fresh Highlands air, checking for anything that looked unusual, always keeping one hand close to his pistol.

  Betty was wearing a thick tweed jacket, skirt, and hiking boots—clothes she’d worn to take James on a hike around the mountainous estate earlier in the day. James had cursed and wheezed and grumbled for most of the walk, but as they’d strolled alongside the loch toward the lodge one hour ago he told Betty that he’d had the best day he could remember, had decided that London life was no longer for him, recited the fauna and flora they’d seen on their route, and said that he was very worried about his wife.

  He was now preparing a fire, and probably pouring himself a slug of single malt.

  “Would you like me to help you, my dear?” Betty watched Sarah reach for shallots.

  “You could get me a glass of wine.” Sarah’s hand shook as she held the knife. “Join me in one?”

  “Not when I’m working.” Betty stood, poured a glass of Shiraz, and handed Sarah the glass. “What are you cooking?”

  “I don’t know . . . yet.”

  “Keep it simple.”

  “Simple isn’t good enough. I’m being judged by the men.”

  “Actually, you’re being judged by me. The men will eat anything. They just want to see you moving.”

  Sarah held the knife still. “I know.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “More than you!”

  “I’m sure you do, my dear.” Betty moved alongside her. “Maybe just put the chicken on top of what you’ve already chopped. Onions, garlic, celery, herbs. Bit of wine. Keep it simple. Blimey, Alfie will think he’s in heaven.”

  “You’re patronizing me.”

  “I’m talking to you.” Betty put her hand on top of Sarah’s knife-holding hand. “Shall we slice some potatoes, sauté them first, then add them to the mix?”