Red War

by Vince Flynn

  “No worries, man. I hope your friend’s okay.”

  Rapp stepped back and the vehicle pulled away, leaving him standing in front of the Max Terán Valls Hospital. They were only running about half the lights to keep pressure off their generators, but the glare was still a stark contrast to the darkness Costa Rica had been plunged into.

  He saw a shadow move on the roof, but didn’t worry about it. Undoubtedly Charlie Wicker clutching the Galil he favored. Joe Maslick was partly visible behind a brick planter, his eyes sweeping back and forth. Bruno McGraw and Scott Coleman were nowhere to be seen but undoubtedly close.

  Rapp started along the outdoor corridor leading to the doors, finally finding Coleman in a dimly lit corner of the waiting room. He had one hand pressed to his earpiece and was nodding perceptibly.

  “What’s our situation?” Rapp said, grabbing a paper cup and filling it from a cooler. There were three other people in the room, but all appeared to be locals and likely had limited English.

  “She’s still alive. This is actually a pretty good facility and they had a surgeon on call. Our medical team is on its way from Bethesda but they’re still five hours out. Claudia’s melting down that she didn’t have people in country when we arrived. Says it’ll be her fault if Cara dies.”

  “Bullshit,” Rapp responded. “What were the chances of us showing up at the same time as the Russians? Ten thousand to one?”

  “Exactly what I told her. You can’t stack the local hospitals every time you get on a plane. But it wouldn’t hurt for her to hear it from you, too.”

  Rapp let out a long breath and drained the cup in his hand. Dealing with the emotional well-being of the people who worked for him wasn’t why he got into this business. Claudia had handled logistics for this op the way she always did—flawlessly. If every eventuality could be anticipated beforehand, the world wouldn’t need people like him.

  “Cops?”

  “Irene’s been onto the ambassador and asked her to make sure everything gets swept under the rug,” Coleman said. “But so far it hasn’t been necessary. We told the staff that Grisha was cleaning his gun when it went off and hit her. Pretty lame story, but he’s so freaked out they seem to be buying it. I’m guessing it’s been reported, but with the power outage, I think a Russian accidentally shooting his American girlfriend is pretty far down their priority list.”

  “With a little luck, we’ll be out of here before we get anywhere near the top of it. Where is he?”

  “We put him in an empty room in the back.”

  Rapp tossed the paper cup and started down the hallway. He got a few curious looks from the staff, who undoubtedly wondered where all these muddy, humorless foreigners had come from, but nothing more.

  He finally spotted Azarov through the glass panel in a door near the end of the corridor. The Russian was standing at the foot of an empty bed, staring up at the television bolted to the wall. The volume was turned up high enough for Rapp to hear the commentary, but his Spanish was virtually nonexistent. Not that it mattered. He’d seen the shaky cell phone footage before.

  It depicted an attack on a peaceful protest in Moscow a week ago. For reasons no one could figure out, a woefully inadequate security force had suddenly attacked a crowd gathered in Red Square. Because they had been so badly outnumbered by the demonstrators, the tide had quickly turned, causing the police to use deadly force. Bloodbath was too strong a word, but it wasn’t far off.

  No one—not even Irene Kennedy—had any idea what had happened. Maxim Krupin was a vicious dictator, but he was a calculating one. These kinds of images just didn’t play in the industrialized world. If anything, they’d weaken the one thing he cared about: his grip on power.

  Rapp pushed through the door and let it close behind him. Azarov’s eyes briefly shifted in his direction before returning to the screen.

  “It’s my fault, Mitch. I might as well have shot her myself.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Krupin’s desperate. The volatility of energy prices, breakaway states looking Westward, his political opponents and the oligarchs constantly searching for weakness in him. I let you defeat me in the Middle East and now he’s desperate.”

  Krupin had put Azarov in charge of a plan to turn Saudi Arabia’s oil producing region into a radioactive wasteland. The ensuing chaos in the energy markets would have bailed out natural resource–dependent Russia while trashing the economies of the rest of the world. Rapp had managed to stop it, leaving the aging Krupin to lead his country toward an increasingly uncertain future.

  “What’s that have to do with you anymore, Grisha? As near as my people can tell, all you do is surf and float around in your pool.”

  The television screen shifted from brutalized protesters to Krupin speaking from an outdoor stage. It was in Russian with Spanish subtitles, but the gist was clear. He was appealing to his core supporters—the ultra nationalists, the fascists, and the people old enough to remember former Soviet glory. He was calling on them to help him in his desperate fight to defeat the massive conspiracies being carried out by the West. The imaginary plots to impoverish and surround Russia, to finance political opposition and protests, to relegate their great nation to irrelevance. And the people in the crowd were eating it up.

  Azarov’s eyes had gone dead, locked on the man who used to control every aspect of his life.

  “How is she?” Rapp asked.

  “Living only by the grace of the machines she’s connected to. I’m told that she’ll need a new liver but that there’s a long list of people ahead of her to get one.” He turned away from the television and locked his dead eyes on Rapp. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “We knew a lot of Costa Rica’s power had gone down but just assumed it was a technical issue. When Irene got wind it was a Russian hack, we tried to get you by email and phone. It didn’t work, so I got on a plane.”

  “When you came to me earlier this year and asked for my help, we made a deal.” His voice was emotionless, almost robotic. “I would help you take care of Prince Musaid and in return you’d help me if enemies from my past resurfaced.”

  His eyes narrowed slightly and Rapp realized that this was what rage looked like in Azarov. He’d never seen it before. The Russian tended to do what he did because he calculated that it was in his best interest. Now—maybe for the first time in his life—something had gone wrong that he actually cared about.

  “A blackout is nothing for the CIA!” Azarov shouted, suddenly letting go of the icy exterior he was so famous for. “You knew and didn’t want to send local assets. You didn’t want to expose their identities. And now Cara’s paying the price!”

  It was obvious that the Russian didn’t really believe what he was saying. The number of valuable clandestine assets the CIA had tanning themselves in Costa Rica was precisely zero. But at this point, facts didn’t matter.

  Azarov was fast as hell, but not like before. He was exhausted from carrying Cara and had cut his training regimen by about ninety percent since retiring. Still, the impact between them lifted Rapp into the air and slammed him into the wall next to the door.

  Rapp slipped an ankle around the back of Azarov’s leg, pulling him in close enough that he couldn’t get much momentum behind his blows. The first was an elbow coming in hard from the right. Rapp managed to get a shoulder up, causing Azarov’s forearm to glance off it and absorb most of the force. What was left, though, nearly took him down.

  Seeing him buckling, Azarov swung a knee up, but Rapp managed to block it and ride it away from the wall. Azarov tried to sweep his foot but Rapp put all his weight onto it, compromising the Russian’s balance when his move failed.

  Azarov’s decades of training and the perfection they’d instilled in him were both his strength and his weakness. He could always be counted on to flawlessly execute exactly the right technique at exactly the right moment. It made him predictable.

  Rapp took advantage of the Russian’s split second of instabili
ty and ducked under his arm, getting behind him. He rammed a fist into the back of his head and then another into Azarov’s kidneys. Under the circumstances, he would normally pull the punches, but it wasn’t necessary in this case.

  Azarov remained upright and shoved against the wall in front of him, trying to throw his weight back onto his opponent. Again, though, it was exactly the right move at exactly the right moment. Rapp was countering before it even started.

  He sidestepped and stuck a foot out. That, combined with a firm grip on Azarov’s hair, sent the Russian rolling across the tile floor.

  He came to stop on his back and Rapp moved right, leaving Azarov with the worst possible line of attack. He didn’t move, though. He just lay there staring at the ceiling.

  “I’m just a Russian murderer, Mitch. Without the light she casts on me, I disappear.” He let his head fall to the side so he could look up at Rapp. “You’re responsible for your wife’s death. How did you come to terms with that?”

  If it had been anyone else talking, those would have been their last words. But from Azarov, it wasn’t an attack. It was a serious question.

  In fact, he’d disappeared into Southeast Asia and tried to forget with the help of whatever needle or pill he could find. At first it had worked, but after a time the memories learned to fight back. There was no cheating the grief, rage, and guilt. It was going to have its day no matter what you did.

  “You don’t want to use me as a model,” he said, sliding down the wall behind him and sitting on the floor.

  “Then what? What happens to me now?”

  Rapp rubbed the bleeding knot rising on the back of his head. “There’s a difference between us, Grisha. My wife was dead. Cara’s not.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “GIVE me the short version,” Rapp said to the Costa Rican doctor leaning against the wall. Claudia had checked him out and given him the thumbs-up. A gifted general surgeon who had been trained in Madrid before returning to settle a few miles from where he was born.

  “Are you sure it wouldn’t be better if I came back in a few minutes?” he said through a Spanish accent that was easier to understand than Joe Maslick’s South Carolina one.

  Rapp’s impact with the wall had left a gash in the back of his head that refused to stop bleeding. A local nurse was standing behind him plunging a suture needle in and out of the wound with impressive gusto.

  “I’ve got time between now and her finishing. Go.”

  “Okay. The first aid your people performed was excellent but her wound is extremely serious. I was able to remove the bullet and stabilize her but that’s all I can do here.”

  “Can we transfer her? To San José or back to the States?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not even sure she’s going to make it through the night. If she does, it will be a few days before we can even think of moving her.”

  “I heard someone say something about her liver.”

  “Yes. It’s not salvageable. If she survives, she’s going to need a transplant.”

  Rapp let out a long breath as the nurse finished up. It hadn’t been long ago that he’d been in a similar situation with Scott Coleman. People who got too close to Azarov didn’t do so well. It was a problem Rapp understood better than most.

  “If you have good news, go ahead and give it directly to Grisha. If you have bad news, go through me.”

  His expression turned a bit confused. “Who are you? And what’s your relationship to the girl?”

  “Have you ever heard the saying ‘shoot the messenger’?” Rapp said by way of answer.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m going to tell you once and you’re going to listen to me. If the message is that Cara’s dead or dying, your life may depend on me being the one who delivers it.”

  • • •

  Rapp’s satellite phone started to ring just as he stepped through the hospital’s front gates. The humidity was still oppressive, but the heat was down. Coleman had taken Joe Maslick’s place behind a massive planter and was scanning the empty road in front of him. Mas had disappeared somewhere into the landscape.

  It still seemed improbable that the Russians would attack the hospital in search of Azarov, but not so improbable that security wasn’t a concern. If Krupin wanted him dead badly enough to take down a third of Costa Rica’s power grid, there was no reason to believe he’d draw the line at shooting up a rural medical facility.

  He pulled the phone from his pocket and put it to his ear. “Hello, Irene.”

  “How is she?”

  “Alive, but it sounds like she might not stay that way. If she does, she’s going to need a liver.”

  “I’ll make some calls. In the meantime, do you have any idea what happened there? Why Maxim Krupin would go to these lengths to see Grisha dead?”

  “We haven’t had that conversation.”

  “I know it’s a bad time, Mitch, but you’re going to need to broach the subject. We’re in crisis mode here. This isn’t a completely isolated incident. There’s also the recent attacks on Russian protesters and now we’re seeing increasing military activity in Ukraine as well as on the borders of the Baltic states.”

  “You must have some idea what’s happening.”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t. It’s impossible to see Krupin’s current behavior as anything but erratic and counterproductive to his own interests.”

  “Doesn’t sound like him.”

  “Our thoughts exactly. The fact that he’s not a man prone to rash action or self-sabotage suggests that he’s working toward something. Something we’re blind to but that Grisha might have some sense of.”

  They’d debriefed Azarov when he’d walked away from Krupin but hadn’t gotten anything actionable. They could have pushed harder of course, but what was the point? Krupin was a rational actor surrounded by a massive military and nuclear arsenal. Azarov undoubtedly had some interesting dirt locked up in his brain, but it wouldn’t change anything.

  Now, though, the chessboard had changed. Krupin seemed to be blowing a gasket, and any residual loyalty that Azarov might have felt for the man had disappeared along with his house and Cara’s liver.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Rapp said. “And if we end up putting Cara on a plane to Bethesda, you’ll have a chance for a face-to-face.”

  “I’ll look forward to that. But in the meantime, anything at all would be helpful. I have a meeting scheduled with the president and I’d like to tell him something more than we’re working on it.”

  “Understood.”

  He disconnected the call and adjusted his trajectory toward Coleman. “Where’s Grisha? I looked for him inside and he’s not there.”

  “He left.”

  “What do you mean, he left?”

  The former SEAL shrugged. “He came out, turned right, and walked away.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “You told me to keep the Russians out of the hospital. Not to keep them in.”

  Rapp reached up to grab him by the throat and have a serious conversation about how his orders should be interpreted, but managed to stop himself. His old friend was the best in the business and knew damn well what was expected. The fact that he’d decided to do only the bare minimum on this op was understandable. He’d follow specific directives, but going out of his way to protect the man who had nearly crippled him was a bridge too far.

  Rapp turned and walked toward the road, dialing Kennedy as he went.

  “That was faster than I thought,” she said by way of greeting.

  “Grisha’s gone.”

  “What do you mean? Gone where?”

  He stopped and looked out into the darkness. “I can’t say for sure, but I have a pretty good guess.”

  CHAPTER 11

  NORTHWEST OF ZHIGANSK

  RUSSIA

  “IT’S on every news station across the country!” Prime Minister Boris Utkin’s voice continued to rise in pitch. “It’s virtually all that’s being report
ed on.”

  Krupin reached for the volume knob on the console in front of him. Utkin could screech like an old woman when his comfortable existence was disrupted.

  “Try not to get hysterical, Boris.”

  The fog of his breath was barely visible in the glow that filled the shipping container. It had been moved into the warehouse on his orders and set up as a secure communications center. Internet was now fully functional, as was encrypted satellite phone, and various news feeds were playing out on screens attached to the steel walls. Other than that, the claustrophobic space contained little more than a scavenged chair and a desk made from a plank of wood. Not the surroundings he’d become accustomed to, but adequate. Comfort was no longer a consideration. All that mattered was security.

  “Hysterical? The press has videos of my homes and their grounds. A detailed inventory of my car collection. Photos of my personal closet, Mr. President! How is it possible these things fell into their hands?”

  Of course, this conversation was little more than a game. They were both perfectly aware of how the state-run media got that information—Krupin had ordered it gathered by Utkin’s security detail. A more courageous man would have simply voiced that accusation. But courage was hardly a word that anyone would use to describe the prime minister. He was a flatterer and back room dealmaker. A man who could always be counted on to protect what he had in place and pursuing more.

  “I don’t know how they got it,” Krupin said, not bothering to hide his boredom with this contrivance. “I have no access to television and can barely hear you on this link.”

  “Then perhaps you should consider returning from your wilderness trip.”

  As far as anyone in Russia knew, he was on one of his beloved hunting expeditions.

  “I hardly think I should be forced to cut short one of my few vacations because the Russian people are discovering that you like the finer things in life.”

  “They’re not just making a fool of me, Mr. President. They’re making accusations of corruption.”

  “Perhaps you should have thought of that before you gilded your doghouse.”