Politika pp-1

by Tom Clancy

  A moment later he saw Nikki fire off another round from the BTR-40’s mortar, dropping it squarely on the roof of the pillbox. The remaining gunfire fell silent, and the rest of Gregor’s team opened up with their own grenade launchers. Within minutes the little white building was little more than a burning ruin.

  Gregor turned to his team and gave the order to fan out. With their primary objective accomplished, their orders were to search for any survivors and to neutralize them.

  Using hand signals, he motioned the three members of his personal team to hang back slightly. This part of their job wasn’t war. It was simple murder, and he’d be happy to let Gilea’s men do most of it.

  * * *

  Max Blackburn could see the flames as they drew near the compound. He was leaning forward in the back of the truck, trying to will the driver to go faster. Beside him, Megan had gone still and silent as the impact of what they were seeing hit home.

  “My God,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.

  Max didn’t say anything. He merely clenched his fists tighter.

  His team was ready. They had all seen the flames leaping into the night sky, and they all knew what those flames meant. All of them, even the driver, had their Kevlar on and their night vision goggles adjusted. They had their weapons prepared and their lines of fire planned out. They had received their orders and made all the plans they could. Now all they needed was a target and a chance for revenge.

  Fifty yards out, their headlights off, Max ordered the driver to slow down and head around toward the back. This close to the compound, the road was finally smoothing out, and every part of him wanted to take that command back, wanted to tell the driver to drive even faster, but he knew he couldn’t. The personnel in that compound were counting on him — if any of them were still alive — and waltzing in there like an idiot and getting himself and his team killed wouldn’t do any of them any good.

  No, as much as he would have liked to ride in like the cavalry, Blackburn knew he had to play this one by the book.

  Slowing near the first corner, Blackburn motioned for four of his twelve-man team to jump off the truck. It would be up to them to get over the wall and take up positions with two men at each of the front corners. Four more would take up similar positions at the rear corner, and Blackburn, Megan, and the other three would come over the back wall, directly opposite the gate. The driver would stay with the truck.

  Please, God, Blackburn thought, watching as the driver went around the first corner. He’d intended to pray for survivors, for God to let at least some of the Americans survive this night. But that’s not what formed in his head. Please, God, let them be there. Help me to make them pay for what they’ve done.

  Beside him, Megan reached out and touched his hand, offering silent support, but he didn’t notice. He was too intent on the sounds of stray gunfire coming over the wall, and the visions of vengeance playing in his head.

  * * *

  Gregor heard the gunfire taper off and he smiled. A few more minutes and he’d recall the team.

  “Good work tonight,” he said to Nikki. And he meant it, too. She had performed flawlessly, making all her shots clean and keeping her cool when things got hot. She was a good fighter, a good soldier, and he was pleased that she’d made it through this far.

  To his right, he heard a single AKMS snap off two shots and then fall silent.

  That was it, he thought. The last one. Reaching for the transmitter on his belt, he pressed the squawk button three times — short, long, short — giving the signal to join up at the motor pool, with the only undamaged building in the compound. Once his team joined up again, they would take the building, clean out any survivors, and then take whatever vehicles Gregor thought he could resell.

  That was the plan. Gregor’s first clue that the plan had gone wrong was when a hand fell on his arm and the blade of a knife pressed against his throat.

  * * *

  Max was proud of his team. Like true professionals, they had turned off their emotions and were going about their jobs in complete silence and with utter proficiency. With tactics learned from the Army Rangers, the Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, and other SpecOps groups, they identified the enemy and took them out by ones and twos, all without firing a shot. What was even more surprising was that, ignoring the rage that had to be burning within them as brightly as the compound, they neutralized the attackers without firing a shot and, as far as Blackburn could tell, without killing a single one of the enemy. This was one band of terrorists that would live to see a trial.

  Seeing the last two enemies in front of them, Max raised his hand, signaling for extra caution, and then moved forward. Megan was on his left, and the two of them were flanked by two other members of his team.

  Under other circumstances, Blackburn might have played it more cautiously and let one of the others take the point. Then again, he might not have. He and Gordian had argued about this countless times, but the simple fact was that Max refused to consider that any member of his team, no matter how new or how young or how inexperienced, was less indispensable than he was himself. And he absolutely refused to send men in where he himself would not go.

  Slipping forward on silent feet, he waited for the man’s hand to come off the radio at his belt, and then he acted, reaching forward and seizing the man’s arm with his right hand and laying a knife along his throat with his left hand. He didn’t say anything. He was more than half hoping the man would react, would start to fight, would do anything to give him a reason to use that knife.

  Beside him, Megan wasn’t so nice. Stepping forward in tandem with him, her own short-bladed knife in her hand, she closed on the woman who was her target. Reversing her blade, she brought the hilt down hard on the base of the woman’s neck. The woman tumbled to the ground, unconscious, long, dark hair spilling out from beneath her helmet as she fell.

  Too easy, Blackburn thought. He wanted blood. He wanted to pull the knife hard across the neck of the man he’d captured. But he couldn’t. He was a soldier, first and foremost, and though he worked for a company rather than a country, still he had a code to uphold.

  Besides, someday this pain and rage would fade, and on that day he wanted to be able to live with himself.

  He maintained control of the man he had captured until his men had secured him. Then he sheathed his blade and said, “Get them the hell out of here.”

  Spinning away from them, he started the process of searching for survivors. It had been a long night already, and he knew that it was only going to get longer.

  FORTY-THREE

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA FEBRUARY 10, 2000

  “Yuri Vostov,” Gordian said to his desktop videophone. His voice was dull, inflectionless, almost mechanical. It somehow reminded Nimec of the way robotic voices had sounded in science fiction movies that were made in the 1950s. He’d never heard Gordian speak in that sort of tone before, and it disquieted him perhaps more than anything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours. What was going on inside the man?

  Gordian sat there in his office and continued looking at Max Blackburn’s image in the small LCD monitor. Across the desk from him, Nimec sipped his third coffee of the morning. None of the men had gotten any sleep, and it showed in the dark crescents under all their eyes.

  “According to everything Pete’s got on him, Vostov’s a black marketeer. A drug dealer. A cheap John Gotti knockoff,” Gordian said. “Are we really expected to believe he’d be behind a plot of this complexity?”

  Blackburn’s voice came through the speaker. “What Korut Zelva would like us to swallow isn’t important. He probably decided that by flushing Vostov he could throw us off the trail awhile.”

  “Whose trail? And long enough for what?” Nimec said. “I don’t care if this guy’s some kind of dimwit, he has to know we’re going to look into his information.” Especially after what was done to our people at the ground station, he almost added, stopping himself at the last moment. />
  “That’s just it, Pete,” Blackburn said. “I tend to believe there’s a very large grain of truth in the things he’s told us about Vostov. I mean, it makes perfect sense that he’s the next link up in the chain from Nick Roma’s outfit.”

  Gordian shook his head. “That still doesn’t address Pete’s essential point. How far does knowing about Vostov really get us? I don’t care how deeply the Russian mafia are involved, they wouldn’t have brought Zelva and the woman…” He glanced down at the notes in front of him, searching for her name. “… Gilea Nastik into this. Those two are professional terrorists. Freelancers.”

  “With a grudge against the United States that goes back to the days after the Gulf War,” Nimec said. “From what Ibrahim’s told Max, they blame our government for having reneged on a promise to support the Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein. And God help us, there may be truth in that.”

  “Their grievance doesn’t concern me, not after they’ve butchered thousands of innocents,” Gordian said. “And it has nothing to do with the fact that Vostov could have used his own people and kept it simple.”

  “Roger—”

  “It doesn’t sit right,” Gordian interrupted. “It doesn’t goddamned sit right.”

  Nimec saw Roger’s hand clench and unclench in the air, and again wondered what the deaths of the Steiners, and all the others, were doing to him inside.

  “Gord, listen, it seems to me we’re all saying the same thing here,” Nimec said. “If we’re agreed Vostov’s in it, then our next step is to go after him. Squeeze him hard. See what he’ll give up.”

  “I don’t think we can assume he’d give up anything.” Gordian looked at Nimec, then turned back to the screen, a set expression on his face. “Don’t you see? According to the reasoning I’ve heard from both of you, this Korut gave us Vostov as a diversion. But why bother if he thought Vostov would crack and send us in the right direction?”

  Nimec pursed his lips, thinking.

  “Maybe he underestimated the sort of pressure we’d be willing to apply,” Blackburn said in a low, meaningful voice.

  “Somebody left a dead body for us to find in a Milan hotel room, and another corpse on a beach in Andalucia. The first man was hanging from a noose. The second man’s throat had been slashed almost to his spine. And both were members of the bombing team. Whoever killed them is obviously convinced we intend to get to the bottom of this affair.”

  “Roger,” Blackburn said, “I’m only saying…”

  Gordian went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “They slaughtered Art and Elaine Steiner in cold blood — two of the kindest, most decent human beings I’ve ever met, married forty years, both looking toward retirement. They killed dozens of our technicians, administrators, and construction workers, people who’d never lifted a weapon in their lives. People who were just out there doing their jobs, making an honest wage, and perhaps doing a little good for this world in the process. They killed my friends and my employees and tried burning my ground station to the ground, Max. They know we’re in it up to our necks. They know, and they’ve been trying to scare us off, and yesterday they took it as far as they could. But they made a mistake. Because I swear to God, I’m going to bring those bastards down for what they’ve done.”

  He closed his eyes then, and sat there in silence, his lips trembling, hands balled into fists. Nimec looked at him a moment and then shifted his eyes to the wall, feeling somehow like a trespasser.

  The pain he’s in must be indescribable, he thought.

  “Roger, I want to go after Vostov, see where that takes us,” Blackburn said after what seemed a very long time. “But I need your permission to do it fast and dirty. And if it means putting a real hurt on the sonovabitch…”

  He let the sentence hang in space somewhere between Russia and the west coast of America.

  Gordian didn’t make a sound for another full minute. Then he nodded, more to himself than to anyone else.

  “There’s to be no killing on our part unless it’s in self-defense,” he said. “I won’t sink to the level of these scum. And I want this done so the entire world can learn the truth.”

  “I understand.”

  “I know you do, Max. And I’m sorry for jumping down your throat.”

  “No problem,” Blackburn said. “These are rough times for all of us.”

  Gordian nodded again.

  “I want to make sense of this,” Roger said, swallowing thickly. “I need for it to make sense.”

  Neither of the other men said anything to that. Neither of them knew what to say.

  Make sense?

  Sitting there with his eyes fastened to the wall, still reluctant to look at Gordian, Nimec found himself wondering if it ever possibly could.

  * * *

  They came prepared for a siege.

  They had a warrant, but nobody was expecting Nick Roma to open the door and stand quietly and calmly while they cuffed him and read him his rights.

  They figured they were going to have to work for this one.

  So they brought out all the good stuff — high-tech surveillance equipment and low-tech battering rams, full-body armor and tear gas grenades. Everything they could think of, and more.

  They even had the SWAT team on standby.

  They never expected to find the Platinum Club as silent as a tomb.

  Or the door wide open.

  But that’s exactly what they found.

  “Dammit, the guy has snitches everywhere. He knew we were coming for him. He’s probably halfway to Russia by now.” The officer in charge, police lieutenant Manny deAngelo, flipped off his radio and pulled his gloves back on. He’d have cussed a blue streak, but it was too cold to waste the energy.

  “Think it’s a trap?” one of the cops asked.

  “Nah.” Manny sighed. “Nick’s smart, but nobody’s ever accused him of being subtle. But it wouldn’t hurt to be careful going in.” He signaled his men to move forward.

  So they did. Cautiously. Two by two, in covering formation.

  The warehouse was deserted, and it had been looted. Whoever had done it had left a mess behind, but not a single thing of value. They’d pulled the phones from the walls and busted open the canned drink machines to get at the change. They’d tagged the walls with graffiti — more than one gang had been here. Some of the spray paint was still wet.

  Penny-ante stuff. And very recent.

  It seemed Mr. Roma had enemies in low places.

  “These guys better hope Roma’s outa here — he’s likely to cut their balls off if he’s still around.” Manny surveyed the wreckage with a jaundiced eye. “I wonder what they knew?”

  “Yeah.”

  They kept moving. The deeper into the building they got, the worse the damage was, probably because the street resale value of the missing contents rose as they got farther in. When they reached Nick’s office, it looked like it had been stripped clean by hungry locusts. But the hoods had left something behind.

  “The chief isn’t gonna like this.” Manny looked down at Nick’s body, tumbled to the floor so somebody could steal the chair the man had clearly died in.

  “I don’t know — seems to me Nick got what he deserved.” The cop gave a tight grin. “But I’m glad it’s your job to call it in.”

  * * *

  Manny had it right.

  Bill Harrison was still in his office. It was close to midnight, and his desk was stacked so high with reports and associated materials that he’d need an archaeologist to get to the bottom of it.

  The photos of Nick Roma at the crime scene occupied a prominent position on the top of the pile.

  Harrison didn’t like it.

  He’d wanted to put this man who had caused so much unbearable grief on trial. He’d wanted to confront him, along with all the other victims, and tell him what he’d done. Tell him about the nightmares and the pain and the loneliness.

  He’d wanted to lock him away and watch the system slowly eat Nick Roma alive.<
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  And then, only after he’d been through decades of it, Bill Harrison wanted to watch Nick Roma strapped down and killed.

  But now it was too late for that.

  Unlike most of his victims, Nick had died fast and easy. He’d probably barely had time to know it was coming.

  Harrison was cheated of his revenge.

  He didn’t like it at all.

  He looked at the eight-by-ten glossies of the man who’d gotten away — permanently.

  That’s when he heard Rosie’s voice, as clearly as if she were standing there beside him. “It’s better like this. Now you can get on with living.”

  He turned to look around him. He was alone, not a soul in sight. Downstairs, the usual business of the city at midnight went on at a feverish pace. But here, there was nobody but him, and a voice that he couldn’t possibly have heard.

  “Rosie?” Nothing. “Rosie!” Silence. The pain came crashing down again. But through it, he felt, for the very first time, a sense of peace. Rosie—had that really been Rosie? — was right on target. As usual.

  His thirst for revenge was as destructive as the man in those pictures. It would tear him up, slowly eat his soul if he let it.

  Instead, he needed to look for justice.

  The people who did this needed to be stopped. They had to be caught and caged so that they couldn’t do it again.

  Nick Roma wasn’t going to cause any more trouble in this life. Once the paperwork was filed, his case was over.

  He’d not acted alone, of course. Bill Harrison wouldn’t rest until he’d gotten them all, one way or another.

  But not for revenge. For justice. And to preserve the peace for all of the good people he’d sworn to protect.

  That was his job, and he was going to do it.

  He stood up, turned his back on his desk, and went to get his suit jacket and overcoat.

  He had a daughter to go home to, and a life to put back together. He had a future. He owed it to his wife to make it a good one, to live the very best life he could without her.