Death Metal

by Don Pendleton

  It was like looking for a speck of sand on a very long beach.

  * * *

  THE JOURNEY HAD BEEN long and tiring. Not just because of the vast distance involved and the conditions of highways that were poorly maintained. To cross borders—even in countries that paid lip service to the alleged openness of European Union territories—was not a simple matter.

  To avoid toll roads, border guards and the possibility of being searched—either as a matter of course or as a random selection—it had been necessary to sometimes hit back roads and dirt trails that took them through small villages before returning to the major highways. Perhaps if they had known the sudden panic which these detours had given certain parties—who were hacking into CCTV systems in order to keep on their tail—they may have opted to stay on the hard road. As it was, the desire to make good time and have an easier drive had forced them back into the open.

  Now, after what seemed weeks rather than the days they had endured, the three trucks stood in the car park of a truck stop on the edge of Moscow’s Sparrow Hills, under the watchful eye of a pole-mounted camera that kept them in its unblinking gaze.

  The men from each of the trucks stretched their legs, used the facilities and bought coffee that failed to warm them against the bitter cold. Andrus was silent and withdrawn from his men, staring out over the river, with Luzhniki Stadium and the Luzhnetsky Metro Bridge in clear view, but the Russian Academy of Sciences drawing his attention.

  “So, now that we are here, do you think we can really pull this off?” Velio asked quietly as he joined his leader.

  Andrus smiled weakly. “I will not try to fool you, of all people. I attempt to inspire the others, but it’s a long shot. I really don’t know if we can. If our luck holds, then we can make the attack before we are stopped.”

  “I’m surprised that we haven’t encountered any resistance on the way here,” Velio mused. “Maybe we’ve finally shaken off the Americans, or maybe they’re happy for us to do this?”

  Andrus shrugged. “Maybe... If they could track us down, then the Russians could, too. It is only time. I wonder if they are holding off for some reason of their own, or are they really as crappy as we always thought?”

  Velio spit the coffee grounds from his paper cup onto the tarmac. “You could think around in circles forever. The truth is, we are still running free, and if they want to give us slack, then they have poor judgment. Let’s do this before the slack tightens into a noose. Don’t let doubt get to you. God help me, if it does...”

  Andrus was alarmed by the expression in his deputy’s eyes. “I believe you would, if you thought I was backing down. No worries, my friend. It’s too late to do that now.”

  He turned and called his men together. Under the mute eye of the camera that went unnoticed by them all, he detailed to each truck crew the location in which they were to plant and time their weapons, and their escape route.

  “Make no mistake, there is every chance that we will either be killed in attempting to achieve our mission or in failing to get clear of the capital in good time. We have left behind those who will continue our work, and this will give them the platform they need. If we do not get out, then I thank you for the dedication that you have shown and are about to show. But if we do survive, then we will all meet again in Tallinn and continue with our work. The war goes on, even if the humble soldier is cut down in battle.”

  Velio joined in the cheer that the small group gave to Andrus. In the silent reflection of the lens, it looked absurd and exaggerated, but to the men on the ground it was the spur they needed as they went back to their vehicles and left the truck stop, finally parting ways as they each headed toward a destination as yet unknown to the several interested parties with a feed on the CCTV system.

  * * *

  DEEP WITHIN THE KREMLIN, Roman Yeltsin chewed noisily on a pink-iced doughnut with sprinkles and washed it down with a cheap local cola. Despite the money that was now washing over the capital, there were some things that were still difficult to get, and so he hoped that this little job would help get him an overseas posting. He picked up the phone and pushed a yellow button. He did this without taking his eyes off the monitors before him, which showed a bank that stretched over half the wall. Now they showed three trucks split across a number of screens as they headed one east, one west and one north.

  “Sir,” he mumbled through a mouthful of doughnut. He swallowed hard and just avoided choking as he continued. “I have all three in view. They have just separated.... Yes, sir, from the routes they are taking, I would say that I have a very good idea of where they are headed.”

  * * *

  GRIMALDI TOOK THE CHOPPER right to the grounds of the U.S. Embassy and put her down.

  “Medical emergency. The ambassador has an allergy, and the antidote—as formulated by his consultant back home in the good old U.S. of A.—has to be flown in as a diplomatic bag to make sure that it arrives with no red tape and saves his ass.”

  “Seriously? They bought that?” Dostoyevsky asked with wide-eyed amazement. “Even my president is not that mad.”

  “Hell, no, of course he isn’t,” Bolan replied easily. “But he knows we’ll be here one way or another, and as long as we keep up the pretense, then at least he knows where we are. Better he can keep half an eye on us than none at all. We’ll tiptoe around each other until the real shooting starts, then he’ll claim outrage if our identities go public. They’d have to kill us first, though.”

  As the three men left the chopper and entered the embassy, met by the head of security for the complex, it became obvious that they were far from welcome. The ambassador refused to meet them, and the manner in which corridors miraculously emptied before them as staff scuttled away from their presence showed how persona non grata they were.

  “It’s nothing personal,” the security chief said uneasily as he led them into an anteroom. “It’s just that the ambassador feels that this had rather been forced on him, and it makes things uncomfortable with the locals.”

  “It would,” Bolan said calmly. “And of course it’s been forced on him. He’d be an idiot to have agreed. But sometimes shit just happens. You let us unload our weapons, give us transport and let Jack here take off, and you can wash your hands of the whole affair.”

  The security chief merely nodded. He had the look of a man who wanted to say plenty but wasn’t sure just where to start. He left them alone for a few minutes, then returned and beckoned them out to the yard where Jack’s chopper, aptly named Dragonslayer, sat. The security chief and two of his men stood mutely, watching Bolan and the Russian get kitted up, before leading them back toward a service entrance to the main building. He opened a door and they were out on a central Moscow side street. He tossed them a set of keys.

  “Škoda,” he snapped. “Best I could do.”

  Bolan and the Russian merc looked at the vehicle. When they turned back, the door to the embassy had been closed.

  “You know, if I were you, I would wonder why I worked with assholes like that, Cooper,” the Russian said mildly as they got into the Škoda and fired it up. Overhead, they could hear the blades of Dragonslayer as Jack took her up and back to where she was more welcome.

  “Sometimes I wonder myself,” Bolan muttered as he took out his smartphone. “But then I have guys like this—hey, Bear, are you a friendly voice?”

  “Certainly are, Striker,” came Kurtzman’s warm tones. “I take it our diplomatic corps have been less than diplomatic?”

  “I would have expected nothing less. Me and my partner are mobile. Where should we be headed?”

  “I have three vehicles heading in different directions. No clear target as yet. Take your pick.”

  “What about any hangers-on?”

  “Radio silence. The three groups we know of are keeping their heads down. The Russians? Lots of hot air,
but I think that might be just to confuse us. It looks like they’re covering ground with no real ideas. I don’t believe them.”

  “Neither do I. We’ll have to treat it like jungle warfare down here. Better that way.” Bolan grinned mirthlessly.

  Dostoyevsky piloted the Škoda through the crazy Moscow traffic. They moved across roads where there were no markings and seemingly no order, away from the richer and regenerated area where the department stores and embassies were clustered, and through an area where the social housing blocks of the late Soviet era loomed grim and foreboding on the skyline. The streets in this area all looked the same, and it was easy to lose bearings as the concrete stood gray and decaying, with men hanging around the entrances to each block, eyeing the Škoda as it passed.

  “This hasn’t changed since I was a young man,” the Russian remarked bitterly. “It was supposed to change when the old guard left. What a crock of shit that turned out to be. The few friends of the old guard who were smart enough to adapt have had the best of the pickings. If I had come out of the army and stayed, then I would be one of those men. I think that if they could get rid of the cancer without killing the patient, then I would not be so averse to these cretins we chase.”

  Bolan looked at the human desolation set against drab decay and remembered the district in which he had grown up, along with the reasons that had made him join the services and set first foot on this career. The people here didn’t deserve what they were getting from the attention-seeking Russian president, who cared more about overseas leaders than his own people. And they didn’t deserve the threat of nuclear contamination that was hanging over them.

  “This is your city,” Bolan said at length. “You know which way each truck has gone. What kind of target does that suggest to you?”

  “Cooper, I have an idea.”

  “Run it by me.”

  The Russian laughed. “I haven’t bothered. We’re already on our way. You know the GUM store, right?”

  Bolan nodded. Dostoyevsky was referring to the State Department store found in many cities in the former Soviet Union. The one in Moscow was now a shopping mall.

  “They wouldn’t pick that,” the Russian continued, “as it’s too difficult to approach easily. But Vladimir Shukhov, the man who built it—he was a big man in constructivist architecture, and he built a tower at the turn of the 1920s. It was a radio tower. A beautiful thing, and how it survived the brutality of Stalin is a mystery. It’s a huge symbol of the Russian people, even though the assholes in charge now want to tear it down. Maybe our boys can spare them the bother.”

  “Why? What purpose—”

  Dostoyevsky chuckled. “Even the UN wants to save it for the Russian people. You’ll understand when you see it, Cooper.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Moscow was a strange city in the twenty-first century. Much of its shape and construction were medieval. It clustered around the river in tightly packed streets that, up until shortly before the October Revolution, were populated by mud and wood houses. Even though mass rebuilding had taken place under the Communist regime, the shape of the city remained. Any development outward took the shape of concentric circles radiating from the original design. It was only in recent years that it had started to echo London, and develop in radial fashion along the roads that fed into and out of the city itself.

  In some other ways Moscow was very similar to London. Although parts of each had suffered during war, unlike many other major cities in Europe and the western reaches of Asia, they had not had the heart ripped from them to necessitate wholesale rebuilding and redesign. After the Great Fire of London, Christopher Wren had proposed that the twisting nature of small streets that had grown in London be torn down wholesale to make way for intersecting straight roads of almost Roman design. His death, preceded by the intransigence of the bankers who had controlled London’s finances, had put a stop to that.

  Three hundred years later, in the midst of a constructivist revolution in design and thinking, Josef Stalin had desired to do something similar to Moscow. Wielding a power that Wren did not have, Stalin had ripped up tracts of the city and placed long intersecting concrete roads through the heart of what remained, the new constructivist architecture intended to replace the old Moscow.

  The irony that the fifteenth-century Kremlin was his power base would have been ignored by Stalin, and other matters—from in-fighting to finance to war—would stop the development in its tracks by the late 1930s. But not before he had set in place the three freeways that dominated the roadscape of Moscow. A fourth was due to be complete, to cover the spread of the city and make those areas as accessible as the rest, but the inevitable red tape that followed a bureaucracy with as rich a tradition as Russia had slowed it.

  Stalin and Wren—an unlikely meeting of minds, but one that did cross the soldier’s as he sat beside Dostoyevsky while the Russian negotiated the third freeway, coming onto long straight stretches of road before detouring into mazes that suddenly became, once again, the long straights. When Bolan was in London, he liked the odd juxtaposition of the old and new; it contrasted well with the order of New York and Washington, where grid systems imposed order as opposed to the chaos of the English capital.

  Right now, what was charming in one country was a damned annoyance in another. The arcane nature of Moscow was slowing them. Bolan studied his smartphone, tracing the progress of the truck they now pursued. They were gaining ground, but only because they were approaching the same target from different angles and were rapidly converging.

  “How far?” Bolan asked.

  “Not far, but the question should be how long,” Dostoyevsky replied. “In this traffic system?” He swerved around a cab, throwing an insult in his native language to the driver.

  “At least it’s like New York in some ways,” Bolan murmured. “Skip it,” he added, catching the quizzical glance the Russian threw him. “Just get us there as quick as you can.”

  He looked into the backseat. All their ordnance was stowed in two duffel bags, so that they could cut and run, leaving the Škoda behind without losing hardware. It had made choosing what they took from Dragonslayer a hard call. There was some ordnance that was obvious: HKs and spare magazines, mini Uzis as well, explosive and smoke grenades, handguns—a 9 mm Walther for Dostoyevsky and a Desert Eagle .357 for the soldier—but then there was the less obvious. A machine gun like the RPD would have been useful but too heavy to easily transport. Mines or plastic explosives could have been employed but would have been awkward. In the end they had settled for Benelli combat shotguns, the destructive option of buckshot being something that may come in handy. They also carried night vision monocles, nose plugs and full masks, fiber-optic cameras with small receivers, and motion detectors and surveillance mics. The intel equipment may help in getting the lay of the land before attack. Considering the weaponry they had to retrieve, caution was as important as speed.

  Bolan’s appreciation of architecture heightened as the Shukhov Tower came into view. Hyperboloid in design, it was not the only one that the great constructivist architect had designed. It was, however, one of the few still standing, and far and away the jewel in his collection. That was what it looked like, even in daylight: gold filigree structures flowing upward, leading to a silver head that looked too ornate, too beautiful, to be part of such a functional tradition.

  “Yeah, I see why it’s a symbolic target,” he stated. Then, as his view came back to earth via the road ahead and the screen on his smartphone, he added, “And it looks like we’re just in time.”

  “And not the only ones,” the Russian said grimly as the fight started without them.

  * * *

  “DO WE TAKE THEM NOW, or do we wait until they have shown us the weapon?” asked the slab-faced colonel, squirming uncomfortably in civilian clothes and seated next to a suave intelligence agent.

&n
bsp; “Neither,” the agent replied smoothly. “We wait for the intervention, and then we take them all. Your men are in place?”

  “Yes,” the colonel stated. “We have cars at all four compass points, each with three men. Fourteen including ourselves. It is too many.”

  “Safety in numbers, I would have thought,” the agent murmured as he watched the black truck pull up at the foot of the tower. It was still an attraction and manned even though this was a quiet day. There were enough people around to make him wonder where and how the Freedom Right people would plant the device.

  This did not concern the colonel, who was still bridling at taking orders from someone younger and—in his view—dumber.

  “Safety in numbers...ha...too easy to get in each other’s way, killed by friendly fire. Anyway, what intervention?”

  “According to our sources...” He trailed off as he realized that Freedom Right would just leave the truck. There was no need for them to plant the device, for, as far as they knew, they weren’t being tailed by anyone.

  “Scratch that, we take them now,” he said urgently as he watched two men get out of the truck while a third appeared through the rear door, closing them behind him and nodding to the others. “They’ve already done it....”

  The colonel yelled orders into his communication device and started to open his door when he was cut short by a car that roared past, nearly taking off the door and his arm with it. He yelled abuse at the driver and then fell silent as he understood what the intelligence agent had meant.

  The car roared up to where the truck was parked, the sudden violent sound making the three terrorists from the truck turn. It took them a fraction of a second to realize what was happening, for which time they were frozen as the car squealed on a hand brake turn to bring it sideways to them.

  As it shuddered to a halt and the doors were flung open, five men exited, waving HKs and Uzis, yelling in Russian for the three men to get down on the ground. It was as if the sound of voices snapped them from their shock.