“Okay. But Ox . . . I don’t care if you sweat this guy, but don’t kill him.”
Oxley nodded; his face had taken on a blank expression since the moment he pulled off his sweater and again revealed himself to be a former inmate of a Russian gulag. He said, “I learned something a long time ago, something you’d do well never to learn for yourself. Surviving is much more painful than death. Believe me, I won’t do this arsehole the favor of snapping his neck.”
Oxley stepped into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.
—
He stepped back out twenty minutes later. Ryan had spent the time transcribing numbers off the Russian’s phone. All the exchanges were foreign, but Ryan hadn’t looked them up yet. He hadn’t called any of the numbers, either. The contact list was in Cyrillic, but although Ryan could read it easily, it was just a bunch of first names that told him little.
While Ryan had worked on writing the numbers down and looking through the text history on the phone, he’d heard several low wails and two sharp screams from the bathroom.
Victor Oxley’s forehead was covered in sweat now. He was a good sixty pounds overweight, but Jack noticed for the first time that his shoulders, arms, and pecs, although covered in a thick layer of fat, retained a good deal of muscular bulk. He seemed to Jack more of an aging boxer who had let himself go than a completely sedentary bar-stool drunk.
“How is he?” Jack asked.
Ox did not respond at first. Instead, he just walked out to the balcony, breathed in a little cool air, and scooped up his bottle. He also picked up a bottle of beer, then went back inside, opened the bathroom door, and rolled the bottle inside.
He shut the door again, walked over to the bed, and slumped heavily onto his back on the mattress.
Finally he answered Ryan. “He’s fine. The two of us got on like old chums. Oleg’s his name.”
“You didn’t have to beat him up?”
“Well, just to say hello. After that, he was a right talker.”
“And?”
“He is Seven Strong Men. He’s been in the UK for only three days, came over on a Ukrainian passport that he got from Seven Strong Men contacts in Kiev.”
“Kiev?”
“That’s right. He works for a Russian bloke called Gleb the Scar. Gleb is vory.”
“That’s like a made man in Russia, right?”
“Exactly. Gleb’s blokes in Kiev had ordered some other blokes to tail you, they’d been doing it for weeks, says Oleg. He couldn’t name ’em or describe them. He said he never saw them.” Oxley shrugged and swigged. “And I do believe him. He wasn’t holding out. Anyway, he and two others we met today in my flat came over to London with orders to take over for another crew that was following you around. Nothing more than that. But right after they arrived, you surprised them by driving up to Corby. One of the watchers reported that up the chain to Kiev, and then suddenly more Seven Strong Men henchmen were flying over from Kiev with new orders.”
“What orders?” Jack asked.
“You were to get a good knockabout, broken jaw, that sort of thing, enough to send you home to America with your tail between your legs. Me, on the other hand, wasn’t going to get off that easily. They had orders to kill me.”
“Why?”
Oxley chuckled, a low rumble that shook the bedsprings of the cheap mattress. “Let me explain something to you, lad. Oleg isn’t in the ‘why’ loop of things. He gets a photo and an address, and he goes and does his job without asking about the ‘why’ part.”
Jack thought it over. “So they were onto me before I even knew about you.”
“Like I suspected. You brought this down on me.”
“It must have to do Malcolm Galbraith.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s a guy who got screwed out of a billion dollars in Russia. I’m working for him. Well, I was until I was reassigned.”
Oxley just sipped his drink, lying back on the pillows of the bed.
Jack asked, “You’ve never heard of Galbraith?”
The Englishman shook his head.
“What about Gleb the Scar?”
“Not till just now.”
Jack thought for a moment. “Do you know a man named Dmitri Nesterov?”
He shook his head. “Who might that be?”
“He’s the crook who ripped off Malcolm Galbraith. He is supposedly FSB.”
Oxley shrugged and took another drink. The big man looked somewhat tipsy, which was to be expected. Jack was no teetotaler, but he realized he would have passed out long ago if he’d downed so much booze.
Jack said, “I need to talk to my dad, and I need to talk to my boss. Maybe we can put more pieces of the puzzle together.”
“What’s dear old Daddy gonna say about you shooting it out with the Russian mafia?”
Jack had been thinking about little else for the past few hours. It was a problem, but this had gone way past the point of shielding his father from possible scandal. He said, “He’s going to want me to come home to the USA as soon as he hears what’s happened.” Jack thought for a moment. “I’ll wait for now, and call my dad once I know a little more about what’s going on.”
“He won’t be pleased.”
Jack just shrugged. He felt bad about continually worrying his parents with the life he led, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to talk to this old Brit about his relationship with his family. He changed the subject: “What are we going to do with your pal Oleg in there?”
“We’re going to let him go.”
“Let him go? Are you crazy?”
“Might be, but when you think about it, what can we do with him? We are the two sods who’ve put four men on ice today, right?”
Jack didn’t answer.
Oxley said, “Look, we turn him over to the cops, and this gets a lot more complicated for you. We cut him loose, and you don’t have to admit you were there in Corby.”
“What about your next-door neighbor? She saw me.”
“Blind as a bloody bat, and half deaf to boot. She couldn’t identify you as white, black, green, or blue, trust me.”
“But if we let Oleg go, how do we know he won’t just come back and try to kill us again?”
Ox laughed. “I’d like to see him try it with his two broken arms.”
Jack slowly put his head down in his hands. “You broke his arms?”
“I’m not fucking daft, Ryan. He’s a dangerous man. He’s not walking outta here with all his parts in working order.”
“How the hell is he supposed to drink that beer you gave him?”
Victor laughed at this, too. “Not my problem, is it?”
“Okay,” Jack said slowly. “I guess Oleg gets a pass. But if this Gleb the Scar character sent a half-dozen men after us, I imagine he can come up with another half-dozen.”
Ox nodded. “It’s a safe bet this town is crawling with Seven Strong Men killers.”
“Why don’t you come with me? You’ll be safe. I’ll talk to Sandy and see if he has any ideas as to who this Gleb the Scar is. Castor, too. It’s possible that they’ve crossed paths in the—”
Victor Oxley sat up straight on the bed. His eyes were full of intensity again; whatever alcohol-fueled impairment Ryan had detected a moment ago was gone. “What did you say?”
“I said I have to talk to Sandy. Sandy Lamont. He’s my boss.”
“The other bloke.”
“Oh . . . Castor. Hugh Castor. He runs Castor and Boyle, the consulting firm where I work.”
Oxley climbed off the bed, stood, and walked over to Ryan. He stood above him, his posture menacing.
“What is it?”
“You asked me if I knew a lot of people, you didn’t ask me if I knew Hugh Castor.”
“Okay. I take it you know Hugh Castor?”
Oxley squeezed the bottle hard. “Tell me again, lad. How do you know about me?”
“I told you. Your code name. I showed you where Bedrock was written in the file.
”
“Yeah, you did. But how do I know Castor didn’t send you?”
“Send me? Why?” The young American could tell that with his mention of Castor’s name, the trust Oxley had slowly begun to give him seemed to be in jeopardy. “Who is Castor to you?”
“He was my control officer at Five.”
Ryan’s eyes went wide. “Oh, shit.”
Oxley just stared at Ryan. Jack could see the older man was looking for signs of deception.
“I didn’t know that.” Jack stood up. “I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but he never once mentioned your name. I’ve been trying to find a connection between my work at C&B and you, and now I guess I found it.” He rubbed a hand over his short-cropped hair. “But I don’t know what the hell any of it means.”
Oxley turned away. “I don’t know what it means, either.”
Jack could see the man had become emotional. His face reddened, but Jack couldn’t tell if it was anger or the whiskey.
“What happened between the two of you, Ox?”
Oxley just shook his head.
Ryan could tell now was not the time to press. “Okay. I understand. But listen to me. I want to unravel what’s going on. My dad sent me to find out about you, to see if it could help tie Talanov to the Zenith killings. You’ve got your theories, your memories of a story you heard, but that’s not actionable intelligence. I need to dig deeper in this, and I really need your help.”
Ox was back on the bed, drinking again. His eyes were distant, but Ryan suspected it was from the memories now, and not the alcohol. Ox asked, “What help?”
Jack said, “I need to know where you first heard the name Talanov.”
Oxley blinked. Again, it was obvious to Ryan that there was an incredible amount of pain in his memories.
He began speaking slowly: “It would have been about 1989, I guess. Time really had no meaning at all. I was in Syktyvkar, a gulag in Komi. No one there knew I was English. Sure as hell, no one knew I was MI5. I was just another zek.”
“Zek?”
“A prisoner. Anyway, I’d been inside the system several years already, I was long past solitary. As a matter of fact, I was right popular. I knew enough battlefield medicine to keep some of the other zeks healthy, and I was fit enough, despite all I’d been through, to be the chap you wanted on your work crew. That goes a long way over there.”
“I’m sure.”
“I was still on the job, as far as I was concerned. I spent every day trying to pull intelligence out of the men around me. I thought someday I would escape, I really fuckin’ believed it, probably because I would have gone mad without havin’ a little hope. Anyway, I worked every other prisoner I could get to like they were a source or an agent. Prisoners know things, Ryan. I’d worked out the names and locations of most every secret military installation in the Soviet Union over the years. None of it made a bit of difference in the end, but as I said, as long as I lived like I was operational, even in the gulag, I had life, I had hope.”
Ryan nodded thoughtfully. “I understand what you mean.”
“One day I was eatin’ my supper and listening in on a conversation between a couple of zeks. One bloke starts off with a story about his day. He says he was mopping the floor in the infirmary when a prisoner from another cell block was brought in. The man had classic symptoms of typhoid: bloody nose, fever, delirium. He was a strong chap, still had his strength and fight. There were no tattoos on his body, so he hadn’t been in the gulag for too long.”
“Go on.”
“This bloke tells me the guy started ranting about the KGB.”
“What about the KGB?”
“He says he was a bloody KGB officer, starts telling the doctor to make a call to confirm it, he gives his name, which didn’t match the name on his chart.”
“Did they believe him?”
“Fuck no. I probably told somebody I was in the KGB at one point or another in Syktyvkar. Prisoners lie, Ryan. Once I met a chap in the gulag who said he was Yuri Gagarin. Of course, in his case, it wasn’t so much a lie as a fantasy, as I believe he meant it.”
“Back to the KGB guy, Ox.”
“Right. So this delirious chap says he’s KGB, and he’s in the gulag on an operation. Everyone just laughed or what have you, then he starts in with how he was a paratrooper who was there when the presidential palace was taken in Kabul on the first day of the Afghanistan war. Claimed he then went into GRU, that’s Russian military intelligence, fighting in Afghanistan.
“I was eatin’ me soup through all this, listening in to the bloke, of course, but it wasn’t until the guy told the doctor to contact a number in Moscow and report that Zenith needs emergency extraction that I knew I’d stumbled into a piece of me own history.”
Ryan was transfixed by the story. “What happened to him?”
“Like I said, no one believed him, but he was persuasive enough that one of the nurses picked up the phone. You’ve got to understand, everyone must have been thinking, ‘It’s probably just the fever talking, but if there’s a one-in-a-thousand chance he’s on the up-and-up, then we might as well make the call,’ because everyone working in that infirmary would have been shot if his story panned out and they had done nothing.”
“Right.”
“The nurse calls, the guy on the other end of the line says he doesn’t have a fucking clue what she’s on about, and he hangs up. Everyone figures that’s that. They decide the bloke on the gurney covered in his own puke and blood and shit has a coin toss of a chance to survive, and they roll him into a corner, just like they’d do to any other zek.”
Ryan realized there was more. His heart was pounding while he waited for Oxley to tell the rest.
“Five minutes later, I was in the kitchen pouring salt into hot water. I drank it down fast, and within a few seconds I was pukin’ across the chow hall. They wheeled me into the infirmary.”
Ryan was impressed. “What did you see?”
“I didn’t see Zenith, unfortunately, I was shackled to my bed. But I did hear what was going on. The trucks came around midnight. It was a regular prisoner transfer, wasn’t KGB, it was the Ministry of Prisons. They had the papers to take the other zek away. I heard the commotion as they wheeled him out.
“Later that night a bloke with a mop came by my bed. I offered him all the food I’d managed to save up in me cell to tell me what he’d seen and heard that day.
“He told me the zek sick with typhoid had called himself Talanov.”
“Oh my God,” Ryan muttered.
“The prisoner-transfer truck showed up with doctors in the back of the vehicle ready to tend to him. Didn’t sound like any prisoner transfer I’d ever heard of.” Ox shrugged. “By the time this chap told me the story, the zek named Talanov who’d said he was a KGB officer called Zenith was gone from Syktyvkar.”
Ryan believed the story, or he at least believed that Ox believed it.
Oxley kept his eyes on Jack now. There was a lack of trust there still, but Jack also got the impression Oxley didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t go home. After a moment, he said, “I’ll stick around for a wee bit, Ryan. But I’m watching you. You got it?”
“I’ve got it.”
“What’s our next move, then?”
“We untie that asshole in the bathroom, leave him here, get back in the car and go someplace else. Don’t know where, but we’ll wing it. Once we get there I’ll call a friend who can tell me everything I’d ever want to know about every phone number on Oleg’s phone. That should help.”
“Sounds like a bloody handy friend.”
“He has his moments.”
69
Eric Conway and Andre Page headed out to their helicopter at five a.m. They’d been up for more than an hour already, drinking coffee and going over weather reports in the flight operations center. Conway had spent a little longer than usual at the weather desk in Flight Ops, because a thick fog had settled over Cherkasy, and storms were
brewing to the north. It was something they would have to monitor, but this was combat; it would not affect their planned six a.m. departure.
Even though there was a war going on out there somewhere, it seemed quiet and peaceful here. Most of the Ukrainian ground forces at the base had rolled out for the front lines as soon as the fighting broke out, leaving behind the company of American multipurpose scout helos, the Ranger security force, and Midas’s Joint Operations Center.
Four of Bravo Company’s eight matte-black Kiowas were already up in the air to support Ukrainian Mi-24 attack helicopters fighting against ground units near Chuhuiv Air Base, a half-hour flying time to the east.
Those OH-58s would be used to fire lasers at targets in locations where the Special Forces and Delta teams were not available. Their work would be no more or less dangerous than today’s flight by Conway and Page, except for the fact Eric and Dre would be flying into battle without any air defense missiles.
Black Wolf Two Six wore four Hellfire missiles on its pylons, and that was all. They had considered operating with a pair of Stingers on one pylon and a pair of Hellfires on the other, but Conway decided to trust in the advanced countermeasures of his helicopter as well as its radar, and to give up air-to-air capability to buy himself double the air-to-ground capability.
They finished their preflight workup outside the helo and each man walked to his side of the OH-58. Here, they stood at the crew station doors, put on their helmets, attached their commo sets, and unhooked their M4 rifles from the slings around their necks. It was impossible for them to fly with rifles hanging off their chests, so they stored the weapons on the dashboard above the instrument panels, keeping them within reach at all times so they could grab them and fire out the open sides of the little helicopter if necessary. They kept a few frag grenades and smoke markers Velcroed into position here as well.
A couple of carbines and some frags wasn’t much when compared with the four antiarmor missiles on the outboard stores, but the battle rifles had come in handy for the two men before. Two years earlier, in Afghanistan, they’d been on a close air-support mission over a group of Dutch coalition infantry in danger of being overrun by Taliban on a hillside. They launched all of the Kiowa’s Hydra seventy-millimeter rockets at an enemy position, wiping out the threat there, but almost immediately after this an RPG streaked past the windscreen of the OH-58. Conway saw the origin of the launch, called out the location to his copilot, then turned the helo ninety degrees. He flew sideways at the threat while Dre aimed his M4 and emptied a full magazine at the RPG crew, killing both men before they’d been able to fire another rocket at either the helicopter or the Dutch troops in the valley.
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