They were louder than I wanted, but not as bad as they could have been. And they were the last sounds that fucking Blynkenski ever heard. The sonofabitch sprayed bone, brains, and blood all over the mausoleum wall as he dropped like a fucking stone.
I stepped back far enough to admire my handiwork. Now there was an example of an asshole who’d literally pissed his life away.
For the first half-second or so, Vynkenski was too surprised to move. Maybe it was the alcohol he’d consumed that slowed his reactions—I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to deal with the motherfucker. I wasn’t going to kill him—not yet at least. I needed information.
Of course, he didn’t know that. He moved in my direction. I stepped away from Blynkenski’s corpse, and as Vynkenski advanced, his hand digging frantically in his saggy trouser pocket for the pistol I knew was there, I charged his ass.
Can we stop here long enough for me to give you all a piece of sound advice? Good. It is this: if you carry a pistol, use a holster. Do not stick the sonofabitch in your pocket. If you store a revolver in your pocket, it is likely that the hammer will snag as you withdraw it. Even if you carry a bobbed-hammer weapon, it will not withdraw easily. Autoloaders are even worse. If they are of the Glock persuasion, and you are carrying the pistol locked and loaded, there is a good chance that in your excitement you will shoot yourself in the groin or thigh. Other autoloaders, even the hammerless kind like P7s, are hard to draw from a pocket. Anything with a hammer is nigh on impossible. And don’t even think about shooting through your pocket—you are much more likely to kill yourself than wax the opposition.
Okay—back to real time. I came on him from his unprotected side and slapped him hard across the face—whap-whap—with the barrel of my pistol, cutting him deeply with the front sight. That got his fucking attention. His free hand went to his face and came away bloody.
Drunken panic showed in his eyes as he saw the expression on my face. I was the fucking god of war and I was about to sacrifice him the same way I’d just sacrificed his buddy. He backed away, a scream choking in his throat. I advanced—kept pushing. Slapped him again with the P7. Never give up ground. Always advance into the vacuum left by your adversary. War is the act of taking turf from your opponent—and this was fucking war. I hit him again—a hard shot to the throat. He tripped, stumbling backward over a grave marker, lurched to his feet, and tried to get away.
Impossible. I was all over him. I hit him with the pistol again, knocked him on his ass. He rolled away from me. I jumped his bones. He tried to wriggle out from my grasp. Never happen. No need to use the steel on him now—didn’t want to. I jammed the gun in my waistband, straddled Vynkenski, and beat a tattoo on his face with my fists. This was one of the assholes who’d killed my godchild—murdered the youngster I’d dreamed would follow in my own warrior’s footsteps. And I was taking my revenge here and now. With every blow came a name. This for Paul. This for Becky. This for Adam. This for Louise. I grabbed a fistful of hair and began slamming his ugly head onto the ground in a steady syncopation—wham, Paul, wham, Adam, wham-wham-wham-wham—
Hands reached out to grab me but I fought them off. Slapped them away. Doc Tremblay grabbed me around the throat and gently, but forcefully, eased me off Vynkenski’s limp, bloodied body.
“He’s had enough, Skipper—let us take him, now.” I was shaking all over. Vibrating from the rage. Had to calm down. Get control again.
I raised my arms to force some air into my lungs. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” I wheezed. “Just let me grab a breath or two.”
Duck Foot and Wonder pulled me to my feet. I was goddamn lightheaded—woozy, almost. Doc was checking Vynkenski’s swollen eyes with his pencil light. “You came real close to killing this one,” he said.
“Too fuckin’ bad.” I wasn’t feeling very much sympathy for the s.o.b.
No time to waste, either: there was work to be done. “Wonder—get the fuckin’ keys out of the dead Ivan’s pocket. He has a Mercedes stashed near the club—end of the block under a streetlight. We’ll need it tonight.”
He didn’t have to be asked twice. “Roger-roger, Skipper.”
“Rodent—you and Doc get this one ready to move.”
Doc’s corpsman expression told me he’d rather work on Vynkenski here and now. “C’mon, Doc—you can practice healing arts later, when we’ve cut ourselves a little slack.”
He looked at me as if he didn’t quite trust what I was saying.
“Hey, I’m totally serious. I want him patched up.” I did, too—I had two or three questions I needed to ask him before he left us for good.
Chapter 6
WE ARRIVED SEPARATELY—AND VERY QUIETLY—AT OUR RENdezvous point, a deserted, secluded side street two blocks from Dostoevsky’s house, just after 0315. Yeah, it’s the same place Crime and Punishment was written. I found that fact appropriate: after all, I was planning to perform both in a few minutes. Furthermore, I believed I’d be able to do my work without interruption, because tonight I wasn’t taking any chances with our OPSEC.
We’d worked out what I believed was a passable operation, given the time constraints and lack of intelligence we were faced with. Let me take a minute here to talk about what the folks who design SpecWar ops for the Pentagon often refer to as “mission planning.” To achieve success, all special operations require what the doctrine writers at the Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa like to call “the dynamic of relative superiority,” or more simply, RS.
RS takes place when a small, unconventional force wins out over a larger, but more conventional force. You want an example or two? Okay. How about Entebbe, when Israeli commandos rescued a planeload of hostages from a force of terrorists who were protected by two companies of Ugandan regulars. Closer to home, there was the time not so very long ago when I led seven shooters against a large, well-armed force of tangos in the northwestern mountains of Afghanistan.
Now, the core of the principle of relative superiority lies in the dynamic, the gestalt. the very heart, of special operations itself. I see you waving at me out there, accusing me of falling back into Navyspeak bureaucratic gibberish. You’re saying, “What the hell are you talking about, Mr. Rogue?”
Okay—I’m saying that all the elements—intelligence, communications, and training are some of the most critical—must combine to allow you to act decisively in SpecWar, otherwise you will lose the advantage. The longer you take to achieve your mission goals—the more steps there are in the mission, for example, or the older the intelligence—the more chances there are that you will fuck up and get you and your men killed. An example? Eagle Claw—Tehran, 1980. My old friend Charlie Beckwith was saddled with a bad ops plan that had too many steps and too many stages and not enough decisive aggressive actions. That series of complexities, defective intel, and flawed training is what led to the fiasco at Desert One.
Tonight, we had to achieve a dynamic, decisive victory oven though we had crude and incomplete operational intelligence, numerical inferiority, and lack of time to plan for contingencies
What’s all that ruckus I hear? What? Oh, you’re accusing me of being contradictory. No, I’m not. Despite all the doctrine, and all the case studies, there are times in SpecWar when you simply have to ACT—now; times when you simply have to GO and to DO—and hope for the best. This was one of them.
We’d packed, locked, and loaded, then left the hotel as covertly as possible. I went out first, carrying a radio. I circled the block checking for surveillance and discovered none I could discern. So I hit the transmit button twice, which was the signal to move. Wonder, Doc, and Rodent slipped past the snoozing desk clerk, one by one. Duck Foot and Gator, ever the impatient leprechauns, had already exfiltrated their own way—they’d gone out the window, shinnied down the back drainpipe, and slipped out via the courtyard. Wonder and Doc drove the weapons to our assembly point near Dostoevsky’s house using Blynkenski’s car. The rest of us dispersed and traveled there
by foot—a forty-plus-minute slog through the nasty Russian night that did nothing to improve my mood.
Still, we had made it cleanly: traversed the city passing as few as possible stakans, the round, glass-encased metal booths manned twenty-four hours a day by traffic police—and intelligence spotters—to keep an eye on things. More significant to our OPSEC preservation was the fact that, as we were moving at night, it was less likely that we’d be spotted by the passive monitors of the venerable but still fully operational KGB visir system.
You say you haven’t heard about visirs before? That’s not surprising—very few people have. So let me clue you in. During the height of the Cold War, the KGB set up a highly classified system of surveillance devices atop (and inside) many of the buildings that line Moscow’s main avenues and boulevards. The system worked so well because it was so KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid. It had no technogoodies or fancy bells and whistles. Instead, it was assembled out of old-fashioned telescopic devices—an altogether inconspicuous yet highly accurate way of observing what was going on inside the automobiles that drove along the street.
You see, back then, there weren’t very many cars in Moscow. Most autos, in fact, were driven either by privileged Party members, high-ranking government officials, or foreign diplomats—and all of those categories were designated as official targets of KGB kuriosity. To satisfy that kuriosity sans attracting undue attention, the KGB developed visir.
The system employed exceptionally stable, high-powered, remotely controlled telescopic devices that were fitted with panning heads and zoom lenses. Using a system of prisms, the images from the telescopes were projected onto matte screens much the same way a college professor projects his notes onto a screen in an auditorium. It was practical, simple, and efficient. It was also kept very secret.
The visir stations were run by Line Q, sub-line VT, of the Sixteenth Chief Directorate. Just in case you’ve forgotten, that directorate was a self-contained subsection of the KGB’s internal counterintelligence division, which remained hidden from Western intelligence sources well into the late seventies. There was no outward evidence that the Sixteenth Directorate or its Line Q, sub-line VT, even existed, hence no way to learn about visir.
Moreover, the visir locations were interconnected by a Mark-1. Mod Zero communications system that relied on telephones and underground cables instead of more technologically advanced UHF or VHF radio transmissions. The visirs had been built like that not because the Sovs were smart, but simply because the Soviets didn’t have any more advanced technology at the time.
But their kiss design meant that it was impossible to detect the network even after NRO—remember, the initials stand for the National Reconnaissance Office, a spooky agency run out of the Pentagon and headquartered in a huge, modern, luxurious office complex near Dulles International Airport. NRO is responsible for operating all our satellite programs. In that capacity, the agency began regular SIGINT and ELINT (SIGnals and ELectronic INTelligence) satellite overflights of the Moscow region with a dedicated KH-9 (Keyhole-9) reconnaissance bird from the National Security Agency’s first BYEMAN orbiting collection program. The project was code-named IVY CHARM, and it began early in August of 1974. But it never picked up visir. Billions of your tax dollars spent, and still we didn’t have a fucking clue.
In fact, our friends at Christians In Action did not (as usual) know fuck-all about visir until a Sixteenth Directorate officer defected in the late seventies and told them both about it, and the rest of the Sixteenth Directorate’s Line Q, sub-line VT covert programs.
And, while there may not be a KGB anymore, I can assure you that visir is still in place—and it is monitored, moreover, by minions of Viktor Grinkov’s Ministry of the Interior. I know all of this because I have scoped it (heh, heh) out myself. And so we took our time getting to our assembly point, especially as, in addition to our diplomatic passports, we were carrying the sorts of weapons and other lethal devices that neither the Moscow police, nor the Ministry of the Interior, nor anybody else for that matter, generally approves of.
Our target was a six-story block of flats that sat in an isolated, dilapidated cul-de-sac one street to our west. Godfather Andrei was staying the night on the top floor, in what our unwilling but finally compliant source, Vynkenski, had described as a three-room flat shortly before he departed for destinations unknown. Translation into English: it had three bedrooms. The information he provided allowed me to make a rough, sketched floor plan of the apartment, as well as a map of the neighborhood.
To reach Andrei, we had to make our way through the locked courtyard doors, crack the locks of the inner doors, sneak up the stairway, and penetrate the flat—all without waking any of the neighbors. And we had to do it all before 0500, which is when greater metropolitan Moscow starts to yawn, wake up, and take its morning piss.
0325. We moved out. I took point. We stayed close to the buildings as we moved toward the cul-de-sac, taking advantage of the shadows. One point in our favor was the lack of street lighting. There was one working street lamp half a block away. Six others were down for the count—shot out, judging from the shattered lenses.
I moved as cautiously as I would going down a jungle trail. I didn’t expect trip wires or land mines, but I didn’t want to announce my presence by stepping on a piece of broken glass or any other brittle garbage, either.
I put my fist in the air at shoulder level to silent-signal a halt as we came up to the corner. From the pocket of my black BDU shirt I extracted a night-vision monocular. Then, I dropped to the ground and very, very carefully, peered around the corner at our target.
Why did I suck concrete? The answer is because I didn’t want to create a nasty silhouette. At night, you will remember, you don’t see things directly. You see them peripherally. So if I were to stick my big Slovak nose around the corner at a height of six feet, it would be easily discerned by anybody halfway alert—because the line of the building wall would change—and I would stand out. It’s similar to the way you spot a deer when you’re hunting. You almost never see the whole deer—but the motion of its haunch, or ears, or tail, draws your attention, because something is moving where something shouldn’t be moving.
Same principle here. By sticking close to the ground, I was making sure that I was presenting the smallest, least noticeable profile to whomever was standing guard.
And there was somebody standing guard. Well, he was sitting guard. An Ivan, alone in a BMW seven thousand series-that’s a quarter of a billion, with a b, rubles, more or less—worth of car. The Beemer’s motor was purring, no doubt to keep the heater running—and its amber parking lights were on. I could make out the Ivan’s face. It was actually too bright for the night-vision monocular because he had the dash lights on, too. He was looking down—maybe reading, maybe nodding off. Whichever, it didn’t matter, because the sound of our approach was going to be muffled by the idling engine. I slid the NV back into my pocket and signaled back to the others that there was a single target ahead.
He was parked dead center in front of the courtyard entrance, a pair of heavy, paneled wood and wrought iron doors set into a sturdy steel frame. The right-hand door panel, which measured about six feet wide by eight feet high, contained a small entry door. That way, if a single person was coming into the apartment house, they wouldn’t have to open both courtyard gates in order to get in.
Once we cracked the building’s outer shell, we’d split into working groups. Duck Foot, who liked heights, and the Gator, who didn’t, would shinny the drainpipe that the late and unlamented Vynkenski promised ran up the side of the apartment house from the courtyard. They’d slip over the roof, lower themselves by rope, and come through Andrei’s bedroom window at the same time that the rest of us were coming through the door.
But first things first. I silent-signaled my intentions, then moved out, keeping low as I crept around the corner. The rule here is to keep it slow and steady, so as not to attract attention. The key word is slow. We are t
alking about inches-at-a-time progress, friends. Indeed, all that sneak-and-peek stuff you see in action movies by Steve and Chuck and Bruce and the rest of ’em is crapola. They move so fast and loud that even a wannabe would notice ’em in real life.
I got about three-quarters of the way down the cul-de-sac—about sixty-five or seventy yards from the corner—and was about to work my way around a raised window well set into the wall along which I was crawling, when Mr. Murphy decided I was lonely out there and that he’d join me.
The Ivan in the Beemer stretched and peered out through the windshield. I froze in midcreep, outlined against the dirty gray stone of the window well.
He yawned wide, cracked his knuckles and stretched again. Then he switched off the BMW’s ignition, opened the car door, and pulled himself outside. He stood for a second, silhouetted by the car’s interior lights. Obviously, he had no sense of tradecraft. I could hear the jingle of the keys as he dropped them into his trouser pocket. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a package of cigarettes, shook one out of the pack, and inserted it between his lips. Then he found a lighter and applied it to the end of the cigarette. He took a couple of deep drags, exhaling smoke from his nose and mouth simultaneously.
I stayed frozen. And I mean frozen—I didn’t even breathe. Don’t forget, it was cold—and when it’s cold, your breath comes out like smoke, and it picks up any ambient light. Even though he probably had no night vision, given the fact that the car’s interior lights had gone on when he’d opened the door. I wasn’t about to lake any chances.
He zipped the leather jacket he was wearing up to his throat. As he did, he turned slightly. And as he turned, despite the cigarette, despite the night blindness—despite everything—his peripheral vision caught me.
The knowledge that he’d seen me hit me like, well, it’s ineffable. I can’t really describe it, but you know it when it happens. and it wasn’t even that he saw me. It was that he saw something. And that something made him suspicious. He froze for an instant. Then his arm started north, the preliminary step to tossing away his cigarette, unzipping his jacket, and reaching for whatever he had concealed inside.
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