0336. I returned to the main doorway and brought the team inside. We stacked against the stairwell wall and began our climb. In case you hadn’t figured it out already, operating in total blackness is tough, stress-producing, uncomfortable work. The dark makes most people claustrophobic. You’re moving against an unknown, unseen enemy. Where he is, you have no idea. What he’s done to make your infiltration a goatfuck is equally unknown. And then there is Mr. Murphy, who has positioned himself in the stack where he can make the most noise and do the most damage. Have I made my point sufficiently enough? I have? Good. Then I can get back to work.
Here is how our “train,” which is what they call the single-file stack when it moves, was lined up. I had the point—and all my energies were going to be devoted to getting us up to Andrei’s doorway without attracting any attention. Yeah, I had my pistol out, but it was Doc Tremblay, who rode my shoulder, who’d take out any threat with the suppressed Tokorev. Doc has a kind of Zen ability to shoot blind and hit what he can’t even see. It’s as if he comes with radar. Behind Doc came the Rodent. Stevie Wonder and his suppressed MP5 brought up the rear.
I took the ascent one step at a time, my toes exploring the marble for loose treads. The pace was excruciatingly slow. It had to be—there was no other way to maintain noise discipline. And so we moved more like SNAILS (Slow, Nerdy Assholes In Ludicrous Shoes), than SEALs, which as you all know stands for Sleep, Eat, And Live-it-ups.
On the second floor I called a halt—there was light coming from under the door on the left side of the landing. That was potentially Bad Juju—I didn’t need to be seen by some insomniac checking the landing. We cut the pace in half and continued.
0351. Andrei’s landing. His doorway was on the left side—the number 52 in brass. No sentry outside. In fact, we hadn’t seen any sentries since we’d made entry. Did that still make me nervous? Well, kinda. But to be honest, it was nice to be able to take “yes” for an answer just this once. Tonight, Relative Superiority was going to be easy to achieve.
0352. We stacked in the usual sequence. Wonder borrowed my night vision and examined the door lock. I stood opposite him. Behind me came Doc and Rodent. Wonder signaled he was ready to perform his “open sesame” act. I turned the radio’s on/off switch to “on,” hit the transmit button three times to let Duck Foot and Gator know we were ready and stacked, and then turned the damn thing off again. I’ve been there, Charlie, and I didn’t want Mr. Murphy transmitting during times of radio silence. Carefully, Wonder took his lock picks in one hand. Then he turned the doorknob with the other to test for latch tension.
The fucking door latch clicked open with an ungodly loud click. It was unlocked.
I hesitated. Yes, I know that hesitation is a Bad Thing during entry. But this was not a normal entry. I took my night vision back from Wonder. The door swung wide open now.
Fuck. There was only one thing to do—go. I went into the vestibule. I didn’t like it but I did it. I swung the monocular left/right/left. Nothing. I kept moving. Down a narrow hallway toward the living room. The night vision picked up something on the floor ahead of me. A body, lying in a pool of dark green. I checked it. Corpse. I peered down at the face through my glass. I knew him—it was Nodyev.
I heard Duck Foot and Gator as they cracked through the living-room windows. Keep to the ops plan, Dickie. I cut to the right, into the kitchen. My night vision picked up three more bodies—sitting in chairs, collapsed on the kitchen table. I checked them quickly. They’d been head shot in tight groups, which indicated the kinds of double taps we call hammers, because you shoot lap-tap, tap-tap, real fast. It’s a technique unique to spec-ops shooters. I shook my head to dear it. What the fuck—this place was a real goddamn abattoir.
Two more corpses in the dining room. I cut back and left down a long corridor to my primary target—the master bedroom.
The Yudins were there all right—but they were corpses. He had been shot through the head twice, from the rear, at the base of the neck, in much the same way the KGB used to execute its prisoners. Her body had similar bullet wounds. But I could tell from the bloodstains on the bedclothes—not to mention the attitude of the corpse—that she’d been turned over and searched after she was dead. Her left arm was twisted grotesquely—wrist askew, fingers broken. It didn’t make sense until I realized that her rings were missing.
The officer, Sergei Motorin, was a KGB captain who defected in place (that is to say, while on duty in Moscow), in 1977. He ingeniously contrived to make his first contact with the Americans by staging a fender bender with a U.S. diplomat in one of the visir system’s blind spots and passing a note about his intentions that scheduled a subsequent rendezvous. It was he who first divulged information about visir to the CIA. In 1980, Motorin, then a KGB major, was posted to Washington to gather technological intelligence for Line X of the First Chief Directorate. Once in the United States, he worked for the FBI, passing on crucial information about Soviet spy activities directed at American defense technology. Motorin’s story, however, does not have a happy ending. Late in 1985, he was abruptly recalled to Moscow, imprisoned, and executed, one of the more than fifty U.S. agents whose identities were turned over to the KGB by Aldrich Hazen Ames, the American traitor.
Chapter 7
0357. WE SECURED—AS BEST WE COULD. FIRST, WE COVERED THE windows. Then we turned on just enough lights to let us examine the place. The verdict didn’t take very long, either: this had been one fucking professional job. Better than most Phoenix ops in Vietnam. As clean as the Israeli hit on Abu Jihad in Tunis. There was no sign of forced entry. No indication of defensive countermeasures. The place had been taken down by the numbers, and everyone in it had been executed.
The bodies were still warm. We’d missed the killers by a matter of minutes. Now the fucking sentry in the Beemer made sense. Now I understood why his keys hadn’t fit the front gate door lock. He wasn’t Andrei’s guy—he was one of the killers’ lookouts. Had the bad guys been behind the light on the second-floor landing and let us go by so they could make their escape?
Why had Andrei been waxed? A lot of reasons occurred to me—but only one of them made any sense: Andrei was the most direct link to Paul Mahon’s murder. His goon Vassily Chichkov stole Paul’s Academy ring. His guys Vynkenski and Blynkenski had been in on the hit. And killing Andrei wasn’t the same as, say, wasting John Gotti. In America, there are only a few Godfathers—killing one always makes news. Here, there were hundreds of vors, and their deaths hardly caused a ripple anymore.
I hear you—you’re asking about Andrei’s connections to Viktor Grinkov at the Ministry of the Interior, and to Werner Lantos. In point of fact, any service Andrei provided to either of them could be replaced in hours by one of the dozens of Georgian, Chechen, Armenian, or Russian gangs that controlled huge chunks of this sprawling city. No—he’d been killed to silence him.
We split up and went through the flat looking for evidence. There was lots of booty—art, icons, silver, TV sets, electronics, all piled haphazardly in closets and in the bedrooms. But evidence—whatever it might have been—was not to be found.
I pulled Andrei’s clothes from the chair where they’d been piled and went through his pockets. Empty. I checked under the bed. Nothing. I ran my hands between the mattress and box spring. I felt a lump, pulled it out, and extracted Andrei’s wallet. I dropped it into my blouse pocket and shoved my arm deeper. My fingers touched the edge of something firm. I extracted it. It was a folder containing three sheets of paper covered with sloppily handwritten notations in Cyrillic. I folded the sheets and slipped them into my pocket, then replaced the folder. Since I was wearing gloves (we all were) I wasn’t concerned about leaving any fingerprints. I took a look inside Andrei’s wallet, which had a number of business cards that had notations in Cyrillic on them, two laminated photo IDs, and a few Russian banknotes. The wallet went back into my blouse pocket. I took the business cards and slipped them down my thick sock, well below my left boot top.<
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Wonder spent his time slitting open all the sealed cartons. He came up dry. Doc and Gator searched for caches—hidden drawers, and other hiding places. Nada. Duck Foot and Rodent checked behind the picture frames, lifted the mattresses, tilted the fridge, and checked under the stove. They, too, found nothing.
0429. I was getting nervous. It was time to move already.
We killed the lights. Duck Foot headed toward the window.
“Skipper—” I knew what he wanted us to do—which is exfiltrate down his rope.
I waved him off and pointed toward the hallway and vestibule. With six of us moving at once, it was more efficient and faster to go out the front door, slip down the stairs, and disappear.
0431. We extinguished all lights, waited until our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, then went out the door. I waited until we all gathered on the landing, then signaled Wonder, our rear guard, to ease it shut, which he did without any sound whatsoever.
I almost started to descend the stairs. Instinct made me pause, I stopped, and silent-signaled to Doc to be absolutely quiet and pass the command down the line. Then, for fifteen to twenty seconds, I listened—really listened—my ears as sensitive as any other watchdog’s on that quiet landing.
I heard only silence. Nothing else. That was bad.
Bad? You ask. Yes—bad. At night, even in an apartment house, there are always myriad ambient sounds. Creaks. Vibrations. Other noises that can be technically explained as “stuff.” From my earliest days as a tadpole, I’d been taught to set my ambushes as far in advance as possible—so that the normal sounds of the jungle (or the mountains, or the city) would resume around me and my men. Once that happens, once the crickets chirp, and the mosquitoes buzz, and the birds beat their wings, and the alley cats screech, your ambushee will not realize that he is being stalked, and he will proceed toward his own annihilation unprepared.
This silence was unnatural. It was just too quiet; too hushed. My verdict: it was we who were being stalked. I cupped my hand to my ear—silent-signaling for them to stop and listen. Once again, Doc passed the signal on. Then I thumbs-downed—the signal for “enemy suspected.”
But we couldn’t remain stationary forever. So, without a sound, we began to file down the stairs. We moved quickly but silently in the same order we’d ascended. Behind me, Doc had the Tokorev pointed over my shoulder, searching for targets. Behind him, Duck Foot and Gator moved like shadows. Rodent and Wonder, antennas up, were rear guard.
Halfway to the second-floor landing—the landing where I’d seen light behind a door as we ascended—I called a halt. The SEAL train stopped, stealth-silent, while I proceeded on. Tread by tread I made my way down to the suspect door. The light had been extinguished. Now, moving in increments of centimeters, I eased up to the heavy wood, put my ear to the half-inch of air between, and listened.
There was breathing on the other side of the door. It was unmistakable. Human breathing. Long, deep breaths.
They were behind the door, waiting for us—whoever they were. I knew what they were up to because I’ve done the same thing myself. You let the opposition go by, then sandwich ’em between your forces—catch ’em from two directions at once in a deadly crossfire.
Not tonight. Tonight these assholes were going to be on the receiving end of any deadly crossfire. It took me almost a minute to make my way back and, with my hands in that dim, dim light, explain what I wanted my men to do.
Plan set. Now, all we had to do was execute. Wonder went up the stairs to Andrei’s flat. He opened the door, then closed it again—this time, with an audible “click.” As he began to come down the stairs, Duck Foot and Gator took the lead. Rodent and Wonder followed quickly behind them. They went past the occupied doorway, moving quietly and efficiently, but not without making enough noise to get noticed.
Doc and I remained on the landing, our backs pressed against the wall, positioned right up against the door frame. I’d traded my P7 for a Gerber boot knife. Doc’s suppressed Tokorev rested steady in his hand.
We waited in total silence. No breathing. No movement at all. I wanted those assholes behind the door to hear the team’s progress—not ours.
The silence was absofuckinglutely deafening.
I could hear my decoys as they hit the first-floor landing. And that was when the door next to my left ear cracked open.
There were three of them—a pair of shooters in ninja black, complete with balaclavas, body armor, and stubby Bizon submachine guns, followed by an officer. I knew he was an officer because even though he wore the same balaclava and knit assault cap as his men, he carried only a pistol in his gloved hand.
They crept onto the landing. The shooters were so focused on my decoys, and so intent on maintaining complete silence, that they missed us. The officer, better trained than his compadres, bothered to check in both directions as he came out the door.
Doc jammed the barrel of the Tokorev in his ear. His eyes went wide with shock. Before he could react, I snatched the pistol out of his hand, and slapped my palm across his mouth. The gun went clattering to the ground—so much for noise discipline—and the ossifer tried to wrestle my hand away, pulling at my wrist with his own gloved paw. Hey—there was metal on his wrist. Familiar metal. I couldn’t see this asshole’s face obscured behind the balaclava. But I recognized that brand-new gold Rolex President and whispered a friendly greeting. “Yob tvouy mat—Fuck you, Colonel Rolex!”
And that was when the minuterie light came on and an amplified Russian voice from below ordered us to do something. It was the kind of staccato, universal phrase that needs no translation, because whether it’s shouted in English, French, Italian, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Urdu, or Russian, it sounds exactly the same.
How do the words actually translate? That’s unimportant. What is important is the gist. And no matter what language it’s shouted in, said gist is the same. It goes, “Freeze, motherfuckers, or name your beneficiaries.”
Only tonight, I had some gist of my own. My gist went, “Doom on you, Russkies.”
I blinked in the light, and focused down the stairwell toward the threat. The OMON colonel started to fidget, and I slipped the point of my Gerber under his chin, nicking him just above the Adam’s apple. “Play nice, boychik,” I said.
The light had caught the pair of Russian ninja shooters on the landing just below us. The rearmost one was swiveled in our direction. His gun was in the CQB mode—up and ready. The AK-style safety was in the full-fire mode. I could see his finger on the trigger—in fact, I could see the Ivan taking up the tension on the trigger as he started slowly up the stairs, moving steadily in our direction.
Behind me, Doc Tremblay took no chances. He dropped the ninja with a single shot in the middle of the temple. No sound—just whaap cut him a third eye right through the balaclava. The Ivan slid down the wall leaving a bloody smear on the tile where the back of his head had disintegrated, plopped into a sitting position, rolled over, and collapsed on top of his subgun.
The movement was enough to make ninja Two swivel away from his position focused on what was below him and check on his buddy. There was a micromomentary freeze—the Ivan saw his comrade down and realized he was in trouble, too. So he didn’t take any more time to evaluate or analyze—he simply let loose a fat, panicked burst of automatic fire that was sprayed more or less in our direction. There is an accurate technical term for our Ivan’s indiscriminate shooting method, friends. The term was first used by that old and respected pistoleer Colonel Jeff Cooper. He calls it, “Spray and pray.”
It is amazing the number of things that occur to you when some Ivan asshole with an automatic weapon is trying to wax your ass. For example, right now, I was thinking that in training we almost always wear ear protection, while in battle we do not, and it never fails to amaze me how fucking loud automatic gunfire is, when it’s encountered within tightly confined locations—like this goddamn tile-lined, marbletreaded stairwell. I was thinking that I felt like fu
cking Quasimodo in the fucking Notre Dame bell tower. I was thinking that we were in the middle of an F3—that’s a Full Fucking Faulkner—by which I mean there was as much fury as there was sound.
Damn—I flinched involuntarily as the rounds stitched the stairwell and jagged, sharp tile fragments spewed like cluster bomblets all around us. Sit-rep: I took a quick look and saw that no one was hit. Colonel Rolex was okay, although he was hyperventilating. Why? Because as I’d flinched, I’d unwittingly stuck him about a quarter inch deep with the tip of my knife and his throat was bloody. Fuck him—he’d survive. But just to make the sonofabitch feel better I changed the blade’s position, laying it flat against his neck. With my left hand I picked a long shard of tile out of my upper thigh, and plucked another pair of splinters from my face—I was probably going to need a stitch or two on my right cheek by the time the night’s festivities ended.
Doc was going to need stitches, too. His face had that “death by a thousand cuts” look to it—nasty razor lines all over that big New Englander’s puss of his.
Now, the frame for all of the above perceptions and observations wasn’t more than a second or so—time does fly by when you are having the kind of fun I like to have—and, despite the aura of slo-motion, things were actually taking place in real time. By which I mean, that the Ivan had loosed a volley of autofire at us, we’d ducked, and now (nice to see Mr. Murphy visit somebody else for a change) it would appear that fucking Ivan’s magazine had jammed on him.
Whoops—back to slo-mo again: he fumbled, but ejected the bad mag. I thrust Colonel Rolex over at Doc, who stuck the Tokorev in his ear. Feverishly, the Ivan racked the Bizon’s bolt. He was three, maybe four yards away. He was trying to clear the chamber. I launched myself toward him. He realized the chamber was too fucked to clear, realized he was in real trouble, let go the Bizon, and started to reach for his backup weapon. I caught him with the Gerber in midreach, the tip of my blade finding the two-inch gap between the shoulder pad and rib-plate of his bullet-proof vest.
Designation Gold Page 14