by Tom Clancy
A second ATV was tagged off to Blackburn’s right, its tire rupturing with an explosive outrush of air, peeling away from its rim like a shed snakeskin. It overbalanced and went skidding onto its side in a spray of sand, dislodging its stealthsuited riders. Blackburn saw one of them dash over to his partner, saw him help the man to his feet, saw a member of the hit team take aim at both of them, and knew he had to act fast.
They were pinned.
He wrenched his vehicle in their direction, zooming in close, taking a hand off the handlebars long enough to motion to Perry. Perry nodded, leveled his gun, clouted the diver with a tight, controlled volley before he could pick off the unseated pair.
Angling away, Blackburn suddenly heard gunfire from up on the embankment and swore under his breath.
Starinov, he thought, and urged his ATV toward the slope.
The assassins were up there.
Up there with Starinov.
Gilea and Adil sprinted across the crest of the bluff, toward the cottage, now less than ten feet up ahead. Behind them a dead guard lay spilling his blood into the sand, his uniform tunic spotted with bullet holes. They reached the door and halted, Gilea stepping back out of Adil’s way, giving him room to move in front of her and kick it open.
She pivoted away from him, watching his rear, her eyes flicking warily left and right. A guard came racing around the side of the house and she cut him down before he even spotted them, stitching bullets across his middle. Two more Russian soldiers appeared from around back just as she heard the door crash inward amid spears of broken wood, one of them falling instantly to a burst from her weapon, the other managing to squirt off a volley before she took him out. He staggered in a wide circle, made a moist coughing sound, and keeled over sideways, the gun slipping from his grasp.
She turned back to the cottage. Adil was sprawled in front of the open door, half his head blown away. The second man had gotten him with his salvo, she thought, registering his death without emotion.
Her mind was on her job, and her job was making sure Starinov joined Adil in his fate.
Blackburn crested the rise in just enough time to see the Nastik woman leap through the door over her companion’s body.
He braked the ATV to a sand-spitting halt, leaped off the vehicle, and tore after her, drawing his Smith & Wesson from beneath his shock vest as he ran. Perry was at his heels.
Blackburn plunged through the entryway, snapped a bullet into the gun’s chamber, glanced left and right. He wanted Nastik alive, but if it came down to a choice between her and Starinov, he would do whatever he had to.
The foyer was empty. Which direction should he look in? Where the hell was she?
He heard Perry behind him, motioned crisply for him to search the left side of the house, and was turning toward the right, toward what looked like the bedroom, when he heard the dog growling, heard the gunshot, and then heard the loud crash of someone falling back against the wall.
Starinov had been in the kitchen when the shooting started and, realizing what was happening, realizing that his home was under attack, he had plunged into his bedroom to get his personal firearm from his dresser drawer. It was just a small .22 caliber handgun, and he knew it would do little good against the kind of automatic weapons he heard out there in the night, but it was all he had.
He pulled open the drawer and was fumbling under his clothes for the pistol when the woman burst into the room and raised her AK at him, holding it at point-blank range. The grin stretching across her face seemed barely human.
That was when Ome came springing from under the bed, his teeth bared, growling and snarling as he lunged at the woman, clamping his jaws around her ankle.
Caught off guard, she stumbled backward, triggering a wild burst as she smashed against the wall. She tried to recover her balance, kicking at the dog, but only managing to get it off her after its teeth had sunk deep into her flesh.
“Don’t move!” Blackburn shouted at the top of his voice, training his Smith & Wesson on her with both hands. “Drop the rifle, you hear me? Drop it!”
She looked at him across the room, clinging to the gun, the dog barking in front of her. The leg of her dive suit was soaked with blood. Behind Blackburn, the men he had radioed on his com-link were pouring into the room, led by Scull, shuffling the minister out of harm’s way in a protective phalanx.
“Don’t be suicidal,” Blackburn said. “It’s over.”
She looked at him. Shook her head. Grinned. Still holding the machine gun, her hands clenched tightly around it, trembling.
And then, before Blackburn could react, she swung the AK upward so that its bore was fixed directly upon his heart.
“Over for me,” she said. “Over for both of us.”
His mouth dry of spit, the blood thundering in his ears, Blackburn kept his gun trained on the woman even as she kept her weapon on him, watching her hand for the slightest twitch, hoping to God he’d be fast enough to anticipate her next move. His concentration shrank to a narrow tunnel that encompassed his hand, Gilea, and nothing else.
A moment of slow time passed. Another. Neither of them budged. Neither weapon was lowered. The air around Blackburn felt like gelatin infused with current.
He was unaware of the sudden movement behind him until it was too late. It all seemed to happen with lightning rapidity—the oiled click of a firing mechanism near his ear, the loud crack of the gun discharging behind him, the surprised, almost quizzical expression on Gilea’s face just before the bullet struck her forehead, producing a perfectly round dot of red above the ridge of her nose. Blackburn saw the machine gun jerk in her hand, and for a heartstopping instant was sure her finger would spasmodically lock around the trigger, sure he would be blown off his feet.
But the weapon slipped from her grasp without firing a round, and then her eyes rolled up in their sockets and her legs gave out and she slid loosely to the floor, trailing blood, brains, and skull fragments down the wall as she crumpled.
Blackburn lowered his pistol, turned his head on muscles that felt much too tight.
Starinov was standing directly behind him, having shoved through the Sword operatives that had converged around him. Smoke curled from the barrel of his outthrust .22.
His eyes met Blackburn’s. Held them.
“It is better like this,” he said.
Blackburn swallowed dryly but said nothing. The smell of cordite stung his nostrils.
“Your people saved my life, I saved yours.” Starinov brought down his gun. “Now perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me where you have come from.”
Blackburn was silent another moment. He looked past Starinov at the members of his team, men who had assembled from every corner of the globe to do a job that was both thankless and immeasurably dangerous. Thought about Ibrahim and his desert riders in Turkey, and Nimec’s operatives in New York, and the diverse, ordinary people who had done what they could to help along the way.
How was he to answer?
He considered it another few seconds, and finally just shrugged.
“We’re kind of from everywhere, sir,” he said.
FORTY-SEVEN
NEW YORK CITY KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT FEBRUARY 17, 2000
THE SETTING SUN HAD TINTED THE SCATTERED CLOUDS in the sky over Jamaica Bay glorious shades of scarlet and gold. The skyline of Manhattan was silhouetted in the distance against the sunset. Lights were going on all over in the city that never sleeps, and New York was beginning to take on its nighttime fairy-tale glow. But Roger Gordian stood alone at the end of a runway, oblivious to the beauty spread out before him.
He was about to bring his people home.
The pain, and the sense of terrible responsibility he felt, threatened to bring him to his knees.
As he stood there waiting, he cast his mind back over the events of the last few months. Was there anything, he wondered, that he could have done differently, that would have forestalled this moment? Anything that he or his people co
uld have changed that would have brought these people home alive instead of in boxes? That would have brought their families together to celebrate instead of to mourn?
If there was, he couldn’t think of it now. Hindsight was usually all it was cracked up to be, but even in retrospect, he couldn’t think of a moment he’d wasted, a shred of information he hadn’t acted upon as soon as it had been verified.
Tragedy had come upon them all as silently as a mist in the night. It had drifted into their midst, burst upon them completely without warning. Set into motion half a world away by a handful of opportunists driven by greed and ambition and completely unrestrained by conscience or morality, it was too late to stop it, any of it, from the moment it had been conceived.
And the costs, God, the costs ...
Gordian ran a hand over his eyes.
Times Square had only been the beginning. Over a thousand people dead, many thousands more injured. All the families and friends who would never again share the simple pleasures of life with people they loved. The survivors who would never again be able to enjoy a day without pain, who were left broken in mind and body to pick up the pieces of their lives and go on as best they could. All because they had wanted to celebrate the glorious beginning of a new millennium.
Roger Gordian knew from hard personal experience just how high that price was.
But those people, as much as he mourned their passing and grieved for their losses, hadn’t been his. He had been diminished by their loss, but not directly responsible for their deaths. He had not personally sent them into harm’s way.
More than twenty people, working at his behest in places he had sent them to, were coming home in coffins. From his ground station in Russia. From Cappadocia in Turkey.
He knew most of them by name, some of them well. A few were among the small circle of people he counted as his dearest friends.
He’d sent them out to die.
He would never take a waking breath again without thinking of them.
He would never forgive himself.
And what had it all been about?
Politics.
Miserable, stinking, corrupt politics.
His people had died because some power-crazed demagogue had wanted to throw an election.
It made him physically ill, nauseous.
Every single one of his employees had been, each in his own way, a good person. Pedachenko wasn’t worthy to be in the same room with them. But with his grandiose plans of conquest, he had killed them all.
Oh, God, the pain ...
Stop, it, Gordian, he told himself. Take a deep breath. Take a step back from that endless cycle of guilt and recrimination. It doesn’t change the past, and you know where it leads you.
Right.
So where did that leave him?
With the present ...
Russia was stable for the moment. Starinov had used the furor over Pedachenko’s actions to consolidate his government. Aid was flowing into Russia from the U.S.A. and Europe. The threat of a famine which would kill millions of innocent men, women, and children had been averted for now.
Was it worth Arthur and Elaine Steiner’s deaths?
No. Nothing was worth that.
But nothing could change what had happened, either.
Roger Gordian, mover and shaker among the world’s power elite, was powerless to alter the past, even a single second of it. He was just a lonely man with a guilty conscience, standing and waiting for a chartered plane to land, a plane full of the dead he would never be able to expunge from his conscience.
It hurt. God, it hurt.
What could he do about it?
How could he go on from here?
He searched the heavens for an answer.
For the first time he noticed the beauty of the sunset, now in its fullest glory. It was stunning. For a second he just emptied his mind and let himself bask in the beauty of it. It was, he realized, the first time he’d really looked at something and allowed himself to open his emotions to the experience since the Times Square bombing.
The world was still out there in all its imperfect beauty. It was still turning on its axis, and it would continue to do so, no matter what the humans—good, evil, or indifferent—who crawled on its surface did.
The future was his to make what he could of it.
It was a gift that Arthur or Elaine Steiner would have grabbed with both hands. He wished they were here with him, alive and happy, to do it. But they weren’t, so it was up to him.
And maybe that was the answer he was seeking.
He couldn’t change the past.
He could only embrace the future and give it his best.
It was time to begin again.
The plane he’d been waiting for, a gray-skinned IL-76, now bathed in the slanting golden light of the setting sun, taxied down the runway in front of him. Men waving fluorescent orange lights guided it to a halt, and more men rushed forward to chock the wheels. Someone driving a motorized staircase revved the engine and drove it forward, bringing it to a gentle halt inches from the door of the plane. The stairway driver turned the engine off, put on the brakes, and scrambled out to make the last few adjustments manually.
The door of the plane opened and people began exiting. These were the survivors, some of them swathed in bandages from their recent ordeal. Some of the more serious burn victims were still in Europe, too critical to be moved. Roger Gordian’s eyesight blurred as the tears he refused to shed gathered. At least his people hadn’t all died. Thanks to Max and his crew, many of those who would have certainly died without help were walking down the runway under their own power. He blinked to clear his eyes.
At the rear of the plane, a hatch opened. Musicians he’d engaged for this occasion began playing in the background—the solemn strains of Bach filled the evening. And a coffin was handed down. It was the first of many, Roger knew. Again guilt threatened to swamp him. He turned it aside, and concentrated instead on the memories. Flashes of the days he’d spent with Arthur and Elaine at ground stations all over the world. The surroundings had changed often, but one thing was constant, as immutable as time. The Steiners’ love for each other had been a beacon and an example to anyone who knew them. Death hadn’t changed that. A love like that was too enduring for an assassin’s bullet to kill. Gordian knew they were together, wherever they were, and that that’s the way they would have wanted it.
More coffins were gently laid on the tarmac. More memories surged through Gordian’s mind. He owed these people. He owed them more than he could ever repay.
It was time to build monuments in their memory.
He would rebuild that Russian ground station and others like it, and use them to make sure that information would flow freely across the steppes and all the world. If anything could keep this from happening again, could stop the violence before it started, it would be that. He was in a position to make it happen. He would keep pressing on.
But somehow, it wasn’t enough.
Again, the picture of Elaine and Arthur as he’d last seen them flashed across his mind. No longer young, they had the memories of a long, rich, shared past to bind them together; they’d been holding hands like teenagers, walking through a field scattered with the first bounty of spring flowers. Their love had been palpable.
That, too, was a monument.
He knew what they’d have wished for him.
It was time to call Ashley and work things out.
He loved her. She loved him. That was too beautiful a gift to waste. Like Arthur with Elaine, he needed to learn to cherish his wife. He owed it to himself and the Steiners to give his marriage a real chance.
Tonight, he thought. I’ll call her tonight.
And I’ll make it so.
As the last coffin was placed on the runway, as the last light of day faded from the scene and the white splash of arc lights replaced it, Roger Gordian signaled the beginning of the ceremony he’d arranged. The world, he thought, would never forget wha
t had happened to them all.
Neither would he.
It was time to forge the new beginnings his people had died to bring about.
He owed it to them all to see it through.
A drumroll sounded as the ceremony for his people began.
Roger Gordian took a step forward to take responsibility for the precious cargo.
And as he took the step, he realized his journey was just beginning.
Roger Gordian opened his heart to embrace the future.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
EPILOGUE
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