Child traffickers were one example. Every time he heard about another case, he wished the perpetrators dead and roasting in a hell whose existence he had long ago abandoned as a childish fantasy. And when a prosecution failed because some officer was paid to lose the crucial evidence, Sushko added a fresh name to his list.
His contact, the freckle-faced American who smiled too much and chuckled at his own jokes, had told Sushko that the man he would be meeting here, among the dead, was “serious”—someone adept at solving problems so that they did not recur tomorrow, next week or next year. His interest, of course, was in the spillage of Ukrainian mayhem into the United States, highlighted by the recent incident in Washington.
No one, it seemed, cared about Ukraine for Ukraine alone.
No one, perhaps, but Sushko. He cared, and so he would listen to this foreigner, perhaps cooperate if there was something in it for his homeland and himself. If the proposal put him off, he would refuse. If that, in turn, angered the would-be comic who had paid him the princely sum of one hundred dollars per week for the past eighteen months, then so be it. Sushko was content to live without the extra money and the interference in his life.
And if the freckled-faced American tried to blackmail him somehow...well, there were ways to deal with that, as well.
Sushko could see his landmark now, the rising cairn and crosses, still roughly one hundred yards away. He scanned the graveyard, spotting isolated mourners here and there, stray groups of morbid tourists passing through.
He pushed on, looking for the stranger who might change—or end—his life.
* * *
“HURRY UP!” VASYL KYRYLOVYCH SAID. “We’re losing him!”
“We’re losing nobody,” Roman Cherkassky replied. “If we get too close, we’ll put him on alert.”
“I don’t like this,” Emil Staryk chimed in. “It’s all too open and exposed.”
“Meaning you’re too fat,” Cherkassky said. “No one asked you if you like it.”
“No, but—”
“Pay attention. Watch our man.”
Another three-man team was trailing the policeman at a distance, moving in parallel. Cherkassky didn’t understand why this man should rate six watchers. He knew the corporal had been snooping where he shouldn’t, stepping on some tender toes, but that was reason to eliminate him, not waste time and manpower trailing him around Kiev indefinitely. Every day he lived created new risks of exposure.
Why not simply kill him here and now?
Because Cherkassky’s orders were explicit: Find out who he’s meeting.
Then, and only then, could he eliminate the corporal and snatch his contact for interrogation, find out who he was, how much he knew, what information had been traded off between them.
Cherkassky thought he was prepared for anything. All six men on the job were well armed and proficient with the weapons they’d selected. All of them were killers, not a breed particularly scarce around Ukraine these days. When Cherkassky gave the order, they would act efficiently, accepting any consequences from return fire. If the corporal resisted, or if more policemen appeared, the team would deal with them.
They hung well back, two hundred yards at least, trailing the cop. Cherkassky had not known where he was going, but the target made it obvious, beelining for the great cairn with its crosses, seeming heedless of the other graves around him. In the farther distance, well beyond the cairn, Cherkassky’s eyes picked out more idlers in the boneyard. Any one of them could be the person whom the corporal had come to meet—or any pair, for that matter, although he paid scant attention to the stooped and elderly.
The corporal would not have come to meet some doddering grandmother at this monument to death, and what could some old lady know in any case? Cherkassky looked for someone who could pose a threat to the organization he served, if not a man, at least a woman who was young and fit enough to hold a station of responsibility.
But what if this were something else? What if the corporal was on some private errand best conducted secretly, feeding some vice of which he was ashamed? It was entirely possible, Cherkassky thought. No one was perfect, and the ones who thought they were most often proved to be the greatest hypocrites of all.
Cherkassky spoke into his Bluetooth headset. “Team two, you see anything?”
The answer came back loud and clear. “Nothing yet.”
“Okay. Keep your eyes sharp.”
“Why don’t we just kill him?” Staryk asked. “That settles everything.”
“You want to tell the boss that, when we come back empty-handed?” Cherkassky asked.
“It’s not my job,” the shooter answered petulantly.
“And it’s not your job to think up bright ideas, either. So keep them to yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”
Cherkassky fidgeted, feeling the PP-2000 submachine gun underneath his raincoat, on its shoulder sling, rubbing against his ribs. He would be glad to use it when the time came, but for now they had to watch and wait.
One target was not good enough. Cherkassky absolutely needed two.
* * *
BOLAN WAS LOITERING behind the massive cairn when he saw a lone figure approaching. The man wore a knee-length trench coat, trudging along with his hands buried deep in the coat’s outer pockets. A fedora that had witnessed better days sat squarely on his head, its snap brim pulled down nearly to his eyebrows.
That coat could hide a mini-arsenal, as Bolan’s raincoat did. He couldn’t blame Corporal Sushko from anticipating trouble at their rendezvous, but first he needed to confirm that this was Maksym Sushko in the flesh, and not some ringer sent to bait a trap. The face half shadowed by the old fedora might be Sushko’s at a hundred yards, but Bolan would require a closer look to match against the photographs he’d memorized from Hal Brognola’s file.
At fifty yards his doubts began to ease, but Bolan kept his right hand wrapped around the pistol grip of his assault rifle, accessible through the raincoat’s slit pocket, designed for reaching keys and cash during a downpour, but as useful now for self-defense.
At thirty yards the cop lifted his head, and Bolan verified that it was his contact. It was a long face, with a mournful cast, as if Sushko had witnessed too much misery, internalized it, until it was leaking from his eyes. It was a look Bolan had seen on many law-enforcement officers around the world, and as strange as it might sound, it made him hopeful.
Bad cops, in his personal experience, showed little on their faces beyond arrogance. They simply didn’t care.
“Corporal Sushko,” Bolan said, when they were close enough to speak without raising their voices. He released the AK-12, offered his hand and introduced himself. “Matt Cooper.”
Sushko’s upper lip twitched slightly, either from a nervous tic or logging the false information and dismissing it. If he had any sense at all, he’d know that Bolan wasn’t handing out his true name to a stranger he’d met for the first time in a Ukrainian graveyard.
“Shall we complete the ritual?” Sushko asked.
“Might as well,” Bolan agreed, and launched into the prearranged pass phrase. “It is good fishing—”
“—in streamy water.” Sushko finished the Ukrainian proverb, signifying that people may take advantage of chaos to gain their own ends.
“This must seem odd to you,” Bolan allowed.
“Life frequently seems odd to me, these days,” Sushko replied.
“If you have any qualms...”
“None.” Sushko fanned the air as if swatting at gnats. “I need help. My country needs help.”
“I’m just one man, you understand,” Bolan said. “No one else is coming. If we take this road—”
“It may be the end of us. I understand completely.”
“I’m hoping not. But, yes. Are you go
od with that?”
“I have no family except a sister whom I rarely see, only this job which, often, I am not allowed to do because it might upset someone who ought to be in prison or a coffin. Da, I am ready.”
“Okay, then. We should—”
Movement out among the graves caught Bolan’s eye, just a peripheral until he turned in that direction and the flicker became three men moving closer to the cairn, two hundred yards and closing. The cairn obscured his vision to the left, but Bolan saw one of the new arrivals glance in that direction, lifting one hand in a signal to somebody off in that direction.
“Is this a setup?” he asked Sushko, as his AK-12 eased out from under cover.
“What?”
“Three men at two o’clock. More that I can’t see on the far side of the cairn.”
The corporal began to turn, but Bolan stopped him with a terse “Stand still.”
“They must have followed me. It was clumsy of me. I am sorry.”
Bolan judged him in two seconds flat and thought he was sincere, whatever that was worth. A careless partner was the next-worst thing, in Bolan’s estimation, to a traitor at his side.
“If these are other cops—”
The corporal shook his head emphatically. “No one from the office knows where I am. Of that, I’m sure.”
“Okay. We need to clean this up,” Bolan declared. “It would be nice if we could grab one of these guys and question him, but I’m not counting on it. Step one is to stay alive and mobile. Are you packing?”
Sushko frowned at him, not understanding.
“Armed,” Bolan translated.
“Da. A pistol only, with me. In my car I have—”
“Nothing that’s any use to us right now. How many rounds?”
“Three magazines make thirty-six plus one.”
“All right, then. Make them count,” Bolan replied. “Now follow me.”
* * *
“I’VE LOST THEM. They have passed behind the cairn,” Roman Cherkassky said into his Bluetooth microphone. “Do you have any visual?”
Stas Hutz replied, voice small and peevish in Cherkassy’s ear. “Nothing from here.”
“Move in!” Cherkassky snapped. “They could be running.”
Hutz answered with a curse and passed the order on.
Cherkassky saw the second team advancing quickly toward the cairn and wondered if they might already be too late.
This was supposed to be an easy snatch and grab, but if it turned into a running fight through the Bykivnia Graves it could easily get out of hand. Cherkassky didn’t know the stats offhand, but if he had to guess, he would have said the graveyard sprawled over at least 140 acres. Hiking in, he had already passed at least two dozen witnesses who ordinarily would not have noticed his small party, but if there was shooting in this solemn place—
The first crack was a pistol shot, followed immediately by another curse from Hutz’s side. “Damn! I almost had him!”
“Who told you to fire?” Cherkassky challenged him.
“I thought—”
“Don’t think!” Cherkassky snarled back. “What about the other one?”
“No sight of him. I think—”
This time there was a buzz of automatic fire, two bursts from what Cherkassky took to be a Kalashnikov, one of the smaller, newer calibers. Glancing to his right, he saw the backup team diving for cover where there wasn’t much but headstones, belly-down in grass that left them open for the most part, scared to lift their heads and look for targets.
“Jesus!” Turning to his grim comrades, Cherkassky said, “Come on. We have to help them out before this blows up in our faces and we all go down the toilet.”
“Kill the pair of them,” Staryk suggested. “Easy.”
“Screw trying to take one back alive,” Kyrylovych added.
They had a point, but there was still the boss, their godfather, to think about. When Pavlo Voloshyn gave orders, he did not expect to have them modified, much less ignored completely. Disappointing him was much the same as bending down to kiss a hungry crocodile. Your drunken friends might be impressed at first, but that would be no consolation when the reptile tore you limb from limb.
“Follow my lead exactly,” he instructed his teammates. “No deviations, or you can explain them to the godfather yourself.”
That said, clutching his SMG, Cherkassky ran to join the fight.
* * *
CAUTIOUS ANNIHILATION, BOLAN had decided, was the way to go. He hadn’t counted on a showdown at his first meeting with Sushko, but the fat was in the fire now and he couldn’t alter that. The first shot, fired without a warning, put his mind at ease about the stalkers being cops, but there were still civilians in the neighborhood, which argued against pulling out the stops and hitting them with everything he had, grenades and all.
But that didn’t mean they got to walk away.
The first burst from Bolan’s AK-12 had been to keep their heads down. They had a pincers movement going, working on encirclement, and Bolan only knew two ways to counter that: withdraw or claim the high ground for himself.
He guessed the hunters would expect him to retreat, a logical enough assumption when outnumbered three to one. That might have been the way to go, if he were a civilian or a cop armed only with a pistol, hedged around by rules and regulations, but the shooters had unwittingly surprised another kind of animal entirely when they sprang their trap. This prey was strong, ferocious on a level they had likely never seen before, and well prepared to fight.
“What should I do?” asked Sushov, cutting into Bolan’s thoughts.
“Head west and draw their fire. Not far. Just buy me time to get up high.”
Sushko glanced toward the concrete crosses on the cairn. “You fight up there?”
“It’s cover,” Bolan said. “The dead don’t mind.”
“And I just run away?”
“Not far, I said. You’re bait. Distract them.”
“Bait,” Sushov repeated, then translated it into Ukrainian. “Prymanka. As you wish.” He had a pistol in his right hand now, the hammer cocked.
“One more thing,” Bolan told him. “Don’t get killed.”
Sushko managed a thin, anemic smile at that. “I’ll do my best,” he said, and turned away.
Bolan was climbing by the time the corporal hit his stride, trusting the peaked mound of the cairn to cover his ascent as long as he stayed low and didn’t start a rock slide to betray himself.
In fact, the stones were more like granite blocks, broken and piled to form a mound approximately twenty feet in height, surmounted by the concrete crosses shown on post cards and in countless tourist photographs. This was no grassy knoll, ideal for sniping from. If lying prone, the blocks would gouge his ribs, scrape knees and elbows, bruise his flesh, but all of that was better than a bullet to the head. Rough ground was nothing new to Bolan, and he wouldn’t let it stop him now.
Climbing, the AK-12 clutched tight against his chest, he saw two teams, one on either side of him, observing Sushko, tracking him and waiting for another figure to appear. The six all had their weapons angled westward, scoping on their solitary target, holding fire until they figured out where number two had gone.
Bolan had nearly reached the summit, and he didn’t plan to keep them waiting long.
9
Maksym Sushko felt as if he had been dropped into the middle of a fever dream from which there was no waking. First, he cursed himself for leaving his Kalashnikov back in the trunk of his patrol car, hopelessly beyond his reach now, then resolved himself to follow the American’s instructions.
What choice did he have, in fact?
Sushko felt terribly exposed as he jogged westward from the cairn, his back turned toward the enemy, whose weapons could re
ach out and cut him down at any second. It ran counter to his training and experience, but he could understand the logic of it, drawing their attention while the man who called himself Matt Cooper went to work with his assault rifle.
But was he any good with it? Was anyone outside of Spetznaz or the Alpha Group of Ukraine’s own Security Service prepared to fight six men at once? More to the point, what would become of Sushko if Cooper were killed? Cut off from his vehicle, barred from calling backup on his covert mission, how much longer would he stay alive?
A burst of automatic fire behind him made the corporal flinch, hunching his shoulders, but the bullets did not find him. Cooper had engaged the enemy, it seemed, and they were firing back at him. It struck Sushko that he had no idea who “they” were, how’d they’d trailed him to the meeting, and the void in knowledge troubled him as much as the idea of being hunted like an animal.
He had been hunted in the past, by gangsters and by terrorists. Sushko had beaten all of them so far—killed some, jailed others—but at no time had he been in any doubt as to the motive or identity of his would-be assassins. Now he felt foolish, nearly helpless. Were the gunmen Russian or Ukrainian? Was their desire to kill him motivated by revenge, by politics, by greed?
More firing came from the cairn, and still no bullets were fired his way. As bait, it seemed that he was worthless. The American was pinned down on the cairn but fighting back, surrounded. He had held his own so far, but no one could defend every side at once. If Cooper died, the gunmen would be after Sushko in a heartbeat. If they captured him alive and carried him away...
For starters, they’d be able to confirm Sushko’s collaboration with a foreign government, unauthorized by his superiors. They could expose him as a traitor if it suited them, leave his destruction to his fellow officers or to Ukraine’s Security Service. Who would believe that he simply intended to help his homeland and saw no way to do that within the flawed system he served?
Perhaps a priest, if Sushko had believed in all that mumbo-jumbo.
Someone cried out, high and sharp behind him, badly wounded. Stopping in his tracks, he turned to face the cairn but had no view of Cooper at its pinnacle. Was he already down, wounded or dying?
Terrorist Dispatch (Executioner) Page 10