Sushko cursed himself again, as seven kinds of idiot, and ran back toward the fight.
* * *
BOLAN WASN’T DEAD or wounded, though his enemies had done their best so far to put him down. Sporadic fire from left and right, circling the cairn, had peppered him with granite shards and splinters from the looming concrete crosses, stinging slivers from the ricochets that missed him, but the shooters hadn’t tagged him yet.
From shot one of the battle, they were on the clock. Bolan had passed enough civilians in the graveyard to assume that several—likely dozens—were aware of gunplay in the cemetery. A guidebook he had studied while in flight reported that three Ukrainian mobile phone networks claimed fifty-eight million subscribers between them, not bad for a country whose last census counted only forty-six million inhabitants. The odds of someone calling the police, therefore, stood right around 100 percent.
That was good and bad news. If Bolan simply held his ground until the cavalry arrived, his mission would be scrubbed, his journey wasted. Sushko couldn’t help him without sacrificing his career, maybe his life, and disavowal was a given when it came to Stony Man. So he would have to clean this up, and in a hurry, if he wanted to get clear and reconnect with Sushko somewhere down the line.
He had already dropped one of the hunters, with the first burst from his AK-12, but they learned quickly from the loss and played it cagey, moving close to the broad base of the cairn. They might not have a shot at him from below, that way, but physics hampered Bolan in the same way. He’d be forced to stand, expose himself to gunmen on all sides, if he began to thin the pack.
At least Sushko was clear, it seemed. None of the thugs had followed him, which told Bolan the corporal was a target, not the target. Who would have known Sushko was meeting someone at the cemetery, much less that he might be meeting with a foreigner? He ruled out any kind of leak from Stony Man. Most likely it was vague intel about a meet with no specifics, someone marking Sushko as a man to watch for causing trouble in the past and cultivating squealers, walking in on something that they didn’t understand.
At least, he hoped that was the case, and there was no more time to ponder it.
Fight now. Think later.
He inched over jagged granite, nice to look at but a pain to crawl on, angling for a decent shot that wouldn’t get him killed, when 9 mm pistol fire cracked out somewhere from the west side of the cairn. Bolan heard a flurry of presumed Ukrainian obscenities.
Sushko?
He didn’t second-guess it, turning painfully on his bed of fractured stones and facing toward the battle sounds.
* * *
“STAS? ARE YOU THERE? Answer me, damn it!”
“He can’t hear you,” Taryk Korot told Cherkassky via Bluetooth. “Stas is gone.”
“Useless prick!” Cherkassky spit back through his microphone. “Finished for good?”
“I saw his brains,” Korot replied.
All right. When there was fighting, people died. That was the long and short of it. Cherkassky had been friends with Stas Hutz, but he was not about to let grief cripple him.
“Who has a clear shot at the shooter?” he asked both teams at once.
“None here,” Korot said.
“Same for me,” Nissan Bibik replied, and so it went around the circle, Kyrylovych and Staryk both confirming that they could not see the enemy from where they’d gone to ground.
“The only way to spot him,” Staryk said, “means giving him a shot at one of us.”
Cherkassky recognized the truth of it. He said, “That’s it, then. Any volunteers?”
He half expected mocking laughter, but the silence from his earpiece said it all.
“I choose, then. Taryk, do it.”
“Why me?” Korot challenged.
“Stas was your friend.”
“Yours, too!”
“I never—”
Sudden pistol fire cut off his words, pop-popping from the west, Cherkassky’s left.
“Who’s firing, damn it?” he demanded. “If you can’t—”
“The cop’s back,” Kyrylovych said. “He couldn’t leave his boyfriend, after all.”
More firing, answered by a burst from a Kalashnikov that failed to do the trick, since pistol shots immediately followed. From the far side of the cairn, a cry of pain wafted on dull breeze to Cherkassky’s ears.
“Who’s that?” he hissed into the Bluetooth. “Sound off if you hear me!”
“Vasyl here.”
“Taryk.”
“Nissan.”
Cherkassky waited for the last voice for a moment, then barked, “Emil? Staryk? Answer!”
“Hit bad,” Staryk answered finally, half choking on it. “Too much blood.”
A spark of panic flared inside Cherkassky’s chest then, quickly smothered as he clenched his teeth and said, “Hold on. I’m coming for you.”
“Roman, no!” Staryk replied. “You—”
Pop! Another pistol shot, undoubtedly 9 mm, slapped at Cherkassky’s eardrum. He recoiled, grimacing at the pain, feeling raw fury rise and threaten to eclipse coherent thought.
Cherkassky had already used at least two-thirds of his SMG’s 20-round magazine, trying to bring down the man on the cairn’s top. He pulled it now and stuffed it in a pocket, replacing the 20-round stick with a larger one, loaded with forty-four rounds. Four seconds of sustained fired would exhaust it, but if he could frame the target in his sights, Cherkassky would not mind.
Rage and frustration drove him as he started scuttling toward the sound of pistol fire.
* * *
ATOP THE CAIRN, Mack Bolan felt the tide of battle shift. Sushko’s return had taken his opponents by surprise, and since it seemed the corporal had eliminated one of them, the four survivors were prepared to treat him as the more immediate and deadly threat.
Not wise—in fact, a foolish move—but Bolan was prepared to take advantage of it.
Ten yards, all jutting granite edges, separated Bolan from the east side of the cairn, where he would have to slide and scramble twenty feet or more downslope to plant his feet on level ground. The cairn had been surrounded seconds earlier, but he had tracked a shifting movement of his enemies westward as they rushed to cover Maksym Sushko on the other side. They might have left a man behind, on watch, but one was better than a four-man firing squad.
The Executioner reached the edge, peered over, hearing more gunshots and shouts behind him, and saw no one down below. That was a drawback of the cairn’s curving perimeter, but if he planned to make the move it had to be right then.
And once he reached the ground below, should he go left or right?
Bolan decided he would take that as it came.
He started down the jagged slope, no shortage of footholds, no dearth of sharp edges to cut him and snag on his clothing. Gripping his Kalashnikov in one hand, balancing and bracing with the other, he descended one step at a time, scanning for enemies who might have doubled back, tense in anticipation of a tumbling fall.
He jumped the last ten feet and landed in a crouch, spun in a quick three-sixty with his AK-12 sweeping the ground in front of him, the vast expanse of graves beyond.
When no one challenged him immediately, Bolan circled to his left, around the longer north side of the cairn, one of its two long sides. He didn’t rush it, homing in on the shouts of men who masked fear with profanity and anger.
Had they cornered Sushko yet? Was he already down? Had Bolan come too late to help the ally he had barely met?
A few more steps, and Bolan saw a hulking man in front of him, scuttling toward the west end of the cairn, his back to Bolan. He was carrying some kind of long gun, with its stock just visible beneath his stout right arm.
Bolan didn’t consider playing by rules laid down b
y Hollywood and Wild West novels. He drilled a 3-round burst into the shooter’s back and dropped him like a filthy habit. There was no need to examine the body as Bolan passed, or pry the weapon from beneath him. He was as dead as dirt, already leaking blood in quantities from where the rounds had ripped his flesh and vital organs, severing his spine, pulping his heart.
And now the odds were three on two.
* * *
THE FIRST SHOT stung Maksym Sushko, etching a line of fire across his left biceps without inflicting any major damage. He was quick enough to duck the second round somehow—or lucky that he stumbled—and it grazed the brim of his fedora, leaving Sushko with a thought that he had heard the wings of Death pass by him.
He was firing back then, two rounds from the pistol’s magazine that was already half-depleted. When he emptied that one, if they hadn’t killed him yet, he had two more in leather pouches on his belt, together with a 20-round backup he liked to carry for emergencies but had not needed yet.
Until this day.
Sushko had dropped one enemy since he’d doubled back to help Matt Cooper: one shot in the gut to pin his target, then another through the forehead while the wounded gunman screamed through an earpiece, trying to alert his leader. It had been an execution, more or less, and miles outside police guidelines, but Sushko found he didn’t give a damn. If he was killed within the next few minutes, as seemed likely, he could tell whoever met him on the other side that he had done his part.
Three gunmen remained, that he was sure of, maybe more if reinforcements had been lurking in the cemetery, farther back and out of sight when Sushko left the cairn. Three was enough, but if they had not killed or wounded the American, just possibly, they had a fighting chance.
And fighting was about to start again.
He heard somebody talking to his left, another man somewhere to his right. They were not shouting back and forth, giving their game away, but rather trusting in the Bluetooth headsets to communicate. It gave them an advantage, but they should have whispered in this place where even normal tones were prone to carry like a dialogue of ghosts.
Sushko could not decide which way to go. The gunman to his right, or north, sounded a little closer than the shooter to his left. For just a second, Sushko thought of bolting westward once again, but knew the pair of them would bring him down, their automatic fire converging to annihilate him.
X would mark the bloody spot where Sushko died.
Better to face one of them, he decided—but which one? His mind was spinning, wasting precious seconds, when he heard a short, sharp burst of autofire and ducked instinctively, but heard no bullets whistling past. If they had not been aimed at him, then...
Cooper!
Sushko switched out his pistol’s half-spent magazine, chose his direction, circling to the north, and went to find the tall American.
* * *
ROMAN CHERKASSKY HEARD a zip of automatic fire behind him, stopping in his tracks and turning just in time to see Taryk Korot go down, shot from behind. He glanced up toward the cairn’s ridge with its crosses, but saw no one moving there. Another moment’s hesitation, and he saw a figure start to edge around the rock pile at ground level, as if stalking him.
Cherkassky squeezed a burst out of his submachine gun, missing everything except the cairn itself, his bullets striking sparks from granite, before flying off in all directions through the boneyard. Jogging backward, trying to keep sight of his opponent, he felt loose gravel slide beneath his leather soles and fell heavily onto his backside, wasting half a dozen rounds on thin air before he released the SMG’s trigger.
Stupid! Cherkassky cursed himself and scrambled to his feet, expecting to be slain at any moment, but the gunman who had killed Taryk Korot was in no rush to follow up.
Why not?
Cherkassky faced a new dilemma. Should he go back after the man he had been ordered to retrieve alive, for questioning, or focus on the bastard who had also killed one of his men? He only had two soldiers left, Bibik and Kyrylovych, both off somewhere beyond his line of sight. But he could still speak to them, through the miracle of modern technology.
“Vasyl! Nissan!” he hissed. “Come in! Where are you?”
Static answered him, some words mixed in he could not follow. Had one of the idiots damaged his headset? And where was the other? They couldn’t be far off, unless...
Had they deserted him?
Cherkassky felt a surge of fury, mixed with panic, at the thought of being left alone to die. If he survived this, and the others had run out on him, he vowed to track them down and make their final hours one long, screaming litany of pain.
He tried to judge the load remaining in his weapon’s magazine by hefting it, but drew a blank. He thought of switching mags but did not want to waste the time, be caught holding an empty weapon if one adversary or another suddenly sprang on him from hiding. Sweating heavily despite a chill wind rising from the distant cemetery shade, Cherkassky kept backpedaling, watching for the stalker with the automatic rifle, and glancing frequently over his shoulder to maintain the proper course to try to spot Maksym Sushko before the cop saw him.
Cherkassky thought about his cell phone, wished that he could call for reinforcements, but no one he summoned now would reach him soon enough to help. They’d only meet police arriving at the scene, and thus make matters worse.
It was his job to finish now, no matter what the cost.
* * *
BOLAN ADVANCED, MOVING as cautiously as haste allowed. He’d covered roughly half the cairn’s length when he heard a scuffling of footsteps at his back and turned, crouching, to find another of the gunmen jogging toward him. This one had to have circled back from the south side on hearing gunfire, and he’d come prepared, a folding-stock Kalashnikov held at high port and ready for action.
Bolan met him with a double-tap of 3-round bursts, a chainsaw in miniature ripping the target’s chest first, then his throat and jawline. The result was bloody explosions, heart and aorta ruptured and spewing, the lower face shattered beyond recognition as human. The guy tumbled backward, no sound from his lungs or his weapon until he touched down and the rifle clacked loudly on granite.
The Executioner left the body where it lay and turned back to his former course, concerned that he might have to chase his two remaining adversaries all around the cairn before he ran them down. Each minute spent on hunting brought police cars that much closer, the bing-bong of sirens audible already in the southern distance.
It was time to close this act and leave Bykivnia before he found himself hemmed in by troops he couldn’t fight.
He heard more rapid pistol fire—Sushko?—and a short burst from a Kalashnikov, then he was off and running toward the sound, wishing the cairn and the surrounding trees had not distorted it. In seconds, Bolan reached the north end of the massive rock pile, turned the corner and found a gunner facing off against the corporal, each frozen in his shooter’s stance. Behind Sushko, a crumpled figure lay supine on dusty pavement, dead eyes gaping at the slate-gray sky.
There was a short exchange between them in Ukrainian, then Bolan chimed in, shouting, “Hold it!” to distract the no-neck carrying a compact submachine gun. That intrusion brought the shooter’s head around, against his better judgment, giving Sushko all the time required to shoot him three times in the chest from twelve feet out. The gunner grimaced, kept on turning toward the new arrival on the scene, and Bolan zipped him with a 3-round burst as Sushko shot him once more from the back, behind an ear.
The guy went down, shivered and died, head twisted to the right, gaze fixed at the drab gray cairn. A pond of blood spread quickly from beneath his shattered skull.
“We need to get a move on,” Bolan said.
Sushko nodded and jerked a thumb over his shoulder, aiming vaguely to the south and west. “My car is there.”
&nbs
p; “Mine’s out the other way,” Bolan replied. “Meet you somewhere?”
“You know Rodina Mat, the Motherland statue near the Museum of the Great Patriotic War? It is impossible to miss along Ivan Mazepa Street.”
“I’ll find it,” Bolan said. “How’s thirty, forty minutes sound?”
“That should be adequate.”
They parted without anything resembling a goodbye. A second meeting raised new risks, a possibility that Sushko might experience a change of heart, despite killing three men with Bolan’s help. It was a chance that he would have to take.
He ran, back toward the ZAZ Vida, with an escape route plotted in advance and memorized.
10
Vozdvyzhenka, Kiev
Locals call Vozdvyzhenka “the millionaire’s ghost town.” Built on the ruins of a once historic neighborhood, the district’s forty-two acres of lavish luxury homes were completed in 2003, with big money in mind. Ukraine’s banking crisis of 2008 took the wind from its sails, with only fifty of the area’s two hundred fifty homes occupied. Most days and nights, the streets were deserted, except for regular police patrols and limousines conveying residents who had endured to their expensive, widely scattered nests.
For Pavlo Voloshyn, whose only banking crisis came the time police had caught him burglarizing one, Vozdvyzhenka was perfect. Located fifteen minutes from downtown Kiev, entirely free of squatters, beggars and the other scum who made urban living a nightmare, the district was a wealthy hermit’s dream come true. Security around his coral-pink, four-story mansion—the only occupied dwelling within a block—was easy to maintain. He never worried about random prowlers or solicitors, riotous parties in the structures flanking his, nothing. His men could roam the street at will in search of lurking problems, and there were no neighbors to complain.
This day, the need for tight security impressed him all the more.
The expedition to Bykivnia Graves had gone badly. Six of his men were now lying in drawers at Kiev’s central morgue, reported to him by a well-paid friend with the National Police, and Voloshyn had nothing to show for the loss. He did not mourn the dead, per se. They would be easily replaced, but they had failed him and, in dying, had robbed Voloshyn of the opportunity to punish them.
Terrorist Dispatch (Executioner) Page 11