It should have been a simple job. One police corporal was snooping, asking potentially damning questions, and a rumor reached Voloshyn’s ears that he—this insect who aspired to heroism—was consulting with outsiders. He’d been seen with a minor functionary from the American Embassy, traipsing around Syrets’kyi Park and elsewhere like a pair of tourists, and it only took one phone call for Voloshyn to determine that the contact, a supposed deputy assistant something, was in fact an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
Voloshyn could have simply killed the corporal, but rather had him watched and followed, looking for a chance to grab his contact, sit down for a frank discussion with the meddling Westerner before he disappeared. Today was meant to be that day, but now Voloshyn’s plan had crumbled into ashes and embarrassed him.
“And both of them escaped,” he said, repeating it.
“Yes, sir,” Mykola Shtern replied. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“It’s not your fault. But there must be no more mistakes.”
“No, sir.”
“We cannot reach inside the embassy. There’s too much risk involved.”
“I understand, sir.”
“If it were a question of the French, perhaps, or Italy, even the Austrians, we might attempt it, but America would likely send a drone ‘by accident’ and ruin all of this,” Voloshyn said, spreading his hands to indicate the sunken living room in which they sat, the hulking palace that surrounded it.
“Yes, sir.”
“Instead, I want this damned corporal. Alive, you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He will tell us everything we need to know before he feeds the Dnieper’s fish.”
“It will be a pleasure, sir.”
“He’ll be in hiding now, of course. Contact your friend, the major, and get a look inside the peasant’s file. There must be something we can use to draw him out.”
“Of course, sir.”
The highest ranking member of the National Police staff on Pavlo Voloshyn’s payroll was Major Semyon Golos, a relic from the Militsiya era who had expensive tastes and an accommodating attitude. He would accommodate Voloshyn this time, or his fat retirement fund would suddenly evaporate—along with Golos and, perhaps, his family, as well.
Hard times demanded hard choices, ruthless tactics.
And a little blood might go a long way in the end.
* * *
THE STATUE’S NAME, Rodina Mat, translated to “Mother Motherland” in English. It stood 203 feet tall and weighed 560 tons, holding aloft in its right hand a fifty-two-foot, nine-ton sword. The left hand bore a forty-three-by-twenty-six-foot shield, emblazoned with the now-defunct Soviet Union’s state emblem. The looming figure rose from the rooftop of Kiev’s Museum of the Great Patriotic War—otherwise known as World War II.
Corporal Sushko had been right: Bolan could not have missed the stainless-steel behemoth, glinting with sporadic highlights even underneath a gray and drizzling sky. As far as finding Sushko, that meant strolling on an open plaza near a pair of vintage battle tanks, one painted blue, the other orange, with polka dots of black and white, respectively. As Bolan passed them, he experienced the feeling of a tourist entering a strange and morbid theme park.
Sushko waited for him, sitting slumped on a retaining wall, rain beading on the brim of his fedora. He was smoking what appeared to be a miniature cigar, but from its smell could just as easily have been a stick of cinnamon.
Bolan stood over him and asked, “No tail this time, for sure?”
“No tail,” Sushko confirmed.
Bolan sat beside him. His AK-12’s barrel made a small clank beneath his raincoat, as it came to rest on the retaining wall.
“So, here’s my plan,” he said, “in broad strokes. Grab Voloshyn by the throat and kick his butt until he squeals. At the same time, we start working on his sometime Russian comrade.”
“Bogdan Britnev.”
Bolan nodded. “With some luck and perseverance, we can play them off against each other, let them do some of the heavy lifting when it comes to thinning out both sides.”
“A war? In Kiev?”
Bolan nodded again. “Are you up for that?”
“I have imagined getting rid of these two and their men. It seemed to be a dream.”
“We have a window,” Bolan told him, “but it could go either way.”
“Da, da. I understand.”
“And if we lose, there’s no plan B. No cavalry.”
“You speak of crucifixion?”
Bolan had to smile at that one. “Cavalry, not Calvary.”
“Ah, yes. Your Western cinema. John Wayne.”
“He won’t be joining us.”
“Perhaps we shall not need him,” Sushko said. “Where do we start?”
“Hitting both sides where it hurts most,” Bolan replied. “I have a list of targets. You most likely know some others. Anything you’ve heard about that’s current and important, happening over the next day or day and a half would be great.”
“A drug shipment?”
“Could be. Details?”
“Voloshyn imports heroin through Belarus, originally from Afghanistan. We have an epidemic of addiction in Ukraine. Some addicts find relief with methadone, but since the occupation of Crimea, programs there have been cut off. They kill themselves in jail, buy poison on the streets, whatever. All of it good business for Voloshyn.”
“And he has another shipment due?” Bolan asked.
“Coming in tonight, by lorry from Odessa.”
“Tell me more.”
* * *
BESARABSKY RYNOK WAS a spacious indoor market selling every possible variety of meat, fruit, vegetable and flower found in or imported to Ukraine. Major Semyon Golos, no gourmet and certainly no chef, still felt at home there, browsing among others like himself who could afford the prices without haggling for a discount—which, in any case, would not have been forthcoming. He enjoyed the sights and smells, even the gutted rabbits with their skins on, paws pinned back to show the gleaming insides.
Golos enjoyed it all, but this was not a normal shopping trip. The summons he’d received had killed his appetite.
Despite his rank, his prominence within Ukraine’s National Police, Major Golos could not ignore his master’s voice. The unrecorded, untaxed salary Golos received from Pavlo Voloshyn far exceeded his official monthly pay. At that rate, some corruption was anticipated, but Golos had sold his soul to Voloshyn’s branch of the Ukrainian mafia, and there could be no turning back short of ruin or suicide.
Neither of which held any appeal for the major.
He found the sidewalk café he was seeking and sat by himself at a table near the curb. That might have been a risky proposition if he were in uniform, but he wore a conservative business suit instead, and his face was not well known outside headquarters. When the boxy black ZIL-4112R limousine pulled up and sat there, idling, Golos left his untouched glass of vodka behind and climbed into the car through a back door that opened like magic.
Pavlo Voloshyn sat alone in the backseat, leaving Golos to take a jump seat facing him, so that they were not riding side by side. Before the limo pulled out into traffic, making smaller cars slow down and wait, the mobster said, “One of your officers is after me.”
“Is he?” It was a foolish thing to say, Golos immediately realized, but he could not take it back.
“And working with a foreigner, from what I’m told.”
“By whom, if I may ask?” Golos queried.
“Another foreigner. Intelligence. That’s all you need to know.”
“It helps to know if he or she has proved reliable,” the major said.
“Extremely so.”
“In that case, I assure you that whatever
has been done occurred without my knowledge or approval.”
“That is what worries me, Semyon. It means that someone higher up has bypassed you, or that you’ve lost control of your subordinates. In either case, it bodes ill for our future as a team.”
“You have my word that—”
“What I have,” Voloshyn interrupted him, “is a small window within which to find your man and learn exactly who he is collaborating with. After the recent setbacks in New York, I fear it may be an American. Their DEA perhaps, or FBI, even the ATF pursuing weapons.”
Golos knew certain details of the trouble in New York—not only ruination for the mafia’s various enterprises but considerable loss of life. A kind of massacre, in fact.
“And do you know the officer involved?” he asked.
“A lowly corporal on the force, for God’s sake. No one in the scheme of things. His name is Maksym Sushko.”
“While I’ve never personally heard of him,” Golos replied, “it should be simple to locate him.”
“I hope so,” Voloshyn said, “for your sake.”
“There is no need to be threatening,” Golos stated stiffly.
“When I threaten you, you’ll know it. You most likely will be bleeding and near death. This is a warning, one friend to another. Pull your man in, question him and find out who he’s working for. It clearly is not you.”
“And when I have that information?”
“Tell me where and how to find the foreigner, then make your faithless corporal disappear.”
“It might be wiser—”
“Simply do as you are told!” Voloshyn snapped. “I am not paying you to question me.”
“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
“Take us back to the café,” Voloshyn told his driver.
The major’s mind was spinning, trying hard to process what Voloshyn had revealed to him. He’d questioned whether it was true initially, but that would make no difference now. He had a name, a rank and orders from his secret master to perform a certain task.
Voloshyn had already signed Corporal Sushko’s death sentence with his order.
Now Golos was required to carry out the execution, after he obtained whatever information his subordinate possessed.
And if the corporal died professing innocence, regardless of the means employed, what then? Golos could go back to Voloshyn and admit his failure—or he could concoct a fable from thin air to make himself appear proficient at his job. But when that lie led nowhere in the end...
Then it would be his end, once and for all.
Religion had been actively suppressed when Ukraine was controlled from Moscow, between 1917 and 1991, but Golos had been born to closet Eastern Orthodox believers, secretly instructed in the church’s rituals while public school drilled him on atheism. The result, after the USSR had collapsed, was that Golos knew all the terms and rites of his supposed religion, but he had no faith.
Until today.
Now, he was wondering if he should pray that Corporal Sushko knew a name to give him, which he would in turn pass on to Pavlo Voloshyn. Only in that way could he save himself—and by eliminating Sushko once he was milked dry of information on the foreigner.
Salvation via murder?
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time in this world, or in his personal experience.
Major Golos knew where a great number of bodies had been buried. He had planted some of them himself, and ordered other graves to be prepared. If that did not seem like a policeman’s work, it was a dose of hard reality on life within Ukraine.
The limo stopped, and when the door did not open spontaneously, Golos reached out for the latch and exited, nearly—but not quite—stumbling on the café’s curb. He turned to shut the heavy door and heard Voloshyn say, “Twelve hours. That’s your limit, Semyon.”
Face slack, cursing silently, he watched the ZIL-4112R glide away and disappear.
Fishing inside a pocket of his overcoat, Golos retrieved his cell phone and punched the speed-dial number for his office. When his aide-de-camp responded midway through the second ring, Golos did not identify himself. The young man knew his voice and recognized his mood.
“I’m coming back from lunch,” he said. “Have Sergeant Holovatsky waiting for me when I get there.”
“Yes, sir!”
Golos killed the link and pocketed the phone. He had not brought a vehicle and driver to his meeting with Voloshyn, fearing a police squad car might be recognized. Instead, he walked two blocks to catch a trolleybus.
Sergeant Vanko Holovatsky was a pit bull cast in human form. Once given an assignment he would not relent, and unlike certain other police officers, it did not matter to him whether he was hunting common criminals, subversives or one of his own. A job was simply that, and if it brought some small reward when he was done, so much the better.
Holovatsky also had a knack for squeezing information out of a reluctant suspect. The Americans had once described it as “enhanced interrogation,” fond as ever of their euphemisms. Other nations, other law-enforcement agencies, used different terms—and sometimes squabbled over whether the results could be relied upon.
In this case, Major Golos was willing to take what he could get, as soon as possible.
There was no viable alternative.
11
Kiev Oblast, Ukraine
Mack Bolan peered through the Steiner 5-25x scope on his KNT-308 rifle, watching an old cabin cruiser nose in toward the western shore of the Dnieper River, seven hundred yards in front of him. Maksym Sushko lay beside him in a grove of trees, watching the craft through small binoculars, counting the men who had arrived to meet it in a VEPR multipurpose off-road vehicle.
“Four guns,” he said.
“No problem,” Bolan answered.
They were roughly halfway between Kiev on the south, and cursed Chernobyl to the north. No one lived full-time in this gray zone between Ukraine’s capital and the ghost town blighted by a nuclear reactor accident in April 1986, still the subject of ghastly rumors and low-budget horror films thirty years later. The drug runners had chosen their location wisely, and it worked as well for Bolan in his role of Executioner.
“You let them land the cargo?” Sushko asked, confirming it.
“Just like we planned. The boat won’t want to stick around. Its crew is finished when they put the load ashore.”
It was easier that way for Bolan, too. The bolt-action KNT-308 held five rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition in a 5-round detachable box magazine, replaceable within seconds. Its effective range was rated at one thousand meters with the 122-grain full-metal-jacket rounds he loaded, hurling them downrange at 2,396 feet per second, striking their target with 1,555 foot-pounds of energy. More than enough to do the job.
“This still feels strange,” Sushko said. “In the past, I have always attempted to arrest— What do you call them? Subjects?”
“Targets,” Bolan said, correcting him.
“Yes,” the Ukrainian policeman agreed. “But just to kill them...”
“Take my word for it. They’d do the same to you without a second thought.”
“Of course, but...”
“We’ve been over this. If you’re changing your mind, crawl back and wait for me at the car. I’ll drop you off when we get back to—”
“No! I’m with you. I’m simply getting used to it.”
“Well, now’s the time.”
The boat had grounded, unloading had begun and, as Bolan had calculated from experience, the men who’d made delivery weren’t wasting any time. They might be Belarusians, but they’d know the penalties applied for running heroin by judges in Ukraine: up to twelve years in prison for holding 250 grams or more of heroin.
The packages coming ashore down there were kilo lots, a
nd Bolan counted twenty of them passed from hand to hand before the boat crew pushed off from the riverbank and turned northward, for home.
When shooting started, they would not return to join in the festivities.
* * *
“HURRY. WE NEED to move,” Theo Waksman said, watching while his three companions finished shifting packages of heroin into the VEPR SUV.
“We’re hurrying,” Olexandro Horbulin replied, “while you stand there and watch.”
Waksman brandished his stubby AG-043 assault weapon. “I am watching,” he answered back. “And you’ll be damned glad of it if there’s trouble.”
“Trouble?” When he spoke, Eugen Kuznets put on a mocking tone. “When in the past two years have we had any trouble here?”
“One time is one too many,” Waksman countered, and repeated, “Hurry up!”
They still had some two dozen packages to pick up from the riverbank and transfer to their vehicle. One hundred kilos was a big load, although smaller than some riverboats delivered to the docks of the Pecherskyi District in downtown Kiev, disguised in cases of machine parts, farming tools or Eastern artwork. Those could run into a thousand kilos, sometimes double, even triple that, feeding the habits of Ukraine’s addicts, spreading the plague of HIV faster than any other European nation with their shared needles. Junkies aside, Ukraine was recognized as an important transit country for the flow of heroin during the thirteen years since the American invasion of Afghanistan.
Waksman could have laid down his rifle and pitched in, but he was lazy. That was one reason he had become a gangster, coupled with his love of easy money and the atavistic thrill he always got from violence.
Yakiv Kovel had almost reached the jet-black SUV with two more packages when his head exploded like a ripe melon with a firework packed inside, except that it was nearly silent, just a pop and crimson splash without the ringing bang. Kovel stopped dead in his tracks, the blood and gray matter cascading down his torso, then he dropped and fell face forward on the oilskin packages he carried.
Terrorist Dispatch (Executioner) Page 12