Only then did Waksman hear the echo of a rifle shot.
“Snayper!” he shouted to the others, even as he dived for cover in the VEPR’s shadow, hoping that its bulk would spare him from incoming fire.
The sharp reverberation of a second shot rolled past him, toward the river, and he saw one of the Belarusians staring back at him, already something like a quarter mile up range. The sniper wasn’t taking shots at them, of course, because they had nothing he cared a damn about.
It was the heroin, obviously. Whoever killed Kovel wanted it, and Waksman knew his life was forfeit if he went back to Pavlo Voloshyn empty-handed. Guarding the heroin was his job, and if it cost him his life, at least he would not die a traitor to his chosen Family.
Waksman popped up to fire a short burst from his AG-043, uphill and in the general direction that he thought the shots had come from. He hit nothing, as expected, but at least he made some noise.
* * *
BOLAN HAD WATCHED the first thug drop without emotion, long ago inured to sudden death up close and personal, reflected in a sniper’s scope or at arm’s length in mortal combat. By the time the headless man went down he was already tracking, swinging toward his second target of the four men sent to claim the heroin and drive it to Kiev.
The other three were quick; he gave them that. Their leader shouted something Bolan couldn’t understand, barely a whisper at the distance he was firing from, then pitched himself headlong behind their SUV. The remaining men were slower, at least marginally. One of them, encumbered by his own armload of oilskin parcels, had been walking several yards behind the first man Bolan shot and had to blink his eyes clear from the scarlet mist painting his startled face. The other had been placing his load in the SUV and simply dived inside the vehicle, yanking the double back doors shut behind him as he dropped from sight.
That was a problem, more so if he had the VEPR’s key, but Bolan kept his wits about him, doing one job at a time. His second target was the only man still visible, that one dropping his packages and turning toward the vehicle, right hand outstretched to grab the passenger-door handle, likely praying speed would help him get safely inside.
But in the real world, not so much.
The next round out of Bolan’s KNT was lower than the first. It drilled the drug runner’s chest from left to right, the FMJ slug burrowing through lungs and heart and all, erupting from his right armpit below his upraised arm. There was no question of surviving the hit.
That left two, and one of them—the guy behind the VEPR’s broad front end—sprang up to fire a burst of autofire in Bolan’s general direction, just as a reminder he was still alive. The slugs came nowhere close to Bolan or to Sushko, hardly aimed, but made a rattling, rippling sound over their heads.
The shooter dropped back out of sight before Bolan could tag him, leaving Bolan to devise a better plan.
* * *
MAKSYM SUSHKO LAY deathly still and watched the mobsters dying through his binoculars. He’d plugged his ears with cotton, on advice from the American, before Cooper fired his first rifle shot. The result had been dramatic, even horrifying.
He had grown accustomed to brutality, investigating urban crimes for the National Police, but he had never seen a man’s head detonate before, as if someone had stuffed a hand grenade into his mouth. The body lingered upright for a heartbeat, maybe two, blood pumping from the stub of neck, then dropped as if the dead man were a puppet and someone had slashed his strings. The second gangster’s death was immediate.
Two of the smugglers still survived, but Sushko could not see them, one hiding behind the SUV, the other man somewhere inside it now. Even if he could see them, neither his Bandayevsky RB-12 shotgun, with its twenty-inch barrel, nor his standard-issue Makarov PM sidearm would reach the enemy in front of him, at Cooper’s chosen range.
The truth be told, Sushko was satisfied to watch for now, and even that had made him slightly queasy, disregarding his abilities as an experienced policeman.
Beside him, the American lined up another shot, though neither of the two surviving drug runners were immediately visible. His next round smashed one of the windows in the SUVs double back doors, pebbling the safety glass and blowing it away. There was no hope of that shot striking anyone, but when he fired the next round, Cooper was aiming lower, landing number four where it would pierce the SUV’s fuel tank and start a dribble flowing there.
The low octane of diesel fuel prevented its explosion from igniting the VEPR, but at least the shot would keep the smuggling rig from going much of anywhere if its survivors managed to escape. Cooper’s last round took out the right-rear tire, air hissing from it as it settled on its chrome rim in the dust.
He was reloading when Sushko inquired, “Now what?”
“Now we hang on a little while and see what happens next.”
* * *
THEO WAKSMAN STILL had no idea exactly where the rifle shots were coming from, but it was clear the sniper knew what he was doing, and the lonely setting offered no prospect for rescue in the near future. The men who had delivered Pavlo Voloshyn’s illicit cargo would not send him any help, for fear of being linked to the attack and all that would be revealed because of it. Nor would a stray police patrol pass by in time to save Waksman—and if it did, his destination would be one of Ukraine’s 131 penitentiaries, condemned by various human rights organizations for torture and other harsh treatment of inmates.
No. On balance, he would rather take his chances with the sniper and a sudden death than twenty years at Zamkova Correctional Colony or one of its equivalents.
What could he do?
Reaching his adversary seemed impossible. Waksman could tell that several hundred yards of open ground lay between them, meaning that he could not reach the gunman without being cut down in his tracks. Likewise, he could not rise and take the time to aim a killing burst from his assault rifle, lest he go down like Kovel and Horbulin. Eugen Kuznets was hiding in the SUV, immobilized, but Waksman had the vehicle’s ignition key and—
The idea struck him, pristine in its simplicity. If he could reach the driver’s door alive and duck into the vehicle, stay low and shielded by its bodywork until he got the engine running, he could simply drive away!
All right. He knew the SUV had taken hits, could smell the leaking diesel fuel and felt it listing where one of its tires was flattened, but so what? The VEPR was designed originally as a military vehicle for rough terrain, nicknamed the “wild boar” for its ruggedness. If Waksman could not make it all the way back to Kiev, at least he could drive partway and escape the sniper who was bent on killing him.
As to the heroin, well, part of it was loaded now. The rest could go to hell. If Waksman tried to save it now, he would be dead and his boss would have nothing.
By the gods, Voloshyn should regard him as a hero if he pulled it off!
The driver’s seat was on the VEPR’s left and fairly close to where Waksman was huddled, staying low and out of sight. Putting his plan into action, he crept around the black SUV’s bumper, past the left-front tire, grateful the SUV was jacked up nineteen inches off the ground and granting extra cover from his enemy.
Unless the enemy had moved while he was working out his getaway.
Expecting to be shot at any second, Waksman reached the driver’s door, rose slowly to his knees and opened it. The surge inside required a Herculean effort, after crouching on the ground so long, but Waksman managed it. A second later, he was slumped in the driver’s seat, twisting the key, while Kuznets yammered questions at him from the storage bay in back.
“Shut up!” he snapped and put the rolling monster into gear, released its parking brake and stood on the accelerator.
* * *
BOLAN HAD ONE chance to stop the SUV’s retreat, and only one. Disabling the engine with a long shot through the hood was problematic,
and the VEPR still had fuel enough to run for miles back toward Kiev, or northward to Chernobyl if the driver lost his bearings and escaped that way. Hitting the man himself should do it, but the off-road vehicle’s tinted windows meant he would be nearly shooting blind.
One helpful thing was, once Bolan’s human target got the VEPR rolling, he immediately swung it toward the highway half a mile back from the river, angling toward the asphalt. Thinking quickly, Bolan tried to put himself inside the fleeing mobster’s mind.
Would he be sitting upright in the driver’s seat, risking a window shot? Highly unlikely. Low profile was the way to go, peeking from time to time over the SUV’s dashboard to keep himself on track.
And that meant firing through the driver’s door, assuming that the VEPR wasn’t armored in the military style for runs like this, retrieving heroin worth millions for the mob boss of Kiev.
Taking the gamble, Bolan pegged the Steiner telescopic sight’s G2B Mil-Dot illuminated reticle on the SUV driver’s door, holding the four-post crosshair configuration about where a tall man’s hips and waist should be. He fired once, smoothly worked the bolt and put two more FMJ rounds directly through the door, hoping at least one of the slugs would drill the driver where he sat and scramble his insides.
It took another moment, but at last the VEPR seemed to lose direction, swinging back toward where it had come from, in a wide loop toward the Dnieper River. Bolan watched it through his scope, the driver dead or helpless as the SUV charged downslope, approached the water’s edge, then plunged into the river. It drifted with the current for a moment, slowly sinking out of sight, then disappeared without a trace.
“All gone!” Sushko exhaled.
“Not all,” Bolan corrected him. “They left at least a quarter of the load on shore.”
“What shall we do with it?”
Rising, Bolan slung the sniper rifle over his left shoulder, then stooped to retrieve the AK-12. “I’ll shoot the hell out of it,” he replied, “and leave it to the elements.”
“There will be happy birds,” his sidekick said, grinning.
“But not back in Kiev,” Bolan replied. “While I’m doing that, I need you to make two phone calls.”
12
Vozdvyzhenka, Kiev
Pavlo Voloshyn lived a short distance from the center of the capital, a brief walk from the massive Dreamtown shopping mall replete with high-end retail shops, food market, cinema and other entertainments. Not that he ever actually walked around the city, mind you. Not when he had men to drive him and so many rivals of his Family were waiting for a chance to kill him.
Such was life, and the old saying had proved accurate: it was lonely at the top, in spite of the rewards.
He thought about the heroin whose street value was roughly two hundred million US dollars. Theo Waksman should have called by now, but Voloshyn knew things happened on a drug run, whether the delivery was late or they had trouble on the highway. Waksman had not let him down before, and there was no reason to think...
His burner phone buzzed and the mobster answered before it could sound a second time. “Talk to me,” he ordered.
“But what should I tell you?” asked a voice he did not recognize. “Should I pretend your heroin is safe and sound? It’s not. Should I say your four soldiers are alive and well, when they are dead?”
“Who is this?” Voloshyn demanded.
“Your worst nightmare,” the caller replied. “We have never met, but that time is approaching, Pavlo Voloshyn.”
Through clenched teeth, he replied, “You know my name. What’s yours?”
“That’s not important. What you should be asking is who hired me to destroy your shipment and advise you of the fact.”
“Well? Tell me, then. I’m waiting.”
“Your old friend, Bogdan Britnev,” the caller answered, almost gloating. “It would seem that your alliance is dissolved.”
“You say.”
“And you have no reason to trust me, naturally. Why even believe your shipment and your men are lost, until you check for yourself. By all means, be my guest. Waste more time, when your hours are running out.”
The line went dead. Voloshyn realized he held the burner in a death grip, knuckles blanched, arm trembling, and he made a conscious effort to relax.
His next call went to Theo Waksman’s burner phone, but it went to voice mail after six unanswered rings. Staring from his picture window toward the Dnieper River, Voloshyn tried to wrap his mind around what he’d been told and what, if true, it meant for him, his Family and for their future.
First, assume the worst: What if the heroin was lost? Voloshyn barely thought about his men, compared to what he’d paid the dealer in Belarus for one hundred kilos of prime heroin from Afghanistan, refined to pharmaceutical purity that would have let him cut it for the street at least six times. That tab was twenty million US dollars, and he did know that amount in native currency by heart: 421 million hryvnia straight out of his pocket and thrown to the winds like a ton of confetti.
But no—worse yet, it had been stolen from him by an enemy. And if he dared to trust the nameless caller—who, in fact, might be deceiving him for reasons Voloshyn could not presently divine—that enemy had duped him, posing as an ally as they went about their business, acting as if they were partners.
Bogdan Britnev.
They were not friends, of course, and Voloshyn trusted Britnev no more than he placed faith in any other man, but they had operated for some years now with an understanding, with no violation of that deal on either side. Why would Britnev suddenly decide to kill four of Voloshyn’s men and steal one hundred kilos of heroin that had just arrived from Belarus?
Why did the man do anything? For money.
Next question: If true, who had betrayed Britnev to Voloshyn?
He would think about that next, while he prepared himself for war.
Svyatoshyn-Nyvkiy, Kiev
BOGDAN BRITNEV GLANCED at his cell phone’s LED window and did not recognize the number of the call that had distracted him from paperwork: one thousand AK-105 assault rifles inbound from Russia, destined for the Right Front in its preparation for a possible invasion from the north and east. He thought about ignoring it, letting the call go to voice mail, then picked it up instead.
“Hello,” he said.
A male voice unfamiliar to him, speaking in Ukrainian, demanded, “Why did you steal Pavlo’s heroin?”
After a blink of stunned surprise, Britnev shot back, “What are you babbling about? Who is this?”
“Never mind,” the male voice answered, almost whispering. “He knows!”
Blustering, Britnev said, “I don’t know if you have the wrong phone number or if you’re insane, but—”
“You must be insane, Bogdan, to think that you could rob Voloshyn, kill four of his men and—”
Cutting through the stranger’s accusations, heedless of the sudden ringing in his ears, Britnev insisted, “You have reached the wrong number. Try again and get the right party next time!”
He cut the link, hand trembling as he switched off his cell phone, avoiding any callback from the madman.
Then he had to ask himself: What if the caller was not mad?
Oh, he was wrong, of course. Britnev had stolen no drugs from Pavlo Voloshyn, much less murdered any of his soldiers. But if someone had, and Pavlo thought he was that foolish someone...
Britnev slumped back in his desk chair, paperwork and AK-105s forgotten. If Pavlo suspected him of such betrayal, it could only mean a shooting war. He needed to get ahead of that, find out exactly what—if anything—had happened, and if there was murder in the wind, convince Pavlo somehow that he was not to blame for any losses suffered by the Voloshyn Family.
He switched on the cell phone once more, speed-dialed Voloshyn’s private
number, cleared his throat and spoke decisively when one of Pavlo’s housemen answered. “Bogdan Britnev, calling Mr. Voloshyn.”
“Hang on a minute.”
Britnev hung on as ordered. Seconds later, Voloshyn’s voice came on the line, raging. “You traitorous prick! To pull this shit on me, of all people! You’ve signed your own death warrant! Count the hours until I—”
Britnev ended the call, emotions seething in his chest, thoughts swirling in his brain. He was fearful and furious at the same time, outraged by the false accusation, shocked by the prospect of an all-out war with Pavlo’s brutal Family.
The theft and murders obviously had occurred, and he was being framed for them. By whom? That stymied Britnev. He could think of no one in Ukraine who would attack Voloshyn in that manner, much less blame him for the raid. It had to be a devious conspiracy, and while Britnev could name a hundred men who hated him enough to do it, none possessed the power, skill or finesse to pull it off.
A mystery. He hated that in fiction, all the more so in real life, when it affected him.
And this one, if he could not sort it out damned quickly, just might get him killed.
Voloshyn was already on the warpath, by the sound of it. He would not speak to Britnev beyond shouting accusations and obscenities. Unless they were to fight—and that meant to the death—Britnev would have to find a mediator whom Pavlo would listen to, respect and trust.
Did such a man exist?
Before he puzzled over that, another mystery, Britnev had one more call to make. He needed reinforcements against Pavlo and, off-hand, could only think of one man who might help.
* * *
“HE HUNG UP on me,” Maksym Sushko said, sounding surprised.
Bolan smiled at him from the driver’s seat as they headed southbound, and said, “I’m not surprised. You gave it to him pretty good.”
“You said ‘sound angry.’”
Terrorist Dispatch (Executioner) Page 13