“And you nailed it. He’ll be thinking now, just like Voloshyn.”
“They will go to war?” The corporal sounded nervous now.
“That was the plan. We’ll have to watch and stir things up a bit more, making sure.”
“I’m thinking of the decent people in Kiev.”
“We talked about the risks,” Bolan reminded him. “You still signed on.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But if they choose some crowded place to fight...”
“Not likely. It would go against the grain for both of them.”
“But seeking a surprise, an ambush...”
“Both are on their guard now. You just saw to that.”
“And where will we be?” Sushko asked him.
“In the middle of it. I still want to stir the pot a little. Shake some cages.”
“Keeping up the pressure?”
“That’s the ticket. Something that will keep Voloshyn holed up in his house while the other side gets agitated and goes looking for him.”
“Ah.” Sushko was getting it. “A safer battleground?”
“Best we can do, inside Kiev.”
“But the few residents remaining still have influence, Voloshyn maybe most of all. He’s bound to call for the police if he’s attacked.”
“Too late, with any luck at all,” Bolan replied.
“You trust them to behave a certain way,” Sushko observed.
“With room for deviations. Psychopaths like these two have no conscience as we know it, no regard for others but as tools to gain whatever they desire. They weigh responses to a threat by what it costs, the risks involved for them. In this case, Voloshyn and Britnev both should see eliminating his primary rival as the pathway to relief. I want to keep them thinking that way and direct the action toward Voloshyn’s home base if I can.”
“And how will you—will we—do that?”
“Make Britnev think Voloshyn’s making moves against him, while Voloshyn feels he’s safest staying in Vozdvyzhenka.”
“More raids,” Sushko said, cutting to the chase.
“More raids,” Bolan agreed. “For Britnev, one or two hits ought to do it. And ideally, for Voloshyn, we’d take out his nearest likely hideaway.”
“I know where that is,” Sushko said. “A house in Obolon, between the river and Verbova Street.”
“And for Britnev?” Bolan asked.
“There are several. He deals primarily in weapons, but is also fond of human trafficking to Eastern Europe and beyond. He has what you might call a stable for his women near the Kontraktova Square in the Podil. And there is a warehouse for the guns beside the river, in the Holosiivskyi District.”
“That should do it, if we pull them off.”
“All three?” Sushko seemed startled. “Do we have the time?”
“We’ll make time,” Bolan said. “No sleeping on this tour of duty, soldier. Steer me toward Voloshyn’s home away from home.”
Podilskyi District, Kiev
LOCATED ON THE Dnieper River near the modern city center, Podil was Kiev’s oldest residential neighborhood, known for its lovely pre-Soviet architecture, quiet streets and a wide selection of restaurants. It hosted one of the city’s oldest, most prestigious schools—the National University of Kyiv Mohylanskaya Academy—plus numerous art galleries and the capital’s only funicular railway.
None of which meant anything to Samuil Skorokhod on that afternoon.
Normally, he took pride in Kiev’s past and its historic sites, as in the many others found throughout Ukraine. He was a nationalist first and foremost, to the point that some within his homeland—even more outside it—called him an agitator, rabble-rouser, terrorist, et cetera. As leader of the armed and militant Right Front, Skorokhod would plead guilty to those charges any day and wear them as a badge of pride while battling Russian intervention in Ukraine.
This day, though, he was more concerned with just staying alive, and what that might cost him.
Bogdan Britnev had spoken to him briefly on the phone, but there was no confusion about what he was demanding. On a moment’s notice, he required Skorokhod and the Right Front to defend him from Pavlo Voloshyn’s syndicate, falsely accused—or so he said—of waging unprovoked attacks against the city’s top crime Family.
Skorokhod was now in the bizarre position of fielding his paramilitary troops to guard a Russian criminal against Ukrainian mobsters, the lot of whom he equally despised and would have gladly slaughtered if it were within his power. Sadly, if he killed Britnev or let Voloshyn kill him, that wiped out the Right Front’s leading source of arms and ammunition for their battle to protect Ukraine’s people and their integrity as a nation.
His bargain with Bogdan Britnev was Faustian but still a fact of life. Thus far, aside from making Samuil Skorokhod bitterly chastise himself in private moments, it had worked out well enough, but now the devil called upon him for a favor he could not refuse, even if it destroyed him and the righteous movement he had built from the ground up.
What would his men say if he took the time to brief them on his labyrinthine problem? Would they storm out, turn their guns upon him in a rage or recognize that politics demanded unpleasant compromises every day? Their movement’s “purity” was based on his collaboration with an ancient enemy who might well turn against them if and when Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine.
One thing was certain about Britnev: given any choice, he always sided with a winner, and Russia’s military—ranked fifth largest in the world, with 771,000 active duty personnel, estimates of its reservists ranging between two and twenty million—had Ukraine’s 250,000, with another 700,000 in reserve, as good as beaten in advance.
His country’s last stand might be glorious, but as to victory, unless the world at large weighed in somehow against Moscow, it was a hopelessly lost cause.
Which Samuil Skorokhod would die for, if it came to that.
But first, he had to risk his life and all his soldiers on behalf of Bogdan Britnev.
13
Obolonskyi District, Kiev
Pavlo Voloshyn’s hideout wasn’t spectacular—at least, not from the outside—but it was on a cul-de-sac and easily defensible if the Ukrainian Mob boss called out his troops in force. While troops were probably receiving urgent calls to rally round their boss, they hadn’t flocked to Obolon as yet. Bolan and Sushko had an open window to attack the house, and they weren’t wasting any time.
Bolan had brought his AK-12 assault rifle, his Glock 18 for backup, plus his RPG with two incendiary rockets and some F1 fragmentation grenades. Sushko had his Bandayevsky RB-12 shotgun and Makarov PM sidearm as they approached Voloshyn’s second home, scaled its back wall and made a beeline for the patio’s glass sliding door.
The door was locked, so Bolan shattered it with a short burst from his Kalashnikov and went inside, with Sushko on his heels. Two of Voloshyn’s soldiers were in residence, a cushy job in peacetime as they lounged around and watched the godfather’s TV, eating his food and drinking his beer. They both responded to the crash of gunfire from what Bolan saw was the rec room, stocked with games on par with what you’d find in any upscale video arcade. One man turned up shirtless, likely caught while working out in Voloshyn’s gym; the other one was dressed but had his tie askew, clearly surprised to find himself confronting well-armed, uninvited company.
The rec room specialized in make-believe shooting, but the mobster’s men were packing real-life SR-2 Veresk machine pistols, chambered for 9 mm blunt-nosed viper rounds.
Bolan dropped one of them, with a 3-round burst from his AK that slammed the dead man back against the door frame where he’d entered seconds earlier. Sushko took down the other gunner with a buckshot charge that gutted him and left him writhing for a moment on the white shag carpeting, red now, before he shivered out
and died.
They swept the house for stragglers, cleaners, cooks, whatever, and found no one else in residence. Leaving the way they’d come, Bolan paused long enough to load his RPG with a 105 mm TBG-7V thermobaric round weighing ten pounds, firing it through the rec room’s open doorway to the patio and watching it explode inside. A ball of fire consumed the games, corpses and all that was at ground zero, then spread swiftly through Pavlo Voloshyn’s house. By the time Bolan had followed Sushko back over the wall, the place was totally engulfed, staining the blue suburban sky with smoke.
If Pavlo Voloshyn had fled his first home in the millionaire’s graveyard, he’d need some other place to run and hide.
Vozdvyzhenka, Kiev
VOLOSHYN GOT THE news from one of his police contacts and thought he took it fairly well, under the circumstances. Members of the city’s fire department arrived too late to save his home in Obolon and were impeded by the nature of the fire’s accelerant, a thermobaric chemical often referred to as a fuel-air explosive that included two separate charges: one to detonate the bomb—in this case, he was told, a rocket-propelled grenade—while the other mixed with atmospheric oxygen and caused a massive blast wave.
It was a total loss, Voloshyn was told, and he was lucky from a legal standpoint that the fire had been contained before it spread to other homes around the cul-de-sac.
His head was pounding, driving Voloshyn to use one of his Imitrex inhalers for the budding migraine, washing down its sour aftertaste with Ukrainka Platinum vodka. After the third shot, he began to think his skull would not explode and he could focus on the problem of survival.
After summoning his soldiers, every last man of his army, he called Major Semyon Golos on his private line and waited for the officer to pick up on the fourth shrill ring. “You know who this is?” he demanded, after Golos said “Hello.”
“I do.”
“Have you been told about the fire?”
“What fire?” the major asked, all innocence.
Barely holding back a litany of obscenities, the mobster shifted gears. “How goes the search for you-know-who?”
“I ordered his superior to contact him, with no success,” Golos said. “Now there’s an active search ongoing for the lost corporal, but so far he hasn’t been located. He is not at home. His few kinfolk profess that they’ve not seen or heard from him.”
“He simply disappeared?”
“It would appear so, for the moment, but—”
“Has it occurred to you that I’m under attack? For all I know, this officer of yours and his foreign friend are part of it.”
“I seriously doubt that Corporal—”
“No names on the telephone!”
“Of course. I seriously doubt that he would be involved in something of this kind. As to the foreigner, we have no idea who he is or where to find him.”
“What good are you, then?” Voloshyn demanded.
“I—”
“Take money every month and give me...what? A helpless shrug? Excuses?”
“I am trying,” Golos answered weakly. “We shall find the missing officer, I promise you.”
“Perhaps too late to help me. In the meantime, I have information that an ally has decided to betray me.”
“Who?” the major asked.
“A certain Russian of our mutual acquaintance.”
“You don’t mean it!”
“No, of course not,” the mobster said with a sneer. “I only called to play a joke on you.”
“A joke?”
“Of course I mean it!” Voloshyn raged. “Now what do you plan to do about it?”
“Well, I...”
“Plan your answer carefully,” Voloshyn said, warning him. “Your very life depends on it.”
“As soon as we are off the line, I’m mobilizing every officer at my disposal. If required, I can contact the commanding general of the Ukraine National Guard.”
“And how would you explain it to the National Guard?” the mobster challenged.
“I’ll make something up!”
“No. Forget that. Make do with your officers, but be damned sure that we can trust them. No more meddlers like your corporal.”
“I guarantee it,” Golos said.
“And I expect that guarantee to be fulfilled,” Voloshyn snapped. “Failure on your part will be fatal, I assure you.”
Holosiivskyi District, Kiev
THE HOLOSIIVSKYI DISTRICT was relatively new, fabricated by the Kiev City Council in September of 2001, described by its online promotions as “abounding in stimulating energy and tourist sites.” One of the latter was the 140-acre Holosiivskyi National Park, including, among other things, pristine forest, miles of trails for sightseeing on foot or via bicycle, playgrounds, campgrounds, carnival rides, paddle boats, cafés and a hotel.
The crowds had thinned by waning afternoon, when Bolan and Maksym Sushko approached the warehouse labeled Zeleni Zrostannya Promyslovosti, which Sushko translated to read “Green Growth Industries.” As far as he could say, the only green growth underway was money banked by Bogdan Britnev from the sale of outlawed weapons to whoever had the ready cash on hand.
If Bolan had his way, the Russian was about to have a going-out-of-business sale.
They checked around the place, making their presence obvious to anyone who might be lurking on the grounds, but found no sign of any watchmen standing guard over the property. That lapse surprised the Executioner, but Sushko told him Britnev’s reputation generally kept sane thieves at bay, while any criminals, extremist paramilitary groups and such had sense enough to deal with Britnev honestly, secure in understanding that he never ratted on them to police and sold his wares to all sides equally, without discrimination.
When they were satisfied the warehouse was unoccupied, Bolan shot off the dead bolt on a door in back and took his RPG-7 inside, while Sushko stood watch on the loading dock. The place wasn’t exactly cavernous, like some industrial warehouses, but it was about two hundred feet from end to end, with wooden crates piled up to six feet high in rows, with aisles between them wide enough for a forklift to navigate.
A decent shooting gallery.
Two of the three rounds Bolan carried with him were the standard PG-7VL HEAT variety—short for high-explosive anti-tank warheads—weighing 4.85 pounds apiece. He fired them both downrange, one toward the farthest row of crates off to his left, skipping two rows before he loosed the second one, ears ringing as he backed out of the warehouse with the final rocket dangling from his hand.
Outside, he loaded his launcher with the thermobaric round and sent it smoking through the back door that he’d exited, no great precision aiming to it, knowing that wherever it exploded it would gut the warehouse with a firestorm, fusing metal, setting off the stores of ammunition, maybe even some explosives if Britnev kept them in stock. Before the flames gushed back at him, across the loading dock, Bolan and Sushko were already back inside the ZAZ Vida, rolling away from there and on toward their third Kiev target of the afternoon.
“You make a lot of enemies,” the corporal said. “Is it like this, no matter where you go?”
“Not always,” Bolan said, “but mostly yes. The good news is, my enemies don’t have to stew about it very long.”
“Stew?” Sushko frowned across at him. “That is a recipe, I think, with meat and vegetables?”
“The other kind,” Bolan corrected him. “Meaning to fret or worry.”
“Ah. So not the same. That is tushkovane m’yaso.”
“Whatever,” Bolan said. “I try to put them all out of my misery.”
“We may not have the luxury of using the grenade launcher at our next stop,” Sushko suggested.
“Fair enough,” Bolan replied. “As long as Britnev gets the message.”
Svyatoshyn-N
yvkiy, Kiev
BOGDAN BRITNEV RECEIVED the message loud and clear. He simply didn’t know where it was coming from. After the call from the person he took to be a spokesman for Pavlo Voloshyn, he was focused on Kiev’s crime Family to the exclusion of all else. Britnev had no idea why Voloshyn or anyone associated with him should suspect him, Britnev, of hijacking heroin and murdering the couriers, but he was clearly being blamed for that offense and targeted for grim reprisal.
None of his employees had been killed in the warehouse attack on Chervonozoryanyi Prospekt, but financially it was a grievous blow. The hardware stockpiled there, much of it earmarked for the Right Front, had been worth millions of US dollars, maybe billions in Ukrainian hryvnia. A loss of that size pained him grievously. The thought of other losses still to come hurt even more.
At least he had a firm commitment from Samuil Skorokhod that the Right Front would assist in his defense. Skorokhod knew that without Britnev and his weapons, fighting for Ukraine would be an exercise in talking for the most part, while his soldiers craved the feel of automatic weapons in their hands and living targets in their sights.
The Russians might be coming anytime now, pouring over Ukraine’s border any day, but first, before they faced that onslaught—and Britnev decided how to profit from it, one way or another—Skorokhod’s commandos would be fighting on his side, protecting him, his operation and the steady flow of military contraband.
If the invasion came, of course, that trade would be disrupted in a heartbeat. Smuggling was a part of every war, but Britnev saw disaster for himself, a Russian born and raised, caught arming the resistance when the president’s soldiers rampaged through Ukraine. At that point, he would have to turn his back on Skorokhod, return to singing the State Anthem of the Russian Federation, and strike any bargain that he could with the prospective victors.
Better still, he might just flee the region altogether, drop in on his several bulging bank accounts in Switzerland, and take his time deciding where on Earth to settle next, sharing his knowledge of deadly matériel with those in need of killing tools.
Terrorist Dispatch (Executioner) Page 14