It was a wide world, after all, with no shortage of coups, rebellions, terrorism, civil wars, or ethnic cleansings.
Surviving this day was his challenge at the moment. Talking sense to Pavlo Voloshyn would do no good, when Britnev could not even speak to him in person. When the fighting started, Britnev hoped to get the first blows in and make them count, before the mobster could lash back and decimate his forces, possibly convincing the Right Front to cut and run.
One of his flunkies entered after knocking, without waiting for a summons. “What do you want?” Britnev demanded in a biting tone.
“You need to see the television, Boss,” he said, tone deferential but excited, all at once.
“Which channel?”
“Any one with news on.”
Britnev scooped up the remote, turned on his smart TV and surfed through half a dozen channels until he found a news anchor running on about what seemed to be a terrorist attack in Obolon. A private home had been demolished by some kind of rockets, and two men were incinerated, nearly melted weapons found beside their bodies. They were thought to be the owner’s caretakers, rather than the attackers. No name was available for the primary occupant as yet.
“That’s his place, Boss!”
“His? Whose?”
“The hoodlum. Voloshyn.”
“How do you know?”
“Our man with the police called in.”
“Did we do this?”
“No, sir. I had some boys ready to do it, but you didn’t give the order yet.”
“Then who?”
His soldier shrugged and said, “Maybe Skorokhod?”
Britnev thought about it for a moment, shook his head. “No,” he replied. “We were supposed to talk about a strategy before he moved against Voloshyn.”
“Sorry, Boss. Then I don’t know.”
“Someone’s done us a favor,” Britnev said.
But inside his head, a small voice asked, Or did they only make it worse?
Podilskyi District, Kiev
MACK BOLAN’S TARGET in Podil that afternoon, as dusk bore down upon Kiev, lay two blocks northeast of the square on Spaska Street, directly opposite a park. It had been risky for Bogdan Britnev, stashing the victims of his human trafficking network in what some might have called plain sight, but the three-story house was old and well maintained, no eyesore that would draw complaints from neighbors who might call police.
The police, in any case, had been paid off.
Bolan and Sushko tried the more or less direct approach, both wearing knee-length raincoats in a passing drizzle to conceal their long guns as they walked from Bolan’s rental to the front door of the venerable house. Sushko rang the doorbell and both men waited, hands on pistols through their coats’ slit pockets, until a burly, balding doorman answered, growling, “Chto ty khochesh’?”
Instead of saying what he wanted, Bolan showed the guy, his Glock and Sushko’s Makarov rising as one, a free hand shoving Baldy back inside. While Sushko closed the door, Bolan inquired, “How many other guards?”
“Ne Angliyskiy,” the doorman answered, playing dumb.
Sushko asked him in Russian and the guy reluctantly said, “Tri.”
“Three more,” Sushko announced. “Or maybe two more, if he counts himself.”
“Whatever,” Bolan said. “Let’s roust them out.”
Shoving the front man in front of him, he barged into a parlor standing empty otherwise and put his Glock away, raising the AK-12 to fire a short and noisy burst into a nearby sofa. Instantly, they heard the sounds of footsteps hammering upstairs, then two men hit the spiral staircase to their left, descending rapidly.
Bolan dropped Baldy with a single 5.45 mm round to the head, as the man turned to make a play, then swung around to face the staircase, while the corporal raised his pump-action 12-gauge Bandayevsky. The shooters rushing to the doorman’s rescue came into view mere seconds later, slowing just enough for caution’s sake but not enough to save themselves.
Bolan stitched them from left to right, some half a dozen rounds, while Sushko fired a buckshot blast that spread enough to cover both of them. The corpses tumbled down to ground-floor level, tangled up with each other at the bottom of the staircase in a spreading pool of blood.
“Careful of footprints,” Sushko cautioned, as they stepped around the dead and started climbing to the second floor. Along that hall, a dozen closed doors greeted them, each one requiring clearance, taking time that they could ill afford. After the first two yielded seven frightened women cowering in corners, Bolan guessed the other rooms—and those above them, on the third floor—would reveal more of the same.
“We can’t remove them,” he told Sushko, “but your people can, if you’ve got someone you can trust.”
“I know of one,” the corporal replied, fishing his cell phone from a pocket. “I shall call him now.” Before he rang off, they were back outside and moving toward the ZAZ Vida sedan. “I don’t know what will happen to them, but at least we tried,” he said.
“And we’re not finished,” Bolan answered. “Now it’s getting real.”
14
Vozdvyzhenka, Kiev
The millionaire’s ghost town had not witnessed so many visitors in years. The new arrivals, all grim-looking males with bulges underneath their jackets, many toting heavy bags or obvious gun cases, parked their cars on side streets and fanned out as they had been instructed, jimmying their way inside unoccupied town houses where the furniture, if any still remained, was draped with sheets, awaiting the return of absent tenants.
Pavlo Voloshyn watched from a high window as his soldiers took their places, making ready to defend him at all costs. It was their oath-bound duty, and he had no fear that any man among them would renege and run away once battle had been joined.
As to that battle, Voloshyn had no doubt that it was coming. All the signs pointed in that direction, and he had been cautioned by a man he bribed within the Right Front that Samuil Skorokhod had answered Bogdan Britnev’s call for help that very night. All told, Voloshyn reckoned eighty men or more were on their way to root him out and murder him, all based on what he now took to be a grave misunderstanding.
Stated plainly, he’d been framed, most likely by the rogue police corporal and his damned foreigner, still unidentified.
No matter. If they showed up on the killing streets this night, Voloshyn would learn the interloper’s name.
And then, Voloshyn would begin repaying those who’d sent him to Kiev.
Three-quarters of an hour after the mobster’s men were all in place, more cars entered the pricey ghost town, drivers of the latest fleet making no effort to conceal their vehicles. They parked along the curbs, some even in the street itself, as if to blockade the police and firefighters from responding to alarms. They piled out, anywhere from four to six men in each car, and all of them were packing automatic weapons, shotguns, all the necessary killing tools.
They’d come for him, and the expressions on their faces told Voloshyn they were not open to negotiation.
Fair enough.
He waited, watching from his aerie, until Bogdan Britnev and his lapdog, Skorokhod, emerged from the backseat of a stretch limousine, a dozen shooters instantly surrounding them. Ready to start the party now, Voloshyn spoke into the Bluetooth headpiece he was wearing, linked to men in charge of every friendly unit stationed up and down the street.
“Begin!” he commanded.
On cue, second-and third-floor windows overlooking both sides of his street blazed with a storm of automatic weapons’ fire. The first barrage dropped half a dozen Britnev soldiers and their Right Front comrades, scarring shiny vehicles with bullet holes and blowing out their tinted windows.
Down below, the shock troops scattered, seeking any cover they could find, returnin
g fire in short bursts as they ran. More fell, some of them wounded, others lying deathly still, but there was still a goodly number of them on the move, apparently unharmed.
Voloshyn clutched his chosen weapon, a Bizon submachine gun packing fifty-three 9 mm Parabellum rounds in its unique helical magazine beneath its nine-inch barrel, capable of spewing slugs at seven hundred rounds per minute. If the invaders took him down, at least he would not die alone.
* * *
BOLAN AND SUSHKO watched the action from a rooftop they had scaled before Voloshyn’s reinforcements had started to arrive, remaining out of sight until the large offensive force was in place and they could risk a look over the parapet.
“Voloshyn’s doing well so far,” Sushko observed.
“For now,” Bolan replied, scanning the mobster’s windows through his sniper scope. “Whatever happens on the street, he doesn’t walk away from this.”
Sushko grunted agreement and continued peering down at the battleground. “Britnev is hiding by his limousine,” he said. “That’s Skorokhod with him.”
“Right Front?” Bolan asked. “Still in one piece?”
“Apparently.”
“Let’s see if I can do something about that,” the Executioner said.
He swung the KNT-308 sniper rifle toward the longest car downrange, pockmarked by slugs, the shiny divots in its jet-black paint reminding Bolan of a robot with the measles. Britnev and Skorokhod huddled near the vehicle’s left rear, partly shielded by its double back doors standing open wide in opposite directions.
It was not an easy shot, but those had never been Mack Bolan’s specialty.
From where he sat, there were two ways to try the shot. First, he could put his bullets through the nearest of the limo’s open doors, assuming they weren’t armored against rifle fire, and try to hit the crouching men that way. Second, he could aim his bullets underneath the door. As glancing ricochets, there was a chance he could score against one or both of his selected targets. He might not kill them outright, but even a flesh wound from one of his 7.62 mm FMJ rounds could be crippling, potentially fatal if left untreated even briefly.
It was worth a try, in either case.
Bolan lined up his Steiner scope, relaxed into the trigger pull, and sent 122 grains of death hurtling toward impact with the pavement. It did not strike a spark but ricocheted as planned, a trifle off and striking neither of his human targets, flying on to penetrate the inside panel of the second open door.
Bolan simply made an adjustment after he had chambered another round, then squeezed off again. That time, despite the gunfire blazing from an arsenal of weapons up and down the street, he heard a cry of pain from someone crouched beside the limo, then the one who wasn’t wounded bolted from his hidey-hole and ran for cover in a nearby recessed doorway, leaving his companion where he was.
Bolan recognized the runner: Bogdan Britnev. As to Samuil Skorokhod, and how badly he was hit, assessment would be stalled for the duration of the fight or until he got a closer look.
Meanwhile, the killing field was full of targets, offering a sniper’s smorgasbord.
Bolan peered through his scope and focused on the feast.
* * *
THE LUCKY HIT on Skorokhod had spattered Bogdan Britnev with the wounded man’s blood, prompting a gut reaction to escape before another bullet pierced their fragile hideaway. He’d made it to the curb and up into a sheltering doorway, but knew he could not hide there very long before some other shooter spotted him and tried again.
Britnev was carrying an OTs-12 assault rifle. Chambered for 9 mm rounds, with an eight-inch barrel and a folding stock, it could empty its 20-round box magazine in less than two seconds, assuming Britnev ever found a hostile target in his sights.
So far, all he’d been doing in the millionaire’s ghost town was trying to survive.
Some of his men had not accomplished even that.
A glance across the street showed Britnev that his men had blown out several of Voloshyn’s windows, other bullets scarring the facade of his stronghold. As to whether any of the occupants were dead or injured, he could not have said, but three or four were firing back from shattered windows, peppering the cars below with automatic fire. As he stood watching, someone tossed a hand grenade into the street, blasting the windows from a sedan.
He wished now that his men had brought heavier weapons, perhaps the Vampir RPG or the AT4-CS produced by Sweden’s Saab Bofors Dynamics. Either one could blast their way into Voloshyn’s castle, or reach out to set it blazing from the street, but Britnev had dictated small arms only and was now regretting his mistake.
Too late.
They’d find another way inside, and do it soon, before Pavlo or one of his remaining neighbors, though few and far between, called the police. Britnev had come prepared for war, but not against the national constabulary. It might come to that on some day in the future, if the government continued to ignore him, but for now the enemy before him was his one and only target.
Britnev had to rally his surviving soldiers while a decent number of them still remained and storm Voloshyn’s fortress, either kill him in his lair or pitch him out into the street for execution underneath the street lamps. The result was all that mattered: the mobster lying dead at Britnev’s feet.
Urgently, he issued orders into the headset he wore, waiting until the chief of each small unit called back to acknowledge. Now the clock was running down on Pavlo Voloshyn’s life, and soon he would be nothing but a fading memory.
* * *
BOLAN HAD NO clear shot at Bogdan Britnev in the doorway where he’d hidden, and the man seemed happy to remain there for the moment, relatively safe from harm. Meanwhile, his men were shifting and regrouping, cautious with the bullets flying all around them from Voloshyn’s home defense team, gathering as if to storm the mobster’s fortress in a swarm.
“How many do you think he has inside there?” Sushko asked him.
“Hard to say. They’re firing out of seven windows simultaneously, and they’ve got grenades. His spotters in the other building have the entrance covered, too.”
“A hard assault, then.”
“Hard enough,” Bolan replied. “But I can soften it a little for them.”
Following his glance, Sushko said, “Ah. The RPG.”
As Bolan reached for it, the corporal said, “I keep expecting sirens.”
“Won’t be long,” Bolan agreed. “I’d like to wrap it up before the uniforms arrive.”
Bolan had braced the RPG-7 across his shoulder, loaded with a high-explosive HEAT round, when his sidekick said, “It just occurred to me. I probably have no job to return to after this.”
“You can’t be sure,” Bolan told him, “but it could be worse.”
“Hardly, if they arrest me on a murder charge or for the other things we’ve done.”
“I have a contact at the American Embassy,” Bolan replied. “A number and a name to drop, at least. When this is done I’ll try to hook you up. A flight out of the country, with some cash to get you started someplace else.”
Sushko was silent then, frowning, and Bolan put him out of mind, framing the doorway of Voloshyn’s house in the launcher’s UP-7V telescopic sight. He waited for the first Britnev assault team to begin their rush, advancing under fire, and only fired his rocket when they’d reached the mobster’s doorstep.
With a mighty whoosh and flames boiling behind him in the launcher’s backflash, Bolan’s rocket whistled toward its mark, the secondary rocket motor lighting after ten meters, ramming the deadly arrow forward at a speed of 958 feet per second. It clipped one raider’s head off his shoulders without detonating, then its warhead met the heavy door and mushroomed into smoky flames, hurling more bodies and their fragments out into the bloodied street.
“Door’s open,” Bol
an told himself, half whispering, waiting for more of Britnev’s soldiers to advance.
But some of them had tracked the rocket’s course and had him spotted now, their weapons swiveling to spray the rooftop, driving Bolan and Sushko down behind its parapet. A swarm of hornets traveling at supersonic speed flew over them, warming the nighttime air.
“Time we were going,” he told Sushko. “Want to join the party?”
With a jerky nod, Sushko replied, “I don’t mind if I do.”
Shevchenkivskyi District, Kiev
MAJOR SEMYON GOLOS was about to leave his office when the phone rang, his private line. Reluctantly, he answered it and had to hold the handset well back from his ear, wincing as the familiar caller screamed at him.
“Send everyone!” Pavlo Voloshyn cried. “They’re killing us!”
“Who is?” Golos inquired, hoping the man was drunk and raving, but he soon heard gunfire rattling in the background, and the noise of an explosion somewhere close at hand.
“Them!” Pavlo bellowed. “Britnev and his henchmen! Dozens of them! Hurry, or you’ll be too late!”
“Where are you?”
“At my home! Hurry!”
Angry and feeling nauseated in a heartbeat, Golos swallowed the rising bile and told Voloshyn, “I’ll be there as soon as I can manage.”
Cutting off the call before the mobster could launch into another round of cursing, Golos speed-dialed Special Services, the famed SWAT unit employed to counter terrorist attacks, seize drug smugglers and to suppress protests held by dissenters in the capital. He ordered every man assembled, dressed and armed for riot duty in the next five minutes. Those on leave but still within the city should be called in to augment the force and rush to Vozdvyzhenka as soon as they could manage it. From there, the sounds and smell of gunfire would direct them to the battleground.
And damn it, he would have to go himself, as well.
The Makarov PM pistol he carried was the major’s only weapon, but he planned to stop off at the arsenal before continuing to the garage below ground, picking up an AKMS submachine gun for himself. He had not fired an automatic weapon in at least eight years, but Golos knew he would feel better with the SMG in hand while he directed his commandos into combat.
Terrorist Dispatch (Executioner) Page 15