by Scott McEwen
“That’s doesn’t mean shit. They take their people off the books all the time.”
“But that’s not what this is,” Pope insisted. “The personnel office genuinely believes Lerher’s on vacation, which means he was either acting independently, or he was part of an unsanctioned operation. If there’s a shadow cell operating inside the CIA, we have to expose it.”
Gil glanced again at the Spetsnaz men. “These guys are all wired for sound, Bob—chain-smoking and hypervigilant. I don’t like it.”
“Is Dragunov chain-smoking?”
“No. He seems to have his shit mostly together.”
“Well, maybe that’s why he wants you along. Maybe he needs another level head.”
Gil chuckled. “Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s rainin’, old man.”
Pope laughed. “I wouldn’t do that, but we need to figure out what Lerher was doing in that apartment with the Chechens.”
“I don’t like operating in the blind, Bob. I’m not an espionage guy. I need a well-defined target.”
“Suppose I can give you one.”
“What, a target?”
“The yacht that Yeshevsky took to Marseille is slowly making its way back to Athens. It’s called the Palinouros, currently anchored at Malta. It belongs to a Turkish banker with loose financial ties to Chechen terrorists, but the owner’s not aboard. He’s at his home in Istanbul.”
“So who’s aboard?” Gil asked.
“Good question. Maybe your Spetsnaz friends would be interested in helping us find that out. The GRU has resources in Rome they can bring to bear on a seaborne operation of this nature. And Dragunov has operated with the Black Sea Fleet.”
“Yeah,” Gil said dryly. “He mentioned that.”
“If you’re not interested, Gil, you can ditch the Russians and head for our embassy. I’ll make sure you’re brought home ASAP. It’s your call.”
Gil glanced over at the Spetsnaz men. One of them caught his gaze and grinned mischievously.
“You there?” Pope asked.
“I’m thinking, damn it.”
The grinning Russian came over, shaking an unfiltered Russian cigarette from a crinkled pack and offering it to Gil. “Brody,” he said pointing at himself.
“I’m Gil.”
“Vassili,” Brody said with a chuckle. He had pale blue eyes and a narrow face, the youngest of Dragunov’s men at twenty-five. Gil accepted the smoke, and Brody lit it for him from the end of his own cigarette. Gil took a deep drag, and the unrefined tobacco hit his central nervous system like a truck. Brody saw his eyes start to drift and laughed, clapping him on the arm, saying something over his shoulder that made the other four men laugh with him.
“Are you there, Gil?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, letting the dizziness pass. “Go ahead and upload the intel on the Palinouros to my phone. I’ll have a talk with Dragunov and see what he can put together. If his people are game, we’ll take the yacht and gather whatever intel there is. But after that, I’m done. I’m not chasing all over Eastern Europe so these yahoos can get me killed.”
5
MARIGNANE,
France
Though Sasha Kovalenko was an ethnic Chechen, he too was a member of the Spetsnaz Spetsgruppa A, and he was no stranger to violent combat. His years as a sniper in the Chechen wars had left him with a frazzled nervous system and a supernatural ability to sense danger over long distance. It was this sixth sense that had allowed him to pull the trigger on Gil in the rail yard a split second before being shot himself.
When the French gendarmes had first appeared in the rail yard, he’d concluded that Agent Lerher must have betrayed their cause. This sent him into a rage, causing him to shoot down as many of the encroaching French as he dared before leaving for the agreed-upon rally point where he was to rendezvous with Yeshevsky. But owing to trouble avoiding the police en route to the apartment, he had not arrived until a full minute after Gil had cleared the scene.
The sight of his friend Yeshevsky’s body on the floor had enraged him further, but seeing Lerher’s body had given him pause to reconsider his assessment of a CIA double cross. There were too many possible scenarios to bother speculating, but one thing was for sure: he and his team needed to tie up loose ends and find a place to lie low until they could figure out what was going on.
“I’m taking three men with me to Malta,” Kovalenko said, coming out of the bathroom and tossing his cellular onto the hotel bed. “Use the French credit cards to buy the plane tickets. The ones we were given by the CIA may be compromised.”
“Why Malta?” asked his second-in-command, Eli Vitsin. “It’s an island. You could be trapped there.”
Kovalenko took him by the shoulder. He was a tall, muscular man with greenish eyes and black hair. Vitsin was a head shorter, dark complexioned with a thick mustache. “We can’t risk being backtracked. Someone told the French we were in that warehouse. There’s no way to guess how soon they were on to us, but if Yeshevsky was spotted in Athens or seen coming ashore in Marseille, the Palinouros could be their next target. We can’t allow the crew to be questioned—especially Miller, the CIA captain.”
“Moscow has sent Dragunov to track us down,” Vitsin warned. “He’s been seen at the embassy in Paris, and where he goes, his men are sure to follow. We need to get back home to our mountains, where it’s safe.”
“Don’t worry about Dragunov,” Kovalenko said, stepping into the kitchenette. “I can handle him. The trouble is the CIA. Whoever killed Yeshevsky also killed Lerher, and that could mean that Lerher’s people have been found out. If that’s happened, we’re entirely on our own, so we have to wait to see if they make contact before we can head home. In the meantime, I’m going to Malta.”
Kovalenko took a loaf of bread and some lunch meat from the refrigerator and stood in the kitchenette eating a sandwich while Vitsin sat at the computer scheduling the Malta flight for Kovalenko and three other Spetsnaz operators.
“You’re sure about this, Sasha?” Vitsin closed the laptop and pushed it aside. “Moscow may have submitted our photos to Interpol. You could be taken into custody at the airport.”
Kovalenko shook his head. “Moscow wants us for themselves. They can’t risk us telling what we know to anyone else. That’s why they’ve sent Dragunov: to make sure we don’t talk to anyone—ever.” He took a bottle of vodka from the freezer and unscrewed the lid, taking a drink and passing the bottle to Vitsin. “After we’ve taken care of the crew of the Palinouros, we’ll lay a trap for Dragunov somewhere; lure him in for the kill.”
“Bad idea.” Vitsin took a pull from the bottle and set it down on the table, shaking his head. “He’ll absolutely expect a trap.”
“Of course he will,” Kovalenko said, capping the bottle and putting it back in the freezer. “That’s why it’s going to work. He’s arrogant enough to think he can outsmart me.”
They stood in silence for a while, each lost in his own thoughts, until Vitsin said at last, “Who was the sniper on the railcar? He wasn’t French.”
Kovalenko looked at him, nodding pensively. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
6
MALTA
The nation of Malta is an archipelago located roughly fifty miles south of Sicily in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea and is home to almost a half million people. Only the three largest islands are inhabited, the largest being the island of Malta, around which there are no less than nine sizeable bays providing safe harbor from the open seas, making Malta a highly popular maritime destination for both tourism and commercial shipping.
Anchored in the darkness, not far from St. Paul’s Island near the mouth of Xemxija Bay on the north coast of Malta, the Palinouros was a 223-foot Kismet yacht manufactured by the German company Lürssen in 2007. She featured six staterooms, both a formal and an
informal dining salon, a Jacuzzi deck, a disco, a galley to rival the kitchens of most restaurants, separate crew quarters, a laundry service, various lounges, and a state-of-the-art navigational system. Fully crewed, she carried twenty-two hands, and her twin 1,957-horsepower Caterpillar diesel engines gave her a cruising range of 5,000 miles, boasting a top speed of 15 knots. Brand new, she had cost her Turkish owner well over $100 million.
Gil stood beside Dragunov on the rocky shore of the uninhabited island of St. Paul, studying the starboard beam of the vessel through a pair of Russian binoculars. The night was calm, and the Palinouros rested easily at anchor, having fallen off slightly to the north with the current. “The lights are on,” he muttered, “but nobody seems to be home.”
Dragunov grunted as he studied the vessel through his own binoculars. “Aye, they’re bedded down for the night.”
Gil scanned the decks. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone on the bridge, either. That’s odd. Our intel says she has a Greek crew. Greeks know better than to leave the bridge unattended at night.”
Dragunov lowered the binoculars. “She’s at anchor.” He clapped Gil on the shoulder, a bit more roughly than Gil considered customary. “Whoever’s on the bridge is probably lying down.” Pope had emailed them the schematics of the yacht, so they knew her precise layout, and the bridge was fitted with a pair of built-in sofas.
“I reckon we’ll board at the stern. Eh, Ivan?”
“Aye, Vassili, we’ll board at the stern.”
As Dragunov walked off in his wet suit to ready his men, Gil grinned after him, thinking the word aye made him sound like some kind of incongruous pirate.
The Palinouros was anchored a cable’s length from the shore, or approximately two hundred yards. While this distance would be no trouble for Gil—a leisurely swim—he wasn’t so sure about the Spetsnaz operators, who almost never stopped smoking. Even now they stood in the darkness with their glowing cherries dangerously visible for hundreds of yards over the open water.
The Russians dropped their smokes as Dragunov approached, stepping on them and double-checking their brand-new suppressed Arsenal Firearms Strike One pistols. The Strike One was a Russian-made semiautomatic. It operated on the same Browning recoil system as the M1911 and could be chambered in three different cartridges: 9 mm, .40 Smith & Wesson, and .357 Sig Sauer. The weapons the GRU had supplied them in Rome were chambered in .40 caliber. Gil had never fired the Strike One before—called the Strizh in Russian—but he liked that it had a much lower profile than most other pistols.
They moved into the water as a unit and were about knee-deep when Brody let out with a gut-wrenching groan, grabbing his groin.
Gil saw the spout of water kicked up by the rifle bullet after it passed through Brody’s genitals. “Sniper!” He grabbed Brody and dove forward with him into the water.
“It’s Kovalenko!” one of the Russians called out. A bullet tore through his throat, and he went down thrashing in the shallows.
Everyone else was already stroking for the Palinouros. Gil rolled to his back, keeping Brody’s head out of the water as he kicked hard for the yacht. There was no place else to go. St. Paul’s Island was entirely flat, with no cover except for a statue of the island’s namesake on the far side. Brody moaned in Gil’s arms, unable to swim because his hands were locked onto his mangled privates.
Dragunov and the other three men swam as fast as they could, porpoising like dolphins to make themselves as difficult to hit as possible. Gil was unable to drop below the surface because of Brody, so he concentrated on making as little wake as possible as he kicked his feet, stroking with one arm. He couldn’t hear the incoming rounds, but from the angle they were striking the water, he could tell that they were coming from the Maltese shoreline to the south.
“The only easy day was yesterday,” he muttered, certain he would never make it out of the water alive.
Another of Dragunov’s men cried out and began to flounder, shot through both lungs. Within a few seconds, he sank beneath the water and did not resurface as Gil stroked steadily past the point where he’d gone down.
Gil watched the stars to keep his heading, estimating that they had probably covered half the distance to the Palinouros, and glad that shark attacks in the Mediterranean were basically unheard of. The way Brody was gushing blood would have been bad news in most other seas.
Another Spetsnaz man cried out, hit in the leg, but he kept swimming as best he could. Unable to continue porpoising, he was quickly zeroed for a second shot and hit through the torso. He made no sound at all this time, but sank at once and did not return to the surface.
With fifty yards to go, the firing stopped inexplicably, and they made it to the stern of the Palinouros without taking any more casualties. There were four of them left alive, but by the time Gil and Dragunov managed to haul Brody from the water and onto the low-riding stern of the yacht, Gil could see the young man was nearly bled out.
Dragunov’s only other remaining team member, a Russian Mongol named Terbish, provided cover with his pistol as Gil and Dragunov tended to the quickly dying Brody.
Dragunov hissed, “He could have gotten you killed. You should have left him. ”
“That’s not how SEALs operate,” Gil said, unzipping Brody’s wet suit for a look at the wound and finding that the young man’s penis and most of the scrotum were completely shot away. Aggravated that the man was going to die, he looked at Dragunov, the two of them able to see each other clearly in the yacht’s stern lights. “And we don’t shoot our own men for falling behind on a mission, either.”
Dragunov smirked. “Then you don’t have what it takes to be Spetsnaz.”
“You got that right.” Gil zipped Brody’s wet suit closed. There was nothing to be done for him. He was dead a few moments later, and the three of them formed up to move forward with Dragunov at the head of the column.
The sight of a dead middy sprawled out in the lower passageway stopped them in their tracks. She had once been a pretty young woman with long blond hair, but she’d been shot in the head, and one of her eyes was now badly distended in an eight-ball hemorrhage, indicating that she had not died instantly.
“We’re too late,” Dragunov whispered. He mumbled something to Terbish in Russian and then looked back at Gil, who covered the rear. “Kovalenko and his men have already been aboard.”
Gil had begun to suspect as much by the time they reached the vessel without taking any fire from the crew. He nodded, gripping his pistol. As they began to move forward again, a furious firefight erupted near the Maltese shore some five hundred yards away. The shooting reached a murderous crescendo and then died off after ten seconds of constant firing.
Gil locked eyes with Dragunov. “We’d better hurry the fuck up if we’re gonna do this!”
7
MALTA
Prone on the deck of a small charter boat, the frustrated Kovalenko couldn’t see the swimmers well enough by the riding lights of the Palinouros to make them out in their black wet suits, so he was firing at the white froth of their wake. The rifle was a quality weapon, an Accuracy International AWS (Arctic Warfare Suppressed) in .308 Winchester bought on the Italian black market—very probably having been stolen from the Ninth Parachute Assault Regiment—but the Zeiss scope did not have night vision capabilities.
Kovalenko and his men had chartered the fishing boat earlier that day, killing the Maltese owner and stuffing the small man’s body into the fish cooler at the stern. After boarding the Palinouros and murdering her entire crew shortly after midnight, it was their intention to take the charter boat to Pachino on the southern tip of Sicily and then later catch the ferry from Messina to the Italian mainland. Problems with the charter’s carburetor, however, delayed their departure, forcing them back to shore.
With the carburetor fixed an hour later, they were in the process of casting off when one of Kovalenko’s
men spotted the tight group of glowing cigarettes over on St. Paul’s Island two hundred yards away. He knew the island was supposed to be deserted, so the sight looked odd to him. He pointed it out to Kovalenko, who immediately took the AWS from its case and had a look through the scope.
“Spetsnaz!” he’d hissed, dropping to the deck and setting up the rifle’s bipod. By the time he was ready to fire a few seconds later, Dragunov’s men had stepped on their cigarettes and waded into the water. His first shot to Brody’s groin had not been accidental, wanting to inflict as much psychological damage to the enemy Spetsnaz team as possible. His second shot was to the throat of the man who had chosen to shout a warning rather than stay alive.
By the time the swimmers drew within fifty yards of the Palinouros, he believed he had killed two more but couldn’t be sure. It was possible they were swimming beneath the surface.
“Start the motor!” he ordered, getting to his feet. “We’ll finish them as they try to board the yacht.”
At this moment, they saw a Maltese P21, a seventy-foot inshore patrol boat, coming toward them from the southern rim of the bay. Its spotlight snapped on, and the charter craft was bathed in light. Kovalenko left the rifle on the deck, where it couldn’t be seen immediately.
“Ready yourselves,” he said to the other three. “If they attempt to board us, we kill them all.”
As the P21 approached off the starboard beam, Kovalenko and his men spaced themselves apart.
“Boris, switch on the riding lights. That’s why they’re approaching—because we’re dark. And put smiles on your faces!”
Boris went into the wheelhouse to switch on the riding lights, and Kovalenko waved at the crew of the P21, smiling and shielding his eyes from the spotlight with the opposite hand. He could see that the Browning .50 caliber machine gun on the foredeck was manned and trained directly on their vessel as they came alongside. “Boris, stay in the cabin until I call. Then kill the gunner on the foredeck.”