by Scott McEwen
Yablonsky took a drag from the cigarette he’d lit while Gil was talking. “How will you find Kovalenko in all the confusion?”
“I won’t have to.” Gil smiled. “He won’t be drawn off by the diversion. He’ll know I took the shot from the tree, and he’ll come after me.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Gil borrowed the cigarette and took a drag. “There’s no time to explain, but trust me, I know.” He gave back the cigarette. “I’ll need some help getting up into the tree. After that, I’ll give you and your men time to circle around to the other side and get set up. Think you can manage in an hour?”
“If all goes well,” Yablonsky said, “but I never count on things going well.”
“Me neither.”
They arrived at the base of the great tree twenty minutes later. The trunk was close to twenty feet in circumference, and the nearest limb was twenty-five feet off the ground. The Spetsnaz threw a hundred-foot rope over it, and the six of them hoisted Gil. He climbed into the crotch of the tree and pulled the rope up after him, giving them a wave to send them on their way. They disappeared in seconds, and he carefully worked his way another thirty-five feet up into the tree, using a section of the rope to secure himself. Once Gil was sure he wasn’t going to fall sixty feet to his death, he unslung the sniper rifle and attached it to the three-point sling, stretching out along a broad limb.
He didn’t have a particular fear of heights, but his palms were sweating from the tedious climb, so he pulled on a pair of tight-fitting black leather gloves and pulled the rifle into his shoulder, popping the lens caps for a look at the encampment eight hundred yards away. To his shock, Dokka Umarov was one of the first people who came into focus. The Chechen leader was standing in front a command tent talking with Ali Abu Mukhammad. Umarov was by no means the only man in camp with facial hair, but his long, Jeb Stuart–style beard caused him to stand out.
Gil checked his watch. Only thirty minutes had passed since Yablonsky and his men had moved out. He stretched a patch of panty hose tightly over the end of the scope, fixing it in place with a thick black rubber band. The panty hose would prevent the descending sun from glinting off the lens without significantly reducing resolution of the sight picture. He pulled back the bolt to load a .338 Lapua Magnum into battery. Then he released the five-round magazine and loaded a sixth cartridge to top off the weapon.
Now Gil was ready to do battle. He only had to give the Spetsnaz team time to get into position. He was busy studying Umarov when it occurred to him that he had never fired this particular rifle before. The TAC-338 had an adjustable trigger pull of 2.5 to 4.5 pounds, and there was no way to know if Mason preferred a light or heavy trigger without dry-firing the weapon, so he tucked the magazine into his leg pocket and carefully ejected the leader round. He pushed the bolt forward and pulled the trigger, satisfied to find that the rifle’s owner had left it on the factory setting of 3 pounds.
Gil made the weapon ready once more and scanned around for Kovalenko. There were dozens of tents and ramshackle huts, numerous cooking fires, and Gil was wondering why the Russians hadn’t bombed the place when—suddenly—he was stunned to see three children chasing after a puppy. Upon closer study, he realized there were at least twenty women in the camp as well, along with a half dozen other children. He guessed they were the families of Chechen insurgents, but it was possible they were Chechen or Ukrainian refugees displaced by a decade of war.
Gil felt bad for the women and children and hoped they wouldn’t be hit by the Spetsnaz diversionary barrage, but their ultimate fate was out of his hands.
He spotted Kovalenko coming out of the command tent, and his adrenaline began to surge as the ex-Spetsnaz sniper approached Umarov and Mukhammad. Having all three ducks lined up in a row was almost too much for Gil to take. Then Kovalenko made it worse by putting his arm around Umarov’s shoulders, giving Gil a golden opportunity to kill them both with a single shot. All three of them stood laughing in the silence of the rifle scope.
“You motherfucker,” Gil muttered to Kovalenko. “You’re doin’ that to tempt me.”
It killed him not being able to squeeze the trigger at such a pristine moment, but breaking with the plan could easily spell his death, as well as the deaths of his Russian allies, so all he could do was watch the clock and hope for an equally pristine shot in twenty-five minutes.
78
HAVANA,
Cuba
Crosswhite and Mariana had borrowed Ernesto’s car. Now they sat parked in the shade up the street from Peterson’s finca, staring at a white Nissan parked outside the gate.
“They’re definitely watching the place,” Crosswhite said.
“I’ll bet they’re cops.”
He thought it over, deciding, “This isn’t all bad. If the prick thinks he needs cops at the gate, he probably doesn’t have security inside the house.”
“Are you going to have to kill them?”
“Hope not,” he muttered. “I plan on living here when this is over, and I don’t need any more trouble with the local heat.”
“You two barely know each other, Dan.”
“That’s not a problem for me,” he said. “I’m old enough to know what I want. If she decides she doesn’t like me a month from now, all she has to do is say so.”
“And if you decide you don’t want her?”
He turned to look at her. “You’ve seen her. That’s not gonna happen.”
Mariana realized that was probably true, admitting to herself that the young Cuban woman was as precious as a woman could be. “If you go back to her, you should leave this life.”
“I just might do that.”
They sat watching for a while, hidden from view inside the car by the shadow of the tree.
“Any ideas?” she asked.
“Nothing’s jumping to mind. Those electrified wires around the top of the wall are a real problem.”
“Can’t we just cut them?”
“That would almost definitely set off an alarm inside the house.”
“What if we pay the cops to leave?”
Crosswhite sat up straight behind the wheel. “You know, with the right pair of cops, that could work.”
She smiled. “But are they the right pair of cops?”
“Exactly. If they’re not, there’s no do-overs. It’s off to the clink.”
“Unless you shoot them.”
He nodded. “Unless I shoot them, and without a silencer, that’s a risky proposition at best.” He started the car and shifted into drive.
“What are you doing?”
“Fortune favors the bold.”
He drove down the block and slowed to a stop alongside the Nissan, smiling at the driver.
“Good afternoon,” he said in Spanish, the pistol in his lap.
“Good afternoon,” the cop said, very businesslike. “Have you been watching us?”
“No, we’ve been watching the finca,” Crosswhite said. “Same as you.”
The cop narrowed his gaze. “What’s your interest in the finca, señor?”
“That’s not really important, but I’ll tell you this: there’s ten thousand dollars in it for both of you if you’ll let us inside for a look around.” Crosswhite knew they earned less than $2,500 a year.
The cop looked at his partner, and his partner told him to power up the window. They sat talking for a minute, and then the driver put the window back down. “Who are you, señor?”
“I’m the guy with twenty thousand US dollars,” Crosswhite said, his gaze set. “And all you gotta do is look the other way while we climb over that gate.”
The cop in the passenger seat was obviously ready to jump on the money, but the driver was very hesitant. “You should go back to your country,” he said, staring off down the street.
“Look, amigo, my busines
s inside the finca, it’s between Americans. It doesn’t have anything to do with you or your government. But I’ll tell you what: my country and your country? Things are changing. Castro’s out of power. Pretty soon real business is going to open up again. Why not be in a position to capitalize on it when it happens?”
The cop looked at him. “What does that mean?”
Crosswhite pushed all of his chips forward. “It means I’m going to be around awhile, and I’ll be needing things from time to time. Simple things. No blood.”
“You’re CIA . . . like him inside?”
Crosswhite laughed. “No, amigo. I’m a whole lot worse. I’m a corporate point man. I work for a group of Yankee corporations that are very eager to do business here in Havana. It’s only a matter of time before they pressure my government into ending the trade embargo, and when that happens, I’ll be needing friends in the police. You can turn me away, but you know and I know the other cops won’t.”
The driver put the window back up, and the two cops talked for another minute. Then he put the window back down. “If our captain finds out we let you—”
“Your captain won’t know anything,” Crosswhite said, knowing he had them.
“But if that man in there ends up dead—”
“There’s a swimming pool.”
“A what?”
“A swimming pool.”
The cops looked at each other. “You’re going to drown him?”
Crosswhite turned to Mariana, knowing it was time to flash some cash. “Gimme ten grand.”
Mariana unzipped the pouch and quickly counted out the money.
Crosswhite put the money in a greasy paper sack from the backseat of Ernesto’s car and offered it to the cop. “This is ten thousand. You can have the other half when we come back out.”
The driver looked nervously at his partner.
“Take it!” his partner said. “What do we care about a CIA man?”
“No blood!” the driver said in a hushed voice.
“No blood,” Crosswhite said, tossing the bag across. Then he looked at Mariana and winked. “We’re in.”
“Go now,” the cop said, waving them off. “Park up the block and walk down to the gate.”
Crosswhite pulled off and parked a block away. “You ready?” he said to Mariana.
She nodded. “Scared shitless, but I’m ready.”
79
THE CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS
Gil noted that Sasha Kovalenko favored his right leg as he turned to go back into the command tent, wondering what kind of wound he had sustained and when it had happened. Gil’s own battered body was still suppurating, his shrapnel wounds burning from the jagged pieces of metal still lodged in his flesh. He popped another dextroamphetamine capsule and gulped water from the CamelBak, knowing he was now robbing Peter to pay Paul.
He whispered to himself, “All you have to do is run three thousand yards, and you’re in the clear.”
Umarov took a seat on a log near a cooking fire, tussling the curly black hair of a small boy who knelt on the ground playing with a toy airplane. A woman gave Umarov a plate of food, and he sat eating, talking with a number of other men sitting around the fire.
A grenade exploded in the forest to the west, followed by the distant staccato of machine-gun fire, and every man in the camp sprang into action.
Umarov dropped his plate and stepped over the log, making for the command tent.
Gil put the crosshairs on the back of his head and squeezed the trigger.
Dokka Umarov’s head exploded like a watermelon shot off a fence post, and he dropped to the ground. The women screamed, grabbing up the children and running for the huts.
Gil slung the rifle over his back and began working to get his feet back on the ground as fast as possible.
COLONEL YABLONSKY AND his men had been in the process of setting up their claymore screen when a small Chechen patrol stumbled across them. A brief firefight ensued, and all four Chechens were killed, but two of the Spetsnaz were hit with shrapnel, and one was shot through the shoulder blade.
“They’ll come fast,” Yablonsky said. “We’ll hit them hard and fall back through the MON screen.”
The Russian MON-50 version of the claymore mine came in two different variants. One variant fired 540 steel ball bearings, the other firing 485 short steel rods, each covering an arc of 54 degrees out to lethal range of fifty meters. Employing trip-wire detonators, the Spetsnaz had placed its mines (three of each variant) roughly thirty meters apart in order to deliver the maximum effect on the Chechen line of advance.
“Did anyone hear the American’s rifle?”
“I heard nothing,” Yablonsky said. “We have other problems to worry about now.”
The six of them formed up by twos and prepared for the attack. They could hear the Chechens shouting to one another as they came forward through the forest, ramming through rhododendron thickets and firing indiscriminately in an attempt to flush out the enemy. They were at least a hundred strong and moved with all the confidence of a superior force. Ali Abu Mukhammad commanded from the center, well back from the front, surrounded by a personal guard of a dozen devoted men. With Dokka Umarov now dead, he was the new emir of the Caucasus Emirate.
The Spetsnaz let loose with a volley of hand grenades, hurling three apiece before falling back through the claymore screen. The grenades exploded all along the Chechen line, killing or wounding nearly twenty men. Taking up firing positions among the trees, the Russians waited as the Chechens sorted themselves out, shouting for the wounded to be recovered and to close the gaps in the line.
The Chechens drew within range once more, and the Spetsnaz opened up with rifle and grenade fire, killing a dozen more before turning to run. The Chechens saw them and opened fire, dashing after them and directly into the screen of MON-50s.
The mines exploded with devastating effect all along the front of the Chechen advance, killing or wounding at least thirty more men, and bringing the advance to an abrupt halt. Men were screaming everywhere, their bodies shredded.
Mukhammad saw the devastation and called for ten volunteers to continue the pursuit while they waited for the remainder of the camp to arrive.
His personal guards volunteered immediately, but they were denied. Ten former Zapad Spetsnaz men came forward and told Mukhammad they would track down the assassins and kill them. He sent them off at once, turning to ask where the hell Kovalenko was, but no one had seen the Chechen sniper. A search of the dead was carried out, but his body was not found.
SASHA KOVALENKO WAS in the forest on the far side of the camp, perfectly camouflaged in his Russian leshy suit, slithering slowly along the ground at a snail’s pace. He could now see the great tree from where he lay, the rope hanging down from the high limb, but there was no sign of the American sniper. He could feel him, however; his combat instincts telling him that Gil had not fled the scene. The rhododendron were not as dense here on the east side of camp, where the elevation was slightly higher, so visibility through the trees was about 60 percent.
Something moved along the forest floor to his right, no more than thirty feet beyond a rhododendron thicket. The sound was slow and deliberate, like that of a man crawling, moving parallel to his position toward the east. Kovalenko realized at once that the American was maneuvering to intercept him at the far end of the thicket.
The movement stopped, and he lay listening for five full minutes before he heard the American move again through the dead leaves. He smiled and moved carefully forward on his elbows and knees, his eyes peering out from within the leshy suit, the suppressed AK-105 cradled carefully in his arms. The ground was cleaner on his side of the thicket, so he made very little discernible sound as he moved.
GIL WASN’T SURE of Kovalenko’s position, but he could feel him drawing closer, a kind of ozone slowly pervading the air around
him. His arrector pili muscles contracted along his arms and shoulders, tightening his skin into gooseflesh, and he pulled the .338 into his shoulder.
He studied the terrain before him, watching not for the movement of a man but of a segment of the forest. Although highly effective from a static position, a ghillie suit was no more effective in motion than any other type of camouflage. The sound of fighting on the far side of the camp had dropped off immediately after the claymores had detonated, and there hadn’t been a shot fired since.
He closed his hand around the end of a one-hundred-foot length of parachute cord taken from Mason’s rucksack. The other end of the cord was attached to the rucksack, which he had stashed in the rhododendron thicket a hundred feet out in front of him. The cord was concealed beneath the dead leaves and other forest debris, so it would not be readily visible to anyone who didn’t already know it was there. Gil gave the rucksack a slow, steady pull of about three feet, hoping to lure Kovalenko in for the kill shot.
He was very tired, approaching exhaustion, and he was a bit shaky from the amphetamines, so when he first detected Kovalenko’s movement in the fading light of the forest, he wasn’t sure whether or not his eyes were playing tricks on him. Gil eyed the spot through the scope and finally realized that he was looking at one of the finest ghillie suits he’d ever seen. The Chechen’s movement was scarcely faster than that of the minute hand on a clock, and Gil had to blink his eyes to be sure he was seeing what he was seeing. As of yet, he did not have a shot because Kovalenko was belly-down against the ground, and Gil was concealed within a natural depression in the earth, a leafy rhododendron branch dangling overhead. His scope had an untrammeled view of Kovalenko, but the muzzle of the rifle did not. In order to fire now, he would have to raise up onto one knee, and he was not about to give a man like Kovalenko that kind of opportunity.
LISTENING TO THE movement on his right, Kovalenko decided the American must not know his position after all. He was moving too fast and making too much noise, shifting position with impatience. The movement stopped, and Kovalenko knew he had him.