“Time’s up, Dieter. Tell me now or lose the opportunity I’m giving you.”
“Fine, fine.” Vesler leaned back in his chair.
The German opened his mouth, prepared to speak, and intuition struck Bolan like a lightening bolt.
“Shut up!” Bolan snapped, interrupting a now completely stunned Vesler.
Bolan had almost been fatally foolish in the very moment of his triumph. Agency technicians and countersurveillance specialists probably swept Vesler’s office on a regular basis looking for bugs, but such actions were not perfect countermeasures. A parabolic microphone operation pointed at those ceiling-to-floor windows would be a completely passive activity. Bolan could not afford to have Vesler speak the location of Sable out loud.
Bolan looked at the video feed. Five men with short hair, broad shoulders and trim waists were entering the building. On a second of the four video feeds Bolan saw a second car, nearly identical with the first, pulling through the gate. Things were closing in around him rapidly now.
As Bolan’s race neared the finish line, his room to maneuver was being strangled. He couldn’t leave Vesler in the hands of the crew rolling in through the front doors, even if he wanted to.
“You have your keys?” Bolan demanded.
“What?”
“Your car keys, you have them?”
“Yes, of course, but I—”
“Shut up and stand up, you’re coming with me.”
“I can’t—”
“Tell it to the gun, Dieter.”
Bolan leveled the .22 at the stunned man. Vesler’s eyes widened to ridiculous proportions behind his thick glasses. The effect would have been almost comical if the situation hadn’t been so completely and utterly serious. Desperate, Vesler wrote down the address on a piece of paper and shoved it toward Bolan.
“Here, here, take that, she’s there. I swear!”
“No good.” Bolan crumpled the paper into his pocket. “Kubrick’s sent men to kill you. You either take me to Sable’s location or you commit suicide. Your choice, but you have two seconds to make up your mind.”
“I’ll come with you,” Vesler said.
“Good choice.”
Bolan looked at the video monitor, saw the hit squad approaching Ms. Sari’s desk. He directed Vesler toward the corner of his office farthest from the door.
Bolan whirled and put his foot against his chair, kicking out. The chair lodged with its back under the doorknob. Bolan eyed the camera feed again and then turned his back on both desk and door. Vesler was making confused noises from his position in the corner.
“Pull the blinds,” Bolan ordered.
Vesler turned to obey. The Executioner didn’t wait for the German to complete his task. As soon as Vesler turned his back, Bolan lifted his pistol and pulled the trigger four times. The sound-suppressed subsonic .22 hollowpoint rounds struck the glass and mushroomed out, splintering the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Vesler gasped at the sound and spun. Bolan reached over and picked up the second leather chair sitting in front of Vesler’s desk. He tossed it into the already broken window, shattering the glass completely.
“Go! Get to your car, now,” Bolan snarled.
He took a threatening step toward Vesler and the man scrambled to obey. The scientist stepped carefully through the hole. Bolan was behind him instantly, pushing the man forward into the parking lot. As he moved, Bolan slid the .22 pistol into his waistband.
Bolan stayed close to Vesler as he hustled him across the parking lot. He kept one hand on the researcher’s elbow and another close by the pistol butt sticking out of his waistband.
“Get your keys out, damn it. Which one is your car?”
“The red Porsche 922, over there in the executive parking lot.”
“Of course. Now move.”
16
The Caucasus Mountains above Grozny led to the border with Georgia. The area had been the refuge of Islamic rebels after both Chechen conflicts. Russian forces still hunted and skirmished among the valleys with determined insurgents.
It was a place that, unlike the oil infrastructure, hadn’t received much in the way of postconflict rebuilding funds. Outside of the city proper, Vesler was forced to slow the Porsche in order to better deal with the unimproved roads.
Bolan quizzed Vesler ruthlessly on the trip but was left discontent with the answers the research scientist gave him. He knew only that Sable operated out of a dacha in the mountains where she paid mercenaries for both protection and privacy. Because his position gave him access to information that had become Sable’s main financial pipeline, Vesler had been made privy to the location of her redoubt.
Twilight gathered as Vesler took a labyrinthine route of back roads in order to avoid military and interior police patrols. After turning off the regional highway, the sports car made the climb into the mountains above the city with little trouble.
The road to Sable’s dacha was narrow and winding. The area was rough and isolated, giving Sable little in the way of neighbors. After darkness had completely fallen, Vesler stopped at the edge of a gated compound on what appeared to have once been a logging road.
Bolan surveyed the sprawling house behind the wood-and-metal fence. The dacha made Kubrick’s house look like a second-rate shack. No guards were in evidence. There was a intercom station with a camera set next to the black metal gate at the end of the drive. Bolan took that in and frowned, deep in thought.
He picked up his GPS unit from the middle console of the sports car. He activated the device and then double-checked his results. Satisfied, he pulled out his BlackBerry and typed in his GPS coordinates. He sent them through a wireless burst transmission before he returned both items to his knapsack.
“Who are you, James Bond?” Vesler sneered, trying to rally his pride with bravado.
Bolan looked up at him casually, face impassive. “What?”
“Nothing,” Vesler muttered.
“No, really. I missed it. Say it again.”
Vesler paled. “Nothing. I didn’t say, anything.”
“Drive,” Bolan ordered.
“What? But here is—”
“Shut up and drive on,” Bolan said.
BOLAN CLEARED THE DACHA’S estate wall and crossed the stretch of back lawn.
The lush, closely cut grass of the landscaped yard ended at a two-foot-high retaining wall, separating lawn from the security wall in the back. Crouch walking, Bolan kept as low a profile as possible until he had reached the cover of a pruned and sculpted pine tree and large bush near the left-hand side of the fence.
Pulling out his .22, Bolan settled into a comfortable crouch, supporting his arm on a low hanging branch.
He could see the backyard very clearly in all the ambient light the house was throwing out through the picture windows set into the back of the dacha. To the right of his position, across the lawn, was an Olympic-size swimming pool, complete with slide and diving board, drained into an empty, hollow pit. Beyond the pool house were the garage and kennels.
Behind him, Bolan heard the wind moving through the branches of the trees. The pine smell reached his nose. The same breeze driving the smell of pine to him would be picking up his scent and wafting it across the yard toward the dog runs behind the five-car garage. Bolan detected no movement from the well-lit house, but the sound of the stereo playing reached his ears, over the sound of the low wind.
Vesler had said that upon seeing them for the first time, he had promptly dubbed Sable’s guard dogs the “terror twins.” Less than four minutes after Bolan climbed out from the shelter of the wall two Doberman pinschers trotted out from beside the house. Both dogs kept their noses in the air, searching out the scent carried to them on the soft mountain breeze.
One dog swung his head in Bolan’s direction and snarled. The other growled in answer and began trotting toward the deep shadows of the shrubbery.
Bolan hated to kill animals just doing their job, but he had no choice. His pistol c
oughed and the closest dog went down. The sound-suppressed, subsonic .22 caliber round entered just under its ear, severing the spine and dropping the dog instantly. The other dog barked once in surprise and turned toward his fallen brother. Bolan’s shot took him through lung and heart, entering just behind the right foreleg. The black dog folded instantly.
Bolan was on his feet and moving. He crossed the lawn in a fast jog, hoping to be inside long before anyone noticed the motionless dogs.
Halfway across the lawn the soldier passed through an arc of light thrown out by a floodlight set high up on the side of the house. Crossing the beam he went to one knee on the other side, bringing the pistol up in both hands. He took a long, careful moment to sight in on his target before squeezing the trigger with slow, even pressure.
The gun coughed again. The halogen floodlight connected to the proximity sensor exploded. Caution had argued for Bolan to take the shot from the relative safety of the lawn retaining wall, but he didn’t have enough faith in the accuracy of the modified weapon across that longer distance. Light neutralized, Bolan rose and sprinted toward his target.
He raced through a flower bed, hurtled a low hedge and landed on a back patio. Weaving his way past metal framed lawn furniture, Bolan gained the back of the house just under the second-story deck. He moved quickly to the left corner of the house.
Slowing his pace, Bolan set his back against the wall. About ten yards down, toward the front of the house, was a secondary door.
Pistol ready, Bolan slid up next to the door. At eye level a relay box for the dacha alarm system burned a passive green. No intruders had been detected, no alert sounded. Bolan’s reconnaissance had been as exhaustive as time had permitted. As far as he was able to determine, the protective system did not include remote cameras or pressure sensors.
Bolan quickly inserted his lock pick gun and compressed the lever trigger. He heard the subtle scraping of metal on metal as the prongs manipulated the pins of the lock. The bolt clicked home and the doorknob turned under his hand.
Steeling himself, Bolan entered Sable’s lair.
17
Bolan moved through the door in a sudden, fluid movement, pulling it quickly shut behind him and stepping to one side as he entered the building. His pistol was out in front of him, tracking. The big room was dark, a jumble of hulking, shadowy shapes. Going to one knee, Bolan waited for his eyes to adjust after having his night vision blown by the house lights outside.
His pupils quickly expanded, and he began picking out details. He was in a game room that contained two billiards tables and a massive home entertainment system. Various electronic games and expensive, comfortable-looking furniture were scattered around. Across the massive room from the outside door a short flight of stairs led up to the main floor of the house.
Bolan stood, shifting his knapsack off his back as he did so. With it in hand he crossed the room to the stairs. He could clearly hear music coming from upstairs. He was depending on it to cover any slight noise he made while moving. To his possible detriment, however, it increased his chances of being surprised going through transition points.
Reaching the stairs, Bolan looked up. The door to the next level was tightly closed, a bar of light showing through at the bottom. He mounted the steps, knelt in front of the door and set his pistol down. It took only a moment to remove a fiber-optic camera tactical video system from the knapsack. The borescope had been pre-assembled, but Bolan still needed both hands to position the surveillance device. He slid the tiny cable under the doorway and then turned on the handheld video display screen. An image of the room on the other side of the door popped up clearly. Bolan smoothly panned the fiber cam across the room.
The great room stretched from the front to the back of the house, with a wet bar along one wall and a sunken leisure area containing costly pieces of furniture and art. The floor was dark hardwood and a spiral staircase ran from the second level to beside the bar. The room appeared empty.
Bolan frowned. Everything about this probe was hasty. Domestic help came cheap in the economic shambles of postconflict Chechnya. Sable could have half a dozen live-in servants rushing around the dacha, fetching her meals and cleaning up after her.
A maid’s salary usually wasn’t high enough to encourage heroics in the face of armed intruders, but when Bolan acted, he didn’t like the idea of various civilians wandering haphazardly through the kill zone. It had happened too often no matter what precautions he took.
Suddenly Peter Sanders stepped around a corner along the same wall as Bolan’s door, coming around the end of the wet bar with a drink in his hand. Bile rose in the back of Bolan’s throat. Sanders sure didn’t look like a man run to ground, in danger for his life. He looked pretty at ease in his surroundings.
Bolan set his mouth in a hard, straight line. This confirmed suspicions that had caused him to enter the dacha on a hard probe in the first place. Sanders was obviously hand in glove with Sable. Sanders was about to get a visit from someone who was there to “rescue” him.
Through the borescope, Bolan watched Sanders walk across the area and step down into the entranceway. The front door opened, and Sable walked into the informal entertaining area. Sanders trailed her, standing close at her side.
They crossed to the bar and Sanders watched as Sable poured herself a drink. While they did this Bolan quickly broke down his surveillance device, secured it in his pack, then removed a stun grenade. Slowly he released his breath, like a pressure valve bleeding steam. He focused himself, mentally imagined each step he was about to execute as clearly and precisely as he could picture. He was like a dancer choreographing a particularly difficult routine. Each step had to be perfect.
18
Bolan snatched the pin from the flash-bang grenade and let the lever spring free. There was a metallic sound as the coil spring holding the weapon parts together disengaged. The soldier swung open the door and stepped through.
Sanders stood on one side of the bar, his face registering only shock as he froze in midsentence. Sable was spinning, her hand diving toward the small of her back under a designer cut leather jacket.
Bolan lobbed the primed grenade in a gentle underhand, aiming for it to roll across the well-polished top of the wet bar. Sanders’s mouth worked like a fish yanked clear of the water. Hands free, Bolan stepped back around the protective corner of the door. He drew a Taser and snapped it on. With his right hand he pulled his Glock.
The grenade’s bang was brutally loud and the flash blinding. Sable’s stereo system abruptly shut down. Bolan stepped back into the main room from around the corner, pistol held ready, snuggled safely close at his hip. He leaped forward and the Taser came out like the fangs of a cobra as he struck. Sable backpedaled in the face of the sudden, incapacitating flash-bang, arms held up like a person expecting the impact of a car wreck. Sanders collapsed, sagging against the counter behind him.
Bolan took two steps and went airborne. He landed on his hip on the bar and his momentum carried him sliding down its length. He whipped his Taser around and caught Sable in her ribs. The electrical charge locked the woman and then swept her to the ground, her eyes rolling up to show white. She made crude, inarticulate sounds deep in her throat.
As Sable went down, Bolan spun. He cleared the counter, rolling off the edge and came down next to Sanders. The American agent cringed before him, raising his hands and cowering like a child. Bolan snarled and moved forward, weapon held up in each hand.
“Move!” he shouted.
Bolan took half a step forward and kicked Sanders in the hip, shoving him around the corner of the bar. He thumbed off the Taser’s power and clipped it onto his belt. Following the stumbling Sanders, Bolan kicked him again, this time driving the man’s arm into his side and spilling him onto the floor next to the incapacitated Sable.
Sanders looked up, terrified. He saw Bolan with pistol ready, looming above them, a grim manifestation of justice. Bolan’s eyes gleamed in brilliant, angry counterpo
ints to the emotionless affect of his face. The Agency intelligence officer whimpered in horror. Sable moaned ineffectually at his side.
More quickly than Bolan would have thought possible, Sable began to recover. Bolan stepped past the cowering, ineffectual Sanders and over to the Russian operative. Leaning down, he thrust the muzzle of his pistol into Sable’s forehead.
“Am I going to have to shoot you, little girl?”
“What?” Sable was still shaking off the effects of her stunning. “Who—”
“I said, do I have to shoot you?” Bolan let the volume and cadence of his voice climb. He tapped the muzzle of his pistol against the bridge of Sable’s nose.
“No.” Her voice was surprisingly calm.
Already she was suppressing her fear and disorientation. Her eyes sized up Bolan. Bolan brought up his Taser, clicked it on. The device began to hum and crackle with energy. The predatory look was pushed out of Sable’s eyes.
“Okay, both of you get up. Sanders, I’m keeping my gun on you. Understand? You try anything, I shoot you. Sable tries anything, I shoot you. No matter how this plays out, you get shot, understand?”
The man nodded, pale, as he climbed to his feet.
“I can’t hear you!” Bolan barked, never taking his eyes off the rising Sable.
“Yes! Yes. I get shot, I understand,” Sanders babbled.
“Good, now both of you get into the living room. Sit down on that couch.”
With a sniper’s eye, Bolan watched them, one frightened, one angry, sink into the couch. He replaced his Taser properly, but kept a wide, glass-topped coffee table between himself and the pair.
“Nice place, Sable,” Bolan said, putting a big boot on the table. “Apparently turning people into traitors pays well.”
“You’re messing up, cowboy,” Sanders said. “You’re American. Who are you and why are you interfering in my operation?”
“Your operation?” Bolan countered. “From what I’ve been able to tell, this is Sable’s operation.”
Rebel Force Page 12