Dead Eye cg-4

by Mark Greaney

  The aircraft was lower than he’d envisioned, much lower. He could only hope now that it made it over the northern wall, and he hoped when it crashed there in the impenetrable forest it wouldn’t make too much noise.

  Court turned back around to face the property, and he scanned the grounds four stories below with his NOD’s, seeing all the men on the ground either stationary or moving idly in the distance.

  There were no shouts of alarm, no cracks of gunfire, and no movement that seemed out of place.

  Court took off his backpack, unzipped an outer pocket, and removed a second, smaller, snaking fuse full of fireworks, also attached to a wireless igniter. This string was a battery of Yanisars, a dozen four-inch cardboard tubes filled with a lift charge of black powder under a paper shell filled with more powder designed to create a bright flash and a loud report. He took off the rubber band, uncoiled the strand, and threw it over the south side of the mansion. It fell the four stories, landing in the snow.

  He re-donned his pack and moved up the roof, heading to an attic window jutting out of the ceramic tiles. He knelt down; there was no alarm system he could see. The lock was ancient and would be a cinch to defeat, had Gentry’s hands not been so damn cold.

  But he shook his fingers to warm them and got the window open in under a minute, then slipped into the attic, shut the window behind him, and drew his suppressed Glock 19 pistol. He flipped up his wet NOD’s and actuated a red light under the barrel of his gun; with this he searched the expansive but cluttered space for motion detectors. Instead he saw rat droppings in the dusty corners of the room, and he knew the attic was accustomed to unwanted guests that would render motion detectors useless.

  He kept his silenced Glock out in front of him as he made his way forward through the attic toward a door ahead.

  He’d done it. Ingress to target complete. Court was in.

  Lev and Yevgeny were cold, but not as cold as they would have been without all the vodka in their bloodstream. Tonight’s festivities were long over; most of the security forces in the compound were in tents or the dacha’s barracks, a long, coal-furnace-heated shack just north of the barn. Inside, two dozen skinheaded neo-Nazis slept, most of them facedown on bunks or on the floor with puke-stained olive drab winter gear, many with unattended cuts and bruises from the evening’s fights, and all of them passed out from the marathon session of drinking that had taken place for much of the past ten hours.

  But Lev and Yevgeny were among the twelve men forced to work the night detail, and though they had consumed nearly as much vodka and beer as the rest of the toughs around the property, they still had a job to do. They were off on the second of three half-hour patrols of the forest tracks and dirt roads just north of the property.

  Both men were armed with AK-47s, radios, and thermoses of vodka-laced tea. They shuffled through wet snow, their flashlights swinging low, not really looking for anything, just killing time until they could return to the north guard shack and warm themselves at the stove.

  Both men were just twenty-one years old, and they had been working with the Sidorenko organization since they were adolescents, manning mobile phones in St. Petersburg to report police presence in the red-light district. They pledged no allegiance to the effeminate millionaire in the dacha they guarded. No, they were fascists and Sid would hardly be the one to rule their ideal Russia. But Sid was a means to an end for them; he provided them safety and security and enough money to pay for their basic needs, and in return they spent a few nights a week guarding his property when he was here west of the city.

  A single frozen mud road led through the forest from the compound gate to the north, and it ran straight for almost a kilometer before coming to a T. Lev and Yevgeny walked the length of the road, occasionally shining their flashlights into the thick larch that ran on either side. They expected no trouble but if trouble came, both young men were drunk enough and replete with enough testosterone to know unequivocally that they could handle it.

  They stopped for a moment so Lev could piss; he shifted his rifle to his shoulder and opened his coat and pants right there in the road while Yevgeny took a sip from his thermos.

  From the dark above them came a quick movement, sending both men diving headlong into the snow. Something large shot past just feet from their heads, and then a dark form was silhouetted against the white bark of the larch trunks for an instant before it slammed into the trees, cracking and popping branches before a last thud of impact with the ground.

  The two young Russians scrambled to their feet and ran toward the noise. Yevgeny chambered a round in his Kalashnikov and Lev shined his flashlight on the big dark mass in the snow.

  It was a hang glider, its frame twisted, its dark blue wings torn to shreds by the broken larch. A propeller jutted from the broken tree limbs.

  “What the fuck?” Lev muttered, his flashlight scanning all around the forest, searching for a hint as to where the hell this thing came from.

  Yevgeny did not answer Lev’s question, because he did not know what the fuck. But he did know what to do. He reached for the radio inside his coat. “North patrol to north shack! Something’s going on out here!”

  Court moved up a quiet fourth-floor hallway with his pistol leveled in front of him. He’d wiped moisture from the lens of his night vision monocle, and through it he had a narrow, dim, green view of the way ahead over the top of his long silencer, and he saw no threats.

  The intel he had been provided by the Moscow Bratva had not given him a clear picture of the inside of the mansion, so Court was doing much of this by feel. Court had been inside another of Sid’s St. Petersburg properties, and there Sid kept an office and bedroom on the top floor, no doubt because he felt he was safer up here. Court decided he would clear the top floor first, imagining Sid’s paranoia would force him to keep the same setup for all of his properties.

  The dark hallway ended at a balcony that overlooked a wide circular atrium. He peered over the railing and, four stories down, he saw a low fountain in the center of a courtyardlike space, along with a few tables and chairs nestled between potted plants and trees.

  Above him, over the center of the atrium, the glass-domed roof, some thirty feet across, was rimmed with ornate iron support beams, from which lights hung. The lights were off now, and only a faint glow of the moonless night through the glass hazed his night vision monocle.

  Scanning the open balconies on the floor below him, he saw two guards one floor down on the other side of the atrium. They sat in chairs by an open staircase. Court thought it likely there would be more men directly under him.

  Gentry had no plan to return to this part of the house, but he took a quick mental picture of the area. If he needed a fallback option, he might well find himself here again, and with no time to get a proper look at the layout.

  This done, he left the balcony and began heading up a hallway that shot off to his right. It was dark here; there were electric lighting sconces along the corridor, but they were turned off for the night. Upon making a turn in the hall, however, he saw a single sconce shining brightly outside a heavy wooden door at the far end of the passage. The rug that ran all the way down to the end of the hall was more ornate than the bare floor of the hall he had just left, and there was an unmistakable scent of wood smoke and incense in the air.

  Court got the impression he was nearing his target.

  He’d made it only a few feet up the hall when a door on his right opened. The muzzle of his pistol swiveled toward the movement, and his finger left his trigger guard and took up the scant slack of the Glock’s trigger safety. At first he saw no one in the doorway, but he lowered his aim and centered his pistol on a small boy, no more than six or seven years old. The boy looked at him with sleepy, unfixed eyes. Behind the boy Gentry saw a child’s bedroom.

  There was little light in the hall and no light in the bedroom, and Court doubted the boy could see the gun or even identify the man standing in the hall five feet in front of him.
/>   Court knew who the boy belonged to. His intel indicated that Sidorenko, a bachelor, had family who lived with him: two male cousins who were part of his organization and a sister, and his sister had several children. Court braced himself to encounter kids here in the mansion, but he hoped that hitting in the dead of night would help keep them from straying downrange of his gun barrel.

  No such luck.

  “I can’t sleep.” The boy said it in Russian, but Court understood.

  Court lowered his pistol and hid it behind his leg, but his long night vision optic protruded from between his eyes. The boy noticed it and peered closer.

  “Back inside,” Court replied in Russian. “Lock the door.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Back inside,” Court repeated.

  “Are you a monster?” the boy asked.

  Court knelt down, his NOD’s monocle inches from the boy’s face. “Yes, I am. I am a monster. Run. Back inside. Get under your bed and hide until your mother comes for you.”

  The boy’s eyes widened in fear. He stepped back in the room and shut the door.

  Court stood back up and began moving quickly up the hall toward the light by the heavy door.

  FOUR

  One thousand ninety-one miles south of St. Petersburg, the Lipscani neighborhood of Bucharest, Romania, had quieted down much in the past hour. For most of this Saturday evening the district had been full of young partygoers, as many of the city’s best clubs were located in this warren of winding streets and back alleys. But it was four A.M. now, and the late hour along with an icy wind had driven everyone indoors, either to the dance floors at Kulturhaus or Terminus or Club A, or back to flats and hotels around Romania’s capital.

  On the fifth-floor rooftop of an office building directly on the opposite side of the Dambovita River from Lipscani, a man lay prone behind a Knight’s Armament SR-25 sniper rifle. He peered through his weapon’s optics, centering his crosshairs on the back of a man’s head, just visible through sheer silk curtains, two hundred twenty meters away.

  The sniper’s nine-power scope showed him everything he needed to see. In a fifth-floor luxury apartment on Splaiul Independentei, the heavyset man, well into his sixties, stood in his bedroom in his underwear and socks, slowly and ceremoniously undressing a much younger woman, a girl, really, who stood obediently in front of the bed, her eyes fixed to a point somewhere out the window.

  The sniper’s target was supposed to be alone, but either the target or his security detail had ordered a teenaged prostitute, and she was throwing a wrench into the sniper’s plan.

  This was not optimal, the man behind the SR-25 concluded.

  The girl would see the muzzle flash, and the girl would point to the rooftop upon which the sniper had set up his hide, and the target’s security would run to the window, scanning for the sniper, and then they would rush down to the streets, cutting off the sniper’s escape.

  They would call the police, as well, and roadblocks would be set up and patrol cars would start pulling over anyone driving around at four in the morning.

  The sniper wanted to wait until the girl turned away, but his target was taking his sweet time, and the sniper knew that at any moment, the man’s bodyguards in the next room might come to the window there and gaze out, putting even more eyes on his position.

  No, this hit was not optimal. Not optimal at all.

  But it was doable.

  The sniper decided to proceed. He would send a round into the back of his target’s head.

  And then he would shoot the hooker.

  Quickly the sniper scanned the bedroom, determining where the girl would go after her john’s brains blew all over her naked body. Most likely, he decided, she would just stand there in shock, giving the sniper plenty of time to line up a second 220-meter shot with his semiautomatic rifle. He’d need no more than a second for this, and he expected the girl would not process the danger in so little time.

  But if she did drop to the ground, or move left or right, the sniper saw that she had no cover that would protect her from a .556 copper-jacketed bullet.

  The girl was not his target, but killing the girl was necessary for a smooth egress from the target area, so he gave it no more thought.

  Satisfied that he had prepared for any eventuality, the sniper recentered the crosshairs on the back of the man’s head, thumbed the safety off his rifle, then placed his finger on the trigger. He slowed his breathing, even exerted control over the beating of his heart by consciously relaxing his blood pressure.

  A beep in his left ear caused the sniper to blow out the air in his lungs in a soft sigh. He allowed himself a moment to regain his normal breath; his fingertip left the trigger and rested on the trigger guard, and his left hand moved out from under the weapon. He touched the button on his Bluetooth earpiece.

  Softly he said, “Go.”

  “This is Metronome.”

  “Bad timing,” the sniper muttered. And then, “Say iden, Metronome.”

  “Two, seven, seven, four, nine, two, four, three, eight.”

  “Iden confirmed. This is Dead Eye.”

  “Say iden, Dead Eye.”

  “Four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”

  After a quick pause on the other end, the man on the roof heard, “Good evening, Whitlock.”

  “It might be evening where you are, Parks, but it’s four A.M. here.”

  There was no response to this. Instead Parks said, “Execute immediate stand down. We need to get you moving to the airport.”

  The man prone on the rooftop kept his eye in the glass a moment more; he watched the man kneel down and begin pulling off the girl’s panties. But the sniper did not continue to watch. Why should he? His mission was over. He rolled away from the gun, crawled back a few feet, and dragged the weapon back to him by the butt stock. He closed the bipod, unloaded the rifle, and began dismantling it. While he did this, executed with efficiency gained from many years of practice, he said, “Only one reason you would pull me right now.”

  As a confirmation Parks said, “The primary target has been located.”

  The sniper smiled, but his smile did not carry over into the tenor of his voice. He kept it clipped and professional. “At Sid’s palace in Rochino.”

  “Affirmative.” A pause. “You were right, Whitlock.”

  Whitlock continued breaking down his weapon as he said, “Of course I was right. You have real-time viz?”

  “He is inside the main house now. We’ll have eyes on via the ScanEagle when he comes out.”

  “Understood. Is the audio equipment picking up anything?”

  “Quiet as a tomb.”

  The sniper was pleased for many reasons. He opened a black Pelican case and placed the disassembled rifle in it. He kept his voice soft, though he was alone on the rooftop and the offices below him were vacant. “Expect that to change. He won’t get out of there without it going loud.”

  Parks said, “We are moving you to St. Petersburg this morning. Get to the airport; we’ll have the plane prepped and ready by the time you arrive.”

  Quickly Dead Eye entered the stairwell and began descending swiftly and silently in the dark, a penlight in his left hand leading the way forward and his Pelican case in his right. “Why would I go to St. Petersburg? Gentry isn’t going to St. Petersburg.”

  “Probably not, but we need to get you into the area. St. Petersburg is closest. We can update the flight plan while you are in the air if we track him somewhere else.”

  “Is Jumper on alert?”

  “Negative. Trestle is the alert team. They are in St. Pete. Heading to the X now. Jumper will come up from Berlin, if necessary, to back them up.”

  “Bad idea, Parks. Both strike teams need to stay out of sight until Gentry goes to ground after the operation. Keep the ScanEagle overhead and lead me into his path; I will surveil and then set up the strikers once I’m on station.”

  Parks replied dismissively. “I will pass on your though
ts to Babbitt. For now, Russ, just get moving. Graveside out.”

  Russell “Dead Eye” Whitlock tapped his earpiece and continued down the stairs. He was disappointed about his mission tonight. He’d been working on this Bucharest op for weeks. In theory he could have gone ahead, shot the target and then shot the girl, and in so doing achieve his objective here in Romania, but this would have slowed his ability to get out of town quickly and cleanly, and that was paramount.

  Court Gentry was one hundred times more important than this Muslim Brotherhood terrorist. Moreover, someone else from Townsend Government Services would show up here, in a few days or in a few weeks, to finish the job.

  It did not matter to Dead Eye. He was a prideful man, but in his eyes, he’d long since outgrown ops like tonight. To him there was no real challenge in this hit, which meant there was no real pride in this hit. A two-hundred-twenty-meter shot through window glass into the heads of an unsuspecting tango and his teenaged hooker.

  So fucking what?

  Dead Eye was out for big game.

  Hard targets.

  And very soon it would be time to go after the hardest target on earth.

  On the ground floor of the darkened office building he passed a security guard sprawled on the floor, arms and legs askew, his eyes wide open in death. Dead Eye shined his penlight over the body quickly as he headed for the exit and saw the rich bruising around the neck, a single band of color from a garrote’s bite.

  Dead Eye regarded the wound as he passed, acknowledging a job well done. The guard never saw him coming.

  But as he reached the lobby door, he allowed himself no more time to think of tonight’s action. There was much work to do in the days ahead, and he needed to focus all his attention on his new mission.