by Vince Flynn
According to his FSB informants, the village was inhabited by approximately ten families, some of which included children. Focused on hacking and Internet scams, they weren’t involved in any activity that could create territorial disputes, and they paid significant protection money to both organized crime and the police. Combined with the remote setting, this suggested—but by no means guaranteed—that they would have light security.
“I’ll go in using the road,” he said as his men began piling out of the vehicle. It was the most straightforward of the three attack plans they’d devised. Unfortunately, it was also the most dangerous. With visibility so limited, though, the risks were outweighed by the benefits. Every moment of delay increased the potential for a confrontation with the Americans.
Gadai started the snowcat and propelled it forward. His men would follow at a distance that allowed them to remain in darkness.
At first, he thought the entrance to the village was completely unguarded, but then he spotted a man running toward him. He was wearing mismatched down pants and jacket, both in garish colors that made him stand out against the white background. The rifle over his shoulder hung up as he clawed at it, finally coming free and allowing him to aim the weapon in Gadai’s general direction. It was a pathetic display that confirmed his suspicions about security. No doubt the men of the village took turns on watch with no regard to ability or training.
Gadai slid the driver’s-side window down and shouted a greeting in Russian as the man cautiously approached. Satisfied that he posed little threat, Gadai turned his attention to the small enclave beyond his windshield. The photos he’d seen appeared to be accurate. The village formed a rough U shape, with four buildings on each side of a snow-packed street and one at the end. All were two stories, constructed primarily of local timber and metal sheeting. A single snowcat and various snowmobiles were visible but showed little sign of use. None could be dug out quickly enough to be used as escape vehicles and fleeing into the wilderness on foot would be suicide.
When the man got to within a few meters, he called out to Gadai. The Pakistani smiled in an attempt to put the man at ease, but also in reaction to his own good luck. He possessed only a single blurry photo of Pavel Katdsyn and had assumed that he would have to question the guard out of fear that it could be him. The man’s pure-blood Asian features made that unnecessary.
Gadai lifted the silenced pistol from his lap, aiming it through the open window and squeezing the trigger. The round hit the man directly between the eyes and he crumpled to the snow without so much as a whimper.
Gadai’s team appeared a moment later, running past the snowcat and fanning out in a well-coordinated pattern. He jumped down to the snow and sprinted toward the first building on the left as his men began accessing the others.
The door was unlocked and he went inside, entering an open room with threadbare sofas and a kitchen stacked with dirty dishes. There was a set of stairs to the left and he began to ascend, dragging a hand against the wall as a guide in the darkness. He heard a muffled scream from outside and picked up his pace, concerned that it might wake the house’s occupants.
His instincts were right. When he slipped into a room on the upper floor, he found a man desperately searching an old chest of drawers for a weapon. He spun when Gadai stepped on a loose floorboard and instinctively threw an arm in front of his face. He was wearing only a pair of briefs, but his long hair provided a convenient grip point that Gadai used to drag him down the stairs and out into the snow.
He began to babble in Russian, but Gadai ignored him, scanning the upper windows of the buildings for any threat. There was nothing, though. His men had control of the situation and were marching people out of their homes at gunpoint. Men, women, children, and even infants appeared, some fully dressed and others naked or in bedclothes. His team lined them up on their knees, standing behind them with weapons at the ready. Some were shouting angrily, others pleading. The children wailed, already shivering as their skin reddened in the frigid temperatures.
“Who here speaks English?” Gadai said.
They all looked at each other but no one answered. Normally, he would have just stood there and let them freeze but he had neither the time nor patience for that. Despite his heavy clothing, he himself was beginning to suffer from the bitter climate.
“I’ll ask only one more time. Who here speaks English?”
“What do you want?”
Gadai turned toward the man who had spoken. He was fully dressed but his daughter, probably no older than six, was wearing only a long T-shirt. He had wrapped his arms around her for warmth and was trying to quiet her sobbing.
“I want Pavel Katdsyn. Are you him?”
“No. Pavel isn’t here. He left weeks ago.”
For a career criminal, he was an almost laughably bad liar.
Gadai raised his pistol and aimed at the girl. The man tried to put himself between her and the weapon, but the cold made him a fraction too slow.
CHAPTER 53
RAPP’S team had abandoned their snowmobiles about a mile back and were now making slow progress through the wilderness on skis. Gaps had formed in the clouds, creating intermittent splashes of stars. Not much light, but with the snow reflecting it, there was enough to proceed without night-vision equipment.
Since this frozen landscape was fundamentally indistinguishable from Charlie Wicker’s backyard, Rapp had put him on point. McGraw was breaking his own trail thirty-five feet left and Coleman was keeping roughly the same interval to Rapp’s right. Just ahead, following unsteadily in Wick’s tracks, was a very unhappy Marcus Dumond.
Despite the young hacker being dressed head-to-toe in white, his outline was clearly visible. When it started to waver, Rapp swore under his breath and accelerated to a near run. Once again, he was too late. Dumond tipped right, overcompensated, and ended up buried in the deep snow. When Rapp pulled alongside, Dumond was thrashing like a drowning man, digging himself in deeper in an attempt to keep his nose and mouth clear.
“Marcus, stop moving!” Rapp said in a harsh whisper. “This stuff’s like quicksand.”
“What am I doing here?” he whined, sounding like he was on the verge of breaking into tears. “I’m freezing and I’m exhausted. Just leave me. Just leave me here to die.”
There had been no choice but to bring Dumond along. Coleman was probably the best computer guy they had on the ops side, and he still hadn’t fully figured out texting.
“Spare me the melodrama, Marcus. Now grab my pole.”
Dumond threw out a mitten-clad hand and after a few tries, Rapp managed to get him back on his skis. “Slow and steady, kid. Okay? If you feel like you’re starting to lose your balance again, stop before it’s too late to get it back. Understand?”
“Mitch, I—”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
He gave Dumond a full minute’s lead before starting out again. To his right, he could see Coleman pacing him. Wick and McGraw were out of visual range, but they would have stopped, too, in order to keep the intervals he’d stipulated.
Miraculously, the next ten minutes passed without any more problems. The wind had died down and the snow absorbed sound with startling efficiency. Beyond the hiss of his skis, the only thing audible was the occasional dull whup of snow dropping from overloaded tree branches.
Rapp came to an abrupt halt when the silence was broken by the faint echo of a gunshot. “Marcus, stop!” he said into his throat mike. “Crouch down on your skis and don’t move.”
There was no follow-up shot and all his men checked in safe. After staying motionless for almost a minute, it seemed clear that whoever had fired wasn’t aiming at them.
“Wick. Can you get a bearing?”
“Hard to say with the acoustics but I’m pretty sure it came from the village. It’s dead ahead less than five hundred yards.”
Rapp accelerated, stopping next to Dumond to pull him back into a standing position. “Stay. Ju
st stand here and don’t do anything.”
“What? Alone? Are you crazy?”
“You’ll be fine.”
“What if . . . What if something happens to you? What if you don’t come back?”
“That’s not going to happen, Marcus.”
“But what if it does?”
Patience wasn’t Rapp’s finest trait and what little he had was starting to fail him. “Then you’re probably going to die.”
He took off, staying in Wicker’s tracks and leaving a speechless Dumond to himself. Coleman was out of sight now, having headed southeast while McGraw went north. After a hard four-minute effort, Rapp saw Wicker’s track disappear into a dense stand of snow-encapsulated trees. He released his bindings and covered his skis before half-crawling, half-swimming into a depression beneath trees.
He found Wicker lying partially buried with an eye to his rifle scope. The long silencer on the end of his barrel was covered in a silicone sleeve to prevent heat shimmer from interfering with the optics.
They were at the western edge of the village as planned. Its inhabitants—twenty-five or thirty in all—were in the middle of the street in various stages of undress. Most were on their knees being guarded by three armed men in white jumpsuits identical to the ones his team wore. The one exception was a child lying in the snow with half her head missing.
Of more immediate concern was the armed man running north, dragging along with him a man wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts. Pavel Katdsyn.
“What have we got?” Rapp whispered.
“Pakistanis,” Wicker said. “You can always tell by the mustaches.”
“Four tangos visible from our position,” Rapp said into his throat mike. “Three in the square and one running west with our potential target. Bruno, give me a sitrep.”
“I have eyes on your runners. They’re headed for the building at the end of the road and they’re going to make it before I can get an angle. No other movement. Windows look clear but it seems unlikely that they don’t have anyone up there.”
“Scott?”
“I’m at the entrance to the village. One dead local and one armed tango. Judging by the tracks coming out of a snowcat, I make it six men total.”
That left one tango unaccounted for and it wasn’t hard to guess where he was. To his left, Rapp saw the two men disappear through a door in the building at the far edge of the village. It wouldn’t take Katdsyn long to access those files. Most likely a matter of minutes.
“Scott. Do you have a shot at the man guarding the entrance?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Take it and move into a position to cover the east-facing windows.”
“Give me a minute and a half. Two at the most.”
“Bruno. How long to get into position to cover the west-facing windows?”
“The same.”
“Do it.”
Rapp pointed to the men guarding the civilians in the street. “Can you take the two on the right, Wick?”
“No problem.”
Rapp slid the rifle off his back and lined up on the head of the man to the left. He was scanning the area for anything unusual, no longer having to pay much attention to his prisoners. The intense cold was doing his job for him. A number of the children had slipped into unconsciousness and their parents looked like they were on the verge of doing the same. Another fifteen minutes and they’d all be dead.
Coleman’s voice crackled over his earpiece. “Tango’s down and I’m in position.”
A few seconds passed before McGraw came on. “I’m ready.”
“Okay, then. On three.”
Rapp counted them off and then squeezed the rifle’s trigger. His target’s head exploded along with the head of the man next to him. Rapp immediately dropped the rifle and vaulted the low snowbank. He made it to the street just as the third Pakistani was swinging his rifle into position. Rapp ignored the threat and sprinted up the road. A moment later the puff of Wicker’s silenced rifle sounded and he knew without looking back that there were no tangos left alive behind him.
Rapp retrieved his Glock from beneath his jacket and made it about a hundred yards before a cloud of snow and ice kicked up to his left. As anticipated, the Pakistani assault team had put a man in the upper floor of one of the buildings. Fortunately, the sniper had underestimated Rapp’s speed and failed to lead him enough. Wicker had turned Rapp on to a pair of Dynafit ski boots that didn’t weigh much more than his running shoes. They allowed him to hold a faster pace on the hard-packed snow than many college sprinters could on a track.
The shooter wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, though.
The sound of shattering glass reached him as he continued to run along the fronts of the buildings. Coleman’s voice came over his earpiece a moment later. “Sniper’s down.”
Rapp slid on his hip, ending up behind a pillar bowing visibly under the weight of an overhang piled with snow. He crawled to the door the two men had disappeared through and found it unlocked. Before entering, he glanced back into the street. It was as if nothing had happened. The locals were still slowly freezing to death, watched over by three armed men in white jumpsuits. The only difference was that now those men were his.
Rapp would have liked to give the order to take at least the children to safety, but it was impossible. The man holding Pavel Katdsyn would be unlikely to miss something that obvious. If he looked out the window—and he would—Rapp couldn’t afford for him to see anything but exactly what he expected to see.
CHAPTER 54
GADAI shoved his prisoner through the door and watched him fall to the floor. Pavel Katdsyn curled into a fetal position on the warm surface, pulling his hands to his bare chest in an attempt to warm them. His feet appeared to be completely numb, making it unlikely that he would try to escape.
“Your computers,” Gadai said, scanning the room and finding only telephone headsets set up on desks piled with paper files. “Where are they?”
“Up . . .” was all Katdsyn could get out. His teeth were chattering audibly and his shivering had become so violent that he appeared to be in the throes of convulsions.
Gadai forced the man to stand. He couldn’t walk on his own, making it necessary for the Pakistani to support much of his weight as they ascended a set of stairs. Normally, he would have made his prisoner go first as a shield. In this case, though, Gadai would have to rely on his skill and the bulletproof vest beneath his parka. Until the Russian decrypted Rickman’s files, he had to be protected at all costs.
Despite the darkness, entering the second floor with any stealth was made impossible by the whimpering man. Gadai dropped him on the landing and slapped the light switch before stepping out with his Beretta held in front of him. The upper story was a single open space similar to the one below, but lined with computer equipment. He dragged Katdsyn to the nearest terminal and propped him in a chair.
“You’ve been decrypting and releasing a set of files sent to you by a law firm in Rome. Do you know the files I’m speaking of?”
Katdsyn managed only a weak nod and Gadai pressed his gun to the side of the man’s head. “Speak!”
“Yes!” Katdsyn said, his voice shaking with panic and cold. “I know them.”
“I want the encryption key.”
Katdsyn hesitated. “My people. You have to release them. Let them leave here and I’ll give you whatever you want.”
Gadai had been through this scenario already with Maxim Durov and his patience had run out. He reached for a letter opener next to the computer but then hesitated. While it would be a pleasure to ram it into the man’s leg and start making threats, Katdsyn was already compromised by hypothermia. If he lost consciousness, it would accomplish nothing but cause further delays.
He pulled Katdsyn from his chair and forced him to the window at the far end of the room.
“Look!”
The Russian tried to turn away but Gadai shoved his face into the icy glass. The people of the villa
ge were just barely visible through the falling snow. A few were still on their knees but most had collapsed at the feet of the men keeping watch over them.
“They’re dying, Pavel. Not an hour from now. Not in ten minutes. They’re dying now. And you can stop it. Only you.”
“I—”
Gadai twisted the man’s head around and stared directly into his eyes. “I don’t care about you. I don’t care about your people. Give me what I want and you can go to them. You can get them to shelter and care for them. But do it now, Pavel. Because it may already be too late for the children.”
Katdsyn pulled away and this time Gadai allowed it. He watched the Russian stagger back to the computer and peck awkwardly at the keyboard with dead hands. It took an excruciating two minutes before the screen suddenly filled with a solid block of nonsensical characters.
“That’s it,” Katdsyn said. “That’s the encryption key.”
Gadai shoved him to the floor and sat, peeling off his jacket as the sweat broke across his forehead. He pulled a thumb drive from a pocket in his vest and inserted it into the computer’s USB slot. When he tried to open one of the Rickman files it contained, the screen prompted him for a password. He pasted Katdsyn’s key into the window and held his breath. A moment later, the individual documents appeared on the screen.
Gadai opened one, skimming a dossier relating to a CIA mole inside the Chinese defense ministry. A second file opened with similar ease and contained a detailed account of the illegal rendition of a French citizen living in Yemen.
His mouth went dry and he leaned back for a moment, staring at the screen. It was done. With the proper cunning and the unwitting help of Carl Ferris, there was no limit to the damage Taj could do to the Americans.
“I’ve given it to you!” Katdsyn said. “Have your men take my people inside.”
Gadai ignored him and opened a browser, navigating to Gmail on the village’s satellite link. He typed in the address Taj had given him and pasted the key into it. After pressing the SEND button, he leaned back in his chair again. Katdsyn was struggling to get to his feet, pleading in broken English, but Gadai was consumed by the words on the screen.