Blood Play (Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan)

by Pendleton, Don

  The Russian had already contacted Mikhaylov to advise him of his pending arrival and ask that one of his men pick him up once he landed. It had been a strained conversation, due not only to their mutual animosity but also the fact that news accounts coming out of Taos had confirmed Mikhaylov’s suspicion that Petenka Tramelik had been killed along with four other SVR agents after facilitating Vishnevsky’s escape from the airfield. This on the heels of word that Melido Diaz had been taken into custody had left Mikhaylov convinced that Vishnevksy’s arrival, rather than reversing the string of setbacks to Operation Zenta, had only served to accelerate the plan’s unraveling. Things had come to a head when Vishnevsky had been advised to kill both Vanya and the pilot before he jumped. Vishnevsky himself had considered the option but, sensing a power play on Mikhaylov’s part, he’d balked, countering with concerns that the pilotless jet might crash prematurely near the farm, tipping off its location to the authorities. He’d dismissed Mikhaylov’s argument that the jet could fly indefinitely on autopilot, insisting it would better serve their needs if the pilot were to change course once he’d jumped and lead any pursuing aircraft on a wild-goose chase. Mikhaylov had accused him of being too soft to kill his own people when necessary and hung up, leaving Vishnevsky to wonder if, in fact, someone would be sent to meet him once he’d touched down.

  When he felt the plane descending, Vishnevsky ventured to the nearest portal and glanced out at the verdant landscape below. They’d just passed over the headwaters of the Rio Pecos, and the pilot had begun to veer westward. Ahead in the distance the Russian could see signs of development in a scalloped flatland just beyond the forest. It had to be Pecos, Vishnevsky thought, which would put them just five miles east of their target.

  Almost there, the Russian thought.

  “I’ve been thinking about your offer,” Vanya interrupted. She’d put down her drink and moved away from the galley to within a few feet of Vishnevsky. Gone was her sense of playful mirth, replaced by a look Vishnevsky immediately recognized as naked greed.

  “What about it?” Vishnevsky said. He’d offered Vanya and the pilot each half a million dollars to carry out a diversion once he’d jumped, assuring them they’d be able to collect it even if they were arrested because he’d secure them a lawyer capable of having any charges dropped on the grounds they’d been hostages during the standoff in Taos.

  “We wouldn’t have gotten away if I hadn’t bought us enough time for your men to knock that truck out of our way,” Vanya contended.

  Vishnevsky stared at the woman whose passions he’d shared less than an hour ago. Now that she’d served her purpose he was in no mood for theatrics.

  “What do you want, an acting award to go along with the half million?” he said.

  Vanya smiled. “Well, it was quite a performance, if I have to say so myself. The same with what happened before we landed.”

  Vishnevsky bristled but before he could respond the pilot interjected, “Get ready, we’re nearly there.”

  “I’m ready,” Vishnevsky told him.

  He turned back to Vanya. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but I don’t have time for this.”

  Vanya cut to the chase. “I think I deserve a whole million, not just half.”

  “Oh, do you?” Vishnevsky retorted. “Here, let me get my checkbook.”

  Vishnevsky reached past his parachute straps and quickly drew the GSh-18 pistol from his web holster. Before Vanya could react he calmly put a bullet through the woman’s heart, then brusquely shoved her to one side when she fell toward him. Holstering the weapon, he headed for the cabin door and called over his shoulder to the pilot.

  “Now your story will be more convincing,” he told the other man. “And if you do what I told you, you can have her share.”

  Glorieta, New Mexico

  FRANKLIN COLT HAD BEEN in the walk-in freezer for just over an hour, but it seemed forever since he’d left his wife’s side. He was seated in the middle of the frigid storage space, which was half the size of the room where he’d been held captive earlier. Like then, he was bound to a chair, this time not with rope but duct tape. Every ten minutes, Yuri Reinhart had entered from outside, armed with his subgun, and parted the dangling strips of thick plastic separating the main freezer compartment from a smaller, slightly warmer antechamber. The Russian was checking to make sure the battery charge operating Colt’s thermal armor was still holding up. Each time Reinhart had felt compelled to make some lame joke about Colt’s being used as a human guinea pig to test how long the suit could effectively ward off subfreezing temperatures, and the next time he entered was no exception.

  “You haven’t turned into a Popsicle yet, I see.”

  “I have an idea,” Colt told the man. “I’m not gagged, so why don’t I just call out to you when the suit gives out and I start to freeze to death?”

  “What, you don’t enjoy my visits?”

  “I’ve already said I’m willing to talk about what I know,” Colt said.

  Reinhart smiled. “Yes, but you were a little late with that. Besides, the part about letting your family go free first was what we call a deal breaker.”

  “Those are my terms,” Colt said.

  “Suit yourself,” Reinhart told him. “Actually, I think our boss fancies the notion of seeing your wife put on the hoist whether you talk or not.”

  Enraged, Colt tried to bolt from his chair but managed to only send himself teetering sideways into a waist-high stack of cardboard boxes filled with shrink-wrapped javelina cuts. Reinhart stepped forward and righted Colt, shaking his head disapprovingly.

  “You know what they say,” he joked, “‘You break it, you bought it.’”

  “Go to hell,” Colt seethed.

  “I’ll bet it’s a little warmer there than here.”

  Reinhart turned and passed back through the plastic curtain, leaving Colt alone to resume his icy confinement. For all his anger, Colt was amazed at how effective his friend’s suit had been in warding off the cold. Except for his nose and cheeks, he felt, head to toe, every bit as warm as he’d been back in the farmhouse. No wonder the Russians were so interested in the armor. What better means to give its infantry a decisive edge should they stage a winter offensive against an enemy less equipped to deal with the cold.

  As he sat in the cold recalling Reinhart’s taunt about Mikhaylov placing his wife on the same hoist he’d used to carve the javelina, Colt’s frustration mounted and once again he began what had been a long and futile attempt to wrestle free of the duct tape. It had been twenty minutes since his last effort and he fully expected it to be another wasted exercise, but in that time the protracted exposure to the cold had produced a result neither he nor his captors had anticipated. The normally malleable duct tape had not only hardened in places where it wasn’t in direct contact with the thermal suit, it had also turned brittle enough to give way under Colt’s continued wriggling.

  First he’d freed his right hand, then his left, and soon Colt had also managed to break loose the tape securing his ankles to the chair legs. Dumbfounded, he flexed his limbs and quietly stood, pondering his next move. He’d taken a step toward the thick curtain when he checked himself and stopped, staring through it at the outer door. As he turned and stared at the boxes he’d crashed into moments before, a plan took shape in his mind. He thought it through, then slowly stepped back and lowered himself onto the chair, assuming the same position as before he’d broken free.

  Reinhart would be returning in less than ten minutes to check on him. For once, Colt was looking forward to the visit.

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  AARON KURTZMAN’S COMP-LINK access to the Taos Police Department had kept him first in line for news on the aftermath of the standoff at the town’s Municipal Airport. Once he’d procured a description of the men who’d been killed fleeing the scene, he knew that his short list of likely masterminds behind the Russian machinations in New Mexico had just been cut by half.

  �
�Petenka Tramelik was the last to go down,” he told his fellow cybermates, who’d already been briefed as to Lyons’s role in the pursuit. They were all still entrenched at their Annex facility battle stations. Price was on hand, as well, fielding another call on her headset, while Brognola had gone to a private room down the hall to arrange for his long-distance bartering session with the Bolivian detainee in Santa Fe, whose true identity had just been revealed as Melido Diaz.

  “The Land Rover’s in his name with a Taos address,” Kurtzman wrapped up, “so I’m guessing he was point man there, answering to Mikhaylov.”

  “I assume that address will turn out to be their safe house,” Huntington Wethers ventured.

  “Safe guess, but we’ll know any minute,” Kurtzman replied. “There’s a SWAT team en route with aerial backup.”

  “What about Carl?” Tokaido asked.

  “He’s up in Orson’s speed bird chasing Vishnevsky,” Kurtzman said. “The Citation has a head start and is twice as fast, though, so he’s got his work cut out.”

  Price had just gotten off the phone. “If we’ve got a radar track on the Cessna,” she interjected. “Grimaldi’s free to help with an intercept.”

  “Perfect,” Kurtzman said. “Let me get their position.”

  “Striker got the balloon down?” Carmen Delahunt asked.

  Price nodded. “Shiraldi’s being airlifted to the same facility where they’re treating Lowe. It sounds touch-and-go for both of them.”

  “And this Captain Brown?”

  “Jail-bound along with the cop who was with her. Russell Combs.”

  “They’ll get a different cell from the goon who’s ratting on them, I take it,” Tokaido said.

  “I would hope so.” Price changed the subject. “I managed to reach Fisk before he headed for Taos. He’s decided to stay put and ask BIA to put Roaming Bison into receivership while Global Holdings goes under investigation.”

  “Let’s hope they bring some bloodhounds to sniff around the nuke plant,” Delahunt said as she nodded a greeting to Brognola, who’d just rejoined the group.

  “I’m sure that’ll be top priority,” Price said, “That along with tracking down Mikhaylov.”

  “I have a prettty good idea where to find him,” Brognola said.

  All eyes turned to the SOG director.

  “You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Delahunt told him. “You got Diaz to spill?”

  Brognola nodded. “He was on his way to report to Mikhaylov just outside some town called Glorieta.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Glorieta, New Mexico

  When Frederik Mikhaylov had claimed the back room of the milk shed as his personal quarters, the only thing he’d left unchanged was the east wall, which a previous owner had adorned with a collection of New Mexico state license plates. There had originally been only eighteen, but thanks to his access to the GHC-run salvage yard in Santa Fe, Mikhaylov had nearly tripled the collection to fifty-two. All but a handful of the plates contained the state’s nickname, and as the Butcher stared at the repeated phrase he let out a sudden laugh that was steeped far more in rage and irony than any sense of amusement.

  Hoisting his hip flask, Mikhaylov toasted the collection.

  “To the Land of Enchantment!”

  Mikhaylov drained the small container, then hurled it across the room, knocking down several of the license plates. The Russian had forgone all discretion and dragged his vodka supply from the closet to his desk. He reached down and grabbed the nearest bottle, then sat back and cracked the seal. He raised the bottle to his lips and began to guzzle, intent on drinking as much as it would take to blot out the sense that he was as marked for doom as the operation.

  The brief euphoria Mikhaylov had felt when Tramelik had come by earlier with Colt’s telltale cell phone had been long shattered by the steady bombardment of grim news from nearly every other quarter. So much had gone wrong in just the past hour he had difficulty keeping track of it all. Evgenii Danilov and Alek Repin conspiring against him; Melido Diaz in custody, no doubt ready to turn on his benefactors in exchange for leniency; Petenka Tramelik—his right-hand man and the nearest to a friend he’d ever known—slain in the process of allowing that scumbag Vishnevsky a chance to lay claim to all Mikhaylov had spend the past few years working toward. Those were only the first things that came to mind, the tip of an iceberg the Russian feared would soon include confirmation that something had gone awry with the plan to execute Cherkow in Algodones and scapegoat him for at least a portion of the violent maelstrom that over the past few hours had turned The Land of Enchantment into a veritable war zone.

  Mikhaylov had swilled nearly a third of the bottle when someone knocked on the outer door.

  “It’s open,” Mikhaylov said, his voice slurred. He set the bottle on the desk rather than make any attempt to conceal it.

  Cheslav Abramowicz, the only agent besides Cherkow to survive the reservation shootout, opened the door and did his best to ignore the alcoholic fumes that greeted him.

  “You wanted to be notified once Colt had been on ice for over an hour.”

  “He’s still alive, I take it.” Mikhaylov stared at Abramowicz as if daring the sniper to comment on his inebriation.

  “The suit’s still working,” the other man replied. “Reinhart wants to know if we should test it awhile longer.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Mikhaylov said. “Get Colt out of the suit. I’ll be there shortly.”

  “Yes, sir.” Abramowicz allowed his gaze to drift briefly to the vodka-filled case at Mikhaylov’s feet, then turned and left, gently closing the door behind him.

  “You’d have a drink or two if you were in my position!” Mikhaylov snapped once the other man was beyond earshot.

  The Butcher took two more long swallows, then tossed the half-emptied bottle in with the others and slowly rose to his feet. He felt calm and composed, a burden lifted from his shoulders. He was no longer interested in interrogating his prisoner. To him, it no longer mattered who else the Indian might have gone to with the information he’d collected on his cell phone. None of it mattered anymore. All Mikhaylov was interested in now was seeing to it that Colt paid for triggering the chain reaction that had undermined the Russian’s best-laid plans and sown the seeds for his downfall.

  Before leaving his quarters, Mikhaylov holstered his Makarov pistol, then sheathed the skinning knife he’d used earlier on the javelina. He figured he’d start with Colt’s wife, and then his son, gutting them both on the hoist while the Indian watched. They’d both be alive when the knife first went in, and when it came Colt’s turn, he’d be alive as well, forced to stare into the Butcher’s eyes as he was subjected to the same grisly fate.

  AFTER SPEAKING WITH Abramowicz, Yuri Reinhart once more entered the walk-in freezer, clutching his Bizon 2 submachine gun, glad this was the last time he’d have to subject himself to the sudden drop in temperature. As he approached the dangling curtains he stopped a moment. It appeared the test may have gone on a few minutes too long. Colt was slumped in the chair, his head bowed limply to one side, not moving.

  “It’s just as well,” Reinhart mumbled, parting the curtains. “I’m out of jokes.”

  Colt suddenly sprang to life and flicked his right wrist out from behind his back, letting fly the frozen javelina steak he’d taken from one of the storage boxes. The rock-hard slab caught Reinhart above the bridge of his nose, striking with enough force to knock the man out. Colt lunged from the chair and caught his tormentor as he teetered forward, then eased him to the floor and grabbed the fallen subgun. Untethered, the prisoner passed through the curtains and paused before the closed door leading to the outside world. He had no idea what would await him when he threw the door open, but one way or another he was determined to rescue his family and flee their captors or die trying.

  DESPITE MIKHAYLOV’S LONG-STANDING tolerance for vodka, the Russian’s system was ill-equipped to handle the volume he’d just ingested.
He’d only made it as far as his Hummer, parked a few yards from the milk shed, when he was forced to lean against the vehicle to catch his bearings. His head was swimming and his legs felt as if they’d turned to rubber. Before him, the farm grounds swayed and wavered in the brutal sunlight like some uncertain mirage. He saw two Camrys parked outside the barn, two Abramowiczses standing near the walk-in freezer, two skinned javelinas roasting on spits near twin engine hoists. Mikhaylov blinked but was still seeing double so he closed his eyes a moment and leaned across the Hummer’s front hood, drawing in a deep breath. He felt an urge to sleep and was giving in to it when his insides rebelled against the alcohol and he abruptly reeled away from the SUV, dropping to his knees as the vodka came up on him.

  This is a good thing, he thought drunkenly as he vomited onto the ground before him. In all, he was racked by three such convulsions before the purge ran its course. Weakened, his stomach aching, Mikhaylov eased back and sat beside the Hummer, his back to the front quarterpanel. He was feeling much better.

  A flurry of shouts sounded across the grounds, followed by the excruciating sound of gunfire. Mikhaylov glanced up, his vision cleared, and saw Franklin Colt standing outside the walk-in freezer in the thermal suit, a submachine gun in his hands. He’d already downed Abramowicz and was trading shots with two armed men rushing out of the nearby barn. It looked to Mikhaylov as if both men had nailed Colt in the chest, and it was only when the Indian returned fire, clearly unscathed, that the Russian recalled the suit’s amored capacities.