The Russian Bride

by Ed Kovacs

  It wouldn’t be the first time Viktor had shot himself in the foot, so to speak. The pattern had existed throughout his life, of being on the brink of some great achievement but then finding a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and do some stupid thing that ruined everything. It was only pure ruthlessness that had allowed him to become a KGB general; somehow, he hadn’t sabotaged that aspect of his life.

  Bennings! Why did he have to walk into my life three months ago? If the major hadn’t shown up in Moscow, the deceptions would have proceeded using Rodchenko’s bomb, a bomb that Viktor now knew worked just fine.

  Hopefully, Dennis had made him suffer before killing him. And that whore, that gryaznaya shlyukha, filthy slut, the scientist Yulana Petkova obviously didn’t love her daughter or she wouldn’t have helped the Americans. So … so her daughter, much as he hated to think about it, would be disappeared. He’d deal with that later, in Moscow, after things settled down.

  Thinking of Petkova’s daughter reminded him he must call Lily Bain from the Citation jet and tell her to kill Bennings’s sister and dispose of the body in such a way that it wouldn’t be found.

  Time to start tying up loose ends, which is why Dr. Rodchenko and his team were right now being driven to the Citation. They would accompany him as far as Havana, where they would perish in a tragic boating accident while enjoying a few well-deserved days in the sun.

  Movement to his left caused Viktor to turn his head, and he was startled to see …

  … another helicopter flying dangerously, crazy dangerously, close to his port side, the left side! The cockpit lights were on, and he clearly saw Kit Bennings holding the cyclic stick between his legs with one hand, while the other hand held a submachine gun nosing out of a small window opening. Orange muzzle flashes erupted from the gun, and, while he couldn’t hear them, Popov knew the bullets were ripping into his R66.

  He jerked the cyclic right, and his copter veered sharply starboard as he pushed the collective down with his left hand, sending the bird into a steep descent.

  So, it’s up to me, thought Viktor. Okay, I flew helicopters before you were born. Let’s play.

  He made a radical descent, leveling out just fifty feet above Las Vegas Boulevard—the heart of the Strip—as thousands of pedestrians gaped in awe, thinking it was some kind of free show.

  * * *

  Yulana tried to grab a handhold that wasn’t there.

  “What are you doing?” she said, louder than necessary.

  “I’m trying to follow him.”

  “But shouldn’t we be in the sky?”

  There was no argument from Kit on that point. As they zoomed over the Strip at 140 knots, Popov suddenly banked left just north of Harmon Avenue and threaded his way between two towers of the Cosmopolitan.

  Bennings went clammy as he focused every ounce of concentration on closely following the R66, but hopefully not into a casino high-rise.

  Popov emerged over the Bellagio’s front pool just as the computer-controlled fountains erupted in an orgasm of white froth to the sounds of “Viva Las Vegas.”

  The R66 flew so low it sliced through the columns of water, and Kit had no choice but to do the same, electrifying the tourist throngs. The helicopters banked hard right, crossed the Strip, and threaded the narrow space between the half-scale replica Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas and the hotel’s high-rise tower.

  They continued to bank hard right, splitting between more buildings before cutting back south over the Strip and then into the gracefully curving concrete and steel canyons created by the crescent-shaped high-rises of Aria and Vdara. They flew so close to the structures, Kit felt certain his rotors would chip window glass.

  And then, the Strip went dark.

  “No!” screamed Yulana, covering her eyes.

  The world outside the cockpit went black as a dungeon. All lights flicked off, save for car headlights on the streets below. Kit instantly backed off the throttle and maintained the mental picture in his mind of the building in front of him, until …

  … Backup generators kicked in all along the Strip and threw enough light for him to avoid slamming into a tram station stop. At a much slower speed, he gained altitude, carefully, but there was no sign of Popov in the R66.

  * * *

  Popov had flown a few blocks from Aria when two chip lights came on in the R66’s instrument panel—indications of imminent catastrophic failure of both the main gearbox and the engine. Oil pressure was plummeting, and the controls felt sluggish in Popov’s hand. Bennings’s gunfire had done damage. Viktor had to put the bird down right now.

  So he fought the controls and made a rough landing onto the roof of the closest building, and one of the tallest buildings in Las Vegas—the Palazzo Resort Hotel Casino. He shut down the helicopter and looked out. The electricity was off, but cell towers operated with four hours of battery backup, so he pulled out his cell, and made a quick call.

  * * *

  “There he is!”

  Yulana spotted the black copter on the all-white roof of Palazzo, just below them. As Kit descended, they saw the cockpit door open and Popov climb out holding the black valise.

  “Jen, Popov landed on the roof of Palazzo. We’re going in after him,” said Kit into his headset boom mike.

  “Look, he has a black case,” said Yulana.

  “He’s got the stolen goods, Jen. Notify Metro, and then you better clear out of the hangar, PDQ.”

  “Roger that,” said Jen.

  “We copy, too,” said Buzz. “We’ve got the RT-Seven. It landed in a soft, sandy area that was wet, probably from a leaking water main, so it’s fairly intact.”

  “Roger and out,” said Kit, concentrating on his landing. Careful to avoid rooftop clutter from air-conditioning units, crane booms, or antennae, Kit set the MD 530F down. Hopefully, the roof would support the weight, but it was too late to worry about that now.

  He slammed a new magazine into his Kel-Tec Sub-2000 and tore out of the cockpit.

  CHAPTER 41

  The rooftop steel door was locked! “Sookin syn!” screamed Viktor Popov as he spun away from his means of escape. Son of a bitch!

  He had a weapon, but it was inside his flight suit and he couldn’t remember which pocket he’d put it in. The valise felt heavy as he stumbled off the steel stairway and jogged toward the roof’s edge.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Bennings and Petkova running toward him. Damn, I’m getting old. No, be honest: I am old. Too old for these kinds of games anymore. Oh, well, it almost worked. I can only blame myself for the curse of Bennings.

  “Stop right there, Viktor.”

  Popov slowly turned; he stood less than two yards from the roof’s edge. The garish glow from billions of watts of light below shone dim now as the Strip sucked its juice from emergency generators. Likewise, his own hopes had dimmed considerably, and like much of the city right now, Viktor was reduced to operating on a backup plan.

  Regrettably, he couldn’t hold on to the valise and still do what he had to do. A simple bungee cord would solve his dilemma, but he didn’t have one.

  Bennings had the subgun pointed at Viktor’s heart. “I have no problem killing you.”

  “You have shown me, Major, that, like me, you have no problem killing, period.”

  “You kill innocent people. That’s just one of the differences between you and me.”

  “If you had taken my generous cash offer, nothing would have happened to your family.”

  “This might not be a good time to remind me of what has happened to my family.”

  “We all have to die sometime. Better to die rich,” said Popov as he flung the valise at Bennings, then turned and ran the two yards and dived off the edge of the roof into the dimness below.

  Yulana gasped, but only because she didn’t understand he was wearing a parachute.

  Kit ran to the edge and looked down toward Sands Avenue. In the subdued illumination he caught a fleeting glimpse of a floating bl
ack shadow that quickly disappeared around the corner of the building. Kit folded and holstered his subgun, then spoke into the two-way radio as he picked up the black valise.

  “Buzz, Viktor has—”

  Kit and Yulana were suddenly bathed in the beam of a ten-million-candlepower searchlight from a Metro PD police helicopter overhead.

  “Freeze! Police!” came a disembodied voice over the helicopter’s public address system.

  They stood still, but Kit took his finger off the radio’s transmit button.

  “Sounds like you have company,” said Buzz, over the radio.

  Kit looked to Yulana and made a slight gesture with his head toward the MD 530F. They both took a step toward the helicopter, but then half a dozen Metro coppers charged through the steel rooftop door that Popov had been unable to open and pointed pistols at them. The cops couldn’t see as Kit pressed the transmit button on his radio.

  “Don’t move. Just drop the bag!”

  “Okay. Please hold your fire.”

  Kit dropped the bag.

  “The man you want just jumped off the roof, and he was wearing a parachute,” yelled Kit.

  “Drop the radio!”

  Kit knew Buzz had heard the exchange of key information. “Okay, I will. Don’t shoot. Looks like it’s time to go to plan B.”

  He dropped the radio and faintly heard Buzz say, “Copy.”

  The Vegas officers closed in quickly. “You’re the man we want. Now get on your knees!”

  CHAPTER 42

  The wall-mounted air conditioner for room 314 droned on as Ron Franklin gingerly approached the door and grabbed the trash bag sitting outside. He retreated with it to the end of the walkway, where Bobby Chan stood waiting.

  Franklin held the bag open while Chan routed through it.

  “Three empty drink containers, three nearly empty bags of fries, and three burger wrappers.”

  “Unless Blondie is pregnant and she’s eating for two, I’m betting there are three people in there,” said Chan.

  “And one of them is Staci Bennings.”

  “We’re exposed here. Let’s go downstairs and I’ll call Metro for backup.”

  Just then, the power went out and the whole neighborhood went dark.

  “What the hell?!”

  There were no backup generators in this neck of the woods, just moonlight and spillover from headlights on West Tropicana. Chan pulled out his cell phone and used it as a flashlight. The detectives took a couple of steps toward the stairs.

  Then the door to 314 opened. Lily Bain looked down. There was enough light for her to see that the trash bag was gone. She then looked over to Chan and Franklin, who still held the trash bag.

  It’s not that cops have a certain look to them, but many of them do have a certain vibe, a certain presence. The way they walk, the way they carry themselves, the look in their eyes. When Lily’s eyes met Chan’s, she slammed the door shut.

  “She made us!” said Franklin.

  “Forget backup, we’re going in now or she might cap the girl!”

  They charged forward, and Franklin slammed his full weight into the flimsy, warped door, which popped right off its hinges. He went sprawling onto the floor of the small front room.

  Staci Bennings screamed a bloodcurdling, torturous scream of pain as Lily Bain dragged her deeper into the room toward the bedroom doorway. The scream sent chills up Bobby Chan’s massive arms as he stepped inside.

  As time stretched into slow motion, muzzle flashes lit up the kitchen area with what Chan instinctively knew to be brief tableaux of the last moments of life and the first moments of death. But for whom?

  He swept the room with a short burst of incredibly bright, blinding light from his SureFire. Franklin lay on the floor dazed, maybe shot.

  Gregory held a smoking pistol as he stood at the kitchen table, so Chan drilled him with three rounds from his .40 caliber Para Ordnance P16.

  Chan saw Staci Bennings elbow Lily Bain in the face, then spin away. He lit Lily up with his light as she raised her pistol in Staci’s direction. Strangely, the blonde flashed something of a cutie-pie smile.

  It wasn’t him shooting in the dark, it was some other being, some vengeful angel of justice that pulled his trigger seven times, sending all seven rounds home to center mass, but since she just stood there, motionless, the angel fired Chan’s weapon three more times, head shots this time, and Lily Bain’s mutilated corpse collapsed into a twisted heap in the first seconds of death.

  Chan knew he’d been shot—it was hard to miss a big fat guy standing in a doorway—but he walked in shadowy light toward the sounds of sobbing.

  “It’s okay, Miss Bennings. We’ve come to take you home.”

  “I’m sorry I screamed. Can you help me stand up? My knee is destroyed.”

  A light came on behind him. Franklin stood holding a small LED, shining it to the floor and not in Staci’s face—a face the coppers could see had two black eyes, a broken nose, smashed lips.

  “My wrist is broken, too.”

  “Blessed Mary, mother of God, what did they do to you?” asked Chan, bending down. He felt the burning now, in his left side, and his shirt felt sticky with blood, but he ignored it.

  “This is Detective Franklin, we need an ambulance at…”

  Chan tuned out Franklin, who was calling in the shooting. He glanced around the room shrouded in inky blackness. “You want to wait for the paramedics, or you want me to carry you out of this dump right now?”

  “Can you please take me now?”

  The big man lifted her as easily and gently as if she were a newborn. And maybe, somehow, she was.

  * * *

  Middle-of-the-night phone calls never bring good news. The secretary of state answered it, anyway.

  “Padilla,” she said, trying not to sound too groggy.

  “Your man Bennings has caused quite a stir in Las Vegas,” said DCI John Stout. “The EMP weapon he stole from Sandia was detonated over the city about forty-five minutes ago.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “We don’t make mistakes.”

  Like hell you don’t. “Bennings said Popov had a Russian-built e-bomb.”

  “I recall you had no proof of that, but we have very good video of Major Bennings and the Russian spy Yulana Petkova stealing the RT-Seven, don’t we? And the damage was limited to a two-square-block area. A Russian weapon would most likely have left a significantly larger footprint.”

  “That’s speculation. And neither of us, John, has any proof right now telling us exactly which weapon was used,” retorted Padilla. “What’s the situation on the ground there?”

  “Fluid. But the public will never learn an e-bomb was detonated. The bad guys hit a private storage vault and apparently made off with a massive trove of diamonds. I’ll brief the president first thing in the morning.”

  “What about Major Bennings?”

  “He was captured. Holding the diamonds. He’s being detained at Nellis for now. I’ll be demanding the army rescind the offer of amnesty. Good night.”

  Padilla turned off the phone and shook her head. There would be no return to sleep, even fitful sleep, so she got out of bed, pulled on a robe, and padded down the stairs of her Georgetown home toward the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 43

  Bennings knew that army units sometimes trained at Nellis Air Force Base, but he had never taken part in any training there. The army had their own small post tucked away at Nellis, which Kit hadn’t been aware of. He was aware of it now.

  He sat with his hands handcuffed behind his back at a Formica table. His position made the flesh wound to his upper arm hurt, but just a little. Bright fluorescent lights shone overhead in a drab room that looked like it was strictly for meetings, not for interrogations or prisoner detention. Yulana had been taken to a different room.

  All of his belongings had been taken from him, but the thing he most needed now was a handcuff key. He’d been in the room for seven minutes and was fairly
certain there was no hidden video camera observing him. So he stood up and walked to a table against the wall that held some basic office supplies, but he didn’t see what he was looking for.

  He crossed to another table on the other side of the room. A few magazines, a file folder, some kind of report stapled together and then some pages held with a paper clip. He turned his back to the pages, slipped off the paper clip, then returned to his seat.

  Within two minutes he’d picked the handcuffs’ lock with the paper clip. He quickly rifled the drawers of a desk and found scissors and a roll of duct tape, which he pocketed.

  The angle of the door orientation to the room and furniture arrangement was such that a person entering the room would have to step inside before seeing that Bennings’s chair was empty. So he moved to the side of the door and waited. With luck, one of the MPs who had brought him here would come in to check on him before the serious boys in black suits arrived. He needed to get out, sooner rather than later. He decided to wait five minutes before forcing the issue and venturing out into the hallway.

  One minute later the door opened.

  Most people are right-handed. So most people use their right hand, their gun hand, to turn a doorknob and push open a door, meaning their gun hand is engaged.

  Kit reached around, grabbed the hand on the doorknob, and wrenched it into a wristlock while pulling the body into the room. He had a female MP, a brunette lieutenant, and as she went down to the floor, he pulled her 9mm Beretta free from its holster.

  “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered while standing over her, applying the painful wristlock with only his right hand. Using his left hand, he eased back the slide on the Beretta, confirming there was a round in the chamber.