The Assassin

by Stephen Coonts

  The uniformed guard opened the door for Rolf; he stepped outside into the evening gloom. The temperature was still well above freezing. The sidewalks were shoveled, the icicles on the building were dripping copiously, and slush filled the gutters.

  He looked around nervously. Away from the safety of the office, outside in raw nature, with water and wind and slush and people moving randomly, Oleg’s warning about assassins seemed more real, more possible. He set off along the sidewalk toward the parking garage that held his car as he glanced warily at pedestrians and passing cars.

  Really, in the twenty-first century, in safe, civilized Switzerland, in this ancient old city by the lake, the nightmare of killers and murderers and religious fanatics seemed like something from one of those trailers for a horror movie that he would never watch. A lot of people did watch the horror films, of course, to be titillated, because even they could not accept at a gut level the fact that the evil depicted on the screen might be a part of the world in which they lived.

  The banker paused at the door to the garage. Took a deep breath and opened it. The stairwell was empty, the overhead light burning brightly. He climbed the stairs, his leather shoes making grinding noises with every step, noises that reverberated inside that concrete stairwell.

  His car was on the third level, right where he always parked. In fact, the parking place had a number and was reserved for him: The bank rented it by the year.

  No one was in sight amid the cars when he came out of the stairwell. About half the spaces were empty. He forced himself to walk calmly toward his car. He already had the keys in his hand, his thumb on the button of the fob that would open the locks.

  His eyes moved restlessly, looking for a lurking figure, anything out of the ordinary. Of course he saw nothing.

  Fear is a corrosive emotion, and Gnadinger knew that. In time he would become more and more jumpy, more and more nervous, as the acid of fear worked on his nerves. He knew that, too.

  Approaching the car Gnadinger pushed the button on the fob. He heard the click, audible and distinctive in that concrete mausoleum, as the door locks released.

  Then he realized that someone might have put a bomb in his car. He stopped, stood frozen, waiting, wondering what he should do. He realized that he was holding his breath, waiting for the bomb to explode.

  It didn’t, of course. He stood there in that ill-lit, dingy garage until he felt foolish; then he opened the door to the car, the interior lights illuminated just as they should, and he climbed in. Closed the doors and locked them and put on his seat belt. Inserted the key into the ignition.

  The bomb might be wired to explode when he turned the ignition! Several seconds passed before a wave of disgust washed over him and he turned the key. The engine caught immediately and the vehicle’s headlights came on automatically. So did the CD player, from which emanated the lively tones of classic jazz, which he had listened to on the way to work this morning.

  As he put the transmission into drive and inched out of his space, Rolf Gnadinger chastised himself for being a fool. Oleg had spooked him, and his imagination had done the rest.

  Yet the killer or killers might come one of these days. Someone had murdered Tchernychenko’s aide, and Wolfgang Zetsche, and Isolde Petrou’s son. Someone from the Kremlin? Perhaps the Kremlin had ordered Surkov’s murder—he had immediately assumed that when he first heard the news, but why would the Kremlin want Zetsche dead? Or young Petrou, a French diplomat?

  Terrorists, he thought. Yes, indeed. Fanatics. Throat-slitters. Suicidal bombers and mass murderers.

  He needed a professional bodyguard, he told himself again. Someone trained to be watchful for all these threats. The bodyguard could worry about all this stuff and Gnadinger wouldn’t have to.

  The traffic was moderate at this hour and threw up sheets of spray that the wipers had difficulty with. Gnadinger kept busy punching the windshield wash system every few moments.

  His neighborhood of renovated older homes was also quiet. Only a few cars passing on the streets, no pedestrians. His house was empty tonight. His wife was in Rome on a shopping expedition with their daughter, who was grown with children of her own. They had planned this trip for months.

  And today was the maid’s day off. The maid was from somewhere in North Africa—he didn’t know where; the employment agency had sent her, and his wife had dealt with them. What the maid did on her day off, where she went or whom she talked to, he had no idea.

  He pushed the button to raise the door on the two car-garage, the new one that he had had built after he and his wife bought the house ten years ago. The old one was a ramshackle wooden affair, ready to fall down, and he had gotten tired of looking at it. The new one had the same facade and design as the old house, so it looked as if it had been there forever.

  Much better, he thought as he walked out of the garage and lowered the door with another button on his key fob.

  Fifteen paces took him to his front door. As he walked he eyed the icicles hanging dangerously from the eaves. He needed to have the maintenance people remove those tomorrow.

  As he looked for the door key on his ring, he heard a noise behind him, very slight. Startled, he turned immediately.

  A man coming at him, with something in his hand! Before Gnadinger could react, he jabbed the thing downward into Rolf Gnadinger’s chest.

  Stunned and amazed, Gnadinger glanced down and saw the butt end of an icicle protruding from his chest. He grasped it, tugged futilely . . . and looked into the face of the man who had stabbed him. The man smiled.

  Rolf Gnadinger could no longer stand. He felt himself sinking toward the ground, too weak to remain upright. His vision became a tunnel. Through that long, long tunnel he saw the man walking away. Then the tunnel closed completely and the darkness became total.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Harry Longworth and Gat Brown were dirty, cold and bored. They had been sleeping in a hole, eating MREs and pooping in another hole for ten days now, and they were thoroughly sick of it. The cold, the wind that never stopped and the blowing dust didn’t help.

  “One more day of this,” Harry Longworth said. “Then tomorrow we call for an extraction and hike to the pickup point.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Brown retorted. “Let’s call this morning and start hiking tonight. Get picked up tomorrow afternoon and by tomorrow night we’ll be in a bath, eating real food and drinking real beer. A tub full of hot water, real soap, aaah.”

  “Pussy.”

  “If I had some I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “If nothing happens by this time tomorrow, we call then.”

  The men were hidden on the side of a canyon that wound its way into the mountains. The crest of a rocky ridge was a thousand feet behind them. To their left the Hindu Kush rose in peaks covered with snow.

  They listened to the weather on their shortwave radio every day. If snow was forecast, they would have to leave. They had had a window of dry air, though, cold as the devil, with not a cloud in the sky or a flake of snow. They huddled in their hole, watching, shivering, enduring, cursing, telling each other the same old lies.

  Below them, against the far wall of the canyon, sat a cluster of six houses and barns, ramshackle affairs made of stones and wood and cinder block. Smoke rose from several chimneys. When the wind was just right, they could smell the smoke and the aroma of cooking meat. Of course, they couldn’t risk a fire. Although it was wide, the canyon wasn’t particularly deep. On its floor were flats with grass for goats and small gardens.

  They were there to watch that village complex. So far, for ten days, nothing of interest had happened.

  Beside them on a bipod was the .50-caliber sniper rifle, complete with scope. The darn thing weighed thirty-one pounds and shot 1.71 ounce slugs a half inch in diameter and two and a half inches long.

  Brown lay on his back as Longworth kept watch. Occasionally Longworth glanced through a spotting scope at the village, but mostly he just
watched. They were hidden in an acre of leafless brush, and the view outward was restricted. Ten days ago they had ensured they had a good viewing hole through some judicious pruning of branches. Not much, just enough.

  They had counted four men in the village and given each a nickname. There was also one woman and two children. The man they wanted wasn’t there.

  “I don’t think the bastard will ever come,” Brown said. “More bum information, and we do the big camp-out. I don’t care what anyone says, at least we can out-camp these bastards.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t know how these people stand living in this wasteland. No wonder they’re hot to die and get to Paradise.”

  “Next life’s gotta be better than this one.”

  “You Jesus freaks keep saying that, and without a shred of evidence,” Gat Brown said, delighted that Longworth had given him this opening. To keep from dying of boredom, they had been debating religion for days. Longworth was a born-again Christian, and Brown was an atheist, or so he said. He wasn’t really, but he wanted to keep the conversation alive, and one way was to never agree with Longworth.

  There was a man on the ridge behind them. He had climbed up there at dawn and was hiking along the ridge, looking. He had a rifle of some kind. With his back to the village, Brown tracked his progress with binoculars. “They’re expecting something to happen,” he muttered.

  “What?” muttered Longworth.

  “Why don’t you admit it?” Brown asked, his eyes glued to the binoculars. “All religion is bunk, theirs and yours and everyone else’s. The whole religious house of cards is built on the premise that man is a special animal, and he isn’t. We’re cousins of the monkey, and he doesn’t fret about getting to heaven or worry about going to hell.”

  “You’re an idiot,” Harry Longworth said mildly and closed his eyes, pretending to sleep.

  An hour later Longworth said, “Well, look at this. Truck coming.”

  Gat Brown checked the sentry on the side of the ridge one more time, got him located on the skyline, then crawled to his hole in the brush for a look. He swung up his binoculars. The vehicle was coming up the canyon, trailing a plume of dust. An old flatbed truck of some kind.

  “This might be it,” Harry said.

  “That guy up behind us. When we shoot, think you can take him? He’s about three hundred yards away.”

  Longworth crawled to a place where he could see the ridgeline. He located the sentry. “Okay,” he said, and checked his M40A3 bolt-action rifle in 7.62 mm NATO, which was lying on a blanket. Then he returned to the spotting scope.

  Brown settled himself behind the big Fifty and ensured the safety was on. He swung the scope crosshairs onto the huts, checked that both legs of the bipod were level and the horizontal line in the scope was also level. Beside him was the case that held the .50-caliber Browning machine-gun cartridges. He opened it, pulled four more cartridges out so they lay loose upon the padding.

  After a little fidgeting, he settled down to watch the scene through the scope, which had a twenty-six-power magnification.

  The range to the huts was 1,639 yards. They had used a laser range finder to establish that, and had lased every path and promontory below them, just in case the people in the huts discovered them and decided to come up here for a look-see. This would be a long shot, but Gat Brown had made shots at this distance before. His longest was almost 1,700 yards.

  Shots at these ranges, even with the big Fifty, were difficult. The scope had to have a lot of magnification so that he could actually see what he was aiming at, yet the high magnification made it difficult—actually almost impossible—to hold the crosshairs steady. His breathing, the beating of his heart, the uneven heating of the air—everything made those crosshairs dance nervously even though the thirty-one-pound rifle was on a bipod. Hitting a man-sized target at that range was a job for an expert, which Gat Brown was.

  “Wind from your left, maybe eight knots,” Longworth said. He had the binoculars on the truck again. “Three guys in the cab, I think. Hard to say.”

  Brown adjusted the rifle to account for the estimated wind. He liked to hold a centered crosshair on his target, but at this distance, there were no guarantees. The wind was just an estimate, and it wouldn’t be uniform over the 4,900 feet the bullet had to travel. He had adjusted the horizontal crosshairs for the trajectory days ago.

  “Guy with binoculars beside Hut Two,” Brown murmured. “He’s glassing this slope.”

  The village men glassed the slopes every day, and twice in the last ten days they had hiked along the valley floor and ridges with dogs, just looking. Brown and Longworth were well hidden, and the dogs hadn’t gotten a sniff.

  “This may be it,” Harry said again, trying to keep the tension out of his voice.

  Brown instinctively pulled the rifle tighter into his shoulder, settled himself, forced himself to breathe easily and regularly. He was steady as a rock when the truck rolled to a stop near the huts.

  Two men who had been inside came out to greet the new arrivals. Longworth examined each of them carefully through the spotting scope, which had a thirty-six-power magnification. He didn’t touch the scope, which sat on a tripod—merely held his eye as close as possible and looked.

  The driver of the truck . . . his back was to them, and he walked around the front of the truck, disappearing from view. The man getting out on the passenger side . . . Brown got a profile. The other man, who had been riding in the middle of the bench seat, also got out and for a moment stood behind the other passenger. Then he stepped away and Brown got his best look at the first man to exit.

  “It’s him,” he said softly and flicked off the safety. “The guy in the brown coat.”

  “That’s our man,” Longworth agreed, his eyes glued to the spotting scope. “Any time you’re ready.”

  Brown took a deep breath, exhaled, steadied the rifle on that brown coat. The bearded man wearing it was talking to a man from the hut. This would be a quartering shot into his left rear side.

  With the reticle in the scope twitchy, yet more or less centered on the target as steady as a trained rifleman could hold it, Brown began squeezing the trigger, which was adjusted for an eighteen-ounce pull. So gently and steadily did he caress it that the shock of the report and recoil took him by surprise. Automatically he worked the bolt, ejecting the empty cartridge as the deep, booming echo of the report rolled back and forth across the valley.

  “You got him,” Longworth said, his voice taut. He abandoned the spotting scope and swiftly crawled to his bolt-action. He looked for the sentry on the ridge.

  The man wasn’t there.

  Terrific!

  Gat Brown shoved a fresh round into the chamber and closed the bolt, then settled back into shooting position and again looked through his rifle scope. Two men were kneeling by the man who was down. He steadied the crosshairs on the nearest man and squeezed the trigger again. In front of him the brush quivered from the muzzle blast.

  At the second report the ridge sentry’s head popped out from behind a boulder. He looked around, still uncertain of the sniper’s location. Longworth got his rifle on him, settled into a braced position on one knee and brought the crosshairs to rest. Then he squeezed one off. The sentry went down.

  “A hit,” he told himself. He didn’t see the bullet strike, but the shot felt good. A good shooter has an instinct about these things. He crawled back to the spotting scope.

  When Brown again looked through the scope, he saw two men sprawled beside the flatbed.

  “Put a couple in that truck—see if you can disable it—and let’s saddle up,” Harry Longworth said.

  The truck was a much easier target than a man. Where do you suppose the designers put the gas tank?

  Brown steadied the big Fifty, held the crosshair where he thought the tank should be, and squeezed the trigger ever so gently.

  The rifle spoke again, the brush shook, and again the booming echo rolled around the valley.


  “You hit it,” Longworth said tightly. “One more.”

  Brown fired again, trying to angle a bullet through the truck to hit the engine block.

  “That’s shooting!” Longworth exulted. “Now let’s get outta here while we still can.”

  “Amen to that,” said Gat Brown. They taped a delayed-fuse bomb containing a half pound of plastique to the rifle. Then they tossed the spotting scope and ammo beside it, triggered the chemical fuse, grabbed their personal weapons and the rucksacks containing the radios and water and boogied. They left the uneaten MREs and the sleeping bags for the holy warriors.

  On their way across the ridge they passed the dead sentry. He had taken a bullet in the left chest.

  Two hours of running and trotting later, they were on the other side of the ridge and into the valley. Another hour of hard trotting took them to the mouth of a small canyon they had passed through on their way to the village. They went up the canyon almost a mile, then separated, one man taking one side of the defile, one the other. They came back down the canyon to a place about five hundred yards or so from the entrance, a place where the canyon widened out and there was little cover. The likelihood of an ambush was much greater at the mouth of the canyon; when it didn’t happen there, the pursuers would be less wary when they reached this spot, which at first glance didn’t seem to offer much in the way of cover. There wasn’t—for them.

  Harry Longworth fired up the satellite telephone and called for the extraction. He used code words. When he got an acknowledgment he turned the telephone off again to save the battery and stowed it in his backpack.

  He arranged his M40A3 and ammo so they were handy. In his backpack were two grenades; he placed them beside the ammo. Making himself comfortable, he removed an energy bar from a jacket pocket, tore off the wrapper and munched on it between swigs of water as he scanned the rocks and ridges and stunted vegetation huddled down for the winter.