* * *
Captain Anatoli Zuyenko of the Moscow Metropolitan Police lowered the infrared night vision binoculars from his eyes as Sergeant Kulik quietly approached the GAZ patrol car.
"All is in readiness, Captain," Kulik reported in barely a whisper. "Everyone and their equipment is in place."
Zuyenko nodded. "Both entrances to the park have been cordoned off?"
"Precisely as you ordered. BTR-40s at either end of the parkway, and I have positioned seventy men in as tight a perimeter as possible. We await your order to close in."
Zuyenko lifted the binoculars to his face again for another look at the six people rendezvousing two hundred meters away at the base of the war memorial. He did not know what to make of the confrontation between Niktov and his two bodyguards, who had been under surveillance for some time, and the big man and two women who had arrived in the Fiat only moments before. Their arrival, their presence in this Moscow park tonight, troubled Zuyenko because they did not fit in with his plans at all, especially the man.
From his slightly higher vantage point, Zuyenko tried again to get a better view of the imposing new figure who was conversing with Niktov. Zuyenko's force, all heavily armed policemen, had been positioned in a wide circle around the two cars and the people at the monument. The police captain's small army was concealed by foliage, the bends and dips in the terrain and, of course, by the dark shroud of night.
Zuyenko sharpened the focus of the binoculars, but this did little good since the big man speaking with Niktov had shifted his position slightly. His back to Zuyenko now, the new arrival scanned the night around him.
Zuyenko heard himself mutter a curse.
Kulik followed his superior's line of vision.
"It is not the way we had planned it, is it, sir? Could they be emissaries from the other side?"
Zuyenko shook his head. "Niktov is a marked man, Sergeant."
"They must know he has a terminal cancer. Why are you so sure..."
"They must kill him before he dies of natural causes. If Niktov falls and it is their work, if they take out the boss, the others will fall in line."
"Then if the man who has just arrived down there with those two women is not an emissary of Niktov's enemies," Kulik followed through, "who can he be?"
The police captain could see the man in question, his back still to Zuyenko, accepting something from Niktov — an attaché case.
Zuyenko lowered his binoculars thoughtfully. "He appears extremely capable, dangerous, even from this distance. Get on the radio. Inform all units to prepare."
"And the plan?"
Zuyenko glanced at his watch. "We will give the plan... another four minutes. If nothing happens by then, we close in and capture those we have down there now. Do not let any of them leave the park. Especially the big man."
Kulik saluted. "Yes, Captain."
The sergeant turned to the patrol car and the dashboard radio inside.
Zuyenko resumed observing the confrontation taking place below between Niktov and his bodyguards and... who?
Anatoli Zuyenko detested uncertainty in all things, especially in an operation like this one. He understood the uncertainties in his plan for tonight, yet the arrival of those three in the Fiat — yes, especially the hulking giant of a man who had driven — presented an uncertainty Zuyenko had not even considered, and so it troubled him, causing his stomach muscles to tense as his throat constricted.
The plan had seemed relatively simple at first.
Zuyenko was in charge of the department's tactical unit assigned to crush the city's black market cartel once and for all, his superiors having grown increasingly adamant in their orders that Niktov be stopped.
And yet the "art dealer" was so clever in his rule over the city's black marketeering, so devious, so well-connected — and Zuyenko knew this meant many who had been bought off — that Zuyenko had become increasingly frustrated with his own inability to arrest Niktov for the crimes everyone knew him to be guilty of.
Zuyenko held no personal hostility toward shrewd old Niktov. Zuyenko's wife shopped regularly for their family's produce at the black market stalls, but that was hardly the point, as Captain Zuyenko's superiors had made increasingly clear.
His career was on the line unless he stopped these black marketeer gangsters, and Zuyenko's bosses were anything but particular about how he did it.
He had worked too hard for what gains he had made in a cold, hostile, impersonal system, and so Zuyenko had gone to work employing decidedly extralegal measures once he had learned of the dissension within Niktov's underworld hierarchy and the fact that a splinter group existed that wanted Niktov dead.
Much careful maneuvering had gone into setting up what Zuyenko hoped would happen in this park tonight. He had had Niktov under constant surveillance, and when the art dealer had slipped away through a secret exit in his apartment house in the Lenin Hills, an escape route Zuyenko had known about — thanks to a paid informer — and so had watched, Zuyenko's men had followed Niktov to this park and had reported to their captain, who had been waiting for this exact situation to occur for ten tense days.
It had looked as if Niktov intended to hole up in his fortresslike apartment for the rest of his short life. Zuyenko had almost begun looking for another idea, but when the call had come less than an hour ago he had known it would work and had gone about setting the rest of his plan in motion: an anonymous phone call to the leader of the rival outfit who wanted Niktov dead and a whispered message saying where the art dealer could be found. Then Zuyenko had deployed his paramilitary tactical unit in a cordon around the monument where Niktov waited.
The plan was a simple one indeed, and considering his concentration of force in the park tonight, the police captain did not see how the plan could fail. He would allow Niktov's underworld enemies to accomplish what he could not. He expected one or more cars full of thugs to come careening into the park any moment now, following his anonymous phone tip about Niktov's whereabouts.
Zuyenko had ordered his units to disperse and seal off the park. They were to do nothing until the shooting near the monument was over, then close in and kill anyone left alive. It would appear as a clear-cut case of underworld vermin killing their own, with the police moving in to mop up.
Zuyenko knew that, with both Niktov and the principal killer squad of his rivals out of the way, Moscow's black market underworld would be thrown into anarchy. He and his men could then move in, pick up the pieces to their own satisfaction and bust the gangs apart once and for all.
He fully expected Niktov's enemies to launch an attack any moment now, though the BTR-40 armored cars hidden behind thick foliage near both entrances of the park had reported nothing since the arrival of the Fiat with the women and the big man in black.
Zuyenko clearly discerned the big man's uneasiness down there. The big fellow spoke with Niktov but never seemed to stop glancing around at the veil of night. He was unable to see Zuyenko's men but, the police captain sensed, the big man seemed somehow aware that all was not right in the park tonight.
A chill ran up Captain Zuyenko's spine.
The big man, whoever he was, looked like a born warrior, a fighter, even with his back turned and at this distance.
He would not be easy to take, thought Zuyenko. The big stranger looked more than dangerous. He looked like walking death.
* * *
"Inside that attaché case," Niktov said to Bolan, "you will find..."
Katrina stepped forward. "Stop. I do not want to hear this. My work is done. I was to meet this man..." she nodded to Bolan "...and deliver him into your hands," she said to Niktov. Turning to Bolan, she added simply, "I must leave now."
Niktov raised a hand. "My dear, please reconsider. It is late. You will be in danger."
Zara nodded in agreement. "You have come this far with us..." she began.
"It is as far as I wish to go," Katrina said. She turned to Niktov. "I live constantly in danger." She stepped f
orward, reached up and planted a chaste kiss on Bolan's mouth. "You understand, my mighty warrior."
Bolan nodded. "I understand, Katrina. Good luck."
Katrina said to Zara, "There, you see, now you have no competition for him."
It was not said cattily, merely as a statement of fact.
Zara started to say something, as did Niktov.
Katrina spun on her heel and withdrew at an angle away from the small gathering, heading away from the faint lamplight. She disappeared into the night.
Zara stared off in the direction in which Katrina had gone.
"Foolish one," she sighed.
"Not foolish," Bolan growled. "Professional. She did her part bringing me this far."
"A professional, as you say," Niktov agreed. "The less that woman knows, the less she can be forced to tell if apprehended."
Bolan thought of Katrina's decision to break the news to the widows of Gordeyev and Mikhalin, the dissidents slain on the outskirts of Moscow.
"She's got other work to do," he told Niktov, "and so do we. But first I want to know something. Why you?" He gestured with the attaché case gripped in his left hand, ready to be dropped if he needed to fill the hand with a weapon, fast. "Why are you the one handing me this?"
The art dealer chuckled. "You have lost none of your edge since we last met. I do believe you are the sharpest man I've ever dealt with, Mack Bolan."
"Answer me."
"I am the one with the connections. And I will get even with Strakhov before I die for the misdeed he perpetrated at my expense. Yet even I do not know the why of it all, my friend. I was only told — asked, I should say — to play this small part. Now that my part is done, I intend to return home to expire a happy man, knowing I have done what I could to strike down Greb Strakhov. Satisfactory?"
"I'm not sure."
Niktov ignored the iced response. "As to the contents of the attaché case," the old man continued, "and what is to happen next..."
* * *
In the blackness ahead of her, Katrina raced, light-footed, toward a break in the foliage. Streetlights from beyond the edge of the park offered the only illumination, and not much at that. The park's healthy turf muted her footsteps as she ran, the shoulder-strapped Uzi held in close against her hip beneath the jacket.
She had paid close attention to the route the Fiat had taken from the warehouse where she and Bolan had connected with Zara. Since the beginning of her association with the dissidents, Katrina did not often venture into Moscow. It was too dangerous for her in the city, but this had been a job she had not allowed to pass by.
It had been so strange, she reflected, meeting Bolan once again, and she recalled her thoughts in the moments before she had met him tonight in that farmer's field outside the city. Romantic thoughts, she realized now, jogging along as fast as she could.
Everything had gone so wrong at that rendezvous in the country. Andrei and Vladimir dead. Then the Gypsy woman, Zara, appearing on the scene. It seemed now that in some ways Katrina had never spent any time with the man known as the Executioner. And she somehow knew she would never see him again.
She gained the break in the foliage and kept on the run. If she had gauged her position correctly, judging from those days in her past when she had lived in Moscow, a metro station should be only a few blocks away.
There was danger traveling on foot, of course, not from any sort of street crime — for all its ills, the System had been most successful in dealing with street crime — but simply because it would be odd for a woman to be traveling alone at this hour.
There was a safe house nearby. If she could reach that, she could move out of the city more freely in a few hours after dawn, provided she was not stopped by a curious policeman. She started thinking of stories she could tell if such a thing happened.
She broke through the space between two rows of manicured hedges and ran straight into the towering form of a Moscow policeman wearing sergeant's stripes.
The man chuckled mirthlessly as she collided with him. He grabbed her by the arm, her gun arm, so she could not swing up the Uzi, and jerked her around.
"And what have we here?" the giant demanded almost merrily.
Katrina whirled under his force, finding herself staring at another man.
A man in plainclothes, but a policeman for all that, she sensed with certainty.
She saw the GAZ patrol car and other dark, shadowy forms, men with rifles, fanning out in either direction on the high ground overlooking the monument where Bolan and Zara stood with the seated Niktov and his bodyguards.
Katrina registered everything at once. She twisted, fighting to tug herself loose from the policeman's grip, knowing she could not break free. She opened her mouth to shout a warning, even if only a scream, so Bolan would know he had been led into a trap.
The plainclothesman by the patrol car saw what she was about to do and stepped forward, snarling at the brute trying to restrain her.
"Kulik, silence her!"
"Yes, Captain."
She heard no more except for the swishing of the sergeant's hamlike fist delivering a punch to the base of her neck before any sound could leave her mouth.
She felt a burst of pain, then everything went black as she lost consciousness, collapsing to the ground.
Zuyenko turned from the scene as his belt transceiver crackled mutedly.
Kulik leaned over the unconscious figure of the woman. He reached down and flicked back her jacket, smacking his lips at the sight of shapely breasts. Then he saw the Uzi strapped beneath the jacket. He tugged the weapon loose and turned with it to Zuyenko.
The captain replaced his transceiver on its belt hook.
"This little one was ready for trouble. Captain. Look."
Zuyenko glowered at the sight of the weapon.
"Forget that. See that she is handcuffed and put in my car. We'll deal with her later. Tell your men to get ready. A car is approaching the park entrance at a high rate of speed." Zuyenko glanced down toward the meet, which appeared to him to be winding down. "And not one moment too soon." He unholstered his Tokarev pistol, trying to suppress the queasy sensation of dread mixed with excitement. "Niktov and the stranger down there with him are as good as dead. The killing is about to begin."
5
"The attaché case contains a latex life mask," Niktov told Bolan, "as well as the forged identification you will need."
Bolan could no longer ignore or accept the itching unease needling his subconscious during the four minutes or so since he, Zara and Katrina had arrived here to meet the crafty old Russian.
The certainty that something was wrong only intensified in the minute since Katrina had taken it into her head to pull a vanishing act.
"I've got to keep moving," Bolan told Niktov. "Who do I look up after I leave here, or is that inside the attaché case, too?"
"Hardly. Your next contact will be the one who gets you inside KGB headquarters and will help you if necessary. If possible, I should say."
Bolan's palm itched to draw the Beretta, so acute had his awareness of danger around them become.
"You're stalling, Niktov." He turned to the Gypsy woman. "Get in the car, Zara."
Niktov chuckled. "Hardly stalling, dear lad. When one is as close to dying as I am, one tends to savor even such prosaic matters as this conversation of ours."
Zara reached the Fiat and started to get in.
"Who, Niktov?" Bolan demanded in an icy voice.
Niktov sighed. "Very well. Forgive my self-indulgence, please. You are quite right, of course. There is no time to lose. The next one you must seek out, after you have donned that life mask, is..."
The shriek of tires screeching across pavement and the throaty roar of a car speeding into a turn toward them interrupted Niktov.
Bolan gave in to instinct, keeping the attaché case in his left fist and hitting a combat crouch as he reached inside his jacket and whipped out Big Thunder. He pulled around to eyeball a ZIL limousine wit
hout headlights barreling into sight.
Zara threw herself away from the Fiat, freezing against a thick-trunked tree like a lithe jungle feline poised to respond.
Niktov's two bodyguards reacted to the onrushing ZIL with all the precision of a well-oiled machine.
The Russian hood on the old man's right unlimbered an Uzi submachine gun from beneath his coat while his partner fisted a pistol with his right hand, his left supporting the elderly Niktov who played along in what Bolan recognized as a well-coordinated, preplanned emergency response.
The thug with Niktov guided the art dealer toward the Rolls. His twin scurried in a flanking movement, keeping low, his back to his employer, his weapon held in a two-handed firing stance toward the oncoming ZIL.
The flashy black limo racing down the parkway was almost upon them.
Bolan hurried over to Zara.
The ZIL could be some Party muckety-mucks out joyriding after an all-nighter, nothing more dangerous than that.
Bolan didn't think so. He reached Zara.
The whites of her eyes flashed toward him in the dim light.
"What..."she began.
"Hit the dirt."
He helped her along with a brusque shove.
Zara plowed groundward, her Gypsy anger flaring to form a response that never came.
The American nightfighter held his combat stance.
The ZIL tilted forward into a tire-shrieking halt.
Niktov and his bodyguards reached the Rolls. One of his men tracked a pistol toward the rear door of the ZIL, continuing to block Niktov, while the other hardman reached for the Rolls's rear door handle.
Niktov shouted to Bolan and Zara, "The Rolls is bulletproof! Hurry!"
Bolan maintained his position as the back door of the ZIL popped open.
A guy with a pump shotgun started to climb out.
Bolan fired the instant he saw the shotgun emerge from the ZIL's dark interior, the hand howitzer whamming the night air, almost drowning out the nasty sound of a brain-scrambling slug slapping human flesh. The man uttered a death grunt as he tumbled out onto the blacktop of the parkway, the shotgun falling from his dead grip.
Moscow Massacre Page 7