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Operator - 01

Page 14

by David Vinjamuri


  Twenty seconds.

  The door to the large office is open, revealing a hallway flanked by two smaller offices. The hall ends at a steel door that connects the administrative area to the main warehouse floor. As I move into the hallway, a thick Russian with a scar running from his right eye to the edge of his dark mustache steps from the door to the office on the left, holding an assault rifle. I put two rounds into the man’s neck, not breaking stride as I reach into a pouch attached to the checkerboard molle system on my TAG vest and pull out another flash bang.

  I roll the grenade into the first office, the windowless room to my right whose doorway is nearest to the bigger office. I hear a shout as I duck behind the wall, then the flash bang detonates. I flip my night vision goggles down from the tactical helmet and enter the room low, shooting two men. One is swinging a SCAR-H assault rifle wildly like a club, the other is waving a Beretta, a hand over his eyes.

  I step back out into the hallway, which is still illuminated by the fire from the van, and flip the night vision goggles back up. I proceed down the hallway toward the steel fire door. As I reach the second office, a burly Russian comes flying through the door, nearly colliding with me as he passes. I stick a foot out in time to trip the man and start to turn toward him and away from the open doorway. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I stop cold, deciding in an instant to draw the flat-bladed SOG seal pup left-handed from its downward-facing sheath on the Blackhawk vest. I swing the knife backward without looking and bury it cleanly in the side of the man’s neck, severing the carotid artery. At the same time, I raise the Kimber in my right hand and fire two rounds point blank into the chest of a second man who has just appeared in the doorway. This Russian is older and is carrying a sawed-off 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun. The weapon discharges as the man drops, nearly tagging me even though I’ve thrown myself instinctively to the side. I blink once then pick myself up, moving at a crouch into the last office. A lone man remains, huddled over a keyboard. He is unarmed and trembling.

  Forty seconds.

  I pull the man roughly backward, toppling him off of his swivel chair. He is bespectacled and thin, completely unlike the other Russians I have encountered in this place. I roll the thin Russian onto his stomach and put a boot on his neck while I fish through a pouch on my vest until I find a string of plastic whip-ties I’ve liberated from a box of heavy-duty trash bags, and a roll of duct tape. I bind the man’s wrists behind his back and lash his feet together. Then I hog-tie the man’s feet to his wrists with duct tape and roll him over.

  “I’m letting you live so you can pass on a message. Don’t cross the Solntsevskaya Bratva,” I say to him in fluent Russian, picking the name of the only other Russian mafia cartel I can think of. The thin man’s eyes widen and a damp patch blossoms on the front of his polyester trousers.

  Ninety seconds.

  I don’t have much time. I was hoping to find Veronica in the administrative section of the warehouse, but she’s not here. I step out of the room and examine the door to the warehouse. There is a deadbolt, which I slide closed. Then I pull two doorjambs from a pouch attached to my vest and kick them into place under the door. I leave the building the same way I came in, and soon I am back on the roof, running swiftly toward the main section of the warehouse.

  I see a car pulling out of the parking lot just as I breach the skylight at the far end of the main warehouse. A lone man drives the Taurus, but I can’t identify him or read the plates as he peels away. I can’t waste any more time, though. I drop two flash-bangs down the hole and run a dozen feet to drop two more through another skylight. Returning to the first, I hook myself into a line and rappel down ten feet, where I drop onto a massive steel beam that runs the length of the warehouse floor. The room is shrouded in darkness, only faintly illuminated by the dying flames from the smoldering van that leak in through the high slit window above the loading bay doors, which are shut. The lights that were illuminating the parking lot have been extinguished as well.

  I drop prone on the beam, unstrapping a rifle from my back as soon as I’m stable. It is my best find at Stokeley’s: a VSS sniper rifle. I appreciate the irony as I adjust the scope: this piece was undoubtedly smuggled in for the men I’m aiming it at. The Vintorez, as it’s commonly known, was developed in the Tula Arsenal south of Moscow for Spetznaz commandos of the MVD in the late 1980s. It isn’t the most elegant or even accurate weapon, but it has two huge advantages over most other sniper rifles for the kind of close-quarter nighttime work I’m about to engage in. First, it is very compact, with a folding rear stock. Second, it has an integrated silencer and a large twenty-round magazine. With any luck, it will help keep me concealed for long enough to finish the job I’ve started.

  Two minutes.

  I peer through the PKN-03 night scope on the Vintorez. The scene below me is mayhem. The warehouse has an enormous open floor with six large cages set in the middle, about six feet from each other, organized like the dots that form the number six on dice. In the green illumination of the sniper scope, I can see clusters of figures in the cages, some huddled together and some crouched alone. Among the Tambov men, the smartest are huddling between the cages, crouched down while they wait for their eyes and ears to recover from the flash bangs. Others are not so wise, running about wildly in the dark. One man has collapsed near the stairs to the upper extension of the warehouse, and he’s screaming loudly, adding the perceptible feel of panic to the confusion.

  I count eighteen men in total. As I watch, three of them break cover at once and make a beeline for the door adjacent to the loading bay that leads to the parking lot. I see that they are armed and I caress the trigger of the Vintorez, smoothly dropping them one, two, three. I sweep the scope across the warehouse floor and catch the motion of two more men with SCAR-H assault rifles, one with his right hand on the other’s shoulders, run at a crouch towards the upper landing. I take down the leader first and then the man behind him. They didn’t make it fifteen feet. I am scanning for more targets when I feel the ricochet of bullets against the steel beam below me and hear the characteristic crack of an AK assault rifle. I twist sharply towards the muzzle flash I’ve caught from the corner of my eye and I spot the shooter. As light blossoms from the rifle again I put two rounds into the man. I feel a searing pain in my shoulder and, pulling off my glove, explore it with two fingers. A bullet has grazed the fleshy part of my upper arm. I am bleeding, but not badly. The body armor can’t stop a rifle projectile, but has nevertheless diverted the off-angle shot enough to spare me serious injury. It can wait. I shake my head. It is an unbelievable shot with an assault rifle in the dark at a prone target 100 yards away. Either the shooter was lucky or I was.

  Three minutes.

  The warehouse floor has dissolved to chaos as I survey it again. I take down three more Russians brandishing weapons. Then a single man stands and puts his rifle down carefully on the ground, raising his hands above his head. Four more men follow his lead, surrendering. I pause for a moment to consider this. Then I pull a handful of glow sticks from another pouch on my vest. Wrapping them in a chamois cloth, I crack them and toss them in a bunch towards the warehouse floor. They separate from the chammy halfway to the floor and rain down like the arc of a rainbow in four different colors.

  “Drop your weapons and move to the light markers with your hands above your head,” my voice booms in Russian. I shout upward, towards the aluminum warehouse ceiling, hoping to mask my location. There is a moment of utter and complete silence when I wonder if I’ve just identified myself as a target. Then the clatter of another assault rifle shatters the silence as another Tambov thug drops it to the ground. Through the scope I see other stragglers follow suit. Eight men in total shuffle to the vacant area on the floor ten feet from the cages and drop first to their knees and then flat on their stomachs, hands stretched forward and legs crossed behind them. That’s all of them, or at least all that I counted.

  I secure a line around the steel girder w
ith a carabiner, drop it and fast-rope down to the warehouse floor, with both the Vintorez and the P90 strapped to my back. As I hit the ground, one of the Russians on the end of the line of prone men rolls and half-stands, pulling a small automatic from his pants. I drop to one knee and smoothly draw the Kimber, which roars as I squeeze the trigger. The man is blown back off his feet, and the top half of his head dissolves in a spray of blood. Nobody else moves after that.

  I single out the smallest Russian on the ground and kick him in the leg. When the longhaired Russian looks up, I drop a set of quick zip trash bag fasteners at his feet before stepping back and ordering him to bind his compatriots at the wrists and ankles. When the other men are secure, I holster the Kimber then secure my assistant before pulling out a thick roll of duct tape to ensure that the Russians will take some time to escape their bindings. I look at my watch. The entire action has taken less than six minutes, but the FBI helicopters will be overhead in two more. Worse still, I can hear sirens in the distance. It is most likely the Conestoga volunteer fire department, but Sheriff Peterson won’t be far behind them. I have no time to waste.

  I pull a sturdy metal flashlight from my chest rig and trot over to the cages, shining the narrow beam inside. What I see stops me cold. There are eight girls in the first cage my flashlight hits. They are clustered in a group near the middle of the cage, which is crudely fashioned from chain links, like a low-rent dog kennel. The girls are wearing flimsy cotton dresses, far too light for the cool autumn Conestoga weather and they are obviously dehydrated. I can smell perspiration and human excrement. And as I’ve seen while surveying the warehouse, they are children – all of them. The oldest can barely be eleven years old, the youngest no more than six. I have a flashback to a moment in a village in the Sudan where I’d been sent in to record proof of the genocide in Darfur and found house after house full of slaughtered families. What has happened to these girls seems no less awful.

  I moved from cage to cage with my flashlight. In the fourth cage, backed in a corner, sweaty and trembling, I see Veronica. A weight I didn’t know I was carrying lifts. I shout to the men, asking who has the keys. One of them grunts and I walk over and fish through his pockets until I find a ring of keys. It takes too long to find the key and open the lock. The young girls shrink away from me as I point to Veronica. She doesn’t know me at first, and I bring a finger to my lips as I see hope blossom in her eyes. She catches on quickly, remaining silent as I release her. After a second’s consideration, I re-lock the cage and leave the keys on the floor a few feet away. One of the girls still inside makes pleading eye contact with me, a bedraggled, stick-thin waif with stringy, elbow-length blonde hair who looks all of eight. I address her in Russian, raising my voice so all of the girls will hear me. “The American police will be here soon. The men wearing black will help get you back to your families. You can trust them.”

  I consider releasing all of the girls and decide against it. It is infuriating to see children treated like animals, but I have only moments before I risk being detained. It’s also better that the FBI witness exactly what has happened here. Besides, there is no telling what kind of power the Russian men have over these children and I don’t want the girls freeing them.

  Keeping an eye on the bound men, I lead Veronica to the door near the exit bay. I peer outside and see that the parking lot is still clear. The panel van has been reduced to a smoldering skeleton of scorched steel. My watch tells me that FBI helos will be overhead any second. I pause for a moment on the threshold of the doorway, thinking about the story I want to paint for the crime scene investigators. Reaching a decision, I gently remove the Vintorez from my shoulder, laying it down on the ground near the door. I’ve never handled it without gloves on, but I wipe it down quickly with a soft cloth. Then, pulling Veronica along behind me, I sprint out of the parking lot and down the block where we duck onto a side street. In the dumpster behind the abandoned office building I recover our bags and a gear bag I’ve expropriated from Stokeley’s. I have another pang of guilt before reassuring myself that I have just returned sole ownership of the business back to Don Miller. I take the P90 off my back, strip off my molle vest and drop the bags into the trunk of the Crown Victoria. A few seconds later we peel away, passing three fire trucks and a series of sheriff’s cars streaming toward the warehouse on the two-lane road. Three minutes later, as we pull the blue Ford onto the freeway, I hear the unmistakable sound of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters overhead.

  Veronica is still in shock. Her face is ashen white and she looks like she’s thrown up recently. I keep the Crown Victoria riding smoothly on the Thruway, heading south toward Kingston where abundant cheap motels near the Thruway exit will allow us to get some sleep anonymously. Neither of us talks. Finally, she stirs, seems to come out of the trance, and looks at me as if seeing me for the first time.

  “Who are you?” she asks. “That, in the warehouse – and what you did to George – I have never seen anything like that before.”

  I consider this for a moment. She deserves some kind of answer and I really want her to understand. “I’m – I was – a professional, an operator. This is what I was trained for.” It doesn’t register with her. She lives in the same world that most nice kids from wealthy families inhabit. That world doesn’t have room for men like me.

  “I think I understand,” she says, but she doesn’t. I can see her struggling with shock, starting to lose control. She takes a sharp breath in and pulls it back together. Tough girl.

  “So you speak Russian?” she asks off-handedly.

  “Yeah, small world,” I answer.

  Chapter Six – Wednesday

  “Good morning, this is CNN. In the news this morning – explosions and a dramatic gunfight in upstate New York last night as a major sex trafficking ring crumbles. We take you live to CNN correspondent Joanne Meeker in Conestoga, New York.”

  “Good Morning, Robyn. This sleepy town in the Catskills region erupted last night in explosions and gunfire as the FBI raided a warehouse here just after 7pm. Federal agents rescued nearly four-dozen underage girls from this warehouse behind me, some reportedly as young as five years old. While they have no official comment on the investigation that led to this confrontation, some locals are comparing this to Ruby Ridge. What we do know is this, however: at least twenty-one men are dead and most of them are Russian citizens. These men appear to be members of a Russian criminal syndicate. The good news, Robyn, is that it appears that none of the hostages, none of these young girls, were injured. Although they will not comment on the record, sources tell me that the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team conducted the operation in cooperation with local law enforcement authorities based on information from a confidential informant. Local residents here in Conestoga were shocked to learn that this type of criminal enterprise was operating right in their town. The FBI is continuing this investigation, which has expanded to include raids on locations throughout the town this morning. We understand from the Conestoga sheriff’s office that they are seeking two people for questioning related to this incident and the murder of a New York City banker just three days ago. One is Michael Herne, a decorated U.S. Army Sergeant and Afghanistan war veteran. The second is Veronica Ryan, a reporter for the White Plains Gazette. We have no idea what part either of them played in these events…”

  My mind reels as the Stars & Stripes photo of me receiving the Silver Star flashes on the screen. I look at Veronica. “Was there a TV behind the desk when you got the room last night?” We’d checked into the motel, a Super 8, just before nine in the evening, after I’d showered and changed in a truck stop, scrubbing most of the blood off of me and dropping the clothes I’d worn into a dumpster. Veronica got the room, paying cash and registering as Jean Smith, playing the part of a married woman only planning to use the room for a few hours.

  “No, I didn’t see one. The woman on duty didn’t look at me twice.”

  I look at my watch. It’s 6am. “We need to have a serious con
versation,” I say to Veronica. “The Russians were all from a gang operating out of St. Petersburg.” I let that stand for a moment. “You have to tell me what you know.” She sits down heavily on the bed and nods. Drawing her knees to her chest, she begins to talk. She doesn’t look at me.

  “I fell in love, that’s how it all started. I had only been in St. Petersburg for a few months. The mother of one of the children I was teaching at the school hired me to give private English lessons to her daughter. Her husband was there in the evenings when I came to tutor the girl. He would joke around with me. He was funny. One day the girl and the mother weren’t there when I arrived. She’d had to leave town for a funeral and took the daughter with her but forgot to ring me. The husband took pity on me and bought me dinner. After that…well after awhile…I became his mistress. At first it was like…it was amazing. He took me places I had never seen, to restaurants that weren’t in any guidebook and fantastic clubs. He made me feel special. And I met amazing, powerful people. He knew everyone. We grew closer and he started to talk about leaving his wife. His name was Constantine.

  “And then one day Constantine told me that he was in a difficult situation. He said that he wouldn’t be able to leave his wife unless he resolved his issues at work. He used to have a big job in Moscow but he’d been outmaneuvered politically and sent to St. Petersburg. He had an opportunity to revive his career, to get a big new promotion, but he needed to come up with a plan to impress his superiors. I never really understood what he did other than the fact that he worked for the government.

 

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