Operator - 01

by David Vinjamuri

  “Then why did you risk it?” she asks.

  “I wasn’t sure you would be safe if the FBI showed up before I got you out,” I stammer. I should probably tell her a convenient lie, but I don’t really know what else to say. Veronica turns a deep shade of red.

  “How did you learn to do that? Is that what you did in the Army, for Colonel…?” here she uses the name Alpha has given her.

  “I can’t really talk about what I did for him. I can say those were some years I’d prefer not to dwell on.” I change the topic, briefing her on the meeting with Dmitriev. She is both surprised and relieved to hear that Constantine did not show up. I’m uncomfortable. Sending a diplomat in his place might have made sense, but I’m not at all sure why Constantine would send an operator. Possibly he thought such a man would have more credibility with me because of my own background.

  That gets me thinking. Sheriff Peterson is our only definitive connection to Constantine. Veronica makes a good circumstantial case, but she never saw anything that could tie Constantine to the Tambov gang. Buddy Peterson is the critical link, unless the accountant somehow offers more conclusive proof of Russian government involvement. The hardcore Tambov thugs will certainly never talk and if Constantine is competent, he’ll have made sure there’s no money trail that will lead us back to him. A man like Dmitriev is a special-purpose tool, and that purpose is not diplomacy. Perhaps he’s in the area for other reasons. This gives me another thought. I turn to Veronica.

  “We need to shake things up a little before Constantine starts feeling secure again. I’d like you to call him.” Veronica clearly does not like this idea, but she hears me out. “If you tell him you shared the story about the U.N. with me and I’m convinced Constantine must have trapped that tall, red-headed man with his pedophile sex slavery racket, that might scare him. If you’re right about the redheaded man, that is.

  “If you warn Constantine, I’m willing to bet he’ll try to make contact with the man. I doubt he’d risk a direct call, but we might get them both if they meet.” This is one of the things I’ve discussed with Alpha on the phone. The FBI will establish surveillance of Constantine, and the NSA will be tasked to intercept his communications. There are limits to what they’ll be able to find – consular communications are rigorously encrypted – but we agree there’s a chance Constantine will lead us to the redheaded man. In the meantime, analysts at the FBI are putting together a book of men who fit the physical description in positions of power in our government for Veronica to review.

  Veronica weighs my request and finally says, “If I agree, you have to promise me you’ll make sure they get Constantine. Otherwise I’m dead. He’ll know I was involved.”

  “He probably already knows. Besides, as an attaché, he has diplomatic status and immunity to prosecution. The best we’ll be able to do is deport him.”

  “That’s not enough,” she says forcefully.

  “I can’t promise a specific outcome, but I can promise Constantine will not go unpunished.” As I say this, I wonder what this promise will cost me. But Veronica is satisfied and agrees to call Drubich. I give her his cell number and she stands up to make the call as if that will make it easier to confront him. He doesn’t answer his cell and she leaves a message, telling him what we’ve agreed. Then I call Dan Menetti on the Blackberry. He also doesn’t answer, so I leave a message telling him what we’re doing with Constantine Drubich and warning him that Sheriff Peterson might be in danger. Then I turn back to Veronica.

  “This is the end of the road for you,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve stuck your neck far enough out already. I’ll drive you back to your car in Conestoga. From there you should go straight to your parents’ place. The FBI might stop by to show you some photos in the next day or two. Call in sick to work and stay home through the weekend. I think we’ll be able to get this resolved by then.”

  Veronica argues this point but eventually concedes. We hold hands for a moment longer in the sun before we walk back to the car to face reality.

  * * *

  The little Blackberry buzzes just as I’m starting to get uncomfortable.

  Instead of heading directly back east towards Saugerties to catch the Thruway, I’ve decided to cut though the heart of Catskill State Park. It’s a gorgeous drive, a real delight with the G8, and the roads have little traffic. I turn west, planning to use Silver Hollow Road to make the jump north from Route 212 to Route 214, which runs east and west through the park. From 214, I’ll catch State Route 23A and wind through Tannersville to the NY State Thruway, then exit north of Saugerties and twenty minutes closer to Conestoga. It is a longer drive, but the G8 pulls superbly as I wind out the motor and I’m able to relax for the first time in days.

  Until I spot the tail, that is.

  I first take note of the big Caddy while we are still on 212, which is no more than a two-lane local road as we wind away from Woodstock. Veronica is already asleep; her head slumps against the side of the headrest on the passenger seat. Now the red Cadillac is about a half-mile behind me. This wasn’t suspicious when we were on 212, but as we turn off 212 to Eighmey Road, I see him slow so that he can make the turn while letting me pull ahead a ways. It’s an understandable maneuver, but he’s too close to escape my attention.

  The Caddy itself stands out like a sore thumb. It’s a bright red, brand-spanking-new CTS-V, a four-door sedan sporting a supercharged 556 horsepower V-8 lifted directly from the Corvette ZR-1, the only American supercar. The big Caddy can hit 100 miles per hour from a standing start in just over nine seconds, before a Prius would reach highway speed. Practically speaking, the Cadillac driver has little chance of escaping my notice on the nearly deserted mountain roads. It is a spectacularly bad vehicle for surveillance. The tarted-up $70,000 Caddy would draw stares anywhere in Greene County. In the mountains it looks as out of place as a limo at a pig roast. Now the driver is paying the price for having followed too eagerly. Even a soccer mom would notice that the Caddy is trying very hard not to get too close, and it would take a four-car team to trail us without me noticing.

  My subconscious is just starting to break through to my active brain as the intersection with Silver Hollow Road comes into sight. I’m very tired, not having had a full night’s sleep since I was in jail three nights ago. The human reaction to a lack of sleep tells a lot about our origins as a species. Human motor skills and even the ability to understand language are immediately affected by sleep deprivation, but the parietal lobe activates to take up the slack left by the decreasing activity in the temporal lobe. This allows people to process simple commands and retain some cognitive functions, but it dramatically decreases creativity and the ability to make intuitive leaps. For this reason, elite military operators are screened to be high functioning when sleep-deprived. At the end of one of the hardest days of Delta Force selection, a weighty reading assignment and a written essay followed our forty-mile hike. The purpose was to see which of us candidates retained the basic ability to reason while bone-tired, having slept less than four hours a night for an entire week and not at all for the previous day and a half.

  I’m not quite at that point, although I can feel myself approaching it. But something is forcing itself into my conscious brain as the Blackberry starts to buzz. Why did Dmitriev show up at Pig Bar & Grill? Why send a soldier? Then, as I’m raising the phone to my ear and I hear the nearly panicked voice of Dan Menetti on the other end of the line, it occurs to me. Before you send a dog on a hunt, you need to give him something to smell so he can catch the trail of the game you’re after. In an instant I am convinced that all of the blather about Yuri and his brother was a distraction – or worse. Maybe those pictures are intended to provide a motive for me to be gunned down on a mountain road.

  “Sheriff Peterson is dead,” Menetti croaks, out of breath. “He had a heart attack about 11 this morning. We don’t have a toxicology report yet, so this could just be a coincidence, or a reac
tion to stress, but I wouldn’t lay odds on that.”

  As Menetti says this, I’m slowing the G8 down as I approach an intersection. This is the center of a tiny village called Willow. I pass a U.S. Post Office on my left. There’s a gas station to my right at the intersection. It’s an odd crossing because although four roads meet here – Eighmey, Van Wagner, Jessop and Silver Hollow – Jessop hits Van Wagner about thirty feet before Eighmey does from the opposite direction. I’m effectively approaching a T-shaped crossing where I need to turn either right onto Silver Hollow Road or left to Van Wagner. As I pull up to the intersection, a tall man in an orange striped construction vest and a yellow hardhat steps in front the car with a stop sign.

  There’s a white Ford F-150 waiting on Van Wagner about thirty feet away, also apparently waiting for the construction worker to flag it through. It is an extended cab-model with windows tinted so dark, I can’t see the driver. I flick my eyes back to the Caddy in the rearview mirror. It has approached to within thirty yards and stopped. I’m instantly alert. I notice the Caddy’s windows have exactly the same grade of tinting as the F-150, obscuring the passengers. What are the odds? I begin to think when a flash of movement from the F-150 catches my eye. A man pops up from the flatbed holding an RPG-7 – a Russian-made rocket propelled grenade, used all over the world against light vehicles and helicopters. The business end of the RPG swings toward the G8 as the bulky, broad-faced man in a black nylon jacket points it at my car. At the same moment the man in the red vest drops the stop sign and starts sprinting away from the intersection.

  Dropping the Blackberry, I jam the G8’s accelerator, depressing the clutch until the engine reaches 5000 rpms as I wrench the steering wheel around to the right. Then I drop the clutch and the G8’s tail swings out – around to the left – as a cloud of smoke rises from the tires. Hopping forward, the G8 powers into the right turn just as the rocket from the RPG screams by, scant inches over the trunk. The rear end of the G8 catches the sprinting construction worker in the back and knocks him off his feet on the side of the road. The man has a silenced Glock in his hands as he goes sprawling forward. As we power through the turn, the heavy Ford pickup smashes into our tail, knocking the back end of the G8 loose. The G8 fishtails and as the stability control kicks in, I see the construction worker jump into the back seat of the F-150, the door having been thrown open for him.

  I glance in the rearview mirror just in time to see the RPG rocket slam squarely into one of the two pumps at the Yancy Country Store and Gas Station, a ramshackle white building with a green awning. The shaped charge from the RPG explodes as it hits the pump, igniting the gas in the line. A double-concussion followed by a pillar of flame rises like a tsunami over the small store as the bespectacled, white-haired owner runs out, his arms waving and his face a mask of disbelief.

  An instant later, another man wearing mirrored sunglasses leans out of the front passenger window of the pickup with a Benelli M4 Super 90 Shotgun, a high performance semi-automatic piece with a folding stock. The man aims the weapon at the backside of the G8 and fires. The heavy buckshot hits the rear window, sprouting a mushroom of opaque glass in the center surrounded by a peppering of small divots.

  Veronica, who woke abruptly when the F-150 hit us and was momentarily paralyzed by the explosion at the gas station, finally screams, ducking her head down and covering her ears with her hands. I wrestle with the steering wheel as the stability control fights the fishtailing rear end of the G8. The tail swerves right and left before it falls back into line as the chassis recovers from the destabilizing impact of the heavy truck. Then I stomp on the accelerator and the G8 surges forward, the 415 horsepower V-8 screaming. We immediately begin putting distance on the much slower F-150. Another glance in the rearview mirror shows the CTS-V pulling around the corner behind the truck.

  “Grab the phone!” I shout to Veronica, who is already starting to regain her composure. Her arm snakes into the well beside my seat and emerges with the Blackberry after a moment. “Hit the speaker button,” I yell. It takes her a moment to find it.

  “Dan, are you still there?”

  “What in the hell just happened?” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard Menetti – a Catholic altar boy – swear.

  “We just came about two inches away from being vaporized by an RPG-7.”

  “Fired by who?”

  “I think it’s a team led by the guy I just met for lunch – Karl Ivanov Dmitriev. I pegged him as an operator, maybe the leader of a Spetznaz team for the SVR. I’ll bet you a steak dinner they’re the same ones who took Buddy Peterson this morning. It means that someone – either Drubich or someone above him in the SVR – is trying to erase all the links between the Russian government and the Tambov Gang.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have one of his guys pick you off on your way out of the restaurant, then?”

  “I have a feeling that it’s not me they’re after. Veronica is the one who made the connection between the gang and the SVR. She’s also the only one other than Drubich who’s seen the redheaded man we’re guessing might have been compromised.” I glance over at Veronica as I say this. I did not consider the impact on her before I spoke the words. She starts trembling.

  “What can I do?” Menetti asks.

  “You should be able to pinpoint our location from the GPS chip in my Blackberry. Get me help as soon as you can.” As I ask this I realize that by the time they mobilize they’ll be doing cleanup of one sort or another.

  “You got it. Good luck,” Menetti says and gets off quickly.

  Veronica is looking back at the truck and car pursuing us. She notices the damage to the rear windshield.

  “Is that some kind of bulletproof glass?” she asks.

  “It’s a government car. There’s no such thing as ‘bulletproof,’ but the car is lightly armored. The front and rear windshields are reinforced. There’s also Kevlar in your seat back.”

  “Well they should have reinforced it some more. It looks like the rear window is about to fall off,” Veronica says. The G8 bounds over a dip in the road, momentarily going airborne at 90 miles an hour.

  “It’s all a tradeoff,” I respond, checking the rearview mirror. We are already a half-mile ahead of the F-150, which will never catch the G8 on a paved road. As I watch, the Cadillac CTS-V pulls around to pass the pickup. Then Silver Mountain Road sweeps right and I briefly lose sight of both vehicles. “If this car was armored well enough to stop high-velocity weapons, it would be a lot heavier and slower. Most pistols wouldn’t penetrate the windshield but that Benelli fires a hot load – it’ll eventually punch through. We need to make sure he doesn’t get another clear shot.” Still, I am less worried about the men in the F-150 than the Cadillac. The engine modifications to the G8 add enough horsepower to compensate for the additional weight of the up-armoring, but the CTS-V is a much faster car. Then again, I’ve seen a trained driver in a Honda Accord pass an amateur driving a Porsche 911 at Willow Springs in California.

  As we reach the intersection of Silver Hollow Road and Lang, I whip the G8 into a right turn to stay on Silver Hollow, braking at the last moment, then swinging the car’s rear end out intentionally to decrease the radius of the turn while maintain the maximum possible speed. As soon as I completed the maneuver, I’m back on the gas. In the rearview mirror, I see the Cadillac swing through the same intersection, perfectly lining up the rear wheels. It is gaining ground on us. So much for my hopes that an unskilled driver is chasing us. I push the G8 through a sweeping left hand turn followed by a right-hander. As I power through the second wide bend in the road, the outer wheels briefly scrape gravel.

  As the CTS-V pulls to within a quarter mile, I see a sign blur by, showing an upcoming turn. I realize that Silver Hollow Road takes yet another turn, this one a full ninety degrees to the left, and that going straight will mean joining Cross Patch Road – a dead-end street that shoots straight up the side of a mountain. I stomp down on the accelerator, briefly gaining yards on the Cadi
llac. I blow past the intersection, ignoring the turn. After 300 yards, Cross Patch Road takes a dogleg to the left as it starts to ascend Little Rock Mountain. The moment we pass the turn and are temporarily out of sight of the Caddy, I hit the brake pedal full-force. The enormous ventilated disc brakes scrub the G8’s momentum quickly as the antilock brakes with brake force distribution trigger, allowing me to keep steering control while braking. The speedometer needle sinks like the mercury on a weather gauge in the face of an approaching hurricane.

  When the speed hits thirty, I step off the brakes and wrench the wheel of the G8 around to the left as I pulled the emergency brake. The big sedan pirouettes gracefully, swapping head for tail as it reverses directions on the road. As the G8 turns, I tap the power button on the window to lower it as I draw a 9mm Sig Sauer P226 from the loop holster at the small of my back left-handed. Just as I bring the weapon up and get it pointed out the window, the Cadillac comes screaming around the turn and I empty eight rounds – over half a clip – left-handed into it point-blank as it passes. Then I mash the accelerator on the G8 and speed back towards Silver Hollow Road, making the sharp right turn just as I spot the F-150 approaching from the opposite direction.

  Silver Hollow Road gains over a thousand feet in elevation in just under a mile as it tracks the Warner Creek’s twisting path through the mountains. We pull away from the F-150 immediately, building up a half-mile lead before the road bends left and starts descending, cutting through Silver Hollow Notch. We have almost pulled out of sight of the heavy-duty Ford when Silver Hollow Road abruptly ends, smacking right into Clove Road. I slam on the brakes as a BMW Mini zooms past at the intersection and the Ford pickup quickly draws closer. Then I take a right on Stony Clove Road, heading north. The road follows the valley between Hunter Mountain and Plateau – two of the thirty-five mountains in the Catskills with peaks above 3500 feet. Unfortunately, the road is dead straight, giving us no way to elude our pursuers. I quickly pull up to the Mini and attempt to pass, but I am forced to swerve back into my lane quickly as a Winnebago steams by in the opposite lane. Just as I pull the wheel left again, the boom of a rifle sounds and I see that a high-caliber rifle round has passed through both the rear and front windshields of the G8, leaving a fist-sized hole in the front windshield. In the same instant, the Mini explodes, its diminutive body flying up into the air.