by JT Brannan
The Russian deep-cover agent – a long-serving member of the elite Zaslon special operations unit of Directorate S – was lying on the roof of the Teatr Studio, the theater which occupied the northernmost wing of the giant palace. Maciej Badowski lay in the snow next to him, observing the scene through binoculars; behind them lay the bodies of the two GROM soldiers who had been here before them, a sniper team protecting the group of politicians below.
Ostrawski and Badowski had used their credentials to gain access to the roof, at which stage they had shot the GROM men with silenced pistols and taken their place. At the same time, Stanisław Hajto and Jerzy Porowski had killed the second team of snipers on the roof of the Teatr Dramatyczny, which filled the palace’s southern wing on the opposite side of the entrance plaza.
The remaining man on their small team, Marcin Pazdan, waited in a van on the far side of the palace; the plan was to perform their mission, then race across the rooftops to the rearmost wings of the huge building. There – hidden under the parapets – were inflatable slides, like the type used to get passengers off damaged aircraft. They would throw them over the side, inflate them and jump, sliding quickly down to the street below, where they would meet Pazdan in the van and escape north on Emilii Plater.
They’d switch vehicles soon after, then lose themselves in the Mirów neighborhood, where they’d prepared a safe house they could hide out in for a week or two until the heat had died down.
Of course, he would be doing no such thing – he had his own way out, and fully expected the four genuine Agencja Wywiadu men to be either captured or killed during their escape.
A part of him – buried so deep down it could easily be ignored – felt sorry for these men. They had, after all, been given false orders – they had no idea that their mission was a put-up job, a deception tactic, and they were destined to fail, and to either die or spend the rest of their lives in prison, traitors of their own country.
But a mission was a mission, and orders were orders, and Gorchakov had no intention of not following through with it.
He would take the shot, as instructed, and then disappear.
The others would just have to fend for themselves.
Dementyev was insane, Cole had realized. That was the only explanation for it.
For he had finally figured out what Proyekt Yevropy was all about.
He groaned from the pain in his side as he considered how to make his move, certain now that the Russian president was the target of the Warsaw assassination.
He was here alone, injured and without support – except for Michiko anyway, and she no longer had the supercomputers of Force One to help her.
Because – son of a bitch that he was – Clark Mason had closed them down, had sent in the FBI to Forest Hills to clear the place out. Equipment was seized, files were accessed, and personnel were arrested. Pete Olsen, busy organizing Operation DESERT SWORD, was saved from the purge, as was Catalina dos Santos; but the main bulk of headquarters personnel were brought in for questioning, and the entire operation was as good as finished.
Bruce Vinson hadn’t been arrested – yet. At the moment, he was too busy recovering in hospital, after being attacked by knife-wielding muggers in the street near his home. He would have been dead, had it not been for the fact that he’d managed to fight them off, damaging them enough during the battle that they’d run away before they could stab anything vital. However, they’d cut enough parts of him open to ensure that he would be in critical condition for a while.
Cole didn’t believe for a second that it had been a simple street robbery; the timing was too coincidental, and Cole was not a man who believed in such things. It had been Mason’s order, Cole was sure of it; payback for that video tape, and more besides.
Michiko had told him that Vinson – in a rare lucid moment – had told her that the men had cursed in Russian when he’d hurt them, but this didn’t make Cole think that Mason had nothing to do with it. On the contrary, coward that he was, he’d probably asked the Russians to do his dirty work for him. They’d almost succeeded too, and – certain that more killers would be sent to finish the job – Cole had arranged for colleagues to move his chief-of-staff to a more secure location, where he was being guarded by a private security company manned by ex-Delta and Team Six personnel.
Vinson’s presence in hospital, ironically, was also the very reason that Michiko hadn’t been arrested; she’d been visiting him at the time, and – alerted to the FBI raid while still by his bedside – she’d slipped out of the hospital and gone straight to the apartment in Tysons Corner that Cole had rented for just such an occasion.
Sometimes, he reflected, it paid to be paranoid.
He knew that Mason was behind it, of course, just as he had been behind the betrayal of Cole’s teammates in Russia and Athens. The man had had it in for Vinson and Force One for months and – now that he was president – he had started to act like the all-powerful demi-god he believed himself to be.
He thought he was above prosecution, that he was untouchable. Cole was going to change the president’s beliefs about that, at some point in the near future. He would kill Clark Mason, even if it meant himself dying in the process; he had pledged it to his dead comrades, to Vinson, to himself. He would collect on the blood-debt that Mason had left, if it was the last thing he did.
But right now, he was more concerned with stopping Project Europe from reaching fruition.
And that meant saving President Emelienenko’s life, however much he didn’t want to.
3
Gorchakov watched as the news crews pressed Emelienenko and Rojek with their questions, saw how the politicians answered them with smiles on their lying faces.
The time was drawing near, he knew; the press conference was coming to an end, and the party would then leave in a protected convoy of limousines.
‘Get ready,’ he told the sniper team on the southern wing over the secure radio connection. ‘Shoot on my command.’
‘Yes, sir,’ came the confirmation from the opposite roof, on the far side of the plaza.
Gorchakov settled down as he waited for the shot; precise accuracy was what was required, and he couldn’t afford to slip up. That was why he’d brought his own rifle, and wasn’t using the GROM sniper’s CheyTac Intervention; he needed a weapon zeroed to him, and another man’s rifle simply wouldn’t do.
But it would happen soon, Gorchakov thought happily; and then he might finally be able to return to his family in Moscow.
Cole came out of the rooftop door, just twenty feet away from the sniper team, an untold number of security personnel still scurrying up the stairs behind him.
It had been Michiko – working with limited equipment, but unlimited supplies of ingenuity, from the apartment in Tysons – that had put him on to these men from Bureau III.
He’d told her to look into the files of the Polish security services, law enforcement, and military, to look for any anomalies – for if his assumptions about the real purpose of Project Europe were correct, the Warsaw assassination would have to be carried out by Polish agents, just as the attempted killing of Manturov was designed to implicate the Latvians.
She had written a search program, but it had taken time, and Cole was rapidly running out of it; he’d followed the Russian president on his tour of the city, his side causing him great pain and discomfort all the way, but he still had no real idea what he was looking for. And so he had told Michiko to narrow the search to elements of the security services that dealt with Russia – and she had almost immediately had a hit with Bronisław Ostrawski, of the AW’s Bureau III, the subunit of the foreign intelligence service that ran operations within the Russian Federation.
It wasn’t much to go on, simply the fact that one of the group’s more senior officers had seconded four men for a covert operation, the details of which weren’t recorded anywhere. Not unusual, perhaps, for a unit which dealt with secret operations as part of their remit; and yet there was almost alwa
ys a record of ongoing missions recorded somewhere. This one, on the other hand, was entirely off the grid, and that was enough to arouse Cole’s suspicions.
Michiko had sent him the files on Ostrawski and the four men under his command, along with photographs. And – just an hour ago – she had contacted him to say that there were definite holes in his background; despite his rank in the AW, he’d transferred to the unit only a couple of years ago, and not much about him before that time was on file.
It raised Cole’s suspicion level to a new high, and Cole had sat in wait outside the Palace of Culture and Science, just waiting for a look at the man – for this was surely the location for the assassination. It ticked all the boxes for such an operation – it was highly visible, the world media were here, and there were multiple routes in and out, especially if you were carrying an AW identity card.
Cole himself had an ABW card – arranged for him at the last minute by David Keegan – which listed him as a member of Poland’s internal security service, the Agencja Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego. He was far from fluent in the language, but the Kowalskis of Hamtramck, Michigan, were Polish immigrants after all, and Cole hoped he remembered enough from family meals and church gatherings as a child to get by. He’d got the accent and the pronunciation anyway, which he knew was half the battle, and he’d refamiliarized himself with some key phrases on the flight over.
It wasn’t much perhaps, but it would have to do; there wasn’t time for anything else.
Cole had finally seen the AW men approach the palace, while Emelienenko and the Polish leaders were on the thirtieth-floor gallery, having lunch.
He’d been frightened that he’d missed them initially, that the unit were set up in the gallery, ready to carry out their mission upstairs; as such, the relief he’d felt when he’d seen Ostrawski and the others outside the palace grounds had been palpable.
He’d watched as the men had waited within the security perimeter, chatting easily and happily to the other guards there, waiting for the right time. And then – when Emelienenko and the others had been traveling down in the great gold elevator back to ground level, and the news crews had been gathering outside, they’d made their move; they’d separated, a pair to either wing, using their IDs to get access to the theater interiors.
Seeing the snipers on the roofs, Cole had known immediately what Ostrawski’s plan was, and had raced to follow them.
Cole had been watching from a distance, and it took some time for him to get there; who knew what the team from Bureau III had managed to do in that period?
Cole wished he could have spoken to someone in authority earlier, explain what was happening, but he knew that his Polish was so limited, he would have just incriminated himself, would have revealed himself as an imposter.
And now there were two teams up on the roofs, separated by a vast gulf of space, and Cole knew he had no chance of taking down both pairs of snipers at the same time. He’d therefore decided to use what limited Polish he had, alongside the worldwide language of physical urgency.
He’d raced toward the same security team that had let in Ostrawski and Badowski, flashed them his badge, and simply pointed after the pair and shouted, ‘Zabójcy!’
Assassins!
It had been one of the words that he’d made sure he’d learnt on the flight over from Athens, knowing that it might well come in handy.
Cole had raced ahead of the startled BOR men, but he had soon heard them following as he’d leapt up the stairs two at a time, the pain in his side agonizing but mercifully dulled from its true level by a mixture of painkillers and adrenaline.
He knew that the BOR officers were almost certainly calling their colleagues across on the opposite wing as they raced up the stairs behind him, telling them to do the same, were probably using their radios to try and reach the dead men that Cole could see on the ground next to Ostrawski and Badowski, to call downstairs and warn the security teams that were protecting Emelienenko, Rojek and Konorski.
He had a pistol, ferried to him alongside the ABW identification, and it was already in his hand as he burst out of the door onto the rooftop.
He raised the gun to shoot, knowing he no longer had any other option.
This was it, Gorchakov told himself. The moment had come; the news conference had all but finished, and the politicians would soon be escorted to their vehicles for the journey back to the presidential palace.
‘Okay,’ Badowski said next to him. ‘Do it.’
He felt his finger increase pressure on the trigger; breathed in, breathed out, slow and controlled as he steadied himself; in, and out.
And then heard the dead men’s radios activating, voices calling for them; saw the security teams reacting downstairs, huddling round their clients, pulling them violently out of the danger zone as the news cameras caught it all.
And then he heard the sound of the rooftop door being wrench open, footsteps on the snow-covered gravel.
And – before he could react – he felt the massive impact as something hit him in the back, heard the supersonic crack of a pistol at nearly the same time, and knew he had been shot.
Cole fired the handgun into the back of the prostrate form of Ostrawski, then fired again as Badowski turned, his own pistol raised toward him.
Cole’s second shot took Badowski in the face, caving it in and blasting the back of his head out across the snowy parapet.
He heard gunfire from across the plaza, saw with satisfaction the other Polish security team raiding the opposite rooftop, gunning down the assassins before they had a chance to react.
It was then that Cole sensed movement, ducked instinctively as Ostrawski – down but not out – rolled over and fired a shot from the powerful rifle.
The .338 Lapua Magnum round flew over Cole’s diving body, but a sound from behind him – like a melon exploding – told him that the man who’d been following him hadn’t been so lucky; and a glance behind confirmed it, as Cole saw a near-headless corpse – just a fraction of the lower jaw left, the rest blown apart across the rooftop – fall to its knees in the snow.
Cole tried to get his pistol up to fire again, but the evasive jump down to the rooftop had opened up an exploding agony in his ribs and it was all he could do to roll out of the way, taking cover behind an air conditioning unit as Ostrawski opened fire again with the Accuracy International.
It was a bolt-action weapon, but the man was good enough to make it seem like a semi-automatic as he rattled off shot after shot, forcing the security team back into the stairwell.
Cole held his side, choking from the pain as he hid behind the unit and waited for his chance.
He realized that the man must have been wearing a vest, and so he knew that he had to make the next round a head shot.
The sound of the high-power Magnum rounds finally abated, and Cole gathered himself, ignored the pain raging through him, and span out onto the rooftop, pistol at the ready; but Ostrawski must have been firing on the move, because he was already far away, near the huge, imposing bulk of the central tower of the palace; and he must have had at least one round left, because he pulled the trigger as Cole emerged, and Cole had to throw himself to the hard ground again, the round missing him by mere inches and nearly obliterating the air conditioning unit beside him.
Cole looked up a moment later, but it was too late.
Ostrawski was gone.
4
Gorchakov didn’t know how they’d known, and it didn’t matter; all that mattered now was escape.
The thought occurred to him that he’d been betrayed; the mission had necessitated the arrest of the participants in order to lay the blame at the door of the Poles, but Gorchakov had blindly assumed that he was to be spared. Still, that was the world of covert ops; deceit and betrayal were at the heart of everything they did, and – if you couldn’t handle that – then you had no business being involved in that world.
He would have been forced to escape anyway, he knew, whether he’d mana
ged to take the shot or not; and the only escape route he’d told his superiors about was the one he’d arranged with his team, but which he had no intention of using. Nobody knew his real escape route but him.
And as he pushed through the narrow doorway into the mid-levels of the palace tower, where the vast wings connected to the main, eight-hundred-foot-high block, he knew that meant that he still had a chance.
Cole followed the assassin on the path he’d taken across the rooftop, popping some pills as he went, in an effort to numb the pain enough for him to continue functioning.
He knew that pushing his body past the point that it could manage by itself was unwise; the pain was there for a reason, it was telling him to slow down, that his injured body couldn’t cope with the demands that he was putting on it. He understood that there would be a bill to pay later, that the long-term consequences of his abuse would come back to haunt him; but at the same time he didn’t care, because he was a predator, a hunter, and he had prey to catch – his blood was up, and nothing would stop him. Besides which, he figured, he could die at any moment during this exercise – why worry about how his body would feel, if he survived?
Survive first, he told himself. Win first.
Worry later.
Gorchakov sprinted up the stairs, racing as fast as he could, knowing that the interior was now all but empty of security personnel. After all, the guests of honor were gone, why would their security stick around?
No, he knew that only the normal palace guards would remain, and they would hardly cause him any problems; the 5.7mm FN FiveSeven pistol he held in his hand would see to that.
He pushed himself hard, knowing that every second counted; he’d practiced this route before, and knew it would take him just a little under three minutes to make it up the twenty flights of stairs between the doorway he’d entered through and the viewing gallery on the thirtieth floor. It wasn’t up there with the times of the professional stair runners who did the eighty-six story Empire State Building in just over ten minutes, but he was close.