by JT Brannan
The man’s head was already at Gorchakov’s waist level, and he let go of the right-hand brake handle and started to hammer his fist down onto the agent’s head and face, smashing him with all the energy he had left, all the while maneuvering the huge wing across the streets and rooftops.
But still the man hung on tight, and Gorchakov decided to take more drastic action.
The blows to Cole’s face and head hurt, but he knew they weren’t dangerous – the assassin simply didn’t have the space, or the leverage, to put any power into the shots.
And, as he weathered the punishment, he was getting higher and higher; and as he got higher, so the blows got even less powerful.
And then, all of a sudden, the entire world seemed to drop out from underneath them as the great canopy collapsed, sending them hurtling down to the streets below.
Let go, damn you!, Gorchakov screamed inwardly.
He had steered purposefully across air currents, and the subsequent turbulence had caused an intentional in-flight wing deflation, a total collapse of the canopy.
The result was the bodies of the two men falling like dead weights to the narrow residential street of Foksal below.
Gorchakov’s hope had been for the shock of the fall, the sudden loss of altitude, to dislodge the agent’s grip; but they were well below the clouds now, the street coming up quickly beneath them as they plummeted faster and faster, the cars no longer insects but much larger . . . larger . . . larger . . .
Gorchakov knew the man wasn’t going to let go and moved the canopy, trying to get the wind back into it; but they were already falling beneath the level of the apartment blocks that lined each side of the street and Gorchakov started to panic, knowing that he had made a mistake.
He had left it too late.
Cole didn’t want to look down; he knew they were out of the low winter clouds, could feel the earth rushing up toward him, and didn’t want to induce panic by seeing just how fast it was coming.
But then he felt the encroaching shadows and his eyes opened, and he saw the tops of buildings on either side of him, and he understood that there were only seconds left before they reached ground level.
He could only wonder if it would be the road or the traffic which killed him first.
Gorchakov had almost resigned himself to his fate; but it wasn’t in his nature to give in, he was a fighter and he kept on fighting.
And then – only feet from the car roofs – he got lucky, hit a thermal updraft and rode it, feeling the relief flood him as the canopy filled back up with air, whipping them forward down the street.
And now, if only one of the oncoming cars could smash the agent away from him, everything would be perfect.
Cole heard the canopy re-inflate above him, felt their descent come to a stop, the canopy dragging them fast down the street, the wing barely able to fit between the buildings on either side.
And then he saw the oncoming truck, the top of its roof just about level with his lower legs, and he pulled hard on Ostrawski’s assault vest and yanked his legs up hard, barely clearing the top of the vehicle.
But he did miss it, and a moment later they caught another thermal and got swept upward once more, into the clouds above them.
7
For the next couple of minutes, as the winds carried them up and eastward, Cole started to climb up the assassin’s body again.
The pain in his side was now almost matched by that in his hands, arms and shoulders, the lactic acid from gripping hold so tight, for so long, causing unbearable discomfort; but he ignored it and finally pulled himself level with the man.
Ostrawski responded immediately by whipping a head-butt toward Cole’s face, but Cole turned a shoulder into it, then whipped his own head back toward Ostrawski, smashing the man’s nose to one side, breaking it.
Ostrawski grunted, but still managed to jerk a knee up into Cole’s groin; Cole grunted with the pain but held on, taking one hand away and burying this thumb in the open bullet wound in the assassin’s arm.
Ostrawski squealed in pain and he pulled hard on the brake in a reflex action, sending the wing into a flat spin across rooftops, parkland, the wide river Vistula that ran straight through the city.
Cole, dizzy and disoriented, looked up at the last moment, saw the huge mass of the National Stadium emerging out of the mist before them, on the eastern bank of the river; he let out an involuntary gasp, withdrew his thumb from the man’s wound, and saw Ostrawski’s gaze follow his own toward the massive red and white squares that made up the imposing walls of the oncoming sports stadium.
Gorchakov gasped too, knowing they were on a collision course with the building, and quickly took control back of the wing, flaring it and making it rise suddenly, hard away from the face of the stadium.
He thought for a moment he’d made it – but then the canopy got caught on one of the huge wires that were suspended from giant metal poles that topped the walls, the supporting superstructure for the stadium’s floating roof; he felt the canopy hit the wire, bounce off, then hit one of the poles, wrapping itself around it, whipping him and the agent around and around and around as they spiraled down toward the giant roof canopy.
The feeling was like being in a washing machine, or maybe a tumble drier, Cole thought, as the multiple lines of the canopy got caught on one of the poles that topped the red and white walls.
They were spinning down uncontrollably, until the moment that – with what must have been an incredible amount of physical control under the circumstances – the assassin unclipped himself from the wing, causing both men to fall helplessly the rest of the way to the rooftop.
They bounced along the roof membrane, a cloud-like structure of interlocking white sails, until they came to a stop in a jumbled heap in the snow that had settled atop it.
Both men were exhausted, injured and disoriented, and both men recovered at roughly the same time; but the assassin was just slightly ahead, and whipped his boot into Cole’s face before getting to his feet and running across the curving membrane of the roof.
Cole scrambled up and took off after him, shaking off the kick to the face. He felt the blood leaking from his side as he ran, felt the first dark tinge of unconsciousness threatening him, but doubled his focus, hardened his concentration, and willed his legs to move faster.
Cole could see that his target was slowing, drained from his own lack of blood from the gunshot wound to the arm; Cole moved faster again, sensing the weakness, and – when he sensed he was within range – he launched himself at the assassin, tackling him hard to the roof.
He crawled quickly up his body and grabbed the man’s head, slamming it down into the roof, head-first.
Cole pulled the man over, quickly taking the cell phone out of his pocket, amazed that it was still working. He took a photograph of the man’s battered face, grabbed one of his hands and pressed a fingertip to the sensor, capturing an image of his fingerprints.
He was about to send the data to Michiko when the assassin’s eyes opened and his hand shot out, striking Cole in the throat.
Cole gagged and rolled off Ostrawski’s body, as the assassin got back to his feet and started to run once more.
Cole dropped the phone as he took off after the assassin, catching up to him again as he reached the center of the roof, where a small gap revealed a huge spire beneath, running down from the roof into the vast auditorium below, suspended above what looked like a giant ice rink.
He sent an elbow crashing toward the man’s face, but he blocked it and struck Cole in the eye with a single knuckle, stamping down toward Cole’s knee at the same time.
Cole, one eye closed, sidestepped the knee stamp and placed his leg quickly behind the assassin’s, pushing forward violently against the man’s chest.
The trip worked, and the man fell, caught himself, then slipped on the icy roof structure and lost his balance altogether.
Cole’s hand reached out to stop him, but it was too late – his body was alrea
dy disappearing into the gap in the roof, plummeting down through the open hole.
But his fingers caught on the edge, and Cole ran forward, looking down into the man’s terrified eyes; below him, tiny specks of people – Warsaw locals enjoying the ice – were starting to look up, point and scream.
Cole extended a hand. ‘Come on,’ he said, reaching down for him, ‘let me help you.’ A live captive, after all, was always better than a corpse. Cole, the world blurring before his eyes as the exertion finally caught up with him, could only hope he still had the strength to pull him up.
But as the assassin reached up to accept Cole’s help, a look of annoyed resignation on his face, his grip went, the one arm weakened terribly by Cole’s bullet; and before Cole could reach down to grab him, the man’s hands released their hold on the lip of the roof completely and Cole was forced to watch helplessly as the assassin’s eyes opened wide in fear and disbelief as he plunged – legs kicking, arms swinging, screaming the most terror-filled and bloodcurdling screams that Cole had heard in a long time – to the hard ice below.
Cole watched the body explode in a plume of blood as it hit the surface, heard the screams of the witnesses to the horror, and pulled himself back over the edge of the roof, collapsing to his knees.
His vision blurred again, his head was assaulted by a vicious pounding, and the pain in his side was simply indescribable.
But he still had one thing left to do; and so, pulling his exhausted and pain-ravaged body across the snow-covered roof membrane, blood smearing the pristine whiteness as he crawled slowly across it, he finally arrived at the cell phone he dropped.
Rolling onto his back, he entered Michiko’s number and sent her the photograph and prints of the assassin he knew only as Bronisław Ostrawski, along with a short message.
Find out who this really is.
And then he finally succumbed to his wounds, and passed out.
8
‘What happened?’ Major Alexei Volkov asked, the cold so bad, now that true winter was with them, that he was finally glad to accept the offer of his colonel’s hot borscht.
‘I do not know,’ Boris Ludenko said, looking at the same television screen as his friend. ‘I saw what you saw. A press conference, then all hell broke loose, everyone running for cover.’
‘An assassination attempt?’ Volkov asked. ‘On our president?’
‘It is hard to say,’ Ludenko said. ‘I did not see any shots being fired at him, or the others.’
‘There were shots heard on the rooftop,’ Volkov reminded him.
‘Yes,’ Ludenko allowed.
There was a pause as both men considered the ramifications, if there truly had been an attack on their president.
‘Is this the incident we have been waiting for?’ Volkov asked hopefully, and Ludenko could understand the anticipation; no fighting man liked waiting for combat, they longed to be in the thick of the action already.
And, Ludenko knew, they had been waiting for a long time.
He also knew something that his major did not – that they already had a date for the attack. If Ludenko got the order, they would be on the move in two days from now, and he was sure that what they had just seen on the TV would play a significant part in the likelihood of that order being given.
As he settled into his metal chair, covered from view by the camouflaged tarpaulin, he thought of the might of the 137th Reconnaissance Battalion that sat behind him, and then of the iron gauntlet of the 4th Guards Tank Division behind that, and knew that the target that lay ahead of them would stand no chance at all.
If the order was given.
‘I am being held here against my will!’ Emelienenko exclaimed. ‘This is preposterous!’
Not only that, he raged to himself, it was also damned inconvenient.
His entire plan was for the Zaslon man to get a shot off – to miss him perhaps, or to clip him at the very most, to make the attack look really authentic – and then for this Russian agent to escape, while the rest of the Bureau III men could be killed or arrested.
He would fly immediately back to Russia and a full investigation would follow, of course, showing how it had been a ploy by the Polish government to kill him, to protect themselves in the face of Emelienenko’s feared ‘post-Soviet expansion’.
But instead of being repatriated back to Russia, he was instead being held at the headquarters of the AWB, Poland’s internal security service, along with his entire cohort of PSS bodyguards.
The reason they’d given, of course, was that it was for Emelienenko’s own protection, it was written in their rules and regulations, they had a duty to keep him safe until they could find out exactly what was happening, who was responsible.
And then he heard the rumors that an AWB agent had found the leader of the gang, and the man had been killed in a fight.
You damned fool, Emelienenko thought sadly, you were supposed to escape.
With the body, they could perform all manner of tests, maybe even identify him.
And what then? What if they did discover that the man leading the mission to assassinate him was actually a Russian agent?
And, he reminded himself, Gorchakov had been stopped before he’d even had a chance to fire his weapon; what evidence was there that Emelienenko was even the target? Who was to say that it wasn’t Rojek, or Konorski?
He felt the meticulously concocted plan starting to fall apart around him. It had all been going so well, too – he had finally created the Greater Russian Federation. But it wasn’t the end of his dream, he told himself, it was only the start . . . only the start.
He straightened up, pulling himself together. It wouldn’t matter what the Poles found out, not if Emelienenko got there with his story first; investigations took time, he told himself, and by then he would have put forward the Russian version of events, he would have given his orders . . .
But not when he was stuck here.
‘Damn you!’ he shouted again. ‘Let me out of here!’
Valery Krasnov held the phone in his hand, not believing it had come to this. He was the anchor for the evening news on Rossiya 1, a channel that was regarded as a mouthpiece of the state – and quite rightly, as it was one hundred percent owned by the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company.
‘You do not know what you ask of me,’ he said. ‘If I read this, I will lose my job, maybe go to prison; hell, maybe they will even kill me!’
‘Come now, my friend,’ the voice said on the other end of the phone, ‘you know those last two options are unlikely. Possible of course, but unlikely.’
‘So you believe that I will lose my job, at least?’
On the other end of the line, Bruce Vinson chuckled mildly. He was still in a protected hospital bed, armed guards stationed right outside, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t work. He’d recovered sufficiently to use a phone and a computer at least – and had, indeed, spent the past half an hour deep in conversation with Aoki Michiko.
‘Come on, Valery,’ he chided, ‘you’ve been feeding me information for years. What would happen if that was revealed?’
It was true, too; as a mouthpiece for the state, sometimes Krasnov was able to feed Vinson items of news long before they were made public.
Vinson knew that whoever won the information game, sometimes won the whole battle; and he was therefore determined to get the truth out there before the Russians distributed their version.
Krasnov, for instance, was about to go live on Russian television and lay the groundwork for the false version of events that Emelienenko and Dementyev had planned; he was going to say that it was thought that there had been an assassination attempt on the Russian president, ‘perhaps’ by Polish intelligence services. This would be picked up by the other news channels, until everyone in Russia believed it; and then Emelienenko would come back to Moscow, no doubt an ‘official’ investigation would blame the Poles, and then he would do the only thing he could do, what he had been ‘force
d’ to do.
President Emelienenko would declare war on Poland.
He would also undoubtedly declare war on Latvia too, blaming a ‘European conspiracy’ for the assassination attempts.
And if he attacked Latvia, then he would attack Estonia and Lithuania as well. Latvia sat between them, and Russia would deem this a security risk, would invade them in self-defense.
And all of a sudden, the Greater Russian Federation wouldn’t just include Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but also Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
And then why stop there? The inclusion of those German agents at the meeting with Makarova in Vienna was surely a prelude to a future invasion of Germany, if things had gone well up to that point.
And with American forces – alongside a lot of European units which were part of the coalition – getting hammered in the meat-grinder of Iran, who was going to stand in their way, who was going to stop them?
Mason, idiot that he was, had also just agreed to include the newly-formed GRF in the Mutual Defense Treaty, which precluded military action between the three nations that had signed the agreement. The fact that the US was also part of NATO was going to be a long, drawn-out problem for Congress and the courts; and even if the MDT was eventually declared legally null and void in favor of America’s obligations to NATO, she was still not going to be in any position to help her allies, if things continued to go so badly in Iran.
So that was Dementyev’s Proyekt Yevropy, the secret that they had been trying to find out for months.
It was a plan for the invasion of Europe.
Vinson could only hope that they still had time to stop it.
‘You know what would happen,’ Krasnov said eventually, after a long pause. ‘I would be tortured, before they killed me.’
‘Precisely,’ Vinson answered. ‘If you decide to dance with the Devil, Valery, you have to be prepared to pay the price. But,’ he added, ‘if you do this for me, I will see what we can do about pulling you out of Moscow.’