"I'm watching. It is reaching that roundabout now. Going under the highway."
Preacher raced ahead, brought the BMW up to 90. He could see the roundabout up ahead. He was approximately 30 seconds behind the vehicle.
"Came out the other side and continued straight ahead. I can tell you that up ahead is dark. I can't see the road from here. No streetlights."
"You did good Andrews. I just needed the trail. Wouldn't have got it without you. Stay on those headlights as long as you can. I'll call you back in a few." Preacher cut the line and accepted the incoming caller who tried twice in the last minute. "Bueno." He smiled into the cell phone.
"Jesus what is going on now?" Wyrick. It was like they just talked minutes earlier, not months ago.
"Did I hear your little clicks on the line earlier tonight?"
"Maybe. I'm good at my job."
"What do you know?" Preacher replied
"Shootout in the marina. Lots of players. But I understand you're not there. You are tracking this Bojan, the smuggler?"
"You know quite a bit. Guess you spoke to a certain someone over the past few minutes.
"Yes. I got caught up on parts of it. You're supposed to be five thousand miles from there. Big event coming soon."
"Damn, you really do know quite a bit." Preacher raced around the roundabout and then straight ahead. In the dark distance, he spied the pinpricks of taillights turning to the left. "No time for reminiscing buddy. I'm on him."
"Sit rev." Wyrick used Seibel's method.
"El Cowboy Captain got in way over his head on this transaction and facilitated the delivery of something bad before he got capped."
"Something bad?"
"Bad. Chemical my guess."
"Not nuclear?"
"Can't say. It's small, in one vehicle. I should know in a few minutes when I catch them."
"Location?"
"Call NSA satellite imaging. Ask for Andrews. They're tracking now."
"Right now? They're tracking the vehicle?"
"And me. About a half-mile ahead of my vehicle. Heading up the hill from Trieste toward the Slovenia border."
"Damn. There are hundreds of side roads through that region. He'll disappear. Needle in haystack stuff."
"And whatever he's hauling ends up killing hundreds, maybe thousands." Preacher turned left where the vehicle ahead of him had turned half a minute earlier. "Do you have anything on him, this Bojan. I take it he is a Serb from Bosnia." Preacher asked the pre-eminent information gatherer.
"Nothing yet. I started a database search on him three minutes ago when I heard his name for the first time from... you know who."
"Call me back if you get anything useful. I need to get back with imaging." Preacher cut the line. But just as he did, the phone in his hand rang again before he could hit redial to call Andrews back. He recognized the number and answered. "Yes my dear."
"Location?"
"SP 13, east if Trieste, heading east, north."
"Into Slovenia."
"In a few minutes if I can't stop him."
"Very wild terrain there, roads going everywhere, nowhere. Lots of mountain trails a vehicle can take to pass undetected."
"Need to take him out now."
"You called in additional resources? You spoke with control?"
"No and yes. No time for help. No one can get here in time."
"They can drop a net over Slovenia. Stop the vehicle."
"He's got backup plans, a backup vehicle or two. He's a smuggler. He knows the way through these parts better than most, maybe better than anyone. He knows who to bribe, how to make it through without a hassle."
Preacher hit the accelerator as he spotted the vehicle up ahead, up a hill. Visibility was short. The tight country road he was navigating was originally built for horse or donkey and cart. The trees lining the road and hanging overhead made the whole thing feel like a tunnel. Tiny and quaint houses popped up sporadically on the roadside.
"You don't even know what he is carrying. You're doing all of this on a hunch." Preacher smiled at that. Everything he or she did was based on hunches. They were right a whole lot more often than not.
"Instinct." He smiled, repeating here word from minutes earlier. "I'm not thrilled about this. Three hours ago I was tracking down Elena. Now this thing has spun into total friggin' mess. I'm tailing a guy I didn't even know existed and who likely has some kind of WMD in his trunk. Great."
"You had 48 hours to get in and get out. You have a few more hours. Just get done what you need to do and come home." This last part, Marta switched to Russian. She always used Russian when she spoke her heart. It was the language of her childhood outside Buffalo. Her grandparents spoke very little English. Russian equates to home and security and family. She whispered, "Idi domoy." Come home.
Chapter 26
He lasered in on the two glowing red taillights up ahead. Eighteen seconds separated the two vehicles. Time to go dark. Preacher reached and pushed in the knob to turn his headlights off. The intermittent moon peeking through night sky clouds provided the only light.
The road whipped around to the left, heading up a hill. Preacher used the minimal light and headlights now 15 seconds ahead to guide him through the dark terrain.
Preacher's procerus muscle tugged his eyebrows together.
Think.
Put it all together.
Family. Generations. Serb. Bosnia. Wars.
War.
Ah hah.
He's not smuggling something in for someone else this time. This is for him.
Preacher's mind raced through the past 39 hours.
Put it all together. See it all.
This is a takeover operation not just a smuggling operation. The contraband is the reward for doing a job, eliminating the players in Trieste. Any ideas on who's behind it?
He shook his head. It clicked. All of it, right into place.
Chapter 27
Smelinski.
This little operation was planned from the start. The competing Trieste smuggling operations woven into an intricate scheme that involved a devious shipment of dangerous goods. Bojan and his war-hardened Bosnian Serb friends were here to both collect on the goods and dispatch the members of the competing operations to that great smuggling route in the sky.
The Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, formerly known as the KGB, was behind this. Had to be. Gregor Smelinski, Seibel's decades long KGB counterpart, was the puppet master pulling the hidden strings. Preacher could see the plan, the map, the players. And he could see his own role in the thing. Damn. He shook his head and smiled.
He considered himself a very good reader of humans and human deceit. But he was fooled this time. It was Katarina. She was the plant, the key.
She was Smelinski's key player in this game of multi-player chess, not Seibel's.
He had to give to the old guy. Here, this gnawing feeling in his gut over the past couple of hours had been pointing him to old faithful master puppeteer, Seibel. It had all the hallmarks of one of Seibel's operations. Lots of players on the field, misdirection upon misdirection, a primary angle that everyone was lining up for unmasked at the last minute as nothing but facade.
What was the key to it all? It was the little tidbit shared earlier by Marta that one of Bojan's men was captured supposedly by the KGB two year's ago.
That precise piece of information tied everything together.
And if he needed it, the gods brought him confirmation as the cell phone rang again. He picked it up and looked. It was Elena's number. How?
He answered after dodging a rock wall on the right as the road took a quick jog left. This driving in the dark was a blast. He was down to 12 seconds behind the taillights ahead.
"Yes?" He spoke into the phone.
"Elena is dead, looks like this is the last number she called." It was Antonelli, the nice-dressed photographer. He was most likely standing in the room looking at a dead Elena now.
"I heard. Sorry."
<
br /> "People die around you don't they?"
"They do. Lots of them." A piece of the messy puzzle just fell into place. Sometimes it takes a few nudges and hints. "Papa inserted you with Elena, didn't he?"
"Who are you?" That would be a yes.
"No time. I need to stop a suicidal Bosnian Serb. Smelinski planted Katarina in the team. Spies everywhere. Say hi to Papa for me when you see him."
Preacher clicked the phone off and tossed it in the passenger seat. No more calls.
Chapter 28
As he pressed on the accelerator coming around a bend, closing the distance on the vehicle ahead to just under a hundred yards, he did a mental jigsaw puzzle and brought all the pieces together rapid-fire style.
Bojan's man captured and interrogated a couple of years ago. His smuggling operation detailed to the extreme. Smelinski inserting Katarina into Elena's operation. Setting up the delivery. Rodrigo bringing together Elena and Voloshyn's smuggling operations in Trieste in one location. Requiring Bojan to exterminate both teams as part of the deal to receive the illicit contraband. All the while knowing the prized item in the mix was a fake.
Brilliant.
Smelinski pulled one from Seibel's basket of twisted tricks.
But.
'How do we know for sure Bojan doesn't have the real stuff?' He asked himself as he bore down on the two red headlights now only two hundred feet ahead.
Better safe than sorry.
He gripped the steering wheel tightly with his gloved hands, jammed the accelerator pedal to the floor and closed the 200-foot gap in eight seconds. Looking from above simultaneously, he knew they were just entering the tiny village of Crociata perched right on the Italy/Slovenia border on SP 13. A border crossing checkpoint was just a few hundred yards up the road.
The front bumper of Preacher's borrowed BMW battered the rear of Bojan's SUV. He slid to the left, accelerated, raced in front of the SUV and ripped the wheel to the right spinning his car in front. The Toyota SUV t-boned the BMW. Perfect. Preacher raised the Beretta and fired four shots through the BMW's passenger window and through the SUV's windshield right into the driver center mass. One down.
A moment later, the Toyota's windshield exploded out as a passenger in the rear seat fired an automatic rifle. Preacher ducked and spun the wheel further to the right, pinwheeling the vehicle around the right passenger side of the SUV. Inside a flash of a second, Preacher popped up and fired six shots into the right rear passenger window. He watched through the shattered glass as the guy in the seat fell back with new holes in his head. Kill shots.
Both vehicles came to a stop right there in the road. He watched the passenger in the front seat shove the deceased driver out of the open driver side door and jump into the driver's seat. The vehicle took off up the hill on the offshoot of SP 13 toward the hilltop village of Caresana, away from the border crossing into Slovenia for the moment. Good.
The Toyota shot forward for 90 yards and then abruptly veered right onto a one-lane side road. Preacher was right on his tail, with his headlights turned back on. No need for stealth anymore.
He didn't have this road in his memory bank. It was basically a farm and vineyard trail winding up the hillside to the tiny village of Prebenico. Then he realized what he was looking at from on high. This trail road is the borderline between Italy and Slovenia for this little stretch of international border. Left side of the road Italy. Right side Slovenia.
And a master smuggler experienced in traversing the highways and byways and off-the-map back roads in this region of the world would know this route. That told him it was most likely Bojan up there behind the wheel. Good.
The winding trail road banked right then tilted left. Vineyards with thousands of grape vines in pretty rows populated the Italy side of the road. Trees and woods and a dropping hillside on the right. Preacher, with a quicker, peppier vehicle stayed on the SUV's tail. He looked for his split second opportunity to exploit an opening and jam on the gas pedal so the BMW could shoot up beside Bojan's vehicle.
The tiny village had to be up ahead around the next turn or the one after that. But just when it looked like this thing would be finished in the village, Bojan did the unexpected. He slammed on the brakes then aimed his tires off the road to the right. A clearing in the trees showed a path of sorts down the hillside descending into a ravine and further down the hillside into thick woods. Early spring leafless trees looked foreboding in the splash of both vehicles' bouncy headlights.
Bojan's Toyota lurched forward over the edge. Damn. This is where the plan to tail, harass and drive the other vehicle off the road fell apart. The other vehicle was a 4-wheel drive all terrain type. It had the engine, struts, shocks, tires and sturdy frame to take the beating surely waiting below. Preacher followed the smuggler over the edge of the road and down.
Mistake.
This was no road or even a dirt track. He looked ahead of Bojan's SUV down the hillside. This was a damn hiking and bike trail. Not unlike challenging trails he runs in the mountains above their hidden cabin back home in Colorado.
There was barely any room between trees for the four-wheeled vehicle on the narrow passageway. And worse, it was rough, rugged, rutted and rocky. The already rattling vehicle beneath him would not make it. No way.
Time to act.
Preacher floored it. The revving engine and gravity aided his descent into the rear of Bojan's rugged SUV. His front bumper again smashed into the rear bumper of the Toyota. He turned the wheel to the left then right as he accelerated trying to fishtail the larger more powerful vehicle and crash it into a tree. Bojan countered by braking. Preacher lurched forward crushing into the steering wheel. He pushed himself back into his seat and sliced the wheel to the right while putting maximum pressure on the gas pedal.
There was just enough space to the right of Bojan's vehicle for Preacher to maneuver up there, momentarily putting him directly beside his prey. Time to roll.
The ravine to the left dropped down into a small rocky gulley. It was steep. The ravine was formed by thousands upon thousands of years of rainwater falling and spilling down the hillside on its way down to the peaceful valley floor several hundred feet below. Preacher levered in beside the Toyota and accelerated again while steering the car to the left into the SUV. On a flat road he would likely not be able to force the larger, heavier, more powerful machine off the road. But on a slanting hillside with rock and gravel under wheels, he was able to apply enough force to achieve his goal. The front end of the BMW shot underneath the right side of the larger SUV. The Toyota's right front and rear wheels lost their grip as they were lifted. The two left tires fell into a slight rut, dropping that side of the vehicle down two feet and essentially lifting the right side up further. This allowed Preacher to lever his little car into this yawning gap between the bottom of the Toyota and rocky path below.
As he executed this move, he knew what was coming. An understanding of physics and gravitational force and centrifugal motion all let him see the immediate future for both he and Bojan. Liftoff.
The Toyota was first to go over. Because Preacher kept accelerating into and under the larger vehicle, it didn't just tip and roll over. He basically flipped it into the air and over onto its top where it landed hard and then continued to roll down the rock-strewn ravine. Preacher followed in the BMW. His vehicle started its cart wheeling underneath the larger one. Both vehicles tumbled down the steep grade for all 70 feet of it.
With his seatbelt locked and piercing him to his seat, Preacher had a little time during the raucous explosions of the rolling tumble to do a little thinking. He thought in rapid fashion about time and space and life and babies and love and Marta and reasons and how a slight irregularity in the zygomaticus major muscle forms cheek dimples. He knew the clinical word for dimple: gelasin. Almost completely useless information.
Except.
When you see a dimple smiling back at you from the one and only love of your life.
The crunching o
f metal and glass and plastic and rock came to an abrupt and violent end. The two vehicles were lodged against one another. The Toyota landed upside down on its roof. Preacher's battered sedan came to rest on the passenger side. He hung there in his seat like a fraying ragdoll pinned to a laundry line for drying. But he did have to admit, that was kind of fun. Hell, that was a lot of fun. Most people will never get to do what he'd just done.
He was loose from his seatbelt, scrambling up and out of the drivers' side door onto and over the car to the ground. He was a little banged up. Blood streamed down from a small gash just above his hairline on the left side of his head where he smacked the doorframe during the tumble down the ravine.
Preacher sprinted over rocks and gravel around to the other side of the upended Toyota. Bojan had obviously not been strapped in and was laying in a crumpled mess on the roof lining of the Toyota. A pretty good deep slash from his forehead down across his nose pulsed blood. But his eyes were open and stared up at Preacher through shattered glass.
He stepped toward the rear of the vehicle. Preacher peered in to see the container about the size of a large picnic cooler resting on the roof in the rear of the Toyota. He was fairly certain nothing too dangerous was inside the package, but he wasn't going to chance it and open it. He'd call in someone with the proper gear and protective covering to assess. He returned to Bojan with his gun drawn from his belt.
"You did your part Bojan, but you got fooled along the way." Preacher spoke good ol' English. Nothing to hide here. "You and your men took out two teams and the captain as your part of the bargain. And all you got in return is probably some aerosol spray or bug juice in that box back there."
"On the phone, that was you?" Bojan whispered.
"Yes. I told you to walk away and you could live. But you had to go ahead and kill that nice sailing captain and try to skittle off with the dirty goods. Too bad."
"Who are you? KGB? CIA? Interpol?"
"One of those. But enough questions. You probably have a very dramatic and moving story involving love and loss and even holding the dead bodies of your children in your arms. Bad stuff happens. Going to continue to happen as long as humans are involved. And if I had to guess I'd say you were looking to add to all this human suffering by releasing what you believed to be chemical weapons in some densely populated area killing thousands more. Great."
The Perfect Instinct Page 11