Vladimir scowled, muttering 'shit' in Russian under his breath when he'd snapped the small branch under his boot. The damned leaves were so thick in places it was impossible to detect things like that. His next step had swished through some dry leaves as he stumbled, compounding his mistake. He stood, silent, trying to hear anyone moving near him. He wasn't a sniper because his skills at moving through brush and forests were lacking. He was a little out of practice, that was all. It had been a while since he'd used them, a rarity over the last few years, moving with cars through urban settings for his recent work in Russia and Europe. His avoidance of the forests he'd enjoyed so much as a child in the Pioneers, proudly wearing his red scarf with the others, was showing.
Moving slower, Vladimir worked his boots around, feeling for anything that might snap or crack under his weight. He had time, since the SWAT teams were still working on their plan to assault a building that had nobody on the roof left alive and two very scared men inside, aiming their rifles at the glass doors in front of them, the useless security guards all hiding in the hallways far from the front foyer. At home the State Security forces would shoot a couple of RPG rounds into the lobby, then rolled in a few grenades, followed by a team of men rushing through the destruction and smoke, spraying anything that moved in front of them. It produced civilian casualties, but it didn't take long to plan and execute, unlike these snails with their flashing blue lights who covered their bottoms first and acted last, if at all.
Jabo moved closer, feeling confident he'd gained a slight edge, since he knew where Vladimir was and his opponent had no idea he was so close or even there, stalking him. Parachuting in silently from above, taking that risk a second time had given him a great advantage and he wasn't going to blow it.
His phone was still working so he whispered, asking if they could hear him.
“Roger that,” they whispered back, making him smile. They were like kids who'd sneaked out of the house on a weekend, hiding from their parents so they could play all night.
“Put a single non-explosive round on the very top of the hill, don't worry I'm nearly 300 meters North of the top, then bug out, I'm good from here on out, that's an order, fire at will.”
“Yessir,” there was a pause, “give 'em hell sir and good hunting. On the way.”
They'd decided an explosive round was better than a sniper bullet. It made Jabo flinch as he said 'fuck me Sargent' softly. He started moving quickly, understanding the temporary sound 'blindness' caused by the ringing in his ears would afflict the sniper's hearing as well, for a few precious seconds.
“Mother of God,” the sniper spat, flinching and fighting his body's urge to drop flat, worried they'd spotted him on thermals or night vision, even though he'd scrupulously kept his Spetsnaz thermal hood covering his upper body. As a further advantage he'd stayed in the thickest part of the brush that grew in huge clumps on this North side of the low hill. The echo from the explosion confirmed it had struck the top of the hill. That told him they'd done it to shake him up or make him run away in fear, giving away his position to their thermal scope.
Not likely, but a good try. The police bullhorn warned the shooter he was going to be arrested and to not move, but Vladimir doubted they'd stay around for that. It was a parting shot, a little goodbye, which brought a sigh of relief to his lips. He'd made it, suffering no great harm. There was always tomorrow, then his own ears started working again and he heard a crashing through the woods, up the hill from him, coming his way?
Jabo saw him and kept running, the slight dimming of his opponent's hearing was fading but there was only a hundred meters between them. His plan of using the brush against him looked like it was going to work. It gave the man little time to switch to his sniper rifle – using two hands to steady the night scope he'd taken from the R/F men after killing them. Vladimir turned to look in Jabo's direction, following his ears, fighting to work his rifle off his shoulder, to bring it up to bear, clumsy because of it's heavy, purely optic, light gathering scope. As he got his rifle in position, the running enemy dodged aside, dropping out of sight, dangerously close.
Jabo rolled when he hit the ground at the last second, seeing Vladimir bring his rifle to point in his direction. Jabo worked his body, rolling up hill, counter the expectations of the other man who put three very quick rounds in the place Jabo would have been if he'd taken the easier option of rolling down hill, letting gravity help him.
As he finished his roll Jabo stabilized, gripping his rifle he'd kept dangling on the front of his chest. He had one knee up, one down, a shooting position rarely used these days, but one of the three he'd been taught as a child by his grandfather, long ago so it was burned into his muscle memory. Snugging the rifle in his shoulder, feeling the hard curve of the stock where it should be, the fire in his bad calf made his mind sharper, adding tension to his muscles until his entire body froze into meaty stone, stiffening to give his rifle an extremely stable platform for the one shot he needed to make.
His finger tightened as the saw the sniper turn, deciding to hide instead of shoot it out. He flew headfirst into the heavy brush, moving low, in a crouch. He moved backwards immediately, surprised by how thick and prickly it was, as Jabo hoped he would. Vladimir had found the brambly scrub impossible to break through quickly, one spiny Mesquite branch nearly taking out an eye. It forced him to draw back then turn to run down hill, desperate to open up the distance between himself and Jabo he'd shot at after he fell to the ground. Vladimir's favorite distance to engage and kill was either two hundred or more meters away or hand to hand. Now he was too close for one and too far for the other.
The seconds after Vladimir started running downhill he felt the bullet hit his arm, turning him and making his sniper rifle fly off into the night. Starting lose balance, he slipped on the dried leaves that covered the hillside everywhere. His next step couldn't keep him from falling and didn't slow his fall at all. He turned to use his dominant, right hand which was the arm that had just been shot, breaking the bone so it hung uselessly, unable to respond to the command his brain issued. A foot from the ground, he realized he couldn't reach out to stop his impact. He fell on his face, hitting a wicked local cactus which hugged the ground, producing a spiny rounded hump. One of it's sharp, thick thorns aimed at his face penetrated one eyeball, making him scream as he tried to close his mouth to cut it the animal screech the piercing pain produced. He succeeded for a few seconds, turning on his back, panting – his face tortured by nearly a twenty spines bristling from his brow and cheek – a human porcupine.
Jabo saw the assassin spin and fall, flinging away his rifle with the large starlight scope so it disappeared, but he couldn't be sure. The darkness and scattering of bushes and trees between them broke up his profile, already difficult to see because of his black clothes and the sniper suit he wore, matching Jabo.
Like all animals, worse for predators, which the sniper assuredly was, wounding them made them far more dangerous to approach. Jabo's shot, following the three from Vladimir, had alerted the police their fire fight was live again. This new source of shooting, far from the snipers in the West, ended the discussion they'd been having over fresh coffee, brewed in the new crisis response RV that had pulled up five minutes earlier, adding another layer of discussion and brass hats to slow the decision cycle once more. Cops swapped jurisdiction claims like women traded romance novels.
Events took over. Some called for release of their assembled SWAT teams to enter the battle ground they thought had quieted down – a hypothesis thrown out when Jabo's and Vladimir's rifles exchanged fire, thirty seconds after the final AP/Explosive round from the Barrett echoed across the low valley. Their crime scene was turning into a hot fire fight again, with shots exchanged fire in a new location. How they many were there? Was a new group arriving on the scene, backups? The discussion among the SWAT team leaders and the senior officers in charge of them intensified. Their assault was delayed once more as their bosses decided this new information
required new consensus and planning. The SWAT units returned to rechecking their weapons and gear, distraught they had to wait again.
Coming up from below, taking a slightly longer approach to the wounded sniper seemed the right idea and it had worked. Coming down hill was the obvious path, and Vladimir had shown him he bet on the obvious move each time. Given enough time Jabo always built a good model of the person he was fighting and he had Vladimir's psyche cold.
The man didn't take risks, preferring the conventional outcome. His scream of pain when he hit the ground meant a rock or a branch on the ground had hurt, bad – something Jabo remembered from his own hunts. He'd had tree limbs try to take out an eye and a rattlesnake make a lunge at his pants, making him wary every second he moved in Texas brush.
That was Texas hunting and all good fun, part of the challenge, what it enjoyable to hunt in the woods, the opposite of his mood now. He felt like a snake at the moment, the best way to describe his weaving approach, carefully working around every little branch and obstacle, extremely careful, coming up at a new angle toward the last place he'd seen the sniper lurking, before he fell.
Vladimir was reduced to his small pistol, the automatic he could silence, as he was now, an added advantage because he was wounded. One shot was all he needed, in Jabo's brain. The small bullet was guaranteed to stay inside and swirl around, making the highly organized nerve networks into bloody mush – 'kasha' in his language. Let him come!
Vladimir screwed the silencer on the barrel, which would make it slower to aim but provide a flash guard to some extent, making his shots invisible or muted, compared to the explosion of light from the AR15 he'd decided to leave with the dead soldiers, but not their beautiful hunting rifle and it's electronic scope they'd brought along as a sniper piece. He'd left behind one of his weapons when he sneaked out of his blind at the top of the hill, getting ready to run, quickly. He'd started with his beloved Dragunov, a dead weight his quick escape required he abandon. It was easily replaced, just metal and wood, nothing to be sentimental about.
That had left him with the hunting rifle, loaded with a few rounds, it was heavier than the Dragunov, but far more useful, allowing him to kill past six hundred yards. But his beautiful stolen weapon was gone, thrown into the woods by his spinning body when he'd been shot in the arm and knocked off balance, falling to the ground and into that damned cactus. Fuck! He hated Texas.
Jabo listened, closing up, stopping, then working nearer, bent low to the ground. This posture made his wound scream, then ease up, a muted, background sensation, joining his lungs that were burning from the slow exertion of stalking closer, almost kissing the ground. He was ready to crawl if needed, bent over as he approached the man he could hear breathing slowly – both of them trying to make as little sound as possible.
It came down to that, two wounded men both trying to breathe without making any sound. Vladimir nearly achieved it, with a cactus spine sticking out of his useless eye, along with twenty others studding his face, creating a chorus of agonies he fought through, resisting the urge to blink his impaled eye, knowing it would set off the raging fire he'd forced down with herculean effort, requiring all his ability and considerable mental focus,
Vladimir used his good eye to peer up the hill, in the direction he'd come. Fighting his urge to blink and clear his eye. There! Vladimir saw him, his enemy, moving impossibly slowly, like a big turtle weaving back and forth as his body heaved with deep, panting breaths, clearly as exhausted as Vladimir. Unable to focus properly, he stared at his fuzzy target that kept slowly moving in his direction, taking the easier path, incredibly quiet, the only option either of them had – approach in silence, aim and kill.
Jabo saw him pointing a small pistol with a very long barrel that resolved into a silencer. His mind recalled the information he'd gotten on the back channel, through Albert, about the killings of the young girl's parents, both shot in the head with a small caliber pistol, from the short twist on the bullets they'd recovered. It was him, for sure, the last bit of verification he'd wanted, to be certain this was the sniper who'd killed his loving grandpa. That thought changed him, altered him from the core out. Jonah started talking in his head, like he was crouched next to him, giving him one last lesson.
“Breathe slow Jabo, slower, so slow you feel like you're going to pass out. Ignore everything, even me as you hear my voice in your head. Your entire world is that animal at the end of your barrel. You're a rock, nothing moves, release your breath as your mind concentrates on the slight tension in your finger moving backward, taking out the slack...”
His heavy rifle round made the thirty feet to Vladimir in micro seconds, tearing through the man's back between his shoulder blades, on the side opposite his heart, so he wouldn't die, only fall, terribly wounded, unable to fight back. Jabo moved up, hearing the police bull horn calling out for him to drop his weapon and cease firing. He doubted they had a good fix on him. He'd failed to locate the sniper in the scrub oaks and brush from the roof of the data center, a position far closer than the SWAT teams that were still cautiously approaching on foot and in heavily armored vehicles, nearly a quarter mile away. 'That hill, over there' was all they could muster as a location.
Coming up on the sniper he stepped on his arm that still had the gun in his hand, his other arm, the one he'd shot, was flopped over his body, limp and useless. Disarming him, he stuffed the silenced weapon in his pants, after clearing out the round in the chamber and dropping its short magazine in his hand.
“You done?” Vladimir looked up at him, “I shot them, your grandfather went first, no pain, head shot, I couldn't kill your grandmother, she was hiding in the cab, impossible to hit, I never knew she was there, only the girl, who I wanted to kill. I had to clean up, you know, to finish my job.” he tried to make it professional to professional, a final report.
“You're going to live, whoever you are,” he called out to Albert, tapping the number on the screen with his name. “Hey, got him, your boys want another Russki? Hey, great, call off the SWAT in this area, oh your guys are posing as FBI? Great, my last shot, you see it? Then get a move on. Good, two guys, hurry, bring first aid, he's got an arm that's bleeding out and a sucking chest wound, but he'll live, I guarantee you that if you get here in... two minutes? Hey, great.”
He tapped the red button that ended the call, the looked at the man who turned his head, staring off at the future he'd feared, held in a secret cell, pumped for every bit of information he had for years and years. In Russia he knew everyone, starting with Putin who'd offered him a fourteen year old ballet dancer one amazing night, an offer he'd turned down – too old for his taste. He'd rot away until he died, alone in the small room that would never be comfortable, or perhaps they would be nice, these soft Americans, breaking him with kindness. In Russia...
Jabo watched the man pass out from all the blood he'd lost, hoping he was dead. In a minute he saw the two men, waving so he wouldn't shoot them, spreading out to cover as much of the hill as possible until they saw him, immediately running toward his small flashlight. He used the red lens that would keep their meeting halfway private, since the area was going to be swarming with real SWAT and law enforcement in a few minutes.
“Here,” they handed him an FBI marked bullet proof vest, redundant as he had his own on under his black SWAT style blouse. With the FBI ball cap they handed him, he could pass as one of them. They stabilized Vladimir, slapped a heavy bandage on his chest wound, then picked him up. All three of them jogged down the hill to a waiting Suburban, carrying the wounded sniper in a cloth stretcher. It was driven by a real FBI agent who'd be recognized by the locals. Albert worked fast.
They blew through the roadblocks as they listened to Jabo explain what had happened to the two radio men. It pissed off the agency man sitting next to Vladimir, holding his drip bag. He checked the tourniquet they'd tied on his wounded arm, not concerned if he lost it now, or his eye with the cactus spines sticking out of it. Serve the bastard right.<
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Vladimir had killed two American soldiers, two border patrol agents, a family whose father had been ready to bring down the LazaRuss operation with inside information, as well as Bowie's grandparents and the pilot who'd provided his escape route. If he was reduced to his torso with no extremities, it'd be fine with them, just as long as he was alive and they could make him talk until his tongue wore out.
“What the fuck can I say? Those two men, was it even worth it?” Jabo felt terrible. Losing men on his team always made him feel awful, something that never went away.
“We're raiding their offices now and the guy Grigor was talking to was easy to track, since we have his phone number. He led us to the rest of them. Their laptop told us everything we needed to know after we retrieved it ten minutes ago. We were on that before you jumped out of the helicopter a second time. You're crazy, you know that?”
It seemed a very high price to pay, two lives for some phone numbers that led to the gang of rich crooks who'd run LazaRuss.
“They were going to clone humans, they called it their HXX Project. Hell they already had, all females, but we were never sure, not until tonight, when our people raided their labs.” The agent grinned, “Fucking Russians. They used our technology, our biotech people to run their labs, developing the methods to make it work. When they had it cold they were cloning the best we had to offer.”
“What do you mean, geniuses?” All Jabo could think of was making an horde of brilliant humans, all enslaved to the Russian government, inventing and engineering new technology to win the next round of the cold war that had begun again, after Putin took over and started rearming Russia – taking chunks out of his neighboring, former SSR countries.
“No, cheerleaders, all natural blondes too, look.” He thrust a large phone with a smiling older teen its display in a cheer costume, grinning to hard it looked like it hurt. He held it in front of Jabo as he sat in the back, his leg on a splint, stretched out on the wide bench seat in the huge lumbering vehicle, speeding down a side road, going somewhere.
Hell To Pay Page 37