by Alex Carlson
The hut could best be described as rustic, though if you lived there you might just call it old. It was built in the eighteenth century and had served generations of farmers as they brought their cows to pasture during the summer months. The walls were of thick wooden beams, the wide floorboards creaked under steps, and the layout of the bedrooms around the central sitting-eating-cooking area was purely functional. In back, there was a modern outhouse, which they now didn’t have access to, and there were solar panels on the roof, which fed electricity into a battery to power the refrigerator and the few low-watt bulbs that were built into the ceiling. The wood stove provided heat and its top got hot enough to boil water and cook soups and stews. There was a stone grill outside for cooking meat over an open fire. The pantry was stocked with canned foods, soda, beer, and wine. They had been roughing it, but roughing it with charm.
The hut was not completely without modern amenities, unusual though they were. The standard CIA field box was stuffed with fun stuff—weapons, gadgets, and toys—and less fun stuff—a first aid kit that included bandages, medicine, and plasma. The yin and yang of the box reminded everyone that they were playing a very serious game.
Colin had emptied the field box on a narrow bed in an adjacent bedroom and arranged the items to make a quick inventory. It wasn’t much. Their greatest defense was meant to be their hidden location. Still, they had an M39 Enhanced Marksman Rifle along with plenty of ammunition. Tyler had his Beretta, Colin a Glock, and now they had the Russian’s Heckler & Koch. The field box also contained binoculars and a night vision device. The first aid supplies, now arranged on the other bed, would satisfy any Navy corpsman.
Meanwhile, Tyler secured the hut. He checked windows and doors, of course, and familiarized himself with angles through the windows. He knew exactly where they could safely stand or on which lines they could walk without getting their heads blown off by a well-placed shot.
The last thing they did was remove the body. Tyler and Colin dragged it to the pantry and covered it with the blanket. Colin then grabbed a towel and did his best to clean up the blood.
“We’re secure,” Tyler finally told Stirewalt. Colin nodded approval as he threw the bloody towel in the pantry and Lucinda opened the hatch to the safe room.
“It’s safe,” she said. “You can come up.”
Svitlana climbed out first, followed by Pavlo and Maksym. Pavlo looked shaky and Maksym, for once, had been silenced and didn’t have a humorous quip on his lips. Svitlana was the strongest of the three, her posture erect, her face calm. She looked at Lucinda, a look that demanded an explanation.
“Russian Spetsnaz,” said Lucinda. Svitlana didn’t seem surprised. “Tyler eliminated one, but at least two more are still out there. Chances are, there are even more out there or more are coming. We’re safe for the moment, but at some point they’ll attack. I won’t sugarcoat this: time is not our friend. Unless, of course, we can hold out until it gets dark. Then we might have a chance.”
Svitlana Tereshchenko looked at her watch. Nightfall was eight hours away.
C
HAPTER SIX
ATGATT. ALL THE Gear All The Time. It was a pain in the ass, but bikers lived by it. Literally. If you weren’t all atgatted up, a crash could lead to a horrific death.
And so Rhys wore a full-faced helmet with the ECE-15 seal of approval, a protective textile jacket and pants, leather gloves with reinforced padding over the knuckles and at the base of the palm, where you’d brace yourself during a fall. His boots were actually hiking boots, but they’d protect his ankles if needed. The jacket and pants were a marvel of safety engineering. Built-in armor protected the elbows, shoulders, chest, back, hips, and knees. The D30 armor was malleable and relatively comfortable until impact, when it instantaneously hardened, forming a protective shell around vulnerable body parts. The material also had Karbonite Ripstop ceramic beads built into the surface of the textile, which meant that any hard contact with the ground was more likely to tear the road than the material. He spent a small fortune on the suit at a Klim outlet store, but it was worth every penny. Not only was it safe, it was also Gore-Tex waterproof. He was dry even as he rode through the rainiest season the Alps had ever seen.
The rain splattered on his visor and was immediately blown aside by the wind. He rode aggressively, careful to stay just barely within the border between control and reckless. He had no choice but to trust his tires on the wet but smoothly paved road.
Sophia Venegas had called from Berlin. How she got the information as quickly as she did was a mystery, but Rhys figured it had something to do with her stunning beauty, which led men to do anything to please her, even breaking security protocols.
She confirmed what he had feared: SIGINT detected encrypted communications from the area of the hut. The signature of the satellite phone used near the hut matched a record of a phone used in Crimea a year previously. The recipient of the call, also detected magically by the NSA, was pinpointed at Lengberg Airfield, a single runway set-up nestled in a valley, thirty kilometers from Rhys’ location. A quick penetration of Austrian air traffic control’s network revealed that a Fokker F27 with registration RU-AKB had recently landed at the airstrip.
“The plane has a history,” Venegas told Rhys. “Yes, it’s Russian. RU-AKB’s home base is in the Caucuses and logs show frequent flights to the Crimea. The plane is designated to a Spetsnaz reconnaissance unit, RG 405, which itself has a history. Langley has it linked to massacres in both Crimea and Syria. They’re forwarding the write-up they have on RG 405 to Manny. But to be blunt, Rhys, these guys are bad news.”
Rhys knew Venegas to be all business, not someone worried about his safety. He understood: she was telling him he was way overmatched.
“What kind of support do we have in the area?” He didn’t want anything to do with RG 405.
“There’s a SEAL team at Ramstein, unless you want to get the Germans involved.”
Rhys considered. “Lucinda wouldn’t want the Germans involved. There’s gotta be a reason she has whoever she has squirreled away in a safe house. See what you can do to get the SEALS moving. From Ramstein they could get here in an hour or two.”
“I’ll work on it. I’m sure Ambassador McClellum will be glad to help.”
“I’m sure he will.” Rhys knew McClellum didn’t have a choice.
“Who does she have up there, Rhys?”
“Someone the Russians want gone and their willing to take chances to ensure she goes away,” said Rhys. “But more importantly, how’d they find the location? We might wanna look into that.”
Now, after kilometers along a basically empty road that ran through a flat valley between two rows of mountains, Rhys saw the airfield on his right. He would have missed it but for the orange windsocks that extended in the fierce wind.
He turned onto an access road and after a distance pulled into a gravel parking lot. He rolled to a stop next to a Renault, the only car in the lot. The parking area was small, but still too big for the small amount of traffic the airfield would generate. Across the road was a signpost with yellow hiking trail signs pointing in various directions. Rhys figured the lot also served as a base for hikers wanting to spend a day in the mountains.
He walked to the airfield’s office—terminal was too grand a word—with his helmet in hand. There were no planes on the runway and the doors to the adjacent hangar were sealed tight. He looked through the office’s single large window. The light was on but no one was inside.
The rain had all but stopped, but the clouds were still full of water and the rain would return soon enough. He stood there a moment, trying to make sense of it all. Who’d the Russians call if no one was here?
He tried the door and it opened. He stepped in, feeling bad about the water that dripped from his clothes onto the floor.
The room was functional, without much thought given to comfort or decoration. Still, you could tell the office serviced the flight industry. There was an Austrian Airlines
calendar on the wall and signs that instructed pilots how to file their flight plans and reminded them to sign the pre-flight checklist before takeoff. Stacks of binders were piled on the desk as though someone were in the middle of reorganizing. No work was getting done on that desk. The chair had been hastily pushed to the side. Next to the door, a coat hung from a coat rack and a dry umbrella leaned against the wall.
Any plane that might have landed here would have been logged, not just digitally, which was how Sophia Venegas had found it, but written down somewhere as well. He looked around but didn’t know what he was looking for. Some form or something, maybe attached to a clipboard located somewhere handy. If it was on the desk, it was buried under the binders. If it had already been filed away somewhere—and Rhys knew Austrians were more German than the Germans when it came to Ordnung—it would be in one of the binders. Searching for it meant going through the stacks and Rhys didn’t have the patience for that.
Then he saw the cabinet. No, it wouldn’t be in there, he thought. It would be on the desk. He lifted the binders, looked for a clipboard or something on the surface. He found nothing. Resigned, he considered the binders and flipped open the cover of the binder on top. The first page dealt with the snow removal budget from 2006. He closed the cover. Waste of time.
He looked at the cabinet and decided to open it for no other reason than he had no other ideas.
An arm flopped out.
The body was twisted and folded to fit in the cabinet, the neck hideously broken. The man’s eyes were still open, frozen in a look of shock.
RG 405 had been here.
He bent and touched the man’s arm with the back of his fingers. It was still warm.
Rhys ran out the door and looked about. Why was there no plane? Why kill the controller?
It started to come together.
Kill the guy so that no one would see a large group of men disembark. But the idea of moving a Spetsnaz unit out by vehicle was unrealistic. They probably hoped to land in Klagenfurt but were redirected here. Ground transportation would have been waiting for them there. Nothing would be waiting here.
Did that matter? A Spetsnaz unit was capable of moving by foot through inclement weather.
Rhys oriented himself and figured they’d go the most direct route possible. North. He turned to the north and saw the mountain climb above him and disappear into the clouds. He turned back around and imagined where the Fokker would have been. It would have been parked at the end of the runway, waiting to take off or just sitting out of the way by the hangar. Anyone leaving the plane and heading up the mountain would go through the parking lot to the start of the hiking trails on the other side of the access road. He hustled to it, hanging his helmet on his handlebars as he passed his bike.
The signpost had half a dozen little yellow signs on it, each indicating the distance and estimated time to various destinations up in the mountains.
There was a depression in the ground between the road and the first rise up onto the trail, a small ditch that had filled with murky water. Rhys jumped over it, not wanting to soak his boots. He landed with a slide, but when he lifted his foot, his boot had left a near perfect print. It wasn’t the only one. Countless boots, large ones, had made the made the exact same jump. They were fresh. The rain would have washed away anything older than an hour, at most.
There were at least a dozen pairs of footprints, probably many more.
C
HAPTER SEVEN
VALENTIN PRIMAKOV CLIMBED with the rest of them, placing one foot in front of the other. The steps on the dirt path were measured, consistent, almost a march.
They had been moving for maybe an hour and Primakov knew this would be a long one, so expectations naturally managed the degree to which he felt the exertion. If it were an hour-long hike, he might allow himself to feel tired, knowing the end was near. But the end wasn’t near. The hike had just begun and his brain had somehow told his body—and his body understood—that this was just the warm up.
RG 405 climbed without rush, but without slack either. They just kept going, along a path that inclined gradually up the side of the mountain. Sometimes the path turned, almost 180 degrees and worked its way back in the other direction, yet it always climbed up and up, forever up. The men could have cut the corners, in an effort to save time, and head straight up the steep side of the mountain, but overtaxing their muscles early made little sense. The shortcuts would have led to aching thighs and drained energy hours later. Better to just stick to the path at a steady pace. Besides, the grass between the stretches of path was treacherously wet and even their combat boots found little purchase.
Primakov’s only annoyance was the weight. The SVD sniper rifle, unloaded, weighed four-and-a-half kilos. He also carried the ammunition, plenty of it, in his pockets and rucksack. He had a handgun, loaded, a couple of grenades, communications gear, and all of the personal effects he’d need for a lengthy hike up a mountain in the rain. At least his pack was positioned comfortably on his back. The other men had their AK-9s tucked between back and pack, which must have led to almost unendurable discomfort. And then there was the rain itself, which added weight. Primakov estimated his drenched clothes were twice as heavy as when dry.
Such is the life of a soldier.
Primakov thought of his daughter. Diana was three, a bundle of joy, his reason for living. She and Natalya waited for him in their apartment in Krasnodar, and Primakov thought of the dolls and carriages and toys strewn about the apartment. Did they spoil her? Probably, but how could you resist? The image of home brought a smile to his face. Then a blast of wind whipped rain into his face and he returned to reality.
He understood the mission. He accepted the mission. It was in Russia’s interest and he had signed on to ensure Russia’s interests. But God he was sick of this shit.
Up they went, gradually and forever. The difficulty, if there was one, was in holding the speed down. Primakov had run marathons and the challenge there had been the same: keep the speed down at the beginning lest you’re drained when you need energy later. He was positioned toward the rear of the line, but he sensed the men in front were all but charging ahead. Just slow down, he told them inside his head.
Colonel Scharkov was not a dumb man and Primakov knew the commander had a contingency for the event that they met anyone up in the mountains. The problem, of course, was they didn’t look like hikers or hunters, especially to the trained eyes of locals. They weren’t in fatigues, but they weren’t wearing the camouflage of a hunter nor a hiker’s red or yellow or blue. Their clothes were black, dark, or just plain drab. Moreover, the men in the unit exuded strength, their muscles apparent, even under layers of clothes. Anyone passing from the opposite direction would undoubtedly notice the absence of hard breathing. Training in the Caucuses will do that.
It probably wouldn’t matter. No one was out in this weather to notice these things, and the higher up they went, the less likely they were to come into contact with anyone.
RG 405 was Primakov’s second family. He would die for any man in the group and they would die for him. It was built like a typical Spetsnaz razvedyvatel’naia gruppa, or reconnaissance group, consisting of a strike group, an elimination group, an explosives group, a hostage liberation group, and a diversionary group. Each consisted of three or four men of specific training and specialty. The elimination group and hostage liberation group each had a sniper, the explosives group, of course, had a demolition expert. But all the men were cross-trained, each one had achieved at least the level of marksman, and should a soldier go down, another could competently take his place.
They hiked in groups of three or four, with half a kilometer between each group. Primakov was in the last three-man group, and they alternated in turning around to cover the rear, though they knew they outpaced anyone coming from behind. Occasionally they saw the group in front of them, but usually the fog was so thick they were more likely to hear the forward group than to catch a glimpse of it.
Inevitably, as it always did, a smidgeon of doubt crept into Primakov’s thoughts. It was healthy. It kept you alive. This one was obvious. Had Scharkov planned this through? He had undoubtedly had a back-up plan in the event that Gray Scout failed, but was this the correct course of action? They seemed uncharacteristically exposed and away from quick evacuation. The risk weighed on Primakov. It was just one more weight.
SCHARKOV AND SHUVALOV were in the four-man point group. The dirt path had turned to mud, though pebbles and rocks embedded in it prevented slippage. The cloud they walked through limited their visibility to a few meters. Mist hit their faces, the wetness gathering until gravity pulled the drops of water down to their clothes.
And so it was that a dog had zeroed in on them before they had seen it. A curious thing, it raced to them without fear or aggression. It was a Vizsla and its personality brought a smile to Shuvalov’s face. It looked the product of an aristocrat and a clown.
Scharkov halted and raised his hand, a signal to stop. The dog wouldn’t be alone this high on the trail. No human would willingly come out in this weather, but a dog had no choice. It had physical needs and had attached its usual habits—in this case a walk through the mountains—to those needs. The owner would also maintain the habits and Austrians could be hearty, undeterred by the elements.
A moment passed and then the dog’s owner emerged from the fog as he walked contentedly down the path. He looked more skeptical than surprised to see the men.
“Ach, schrecklicher Tag für einen Spaziergang,” he said with a forced smile.
“English, please,” said Scharkov. He didn’t even try to be friendly.
“The Wetter, very bad,” the Austrian said. “Where do you go?”
“We will be hunting tomorrow. We go to a camp ahead.”
As Scharkov was talking, Shuvalov let the dog sniff his hand and then patted its wet, furry head. One of the soldiers moved a few meters ahead and discretely moved behind the Austrian.