Ibrahim saw the sun heliographing off the automatic weapons on the bluff even before they released their first volleys. He glanced up at the shooters poised in the cave openings, their rifles kicking against their arms, rattling out bursts of fire.
He jerked back on the reins of his horse, rearing it to a halt, simultaneously bringing his hand up and down in a slicing gesture. The other men pulled alongside him, their mounts snorting and whinnying, jets of dirt fanning over their hooves as Parabellums sprinkled the ground up ahead. At the distance from which they were being fired, the guns would be inaccurate, barely within range of their targets. Still, the terrorists held the high ground. And they had been ready, clearly informed of the Sword team’s approach.
It wasn’t the best thing that could have happened. Nor was it the worst, in Ibrahim’s estimate. He’d hoped to have surprise on his side, but had considered the eventuality that it might turn against him. And had familiarized himself with the lay of the land, making sure he had a few tricks of his own up his sleeve.
He turned to the American at his right.
“Take your men around the front, Mark,” he said. “I’ll bring my team to where our man is sure to try wriggling from his nest.”
Mark’s blue eyes regarded him from under his sunburned brow. Then he nodded, signaled to the dozen men behind him.
As their horses thundered toward the rock shelf in an arrow-straight line, Ibrahim broke to his left with the other half of the team, leading them there as quickly as his mare could carry him.
Racing up to the foot of the bluff, the American-led Sword team instantly lifted the RAG launchers—weapons with a range of forty to sixty yards—to their shoulders and took aim through their built-in sights. Rounds snapped down at them from the defenders on the ledges, close enough now to present a deadly threat. Mark saw one of his men go tumbling off his saddle, clutching at his throat, blood spraying between his fingers. Another man fell to the dust, crimson petals blossoming on his desert tunic. Beside him, one of the horses was raked across the chest and collapsed in a writhing heap, its legs giving out all at once, throwing its stunned rider several yards through the air. The screech of pain that issued from the dying animal sounded horribly, sickeningly human.
“Fire!” Mark shouted. “Hit the bastards hard!”
In a tightly coordinated fusillade, his remaining teammates released the ring-shaped energy grenades from their tubes, sent them spinning toward the cave entrances at five thousand revolutions per minute, spirals of propellant trailing behind. The gyro-stabilized airfoil projectiles flew upward with flat, dead-on trajectories, slamming into the men on the rock ledges, hurling them off their feet with yelps of agony and confusion. Soft rubber O rings fitted around the grenades gave way on impact, pouring CS1 tear gas into the cave entrances.
Satisfied that the opening wave of his strike had had its desired effect, Mark barked out another command. In response, his men pulled their gas masks down over their faces, dismounted their horses, and began scrambling up the slope, their boot heels scuffing over the arid soil, triggering off a near-continuous volley of VVRS rounds as they ascended.
The tear gas-blinded men above them thrashed atop the overhanging ledges, screaming, seized by convulsive, wracking coughs. Some stumbled blindly for several seconds, arms pinwheeling for balance, and then tripped off their feet and dropped earthward. Others tried to retreat, groping, crawling on hands and knees, helpless, unable to use their weapons, barely able to find the cave openings in their pain and disorientation.
Reaching the ledges, the Sword team hastily reloaded their airfoil launchers and fired another salvo of RAG/CS grenades into the cave mouths.
Then, clouds of gas swirling in the dimness ahead of them, they went storming into the tunnels to mop up what was left of the resistance.
Korut dashed toward the stairs rising toward the fallback exit, the dim electric lights on the walls throwing tiger stripes of shadow across his features. He could hear the screams and stricken gasps of his fellows echoing in the shaft behind him, but there was nothing he could do for them now. He had thought that even with half their number in Russia, they would be able to fend off attackers unfamiliar with the terrain. But the men that had come after him were hardly performing like outsiders. Who were they? How had they discovered the underground complex?
He would have to figure it out. Have to send word to Gilea about what had happened here today. But all that was for later. Unless he made off right away, he wouldn’t be able to do anything at all. For her, or for himself.
He slipped into the narrow stairwell and bounded toward the surface, taking the steps two at a time, his gun held out at the ready. He could see daylight splashing into the chamber from above, could hear the frightened whinnying of his horse in its stable.
He reached the top of the stairs, turned a jutting corner, plunged into the stable. Though cross-tied in its stall, the horse pawed the ground with its hooves in a jittery little dance, obviously rattled by the sounds of combat down below.
Korut pulled the saddle blanket off its steel wall peg, then the saddle, and tossed both of them over the beast. He tightened the girth quickly, praying that he’d gotten it secure. Then he shoved his foot into the stirrup, hefted himself onto the horse’s back, yanked the reins so the animal turned toward the stable exit, and dug his heels deep into its sides.
The horse bridled for only a moment. Then, with a shrill, startled neigh, it left the stable, bolting into the glare of the undiluted desert sun.
Ibrahim’s team had been told about the stable, had had its precise location mapped out for them by a local merchant who had valued their U.S. currency above tribal loyalty. And after splitting off from Mark’s group, he and his men had gone to wait outside the rim of rock that formed its entrance, knowing Korut would try using it as an escape route if he eluded the frontal assault.
He caught sight of them as soon as he emerged from the cave, sitting astride their horses in a loose semicircle, their weapons trained in his direction.
“Pigs,” he rasped, realizing he’d been trapped. “Fucking pigs.”
He raised his weapon to fire it, thinking he would take down as many of his enemies as he possibly could, but a RAG projectile smashed into his midsection before his finger had even curled around the trigger, bouncing him from the saddle, sending him crashing to the ground in an agonized ball, his knees drawn up, his hands wrapped around his stomach.
“Let’s scrape him up and get him out of here,” Ibrahim said, and climbed off his horse.
THIRTY-NINE
KALININGRAD REGION FEBRUARY 9, 2000
GREGOR SADOV WAS AT THE FIRING RANGE, WORKING with Nikita, when the phone call came in. He had a cell phone clipped to his belt, its ringer set to Silent, but he felt the vibration in the small of his back.
Slamming home a fresh magazine in the AKMS, he pulled back the cocking lever, handed it to Nikita, spun away without a word, unclipped the phone from his belt, and took the call. “Yes?” he said into the cell phone.
“It’s time.” The voice on the other end of the line was masculine, but that didn’t mean anything. It had obviously been altered electronically, and could have belonged to his own grandmother for all Gregor could tell. He did know, however, even with all the electronic modifications, that it was the same voice that had originally hired Gregor for this series of missions, and that relayed Gregor’s orders to him. He had no idea whom he was speaking to, but that wasn’t unusual. In Gregor’s line of work, he was used to several layers of insulation between himself and his employer. What wasn’t usual was the fact that this time Gregor didn’t actually know whom he was working for. He knew it was someone high up in the government, and he could make a good guess who was selecting his targets, but with this job he knew he was better off not knowing.
“Do you have the target selected?” Gregor asked.
“Yes. A satellite ground station in the Kaliningrad region.”
Gregor nodded to himself.
He didn’t ask why this particular site had been targeted. He didn’t need to know. “Any special requests?” Gregor didn’t need to explain what he meant. He needed to know if there were any individuals in particular who needed to be killed—or who needed to survive.
“None. Just make sure you’re thorough.”
Sadov nodded again. “Understood,” he said.
“There’s one more thing,” the electronically altered voice said.
Gregor’s hand tightened around the tiny phone. That little “one more thing” would invariably turn out to be something he didn’t like.
“The mission needs to be carried out as quickly as possible.”
Gregor smiled, but there was no amusement in the quick, tight quirking of his lips. “How quickly?” he asked. “We’ll need time to plan, to reconnoiter, to—”
“Tonight,” the voice said, its tone harsh and unyielding. “Tomorrow night at the latest.”
“Impossible—”
“We’ll double your fee.”
That stopped Sadov in mid-protest. “Triple,” he said.
The man—if man he was—with the altered voice didn’t hesitate. “Agreed,” he said immediately, making Gregor wonder how much higher he could have gone. “As long as it’s done by tomorrow night.”
“It will be,” Gregor said. Hanging up, he turned around again, grabbed the weapon from Nikita, and started peppering the target. “Come on,” he said when the clip was empty. “We’ve got work to do.”
FORTY
KALININGRAD REGION FEBRUARY 10, 2000
“POWER’S OUT AGAIN, ELAINE.”
Elaine Steiner looked up from the junction box she was working on. Her husband had just come into the room, bearing bad news once again. “What is it this time? Don’t tell me they ran the back hoe into the generator again.”
As part of Gordian’s agreement with the Russian government, the ground station purchased electricity from the surrounding grid—but Gordian was no fool. He knew how unreliable the service could be in the remote areas he picked for his ground stations, and so each site was provided with a generator large enough to keep the facility on-line. The problem was that many of the spare parts required for the generator were purchased locally, as was the fuel it ran on, and none of these were ever up to the Steiners’ usual standards.
“Nope,” Arthur said. “The generator came on-line smoothly and automatically, just like it was supposed to. But we can’t figure out why the power from the grid stopped. We put in a call to the local substation, and no one else is without power.”
Elaine frowned and started putting her tools away. She and Arthur had been doing this for long enough, and had worked in enough violent places, for her to have sharpened her sense of caution to a fine edge. “How long has the power been out?” she asked.
“Ten minutes or so. The substation’s sending out a crew to check the lines, so we’ll know more shortly.”
Elaine blew out her lips in silent frustration at her husband’s perpetual optimism. “A local crew?” she asked. “We’ll be lucky if they can even find the lines. No, dear, if we want this repaired quickly, we’d better do it ourselves.”
Gregor Sadov looked at the downed power lines and allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction. Three utility poles in a row had been knocked down, victims of a little bit of C4 plastique planted just above ground level.
Their target was an American satellite ground station, so Gregor knew the loss of electricity would not knock out all their defenses. But he also knew that most of their generator’s output would be directed toward maintaining the most vital systems, including the satellite uplink and the communication channels.
Gregor wanted to take out that generator. He wasn’t too worried about the phones inside the compound. This compound was so far from any real civilization that there simply wasn’t anyone the people inside could call—no one, that is, who could get there in time to do any good. But Gregor hadn’t survived this long by taking unnecessary chances. He couldn’t cut off all the communications from the compound, not without finding some way to knock their satellite out of orbit, but he could try and take out their generator.
He signaled his team members to mount up. He had seven people with him, the three survivors of his current team and four new people Gilea had sent to help him. Gregor hadn’t had much chance to work with the new-comers. That didn’t matter, though. They were Gilea’s people, not his, and even if they’d been with him for a year he still wouldn’t have been able to trust them.
He’d split his team evenly among four BTR-40s. Gilea’s men were together in two of them, he and Nikita were in one, and the last of his own men were in the remaining armored personnel carrier. Each vehicle had a KPV 14.5mm machine gun mounted on the roof of the driver’s compartment and an impressive array of extremely lethal weaponry stored ready to hand. His orders were to be thorough, and he intended to carry those orders out.
They started their engines and, with Gregor and Nikita in the lead, headed toward the compound some three miles away. He’d wanted to make sure that no one at the ground station heard the explosions when they took the power lines down.
As they approached the compound, Gregor saw an American Jeep heading their way, a corporate logo painted on the side. He couldn’t see who was in it, but it didn’t matter. He knew it had to be a repair crew sent out to investigate the loss of power.
Under other circumstances he would have let them go. A small crew of technicians was meaningless in the larger scheme of things. But his orders were to be thorough.
Braking to a stop, he turned to Nikita. “Take them out,” he said.
Nikita nodded once. Breaking out one of the RPGs in the back, she climbed out of the carrier, took careful aim, and fired.
The road was bumpy enough that Arthur had put his seat belt on. Elaine refused to. She said she had had enough of that back in the States, where the law required you to wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets and to put your kids in car seats—not to protect you but to protect the state from additional medical payments in the event of an accident.
Arthur was driving. He always drove. Truth was, Elaine was the better driver, but whenever the two went anywhere together, Arthur always drove. Because of this, and because he had his attention focused on the goat trail they called a road in this part of Russia, it was Elaine who first saw the enemy.
That’s how she thought of them, from the moment they crested the small rise a couple hundred yards ahead. The enemy. Her suspicions had been raised as soon as Arthur told her about the power outage, and how the local substation had said no one else had been affected. It was too coincidental, especially given what had happened back in Times Square only a little while earlier. She would have given a month’s pay to have a gun with them—any sort of gun—but the few small arms the compound had were kept locked up in times of peace ... and no matter what her suspicions were, this was still officially a time of peace.
Now, seeing four unmarked armored personnel carriers heading toward the compound, Elaine knew what she was seeing: the enemy.
“Arthur—” she said, but it was already too late. The four BTR-40s slowed to a stop, and Elaine saw a woman step out of the lead vehicle, pull something out of the back, and point it in their direction. “Turn around, Arthur,” she said. “Turn around now.”
Her husband looked up, his hands starting to shift on the wheel, but at that moment the woman fired.
Nikita’s shot fell short, burrowing into the ground directly in front of the oncoming Jeep and opening up a crater before it. But that was all right, Gregor thought. The effect was the same. The Jeep slammed into the sudden hole in the ground, driving its grill into the far wall of the crater and throwing someone out of the passenger’s side.
Putting his own vehicle in gear, he motioned for Nikki to get back in. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s finish this and get going.”
At first, Elaine couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t even remember what it was that had
happened. All she knew was she was lying down, looking up at a sky that seemed too blue, too peaceful, to belong to anywhere on earth. And then it all came rushing back to her—the enemy carriers, the woman, the rocket exploding in front of them, Arthur ...
“Arthur,” she said. She moved, then, rolling onto her side, and that’s when the pain hit her, a great, white wall of agony that started somewhere down around her toes and ended just past her hairline. She knew then that something was terribly wrong with her, that either the blast itself or her landing on the hard, frozen ground had damaged her beyond any repair, but none of that mattered anymore. All that mattered was Arthur.
Ignoring the pain, she forced herself onto her hands and knees and began crawling back toward the crumpled wreck.
Arthur was there. His seat belt had kept him from being thrown from the Jeep, but it hadn’t done him any favors. As she got closer she could see that the steering column had been driven backward into his chest. He was pinned against his seat, and he was not moving.
“Arthur,” she said, her voice somewhere between a cry and a prayer. “Arthur ...”
She made it to his side, crawling through the open doorway and curling up against his motionless body. She knew he was dead. He wasn’t breathing, his wounds had stopped pumping blood, and she knew there was no hope for either of them.
“Oh, Arthur,” she said. Reaching out, she closed his eyes gently and then, fighting the pain that threatened to overwhelm her, she leaned forward and kissed him gently on the lips. “Sleep well, my darling,” she whispered, and let her head fall against his shoulder one last time.
Gregor approached the broken American Jeep slowly, his Beretta in his hand. He was sure there was no one still alive within it, or at least no one who could be a serious threat, but still it paid to be cautious—especially since it was so difficult to see through the starred and bloody glass remaining in the windshield.
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