by Tom Wood
‘No, thank you,’ Yamout said again.
‘As you wish,’ Petrenko said. ‘I take it you want to get straight to business.’
Yamout nodded. ‘I didn’t fly two thousand miles to fill my stomach.’
Petrenko smiled, but in a different way. His demeanour changed, hardened. The friendly host act had gone. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I hate wasting time when we can be making money.’ He crossed his legs and slouched in the armchair. The leather creaked. ‘As I’m sure you have already been told, I have a large stockpile of small arms, both former Soviet and modern Russia army munitions. Assault rifles, machine guns, even rocket-propelled grenades. Everything.’
He took a briefcase from the coffee table and opened it. He removed a sheet of white paper and handed it to Yamout. ‘As you can see, my prices are very reasonable.’
Yamout spent a minute reading through the long list of weaponry and the accompanying prices. Then he spent another minute pretending to read while a scowl deepened on his face. He passed the document to Elkhouri, who performed a similar routine.
‘These figures are not what I had been expecting,’ Yamout said.
Petrenko adjusted his seating. ‘In what way?’
‘Your pricing structure is too high and doesn’t make a lot of sense.’
Petrenko’s calm persona vanished and Yamout glimpsed the hot-tempered man it was hiding. ‘ Doesn’t make a lot of sense. What the fuck does that mean?’
‘It means-’
The lights went out.
Elkhouri was up from the sofa immediately. There was a commotion in the adjoining part of the suite, anxious bodyguards made more anxious by not being able to see.
Petrenko exhaled heavily. ‘The hotel will have the power restored momentarily, I’m sure.’ He raised his voice to be heard throughout the suite. ‘Everyone stay where you are and keep calm. No one do anything stupid. It’s just a blown fuse.’
‘Maybe we should go,’ Elkhouri suggested in Arabic. He seemed uncommonly agitated.
‘When this idiot is selling guns for a third less than what Ariff would pay,’ Yamout said back, ‘we can afford to sit here for a few minutes.’
‘Everything okay?’ Petrenko asked.
‘My friend is afraid of the dark,’ Yamout replied drily.
‘He shouldn’t worry,’ Petrenko assured. ‘We’re perfectly safe here.’
CHAPTER 23
Victor had been waiting in the stairwell when the power went. With no windows, the space became almost completely black. He already had the thermal imaging goggles in hand and he fixed them in place and switched them on. Through the goggles, everything appeared as shades of pale grey. The cool walls were almost white. The hot light bulbs were black. Victor slipped off his shoes and removed the P90 from his shoulder bag.
He released the gun’s safety, left the bag on the floor next to his shoes and jacket, and pulled open the stairwell door, using his foot to stop it swinging back shut. Victor raised the gun in both hands and pushed the stock against where his chest met his shoulder. He set the P90’s laser designator to high and the needle-thin beam glowed across the space, flaring where it hit the far wall. He stepped through the door.
Artificial light from sources outside the hotel glowed through the glass cupola. Maybe enough illumination to spot him at five feet, but no further. The seventh floor’s open-sided corridor was long and narrow and formed an almost complete circle around the central space. The door to the Presidential Suite was twenty-two feet away. Two men stood outside it. One of Petrenko’s guys in jeans and sports, one of Yamout’s bodyguards wearing a suit. Their clothing appeared as dark grey through the goggles, with the cooler wall and door significantly lighter. Their heads and hands were black. They had handguns drawn, heads moving from side to side, unsure what to do, blind in the darkness. It had been six seconds since the lights had blown.
The end of the infrared beam glowed on the closest guy’s chest. Two 5.7 millimetre bullets hit him in the sternum. A third struck between the eyes.
The noise of the P90’s gunshots were barely audible clicks. The sound of the bullet’s penetrating flesh was louder. The P90 ejected the spent cartridge cases straight down and they clinked together on the carpet. Victor fully depressed the trigger and drilled a burst into the furthest man’s torso as he turned in reaction to the first dropping. He stumbled but stayed on his feet, his brain slow to catch up with what had happened to his body. Victor took a step laterally left to get the angle, squeezed the trigger halfway, and put another bullet through his forehead before he had a chance to cry out in surprise or pain. He fell on top of the other corpse. A neat pile.
Victor hurried to the suite’s door, working on the assumption that someone on the other side had heard the two guards go down and was preparing for him to breach. Unlikely, and even if they had, it was more unlikely still that they would have shaken off their shock in time to think about defending the door, but Victor had only stayed alive this long by preparing for the worst at all times.
He stood directly before the door, aimed the P90 slightly downwards for typical torso height and fanned a long burst through the door to spread the bullets over a wide arc across the room beyond. The chance of scoring a hit was minimal, but his aim was to distract and panic whoever was on the other side long enough for him to get through the door without taking a bullet. Victor put a second burst through where the handle and lock were located.
He angled the P90 back up, kicked open the door and charged in two steps, dropped to a crouch, looking immediately left, shooting the first man he saw in the chest. He fell on to the dining table, knocking over chairs.
Victor tracked right, saw another dark shape at the far side of the room, fired, watched the shape collapse into a dresser. Glass smashed.
A step forward and Victor glimpsed the top of something or someone crouched behind a sofa in the TV area. He put a burst through the cushions, heard a scream, and fired off another. No more screams. His gaze swept over the room a second time. No one.
The suite was large, absent of light but shades of pale grey through his goggles. Thick drapes shaded all of the windows along the far wall, which had prevented him using the rifle, but helped him now. Only the smallest trace of light from Minsk outside filtered through, and wouldn’t enable anyone to see further than a couple of inches. Glancing down, Victor saw that the fifty-round magazine still had maybe ten rounds left, but he released it anyway.
He was reaching for another when a door burst open to his left and a man rushed out. He wore suit trousers and a vest, his bare arms black like his face. The middle of the vest was dark with sweat. He was armed, a big pistol clutched in both hands, moving erratically, his head doing the same, eyes searching the darkness, failing to see Victor crouched no more than ten feet before him.
Victor drew the holstered USP into his left hand and shot the man with a double-tap to the head. The bullets blew out the back of his skull and left brain matter glowing black on the wall behind. Victor reholstered the HK and fitted a second magazine into the P90.
He stepped over the most recent corpse, through the dining area, and quickly into the suite’s master bedroom. It was less dark here, a two-inch-wide gap in the drapes letting in more light from the city outside. Empty. Victor stopped at the door to the adjoining bathroom, spread a burst through it, opened it fast, moved in faster. No one hiding in the shower cubicle or bathtub.
Two guys outside the suite, four guys inside. Six down. Five left: Yamout, Petrenko and three bodyguards. He checked his watch. Twenty seconds since the first shot fired. It seemed much longer. It always did.
He heard a noise — something clattering — from behind him, coming from the opposite end of the suite. He turned around, exited the bathroom and the master bedroom, stepping back out into the lounge. Without shoes his footsteps were silent on the thick carpet. He hurried into the TV area, hearing a whisper he couldn’t decipher from the second bedroom, an answer he likewise couldn’t understand. Victor stood to the left
of the door, depressed the trigger completely for full auto, firing a waist-high burst through the door at a ten-degree angle, sending the bullets along the wall directly to the door’s right, then switched positions and shot another burst from the opposite side.
There was a groan, a clatter of metal on wood. In these kind of situations, people always stood or crouched to the side of doors.
He shot through the handle and lock before dropping to his stomach. He shuffled forward until he was lying with his left shoulder against the skirting board, body parallel to the wall, head in line with the doorframe. He pushed the door open a fraction with the muzzle of the SP-90. The door creaked faintly.
In response, sternum-high holes exploded directly through the door panels. Bullets embedded themselves in the wall at the far side of the suite, some at head height, others higher still. Two shooters then, one very low — prone or kneeling — the other in a tactical crouch.
Victor, still on his stomach, kicked a dining chair and it fell over, thudding on the carpet. The shooting paused at that, and he added a wheezing groan to the ploy as he crawled forward in front of the door, elbowed it open and immediately saw the first shooter — the one he’d shot through the door — sitting on the floor, back against the room’s bed, legs splayed out before him in a pool of black blood. The man saw Victor a split second before 5.7 mm bullets punctured his heart, lungs and spine.
Victor quickly rose into a crouch, acquired the second man crouched down on the far side of the bed, using it as cover, his face contorting in an instant of surprise as Victor appeared seemingly out of nowhere before him. Victor shot him twice in the forehead, stood, swept through the room, but saw no one else. That left the adjoining bathroom. Where the second dead guy fell, he’d brought down one of the drapes and the artificial night light of the city flowed into the room.
The bathroom door was closed. Three guys left, now crowded into the bathroom for safety. Trapped. Victor checked the magazine, saw it still had around thirty per cent capacity. More than enough.
He walked forward but stopped when he heard the crunch of an expended shell casing somewhere behind him — from the lounge. He turned around fast, moving into the doorway, expecting to see a bewildered guest or rent-a-cop investigating. Instead, he saw the dark grey silhouette of a slim man in the middle of the lounge, another by his side, shorter and muscular, both with arms out in front, holding pale grey handguns in their black hands. They’d already seen him in the faint gloom provided by the uncovered window, and fired first.
Their suppressed gunshots clacked in the quiet air, muzzle flashes tiny black bursts through the infrared. They fired almost in unison, the first bullet catching Victor on the right triceps, the second hitting him three inches below his sternum and dropping him before he could shoot back.
The impact knocked the air from his lungs and despite the shock and pain he lay still, hearing their footsteps rushing closer. He breathed as shallowly as he could, eyes shut so they didn’t catch the light, right fist still closed round the P90’s grip. His stomach ached from the subsonic bullet but the pain was only like getting punched, thanks to the Kevlar vest. The arm wound hurt, but he fought to keep it from his face.
He figured they were more associates of Yamout, probably responding to a panicked cell phone call. They had to have been close to have got here so quickly; on the same floor, in another suite, but must have arrived earlier since Victor had not seen them. He thought of the watcher from the lobby, cursed himself for thinking the watcher was alone.
Their footsteps slowed as they came closer. In the darkness they wouldn’t be able to see he was wearing body armour. The floorboards beneath the carpet creaked as a heavy foot stepped close to Victor’s right leg. A shoe nudged him in the hip. A useless check, but one people with too much adrenalin in them tended to make.
Another voice shouted from the bathroom of the master bedroom. It was in Russian — presumably Petrenko — a desperate plea for help. A second cry sounded in Arabic, presumably from Yamout. There was no response from the two men near Victor.
The foot near to his leg moved and Victor sensed the man standing next to his right arm. A second man moved to his left, then past him. The man to his right stepped over his arm and Victor waited until he’d taken three steps forward before opening his eyes. He rolled his head back, saw the grey shapes of the two men ahead of him, upside down, stepping into the bedroom, slowly, despite the cries for help.
Victor clutched the P90’s forward grip in his left hand, raised the sub-machine gun over his head, took aim on the first man’s back and squeezed the trigger.
A jagged line of bullet holes tore along the man’s spine. The recoil of firing upside down and without proper support made the P90 dance in Victor’s hands and waste rounds. He shifted his aim and watched the second man shot in the hip, back, arm and head. Both men hit the carpet, dead.
The pain began to intensify in his arm. He checked the wound. It was bleeding but not badly. The bullet hadn’t gone in, but had dug a shallow groove through the skin and muscle. Not serious but he wouldn’t be doing any push-ups for a while. He rose into a crouch.
A bullet ripped a chunk out of the carpet and floorboard next to Victor.
He felt another cut the air above. There was a third party-crasher firing from the lounge, having difficulty making out exactly where Victor was, so low to the ground. Victor quickly brought up the P90 to return fire but he didn’t have time to fully acquire the target and missed. The suppressing fire did its job, however, and the gunman ducked into cover, but the P90 clicked empty.
There was no time to reload — the gunman could reappear at any moment — so Victor dropped the sub-machine gun, drew the USP, adopted a two-handed grip, held his breath, and waited for his attacker to show himself.
He did. Victor fired.
There was no cry but he heard the distinctive wet thunk of a. 45 calibre slug punching through flesh.
If there were three men he hadn’t known about there could easily be more, so Victor stayed still for five seconds, waiting, USP trained on the space in the centre of the lounge where anyone else entering would appear. When they didn’t, he stood. Thanks to the open lobby, the noise of his attack would have carried far, suppressed weapons or not. Hotel security could be on the way. The police may have already been called.
He knew he should abort, extract immediately, but his target was less than twenty feet away.
He rushed back into the second bedroom, careful with his footfalls to avoid tripping on the corpses in the doorway. He could hear the sound of traffic as he approached the en suite door, understanding what that meant before he felt the draught. He kicked open the door.
Light through the smashed-out window provided enough illumination for him to see the bathroom was empty even without thermal imaging goggles. The window was small but big enough for even a large man to squeeze through if his life depended on it. Victor stepped into the tub, stretched upwards to peer through the gap. There was blood and strips of clothing on the fragments of glass that hadn’t been cleared. He saw the exterior of the hotel. No three men, but a ledge wide enough to shimmy along. He heard sirens.
Victor dashed back through the suite, realising by the groaning from the lounge that the last guy he’d shot wasn’t dead, just incapacitated. Victor ignored him, exited on to the balcony corridor in time to see an elevator descending, already two floors below him, the hint of grey and black from those inside. The elevators, unlike every other electrically operated device in the hotel, wouldn’t have been rendered useless when Victor blew the power. Most systems had auxiliary power for just such emergencies.
He fired and a cobweb of cracks appeared in the elevator’s glass front a second before he lost the angle. He shot anyway, firing at the roof, squeezing the trigger until the gun was empty, knowing a. 45 calibre ACP had little chance of penetrating the steel machinery that sat atop the elevator, but he wasn’t going to beat it to the lobby, and however he got there it was going
to be too late to intercept Yamout, especially with armed hotel security about. He reloaded and emptied a second magazine in less than four seconds. Useless, but there was no time to do anything else. The elevator was one hundred feet below him.
Gone.
The job was over. He’d failed. Now all that mattered was escape. Any problems his failure would create would have to wait.
He headed to the stairwell, noticing pale green light emanated through an open doorway further along the balcony corridor, leading to the suite next to the Presidential. The source of the light had to be something on battery power, a laptop monitor probably. Victor thought back to the three guys who had charged into the Presidential barely a minute after him. They had to have been stationed in the next suite along to have arrived so fast, but they hadn’t responded to the cries for help from Petrenko and Yamout. Not friends of either, so who were they?
He didn’t have long to get an answer but he’d been forced to kill three more men than he’d been paid for. Those men had tried to kill him and stopped him fulfilling his contract, a fact that could have fatal consequences. He needed an explanation.
‘Don’t move,’ a voice said in Russian from behind Victor. The voice carried the confidence gained from the possession of a firearm. A firearm Victor presumed was aimed directly at his back.
He stopped. Two feet from the doorway.
‘Drop the gun.’
There was nothing to tell him exactly where the speaker stood, so if Victor tried anything he would be trusting to speed only, relying on the fact he could turn around, raise his gun, acquire the target, and score a fatal hit before the speaker had time to apply a few pounds of pressure on his weapon’s trigger.
Victor let the USP fall from his fingers and thud quietly on the carpet.
‘Now lose the goggles.’
Victor lowered them to the floor.
‘Turn around.’
Victor did.
A man stood in front of him, no more than ten feet away, equidistant between Victor and the stairwell. The cupola provided enough light to illuminate the suppressed pistol in the man’s hands and the sheen of sweat on his face. He looked out of breath, having probably sprinted up several flights of stairs. He had a long face, stubble. Victor recognised him even without the brown suede jacket. The watcher.