The Sniper and the Wolf

28

Gil lay prone in the brush on a bluff overlooking the goat farm three hundred yards below. Peering through the scope of the G28 sniper rifle, he could clearly make out the red LaForza and the black Peugeot, both parked behind the house with Kovalenko’s car, where they could not be seen from the country road.

“It’s them, all right,” Gil said, moving aside for Dragunov to have a look. “Midori got it on the first try.”

Dragunov watched as one of Kovalenko’s men stepped out the backdoor of the house, smoking a cigarette. “Demetri,” he muttered, recognizing the Chechen Spetsnaz man. “Mudak!” Jacket!

Gil saw him fingering the trigger. “Ease off, Ivan. We only got twenty rounds. I don’t want you wasting my ammo.”

Dragunov moved aside with a smirk. “I can shoot as well as you.”

“I know,” Gil said, getting back behind the rifle and pulling the stock into his shoulder. “You can probably fuck as good as me too, but this ain’t fantasyland.”

Dragunov chuckled. “Do you think Claudina will still be there with the car when we get back?”

They had left Claudina with her car a half mile up the road, and she had promised to wait, but Gil didn’t expect to see her ever again. “Not even thinkin’ about it,” he said, dialing in the scope. “Why? You in love?”

Dragunov chuckled again. “Fuck you, American. I just don’t feel like walking all the way to San Vito to meet your pussy SEAL team friends.”

Gil smiled, placing the reticle on the head of the man Dragunov had referred to as Demetri. “We’ll take Kovalenko’s wheels. How’s that sound?” He squeezed the trigger and blew off most of Demetri’s head from the nose up. The body dropped beside the stone house, and Gil saw a puff of dust as the .308 ricocheted off the wall. “And down went McGinty.”

Dragunov hunkered in. “Who’s McGinty?”

“A drowned Irishman. Look sharp now. Those other pricks may have heard the round hit the house.”

They waited more than five minutes before another Chechen came out. He spotted the body near the far end of the house and turned to duck back inside, but Gil squeezed the trigger again, scoring a second head-shot that blew the Chechen’s brains into the house through the window of the backdoor. The body crashed to the floor half in and half out of the house.

“That’ll kindly spoil a man’s dinner plans.”

“You should have let me identify him,” Dragunov said. “If it was Kovalenko, we could have gotten the hell out of here.”

“It was that bald prick who shot me in the fuckin’ hand back in Messina.”

“Anton,” Dragunov growled. “Another sukin syn.”

“Well, he’s a dead sukin syn now.” Gil pulled back a little farther into the brush. “We gotta be real careful from here on. If Kovalenko knows his shit, he’ll roost in that upstairs window.”

“Can you see inside?”

“Not as well as I’d like,” Gil admitted.

“Then he won’t roost there — not if there’s any chance you can see in. He’ll move out the front to hunt us on the ground.”

“Then you’d better get Midori back on the phone. Tell her to watch if anyone comes out.”

Dragunov had Midori on the satellite phone a minute later, explaining the situation.

The bluff was high enough for Gil to see beyond the house but still low enough that the leeward defilade stretched for a hundred feet or more. The best thing Gil and Dragunov had going for them was that there was no way for Kovalenko or his men to reach any of the vehicles without falling under the gun.

“He may wait until night,” Dragunov remarked.

“Only if he’s a damn fool. For all he knows, we’ve called for backup.”

“He’s as patient as a snake.”

“Yeah, well, so am I,” Gil said. “And we’ve got the fucker boxed in. I can send you for pizza and beer if comes to that. Meanwhile, they’re stuck in there.”

“A beer sounds good,” Dragunov said. “I’ll be back to check on you later.”

“Just don’t come back drunk,” Gil said with a grin. “Last thing I need is a drunk Russian stumblin’ around in the weeds to give away my position.”

“Fuck it, then,” Dragunov said. “We’ll drink after.”

“You’re buyin’.”

Kovalenko had the AWS rifle set up across the kitchen table on its bipod, scanning the terrain beyond the farm, but the glare of the sun on the kitchen window made it difficult to see with much detail.

“They have to be up there on the bluff,” he muttered.

“How in hell did they find us?” Vitsin wondered aloud. “There’s no way they could have followed us — none.”

“Satellite.” Kovalenko’s eye was still to the scope. “You came in a red car, remember?”

Vitsin suddenly felt very stupid for not having told Tapa — the team’s car thief — to steal something else. “Do you think that’s how?”

“That’s the American out there,” Kovalenko said, half to himself. “The damn Americans have everything. He probably had satellite surveillance in Paris too. Those fools we relied upon in the CIA are worthless. If we hadn’t needed their help planning the pipeline operation…”

He shook his head. “They fucked us somehow, but it doesn’t matter now. Lie down with a whore, you get what you pay for.”

“Maybe we could run for the cars,” Vitsin suggested. “Could he get all five of us?”

“We’d be dead before anyone could even turn a key.” Kovalenko wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, glancing down at Anton, who still lay half in, half out of the house, his head blown apart like a ripe watermelon. “The American has a rifle, which means his people are supplying him. And that means we don’t have all day and night.”

“For all we know,” said one of the others, a veteran named Zargan, “there could be an entire Spetsnaz team out there waiting to hit us when it gets dark. We should barricade the house.”

“Make the necessary preparations,” Kovalenko ordered. “And someone drag Robert inside so we can close the door.” Then an idea occurred to him. “Tapa, go upstairs to the bedroom and get the blanket from the bed to wrap the body.”

Tapa went up the stairs, and Kovalenko put his eye back to the scope.

Zargan used the poker from the fireplace to hook Anton’s belt and drag him the rest of the way inside. Vitsin kicked the door closed.

Tapa stepped into the bedroom, grabbing the wool blanket from the bed. A window pane shattered, and he was thrown against the wall with the force of mule kick, the ball of his shoulder joint shot completely away.

Kovalenko spotted the small dust cloud kicked up by Gil’s shot, shifted his aim a fraction of a degree and fired.

When Gil saw Tapa’s dim figure in the upstairs window, he squeezed the trigger and rolled immediately to his left, knowing that Kovalenko or someone else might be scanning the bluff. An instant later, a round cut through the air exactly where Gil’s head had been, close enough for him to feel the energy of the bullet as it passed. Both he and Dragunov pulled quickly back out of sight.

“That fucker’s fast!”

“I told you,” Dragunov said. “He’s been shooting since he was a child.”

“That was too fast! He sacrificed that guy to draw me out.”

Dragunov’s face was grim. “That’s why he’s called the Wolf. Kovalenko is willing to do whatever it takes to win.”

Gil sat back on his haunches, holding the sat phone in the crook of his neck and lighting a cigarette as he spoke with Midori. “Keep an eye on things,” he told her. “We’re eyes off target for the moment.”

“Nothing’s happening,” she said. “Are you hit again?”

“No.” He drew from the cigarette to settle his nerves. “But that bastard’s almost killed me three times now. I’d like to get just one shot at him.”

Dragunov reached for Gil’s smokes. “Maybe if you had waited,” he said under his breath.

“Hey, smoke your own,” Gil told him.

Dragunov gave him the finger and shook a cigarette from the pack, lighting it with a wooden match and lying back in the dry grass to stare up at the sky. “We’re going to have to fight them in the dark again. I hate fighting in the fucking dark.”