The Sniper and the Wolf

6

The nation of Malta is an archipelago located roughly fifty miles south of Sicily in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea and is home to almost a half million people. Only the three largest islands are inhabited, the largest being the island of Malta, around which there are no less than nine sizeable bays providing safe harbor from the open seas, making Malta a highly popular maritime destination for both tourism and commercial shipping.

Anchored in the darkness, not far from St. Paul’s Island near the mouth of Xemxija Bay on the north coast of Malta, the Palinouros was a 223-foot Kismet yacht manufactured by the German company Lürssen in 2007. She featured six staterooms, both a formal and an informal dining salon, a Jacuzzi deck, a disco, a galley to rival the kitchens of most restaurants, separate crew quarters, a laundry service, various lounges, and a state-of-the-art navigational system. Fully crewed, she carried twenty-two hands, and her twin 1,957-horsepower Caterpillar diesel engines gave her a cruising range of 5,000 miles, boasting a top speed of 15 knots. Brand new, she had cost her Turkish owner well over $100 million.

Gil stood beside Dragunov on the rocky shore of the uninhabited island of St. Paul, studying the starboard beam of the vessel through a pair of Russian binoculars. The night was calm, and the Palinouros rested easily at anchor, having fallen off slightly to the north with the current. “The lights are on,” he muttered, “but nobody seems to be home.”

Dragunov grunted as he studied the vessel through his own binoculars. “Aye, they’re bedded down for the night.”

Gil scanned the decks. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone on the bridge, either. That’s odd. Our intel says she has a Greek crew. Greeks know better than to leave the bridge unattended at night.”

Dragunov lowered the binoculars. “She’s at anchor.” He clapped Gil on the shoulder, a bit more roughly than Gil considered customary. “Whoever’s on the bridge is probably lying down.” Pope had emailed them the schematics of the yacht, so they knew her precise layout, and the bridge was fitted with a pair of built-in sofas.

“I reckon we’ll board at the stern. Eh, Ivan?”

“Aye, Vassili, we’ll board at the stern.”

As Dragunov walked off in his wet suit to ready his men, Gil grinned after him, thinking the word aye made him sound like some kind of incongruous pirate.

The Palinouros was anchored a cable’s length from the shore, or approximately two hundred yards. While this distance would be no trouble for Gil — a leisurely swim — he wasn’t so sure about the Spetsnaz operators, who almost never stopped smoking. Even now they stood in the darkness with their glowing cherries dangerously visible for hundreds of yards over the open water.

The Russians dropped their smokes as Dragunov approached, stepping on them and double-checking their brand-new suppressed Arsenal Firearms Strike One pistols. The Strike One was a Russian-made semiautomatic. It operated on the same Browning recoil system as the M1911 and could be chambered in three different cartridges: 9 mm, 40 Smith & Wesson, and .357 Sig Sauer. The weapons the GRU had supplied them in Rome were chambered in .40 caliber. Gil had never fired the Strike One before — called the Strizh in Russian — but he liked that it had a much lower profile than most other pistols.

They moved into the water as a unit and were about knee-deep when Brody let out with a gut-wrenching groan, grabbing his groin.

Gil saw the spout of water kicked up by the rifle bullet after it passed through Brody’s genitals. “Sniper!” He grabbed Brody and dove forward with him into the water.

“It’s Kovalenko!” one of the Russians called out. A bullet tore through his throat, and he went down thrashing in the shallows.

Everyone else was already stroking for the Palinouros. Gil rolled to his back, keeping Brody’s head out of the water as he kicked hard for the yacht. There was no place else to go. St. Paul’s Island was entirely flat, with no cover except for a statue of the island’s namesake on the far side. Brody moaned in Gil’s arms, unable to swim because his hands were locked onto his mangled privates.

Dragunov and the other three men swam as fast as they could, porpoising like dolphins to make themselves as difficult to hit as possible. Gil was unable to drop below the surface because of Brody, so he concentrated on making as little wake as possible as he kicked his feet, stroking with one arm. He couldn’t hear the incoming rounds, but from the angle they were striking the water, he could tell that they were coming from the Maltese shoreline to the south.

“The only easy day was yesterday,” he muttered, certain he would never make it out of the water alive.

Another of Dragunov’s men cried out and began to flounder, shot through both lungs. Within a few seconds, he sank beneath the water and did not resurface as Gil stroked steadily past the point where he’d gone down.

Gil watched the stars to keep his heading, estimating that they had probably covered half the distance to the Palinouros, and glad that shark attacks in the Mediterranean were basically unheard of. The way Brody was gushing blood would have been bad news in most other seas.

Another Spetsnaz man cried out, hit in the leg, but he kept swimming as best he could. Unable to continue porpoising, he was quickly zeroed for a second shot and hit through the torso. He made no sound at all this time, but sank at once and did not return to the surface.

With fifty yards to go, the firing stopped inexplicably, and they made it to the stern of the Palinouros without taking any more casualties. There were four of them left alive, but by the time Gil and Dragunov managed to haul Brody from the water and onto the low-riding stern of the yacht, Gil could see the young man was nearly bled out.

Dragunov’s only other remaining team member, a Russian Mongol named Terbish, provided cover with his pistol as Gil and Dragunov tended to the quickly dying Brody.

Dragunov hissed, “He could have gotten you killed. You should have left him. ”

“That’s not how SEALs operate,” Gil said, unzipping Brody’s wet suit for a look at the wound and finding that the young man’s penis and most of the scrotum were completely shot away. Aggravated that the man was going to die, he looked at Dragunov, the two of them able to see each other clearly in the yacht’s stern lights. “And we don’t shoot our own men for falling behind on a mission, either.”

Dragunov smirked. “Then you don’t have what it takes to be Spetsnaz.”

“You got that right.” Gil zipped Brody’s wet suit closed. There was nothing to be done for him. He was dead a few moments later, and the three of them formed up to move forward with Dragunov at the head of the column.

The sight of a dead middy sprawled out in the lower passageway stopped them in their tracks. She had once been a pretty young woman with long blond hair, but she’d been shot in the head, and one of her eyes was now badly distended in an eight-ball hemorrhage, indicating that she had not died instantly.

“We’re too late,” Dragunov whispered. He mumbled something to Terbish in Russian and then looked back at Gil, who covered the rear. “Kovalenko and his men have already been aboard.”

Gil had begun to suspect as much by the time they reached the vessel without taking any fire from the crew. He nodded, gripping his pistol. As they began to move forward again, a furious firefight erupted near the Maltese shore some five hundred yards away. The shooting reached a murderous crescendo and then died off after ten seconds of constant firing.

Gil locked eyes with Dragunov. “We’d better hurry the fuck up if we’re gonna do this!”