Command Authority

83

Bodies lay all over the grounds, both inside the chalet and out on the property. Sam, Dom, and Ding checked the area quickly to make certain there were no more threats, and in so doing they counted eighteen dead.

The chalet was secluded and in a thick forest, but the men knew the gunfire would have carried over the lake itself, so Ding told everyone they needed to exfiltrate before the police arrived. Driscoll hurried through the wreckage, taking pictures of the faces of the dead Russians to send to Biery to run through facial recognition, while Dom pulled mobile phones and pocket litter.

Soon Chavez had Ryan down in the Russian Zodiac boat. Dom and Sam leapt aboard, and they raced away into the fog, just minutes ahead of the first responders.

They were wheels-up at Zurich sixty minutes later. They had filed a flight plan for Paris, which meant there was no customs departure check to deal with, although they had no real sure plan of where they would go.

Ryan was still in a state of despondency over Oxley. He couldn’t get past the fact that the man had taken bullets meant for him. He knew he had to call his dad and tell him everything he’d learned from Hugh Castor, although what he had been told was not the same as what he could prove. But he couldn’t make himself pull the cabin phone out of the cradle and dial the number. Instead he just lay there with his head down on the table, while the men around him worked, discussed the battle they’d just fought, and occasionally patted him on the back to check on him.

After a phone call to Clark, the decision was made to go to Kiev, although Clark was adamant that Ryan would not even get off the plane. The other men would deplane to head back to the safe house so they could continue the investigation into Gleb the Scar, while Jack would return with the Gulfstream to the United States.

They’d been in the air for less than an hour when Clark called back. Sam flipped on the speakerphone function in the cabin.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got big news, guys. You hit the jackpot.”

Chavez said, “How so?”

“The dead guys you photographed at the scene. Gavin got zip on seven of them, but number eight came up huge.”

“Who is he?”

“We photographed him here in Kiev at the Fairmont meeting with Gleb the Scar last week. At the time Gavin ran his face through all facial-recog sources we had and there was no match. But we ran tonight’s picture, just to be sure. It came up with a match. There is a BOLO out for him with the FBI. They have a pic of him loaded, and it’s a match.”

Ding said, “The dead picture worked better in the software than the live one? That’s weird.”

“No. The last one didn’t work because there was no pic of him uploaded then. The BOLO is brand-spanking-new. He’s wanted in connection with the polonium poisoning of Sergey Golovko.”

The men in the cabin of the G550 exchanged shocked stares. It was quiet for a moment until Chavez said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Gavin spoke up now: “Yep. And there’s more. He was carrying the phone we’d tied to Hugh Castor’s villa in Islington. The one owned by Pavel Lechkov. We’re assuming that’s his name.”

Caruso said, “So Lechkov is Seven Strong Men and an associate of Gleb the Scar, and was in on the Golovko assassination.”

“Right to all of that, Dom,” said Gavin.

Ryan sat up straight now. He said, “And according to Castor, Talanov, the head of the FSB, is also the head of Seven Strong Men. That puts the Golovko murder in the lap of the Kremlin. I’m going to call my dad. At the very least he needs to get a team into Kiev to pick up Nesterov, aka Gleb.”

Clark came on the line now. “Sending a team to the Fairmont, even SEAL Team Six, isn’t going to be easy. Gleb has a shit ton of security in his suite, and the entire hotel is crawling with armed men loyal to the Russians. More important, the Russian Army is forty miles east of the city and advancing.”

Ryan said, “If the U.S. doesn’t take down Nesterov right now, they will miss their chance. Once the Russians come, or once he flees to Russia, he’ll be unreachable.”

Driscoll added, “And now that Lechkov is missing, Nesterov’s got to be sweating bullets wondering if his man has been captured and is singing like a canary.”

Clark’s voice came over the speaker. “You guys hurry back over here. I’ll try to ascertain the situation at the hotel so we have good intel in case the U.S. decides to go ahead with a takedown. I’ll meet the plane at the airport and give you a lift back to the safe house.”