Politika

FORTY-SIX

Vladimir Starinov strolled along the shore dressed in a light windbreaker, sweatpants, and sneakers, staying just above the tide line, salt-tinged semitropical breezes slipping over his cheeks like a warm caress. His cocker spaniel trotted along behind him, bounding over the talc-white sand, chasing incoming and retreating wavelets, occasionally snatching straggles of seaweed from the surf, shaking them in its jaws in an antic flop of ears and fur, and then tossing them back where he’d gotten them. It was a clear, gorgeous night, coppery partial moon over the water, stars glimmering in the sky like diamonds scattered randomly over a black satin jeweler’s cloth.

Starinov felt at peace. For the first time in much too long. At peace. Many miles to the north, he knew, the cruel deceits of winter still prevailed, and the threat of national hunger threatened to sweep over the Russian population like a whirlwind. Here, though, there was a respite, a caesura, from the unrelenting martial rhythms of leadership and political survival.

Sometimes, he mused, life in the Kremlin was like being caught in some colossal machine, one that was running down and down beyond control.

Now he paused, hands in his pockets, looking out over the water. Perhaps a third of a kilometer off, he could see the running lights of a small boat moving slowly across its surface, almost like a snail on smooth, dark glass.

“So, Ome,” he said, leaning to scratch his dog’s head. “There’s more to my existence than trouble, you see? Here we can think, and remember that there’s a purpose to our struggles.” He looked at the grinning expression on his dog’s face and had to chuckle. “Or do you neither know nor care what I’m prattling about, baby angel?”

The dog swiped at his hand with his tongue.

Still smiling, Starinov turned and looked back across the dunes at his cottage. Pale yellow lights glowed in its beachfront windows. Barely visible in the darkness, he could see two members of his guard detail standing watch outside, their outlines still and straight. Ah, how they fretted over his insistence on these solitary walks. But there were times when a man needed to be alone.

He stood there at the water’s edge a few more minutes, watching the boat ply its lazy track to some unknown port of call, and then decided to head back inside for some tea. Perhaps he would read a little before going to bed. At any rate, it was getting late, and he was feeling pleasantly tired.

“Come,” he said, clapping his hands to get the spaniel’s attention. “We don’t want to make our guards any more unhappy with us than they already are!”

He started back toward shore, the dog playfully following along at his heels.

Perfect, Gilea thought, peering at the beach through the double circles of her NVD goggles.

“How’s our friend doing?” a male voice said behind her.

“He’s apparently broken from his rapture and turned back to the dacha.” She lowered the binoculars, blinking away spots of green as normal darkness flooded around her. “Perhaps he’s sensed that the cold black sea waits for him tonight. Do you think, Adil?”

The tall, rawboned man grunted neutrally. Like Gilea and the others on the trawler, he wore a black spandex wet suit and swim fins, and had a diving mask pushed up over his forehead. There were depth gauges on all their wrists and waterproof weapon and equipment cases over their shoulders. Once they were underwater, the closed-circuit breathing apparatuses on their chests would recycle their own breaths, absorbing exhaled carbon dioxide, mixing the cleansed air with oxygen supplied by pressurized tanks.

“We’ve got the Subskimmers ready,” Adil said.

She looked at him. Nodded. In her pupils, the reflected light of the moon looked like slivers of broken glass.

“Then it’s time,” she said.

Light and quiet, the ATVs tooled across the strand, hopping rises and troughs with nimble ease, sound-baffled engines humming as they powered the vehicles forward. Specially designed for Sword by an UpLink subsidiary, they were equipped with fully automatic trannies, accommodated two-man driver-gunner teams, and had pintle-mounted VVRS weapons aft of the cockpit. There were blackout shields over their off-road lights. The riders wore black Nomex stealthsuits, shock vests, and protective goggles, with microfilament radio headsets under their impact helmets. Their faces were daubed with camo paint.

There were a dozen vehicles in total, Blackburn and Perry’s out front, the rest following behind in single file.

Gripping his handlebars with confidence, Blackburn peered anxiously through his goggles at a procession of low dunes, wishing Starinov’s cottage would come into view, wishing he’d had more than a few hours to organize this mission, wishing he’d known when and how the hit team intended to strike so he could have picked up a phone and given Starinov and his guards some warning. But he had been concerned that the cottage might be bugged, and that any attempt at contact might provoke Gilea Nastik to accelerate her plans. In the end, he’d had to balance one evil against another and resign himself to living with his choice — just as he’d done earlier that morning when striking a devil’s bargain with Vostov.

Now he jockeyed the ATV over a big wave-shaped dune, cresting it easily, sand whipping his cheeks, thoughts of their agreement clipping through his head. It had been a simple trade-off: The Russian mobster’s role in the bombing plot would be swept under the rug, and his cojones would remain intact, in exchange for complete disclosure and cooperation. He had spilled everything, not only about Times Square and the Bashkir setup, but also what he knew about tonight’s planned takeout of Starinov… which was plenty. He had provided Gilea with manpower, weapons, and transport in exchange for a million dollars American currency. The assault would have an aquatic element, and perhaps additional land-based support. And its aim was to be decisive and final — Starinov would die. No more Machiavellian games, no more subtleties, no more waiting for governments to grind and groan through their weighty processes.

A good man would die, and that would be the end of it, the coup de grace against democratic reform in Russia.

Unless he and his ad hoc counterstrike team, cobbled together from survivors of the ground station raid and a handful of reinforcements from Sword’s Prague headquarters, headed the bad guys off at the goddamned pass.

Blackburn goosed his ATV to full speed, issued a command to the riders behind him on his radio’s proprietary frequency, and heard their engines revving to keep pace.

He remembered resisting the temptation to make a cavalry charge the night the ground station was burned, and realized grimly that circumstances had forced him to do something very much of that nature this time around.

It went against instinct and training, went against his every fiber.

Because the worst fucking thing about cavalry charges was that they could turn into headlong suicides if the enemy happened to be waiting for you.

Their flotation bladders deflated, the air vented from their buoyancy boxes for underwater action, the Subskimmers glided beneath the chop like manta rays.

The sleek rubber submersibles had been easily transported aboard Gilea’s trawler and offloaded with coordinated precision. Each was powered by compact but muscular twin outboards and carried a trio of divers, shadows on the shadowcraft, toward the beach. Silent running and undetectable, they could travel seventy nautical miles on their electric motors. The divers themselves could have stayed under for over four hours without having to worry about the telltale bubbles produced by standard scuba tanks. If they went any farther down than forty-five feet, however, the greater water pressure would have caused the pure filtered oxygen produced by the apparatus to have a toxic effect on their systems. Neither time nor distance was a concern tonight; the shore was in short range, and their method of approach called for a rapid and shallow dive.

Within minutes of their deployment the skimmers resurfaced and gunned to top speed, streaking at better than eighty knots, moving like hot oil on Teflon. As they leaped from the surf, narrow wakes of foam kicking up in their slipstream, the divers rapidly abandoned the craft, extracted their rifles and nightscopes from their watertight cases, and began stealing inland on foot.

Several hundred yards downbeach, Vladimir Starinov’s cottage perched on its low, isolated bluff, its guards unaware of the approaching killers, its windows still throwing their fragile light into the darkness.

Lifting the teapot from the stove, Starinov moved to his table nook and poured boiling water into his cup.

Before sitting down, he took a dog biscuit from the box on his counter and called Ome through the kitchen archway, holding out the treat, hoping it might settle the animal. The dog glanced at him but didn’t budge. Moments earlier, he had padded out of the room and flattened onto his belly near the front entrance, whining and sniffing, his tail switching back and forth.

At first Starinov had thought the shrill whistling of the teapot was the cause of his pet’s skittishness, but now, despite repeated goading, Ome continued lying by the door, ignoring his master.

Starinov shrugged, dropped the spurned biscuit into a pocket of his robe, and blew on the tea to cool it off. Although the dog’s behavior was perhaps a little unusual, he didn’t think too much about it; Ome sometimes became agitated by the guards making their rounds, and this was probably the case tonight.

Well, fine, let the dog stay where he was, Starinov thought. The minister was feeling rested and relaxed after his walk on the beach, and wanted to savor that rare state of affairs.

The little nuisance was certain to be underfoot soon enough.

Outside the dacha, the guard in the Russian army uniform had thought he heard a sound at the foot of the bluff and had gone to investigate, aware it was most likely nothing — the wind rustling up sand or a twig, some sort of foraging rodent.

Now, glancing over toward his teammate at the far side of the cottage, he wondered if he ought to beckon him over, but then he saw the orange glow of a cigarette in his hand, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to leave him be.

He climbed down to the foot of the embankment, stopped, looking and listening. Moved a little farther out onto the beach and paused again. His brow furrowed. While he’d seen no sign of movement in the sand, he thought he heard a different noise now, a drone, like that of an approaching engine. No—many engines. Still a distance away, but getting nearer. It sounded like wasps to him. A whole nest of wasps. But what did it have to do with the whispery rustling he’d heard? And might it signal a threat to the minister?

Suddenly uneasy, he made up his mind to alert the others after all, and was turning back toward the cottage when a hand clapped over his mouth and a bony arm locked around his neck, snapping it with a quick, brutal twist.

“You hear that sound?” Gilea hissed to Adil. “Like motors.”

He stood with her below the bank, head craned into the night, a vulpine expression on his features. The rest of the men were moving up the beach behind them and the dead guard lay in the sand at his feet.

“I don’t—” He broke off abruptly, gesturing up the ribbon of beach.

Gilea’s eyes followed the course of his finger, widened.

“Shit!” she exclaimed, bringing up her rifle.

The bluff with the solitary cottage atop it rising to his left, Blackburn rounded the curve of the beach, the cones of his headlamps immediately revealing the wet-suited figures in the sand, the abandoned watercraft at the surfline, the uniformed guard lying with his neck at a crooked, broken angle.

“This is it!” he shouted into his mike. His eyes scoured the beach, taking in everything at a glance. “Full offense, let’s go!”

He maxed his throttle as the hit team dispersed across the strand, the pair that had been standing over the body breaking toward the bluff. In the rear of the ATV, Perry hauled his VVRS machine gun around in wide arcs, triggering short, rapid bursts. Fire had erupted all around the beach, flash-suppressed Kalashnikovs swinging up at the swarm of vehicles and stuttering out sound.

One of the divers instantly fell before Perry’s stream of fire, plastic sabot rounds slamming into his chest, his weapon twirling out of his grasp like a relinquished baton. Another dropped down after him in a gush of sand.

Blackburn saw the vehicle Vince Scull was piloting slew off to his right, harrying a pair of wet-suited men, driving them back toward the water. They waded out as deep as their thighs but Scull remained in close pursuit, his vehicle splashing into the surf, ramming into them like a charging bull. Then a bullet pecked into the side of Blackburn’s ATV and he veered off sharply in a zigzagging evasive maneuver.

The air quivered with incoming, and though surprise had given the Sword team an edge, their opposition was determined and murderous. A rippling onslaught of 7.62mm bullets scored a direct hit on one of the ATVs and its driver went sailing over the handlebars like a rag doll, blood showering from his chest. The vehicle flipped over twice in midair, spilling the man in the gunseat. He rose, disoriented, blood ribboning down from under his helmet, and was shot dead before he could regain his bearings.

A second ATV was tagged off to Blackburn’s right, its tire rupturing with an explosive outrush of air, peeling away from its rim like a shed snakeskin. It overbalanced and went skidding onto its side in a spray of sand, dislodging its stealthsuited riders. Blackburn saw one of them dash over to his partner, saw him help the man to his feet, saw a member of the hit team take aim at both of them, and knew he had to act fast.

They were pinned.

He wrenched his vehicle in their direction, zooming in close, taking a hand off the handlebars long enough to motion to Perry. Perry nodded, leveled his gun, clouted the diver with a tight, controlled volley before he could pick off the unseated pair.

Angling away, Blackburn suddenly heard gunfire from up on the embankment and swore under his breath.

Starinov, he thought, and urged his ATV toward the slope.

The assassins were up there.

Up there with Starinov.

Gilea and Adil sprinted across the crest of the bluff, toward the cottage, now less than ten feet up ahead. Behind them a dead guard lay spilling his blood into the sand, his uniform tunic spotted with bullet holes. They reached the door and halted, Gilea stepping back out of Adil’s way, giving him room to move in front of her and kick it open.

She pivoted away from him, watching his rear, her eyes flicking warily left and right. A guard came racing around the side of the house and she cut him down before he even spotted them, stitching bullets across his middle. Two more Russian soldiers appeared from around back just as she heard the door crash inward amid spears of broken wood, one of them falling instantly to a burst from her weapon, the other managing to squirt off a volley before she took him out. He staggered in a wide circle, made a moist coughing sound, and keeled over sideways, the gun slipping from his grasp.

She turned back to the cottage. Adil was sprawled in front of the open door, half his head blown away. The second man had gotten him with his salvo, she thought, registering his death without emotion.

Her mind was on her job, and her job was making sure Starinov joined Adil in his fate.

Blackburn crested the rise in just enough time to see the Nastik woman leap through the door over her companion’s body.

He braked the ATV to a sand-spitting halt, leaped off the vehicle, and tore after her, drawing his Smith & Wesson from beneath his shock vest as he ran. Perry was at his heels.

Blackburn plunged through the entryway, snapped a bullet into the gun’s chamber, glanced left and right. He wanted Nastik alive, but if it came down to a choice between her and Starinov, he would do whatever he had to.

The foyer was empty. Which direction should he look in? Where the hell was she?

He heard Perry behind him, motioned crisply for him to search the left side of the house, and was turning toward the right, toward what looked like the bedroom, when he heard the dog growling, heard the gunshot, and then heard the loud crash of someone falling back against the wall.

Starinov had been in the kitchen when the shooting started and, realizing what was happening, realizing that his home was under attack, he had plunged into his bedroom to get his personal firearm from his dresser drawer. It was just a small.22 caliber handgun, and he knew it would do little good against the kind of automatic weapons he heard out there in the night, but it was all he had.

He pulled open the drawer and was fumbling under his clothes for the pistol when the woman burst into the room and raised her AK at him, holding it at point-blank range. The grin stretching across her face seemed barely human.

That was when Ome came springing from under the bed, his teeth bared, growling and snarling as he lunged at the woman, clamping his jaws around her ankle.

Caught off guard, she stumbled backward, triggering a wild burst as she smashed against the wall. She tried to recover her balance, kicking at the dog, but only managing to get it off her after its teeth had sunk deep into her flesh.

“Don’t move!” Blackburn shouted at the top of his voice, training his Smith & Wesson on her with both hands. “Drop the rifle, you hear me? Drop it!”

She looked at him across the room, clinging to the gun, the dog barking in front of her. The leg of her dive suit was soaked with blood. Behind Blackburn, the men he had radioed on his com-link were pouring into the room, led by Scull, shuffling the minister out of harm’s way in a protective phalanx.

“Don’t be suicidal,” Blackburn said. “It’s over.”

She looked at him. Shook her head. Grinned. Still holding the machine gun, her hands clenched tightly around it, trembling.

And then, before Blackburn could react, she swung the AK upward so that its bore was fixed directly upon his heart.

“Over for me,” she said. “Over for both of us.”

His mouth dry of spit, the blood thundering in his ears, Blackburn kept his gun trained on the woman even as she kept her weapon on him, watching her hand for the slightest twitch, hoping to God he’d be fast enough to anticipate her next move. His concentration shrank to a narrow tunnel that encompassed his hand, Gilea, and nothing else.

A moment of slow time passed. Another. Neither of them budged. Neither weapon was lowered. The air around Blackburn felt like gelatin infused with current.

He was unaware of the sudden movement behind him until it was too late. It all seemed to happen with lightning rapidity — the oiled click of a firing mechanism near his ear, the loud crack of the gun discharging behind him, the surprised, almost quizzical expression on Gilea’s face just before the bullet struck her forehead, producing a perfectly round dot of red above the ridge of her nose. Blackburn saw the machine gun jerk in her hand, and for a heartstopping instant was sure her finger would spasmodically lock around the trigger, sure he would be blown off his feet.

But the weapon slipped from her grasp without firing a round, and then her eyes rolled up in their sockets and her legs gave out and she slid loosely to the floor, trailing blood, brains, and skull fragments down the wall as she crumpled.

Blackburn lowered his pistol, turned his head on muscles that felt much too tight.

Starinov was standing directly behind him, having shoved through the Sword operatives that had converged around him. Smoke curled from the barrel of his outthrust.22.

His eyes met Blackburn’s. Held them.

“It is better like this,” he said.

Blackburn swallowed dryly but said nothing. The smell of cordite stung his nostrils.

“Your people saved my life, I saved yours.” Starinov brought down his gun. “Now perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me where you have come from.”

Blackburn was silent another moment. He looked past Starinov at the members of his team, men who had assembled from every corner of the globe to do a job that was both thankless and immeasurably dangerous. Thought about Ibrahim and his desert riders in Turkey, and Nimec’s operatives in New York, and the diverse, ordinary people who had done what they could to help along the way.

How was he to answer?

He considered it another few seconds, and finally just shrugged.

“We’re kind of from everywhere, sir,” he said.