The Enemy

CHAPTER 17

Minsk, Belarus

Victor had arrived in the city the night before after a relaxing flight from Austria to Minsk International Airport. He had no luggage with him except a carry-on bag holding a few effects that weren’t essential, but he preferred to fly with at least some luggage. Airport security tended to watch out for people with none. A thankfully silent taxi ride from the airport had taken him into central Minsk, where he’d performed counter surveillance before arriving at his hotel, the Best Eastern.

As Yamout was expected to meet with Petrenko around or after nine p.m. at the Hotel Europe the next day, and because of the potentially short duration of his stay, Victor would need to kill him at some point shortly after this time.

He’d taken the Minsk metro across the city and hailed a taxi to take him back into the centre. A second cab immediately after the first took him around the city centre for half an hour. Victor then re-joined the metro for another thirty minutes, changing trains twice before exiting and performing counter surveillance on foot. Finally, a third taxi had taken him to Passazhyrski train station.

He bought himself a large cappuccino with caramel syrup from a stunning Belarusian brunette at a kiosk and drank his coffee leisurely while he circled the concourse. He saw no sign of any shadows. May in Minsk tended to stay in the low seventies so Victor was without an overcoat but kept the jacket of his charcoal suit buttoned up. The cappuccino was especially good, or maybe it was just the memory of the brunette that enhanced the flavour.

In the basement level of the train station he found the left-luggage facility and gave the false name provided by his employer.

An old guy then dragged two heavy Samsonite suitcases to where Victor waited and dabbed the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘What have you got in here, rocks?’

‘Guns,’ Victor replied.

The old guy laughed.

The tags on the suitcases showed they had travelled overnight from Moscow, but there was a good chance the contents had been switched somewhere along the way. By the weight of the suitcase in each hand, Victor knew exactly what they contained.

He took a cab back to the Best Eastern and entered his room. Victor wasn’t sure how the hotel came by its name, as there was nothing best about it. His room was bland and uninviting, the bed soft and lumpy. He closed the drapes and laid the suitcases on top of the bed so he could check the contents. The interiors had been stripped out and replaced with thick foam rubber sheets, cut to fit several items.

Inside one half of the first Samsonite was a dismantled Heckler amp; Koch PSG1A1 semi-automatic rifle and long sound suppressor. It was a very good weapon, perfect for urban use and easily one of the most precise semi-automatic rifles in the world, with an expected accuracy of sub-one minute of angle. Victor wasn’t keen on one characteristic, however. The rifle ejected its spent cartridge casings a long way, which, at best, made sterilising the environment more difficult after shooting the weapon. At worst, it could give away his position. Victor assembled the gun and inserted one of the three detachable box magazines that were set into the foam rubber beneath it. Each magazine contained twenty match-grade 7.62? 52 mm cartridges. Loaded, the rifle weighed almost eighteen pounds and was over forty-seven inches in length.

He set out the Garbini tripod on the bed and familiarised himself with its operation, adjusting elevation and rotating the PSG laterally. He set the fully adjustable butt stock and pistol grip to his requirements and peered down the Schmidt amp; Bender 3-12? 50 scope. With a clear line of sight, he could kill Yamout from a thousand yards away.

Victor disassembled the rifle and placed each part back inside the case. In the lower half of the suitcase were a set of thermal-imaging goggles, a master keycard for the Hotel Europe where Yamout’s meeting was taking place, a block of C-4 plastic explosives and accompanying remote and timed detonators. Victor took out each item and checked it.

Inside the second suitcase, not set into the protective sheeting, was a concealable Class IIIA armoured vest comprised of non-interwoven, thermally bonded Kevlar fibre. Victor tore away its plastic wrap and tried it on for size. It was a medium, which fit him snugly as he wanted, but did not reach down his abdomen as far as he would have liked. A large size would have, but would have been too bulky on his frame to allow him unhindered movement. Better to be fast and vunerable than protected and slow.

Set into the foam rubber of one half of the second suitcase were two suppressed handguns — a. 45 calibre Heckler amp; Koch USP Compact Tactical and a. 22 calibre Walther P22. Each gun had three fully loaded magazines packed with it. One by one, Victor took the guns out, checked and dry fired them a few times, then put them back in the case. He’d requested the handguns because both used ammunition that was naturally subsonic and therefore extremely quiet when used in conjunction with a suppressor. Both guns were also small and concealable, the USP 6.8 inches in length and the Walther just 6.3 inches. They had small capacities to go along with their small sizes, eight rounds for the HK and ten for the P22, but they were purely for backup.

If he couldn’t use the PSG to snipe Yamout from a distance, Victor would be relying on the weapon in the second half of the suitcase to help him successfully fulfil the contract. The FN P90 was a strange-looking weapon even to Victor’s eye. Made by Fabrique National of Herstal, Belgium, the P90 was a selective fire sub-machine gun constructed with a bull pup configuration enabling a long ten-inch barrel that didn’t increase the weapon’s overall length. This gave it quicker target acquisition as well as more accuracy than typical sub-machine guns.

Victor took the compact weapon out of the casing. Primarily composed of high-density impact-resistant polymer and lightweight alloys, when empty it weighed just shy of six pounds and was only 19.7 inches long. He wrapped his right hand around the pistol grip and thumb-hole and in his left hand took the enlarged trigger guard that doubled as the forward grip. Victor found the hand arrangement comfortable. It also helped control recoil, especially on automatic fire.

The selector switch was beneath the trigger guard and Victor thumbed it from safe to semi-automatic to automatic. He squeezed the trigger gently, feeling the weight necessary to fire a single round, and then depressed the trigger fully for automatic fire. It was a useful feature, giving him the option of firing either one shot or several without having to use the selector to change between fire modes. With a cyclic rate of nine hundred rounds per minute, the P90 could unload its fifty-round magazine in 3.3 seconds. The weapon fired a 5.7? 28 mm cartridge extremely accurately, even on fully automatic. Dispersion was minimal, thanks to the round’s low recoil impulse and the weapon’s twin-operating recoil springs and guide rods.

Victor checked the four fully loaded translucent polycarbonate magazines that mounted horizontally along the top of the weapon. He could see that the magazines contained white-tipped SB193 subsonic ammunition. Each bullet was boat-tailed with a lead core and had a projectile weight of 55.0 grains with 2.0 grains of powder, producing a muzzle velocity of just under one thousand feet per second with an effective range of fifty yards. A supersonic round was comparable to a 9 mm JHP in stopping power, but the subsonic SB193, though heavier than a supersonic 5.7 mm, had less than half the velocity. Stopping power therefore wasn’t going to be particularly high, but in Victor’s experience, whatever a bullet’s characteristics, two in the chest and one in the head stopped anyone.

He loaded a magazine and adopted a firing position. He looked down the P90’s unmagnified optical reflex sight. The reticule displayed a pattern of two concentric circles. The largest was approximately one hundred and eighty minutes of arc for fast target acquisition at long range and a smaller circle of twenty MOA surrounding a tiny dot at the centre of the field. Victor moved to the room’s wardrobe, opened it, and held the P90 in the shadows. The tritium cell low-light reticule appeared as two horizontal lines across the middle of the field with a single vertical line from the bottom of the field to the middle to create an open T-shape.

Victor removed the Gemtech SP-90 suppressor from the suitcase. He aligned it with the muzzle brake, pushed down and rotated ninety degrees clockwise to lock it in place. The unique mounting system enabled him to affix the attachment in less than two seconds, far faster than a traditional screw-on suppressor. The SP-90 added 7.25 inches in length and almost twenty ounces in weight to the P90. It also reduced the muzzle velocity of the SB193 round to 951 fps, but Victor found this had next to no negative impact on ballistics or accuracy in real-world situations. The plus side to the reduction in velocity was a suppressed P90 was even quieter than an MP5SD.

Victor put on the thermal imaging goggles, turned off the lights, and switched the goggles on. They detected the infared light omitted and the room became shades of black, grey and white. He released the P90’s magazine and checked the front of the weapon where the infrared wavelength laser aiming module was located beneath the barrel. The laser designator was integrated into the receiver and didn’t affect the P90’s performance in any way. Victor flicked the adjustment switch from off to high intensity. There was a low intensity setting too, but Victor didn’t plan on using the gun long enough for battery life to matter. He set the goggles so hot was displayed as black, cold as white.

A thin black beam, invisible to the naked eye, cut across the room and glowed where it struck the far wall. Victor swept the glow on to the television mounted on the wall. He squeezed the trigger, putting an imaginary burst into his reflection’s head.

Plastic explosives, a sniper rifle, two handguns, and a sub-machine gun.

Yes, Victor thought, probably enough weapons.