The Solomon Effect

61

The two Russians the militia shot down near the creek were dead. So was the militia captain, and the village priest, and a blond, blue-eyed shooter wearing a camouflage jacket and a turtleneck sweater hiked up to show the U.S. Special Forces tattoo on his side.

“Somehow, I don’t think we’re dealing with al-Qa’ida,” said Andrei, studying the elaborate depiction of a snake swallowing a sword.

Jax shook his head and went to hunker down beside the body of the second shooter, a tall, thin man with brown hair and gray eyes and a pale, faintly freckled face. “Doesn’t look like it, does it?” He pushed to his feet. “Any chance I can get these guys’ fingerprints?”

“I’ll have them faxed to Division Thirteen.”

“Oh, Matt’ll love that.”

They found Stefan Baklanov huddled beside an old feed bin at the far end of the stable block, a half-grown black-and-tan pup cradled in his arms.

“He’s hurt,” said the boy.

Crouching beside him, October ran one hand over the pup’s rear flank. Her fingers came away sticky with blood. “If you’ll carry him outside,” she said in her flawless Russian, “I’ll take a look at him and see what I can do.”

The boy hesitated, then swallowed hard and pushed to his feet.

Their attempts to get anything out of the boy were next to useless until some three hours later when, freshly showered and fed, and in clean clothes, Stefan Baklanov sat on a sofa in his mother’s home, the bandaged pup at his side.

“The men who hired your uncle to raise the U-boat,” said Andrei, “who were they?”

The boy hugged the dog tighter and threw a questioning glance at Jax.

“Don’t worry about him,” said Andrei. “Who shot your uncle?”

“Americans,” Stefan whispered.

“How do you know they were Americans?” said Jax in English.

Tobie started to translate for him, but Stefan answered easily, “I heard them talking.” He turned his head to meet Jax’s hard gaze. “They sounded like you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Jax.

Andrei snorted. “You mean, you don’t want it to make any sense.” To the boy, he said, “Do you know why these Americans wanted your uncle to salvage that particular U-boat?”

Stefan sank lower on the sofa, his gaze on the worn carpet at his feet.

“It’s all right,” said Tobie, ignoring Andrei’s frown. “No one is blaming you.”

Stefan fiddled with his dog’s ears. “They said the U-boat carried a weapon.”

Andrei’s voice sharpened. “What kind of a weapon?”

“A disease. I don’t know what kind.”

“Do you know why the Americans killed your uncle?”

Stefan nodded. “They found out he was planning to double-cross them. I don’t know how.”

Jax said, “The man in charge of the Americans-do you know his name?”

Stefan drew the pup up to him in a tight embrace and shook his head. “I only ever heard Uncle Jasha call him ‘Major.’”

“What will happen to the boy?” asked Tobie. They were in another militia van on their way back to the helipad.

Andrei took a new pack out of his pocket and shook out a cigarette. “I’ll leave a couple of militiamen at their farm for a few days, just in case. But I don’t think anyone will bother him. He’s told us what he knows.”

“They could be mercenaries,” said Jax, his thoughts obviously running along a different track entirely.

“They could be,” Andrei agreed.

A lot of Special Forces people left the service as soon as they could, taking their training and selling it for big bucks to private ‘security companies.’ Often they worked for the U.S. government. But sometimes they didn’t. Tobie said, “How do we find out who these guys were working for?”

“If they really were in the American military, their prints should lead us right to them.”

Tobie felt her stomach clench as the Ansat came into view, its main rotor slowly beating the air. “And if they weren’t? We’re at a dead end, aren’t we?”

The militia driver braked beside the waiting chopper. Andrei drew the smoke from his cigarette deep into his lungs and said, “Not necessarily.”

Jax paused with his door half open. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Andrei dropped the half-smoked cigarette in the snow and ground it beneath his heel. “It means there’s someone I think Ensign Guinness might like to meet.”

Carlos Rodriguez rode the Ural to within two hundred meters of the Polish border. Abandoning the motorbike in a ditch, he cut through a nearby stand of birch until he came out on a Polish road. He thumbed down a trucker, then caught a series of rides that brought him to Gdansh-which had once been the German city of Danzig but was now very, very Polish.

He booked a flight to Washington, D.C., then found a quiet coffee shop and put in a call to Boyd.

“The Russians have the kid,” he told Boyd without preamble.

There was a moment’s tense silence. Boyd said, “Tell me what happened.”

Rodriguez stared across the concourse to where a woman in a short skirt and high black boots was helping a toddler take off his coat. “They had his house staked out. It was a trap.” It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was close enough. “They got my entire team.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.” It was important that every man be dead; dead men don’t tell tales. “No one captured. And they were all sterile.”

Boyd’s voice was a gravelly rasp. “You must be losing your edge, to fall into a trap like that.”

Rodriguez tightened his jaw. “It was an FSB operation. They had their first team in there.”

Again, a fierce silence. Boyd said, “When can you get back here?”

“My flight leaves in an hour.”

“We’ll talk when you get here,” said Boyd, and hung up.

Rodriguez glanced again at the woman. As if conscious of showing too much leg, she’d crouched down. He turned away.

The failure to kill the boy was a concern, but not too much of a problem at this point. If the boy had found someone to listen to his tale earlier in the week, he would have done some real damage. But now? No one would have time to put the pieces of the puzzle together before Saturday night.

It was the loss of Salinger and Kirkpatrick that really stung. Rodriguez didn’t like to lose men. He didn’t like to lose, period. He still wasn’t exactly sure what had gone down in the stables of Yasnaya Polyana. But he knew who to blame for it. And once Boyd’s little operation was over, Rodriguez would see that they paid for it.

Both of them.