Retribution (9781429922593) (5 page)

For just an instant Dieter stood looking into the ex-SEAL's eyes, and for just that instant his resolve weakened. The son of a bitch was a killer, and he was in the zone.

Barnes lunged from just a couple of feet away, but instead of stepping out of the way, Dieter moved forward, batting the tip of the blade away with his left hand. He fired the Glock into the man's neck, just below his chin, the round plowing upward into his brain.

 

SIX

Wolf had come through U.S. customs on a diplomatic passport, his one check-on bag sealed. He pulled into a condo parking lot less than fifty meters from the SEAL museum's fence, unlocked the bag in the trunk and took out his big SIG Sauer P226. He loaded it with a fresh magazine of 9mm hollow points, screwed the suppressor barrel on the end, and jacked a round into the firing chamber.

Back behind the wheel of his rental Camry, the pistol on the seat next to him, he watched the main gate and building in the rearview mirror. Zimmer's Chevrolet was parked next to a green Ford pickup truck with a Florida plate. The gate in the tall chain-link fence was open, but no one was about. The yard was deserted.

If they were right about Zimmer and the others working as contract killers, then it was very possible whatever was going on here today could be something more than a meeting. Wolf got a hollow feeling in his stomach.

He'd spent time in the hills of Afghanistan and in Iran's mountains helping set up suites of electronic surveillance equipment that could intercept military transmissions and relay them to an orbiting ComSatBw-2 satellite, which, combined with synthetic aperture radar images from the SAR-Lupe satellite monitoring the region, would give German military intelligence a lot of real-time information.

The problem came the night an Iranian patrol stumbled on their position. In the intense firefight that followed, all six Iranian commandos plus two of Wolf's people were killed.

Finishing their mission that night they had loaded all the bodies in the back of a pickup truck and driven eighty kilometers out into the desert, where they dumped the Iranians. They made their rendezvous point another one hundred plus kilometers to the north near the town of Babol near the Caspian Sea. When they were picked up by the patrol boat, the crew thought they were all mortally wounded because of their bloody uniforms.

He'd had a strong gut feeling just before the attack, and it was that feeling that saved most of his squad. Ever since then he listened.

Waiting until an AC service van heading north passed, Wolf drove to the SEAL parking lot and slowly passed the pickup truck and the Chevy to the end of the chain-link fence.

He turned around and drove back, parking behind the Impala, so that if Zimmer managed to get past him he would not be able to make his escape, at least not by car.

Grabbing the pistol he got out of the car and walked around to the driver's side of the Chevy and took a quick look through the window. The car was empty, no bag or anything else, no key in the ignition.

He looked across toward the museum to make sure no one was coming up the path; then he glanced inside the pickup. A woman lay on her side on the floor; a little blood from a bullet wound in her forehead had dribbled down the side of her nose.

But her death made absolutely no sense. As far as they'd been able to determine the organization Zimmer belonged to probably specialized in assassinations of high-profile targets, not some woman in an old pickup truck. Not unless she was someone important, or the mistress or wife of someone important, and the truck was merely a disguise.

The plate on the back was Hillsborough County, Florida. Moving cautiously toward the open gate, completely focused on what he might be walking into, scanning the roofline, the edges of the building and the corners of the boats and other things on display in the yard, Wolf almost missed the plate on the front of the truck.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure that somehow Zimmer hadn't come around on his six, when he spotted the circular emblem of the U.S. Navy Special Warfare Development Group. SEAL Team Six. The ones who had taken out bin Laden a few years ago.

One of them had apparently driven here with his wife or girlfriend and had gone inside. Zimmer's target? Which made even less sense unless the group was working for al-Qaeda. But there was no money there. The only effective cells still able to function were in backwaters like Somalia and, lately, Ethiopia and Sudan. But they were poorly equipped and had no real connections outside of their little groups. The leaders of the other larger, more important units, mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, had been killed by U.S. drone strikes.

Wolf made his way off the path between the boats and the Huey chopper, until he had a sight line on the front door. Everything from here looked normal.

The problem was Zimmer. They wanted him alive, if possible. If he could be taken, Wolf was to call his operations handler in Berlin, who would in turn make contact with the FBI. From there the situation—except for a debriefing—would be out of his hands. Mission accomplished. Or at least his part of it done. It would be up to the intelligence directorate to put all the pieces together.

He sprinted the last fifteen meters to the front door and flattened himself against the wall next to it. It was summer, and Florida's low season. It was possible that someone from the nearby condos might spot a man running around the museum yard with a pistol in his hand, but unlikely. Most of the people on islands like these were snowbirds—they came down from the snow in the northern states during the winter months and went back home in the summer.

In any event he had Interpol credentials and a permit to carry his weapon across the borders of member states. By agreement, deadly force was to be used only to protect his own life or the lives of innocent bystanders.

He'd been too late to protect the woman in the truck, and almost certainly the docents inside the museum, but he suspected that Zimmer would find dealing with a SEAL Team Six operator was an entirely different matter.

Wolf took a quick glance through the glass door. Nothing moved inside, nor were there any obvious signs of violence. But the short corridor that led maybe eight or ten meters back to a glass display case was a killing field. No place for someone coming through the door to take cover.

He turned and went to the east corner of the building, the scents of the sea at low tide strong on a chance breeze, the day easily as hot and humid as the lowlands along the Tigris River in Iraq. Moving fast and low, he made his way to the rear corner, where once again he held up for just a moment before chancing a quick look.

A man was running flat out, heading down a narrow path through a back gate in the tall fence directly toward the ocean. He was large and bald, and he was wearing a yellow shirt. The same man from the plane.

He disappeared over a rise, and Wolf headed after him at the same moment he heard the first siren from a long ways off. Someone had called the police. But if they were local cops, they wouldn't have a chance against Zimmer.

Near the top of the low dune, Wolf hunched down and cautiously took a look at what appeared to be a beach bunker of some sort. Big logs, barbed wire, of the sort the Japanese had used in the South Pacific during the war.

But there was no sign of Zimmer.

Rising up, he sprinted the rest of the way down to the bunker, at the same moment Zimmer appeared around the corner, his pistol pointed directly at Wolf's chest.

The siren was closer now, and in the distance there were more.

“Who the hell are you?” Zimmer asked in English.

“BND,” Wolf said. His pistol was away from his side, pointed down.

Zimmer reacted, but his aim didn't waver.

“Put down your weapon and you might live out the afternoon. I followed you from Munich, and we have surveillance operations on the rest of your group. I'm only sorry that I wasn't in time to save the poor woman in the pickup truck. Was killing her really necessary?”

“You'll never know,” Zimmer said in German.

He raised his pistol.

“Killing a SEAL. That why you came all this way?”

“You can't guess the half of it,” Zimmer said, and he fired two shots.

Wolf staggered back, both rounds hitting him in the chest. As his legs went out from under him he managed to bring his pistol up and pull off one snap shot that hit Zimmer in the face just below his nose.

 

SEVEN

Wolf was sitting up trying to catch his breath from the impact of the two rounds on his Kevlar vest. He'd holstered his weapon and held up his Interpol credentials when the first cop came over the rise.

“Drop your weapon, put your hands together at the back of your head,” the cop shouted. He was young and nervous.

“I'm a police officer,” Wolf said. “Interpol.”

“Put your hands together at the back of your head.”

Wolf dropped his ID wallet and did as he was told. “There is a woman dead in the pickup truck, and at least two more dead inside the museum. This is the man who committed the murders.”

The cop came down the slope and placed handcuffs on Wolf's wrist. But he was clumsy—it would have been child's play to take his weapon and shoot him.

He radioed something that Wolf didn't quite catch, and a minute later two more cops came over the rise. A lot more sirens were close now.

The young cop stood aside as one of the others picked up Wolf's ID, while the second kicked the pistol away from Zimmer's body.

“Are you armed?” the cop with his ID asked.

“Yes. Holster under my shirt on the left.”

One of the new cops took his pistol. “You've been shot.”

“I'm wearing,” Wolf said. “Can you get these things off me?”

“In a minute,” the cop said. His name tag read Fischer; he was a sergeant. He stepped a few yards away and spoke into a lapel mic.

“The man is Dieter Zimmer,” Wolf said. “He's a German citizen I was following. We think that he works for a terror cell of killers for hire.”

Two more cops showed up, but Fischer held them back and came over to Wolf.

“Passport?”

“Back pocket, right.”

Fischer took it and read the number into his lapel mic.

Another set of sirens came from the south, their tones more high-pitched than the police cruisers. Wolf figured them to be ambulances.

“Take off the man's cuffs,” Fischer said at length.

The younger cop did it and helped Wolf to his feet.

“Do you need a doctor, Captain Weisse?” Fischer asked. He was a short black man, his face glistened with sweat.

“No. But I need to contact my office in Berlin. They'll want to know what's happened here.”

“My lieutenant is speaking with someone; they want to know if you're okay. Your embassy is being contacted.”

“Good. May I have my things?”

Fischer handed over his passport and credentials wallet. “I'll hold the weapon for just a bit.”

Wolf pocketed his ID and passport and went to search Zimmer's body, but one of the cops stepped in the way. “Sorry, sir, but for now he's our dead guy.”

“I'd suggest that you get one of your ordinance disposal people down here. These guys are known to sometimes wear explosives, booby-trapped to go off if a first responder isn't careful.”

The cop stepped back.

“Go ahead and deal with it,” Fischer said from a respectful distance.

Wolf bent over Zimmer's body and carefully probed the areas of the armpits and groin. But he found nothing. He checked the pockets, coming up with about one hundred U.S. dollars, car keys for the Chevy, and a wallet with a driver's license and credit cards and a German passport, all of them in the name of Rheinhardt Schey.

“The passport is a fake. We'll provide you with the proper identification, and I'm sure that the BND or someone will want to claim the body. This is an ongoing investigation.”

“Into what?”

“He was an assassin.”

“There are two people dead up in the museum. One of them is a docent, the other is a younger man, we're working on his ID.”

“He was a navy SEAL.”

“I saw the front plate,” Fischer said, and he cocked his head and stepped away, apparently listening to something in his earbud.

One of the cops had walked around to the other side of the machine-gun bunker. “We've got another one down here,” he called up.

There were now six cops on the dune, and Fischer motioned for one of them to check it out. He was still talking into his lapel mic.

Wolf couldn't make out what he was saying, but the guy seemed a little surprised. None of this made sense to any of them. The killings were not random; Zimmer had gone through a lot of trouble to come all this way to kill a SEAL Team Six operator. Somehow he'd known that the man would be here at this particular moment in time, which meant the Black October Revolution had pretty sophisticated intelligence contacts here.

He stood staring at Zimmer's body, when Fischer came over and handed him the SIG.

“Any ideas?”

“His group is called the Black October Revolution, contract killers of high-profile targets—the four hits we know about were businessmen who weren't in the EU. The hits happened off German soil, one of them, in fact, in Atlanta. Tony Aldrich, who was a big player in the real estate market in Spain and in Monaco.”

“Last year,” Fischer said. “It was in the news. There've been no arrests, but his girlfriend was a suspect. They have a penthouse in Palm Beach, so there was a Florida connection.” He glanced at Zimmer's body. “You think it was this guy?”

“I don't know, but we think it was the same organization.”

“Motive?”

“Money.”

“Killing a navy SEAL doesn't fit the profile.”

“No,” Wolf said.

Fischer looked at him. “Your English is good.”