Gil noted the lower part of the Spetsnaz wolf tattoo protruding beneath the sleeve, glanced briefly at Federov and then back to the Russian. “You’re the man behind the mirror?”
“This is Major Ivan Dragunov of the Tenth Independent Spetsnaz Brigade,” Federov said. “His grandfather was Yevgeny Dragunov—the inventor of the Dragunov rifle, which I understand you’re well acquainted with.”
Gil looked at Dragunov. “If you’re with the Tenth, that means you’re assigned to the Southern Military District—the Caucasus?”
Dragunov was noticeably impressed by Gil’s immediate knowledge of the Tenth ISB. “I’ve also served with the Black Sea Fleet.”
“Where exactly do you think
we’re
going?”
Dragunov shrugged. “Where else but to kill Kovalenko and the rest of the Chechen traitors you fought with tonight?”
Gil looked to Federov for an explanation.
Federov put his hands into his pockets. “Yeshevsky and his Spetsnaz team were all ethnic Chechens from the Vostok Battalion. They were born in South Ossetia. For whatever reason, they’ve gone rogue.”
“How many are left?”
“Ten—counting Sasha Kovalenko.”
Gil crossed his arms. “And I suppose it’s purely a coincidence that a Spetsnaz major from the Tenth ISB happens to be here in Paris on the same night Mr. Yeshevsky gets himself killed during a meeting with a crooked CIA agent.”
Federov deferred to Dragunov.
Dragunov stretched and let out a long yawn. “No coincidence,” he said, his eyes watering with fatigue. “We thought Kovalenko murdered Yeshevsky in Ossetia, and I’ve been tracking him for a month. All Spetsnaz traitors have to be hunted down and killed. That’s our creed.”
“Well, then you don’t need me,” Gil said. “My job here is done.”
Dragunov took Gil’s Canadian passport from his own back pocket and tossed it onto the table. “Good luck at the airport. Hopefully there are no CIA traitors waiting there to point you out to the gendarmes. Life in a French prison would be a sad way to end such a career as yours.”
Gil looked at the two passports on the table, chewing the inside of his cheek.
Federov cleared his throat. “If you’re going with Major Dragunov, Master Chief, now would be a good time to leave. It’s a diplomatic flight, so the French shouldn’t be overly vigilant, but the moment they discover Yeshevsky and the others to be Russian citizens, that will change.”
Gil eyed them both, glancing briefly over his shoulder at the mirror. “You fuckers,” he muttered, smirking as he grabbed the red passport from the table and tucked it into his jacket. “Okay, Ivan. But when this is over, I get one of those ugly fucking T-shirts.”
Dragunov laughed. “When this is over, comrade, we’ll both probably be dead. Kovalenko is the best. We call him the
Wolf
.”
Gil cocked an eyebrow. “I got news for you: the Wolf hesitates. Otherwise I’d be dead already.”
“That was not hesitation,” the Russian replied. “He probably just wanted you to see it coming.”
4
BERN,
Switzerland
“It was Hagen?” Gil said in disbelief, talking to Pope on a satellite phone from the tarmac in Bern, Switzerland, where he had just deplaned from an Aeroflot DC-10. “Chief of Staff Hagen?”
“
Ex–
chief of staff,” Pope reminded him.
“I knew Lerher had a hard-on for me, but what the fuck did I ever do to Hagen? He burned
me
after Earnest Endeavor. Remember?” Operation Earnest Endeavor was the rescue of a female POW in Afghanistan, which Gil had orchestrated against the president’s specific orders to the contrary. As a means of “punishment” for acting without authorization, then–White House Chief of Staff Hagen suggested that the president award both Gil and his fellow operative, Green Beret Daniel Crosswhite, the Medal of Honor. The public award ceremony—while an effective political gambit for the president—had revealed Gil’s identity to the entire world. Not only
did this end his career as a SEAL Team VI operator, but soon it led a band of Muslim assassins directly to his Montana doorstep, very nearly costing both him and his wife their lives.
“Hagen’s a sociopath,” Pope said. “An egomaniacal power junkie, and he blames you and me for his dismissal from the White House.”
“But how’d he get hooked up with Lerher? Lerher wasn’t stupid enough to throw in with a jerk-off like Hagen.”
“I don’t think they were directly linked,” Pope said. “I tracked Hagen down by phone a little while ago, and when I dropped Lerher’s name, it genuinely confused him.”
“You talked to Hagen?”
“Yeah. I told him you’re coming after him. Hopefully that’ll keep him out of our hair long enough for us to get things figured out.”
“How did you know it was Hagen who ghosted the op?”
“I didn’t, but he seemed a logical suspect. Have the Russians told you anything more about what Yeshevsky was doing in Paris?”
Gil glanced over at Dragunov, who stood near the nose gear of the DC-10, also talking on a satellite phone. Five rough-looking Russians in street clothes stood off in a tight group, smoking and talking. “If they know, they’re not telling me, but they definitely want to find this Kovalenko and punch his ticket.”
“What’s their next move?”
“I’m waiting to find that out now. Dragunov’s on the phone with the GRU. His team is standing by here.”
“Spetsnaz?”
“Yeah, and one look at these guys,” Gil said, “tells you they’re heavy pipe hitters. Dragunov says they’ve seen a lot of combat against the Chechens.” “Pipe hitter” was a Special Forces term referring to an operator willing to do whatever it took to accomplish a mission.
“I’ve done some research on Dragunov,” Pope added. “It looks like he killed one of his own men a few years ago for lagging behind on a mission in Chechnya. And he’s not your run-of-the-mill Spetsnaz operator; he’s a member of Spetsgruppa A—the Alpha Group. He
doesn’t mess about, this one.” Spetsgruppa A, an elite subunit of the Spetsnaz, often operated quite separately from the rest of Russian Special Forces, answering directly to the Kremlin.
“Well, I don’t intend to hang around long enough to get to know him. He’s got his team here, so he’s not going to need me.”
“Hanging around might be the best way to find out what the hell Lerher was up to, Gil. I checked, and the agency has him listed as being on vacation all this month.”
“That’s doesn’t mean shit. They take their people off the books all the time.”
“But that’s not what this is,” Pope insisted. “The personnel office genuinely believes Lerher’s on vacation, which means he was either acting independently, or he was part of an unsanctioned operation. If there’s a shadow cell operating inside the CIA, we have to expose it.”
Gil glanced again at the Spetsnaz men. “These guys are all wired for sound, Bob—chain-smoking and hypervigilant. I don’t like it.”
“Is Dragunov chain-smoking?”
“No. He seems to have his shit mostly together.”
“Well, maybe that’s why he wants you along. Maybe he needs another level head.”
Gil chuckled. “Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s rainin’, old man.”
Pope laughed. “I wouldn’t do that, but we need to figure out what Lerher was doing in that apartment with the Chechens.”
“I don’t like operating in the blind, Bob. I’m not an espionage guy. I need a well-defined target.”
“Suppose I can give you one.”
“What, a target?”
“The yacht that Yeshevsky took to Marseille is slowly making its way back to Athens. It’s called the
Palinouros
, currently anchored at Malta. It belongs to a Turkish banker with loose financial ties to Chechen terrorists, but the owner’s not aboard. He’s at his home in Istanbul.”
“So who’s aboard?” Gil asked.
“Good question. Maybe your Spetsnaz friends would be interested in helping us find that out. The GRU has resources in Rome they can bring to bear on a seaborne operation of this nature. And Dragunov has operated with the Black Sea Fleet.”
“Yeah,” Gil said dryly. “He mentioned that.”
“If you’re not interested, Gil, you can ditch the Russians and head for our embassy. I’ll make sure you’re brought home ASAP. It’s your call.”
Gil glanced over at the Spetsnaz men. One of them caught his gaze and grinned mischievously.
“You there?” Pope asked.
“I’m thinking, damn it.”
The grinning Russian came over, shaking an unfiltered Russian cigarette from a crinkled pack and offering it to Gil. “Brody,” he said pointing at himself.
“I’m Gil.”
“
Vassili
,” Brody said with a chuckle. He had pale blue eyes and a narrow face, the youngest of Dragunov’s men at twenty-five. Gil accepted the smoke, and Brody lit it for him from the end of his own cigarette. Gil took a deep drag, and the unrefined tobacco hit his central nervous system like a truck. Brody saw his eyes start to drift and laughed, clapping him on the arm, saying something over his shoulder that made the other four men laugh with him.
“Are you there, Gil?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, letting the dizziness pass. “Go ahead and upload the intel on the
Palinouros
to my phone. I’ll have a talk with Dragunov and see what he can put together. If his people are game, we’ll take the yacht and gather whatever intel there is. But after that, I’m done. I’m not chasing all over Eastern Europe so these yahoos can get me killed.”
5
MARIGNANE,
France
Though Sasha Kovalenko was an ethnic Chechen, he too was a member of the Spetsnaz Spetsgruppa A, and he was no stranger to violent combat. His years as a sniper in the Chechen wars had left him with a frazzled nervous system and a supernatural ability to sense danger over long distance. It was this sixth sense that had allowed him to pull the trigger on Gil in the rail yard a split second before being shot himself.
When the French gendarmes had first appeared in the rail yard, he’d concluded that Agent Lerher must have betrayed their cause. This sent him into a rage, causing him to shoot down as many of the encroaching French as he dared before leaving for the agreed-upon rally point where he was to rendezvous with Yeshevsky. But owing to trouble avoiding the police en route to the apartment, he had not arrived until a full minute after Gil had cleared the scene.
The sight of his friend Yeshevsky’s body on the floor had enraged
him further, but seeing Lerher’s body had given him pause to reconsider his assessment of a CIA double cross. There were too many possible scenarios to bother speculating, but one thing was for sure: he and his team needed to tie up loose ends and find a place to lie low until they could figure out what was going on.
“I’m taking three men with me to Malta,” Kovalenko said, coming out of the bathroom and tossing his cellular onto the hotel bed. “Use the French credit cards to buy the plane tickets. The ones we were given by the CIA may be compromised.”
“Why Malta?” asked his second-in-command, Eli Vitsin. “It’s an island. You could be trapped there.”
Kovalenko took him by the shoulder. He was a tall, muscular man with greenish eyes and black hair. Vitsin was a head shorter, dark complexioned with a thick mustache. “We can’t risk being backtracked. Someone told the French we were in that warehouse. There’s no way to guess how soon they were on to us, but if Yeshevsky was spotted in Athens or seen coming ashore in Marseille, the
Palinouros
could be their next target. We can’t allow the crew to be questioned—especially Miller, the CIA captain.”
“Moscow has sent Dragunov to track us down,” Vitsin warned. “He’s been seen at the embassy in Paris, and where he goes, his men are sure to follow. We need to get back home to our mountains, where it’s safe.”
“Don’t worry about Dragunov,” Kovalenko said, stepping into the kitchenette. “I can handle him. The trouble is the CIA. Whoever killed Yeshevsky also killed Lerher, and that could mean that Lerher’s people have been found out. If that’s happened, we’re entirely on our own, so we have to wait to see if they make contact before we can head home. In the meantime, I’m going to Malta.”
Kovalenko took a loaf of bread and some lunch meat from the refrigerator and stood in the kitchenette eating a sandwich while Vitsin sat at the computer scheduling the Malta flight for Kovalenko and three other Spetsnaz operators.
“You’re sure about this, Sasha?” Vitsin closed the laptop and
pushed it aside. “Moscow may have submitted our photos to Interpol. You could be taken into custody at the airport.”
Kovalenko shook his head. “Moscow wants us for themselves. They can’t risk us telling what we know to anyone else. That’s why they’ve sent Dragunov: to make sure we don’t talk to anyone—ever.” He took a bottle of vodka from the freezer and unscrewed the lid, taking a drink and passing the bottle to Vitsin. “After we’ve taken care of the crew of the
Palinouros
, we’ll lay a trap for Dragunov somewhere; lure him in for the kill.”
“Bad idea.” Vitsin took a pull from the bottle and set it down on the table, shaking his head. “He’ll absolutely expect a trap.”
“Of course he will,” Kovalenko said, capping the bottle and putting it back in the freezer. “That’s why it’s going to work. He’s arrogant enough to think he can outsmart me.”
They stood in silence for a while, each lost in his own thoughts, until Vitsin said at last, “Who was the sniper on the railcar? He
wasn’
t
French.”
Kovalenko looked at him, nodding pensively. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
6
MALTA
The nation of Malta is an archipelago located roughly fifty miles south of Sicily in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea and is home to almost a half million people. Only the three largest islands are inhabited, the largest being the island of Malta, around which there are no less than nine sizeable bays providing safe harbor from the open seas, making Malta a highly popular maritime destination for both tourism and commercial shipping.
Anchored in the darkness, not far from St. Paul’s Island near the mouth of Xemxija Bay on the north coast of Malta, the
Palinouros
was a 223-foot Kismet yacht manufactured by the German company Lürssen in 2007. She featured six staterooms, both a formal and an informal dining salon, a Jacuzzi deck, a disco, a galley to rival the kitchens of most restaurants, separate crew quarters, a laundry service, various lounges, and a state-of-the-art navigational system. Fully crewed, she carried twenty-two hands, and her twin 1,957-horsepower Caterpillar diesel engines gave her a cruising
range of 5,000 miles, boasting a top speed of 15 knots. Brand new, she had cost her Turkish owner well over $100 million.
Gil stood beside Dragunov on the rocky shore of the uninhabited island of St. Paul, studying the starboard beam of the vessel through a pair of Russian binoculars. The night was calm, and the
Palinouros
rested easily at anchor, having fallen off slightly to the north with the current. “The lights are on,” he muttered, “but nobody seems to be home.”
Dragunov grunted as he studied the vessel through his own binoculars. “Aye, they’re bedded down for the night.”
Gil scanned the decks. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone on the bridge, either. That’s odd. Our intel says she has a Greek crew. Greeks know better than to leave the bridge unattended at night.”
Dragunov lowered the binoculars. “She’s at anchor.” He clapped Gil on the shoulder, a bit more roughly than Gil considered customary. “Whoever’s on the bridge is probably lying down.” Pope had emailed them the schematics of the yacht, so they knew her precise layout, and the bridge was fitted with a pair of built-in sofas.
“I reckon we’ll board at the stern. Eh, Ivan?”
“Aye, Vassili, we’ll board at the stern.”
As Dragunov walked off in his wet suit to ready his men, Gil grinned after him, thinking the word
aye
made him sound like some kind of incongruous pirate.
The
Palinouros
was anchored a cable’s length from the shore, or approximately two hundred yards. While this distance would be no trouble for Gil—a leisurely swim—he wasn’t so sure about the Spetsnaz operators, who almost never stopped smoking. Even now they stood in the darkness with their glowing cherries dangerously visible for hundreds of yards over the open water.
The Russians dropped their smokes as Dragunov approached, stepping on them and double-checking their brand-new suppressed Arsenal Firearms Strike One pistols. The Strike One was a Russian-made semiautomatic. It operated on the same Browning recoil system as the M1911 and could be chambered in three different cartridges:
9 mm, .40 Smith & Wesson, and .357 Sig Sauer. The weapons the GRU had supplied them in Rome were chambered in .40 caliber. Gil had never fired the Strike One before—called the
Strizh
in Russian—but he liked that it had a much lower profile than most other pistols.
They moved into the water as a unit and were about knee-deep when Brody let out with a gut-wrenching groan, grabbing his groin.
Gil saw the spout of water kicked up by the rifle bullet after it passed through Brody’s genitals. “Sniper!” He grabbed Brody and dove forward with him into the water.
“It’s Kovalenko!” one of the Russians called out. A bullet tore through his throat, and he went down thrashing in the shallows.
Everyone else was already stroking for the
Palinouros
. Gil rolled to his back, keeping Brody’s head out of the water as he kicked hard for the yacht. There was no place else to go. St. Paul’s Island was entirely flat, with no cover except for a statue of the island’s namesake on the far side. Brody moaned in Gil’s arms, unable to swim because his hands were locked onto his mangled privates.
Dragunov and the other three men swam as fast as they could, porpoising like dolphins to make themselves as difficult to hit as possible. Gil was unable to drop below the surface because of Brody, so he concentrated on making as little wake as possible as he kicked his feet, stroking with one arm. He couldn’t hear the incoming rounds, but from the angle they were striking the water, he could tell that they were coming from the Maltese shoreline to the south.
“The only easy day was yesterday,” he muttered, certain he would never make it out of the water alive.
Another of Dragunov’s men cried out and began to flounder, shot through both lungs. Within a few seconds, he sank beneath the water and did not resurface as Gil stroked steadily past the point where he’d gone down.
Gil watched the stars to keep his heading, estimating that they had probably covered half the distance to the
Palinouros
, and glad that shark attacks in the Mediterranean were basically unheard of.
The way Brody was gushing blood would have been bad news in most other seas.
Another Spetsnaz man cried out, hit in the leg, but he kept swimming as best he could. Unable to continue porpoising, he was quickly zeroed for a second shot and hit through the torso. He made no sound at all this time, but sank at once and did not return to the surface.
With fifty yards to go, the firing stopped inexplicably, and they made it to the stern of the
Palinouros
without taking any more casualties. There were four of them left alive, but by the time Gil and Dragunov managed to haul Brody from the water and onto the low-riding stern of the yacht, Gil could see the young man was nearly bled out.
Dragunov’s only other remaining team member, a Russian Mongol named Terbish, provided cover with his pistol as Gil and Dragunov tended to the quickly dying Brody.
Dragunov hissed, “He could have gotten you killed. You should have left him. ”
“That’s not how SEALs operate,” Gil said, unzipping Brody’s wet suit for a look at the wound and finding that the young man’s penis and most of the scrotum were completely shot away. Aggravated that the man was going to die, he looked at Dragunov, the two of them able to see each other clearly in the yacht’s stern lights. “And we don’t shoot our own men for falling behind on a mission, either.”
Dragunov smirked. “Then you don’t have what it takes to be Spetsnaz.”
“You got that right.” Gil zipped Brody’s wet suit closed. There was nothing to be done for him. He was dead a few moments later, and the three of them formed up to move forward with Dragunov at the head of the column.
The sight of a dead middy sprawled out in the lower passageway stopped them in their tracks. She had once been a pretty young woman with long blond hair, but she’d been shot in the head, and one of her eyes was now badly distended in an eight-ball hemorrhage, indicating that she had not died instantly.
“We’re too late,” Dragunov whispered. He mumbled something to Terbish in Russian and then looked back at Gil, who covered the rear. “Kovalenko and his men have already been aboard.”
Gil had begun to suspect as much by the time they reached the vessel without taking any fire from the crew. He nodded, gripping his pistol. As they began to move forward again, a furious firefight erupted near the Maltese shore some five hundred yards away. The shooting reached a murderous crescendo and then died off after ten seconds of constant firing.
Gil locked eyes with Dragunov. “We’d better hurry the fuck up if we’re gonna do this!”