by Peter Nealen
Let the bitch get shot. It’ll serve her right. If he felt some passing regret at not having gotten the chance to sample her charms again, it was drowned out by the screaming insistence of his own sense of self-preservation.
Getting down the stairs was difficult; he didn’t want to stand up, but when he tried to crawl headfirst down the steps, he quickly lost control and fell, tumbling down the stairs to rebound painfully off the landing and finish his thumping descent to the ground floor. Dazed, he looked up.
The Ukrainian girl must have been standing up near the window. She was on her face on the rug, bloody, puckered holes through her alabaster skin. Lungu, his pants around his ankles, was huddled against the nearest carved wooden pillar, a Beretta PX4 Storm in his hand. He was spattered with blood, probably the Ukrainian girl’s.
Gavril Vaduva stormed into the room from the back, a well-worn Vz.61 Skorpion in his hands. Vaduva had been Codreanu’s chief enforcer and security man for years. Barrel-chested and beefy, he liked to use his hands instead of guns, when he could. This was not one of those times.
“Stay down!” Vaduva snapped.
“We have to get out of here!” Lungu all but screamed. “The boats, on the river…”
“They have the river covered, too,” Vaduva said. “Iulian and Liviu are dead. Petre will probably be following them.” He scrabbled across the floor to peer carefully out the shattered front window toward the gates. “We can hold the house,” he said. “They can’t come in here without a fight. And our friends in the police and the Army will soon clear them out.”
Codreanu wasn’t so sure. He should have had enough money to ensure his security, but somehow these hitters had gotten through, anyway. But Vaduva had never steered him wrong before.
He stayed flat on the floor, listening to the cracks and pops of gunshots outside, hoping that his old friend was right.
***
Redrum was sure that the recall signal had not been well-received. After all, it wasn’t like the Romanians were putting up any sort of coordinated fight.
Yet.
He was down on his belly in the mud and slush, feeling the cold water seeping through his clothes, his M21 aimed in at the gates. It was time for Phase Two of his plan.
The gunfire died away as the rest of his team broke contact and got away from the dacha, pushing down into the thick brush along the banks of the Dniester. Now it was only a matter of waiting.
He suddenly hoped that he hadn’t miscalculated. He’d figured that Codreanu wouldn’t want to stick around long after his dacha had been shot up, but if he waited long enough for the Transnistrian Army, or worse, the Russian peacekeepers, to get there…
But Redrum had studied what information his employers had gathered on Codreanu before the mission, and the man was nothing if not predictable. He paid off authorities through cutouts, and generally tried to have as little contact with them himself as possible. And this time was no different.
Headlights blazed on the other side of the gate, as a pair of Mercedes SUVs raced down the driveway toward him. Putting the M21’s sights about where the windshield should be, Redrum hoped that the glass wasn’t armored as he squeezed the trigger.
He dumped half the magazine in the first burst, gripping the rifle’s forearm tightly to control the recoil. Even in the prone, the Zastava had some significant barrel rise. Flame stabbed in the dark, an identical blast of fire coming from Cat, just to his left.
Glass shattered and the Mercedes swerved sharply, plowing into the low wall next to the gate. The bumper and grill crumpled, and the car skidded sideways, blocking off the gate altogether. Redrum poured more bullets into the Mercedes’ flank, emptying the magazine.
Then it was time to go. Hopefully, his plan had worked, convincing Codreanu that he’d be ambushed if he tried to leave. They’d have to keep eyes on the place and be ready to move in an instant, but he was fairly confident that Stiletto would give them ample warning to intercept Codreanu if the man tried to break out again. They should have enough breathing room for the backup team to get to Transnistria.
He just hoped, as he loped away through the dark under the trees, that his employers didn’t send that bastard Flint.
Chapter 2
John Brannigan sank the bit of the double-bladed ax into the log round he was using as a chopping block and lowered himself painfully to sit on a bigger log nearby.
His breath was steaming in the cold air, and looking down at his bared forearms, he could see steam rising from the graying hairs there, as well. It was well below freezing, but he was sweating and stripped down to his shirt.
He gulped air, wincing slightly at the stitch in his side, as he critically looked at the woodpile. He might have gotten a quarter of a cord split. It wasn’t bad, given how long he’d been working, but it wasn’t up to snuff in his mind, either.
Stretching, he felt the scar tissue on his side pull. It had been months since he’d been shot out on the Gulf of Mexico, and the wounds were healed, but it felt like it was taking forever to get his conditioning back. His leg and his side were tight, and his leg especially didn’t seem to want to work quite right.
Getting old, John. He was further reminded of the fact as the cabin door swung open and Hank walked out.
“You okay, Dad?” the young Marine Lieutenant asked. Hank had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a Marine officer. Brannigan hadn’t approved of the young man’s decision to pursue a commission right off the bat; he’d been a mustang, and just about every other officer he’d known and served with who’d been worth a damn had been, as well. There were exceptions, but he had always felt that an officer needed to spend time in the dirt as an enlisted man before he could really have the insight and the experience to lead them effectively.
“I’m fine,” he grunted, as he heaved himself off the log. He wanted to rest a bit longer, but his pride wouldn’t let his son see him getting feeble. “Just taking a bit of a breather.”
Hank eyed him skeptically. The young man took after his mother, with thick dark hair and dark eyes, and a fineness to his facial features that always reminded Brannigan of Rebecca. He had his father’s build, though, tall and rangy, broad-shouldered and given to lean muscle. The Marine Corps had only honed what Brannigan had already trained.
“You sure?” he asked. “I’ve seen men shot up a lot less than you were who took longer to get back on their feet.”
Hank had a deployment under his belt, now. His unit hadn’t done a lot in Syria, but they’d seen some action, and Brannigan knew that his son’s platoon had taken a couple of casualties.
He still shot his boy a hard glance. “Listen to the hardened combat veteran,” he said. Hank flushed and looked away for a moment. He didn’t know everything his old man had been through, but he knew that there was a lot worse in his father’s past than he’d ever seen yet. “I’m fine, Hank.”
Stiffer and slower than I’d like, and I’m definitely not bouncing back like I used to, but what do you want for fifty years old?
Hank shrugged out of his sheepskin coat and hung it over a low-hanging tree branch, then grabbed the ax. “Sit down and take a breather, Dad,” he said. “I need to get some work in, too.” He shot his father a sly glance. “Can’t have you grumbling about the younger generation getting soft, can I?”
Brannigan snorted, even as he struggled to keep back a grateful sigh as he sat back down. His thigh ached where the .300 Blackout round had torn a ragged hole through the muscle, and he straightened the leg out to try to ease it.
Hank put a log round down and hefted the ax, bringing it down with a practiced swing that sank the bit deeply into the wood.
The son of John Brannigan had been raised to hard work. Brannigan had been away for most of the boy’s upbringing, but he and Rebecca had always seen eye-to-eye on most things, and if anything, she’d been less forgiving with Hank than he had. She expected the boy to grow into a man, and she set him to the chores that would make that happen
. They hadn’t had a woodstove for most of the time they’d been moving back and forth between Camp Pendleton, Camp Lejeune, and Okinawa, but there had always been other work to have him do, and he’d done it, or faced his mother’s wrath.
He handled the ax well, though he wasn’t quite as practiced as Brannigan had gotten over the years since he’d moved up into the woods following Rebecca’s death. He wasn’t as smooth as Brannigan could be at his best, though at the moment he was about equal, given his father’s recovering wounds.
Hank hadn’t known exactly what had happened. He’d suspected that his father was involved in “The Business” again, ever since he’d put Hector Chavez back in touch with him, but he’d never known the details, and had never asked. He probably suspected; the blowup on Khadarkh had happened too soon after Chavez had gone looking for Brannigan. And there was no mistaking the coincidence of his father showing up in the hospital with three bullet wounds in him shortly after the worst terrorist incident since September 11th.
But Hank knew better than to ask, and he’d never even hinted at suspicions. As Brannigan watched his son work, he thought he knew why.
Hank wasn’t happy as a Marine officer. Brannigan had known it would be the case; he hadn’t been particularly happy by the time he’d been forced to retire, either. The bureaucracy that ran the Marine Corps was rapacious, and eager to crush anyone who didn’t color inside the lines. To some extent, that was necessary in a military organization; mavericks often got men killed. But when the lines were all about garrison discipline and paperwork, and less and less about combat effectiveness, it wore on men.
It was wearing on Hank, and he was nearing the end of his first contract. He might pick up Captain within the next year, but that was often the breaking point, in Brannigan’s experience. He’d been fortunate in his superiors and his subordinates. He’d never have made it to Colonel otherwise. By all rights, he should have been forced out long before he was. He’d been a fighter, not a politician.
Something caught his ear, and he turned, his thoughts coming to a halt as he listened. There wasn’t a lot of noise up there; just the wind in the trees, the occasional bird, and the ringing notes of the ax striking the wood. The snow muted most sounds, too, and Brannigan’s hearing had taken a beating over the thirty years he’d been in the profession of arms. But he’d definitely heard something.
Hank must have heard it too, because he stopped, hefting the ax in both hands, and listened, his chest heaving a little. “That’s a vehicle,” he said. He looked at his father. “You expecting somebody else?”
Under normal circumstances, that question could have been taken innocently, or even as a faint ribbing. Brannigan hadn’t shown any particular interest in women since Rebecca had died. Hank had always left it alone; he knew that his father wouldn’t have taken kindly to his son playing matchmaker. Or anyone else, for that matter.
But there was an underlying tension in Hank Brannigan’s voice that had nothing to do with normality. He might not know everything about what his old man was up to, but he knew bullet wounds, and he knew that Chavez hadn’t been looking for Brannigan just to share a few beers.
Brannigan stood, stretching his back, and shook his head. He wasn’t expecting anyone. Hank had a few more days of leave left, and then he’d be alone again. And contact for the little mercenary crew known amongst themselves as “Brannigan’s Blackhearts” wasn’t handled up there at his cabin.
He didn’t ask if Hank was armed. While his son had showed up empty-handed, he’d quickly borrowed Brannigan’s Beretta 92FS, and was even then carrying it on his hip. It wasn’t Brannigan’s favorite gun; he’d never really liked the Beretta. But it had been a gift, so he’d kept it. He would have preferred something that hit a little harder, especially given the big cat tracks he’d seen out back, but he only had the one Redhawk. And that was currently resting in a well-worn leather holster on his own hip.
He looked through the trees toward the road. His “driveway” was about five miles long, and it went over a small ridgeline before it got anywhere near his cabin. There weren’t any other houses within about ten miles, either; he’d made sure of that. There wasn’t much call for anyone to go up there unless they were there to see him.
Or coming after him.
He knew that he, Chavez, and Mark Van Zandt, the former general—who had sacked Brannigan for doing what he’d seen as being necessary in East Africa—who had facilitated both the missions in Burma and most recently in the Gulf of Mexico, had taken steps to ensure security. What the Blackhearts had been up to wasn’t exactly legal in any jurisdiction. Justified, certainly. Brannigan never would have taken the jobs otherwise. But governments frowned on men conducting military operations without state say-so. And that was leaving aside the potential enemies they’d made along the way, to include Iranians, North Koreans, and whoever the hell had executed the attacks leading into the Tourmaline-Delta incident.
That was probably the part that worried him the most. They still had no idea who had been behind it. Hundreds of people had died, and while several terrorist organizations had claimed responsibility after the fact, none of those claims were being given any sort of real credence.
Someone out there had a lot of resources, a lot of intel, and contacts just about everywhere. And they hadn’t hesitated to kill hundreds of civilians, for an objective that was just as obscure as their identity.
Sunlight glinted off auto glass. A green Subaru was coming up the driveway. Brannigan stood motionless, waiting, his hand hanging slack next to the .44 Magnum on his hip. Hank swung the ax to stick it in the chopping block and rested his hand on the butt of the Beretta. After a glance from his father, he tried to relax, hooking his thumb into his belt, only a few inches from the pistol.
The four-wheel-drive station wagon came to a halt just behind Hank’s rental SUV. The driver shut the engine off and got out.
Brannigan relaxed. It was Chavez. His old friend had lost some weight since they’d started this little operation, and there were more lines around his eyes. His graying hair was thinning and going white, too.
Given the heart problem that had led to Chavez’ retirement, that might not be the best sign.
Brannigan walked out of his ax yard, concentrating on making sure he didn’t limp, though his leg was still stiff. He towered over Chavez, at least a head taller, with his own graying hair and mustache still thick and bushy. He held out his hand, and Chavez shook it. “Welcome to the homestead, Hector,” he said. “What brings you all the way up here?” It wasn’t an entirely innocent question.
Chavez, for his part, looked distinctly uncomfortable. “We need to talk, John,” he said. “And I wanted to do it away from any ears.”
“Even mine, Uncle Hector?” Hank asked, stepping closer and leaning against a tree.
“Hi, Hank,” Chavez said, casting a quick glance at Brannigan. The message was clear. “Any” ears meant “any.”
“Why don’t you go put some coffee on, Hank?” Brannigan suggested.
Hank grimaced, knowing a dismissal when he heard one. But he complied without complaint, turning and mounting the steps onto the hewn-plank porch that Brannigan had built with his own two hands and the same ax that Hank had just put down.
He knew better than to dispute an order from his father. Even one so politely phrased as a request.
Brannigan turned back to Chavez. “What’s up?” he asked. He suddenly really wanted to sit down again, but he stayed on his feet. His body needed to get used to doing what it was told again. And he suddenly had a feeling that there was a lot of exertion in his immediate future.
“I got a phone call two nights ago,” Chavez explained, keeping his voice pitched low to make sure it couldn’t be heard at the cabin. Chavez wasn’t an outdoor type, and the quiet up in the woods seemed to unnerve him. Which Brannigan took as a warning sign all by itself. Chavez might have been a city boy, but he had never been jumpy. “On my private cell.”
He hadn’t sp
ecified, but Brannigan picked up the subtext. Chavez’ private cell phone number was limited to a handful of people, Brannigan included. And from the way he was talking, it hadn’t been any of that handful of people who had called him. “Who was it?”
“He said his name is Guildenhall,” Chavez said. “He said he was looking for you and knew that I could contact you. He wants to meet in Seattle, as soon as possible.”
Brannigan frowned. That sounded like a leak, and a fairly major one. “Did he say what he wanted to talk about?” he asked.
“No, but that’s not the point!” Chavez replied. He was clearly rattled. This wasn’t like Hector at all.
“I get the point, Hector,” he said. “I do. Have you changed your cell number yet?”
“As soon as I hung up with Guildenhall,” Chavez admitted, calming down a bit. “John, I don’t think this guy got my number from Mark.”
“You might be right,” Brannigan admitted, rubbing his chin. “You’re thinking Dalca?”
Erika Dalca was the CEO of Ciela International, a transnational conglomerate that was headquartered in Bonn, Germany. Ostensibly a shipping and logistics company, both men were convinced that Ciela was a front for a major international crime organization. And that Dalca was the kingpin. Or queen, as the case may be.
Their conviction was largely based on the fact that Dalca had been able to provide considerable under-the-radar support for the Tourmaline-Delta operation. Including smuggling the Blackhearts to the platform via narco-submarine. She’d insisted it had been captured. Brannigan didn’t know that he believed her.
“I’m telling you, John, that chick knows so much it’s scary,” Chavez said by way of reply.
“You don’t have to convince me of that, Hector,” Brannigan said. “I dealt with her more than you did.” He gusted a sigh, blowing a thick cloud of vapor into the air. “You think she’s looking for some payback? A favor for a favor?”
“I hope not, given what she got paid for that last op,” Chavez said. “You’re the one this Guildenhall is looking for. What do you think?”
