She walked south across the airstrip and into the forest near the river. The water was frozen now, but with the warm-ups that occasionally happen during this winter, blocks of ice covered the surface. It would be difficult to cross.
The crack of a rifle shattered the air, stunning her.
She looked to the west well beyond the airstrip. The sound was of a large-caliber weapon. It echoed off the trees. And then, a moment later, everything became eerily silent. She took her rifle off of her shoulder, pulled the lever action, and saw the bright brass color of a round in the weapon’s chamber.
No reason for anyone else to be out here. She scanned the horizon. The mountain range could be seen well off in the distance. Snag wasn’t the place to be for a casual visit. She turned back to her cabin, thinking that she had left the satellite phone in the cabin.
As she neared the hut, Karen noticed something move well off in the distance beyond the end of the airstrip. She stared at the figure, trying to make out what it was.
The man was walking as if on a Sunday stroll. Except, she saw now, that he was also dragging something behind him on a rope. She couldn’t tell from the distance what was at the end of the line.
“Who in the hell?” Karen whispered to herself.
She chambered a round in the rifle and brought it up to her shoulder.
If the stranger was trouble, the shot would be in the center of his chest.
Chapter 47
The Northern Side of Moscow
Will Parker saw the Lada waiting outside of the Turkish bath just across the street with its engine running. He immediately recognized the vehicle. It was the same one that had been in front of his hotel earlier. Instead of turning away from it, he made a point of crossing directly to it and cutting directly in front of the car, waving to the driver in the front seat. The engine was running and the man inside looked bored. It was likely that he was drunk as well. The FSB knew that vodka was the only way to cope with the cold. It was much more than a drink.
After passing in front of the Lada, Will went back to the center of the street and walked in the tracks left by other vehicles. The snow on the sidewalk was too deep to traverse quickly. He headed in the same direction as the car. He continued on the street for several blocks before cutting to the west. The snow kept coming down in sheets, giving him the cover he so desperately needed.
On one side street, he saw what he had been looking for in a Lada Niva. It was old enough that it wouldn’t stand out, its dark green visible even under the coating of the snow, and had been designed to go off-road. He tried the door and it was unlocked. Moscow was a trusting city.
Will dusted the snow off of the front and opened the hood. A spare tire and the engine were both in the engine compartment. He reached under the engine cowling and then returned to under the steering wheel. There, he pulled two wires, touched them together to cause a spark. The engine turned over. He quietly closed the hood and looked down the street to see a Christmas-card look of snow falling, streetlights glowing in the frosty night, and complete stillness all around. Not a single sign of life.
Time to go.
Will first drove across Moscow to the railroad station, where he’d left his backpack in storage. He parked on a side street, put the car in neutral, and left the engine running while he crossed the lane to the rail station. He pulled his hat down low and his parka’s collar tight. In the snowstorm, he didn’t stand out, so it was easy to retrieve what he’d come for. The backpack felt every bit as heavy as he recalled.
Now, the dangerous part, Will thought as he crossed the street back to the running vehicle.
The Lada’s four-wheel drive was surprisingly good; he was impressed how well it handled in the new snow. Will drove back to the hotel where he’d stayed. He wasn’t going in. He turned the block so that he came back past it in the same direction as when he had been picked up for his visit to Ridges. He was trying to reorient himself for the next step of the journey—this time without a blindfold.
Will also had his laptop open on the front seat. He had the map from the previous journey. Although he carried it in his bag, Will had set the computer to record the journey as a backup to his memory.
As he passed the hotel, he noticed the same Lada parked across the street.
Hoping I might come back, he thought as he glanced at the car through his peripheral vision, making a point of not looking in the direction of the two men sitting in the vehicle. At the next light, he reached into the backpack.
The cold metal of the Baikal .380 Makarov automatic pistol lay at the bottom.
Will was happy to see the Lada’s gas tank was half full.
More than I should need.
And Moscow had not gone to a full lockdown. Yet. He had noticed, however, when he walked through the train station what appeared to be more men in uniform than usual.
Snowplows had cleared the highway for several miles out of downtown Moscow. The wipers were at full speed as the large flakes fell and stuck to the warm glass. It was cold, but not a brutal subzero cold.
Will closed his eyes occasionally to follow the track in his mind of the journey he had made while blindfolded. He felt as though he was on the route as he had imagined it. He anticipated the next turn before the computer showed it. He slowed and took the exit off of the main highway to a side road. It had also been plowed, but the snow was rapidly catching up to it. The snow had drifted in places; each time his front bumper blew up a drift, a heavy blast of snow came back down on the hood and windshield. The wheels wiggled a little as they lost traction for a brief moment.
Ah, Russia. It was starting to remind him of the Yukon….
No. Keep focused.
The final turn came up on the left.
Will stopped the car and turned off the lights. He left the engine running and looked around in the quiet for any movement. The last road was several miles to the cabin and the lake, but it was a single lane that went into the dark woods.
He turned into the side road, drove for several miles until he came to another side road that veered off to the right. Vehicle tracks were on both lanes despite the snow. The past trip had taken him directly down the main way, but here he headed into the side road. Again, he was playing the odds. Will had a sense that the lake went to both the right and left of the main gravel road, which meant that other cabins surrounded the lake. It also was likely that these were vacation cabins only used in the summer season. He just needed one dark cabin closed for the winter—and found it around the next bend. Off in the distance stood another dark cabin; further on, one had a light on in the window. It seemed like the perfect scenario.
“We need a little luck,” he murmured to himself, thinking how foolish the whole effort seemed.
Will parked the Lada under the shed to the side of the dark cabin. Before he turned off the engine, he used the light to open the backpack and pull out the other items needed.
The two white Tyvek coverall suits would typically be used for the spraying of chemicals in a garden. They’d been easy to buy on the internet; here, the suits served as white camouflage in a snow-covered forest. He pulled the Tyvek suit over his sweater and pants. Will left his parka in the car. It was too bulky and he wasn’t planning to stay out long.
Another package in the backpack had been more difficult to source. A small plastic case held an Instant Eye quadcopter and a small Q4S viewer. He put the Instant Eye back in the pack and quietly closed the door to the car. He looked around him in the snowy dark, and only after his eyes adjusted to the low light did he get a feel for his directions. Will put the backpack on and turned toward the other cabins. It was nearing midnight.
The lake was frozen and covered with snow that came up to above his ankles. He started out to the west, crossing past several dark cottages and docks until he saw the well-illuminated guardhouse through the woods. The cabin Ridges was in still had one
window glowing green from an interior light. Will lay in the snow. The Tyvek did not provide any warmth, but it did keep the moisture out.
He pulled the drone from the backpack and started the quadcopter from behind one of the sheds on a dock and watched on the screen as it quickly flew up, above the tree line and over the cabin. It circled the cabin in nearly complete silence as he took in the positions of the guards. There were twice as many guards as before. One walked the premises, while the other three stood together near the guard shack. He watched as he paced out their actions and then returned the quadcopter to the shed.
The green light went out in the cabin.
“Okay, let’s see if they gave him a babysitter,” Will whispered to himself.
He pulled the other Tyvek suit out of the backpack and slowly crossed over the lake and up to the back edge of the cabin. Inside, a guard sat in front of the fireplace, but Ridges was nowhere to be seen.
Where are you, Mr. Ridges? Will had decided that he would give the effort no more than a minute. If Ridges hadn’t figured out a way to get out of the cottage, Will would be on the Air France flight in the morning.
Chapter 48
The Mexican Hideout
The footsteps coming across the floor above shook Todd Newton from a deep sleep. He was numb with fear, exhaustion, and thirst. Todd unconsciously pulled into the fetal position, rightfully fearful that every time he heard the steps it meant another beating.
Just gotta hold on, he thought. It never had occurred to him before now that Parris Island boot camp implanted within him a certain resolve. Todd remembered the name of Staff Sgt. Virgil Williams. The six-foot-two drill instructor in his starched, crisp utility uniform cussed at him almost religiously, using words he’d never heard before.
“I’m going to beat the civilian out of you!” Williams would wake them up with the same call every morning. “This ain’t no Nintendo world!” But Williams taught Todd how to survive the twenty-hour days, the backpack marches through the night, and the built-in torture of standing on the parade deck at attention in the brutally hot South Carolina summer.
I won’t ever forget his name. Todd held onto the thought. Marine boot camp had pushed him beyond what he thought his limits were. Now Parris Island was paying a small dividend.
The sound of conversation came from the room above. He heard the noise of two new voices, the men arguing, and then it stopped. It seemed as if one had left.
God, please be him, Todd hoped. The big one’s leaving might give some chance of his survival. But just as quickly, self-doubt started to creep in again. The man’s departure could also mean the end. It had been some time since his friend had been taken away. He knew her fate.
After a long period of silence, he heard the footsteps coming down the stairs. It was more than one man. The door swung open.
Todd looked through his arms that covered his face. The little one was with two other men. They spoke to each other in Spanish. He got the drift of what was being said. It had been a mistake that he had seen their faces. It guaranteed his death sentence.
“I know more about Ridges.” Todd tried to speak the words loudly, but they almost came out in a whisper. It was a plea.
“What else, my friend?” It was one of the new strangers who spoke. The man had long black hair that went down to his shirt collar, a thin mustache and chin beard, and the glittering eyes of a killer. His shirt was plaid, open at the collar for three buttons down, revealing a leather-woven necklace and a gold one with a small gold cross. He was brown-skinned with no chest hair. He wore black shooting gloves that left the fingers exposed; on his wrist were several colored glass bracelets. The glass beads looked oddly out of place on the killer’s wrist. No doubt they had some brutal meaning and history. The man’s fingernails were long and uncut. He had pointed black boots with heels that made him taller than the other two men.
He also held a silver semiautomatic pistol in one hand.
“I know how to find his back door into DIA.” Todd was grasping at straws. He could only guess that Ridges had left a back door into his old agency, especially if he thought he might need it one day. More important, Todd’s lie sounded important enough that it should get the attention of his captors. If nothing else, a back door into a US military-intelligence agency would be highly marketable.
The man with the gun turned to the others, said something in Spanish, and laughed. “Good,” he said, lowering the hand with the pistol. He looked at the gun and raised it up in the air. “I wasn’t going to shoot you anyway. Angel said we had to keep you alive until he called.”
The suggestion of a call that would end Todd’s life was another brutal form of torture. He knew he’d jump every time he heard the ring of a cell phone upstairs. By now he knew the ringtones that each man had on his phone.
The two guards spoke to each other in Spanish. Todd caught two words that stood out. They referenced Angel, who must have been the large guard. His was the call that could end Todd’s life. And there was another word that didn’t take any translation:
Angel was in Alaska.
Alaska? Todd thought hopelessly as he covered his head once more.
The guard took a fake swing at Todd’s head, just missing, laughed, and then walked back upstairs, leaving Todd curled on the bed alone.
Chapter 49
Moscow
Lt. Col. Mikhailov knocked on the driver’s window of his car, which was parked and running in front of the Sandunovskie Bani on Neglinnaya Street. The bathhouse’s white marble facade looked like a cake with white icing under the snow, which was starting to pile up on Moscow’s unplowed side streets.
“Did you see anyone come out?”
“What?” The driver was in a half stupor from the snow, the cold, the wait, and the vodka. The snow was coming down now in blinding sheets.
“A man, my height?” Mikhailov put his hand to his forehead, demonstrating the height comparison.
The FSB commander had put two and two together while talking to the old veteran in the bath. There was no other veteran of Afghanistan. At least, there was no other Russian veteran of Afghanistan in the bath that night. The colonel had thrown on his clothes and run out of the bath. It had to be the American that they were looking for.
“No, sir, no one.” The driver looked down as he spoke.
Mikhailov had had this driver for more than a year and knew that the man had one fault: Like a child, he didn’t lie well. Based on his reaction, Mikahilov decided it was likely that the driver knew the stranger had come out of the bath and probably cut directly across the guard’s field of vision.
“This damn snow. Not a track in sight.” Mikhailov looked around the small alleyway that joined the street in front of the bathhouse. If the man had come through here, his tracks were long gone.
So, this is my enemy, he thought. He looked up to the sky, feeling a flake hit his face, sting, and then immediately turn into a droplet of water.
Exactly as the colonel had predicted, the man had gone underground. And Moscow made for the ideal hiding place. He could be hidden but in plain sight.
“Canis lupus lupus LC,” he mumbled to himself. Mikhailov had heard his grandfather speak of the gray ghosts that prowled the forest and steppes of Russia. “Call in and tell them that our target was seen in the city near the Gonduras meat market.” He shouted the words to his driver as he turned to the door of the bathhouse. The meat market was less than a block or two away from the bath. It would give the searchers a known point of reference. “And tell them to keep a lookout at the American’s cabin.”
The colonel knocked the snow off from his fur hat and parka after going back in to the bathhouse. The carpet leading in had become fully soaked and squelched as he strode in.
“My friend, tell me of your last customer?” the colonel asked the clerk at the desk.
The man immediately pulled back, t
he smile vanishing from his face. An FSB officer was asking about a visitor.
“He hadn’t been in here before,” the man said defensively.
“I understand.” The officer knew the clerk. He had been here in the same job as his father for decades. The bath was the oldest in Moscow. It had survived the czar, the revolution, and Hitler’s invasion. Despite it all, the bath endured.
“I just need to know what you remember.”
“He was from Belarus.” The clerk smiled as if he had pulled a gem out of a mine. “Yes, he was from Belarus.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He had that accent just like Mikhail.”
“Gorbachev?”
“Yes, a southern one.” The man paused. “I remember he was from somewhere near Minsk.”
“How did he pay?”
“With rubles.”
“Of course, cash.” It didn’t matter, as the credit card would have funds tied to a false name of a false man.
Mikhailov remembered from earlier in the day how the clerk at the hotel talked about the American. There was no mention of a southern accent, only his broken Russian. In fact, he’d painted the picture of a man who would stand out in Moscow because he was so American.
“Thank you.” The officer turned, pulled his white fur ushanka hat on and headed toward the door.
“Sir, I will call you the moment he steps in that door!” the clerk called after him.
“No need to worry.”
The American was good, very good. He would not be returning to the bath.
But he would eventually fall.
“It is only a matter of time,” he murmured as he opened his door. “If only this snow would stop, we could use the drones.”
Mikhailov carried all of the strength of the largest security force in the world behind him. The FSB had inherited all of the traits and talents of its former agency, the KGB. When Moscow awakened to a new day, eyes would be everywhere.
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