“I like to be prepared.”
Just then they heard a sound near the back door.
“Stay here and don’t let anything through that door,” he said before running to the back of the house in a low crouch.
She stayed on her knees behind the bed, trying to block out the pain in her leg, training her pistol on the front door. From the back of the house she heard a crash, a quick burst of fire, and a thump. Two seconds later the front door of the house crashed open and the frame of the door was filled with a black clad figure wearing night vision goggles and holding an MP5. The man turned his head, saw her behind the bed, and brought his weapon to bear, but not before she squeezed off two rounds, one hitting him in the neck and the other right through the night vision goggles.
The next man saw his partner go down and dropped down to roll into the room, coming up on one knee to bring his weapon up. Rachel’s next shot went over his head and thumped into the door frame. He trained his gun on the bed, but Rachel had already scooted a couple feet over and he couldn’t make out where she was in the room. It didn’t help that he had knocked his night vision goggles off his head when he rolled into the room and his eyes had yet to adjust to the dark room.
There she was. He could see her head above the end of the bed and her hand pointing a pistol his direction. He pivoted slightly to take aim, but he never got to pull the trigger. Druzhok leapt from the other side of the bed and was on him in an instant. He dropped his gun to protect his face, but it was useless. The dog made quick work of him, leaving him to bleed out, his throat a bloody mess. There was another rattle of fire from the back of the house, another thump, and then silence.
A moment later Nikita came back and Druzhok went to his side. He saw the two bodies near the front door and the blood on Druzhok’s mouth and gave the dog an affectionate pat on the head.
“I would have had the other one,” Rachel said.
“There were two at the back. I don’t think there are any more,” Nikita said.
“That’s twice that dog has saved my life. I owe him one.”
“We all do. You know what this means. Kazakov won’t rest until he knows you’re dead. We need to leave tonight.”
20
Nikita pulled the UAZ Hunter around to the front of the house and helped Rachel into the back seat. Within minutes he had two large duffel bags loaded in the back and Jelena came out with a bag of pirozhki and several bottles of water. Druzhok climbed in the back seat with Rachel and laid his head on her lap. Before they pulled out, Nikita handed Rachel an AK-47 and a pouch with extra ammo.
“In case we run into any trouble. You ever fire one of these?”
“Only once, and that was at a range.”
“Hopefully you won’t have to use it. It’s normally an hour drive to Usvyaty, but it may take longer.”
“You’re not taking the main road?” Jelena asked.
“I dare not. When Yuriy finds out his team isn’t coming back, he might send more men. Our best bet is to stay off the main roads.”
“Have you called Anton?”
“Tried to, got voice mail. Anton will take us in. He owes me one.”
“Is that the friend you said would help me out of Russia?” Rachel asked.
“Yes. Anton Markov. We served together in Afghanistan…and some other places I’d rather forget.”
“Could I trouble you for a bottle of water, and maybe another pirozhki?”
“Sure,” Jelena said as she handed the food back to Rachel, “how is your leg?”
“Hurts like hell. Thanks for binding it up, by the way. With this bumpy ride…”
“We do have some rough roads in this part of the country,” Nikita said, “sorry about that.”
They rode in silence for nearly an hour while Rachel stroked Druzhok’s head and kept shifting in the seat to try to relieve the pain in her leg.
“Are we getting close?” she asked, “my leg is absolutely killing me.”
“We’re not far from the town now, and Anton’s house is five kilometers west of town.”
“I hate to sound like a complainer.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be complaining were I in your shoes.”
“You know, you never did tell me how you came to speak English so well. The men at Yuriy’s compound didn’t speak it half so well, except maybe Pavel.”
“I spent some time in England before the war.”
“Were you studying there?”
“You might say that.”
Druzhok moved his head slightly and his ears started twitching.
“You hearing something, buddy?” Rachel asked.
A moment later she heard it too, the sound of a vehicle gaining on them from behind.
“Got someone coming up behind,” she said.
“I can hear it now,” Nikita said, “no headlights in the mirror.”
“Who in his right mind drives out here at night with no headlights?” Jelena asked.
“Someone who’s not in his right mind, or someone not wanting to be seen.”
Rachel was sitting sideways in the seat by now, holding the rifle in her lap and looking out the back windshield. A moment later she saw a vehicle coming up behind with no headlights, gaining fast.
“Guy’s getting close back here,” she said.
Nikita sped up gradually and the following car accelerated and continued to close the gap.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Rachel said.
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the rear windshield shattered and Jelena cried out in pain. Nikita jerked the wheel as he looked over at his wife.
“Just pay attention to your driving,” she said, “just got my shoulder.”
She ripped the sleeve off her blouse and pressed it to the wound in her shoulder to stem the bleeding.
“Looks like it passed through. Anton can patch me up when we get there. Just get us there.”
Nikita was swerving left and right on the road to try to throw off the aim of their pursuers and he was now accelerating to a high rate of speed. He looked at his side mirror just as it shattered under a burst of automatic fire. Rachel had the AK up and propped on the back of the seat and was trying to steady it to return fire, but with both cars weaving wildly, it was hard to get a good shot. She fired a couple quick bursts but couldn’t tell if she had hit anything.
The other car was still moving closer and she could now see a man leaning out of the passenger window firing a rifle. The shots missed, but the man fired again, this time hitting the back bumper of the car. Rachel tried to lead her target and fired another burst. This time she saw sparks fly off the front of the other car, but it didn’t appear she had hit anything vital.
This went on for another five miles. Nikita would pull ahead and the other car would close the gap, their pursuer trading rifle fire with Rachel. Both cars had sustained fire, but so far, the damage was superficial. Another burst of fire from behind found its mark, rounds hitting the bumper and a couple rounds coming into the back seat and thumping into the seat next to Rachel’s back. Then as soon as the burst had started it stopped. Rachel stole a glance back and saw the man changing clips.
“Hold it steady for a sec,” she yelled at Nikita.
With the car now moving straight, she raised the rifle and took careful aim at the front windshield of their attacker, now no more than twenty feet behind them, and fired a sustained burst. Most of the rounds hit home and the car lurched violently to one side as the driver slumped over dead and the gunman tried to regain control of the vehicle. Rachel watched as the vehicle swerved abruptly the other direction and flipped over.
“How in the hell did they find us so fast?” Rachel asked.
“It’s been two hours since the attack,” Nikita said.
“Precisely. Two hours. How long did it take Yuriy to find out the attack had failed? How long after that to deploy another team and then they just happen to know exactly where we’re headed, with
you staying off the main roads? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What did you have on your when you escaped?”
“Two pistols, the knife, some ammo, and that thumb drive…oh crap. The drive. You think they could be tracking it?”
“More likely than tracking the pistol. It might have taken a few days to realize the drive was missing. They knew you had the pistols; I assume?”
“Yeah. I killed a couple guys for those.”
“You have to get rid of the drive.”
“We need those files.”
“Anton has the equipment to recover the data, but if we go there, they’ll track us right to his house. We can’t do that.”
Nikita pulled over and called Anton and this time got an answer on the third ring.
“Nikita, you had better have a good reason to call me at this hour.”
“I do, but I don’t think I can say much over the phone.”
“Where are you right now?”
“About ten minutes from your place, but I can’t come there.”
“We can meet at our usual place.”
“I can be there in fifteen minutes. Bring your best laptop and a blank thumb drive.”
Their usual place was a small house in town that Anton owned, but was purchased through an alias that couldn’t be easily traced back to him. He used it primarily for meetings like this where one party or both required a high degree of privacy. They both arrived there in twenty minutes, each having run a surveillance detection route to catch any followers. Anton retrieved his computer and followed Nikita and Jelena in the front door. When he got inside and saw Jelena, he put his computer down and went straight for the bathroom.
He returned shortly with a medical kit and went straight to work on Jelena’s wound.
“You were fortunate. The bullet went clean through without doing much damage.”
A few minutes later he finished cleaning and dressing the wound and Jelena was resting as comfortably as she could manage on the couch. He set his computer on the coffee table and booted it up.
“We need to copy this if we can,” Rachel said, handing him the thumb drive.
He inserted it into a USB slot on the laptop and tried to look at the contents.
“Is this drive damaged?”
“It got wet, but it appears to still be functioning. We think there’s a tracker built in.”
“Now you tell me that. So, if we don’t hurry, we’ll have someone breathing down our necks. Would you care to tell me who?”
“Yuriy Kazakov.”
“Well, if you’re going to make enemies…”
“You know him?”
“I know of him. Not a man you want to cross.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
“What did you do to get on his bad side?”
“He had my parents killed. I'm the loose end.”
“Is that it? Were your parents important.”
“My dad was Doug Prescott.”
“Important enough. Found shot to death in his home, wife found dead upstairs, two other bodies found dead in the house. Seems someone took out the killers and left everything.”
“How do you—”
“I like to stay informed.”
“That’s more than informed. The police never released half of the details.”
“I knew your dad. We worked together on a couple ops, back when he was about your age.”
“Dad never told me he worked in Russia.”
“It wasn’t in Russia.”
“Where—”
“You want this drive copied or not?”
“Okay, I’ll leave you alone.”
“Keep an eye out for any company. Yuriy will keep sending people as long as he knows where you are.”
Rachel went to the couch and sat next to Jelena.
“How are you doing?”
“I could be worse. How about you?”
“Still hurts like…it hurts a lot. I really owe you for fixing me up.”
“It was nothing more than anyone else would have done.”
“Still…thank you.”
“Well,” Anton said, “I think I’m making progress. I’m copying the files, but the data is heavily encrypted. Getting them off the drive was difficult, but opening them will take some time.”
“It wasn’t hard copying them to the drive.”
“The drive is encrypted. I got past it, but the files themselves are also heavily encrypted. It’s opening them that will take a while.”
“I know someone who can crack it, but he’s in the States.”
“Who would that be?”
“The people I’m working with now. We have a system there that can crack anything. If I could upload them to the server—”
“You can’t do that from here. I don’t have a secure enough connection to risk it. Hell, nobody in this part of Russia does, short of running down to Moscow and asking Putin if we can use one of his.”
“And I guess shipping it is out of the question. I’ll have to deliver it myself, but Yuriy’s thugs stole my passport.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. I’m sure we can get you another one. I have an acquaintance in Vitsyebsk.”
“Vitsyebsk,” Nikita said, “I haven’t been there since…wait…you can’t be talking about Boris Vasilevsky.”
“One and the same.”
“Can you trust him?”
“You know better than that, but he’s the best document man in this part of the world. If you can think of a better way of getting her out of here…”
“We can smuggle her on a freighter out of St. Petersburg.”
“I suppose we could, but if the intel on this drive is a volatile as you’re suggesting, speed is essential.”
“You don’t think Yuriy will be watching the airports? You put her on a plane, he’s going to know, even with a different identity.”
“Still, she’s going to need that identity, no matter how we get her out. But back to the matter at hand. The drive is copied, but the original could bring company. What do you suppose we do with it?”
“We could just destroy it and move on.”
“Or we could use it as bait.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Let me explain.”
21
Nikita, Jelena, and Rachel waited in the house across the street, where Anton joined them five minutes later.
“ Whose house is this?” Nikita asked.
“An old woman who only lives here part of the year. She’ll never know we were here,” Anton said.
“So, what’s your grand plan?”
“Not very grand, I’m afraid. Couple of grenades set to go off if anyone opens the door. Got both doors. Anyone going through the door will be out of sorts for a few seconds, plenty of time for us to get across the street.”
“You brought flash bangs?”
“I like to be prepared.”
“So, we catch them alive and—”
“Find out what they know. Just like old times.”
“I’m not sure I have the stomach for that sort of thing again.”
“Maybe we won’t have to push too hard.”
“Do you think they’re just going to walk right up and open the door?”
“We’ll probably find out before long.”
“While we’re waiting, you think I can borrow that phone?” Rachel asked.
“What do you want with it?” Anton asked.
“How secure is it?”
“Pretty good, if you’re not online too long.”
“I won’t be, thirty seconds tops.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Hail a cab.”
“Here you go,” Anton said, handing her the phone, ”be quick.”
Rachel handed him the phone back twenty seconds later.
“That freighter you talked about. Does it put in at Stockholm?”
“I believe so.”
“You still think you can get
me aboard?”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“Good. I’ll have a ride in Stockholm. Can you think of a better way of getting me there?”
“That’s probably the most secure way. I’ll call…what the hell?”
A moment later the house across the street was rocked by an enormous explosion.
“RPG,” Nikita yelled, “get away from the windows.”
Anton watched as two people exited the house next to the one they were in and went across the street.
“They think we were in there. Guess they didn’t care much for taking us alive,” Anton said.
“It won’t take long for them to find out we’re not there,” Nikita said.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Anton said, pulling a pistol and running out of the house.
Nikita was right on his heels and they were across the street in seconds, but they lost the element of surprise when one of the men turned around and saw them coming. The man raised a weapon and opened fire, hitting Anton in the leg. He raised himself up on one knee and returned fire, dropping the shooter with two rounds to the chest. The other man ducked behind the door as Nikita found cover behind a parked car. Anton continued firing at the door and the man behind the door came out and fired in his direction again, hitting the pavement next to him.
While the man was distracted by Anton, Nikita managed to work his way around the house and in through a blown- out window, taking the man by surprise. He walked up behind him and put the barrel of his pistol at the back of the man’s head.
“Drop your weapon. We need to have a little talk.”
“Go to hell.”
“Not now, but you can after you tell me what you know.”
The man said nothing, but slumped to his knees.
“Oh no you don’t,” Nikita yelled when he saw the foam at the man’s lips.
Anton limped over and took one look at the man lying in front on Nikita.
“Cyanide?”
“Something faster. He was gone in seconds.”
“Well, we’d better destroy that old drive. Does the girl have the copy?”
“You gave it to her yourself.”
“Pardon me. Getting shot has a way of playing havoc with your wits.”
“Can you drive? The police will be here any minute and we need to be gone.”
The Korean Gambit Page 15
