by Sean Parnell
The figure left the cart and scuttled away, and then Major Petrov stepped into the light. He was wearing a greatcoat as well, the shoulders dusted with fat snowflakes, and it was open in front to reveal a fresh uniform. Steele’s precious .45 was tucked in his belt. A fluffy fur hat, earflaps pinned up, was perched on his head, and his black gloves looked brand-new, as if he’d been saving them for a special occasion and had just clipped off the price tags. He looked nothing like the sniveling coward who, only hours before, Steele had dragged from Black Dolphin with a Dutch hand grenade in his mouth. He looked so fresh and clean that Steele’s first thought was that either this guy was Petrov’s twin, or the major had gone home for a hot bath and a sauna before showing up here.
Petrov looked down at Steele with the beady dark eyes of a rabid raccoon. He removed his gloves, one at a time, smoothed his thick mustache, and smiled. Five of his guards then appeared behind him, hanging back at the farthest edge of the semicircle of light, but they were brandishing their Bizons, and Steele thought for sure that he saw one of them licking his lips.
“You humiliated me in front of my men,” Petrov said in near-perfect English.
“I’d apologize, Major,” Steele answered in kind, “but it wouldn’t be sincere. The only thing I’m sorry about is not pulling the pin on that grenade or shooting you in the balls.”
Petrov backhanded Steele in the face, snapping his head to the left and slinging blood from his nose across the floor. The major looked at the back of his knuckles, took a handkerchief embroidered with roses from his greatcoat pocket, and wiped them clean. Steele shook off the blow and smiled up at the major.
“I’m not going to talk, you know,” he said.
“I sent your photograph to FSB headquarters. I know who you are,” Petrov said. “I don’t want you to talk, Mr. Steele. I want you to suffer.”
“Don’t you want to know where I came from? How I knew to come here?”
Petrov shrugged, reached inside his coat, and came up with a slim silver box. He slipped a Kazbek cigarette from the box, tapped it on the metal, lipped it, and lit up with what looked like an old-fashioned trench lighter. He blew a stream of smoke at the dripping ceiling.
“All right,” he said. “Where did you come from? And how did you know to come here?”
“I came from Nunya-FB,” Steele said.
“Nunya-FB?” Petrov cocked his head. “What does this mean?”
“None a ya fucking business.”
The second backhanded slap was harder than the first, but from the other side, and this time Petrov’s knuckles impacted with the ugly open gash in Steele’s temple, so it really rang his bell.
Don’t give this bastard even a wince, he said to himself as he deliberately slowed his breathing and fought through the pain. If you’re gonna die here, die well.
Steele switched back to Russian.
“Do your men here know how you pissed yourself back in your office, Major? How you whimpered and cried like a little girl?”
Petrov’s face flushed and he grunted and turned to the crash cart. He inspected the tools, as if making sure that whatever he chose would be the right size for a specific repair, picked up a long red C-wrench, stepped forward toward Steele, and swung it in a blurring arc, smashing the haft into the side of Steele’s left knee. Steele’s head whipped back against his right shoulder as the pain thundered up through his leg, into his chest, and shot a burst of saliva from his bloodstained lips. But he didn’t make a sound.
“Would you like to tell them?” Petrov asked.
Steele coughed and managed to speak again. “No, you do it. I’m busy composing a string quartet in my head.”
Petrov grinned. “It’s so fortunate that you came here, Mr. Steele. You’ve given us the opportunity that we never fulfilled with your father, that piece of shit. His escape destroyed the career of the warden back then, which is essentially how I arrived at my rank and position.”
“Keep blabbering,” Steele said. “I’m almost done with the score.”
At that point, Steele thought he heard something familiar. It wasn’t really a sound, just a mild pulse in the air. Petrov dropped the C-wrench back on the cart and came up with something larger. It was a ball-peen hammer, probably a three-pounder, with a heavy wooden shaft and a gleaming stainless steel head.
“Well,” Petrov said as he put his gloves back on and started bouncing the haft of the hammer in his left-hand palm, “this is something akin to karma, is it not? Your father escapes and never returns to you, which is why I assume you are here. And then you appear, like some pathetic child on an idiot’s tearful errand, so we can do to you what we never got to do to him. Irony, isn’t it?”
“It’s pure fucking Tolstoy,” Steele said.
“I think it is more like Kafka, but whatever,” Petrov said, and then he walked closer and looked down at Steele’s left knee, the one that was still sending ripples of pain all the way into his head.
That pulse in Steele’s ears was growing more distinct. It was a helicopter of some sort, which was weird as hell, considering the storm. But then again, Russian pilots were used to flying in that kind of nightmare.
“At any rate, you’ll soon be on your way to Lubyanka. The FSB has extended you an invitation, which I, of course, accepted on your behalf. They are sending air transport tonight. I did, however, warn them that you were badly injured after the murders you committed at our facility.”
Steele was now hearing something else. A couple of the ovcharkas were barking furiously, and then they were quiet, and he could hear a faint but distinct and rapid clicking, like the sound of weapons bolts ringing behind heavy-duty suppressors. No gunshots; just that.
“As a matter of fact, I told them that you were crippled.” Petrov laughed as he raised the ball-peen hammer high above his head. Steele glanced right and left, and in the overspill of the Klieg light, he saw the teeth of the guards grinning. “That wasn’t true when I spoke to Moscow. . . . But it will be, now.”
And he opened his mouth, stretched the hammer up one more inch, and started to bring it down.
Then the iron entrance door burst open, and his brains exploded from his teeth.
Chapter 32
Sol-Iletsk, Russia
Steele knew not to move, not even a millimeter. He sat there in the chair, rock steady as an ice sculpture, and even though he was slathered with putrid brain matter and slick, hot blood, he didn’t close his eyes. If these were going to be his last moments on earth, he was going to see them in Cinerama.
He could have flung himself to the left or right, or toppled his chair over backward, but anyone who’d ever been in a shoot house when top-tier operators were working Close-Quarters Battle knew better. Steele had been on both ends of that spectrum hundreds of times, in training and on real-world missions, with Navy SEALs, Germans from GSG9, British SAS, and Program Alphas. If you were “playing” hostage in a CQB live-fire environment, from Range 37 down at Fort Bragg to the Israeli kill houses at Lashabiyah, you sat in that chair and you didn’t fucking move, and you just let it all flow around you. Otherwise you were bound to be dead.
It sure as hell separated the boys from the men, and the girls from the women.
And man, it happened fast.
Petrov’s ball-peen hammer went flying and clanged off a wall, his corpse bounced with a sickening thunk on the floor, and the rest of the shitstorm started. The soles of tactical boots came pounding into the space, the mouths of suppressor barrels bloomed white flowers of flame, and the upper receivers of automatic weapons clacked like somebody hammering the keys of a dead piano. Steele saw the Russians trying to react as they spun toward the assault, and one of them actually got off a shot with his pistol, which flashed and banged in the enclosed space like a magnesium grenade with a shotgun kicker. But then his head whipped back with a bullet to the forehead, and his nose came off as another round burst through under his chin, and then the room went totally black as the operators took out the Klieg l
ight.
The rest of it was suppressed gunfire that sounded like half a dozen German shepherds sneezing, empty shell casings bouncing off the ceiling, floor, and walls like jelly beans in a clothes dryer, and terrible screams and gurgling grunts. And then it was over. Dead silence.
Steele realized he was hyperventilating. No surprise, since about two hundred rounds had just been winging around his head and body like pissed-off wasps, and somehow, miraculously, even with the ricochet factor very high, he hadn’t been hit. In fact, his adrenaline score was so off the charts that he didn’t even feel his flaming left knee anymore, which he reasoned might be good or bad. Then, lights started to fill the space, chemlights, of the kind that he and most special operators kept by the handful in their LBVs. They were eerie and green, and they revealed the bodies all over.
He squinted into the darkness to identify his rescuers, and wondered for a moment if they were indeed that, or maybe the operators of some rival Russian power, perhaps a Putin oligarch who realized Steele would be worth a fortune as a prize. But none of that really made sense—the Kremlin could have whatever it wanted.
And these men were no band of Russian ruffians. They were kitted up even better than he’d been, just a few hours before. They were wearing MICH helmets, not with PVS-14 monocular NODs like his, but with four-tube Ground Panoramic Night Vision Goggles, and the rest of their kit was the latest DARPA prototype body armor in that weird snow cat camouflage. And they were all carrying Heckler & Koch MP5SD 9 mm integrally suppressed submachine guns, because they’d obviously anticipated doing close-in work. Lung steam flowed toward the frozen ceiling from the hoods of their balaclavas.
There were no patches or identifiers of any kind on their uniforms, but Steele heard one of them say to the other, in Texas-accented American English, “Five mikes and we’re outbound. Start pulling the rest of the squadron in from security, copy?”
“Roger,” the other one said, and that’s when Steele knew who they were.
Delta Force.
The Program could call on the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment “D” for support, but only in cases of dire emergencies, and only for work OCONUS. But Delta could not respond affirmatively to such a request, except by direct order from President Rockford.
Well, Steele knew where his vote would be going next time around. But at the moment, if he didn’t get some water and a couple of ibuprofens real soon, he was going to pass the hell out.
An operator who appeared to be the Delta team leader came forward out of the swirling gun smoke and semidarkness. He was bulky and short, arm muscles bulging through his winter camo gear, and he kicked aside the fallen shattered Klieg light, walked up to Steele, slung his MP5 behind his back, and knelt on one knee. He pulled off his MICH helmet, and then pulled down the front of his balaclava.
It was Dalton “Blade” Goodhill.
“You know something, Steele?” he growled. “You’re a fucking pain in the ass.”
Steele just blinked at him. He thought he might be delirious, or dreaming. Goodhill pulled a curved-blade Emerson Combat Karambit from his plate carrier and started slicing through the duct tape around Steele’s ankles.
“Medic, up,” Goodhill said, but he didn’t really have to. A Delta corpsman was already moving in next to Steele’s chair, pulling off a glove, and checking his neck pulse.
With the door open and that Russian winter wind ripping into the room now, Steele could plainly hear the sound of big rotors turning outside somewhere. Goodhill was now in back of him, freeing his hands.
“Can I get some water?” Steele said in a hoarse whisper.
The medic bent over and fed him the end of his water carrier tube. Steele took a long pull, spit the tube out, and nodded thanks. He heard another senior operator snapping at his men.
“We’re not doing an SSE here, boys. Just a photo record and let’s get the fuck out.”
Steele thought, A Sensitive Site Exploration . . . intelligence gathering . . . They don’t care about that. They just came for me.
A small camera flashed a few times in the room; the color was muted amber. The medic peeled one of Steele’s eyelids back and checked his pupil with a penlight.
“How the hell did you find me?” Steele said to Goodhill, who came back around in front of him and stared down like a pissed-off middle school principal.
“You’ve got a chip in your ass.”
“A what?”
“A while back, before I came aboard, you had some sort of nasty incident at your house. You and Momma wound up in the ICU at Green Bank, right?”
“Yeah.” The medic was checking Steele’s bruised ribs where his armor had taken a round. He bucked in the chair and said, “Jee-sus.”
“You were out long enough for Pitts to issue an order to the docs. They put a tracking chip in you somewhere, probably hid it behind a piece of shrapnel.”
“Oh,” Steele said, and thought, Gotta get rid of that thing.
“Boss, you ready to move yet?” the Delta leader called out to Goodhill. “We gotta go. Pilot’s picking up inbound on radar.”
“Roger,” Goodhill said. “Get him some boots off a corpse.” He looked down at Steele’s feet. “Size nine.”
“Eleven,” Steele corrected.
“I figured small brain, small feet,” Goodhill sneered. “Probably a small dick too. Okay, let’s get him up.”
The medic and Goodhill helped Steele stand, while another slipped his swollen bare feet into a pair of Russian boots. They were blessedly still warm. The two men gripped him under his armpits and guided him past the Klieg debris, broken glass, spent shells, and bloody corpses. Outside the wind hit Steele like a hammer blow. He was still wearing only his long underwear and nothing else, and his face felt like the cold meat that his mother would soften with a mallet on Sundays before their big evening meal.
Goodhill and the other operator half dragged him, with Steele stumbling like a drunk in the snow, up and over another small hill, where there on its cap a large helicopter sat with its main rotor cranking up to a screaming whine as more operators folded back from their perimeter security positions and started climbing aboard. The snow was being whipped into corkscrews by the big rotors, but some starlight was peeking through splits in the thick clouds above, and Steele could now see the nose of the big fat helo . . . and its cartoon Road Runner cracking a whip.
He stopped stumbling, stood stock-still in the snow, and stared at it. “Allie?”
“Yeah, Allie,” Goodhill shouted in the rotor storm. “She works for the Program, dumbass.”
Steele was totally confused. His reasoning and memories and logical thinking were all mixing and fading like a watercolor painting on a hot sidewalk. A crew chief was leaning outside the helo’s cargo door and madly twirling his finger in the air at Goodhill, but Steele wasn’t moving. “Blade” pushed the medic away toward the helo. The man took off through the snow.
“I came here to find my father,” Steele yelled above the thunder of the rotor blades. He was hanging back from the helicopter, as if his feet were frozen to Russia.
Goodhill turned to Steele, grabbed the front of his black thermal top in one gloved fist, and yanked him close.
“Stalker Seven,” he growled, “your father’s not here. And if we don’t get your ass back to Washington, Lansky’s gonna disband the Program.”
Steele shook his head. “I don’t care.”
“Ya don’t, huh? Is this what you want? A fate just like Hank Steele’s? Branded a renegade, never seeing your mother again, breaking what’s left of her heart? There’s a killer out there, ripping the Program apart, and a traitor inside, tearing our guts out. You’ve got a mission, and this ain’t it. . . .”
“I don’t know who to trust anymore.”
“I don’t either,” Goodhill said. “Except maybe for you, ’cause you’re nuts.”
“But you don’t understand, about my father. . . . I have to finish this.”
And with both gloved ha
nds, Dalton Goodhill gripped the sides of Steele’s bruised and bloodied face, hard so the pain would focus him, and pulled him down so they were nearly nose to nose.
“I knew your father, Eric,” he said. “I knew him well. You’re not half the man that he was, but none of us are. And he’d tell you exactly what I’m telling you.”
Steele just stared at him, dumbfounded, and then Goodhill finished his thought.
“Now get on the fucking bird.”
Chapter 33
Nashville, Tennessee
Lila Kalidi crossed the Canadian border at midnight, halfway between the tiny American towns of Pembina, North Dakota, and Roseau, Minnesota, along a stretch of two-lane highway that was virtually unguarded.
Both of those small towns had bustling official border crossing stations, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection on one side, and the Canada Border Services Agency on the other. Yet between those stations and their endless lines of vehicles patiently waiting to cross in both directions, there were forty miles of unpatrolled open forests and grasslands, except for a few cameras and sensors. Lila could never understand the North American lapdog mentality that made people obey “territorial integrity” in such a ridiculous manner.
Well, all the better for her.
Entering Canada through Montreal had been easy. The daughter of Emile Sadat had a perfect French passport and had used that to apply online while in London for an electronic travel authorization (eTA) to visit Canada, which had cost her a whopping seven Canadian dollars. It was almost as easy as the absurdly porous border crossings of the European Union, which had made smuggling weapons, drugs, and terrorists so easy that it was hardly fun anymore, thank you very much.
From Montreal she’d flown into Winnipeg, waited until evening, rented a Ford Escape, and started driving south on 75 toward St. Jean Baptiste, which was only an hour, then eastward on the 201 toward Menisino and Piney, another hour. At around 10:30 p.m. she’d driven the car into the Lost River State Forest, off the slim road into a shallow ravine, and had covered it up with fir fronds.
