Talarico fanned out to the left, slightly behind her, his pistol in hand.
They moved quickly, and as noiselessly as possible, stopping every few dozen meters to listen.
One hundred meters from the drainage tunnel, Gloria spotted the silhouettes of a small group of figures moving south, at the same moment one of them, dressed in black, turned around. She pulled up short and motioned for Talarico to stop.
For several seconds the main body of the escaping prisoners continued toward the beach, while the one figure remained where he stood, thirty or forty meters out. He dropped to one knee and raised something in front of him.
All of a sudden Gloria realized that the son of a bitch was armed and was about to shoot at them. “Down!” she shouted to her partner.
The black-clad figure opened fire with what sounded to Gloria like a small-caliber suppressed carbine of some sort.
She squatted to a shooter’s stance, brought her pistol up, thumbed the safety catch to the off position, and started firing.
The range was all but impossible under the conditions, but the noise from her unsilenced pistol was impressive. A lot of people on both sides of the fence had just been put on notice that the battle had shifted here from the northeastern perimeter.
Talarico opened fire, as several other black-clad figures turned and returned fire.
She dropped to the ground, and continued firing, until her weapon went dry. Talarico suddenly cried out and went down. But there was no time to help him. This was her fault, because she had been stupid; she hadn’t counted on them being so heavily armed. She ejected the spent magazine, pulled the spare from her back pocket, and rammed it home. The returning fire was starting to concentrate on her now, rock chips flying all over the place from near misses.
She rolled left as she continued to fire.
A helicopter swooped down from the crest of the Camp Delta hill with a deep-throated clatter of its rotors, its spotlight cutting a broad swath down the slope, across the fence, and along the no-man’s zone. Gloria and Talarico were briefly illuminated, but then the knot of black-clad shooters and prisoners dressed in orange was lit like day.
Spotlights in the guard towers all along the perimeter fence came on and a lot of sirens started blaring up and down the line.
The Boeing MH-6J chopper peeled off to the east, firing a spray of 7.62mm rounds from both of its miniguns, bracketing the escaping prisoners.
At least one of them raised his weapon and fired at the helicopter, but the rest of them concentrated their fire on Gloria.
Something blunt hit her hard, like a baseball bat, in the left hip, and her leg went instantly numb. She squeezed off two more shots, and one of the POWs in orange went down.
The chopper was coming around for a second pass when two of the black-clad figures suddenly turned and started shooting the POWs.
Gloria propped herself up with her good leg so she could get a better look. It made no sense that they would kill one another.
The helicopter pulled up short in a hover twenty or thirty meters away, its spotlight illuminating the scene like day. All of the POWs were down. One of the black-clad figures looked up, shook his fist at the chopper, and suddenly disappeared in a bright flash-bang, the noise hammering off the side of the hill.
Gloria’s mouth dropped open. He’d killed the POWs he’d come to rescue, rather than let them be recaptured, and then had committed suicide.
She pulled out her walkie-talkie to warn the chopper pilot to stay back, when the other three black-clad figures disappeared like the first in flash-bangs, blowing themselves up.
Moments later the chopper came back and set down hard ten meters from where Gloria was up on one knee. Two armed men in Marine Corps BDUs sitting in the starboard doorway jumped out and raced back to her.
“We’re going to have company real soon, ma’am,” one of them said, hauling Gloria to her feet. His sewn name tag read JONES.
The other marine had dropped beside Talarico, who lay facedown in the sand. He looked up and shook his head.
“Okay, we’re outta here—now,” Jones said urgently.
“We’re not leaving Bob,” Gloria said, pulling away.
“We’ve got a Frontier Brigade patrol just about on top of us, and we’re not allowed to shoot at them—”
“We’re not leaving my partner!” Gloria shouted.
Jones slung his weapon, hustled Gloria over to where Talarico lay, and between him and his partner dragged the body back to the chopper. They stuffed it unceremoniously inside, then helped Gloria up onto the sill.
The instant the marines were aboard, the chopper pilot hauled the machine airborne and immediately peeled to the west, just clearing the razor wire atop the perimeter fence, before climbing steeply to the crest of the Delta hill.
Gloria held tightly to Talarico’s lifeless body, his half-open eyes staring up at her, his face unnaturally white. She had killed him as surely as if she had shot him herself. Her heart was sick just thinking what she would have to tell his wife. It was a part of the business they were in; some of her friends had bought it in Afghanistan and Iraq. And her own husband had been tortured to death in a Cuban Intelligence Service prison outside Havana. She knew about loss.
But this time she had been the one in charge; this time the responsibility had rested on her shoulders.
PART ONE
ONE
CABIMAS, VENEZUELA
No one looked twice at the Russian sea captain as he got out of his cab in front of the Cabimas Hotel Internacional, paid the fare, and headed toward the lobby. Nor did any of the smartly uniformed bellmen stationed at the front doors offer to help with his battered leather satchel and matching garment bag. He smiled inwardly. He was used to such treatment, he didn’t have the look of a successful man. And this was a busy town of important oil executives, heavy hitters, big money.
He had the typical broad shoulders and barrel chest of a Great Russian, but his face was surprisingly round, with a delicate nose and soft, almost dreamy eyes under short dark hair that made him look like a poet-soldier. He carried his five-feet-ten like a man long accustomed to being at sea; on the balls of his feet, as if he were constantly working to keep a perfect balance.
The captain entered the deluxe hotel, and crossed the busy lobby to stand in line at the registration desk. He’d never stayed here before, but the woman at GAC-Vensport had booked a suite for him. Nothing but first class for the new captain of the Panamax oil tanker Apurto Devlán. In the morning he would be helicoptered out to his ship, currently loading crude, but this evening he would live in the lap of luxury and enjoy it.
When it was the captain’s turn, one of the clerks, a haughty young man in a crisply tailored blue blazer, motioned him up to the desk. “Do you have reservations?”
“Yes,” the captain said. He smiled faintly. Aboard his crude carrier he would be the undisputed lord and master, but the moment he stepped ashore and interacted with civilians he became a nobody. His wife, Tania, back in St. Petersburg, bought him expensive clothes in Helsinki and Paris, but on him even designer labels looked shabby.
He handed over his Russian passport, which identified him as Grigoriy Ivanovich Slavin.
The clerk handled the passport as if he thought his hands would get dirty. He glanced at the photograph and looked up at Slavin. All of a sudden something apparently dawned on him, because his face fell. He laid the passport down and quickly typed something into his computer. He looked up again, a broad smile plastered across his stricken features. “Captain Slavin, we were not expecting you so early.”
“Well, I’m here,” Slavin said. “Is my room ready, or will I have to wait?”
“Of course not, sir. Your suite is at your immediate disposal.” The clerk laid a registration card on the counter and handed Slavin a pen. “If you will sign in, sir, I’ll have your bags taken up and personally escort you.”
“Not necessary,” Slavin said curtly. He signed the card and laid the pen on
the counter. He preferred being a nobody ashore, because he didn’t like being fawned over. Aboard ship he gave orders and his officers and crew followed them. No questions, no bargaining, no diplomacy. It was the discipline he enjoyed.
The clerk handed back his passport, and motioned for a young, handsome bellman, who scurried over from the bell station near the front doors. The clerk passed him a plastic key card. “Take Capitano Slavin’s bags to the Bolívar Suite.”
“It’s not necessary,” Slavin growled.
The clerk was suddenly nervous. “Sir, it’s hotel policy for all VIP guests. GAC-Vensport expects no less from us.” His rigid smile broadened. The company was responsible for all of Venezuela’s oil shipping, which was the major source of the nation’s income. It was big.
Slavin remembered one of the old Russian proverbs his babushka used to use when the family was poor. We’re all related, the same sun dries our rags. He nodded. “Da.”
The clerk gave him a relieved look and he came around from behind the counter as the bellman disappeared with Slavin’s bags. “Just this way, sir,” he said, and he escorted the captain across the soaring atrium lobby to a bank of elevators.
“A helicopter is coming for me at oh-eight-hundred.”
“Yes, sir, we’ll let you know when it’s twenty minutes out,” the clerk said. The hotel provided helicopter service with Maracaibo’s La Chinita Airport eight minutes away, and to the ships loading at fueling platforms out in the lake.
Slavin was impressed despite himself. In the Russian navy such perks were reserved for flag officers, and during his eleven-year career in the merchant marine he’d never had the privilege of such treatment. At 275 meters on the waterline with a beam of nearly forty-four meters, his new command, the Apurto Devlán, was the largest crude carrier that could transit the Panama Canal, and the largest and most important vessel he’d ever been given responsibility for. He’d transited the canal ten times before aboard smaller ships, three times as skipper of container vessels, but being helicoptered out to a ship of his own would be a first. He decided that he would try to loosen up and savor the moment. It was the other thing Tania had tried to change in him; he didn’t know how to relax.
When they reached the top floor, the clerk held the elevator door for Slavin, and then led the way to the suite at the end of the plushly carpeted corridor, where he opened the door. “I believe that you will find these rooms to your liking, Captain.”
Slavin suppressed a grin. “This will do,” he said.
The suite’s sitting room was very large, furnished luxuriously with long leather couches, massive chairs, and dining-table-sized coffee tables facing an electronic media complex that featured a huge plasma television hanging on the richly paneled wall. The opposite side of the room was equipped with a wet bar, a dining area for eight, and a home office corner. Recessed lighting softly illuminated the artwork on the walls and on display tables here and there. A sweeping staircase led upstairs.
The clerk went across the room, touched a button, and heavy drapes that covered the entire rear wall opened, revealing a stunning view of Lake Maracaibo through floor-to-ceiling windows. “At night when an electrical storm crosses the lake, it’s quite spectacular from this vantage point,” he said breezily.
“What’s upstairs?”
“The master bedroom, his and hers bathrooms and dressing rooms, an exercise area, a balcony, and, of course, a Jacuzzi.”
The bellman arrived with Slavin’s bags. “Shall I unpack for you, sir?” he asked.
“No need, I’m only staying the night. Put them on the bed.”
“Very well, sir,” the bellman said, and he took the bags upstairs.
The clerk crossed the room to the wet bar, where a bottle of Dom Pérignon was cooling in a bucket of ice. He opened the champagne, poured a glass, and brought it to Slavin. “Compliments of the hotel, Captain,” he said.
The wine was sour to Slavin’s taste, but he said nothing. The clerk was watching him closely for a reaction. In the old days, to be caught reacting in the wrong way or doing something that was socially inept was to be nekulturny. He’d never forgotten his lessons in humility at the Frunze Military Academy, where on the first evening in the dining room he’d been taught the proper use of the linen napkin and numerous utensils.
Once a word is out of your mouth, his grandmother used to say, you can’t swallow it again. He’d learned the hard way.
The bellman came downstairs. Slavin set his wineglass aside, and reached for his wallet, but the clerk shook his head. “That will not be necessary, sir. Vensport is taking care of everything.”
“I didn’t know,” Slavin said to cover his mild embarrassment. Tomorrow would not come soon enough.
The clerk handed over the plastic card key. “I hope that you enjoy your brief stay with us, Captain. My name is Mr. Angarita. If there is anything that you need don’t hesitate to call me.”
“Thank you,” Slavin said.
“Our La Terraza restaurant by the pool is first-class. Shall I make reservations for you?”
“I’ll decide later.”
“As you wish, sir.”
When the clerk was gone, Slavin took his champagne back to the wet bar and emptied it into the small sink. He found a bottle of Stolichnaya and a glass, and poured a stiff measure of the Russian vodka. He knocked it back, poured another, and then, jamming the bottle in his coat pocket, headed upstairs while loosening his tie with one hand.
The master bedroom was just as grand as the sitting room, with a huge circular bed facing large floor-to-ceiling sliding-glass doors that opened to the balcony. It was midafternoon and the late-afternoon sun was low behind the hotel, casting a beautiful gold light across the lake. At this point the west shore was fifty kilometers away, lost in the mist, but the view was spectacular. The two-hundred-kilometer-long lake was studded with oil drilling platforms, waste gas burning in long, wind-driven jets of fire from many of them; broad loading platforms where tankers bound for refineries all over the world loaded Venezuelan sweet light crude; and the ships themselves, outbound for the Golfo de Venezuela and the open Caribbean, or inbound under the five-mile General Rafael Urdaneta high bridge at the neck of the lake to take on their cargoes.
“Yob tvoyu mat,” Slavin swore softly. Fuck your mother. He raised a toast. Tania had computed that he had been at sea for twenty-one and a half of the twenty-four years they’d been married. She never complained, in part because the money was very good. But just lately she’d started to ask him about an early retirement. Not to quit the sea, rather she wanted to travel with him to some of the places he’d told her about, as civilians, as tourists, as lovers.
God help him, he did love it. And maybe he would do what she asked, retire before he turned fifty. But not to give up the sea, just to voyage differently. It was an intriguing thought.
He poured another drink and went into the whorehouse of a bathroom, where he found the Jacuzzi controls and started the jets.
Slavin was slightly drunk. Lying in the Jacuzzi, he’d finished the first bottle of vodka, and then, dripping wet, had padded downstairs to fetch a second bottle from the bar. That had been two hours ago, and that bottle was nearly empty. He was finally beginning to relax after the long air trip from Moscow to Paris with Tania, and from there across the Atlantic to Caracas, and finally the short hop up to Maracaibo.
Air travel was fast, relatively safe, and cheap these days, but no aluminum tube with wings, into which a couple hundred passengers were crammed like sardines for endless hours, could ever replace an oceangoing vessel in which a man had more room than even in his apartment ashore.
It was starting to get dark out on the lake. The waste gas flames, combined with the oil derricks and platform lights, and the lights on the ships, made a kaleidoscope of ever-changing colors and patterns that was comforting. Like watching waves coming ashore, or burning logs in a fireplace.
Someone came into the bathroom. Slavin saw the reflection in the window
glass and turned.
For a moment he thought it was the idiot clerk again. A man of moderate height, dressed in a dark jacket and open-necked shirt, stood in the doorway, longish blond hair around his ears, with a round face and dark glasses hiding his eyes. The intruder wore latex surgical gloves, and it began to dawn on Slavin that something was very wrong.
“Who are you—?”
The man brought a small-caliber silenced pistol from where he’d concealed it behind his back, raised it, and fired one shot. Something like a hammer struck Slavin in his head, and a billion stars burst inside his brain.
TWO
CABIMAS HOTEL INTERNACIONAL
The assassin, Rupert Graham, stood for a long moment gazing wistfully out the tall windows at the light show on the lake. Soon he would be at sea again, where he belonged. The Apurto Devlán was in the last stages of her loading, ready for sailing in the morning, her crew missing only the captain. So far as he had been able to determine, none of them had ever sailed with Slavin before. The only trouble would come if there was a last-minute replacement who knew the Russian.
But he would deal with that problem if and when it arose.
Graham looked at Captain Slavin’s body. The force of the .22 suppressed long rifle round had been enough to throw the man’s head back against the side of the Jacuzzi, before the body slid underwater. Only the face, its sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, remained above the furiously bubbling surface. An angry red and black hole in the Russian’s forehead, a few centimeters to the right of the nose, had bled very little. And there was no exit wound; the fragmentation round had broken up inside the skull, destroying a massive amount of brain tissue. Death had been nearly instantaneous.
It had been too easy, Graham thought with some regret. He laid his pistol on the toilet seat, removed his rubber gloves, and cocked an ear to listen. The suite was utterly quiet except for the noise of the Jacuzzi’s pumps and the swirling water.
Allah's Scorpion Page 3
