by Ward Larsen
He wasn’t particularly large, but right away Slaton recognized a wrestler—the most common fighting art in the Middle East. His adversary spread his legs for leverage, tried to bar Slaton’s left arm. Slaton blocked the move, but soon they were rolling in the dirt. Hopelessly entangled in near darkness, they fought more by feel than sight. Slaton’s knife was sheathed on his lower leg, yet he couldn’t reach it—every time he got a hand free, his opponent would reach for his gun or throw an elbow. Neither man seemed able to gain an advantage, and Slaton sensed a deadlock of sorts—like two prize fighters happy to get to the bell.
Then suddenly he was angry with himself. The man he was up against was nothing more than a mercenary, a hired gun. Slaton’s motivation was far more profound. He pounded his heels in the dirt furiously, incensed at the thought of a stalemate. He refocused his efforts, straining for all he was worth. Something gave in one of the man’s arms and he screamed in pain. Slaton rolled on top of him, pried an elbow over his throat. He freed his other hand, and when he planted it on the ground for balance, Slaton felt something hard and round in the mud beneath. His fingers clawed and pried, and a softball-sized rock popped free from the earth. Shifting his weight, he created a clear line to the man’s head. Two blows later it was over.
Slaton rolled away and lay next to the dead man. His lungs were heaving, his heart racing. Anger might not be much of a strategy … but it was a damned good motivator.
He sat up slowly, put his arms across his knees. Slaton realized he’d cut things too close. If the third man had arrived seconds sooner, he would have gotten off a shot. Had he been overconfident? Careless? Whatever the fault, he could not allow it again—on this mission, failure was not an option.
He stood gingerly, checked for damage. Aside from scrapes and bruises and other men’s blood, everything seemed intact. It had been a close call, but his objective was met—all three men had met their end silently.
He moved to the shooting stand he’d built and looked out across the water. With considerable relief, Slaton saw his target still standing on the stone semicircle.
Having no idea how long that would be the case, he moved quickly.
* * *
The bodies went into a pile. It wasn’t from any misguided sense of victory or to make a statement. The simple truth was that the best spot for concealing them, beneath a shadowed shelf of underbrush, was quite small. The police were going to have a hell of a time with their chalk outline.
The scene wasn’t pretty. There was blood everywhere, its ferrous odor etched into the air. Slaton wiped the worst of it from his hands and clothing. Hopefully the night would cover the rest. He disassembled his makeshift shooting stand, dropping the golf clubs to the ground. The gun—which wasn’t really a gun at all—he placed back into the box.
He’d known going in that it would be difficult to acquire a rifle on short notice, particularly in a country like Austria where gun laws, while not the most stringent, were unfailingly carried out to the letter. Given his tactical objective tonight, and the fact that things had to be done silently, he’d settled on a better way.
Unlike real guns, facsimile weapons were largely unregulated. They were designed for training, and used widely by police forces and military units. Thanks to their harmless nature, worn or dated specimens often ended up in private ownership, fated to become anything from private training tools to tap handles on kegs in basement bars. Slaton never doubted he could find something that would work, but he got a lucky break when the first gun shop he’d visited had not only a facsimile in stock, but a model that was perfect for his ruse. The M16 “Rubber Duck,” with its black urethane body and metal barrel, was eminently convincing from a distance. On a dark night one would have to virtually touch the stock to distinguish it from the real thing. As hoped, the fac had given him a perfect distraction, drawing his adversaries in like moths to a light.
He was glad there had been only three men. He’d gotten his final count after drawing them into the open: the small bridge over which he’d led his pursuers had served as a funnel, forcing them into the open one by one. From that point it had been little more than prioritization. A matter of divide and conquer.
He again checked across the water. His target was still there, and Slaton decided there was time for a hurried cleanup.
The bodies would be found sometime tomorrow morning—there was nothing to be done about that. A dog on its morning walk would catch the scent, or a vagrant might shoulder through the brush to urinate. The police would be called in, and by noon the little outcropping of trees would be surrounded by yellow tape and paper-booted detectives.
Fingerprints and DNA were not a concern. Slaton knew his profile was not on file anywhere, which put him in the clear as long as he wasn’t taken into custody—something he had no intention of allowing. The one thing that had to be removed was the training gun. It was unique, and if the police took possession it wouldn’t take long to discover where it had come from. In turn, the gun shop owner could give them his description, and video from the store couldn’t be discounted—Slaton had done his best to avoid cameras, but it was possible he’d missed one.
He put the facsimile back inside the box. The knife remained sheathed to his leg. Slaton left the children’s golf clubs on the ground, along with a half roll of duct tape and two crumpled balls of gift wrap. He imagined a baffled Viennese detective scratching his head. He picked up the rock that had saved him, then searched the ground and used the toe of his boot to loosen two more like it. These he fit around the fake M16 before working the packing straps back in place on the box.
He quickly searched the bodies and discovered a wallet on each man, complete with identity cards that might or might not be legitimate. After taking a picture of each with his phone, he left them in place. His earlier thought was reinforced: amateurs. Each man also had a phone. Two were cheap burners that had locked out, a password required to gain access. The last handset, from his first victim—and he suspected the leader—was a higher-end model that also had gone secure. This one, however, allowed either a passcode or a fingerprint—something to which Slaton conveniently had access. He placed the dead man’s thumb on the home button, and after two tries the phone unlocked.
Slaton immediately went to the call log, then the contact list. He saw only two other numbers—certainly the burner phones on the ground next to him. He took a picture of the call log with his own phone, then moved on. He saw no voice mails, and the phone had not been set up for email or web browsing. It was a dead end. He briefly weighed taking the phone with him, but was concerned it might be tracked. He decided to leave it behind.
Slaton kept searching, and his hand came across a hard shape on the second man’s ankle. He was surprised to uncover a compact Glock 26 with a full ten-round magazine. Without hesitation he pocketed the gun. The three MAC-10s he left where they were.
At that point his internal alarm activated.
He returned to the spot where the facsimile had been mounted and confirmed that his target hadn’t moved. He began to turn back, then hesitated. Slaton took the Schmidt & Bender scope from his pocket and studied the man more closely. Again, there was a sense of vague familiarity. He would find out soon enough.
Slaton pocketed the optic, picked up the heavy box, and eased out into the night.
* * *
Slaton disposed of the box beneath the Reichsbrücke Bridge, taking particular care to avoid witnesses. It sank like three rocks. The water appeared reasonably deep, and he decided that if the detective assigned to tomorrow’s triple homicide was particularly tenacious, the package might be recovered within a week. Otherwise he gave it a month. And if budgets or winter conditions precluded diving teams? In that case, the fac would likely be unearthed on the river’s ten-year dredging cycle. None of it mattered to Slaton—one day, two at the most, and his work in Vienna would be done.
He hurried toward the island, still unsure how long his target would wait. So far his theory was hol
ding. Someone was coercing him to kill the man on the island. The three Slaton had just dealt with, he was sure, had been assigned to eliminate him once that job was done. Within the borders of those facts, his assumptions so far appeared on target.
To begin, he himself would never have viewed the Donauturm as a good platform from which to shoot. The great spire was too public a place, and the extreme vertical confines gave but one way out. If those running the attraction were security-conscious at all, which Austrians generally were, any attempt to climb inside with a package sized for a rifle would raise blazing red flags. In the course of his reconnaissance, standing on the semicircle of concrete, Slaton had realized why the point had been chosen—because a non-operator might view the Donauturm as an obvious place from which to shoot. With that much figured out, Slaton knew he was being set up.
The simplest response: alter the battlefield to his own design.
He knew the men would be waiting for him outside the tower. In a more speculative assumption, he reasoned that since he hadn’t completed his mission, they would follow him through the park. Every conjecture gave additive risk, but so far everything had held.
In a perfect world, he would have interrogated at least one of the three men, yet the complications of doing so were insurmountable. Slaton had one clear objective: to find out who’d taken his family. Of the four people who might tell him, three were now dead. They were likely no more than foot soldiers, and not particularly competent ones at that—men who probably didn’t even know who’d hired them. Slaton’s best chance for answers had always been the fourth man. The one standing in wait. He would know who was trying to kill them both.
Logical as it all seemed, Slaton sensed one disconnect: Why had the men he’d eliminated not simply been sent after the man on the island? Inept as they were, they probably could have managed it.
Why have I been brought here at all?
He saw no apparent answer.
As Slaton hurried toward Danube Island, he knew his margin for error was slim. So far he’d been on target. The three men across the estuary had come to kill him.
He only hoped the last man could tell him why.
EIGHTEEN
Boutros woke well before dawn. The first thing he did was look out the window. He saw not a single light in the distant village, yet under a bright moon he could tell the swirling snow had dissipated.
He went to the main room and lit a pair of candles using the dying fireplace embers. He’d slept poorly, having been given nothing more than a blanket to spread on the cold stone floor. In a thought he would never have imagined, Boutros found himself longing for the straw bedroll he’d used throughout the war in Syria.
He and Rafiq had been up until midnight going over details of the mission. The files Park had given them were useful, yet complications had arisen. To begin, the nautical charts were labeled in Korean. Fortunately, Choe was a sailor, and he provided solid translations. More problematic were the engineering diagrams. Choe’s grasp of technical terms was marginal at best. Their minder, Park, had promised to bring a technician in the morning. Boutros and Rafiq hoped he came through, and that whoever it was spoke a common language.
Boutros could see Choe through an open door—he was asleep on a chair in the second bedroom. He debated whether to wake the man. Even if the food had been awful, Choe and his wife had been mostly welcoming. As in most downtrodden corners of the world, the common people of Korea seemed exceedingly hospitable. All the same, he was impatient to move on.
Boutros decided on a middle ground—he targeted his boot on a tin chamber pot near the door and kicked out.
Choe startled awake.
“Sorry,” Boutros said. “It is very dark.”
The Korean rubbed his eyes, drew a hand over his gray-stubble chin. Just like Boutros, the fisherman’s gaze went immediately to the window.
“The weather is better,” Boutros said hopefully.
Choe got up, went closer to the window. He looked outside like a surgeon studying an x-ray. “We shall see.”
* * *
The others stirred awake one by one, yawning and stretching and milling about the tiny cottage. Choe’s wife came out with bowls of something that looked like mashed corn. On closer inspection, Boutros realized that was exactly what it was, only the husks and cobs had been churned in as well. Much like his musings on the sleeping arrangements, he felt a renewed fondness for the cuisine of war-ravaged Syria.
The front door opened and Choe walked in—he’d gone to the docks in the predawn. Right behind him was Park.
Boutros took this as a good sign. “Well?” he prompted.
Not surprisingly, it was Park who answered. “Choe says the weather is acceptable.”
As a former naval officer, it was not lost on Boutros that their weather forecast was sourced not from any national meteorological office, but a long-toothed local skipper. It seemed strange to be doing Allah’s work so far from the stolen lands, housed with representatives of the only people on earth whose hatred of America rivaled their own. Boutros did not delude himself that ISIS and North Korea were any kind of allies. It was more a matter of using one another to effect individual goals—whatever those might be.
He looked at Choe and asked, “Is boat the ready?”
“I have seen to everything,” said the fisherman.
“Good. So we can go this morning?”
Choe deferred to Park who pulled out what appeared to be a smartphone. He began tapping on the screen. It was the first electronic device Boutros had seen since arriving in North Korea. He noticed his men watching as well, all three sitting behind bowls of soup that had not been touched.
It took nearly five minutes, the speed of Park’s communications link clearly challenged. When the answer came, Park simply nodded to Choe.
The weathered skipper smiled. “We go fishing now.”
* * *
The man Slaton was supposed to kill started moving at 8:29.
By 8:31 he was practically running.
Slaton hurried along the path, keeping a distant eye on his target. The man had left the meeting spot hesitantly, obviously not sure if it was the right thing to do. Then he began picking up speed.
Slaton lost sight of his quarry near the boarded-up boat rental office, and by the time he reached the wide paths of the northern shore the man was nowhere in sight. In a terrible moment, with his eyes scouring the tree-lined paths, he realized how easily his plan could fall to disaster. If he lost the man now, he might never see him again—and with him would go the best chance to find his family.
He was saved by a glimpse of a slight figure darting beneath a streetlamp. Slaton locked on like a radar. It was definitely his target—same slender build and light-footed gait, same dark winter jacket. He was moving fast across the island on a diagonal walkway, his silhouette framed by city lights. Having memorized the layout of the paths, Slaton knew the current geometry was unworkable. There was only one way to make up ground.
Turning from the path onto a grassy hill, he took an angle to cut the man off and broke into a dead run. It took less than two minutes to reach the walkway that traced the Danube’s upper shoulder. This put Slaton ahead of his target. It also precluded any chance of stealth. His only option was to put himself on a pathway and stroll in the opposite direction. He saw his man right away, fifty paces ahead. Coming at him with fast steps and an edgy gaze.
A man who was worried. Even afraid.
Slaton wondered under what pretext he had been lured here, to the tranquil riverside arena of his execution. He’d obviously been expecting a meeting of some kind, no doubt arranged by the same party who’d tried to put Slaton on the delivering end of a bullet. A shared enemy, in a sense.
Or could it be something else?
It was time for answers.
With the geometry back under control, Slaton concentrated on timing. He checked the paths behind him, saw a handful of people in the distance on his right. No one was looking in this dir
ection. He tried to govern his intercept with respect to three variables: minimizing the line-of-sight to any witnesses, selecting a spot on the sidewalk that wasn’t illuminated, and keeping close to the tree-covered swales on his right—cover for reaching the rental car.
Slaton tilted his head down, a pose of contemplation. At thirty yards everything was going smoothly. At twenty he sensed the man watching him.
At ten it all went to hell.
NINETEEN
His target broke into a sprint across the grassy shoulder, making a beeline for the wooded glade.
Slaton ran to catch up, and soon had a new revelation—the man was damned fast. He flew into the woods like a startled deer, leaping over brush and darting between trees. Slaton was only a few strides behind but he felt like a lion chasing a gazelle. He got close once, only to stumble over a rotted log. He righted himself and kept going.
Losing this race was not an option.
Slaton pushed harder, straining for speed. He had to catch up before the man got back into the open—if that happened, someone might raise an alarm. The darkness of the glade was an enemy, almost no light penetrating. Leafless limbs slapped his face and stones gave way under foot. The only consolation was that his quarry faced the same obstacles. He registered little more than a dark shape crashing through the underbrush ahead. Then, suddenly, he seemed to close in, the scurrying figure only steps ahead. Slaton heard panting, saw brush snapping back barely an arm’s length away.
The man had made at least one mistake—if he’d run in the opposite direction he would have quickly reached the riverside. A very public place with bystanders and mobile phones. As it was, Slaton and his quarry were both out of sight. Even better—they were heading straight for the car.
If I could just catch the bastard!
He caught a glimpse of light: the edge of the glade looming ahead. Slaton had to catch the man before he reached it. He heard a grunt, a crash of vegetation, then saw him clearly—a tumbling heap in the wet underbrush. Slaton got a hand to him as he bounced up, but in the next instant he himself stumbled and lost his grip. Realizing he was going down, Slaton launched into a last-ditch dive. He swiped an arm in a desperate arc, like a defensive back trying to save a touchdown. His fingers clipped a leg, tripping the man a second time. Together they pitched headlong into a leafless sapling.
