by Scott McEwen
Gil pulled his pistol and dove from the vehicle, rolling into a shallow depression at the side of the road. Dragunov disappeared in the darkness on the far side.
Both the black car and the badly broken—but not dead—Lesnichy were faintly visible in the taillights of the still idling Fiat. Lesnichy’s right leg was folded grotesquely beneath him, the other leg twitching involuntarily.
Gil heard the faint sound of a suppressed pistol shot, and Lesnichy’s leg stopped moving. Two more whispered pistol shots took out the taillights of their Fiat in quick succession, throwing the road into almost total darkness. Screwing the suppressor back onto his Strike One, Gil knew they were all equally pressed for time by the coming of dawn.
The red dot of a laser sight glinted off the chrome fender of the Fiat, and Gil grabbed a handful a dust from the road, throwing it into the air behind the car. The powder instantly formed a cloud, illuminating the beam of the laser. The laser disappeared in that same instant, but it was too late. Gil had been shooting azimuths by eye for too long. His brain worked with computerlike speed to trace the angle of the beam back to its source through the darkness. He fired three shots from the Strike One on pure instinct.
A man grunted.
Hearing him scramble to displace, Gil fired two more shots, and the man cried out, swearing in Russian. Gil could tell by the sound of the voice that he’d struck vital organs, so there was no reason to fire again.
A suppressed rifle shot hissed through the air, and a chunk of flesh the size of a quarter was torn from Gil’s right shoulder. Recoiling from the suddenness of the impact, he rolled back into the road against all prudence, hoping the sniper would expect him to roll the opposite way. Another shot hissed through the air, striking the ground three feet to his left, and Gil froze, knowing the sniper would now be listening for the faintest hint to his location.
“Comrade Dragunov!” someone called out from behind the enemy car.
“Kovalenko!” Dragunov called back.
Gil used this noise as cover, inching his way backward around the front of the car. He listened as the two Spetsnaz men exchanged brief insults in Russian, sitting against the front bumper of the Fiat, probing the wound. It wasn’t life threatening, but it was bleeding and would be difficult to conceal without a proper field dressing and a change of clothes.
“It will be light soon,” Kovalenko was telling Dragunov. “We should finish this another time. Otherwise we may spend the rest of our lives washing one another’s backs in an Italian prison.”
“You’ll wash my back, traitor!”
Kovalenko laughed uproariously from the far side of the car. “Even so, there will soon be light enough to see.”
“You’re the one with your back to the water!” Dragunov shouted. “I have all day!”
“Do you, comrade? We both know I am the man with the rifle.”
Dragunov thought that over, believing Gil dead and realizing he’d be no match for Kovalenko’s rifle once the sun came up. “What do you propose, traitor?”
“You in your car, me in mine—now! While it’s still too dark to see one another. I reverse, you go forward, and we both live to fight another day.”
Dragunov decided to let discretion be the better part of valor. “On three?”
“We count together!”
Together they counted: “One . . . two . . . three!” Then each man darted for his car.
With no idea what the hell had been said, Gil heard Dragunov come scrambling from the rocks. When Dragunov jumped into the car, he reasoned what must be going on and moved quickly around to the passenger side where the door still hung open.
Dragunov nearly shot him when he appeared. “Get in! I thought you were dead!”
Gil got in, and Dragunov gunned the motor before he even had a chance to close the door.
“What the hell was all that about back there?”
“We called a truce before it got light,” Dragunov said. “Kovalenko doesn’t want to risk being caught by the police, and I couldn’t fight him without a rifle. If I’d known you were still alive, I would not have agreed, but at least this way we can beat him to Messina.”
“How do you know he won’t change his plan?”
“The rest of his men will be waiting for him in Rome.”
In the beam of the headlights, Gil saw clothes hanging on a line in front of a house up ahead. “Stop there. I need a new shirt.”
Dragunov pulled to the side and Gil jumped out, grabbing a shirt and some socks to use for bandages. They were under way again a few seconds later.
“Do you guys have a safe house in Italy? Someplace I can get stitched up?”
“Don’t you, American?”
Gil shook his head. “Pope still has no idea who we can trust in Europe. I can’t risk being tracked.”
“I thought you said the GRU was just as bad.”
Gil was shrugging out of his shirt. “You said they were clean. Besides, any port in a storm, Ivan. I won’t be effective for long unless I get this fixed.”
Dragunov shifted gears. “You killed one back there, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, Vassili. Maybe you Americans would have given us a fight after all.”
Gil wrapped a sock around his wound. “Yeah, well, I’m glad we never had to find out.”
“It does not matter,” Dragunov remarked a few moments later. “There would have been nothing left for anyone. We always knew that. It was all a stupid waste. War is a stupid waste.”
“So why do we love it so damn much?” Gil wondered.
Dragunov smiled in the light of the dash. “That is a good question.”
11
TIJUANA,
Mexico
Thirty-eight-year-old Daniel Crosswhite was a former Green Beret captain, former Delta Force operator, and Medal of Honor winner, but since his discharge from the army almost two years earlier, he had devolved into someone less than a model citizen.
Just months after his return to civilian life, he and former Navy SEAL Brett “Conman” Tuckerman formed a two-man vigilante squad, dressing up at night as FBI agents to knock over drug dealers in the cities of Detroit and Chicago, killing a few of the hapless dealers in the process. They were ultimately apprehended in Chicago by the Eighty-Second Airborne Division during that city’s brief period under martial law, which had been imposed in response to the menace of nuclear terror then gripping the nation. Only the timely intervention of Robert Pope—director of the Special Activities Division of the CIA—had saved them from life in prison. In exchange for covering their tracks, Pope had required they assist Gil Shannon in his hunt for a Russian RA-115 “suitcase” nuke. Sadly, Tuckerman was killed during the hunt, leaving Crosswhite to carry out further missions alone.
What Pope had never known, however, was that in the moments before Crosswhite’s and Tuckerman’s apprehension by the Eighty-Second, they managed to hide a half million dollars beneath the foundation of a dilapidated building, and Crosswhite had long since returned to Chicago to retrieve it. Now he lived in relative obscurity back and forth across the California-Mexico border, having fallen off the grid and mostly out of contact with both Shannon and Pope.
However, as an avowed adrenaline junky, he had also made it known in the right circles that his services were available on the international mercenary market—if the price was right.
It was two in the morning, and Crosswhite lay naked on a hotel bed with his arm around an equally naked Mexican prostitute when his cellular chirped on the nightstand. With a curious glance at the clock, he sat up and switched on the lamp. The adrenaline began to pump as he read the lengthy text message, supplying him with names, flight numbers, and the location of a CIA drop box in San Diego, where he would find the money to cover his expenses should he decide to accept the mission.
“You gotta be shittin’
me,” he muttered.
Crosswhite replied at once, confirming his acceptance and his intention to begin immediately. Setting aside the phone, he reached for a powder-covered mirror on the nightstand. He used a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill to snort a thick line of cocaine and then reached over and gave the girl a sharp slap on her backside. “Up at ’em, baby! We got shit to do!”
The twenty-three-year-old girl woke up pissed, taking a swat at him and missing as he got off the bed. “Pendejo! Don’t fucking hit me when I’m sleeping!” Her name was Sarahi. She had obsidian eyes and long, raven hair. “Pinche puto!”
He stopped short of the bathroom and whipped around, his devil-may-care grin splitting his handsome, dark face. “Hey, you wanna take a fuckin’ trip with me, baby?”
She sat up, her gaze narrowing with suspicion. “Where?”
“Fuck you care, where? The fuck outta here! That’s where!”
“You gonna pay me?”
“Hell, yes. Now get that hot little ass into some jeans. I just got a mission, and the CIA pays fucking bueno, baby!”
Her eyes lit up like black fire. “CIA money?”
He laughed. “Yeah, CIA money. Now get your ass moving, you sexy little bitch. We’re on the clock!”
She did a couple quick lines of coke and then sprang out of bed, reaching for her jeans. They were dressed and out the door a few minutes later.
Crosswhite fired up his black Jeep Wrangler and sped out of the hotel lot.
“So where we goin’?” she asked, opening her purse.
“San Diego.” He lit a cigarette and tossed the lighter onto the dash. “I gotta pick up some dinero.”
“Can we stop to see my tía?” She pulled down the vanity mirror to check her makeup.
“We don’t have time to visit your fucking aunt, baby. This is a goddamn mission.”
“A mission to do what? What kind of mission?”
He stopped at a light and looked at her, his face suddenly serious. “We’re gonna kill a motherfucker, baby. We’re gonna kill a motherfucker, and it’s gonna be the most exciting, most dangerous fucking thing you’ve ever been involved in.”
She stared at him, thinking at first that he was joking. When she saw that he was not, she felt her pulse quicken. “Is it legal?”
“Legal!” He laughed again. “Baby, this is the CIA. Whatever you can get away with is legal.”
“What if you get caught?”
He took a drag from the cigarette and flicked the ash out the window. “Well, if you get caught, that’s just your tough shit.”
“Then we ain’t getting fucking caught,” she said, looking back into the mirror. “How much are we getting paid?”
The light turned green, and he stepped on the gas. “Two hundred grand.”
“What?!” She smacked the vanity mirror closed. “Two hundred fucking grand? Shit! My primo Migue will kill a guy for fifty bucks!”
He gave her a look, keeping an eye on the road. “This dude we’re goin’ after, he’d turn your cousin Migue into a fucking piñata. Now get those jeans off and slide over here. That coke’s makin’ me horny as fuck.”
“I’m making you horny.” She started to undo her pants, then stopped. “Half the money is mine, right?”
“Yeah, it’s half yours. Now get over here and straddle this thing, baby. You’re killin’ me with those eyes!”
She laughed and wriggled out of the jeans. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”
He laughed with her as she climbed aboard. “You ain’t foolin’ nobody.” He had to look around her to keep from going off the road as she got into position. “What you like are dead presidents.”
She grabbed his chin as she slid onto him, looking into his eyes. “That’s right, and you’d better not fucking rip me off!”
He clipped the curb, and the Jeep bounced back into the lane. “Don’t worry,” he chuckled, one hand on the wheel holding the cigarette, the other gripping her ass. “I don’t want your puto cousin trackin’ me down.”
12
HOUSTON,
Texas
Twenty-nine-year-old Jason Ryder was not a Medal of Honor recipient, though he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery during the Afghan War. He was lean and wiry at 145 pounds and stood no taller than five foot six. He was fast on his feet and even faster with a gun. Ryder was also a man with a severe case of post-traumatic stress, and since returning home from the war, he had been virtually ignored by the Veterans Administration. “Backlogged” was the official term they used.
It hadn’t taken Ryder long to give up on the VA, turning to a private military company (PMC) named Obsidian Optio, where he took a job leading offshore security details. The work was boring and tedious, and it made his nerves hum with anxiety. When he wasn’t working, he spent his time drinking and smoking pot, sliding ever deeper into the hole of PTSD until he finally began to consider suicide. It was during a detail in Brazil that Ryder had first met Ken Peterson of the CIA.
Peterson was very coy at first, feeding Ryder’s anger at being brushed aside by the VA. He said there were factions within the US government working to change things from the inside out, but key people were standing in the way. It didn’t take more than three hours over beers for Peterson to have Ryder talked into accepting a private contractor’s role with the agency.
“Sure, it’s against our legal charter,” Peterson said, “but the agency’s been turned upside down since the nuke attacks last year.” He went on to exaggerate further the severity of a genuine administrative problem. “Nobody really knows who’s in charge of anything, and nobody can get anything done according to policy. So we’re operating outside official parameters to keep the ship afloat, fighting a holding action against the old guard back in Langley while Washington decides how it wants us to function in the age of ‘nuclear terror.’ ” He smirked. “Hell, the president can’t even get Congress to confirm a new director. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so damn tragic.”
Ryder now sat in George Bush Intercontinental Airport, waiting impatiently to catch an early-morning flight to Washington, where he would assassinate Bob Pope, one of the traitors Peterson claimed was standing in the way of a safer, stronger America.
What Ryder did not know—nor did Peterson or Tim Hagen—was that Pope was the director of a newly formed top-secret Special Mission Unit of the CIA called the Anti-Terrorism Response Unit (ATRU). Though the ATRU was similar in concept to other SMUs such as SEAL Team VI and Delta Force, it was much smaller. It did not operate under the auspices of the Special Activities Division. In fact, the ATRU was not even officially part of the CIA. It answered directly to the Office of the President. It did not conduct large-scale operations, it did not gather its own intelligence, and its operations certainly weren’t subject to congressional oversight. Operators within the ATRU had one purpose and one purpose only: close with and destroy Muslim terrorists wherever they could be found and do so without leaving a trace of having been there. To use the cliché, they didn’t exist.
Ryder sat at the gate and looked at his watch, his leg jiggling up and down. He needed a cigarette, but there was no place to smoke. He’d gone to the restroom to sneak a drag, but there’d been a pair of chubby National Transportation Safety Board cops standing right outside the door, jawing and laughing about some foreign national they’d just denied entrance into the country. So instead, he popped a Xanax and chased it with a swig of water, wondering idly if Peterson understood how close to the edge he really was these days.
Part of him didn’t trust Peterson—the guy was a spook, after all—but fifty grand was good money, and if this guy Pope was only half as bad as Peterson made him out to be, the disloyal bastard still deserved what was coming to him. He’d seen much better men killed on the battlefield for a whole lot less. But in the end, it didn’t really matter to Ryder. He was itchin
g to take his aggressions out on someone in government, and Pope was probably more deserving than most.
An hour before boarding, he managed to nod off, but a bickering couple sat down across from him. A young Mexican woman was bitching about something in Spanish. She was in her early twenties, accompanied by a man easily fifteen years older, and she had long black hair, dark sunglasses, and jeans so tight they fit her like she’d been poured into them.
“Would you shut the fuck up for five minutes?” the guy said irritably. He was tall with dark features, built like a professional baseball player.
Ryder pulled his black Craft International shooting cap down tighter over his eyes, tuning them out.
“If your mother pulls that shit on me again,” the girl said in English, “I’m slapping that bitch right in her fucking mouth!”
“Calm down,” he repeated. “We’re not the only ones in the airport.”
“Hey!” the girl said. “Hey, you.”
Ryder lifted the brim of his cap. The girl was looking right at him. She’d taken off her glasses, and he could see the bloodshot drift of her black eyes, the cocaine shine. “You talkin’ to me?”
“Would you let your mother call your girlfriend a whore?”
Ryder stole a glance at Crosswhite. “Depends on if she was.”
Crosswhite snickered, and Sarahi sat back in the seat. “Pinches putos,” she said under her breath.
Ryder pulled the cap back down and drifted off again. He awoke a short time later to the toe of someone’s shoe tapping against his. He looked up to see the tall man standing over him.
“This your flight?” Crosswhite asked, drinking from his coffee. “It’s boarding.”
13
MESSINA,
Sicily
Gil and Dragunov were parked on the side of the road, waiting for Kovalenko to show his face at the ferry crossing to Villa San Giovanni on the far side of the Strait of Messina. It was late in the day, and Gil sat dozing in the passenger seat when Dragunov spotted Eli Vitsin and three other Spetsnaz men driving off the ferry in an old Italian LaForza SUV.
