by Scott McEwen
“He says we’ll leave in the morning and drive to Georgia. We’ll cross the border with one of their shipments. It’s all set up with the border guards. There won’t be any trouble.”
“Shipments of what?”
An ironic grin crossed Dragunov’s face. “What do you think?”
A short time later, they were busy discussing their plan to eliminate Dokka Umarov, when Vlad marched one of the teenage girls into the room, gripping a handful of her blond hair. He took a half-inch dowel rod from behind the refrigerator and began to beat the girl across her backside, snarling at her in filthy-sounding Russian as she squealed in pain.
Gil stood up from the chair. “That’s enough, goddamnit!”
Dragunov was on his feet an instant behind him. “Gil, this isn’t our business.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn!” Gil was on the verge of drawing the M9.
“What’s he saying?” Vlad demanded.
Two more big men appeared through the blue-beaded curtain, one with a submachine pistol slung under his arm.
Dragunov ignored Vlad, his eyes cutting into Gil. “Do you want to get us both killed? The girl too? Because this foul-smelling bastard will cut her throat just to spite you.”
“What did he say?” Vlad demanded again. “Tell me what he said!”
Dragunov turned around. “He’s not used to this. You know how soft the fucking Americans are. Maybe you could beat the bitch in the other room.”
Vlad glanced at Gil and laughed. “You’re serious? Is he queer or what?”
Dragunov shook his head, realizing it was going to be long twelve hours with this gang. “He just doesn’t want to see you beating the girl, that’s all.”
Vlad let go of her hair and tossed the dowel rod onto the table. “Then he can do it. She refused to suck the customer’s dick, so she gets thirty lashes with the stick. That’s the rule.”
Dragunov knew he had to defuse the situation. “That’s not his job. All I’m asking is for you to do it in the other room. I’m asking you one Russian to another.”
Vlad shook his head. “This has nothing to do with you and me.” He pointed at Gil. “It has to do with him and that fucking look in his eyes. You tell him he can give the girl her thirty lashes, or I’ll give her sixty—right here in front of him.”
“This isn’t professional,” Dragunov said, his tone suddenly peremptory. “He’s just a sheltered American.”
Vlad shook his head, staring at Gil who stared right back at him. “No, he’s not sheltered. Not this one. This one is a killer—I can see it. He’s already killed me fifty times in his mind. You tell him what I said, or I’ll beat this fucking whore to death. Tell him!”
Dragunov looked at Gil. “He wants you to beat the girl—or he’ll kill her.”
Gil smiled, his gaze still locked with Vlad’s, silently consigning himself to death. “Let him kill her.”
“What?”
“I said, let him kill her. He’ll be dead before her body hits the floor.”
To give himself and everyone else a moment to decompress, Dragunov took Gil’s cigarettes from the table and shook one loose from the pack, taking time to light it before finally saying to Gil, “I’m not going to tell him that.”
“Then I guess we got a problem,” Gil said, still locked in a stare-down with Vlad.
“What’s he saying?” Vlad asked, glad for the excuse to break eye contact with the American who obviously wasn’t afraid to die.
Dragunov drew from the cigarette. “He said he doesn’t beat women, but you should be his guest to beat her as many times as you want.”
“Good!” Vlad grabbed the stick from the table and seized the girl by the hair again, giving her a thrashing the likes of which no one in the room had ever seen. She screamed the entire time, trying to block the blows with her hands, and receiving a couple of broken fingers for her troubles. The stick finally snapped after sixty-five lashes, and Vlad threw her on the floor at Gil’s feet, where she lay sobbing in agony.
“Fuck you!” Vlad said with a sneer in passable English. “This is my house!” he added in Russian. “These whores belong to me!”
Gil was as calm as the sea on a windless day, having decided his course of action after the first couple of blows, tuning out the girl’s agonized cries.
“That was your doing,” Dragunov told him quietly. “Has he made his point now?”
Gil nodded. “He’s made his point.”
Vlad shouted for the other women to take the girl to her room, to get her cleaned up and back to work.
The girl was taken away, and Gil crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table, exhaling from the corner of his mouth. “You might wanna finish that smoke, partner.”
Dragunov looked at him, his adrenaline surging. “Why?”
“’Cuz there’s gonna be a gunfight, and I don’t think you wanna be standin’ there with your dick in your hand.”
“Don’t.” Dragunov’s face was composed, but he was readying himself for violence. “Don’t make me shoot you.”
“Before this shit kicks off,” Gil said, casually tucking the pack of cigarettes away in his pocket, “I wanna thank you again for saving that SEAL’s life on the beach. You taught me something about Russians I never knew.”
Dragunov leaned forward to crush out the cigarette, knowing there was no way to stop what was to come. “What was that?”
“That you’re no worse than the rest of us.” Gil jerked the M9 from his pocket and shot Vlad right between the eyes. Vlad’s head snapped back, and his body dropped to the floor like a sack of cement.
Dragunov was only barely behind on the draw, whipping around and shooting the two men behind him as they grabbed for their guns.
Women screamed, and men began shouting from what seemed like all over the building. Chaos reigned during the next ten or fifteen seconds, as panicked customers stumbled into the corridor, hopping clumsily into their pants as they made for the exit.
“Grab the Uzi!” Gil ducked clear of the doorway as both Russians from the front of the house came barreling up the hall, slugging the customers aside with their pistols in their haste to reach the kitchen.
Gil shot one dead the second he appeared, and the other pulled back, throwing himself into one of the bedrooms.
Dragunov made sure the Uzi pistol was ready to fire, and stole a look through the blue-beaded curtain. “There are more men in back.”
“Any idea how many?”
“Enough that I should shoot you and offer them your fucking head,” Dragunov growled in his gravelly voice.
Gil changed out the partial magazine for a full one. “Think it would do any good?”
“It’s worth a fucking try!”
Gil stole a look down the corridor leading to the exit. The woman with long black hair stared back at him from two doors down. “Come here!” he said, beckoning with his hand.
She stole a glance toward the exit and came scurrying into the kitchen. He grabbed her arm and swung her around him into the corner. “Where do they keep your passports?”
“A safe in the office.” Her Russian accent was strong, but she was easily understood.
“What fucking passports?” Dragunov snarled from across the room. “What are you talking about?”
“Extraction! You think I’d let him beat that girl if I wasn’t getting her out of here?”
“That’s not our mission!”
Gil chuckled. “Yeah, well mission parameters change, Ivan.” He looked at the woman. “What’s your name?”
“Katarina.”
“Who can open the safe besides that asshole over there?”
She glanced at Vlad’s body. “His brother Lucian. The bald one out front with the big belly.”
“Hear that, Ivan? Don’t shoot the fat bald fucker. You clear the bac
k while I clear us a way out.”
Dragunov didn’t like the idea of splitting up, but they were fighting a battle on two fronts. He slid one of the dead men’s pistols across the kitchen floor to Gil. “Don’t get killed, you fool.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
Gil wrapped around the corner with a pistol in each hand, stalking boldly into the first bedroom, where the Russian had taken cover. He caught him completely unprepared and shot him twice in the head. A teenage girl cowered on the bed in the corner, and he waved her into the corridor, signaling for her to gather the others from their rooms and take them to the kitchen. There was a burst of fire from Dragunov’s Uzi down the back hall, and she grabbed onto Gil, but he pushed her away, hazing her toward the kitchen.
“Katarina, call them to the kitchen!”
Katarina poked her head around, calling the others out of hiding, and five more girls emerged from their rooms.
“Lucian!” Gil shouted through the red-beaded curtain.
Someone answered in Russian from around the corner to the right.
“Dumb fuck,” Gil thought to himself, now knowing his target’s location and that the hall entrance was bracketed to the left and right.
There was a wild exchange of gunfire in the back of the building, Dragunov’s Uzi followed by a few lengthy blasts from an AK-47. Seconds later, men were screaming in hand-to-hand combat. Gil jammed one pistol down his belt and stepped to the right side of the hall, peering through the beaded curtain to his left, visually cutting the lobby into sections as if it were a pie, each minute step forward revealing another thin slice of the room. He glimpsed a man’s shoulder and fired through the beads.
The Russian twisted into the wound, grabbing it with his right hand, and Gil shot him in the spine between the shoulder blades. The women in the foyer cried out, and he shifted to the left side of the hall, cutting the pie to the right in search of Lucian.
A fusillade of shots rang out, and several severed strands of beads showered to the floor. Gil summersaulted through the curtain over his right shoulder, twisting to his left and shooting Lucian three times in the brachial nerve bundle of his shoulder, instantly paralyzing his gun arm and knocking him over backward.
The women in the room jumped to their feet and fled through the curtain to the kitchen. Gil checked Lucian for additional weapons and hauled him to his feet. “Game over, fuck stick!”
Dragunov appeared through the curtain with dark red blood covering his face from the nose down. “All clear in the back.”
Gil saw the blood. “How bad are you?”
Dragunov swiped at his face, spitting blood and viscera onto the floor. “It’s not mine. I had to bite the big bastard’s throat.”
A minute later, they were in the back office with Lucian on his knees in front of the safe.
“Open it!” Dragunov thumped him in the head with the muzzle of his M9.
“Fuck you!” Lucian sneered in Russian.
Gil looked at Dragunov. “We don’t have all night here.”
“Tie his hands,” Dragunov said. “I’ll be back.”
Gil kicked Lucian onto his face and ripped the phone cord from the wall, using it to bind the Russian’s hands as tightly as he could. The man groaned in pain.
Gil then rolled him onto his back as Dragunov returned with four women in their midtwenties. “What’s goin’ on?”
“They’ll make the man talk.”
That’s when Gil realized each of the women held a serrated steak knife from the kitchen. They swarmed over Lucian, ripping and sawing through his clothes. He tried to reason with them in panic, but they swore at him and spit in his face. One of them grabbed his ear and began to saw it off. He screamed, and they slashed at his exposed groin. He kicked at them, but one of the girls jumped on his legs to hold him down, and he howled like a man put to the rack.
Dragunov allowed the mutilation to continue for a few seconds before calling them off. Then he stood glowering over the hyperventilating Russian. “Are you going to open the box or let them feed you your balls?”
“I’ll open it!” Lucian gasped, an ear and part of his nose already carved off, his genitalia slashed and bleeding. “Let me up!”
Gil cut his hands free, and Lucian flexed his fingers, quickly working the combination, his clothes half torn from his body.
“He’ll have a gun in there,” Gil warned.
Dragunov gave him a wink. “Probably the reason he’s agreed to open it.”
The second Lucian turned the handle, Dragunov shot him in the back of the head and kicked the body aside. Inside the safe was a Tokarev pistol, along with multiple bundles of Turkish lira and a stack of eighteen red passports bound with a thick rubber band.
Gil stuffed the passports into his pocket, and the women began to protest immediately. He saw Katarina standing in the doorway. “Kat, explain to them I don’t want them losing their passports before we get to the airport. There’s gonna be a lot of confusion between here and there.”
Katarina told the others what he’d said, and that seemed to settle them for the moment.
“Get them dressed and ready to go,” Dragunov said to Katarina solemnly in Russian. Then he looked at Gil. “You’re going to make a lot of trouble for the Kremlin with this.”
Gil knelt in front of the safe, stacking the bundles of cash on top of it. “Not if you guys know a damn thing about PR.”
“Putin is not exactly a PR specialist.”
“Fuck Putin,” Gil said, getting to his feet. “I don’t work for his ass.”
“I do.”
“Then I’ll take them back to Moscow by myself, and you can blame it all on me—however you want it. But I’m blown here, so I gotta get the fuck out of Turkey before word of this gets around.”
“What are you talking about? You can’t go to Moscow. You don’t have—”
Gil held up his Russian passport. “I’m flying home to Mother Russia, and not even Putin can stop me.”
40
THE WHITE HOUSE
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Couture hung up the phone and looked across the room at White House Chief of Staff Glen Brooks. “You’d better get the old man, Glen. The shit is about to hit the fan in Eastern Europe.”
Brooks put down the report he was reading. “They hit the pipeline?”
Couture shook his head. “That was Pope. Shannon just knocked over a Russian whorehouse in Istanbul. Now he’s getting ready to fly eighteen female abductees home to Moscow.”
Brooks gaped at him. “He can’t do that.”
“Wanna bet? He’s a got a Russian passport and three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Turkish lira. He can do just about anything he wants at this point.”
“No, I mean he can’t do that,” Brooks said, getting up. “He’s on a mission. He’s got orders.”
Couture stared across the room with his hands on his hips. “Where the hell have you been the past eighteen months?”
“But—”
“But hell,” Couture said, stepping forward. “Didn’t you read the file I sent over on Operation Tiger Claw?”
“I skimmed it.”
“Did you skim the part where Shannon brought a pregnant Iranian back from Iran—a pregnant Iranian he’d been ordered to kill by that idiot Lerher?”
“I didn’t catch that part, no.”
Couture dry-wiped his mouth. “If we don’t play this right, it’s going to rain dung. President Putin is one suspicious son of a bitch, and it’s all too possible he’ll think we staged this as a stunt to make him look like a fool. Not to mention that Shannon’s head is packed with intel we don’t really need the Russians to have.”
Brooks stepped around the table. “I’ll get the president.”
“Hold on a second. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page.”
; “Meaning?”
“Meaning, what are we going to advise?”
Brooks looked at his watch. “How soon does Shannon land?”
“Pope doesn’t know, but they’re not even in the air yet, so we’ve got time. Shannon still has to get them to the airport and buy the tickets. He called Pope so State would have time to contact Moscow before their arrival.”
“Why the hell is he flying with them? Why doesn’t he just put them on the plane?”
“Because the Russian mob is going to be hot on his ass.”
“And his solution to that is flying to Russia, for Christ’s sake?”
“All he’s got is a Russian passport.”
Brooks let out a sigh, and they each grabbed a chair.
“Okay,” Brooks said. “So we check the scheduled flights out of Istanbul. That will give us some idea of the time frame we’re working with. From there we can judge how soon to contact Moscow.”
Couture nodded and picked up the phone, directing his aide to print off a list of flights leaving Istanbul for Moscow over the next twenty-four hours.
“What about the Spetsnaz guy?” Brooks said. “Is Dragunov dead, or what?”
“Pope didn’t mention him. What we need to figure out right now is how to advise the president before he gets on the horn to Putin.”
Brooks sat thinking. “What about grounding the flight? We have people in Istanbul who can make that happen, right?”
“You mean maroon them there?”
“Sure,” Brooks said. “Why not? Look, Shannon exceeded mission parameters—something he’s apparently done before—so he’ll have only himself to blame. Once he realizes we’re not letting him out of Turkey with those women, he’ll have to abandon them and get his ass back on track with the mission he was sent in there to carry out. He’s a resourceful man. I’m sure he’ll find his way to Georgia without the Russian mob catching up to him.”
“And the women?”
Brooks shrugged. “They’re prostitutes.”
“I told you they were abducted,” Couture said. “They’re victims of the slave trade.”
“Not our responsibility, Bill. Hell, their own government doesn’t even care about them. Why should we risk straining our relations with Moscow over a few Russian runaways? We’re already in enough of a tussle with Putin over the mess in Ukraine.”
