by Mark Greaney
During this distraction Gentry shot out of the fourth-floor hallway and, vaulting high with a single bound, pushed off on the top of the balcony railing with his leading foot, then leapt off the balcony face-first, arms out wide with his pistol in his right hand, his body arcing over the atrium below.
SEVEN
Gravity took him and he fell through the darkness, past the third-floor mezzanine, past armed men racing up the open staircase, past more men storming down the hallways on the second floor.
And into the thick red smoke.
The bungee had been set for a leap out a fourth-floor window; it was thirty feet long and would extend to exactly forty feet, which would leave him a short drop to the ground at full extension if he’d attached the hook to a fixture in a room on the fourth floor.
But throwing the hook over the bars below the dome meant he’d have a good ten-to-fifteen-foot drop at maximum extension.
There were eight men who conceivably could have gotten a shot off at Gentry as he fell past them, but no one fired. The darkness, the confusion, the early hour, and the brains addled by drink, along with the concern about firing and missing the target but hitting a colleague on the far balcony, put just enough hesitation into the trigger fingers of the men, causing them all to miss their tiny window of opportunity as the masked man dropped like a stone past their positions.
Court felt the gripping in his harness even before he disappeared into the smoke; the bungee pulled taut and he went from an eighty-mile-an-hour fall to a dead stop in less than twenty feet, wrenching the straps under his clothing at his inner thigh and across his chest. His night vision monocle fell off his head, and he felt gear straining from the weight of gravity in pouches and packs around his body.
At full extension he reached to his left hip to flip the wireless grappling disconnect lever on the control panel. A simple flip of an inch-long switch would send a wireless signal up to the grappling hook, causing its claws to pop open like an umbrella blowing up in high winds. This would release the hook and cause Court to drop to the floor below him.
He’d pulled this off in training dozens of times; the technology was solid and straightforward.
But this time it went wrong. The control panel had popped off his belt at some point in the action and it swung freely now from a nylon strap, knocking against webbing and pistol magazines on his chest. He had less than a second to find it, flip the lever, and free himself, not nearly enough time to root it out of all the gear on his harness.
Court had braced himself for a ten-foot free fall to the floor, but instead the bungee held tight, and he shot back upward like a marble in a slingshot, launching out of the protection of the dark smoke and back up into the dim atrium.
The four men on the first floor were obstructed by the smoke, and they had no time to react. Gentry shot past them, just a few feet away, and as he passed he swung his body around to try to get his gun pointed in their direction.
But neither Gentry nor the skinheads got a shot off in the half second between his emergence from the red smoke and his disappearance above them.
Now Court’s climb rate increased; he passed the second-floor balcony, propelled by his long fall and the spring of the bungee cord. There were two men here; both had their AKs sticking over the railing in his direction.
As Court rocketed upward he grabbed at the barrel of one rifle and knocked it away, then shot the other man once in the body armor on his chest. A second shot at the still-standing skinhead slammed into the man’s radio on his shoulder. The round penetrated just an inch or so through the Russian’s skin, cracking his collarbone and sending him back to the floor, more from the panic of being shot than any real momentum from the bullet.
Four men stood on the third-floor balcony, leaning over just as Court reached eye level. The shock in the Russians’ faces told Court he had the advantage. He opened fire, dumping round after round from the suppressed pistol at the men there, shooting two of the four dead and sending the other two diving for cover.
Court’s momentum had ceased at the third floor, and he hung in midair a moment before he began falling again. His pistol was empty now, so as he dropped, preparing himself to sail past the vertical gauntlet of guns once more, he let go of his Glock 19 and reached down to his right ankle.
On the second-floor balcony a group of gunmen ran out of the hallway directly in front of him. They saw their target dropping past them, not more than twenty feet away. One man fired a burst in Court’s direction as he fell by them, and the rest ran up to the balcony railing, readying to dump rounds on him from above.
Court was back in the smoke again, and he’d yanked his backup gun free of its ankle holster with his right hand and, with his left, he took hold of the stretching bungee cord that was attached to his lower back and pulled himself around to face it.
He had one chance to get this right. There was no way in hell he could spring back up again, now in the sights of a dozen rifles, without being torn to bloody shreds by AK rounds. As he bottomed out, his harness squeezed him tight again and pressed air from his lungs. At ten feet above the atrium floor he jammed the muzzle of the compact Glock 26 into the taut cord, one foot away from his body, and fired.
The rope snapped in two; Court dropped like a stone, breaking his fall with his arms and legs, but still he slammed into the ground next to the fountain on his right side.
The wind was knocked from his lungs, but he knew he could not stay there. Instead he began rolling; he’d dropped the Glock on impact, but he felt for it and grabbed it up, kept rolling, still not breathing, and he banged into tables and chairs, knocking them out of the way as he crawled forward and then scrambled to his feet. He could not see the way ahead in the thick red smoke but he moved anyway, still struggling to catch a breath.
Above him he heard the rattling gunfire, and all around him he heard cracking strikes of the 7.62-millimeter rounds.
He ran out of the smoke choking the atrium floor and into a large banquet room that ran off the north side, hoping like hell he could either find an exit or make one.
“That one! There! Where is he going?”
Jeff Parks ran to the screen in the front of the signal room, and he used the tip of a ballpoint pen to point to a single white-hot heat signature that exited a side entrance on the north side of the massive dacha. The lone figure passed two men rushing toward the entrance, and they did not break stride.
“He walked right by them!” someone shouted.
Parks said, “That’s him. He must have clothing that matches what the goons on the ground there are wearing.”
The figure continued walking. All around the signal room, commands were given to the drone pilots to tighten up on the figure, to the audio techs to focus mics hidden in the forest on the north side, to those in contact with Trestle Actual to let him and his unit know that it appeared the Gray Man was hoofing it off the X in some sort of disguise.
On the screen figures poured out of the building now, mostly through the main door on the south side but some on the west and north. Men ran in one direction and then another; the audio picked up cracks and booms and shouts and barking dogs and then the sounds of gas engines firing up, but soon the tap-tap-tap-tap of cyclic Kalashnikov fire piped through the tiny surveillance mics. Someone was blasting his AK on the south side of the building, apparently at nothing in the darkness.
One of the signal room techs counted twenty-four pax moving about the property and announced it through the commo net. But the one lone heat signature walked on, first between a metal shed and an uneven row of snowmobiles, and then straight toward the north gate, where three men stood at the wall next to the guard shack, facing in his direction.
“Tell the UAV operator I want it as tight as he can make it,” Babbitt demanded. “Don’t worry about image quality; I want to see this up close.”
A moment later the camera zoomed in on the lone man approaching the guard shack along the wall at the north gate. For the first time signa
l room personnel could make out folds in clothing, could see a hood over the man’s head, and they could also see that his hands were empty.
A female voice muttered into her mic, “He’s gonna try to talk his way through—”
A male voice with a southern drawl spoke over her. “He ain’t talkin’ his way through shit.”
The room fell silent as the figure closed to within ten feet of the armed men at the gate. He did not stop, just kept moving toward them. The three guards had been holding their guns at the low ready, but something must have alarmed them because all three raised their weapons at once and backed up; one bumped against the wall. The approaching man moved the last ten feet in the blink of an eye, knocked the first AK to the side, and drove his arm up; it looked like his open hand connected with the first guard’s throat, but it was hard to tell. The Russian left the ground, kicked back, and fell into the second guard; two rifles were on the ground and Gentry—of course this was Gentry—leapt forward, pushed off the stone wall with his right leg to give himself more lift, and launched himself on the third man. He got inside the guard’s weapon just as he fired, a flash of light from the barrel and a thump of noise through the surveillance microphone in the forest to the north. But the round missed; the Gray Man had the guard in a violent embrace and they spun in the snow, the AK twirling through the air. The guard flailed, but the Gray Man got his arms around the man’s head, turned him around, and shoved him violently, face-first, into the wall.
The second man leapt upon the Gray Man from behind, but a right elbow knocked him off balance, and then a high roundhouse kick to the face crumpled the man in the snow in a heap.
“My God!” someone yelled.
All three guards were down now. Motionless. The Gray Man had landed on his back after his roundhouse kick, but he sprang to his feet, pulling a Kalashnikov up with him from the snow as he stood.
He seemed to look up, back at the activity near the house, and then he turned away, slinging the rifle on his back and heading out through the gates.
Babbitt, Parks, and the others in the Townsend signal room watched the glowing silhouette cross a road and enter the forest; his signature was intermittent now as he passed under the trees, but within seconds it was clear that he was moving faster.
Much faster.
The UAV tightened up on the movement; arms and legs pumping from the body were evident at this magnification.
“He’s running.”
Lee Babbitt walked forward to the front of the room and stood in front of the plasma screen facing his surveillance personnel. “And just like that, ladies and gentlemen, he is clear of his target. Sidorenko is dead; we won’t need to wait to hear that from official sources.”
There were claps of amazement in the room. This team had been tracking Gentry for months with no joy, and now they had a fix on his position.
Court had lost his night vision monocle during his jump in the atrium, and there was little illumination here under the snow-covered larch branches to guide him, but the low light and dense canopy was more help than hindrance.
While still in the building he’d pulled the top article of clothing from his backpack, a thin camouflaged pullover. He’d ripped off his ski mask and donned the green and black garment, and out here in the dark he looked much like everyone else running around in the snow. He made it past the guard shack and out through the front gate just as the frantic men came outside, looking desperately for the assassin.
At that point the men with radios shouted and screamed into them, and the men without radios shouted and screamed even louder, and the hunt for the killer in their midst turned into a shambles and young men full on testosterone, booze, and coke ran all over the property pointing guns at one another in the dark.
The chase did lead out past the walls, finally, but most of the goons headed out to the south, following the noise and lights from the fireworks there, and several men opened fire on parked trucks, the silhouette of a garbage can, and even a patrol of two men in the forest that had become separated from the rest of the group. By then Court had taken out the three guards at the north gate and entered the forest. Once under cover of the trees he reached under his camo pullover, pulled out a white nylon hooded windbreaker, and zipped that over his other layers.
After this he knew his only job was to move and to keep moving. He wanted to put space between himself and the dacha, and he needed the heat generated by the activity to keep him alive.
Sid’s skinheads had dogs, but they were untrained, and Court wore a silver-lined base layer that shielded 90 percent of his body’s natural odors, cloaking him to a scent tracker. He pulled a freezer bag from his backpack and out of it he took six hunks of raw, putrefying bear meat, and as he ran he flung the steaks in all directions. The dogs would focus on the meat, not for long, but hopefully it would screw with their hunt long enough to get him some distance off the X, and render what little bit of his smell did emanate from him faint and untraceable.
Gentry met his extraction an hour before dawn, after nearly three hours of trudging, running, tripping, and falling in the snow. He’d heard vehicles on the road and he’d heard the shouts of men and he’d heard the barking of dogs, but the only direct threat to him had been frostbite. He’d kept moving, kept his body temperature up, and he knew he’d thaw out once he got to where he was going.
The truck that came to pick him up was driven by a local who’d been hired by the Moscow Bratva. The man only knew that his job entailed collecting an individual in the forest just before nine A.M., when the skies were still pitch-black, and then driving him twenty kilometers to an inlet where a speedboat would be waiting. This part of Gentry’s exfil went off without a hitch. There were no words between the two men; the driver had, on his own initiative, brought Court a thermos of tea. Court held it in his hands to warm them, and he held it to his face so that the heat would thaw his nose, but he did not drink even a sip.
Court appreciated the gesture, but he didn’t know this bastard. For all he knew the tea was pure poison.
Gentry was not the trusting type.
As the sun grayed the low clouds over the Gulf of Finland, Gentry found himself on his extraction boat. The term speedboat didn’t really fit. It was a fourteen-foot tender with an underpowered engine and a captain who looked like he might have been all of seventeen years old. But they cut through the glassy water of the gulf easily enough, and shortly before noon he was brought alongside the Helsinki Polaris, a Russian-flagged dry-store cargo hauler on its way to Finland.
As he left the tender the captain reached under a seat and handed Gentry a backpack and a small knapsack. Court took them without a word. The backpack was his; he’d packed it himself in Moscow, filling it with things he would need to go on the run after the Sidorenko operation. A new pistol, a trauma kit, clothes, and a few other odds and ends. And the knapsack contained two hundred fifty thousand euros in bundles of one hundred euro notes. This was operating money he’d been promised for his getaway, and he imagined he would need much or all of it to adequately disappear.
By noon he stood in his small quarters in the rear of the ship; he’d consolidated the money into the backpack and the pockets of his heavy coat and now he stood naked in front of a grimy mirror, examining his bruises and scrapes from the activity of the morning. He was beat-up to be sure, but in better condition than he expected to find himself at the end of this ride. More importantly, he’d done it. He’d ended Sid Sidorenko and removed the most passionate and headstrong of those hunting him. It was a good day’s work, and now he was looking forward to melting away for a while, living off grid and biding his time until he figured out where he would go from here.
The Townsend Government Services ScanEagle drone had remained overhead throughout Gentry’s extraction. Babbitt decided to stand down his strike team within minutes of Gentry’s entering the forest. Sid had too many goons out and about; the eight members of Trestle could have handled themselves against any three dozen Russian
skinheads, but their objective was to kill Gentry, and Gentry was safely under surveillance. Trestle could easily wait for him to get clear of the Russians and then hit him later when he was alone.
The ScanEagle tracked its target to the truck, and then the first UAV switched out with a second, which followed the truck to the fourteen-foot boat and remained high overhead as the tender came along a ship sailing west in the Gulf of Finland. The camera onboard the drone picked up the name of the ship—Helsinki Polaris. The Townsend investigators ran the name of the boat through Vesseltracker, a database of the world’s ships, and this showed the Helsinki Polaris’s details and scheduled course, and from this they learned the ship was an 1,800-ton dry-goods cargo hauler and though Helsinki was its home port, it was Russian owned and Antigua and Barbuda flagged. It was on its way to deliver a shipment to Finland and would be calling in Mariehamn at eight A.M. the following morning.
“We’ve got him,” Babbitt said to Parks when everything was confirmed. “We’ll take him right there on the ship. Alert Trestle, let him know they will be doing an underway.”
“Yes, sir. We have the fast boats and all the equipment necessary for a marine assault in the port of St. Petersburg. We’ll fly them to Helsinki and get ahead of the Polaris.”
“Good.”
Parks asked, “What about Dead Eye? Should I stand him down?”
“Negative. Have him proceed to Mariehamn. I want him waiting at the port in case something goes wrong.”
The phone on Jeff Parks’s hip rang; he put it on speaker and took the call from one of his signal room’s communications staff.
“Go for Jeff.”
“Jeff, the pilot of the Beechcraft assigned to Dead Eye just called. The asset’s a no-show. He was supposed to be at the airport two hours ago. The pilot wants to know how long he should wait for him.”
