by Mark Greaney
In the space of thirty seconds he checked each rifle three times, made millimeter adjustments when necessary, and continued his countdown, but added a second running clock in his head, and then a third, as he tried to time the movements of the two moving targets.
After one more look through his scopes and a quick glance at the Iranian jet, he put his left trigger finger on the trigger of the rifle positioned at his three o’clock, then hooked a finger on to the aluminum rod controlling the triggers of the side-to-side rifles at his twelve-o’clock position.
He checked all four targets again, looking into both side-by-side scopes and then upside down through the scope on the rifle in the crook of his right arm.
He waited a moment, willing the moving men to move into his crosshairs. “Now,” he said softly, and then he pulled back on the aluminum rod while, simultaneously, his left index finger pressed the trigger on the Dragunov positioned toward the control tower.
All three rifles fired at once, creating a single cacophonous report. The two guns in front of him were not supported by his shoulder, so they flew back into Court’s face as the bullets and hot gasses left their barrels. The gun pointed at his three-o’clock position lurched hard into his biceps.
In the control tower the window glass shattered, the seated man flew back out of his chair, and the man on his feet just behind him dropped his binoculars and fell to the ground.
In the bunker on the roof of the barracks the seated soldier’s head snapped back and he fell forward on the console in front of him. Next to him the man with the binoculars went airborne as he launched back over a desk, and he landed faceup on the cement floor.
Court did not know if he’d hit all four targets; he figured he would only know for sure if an antitank missile arced into the air and began chasing him across the airfield. He did not wait around for this to happen though; as soon as he fired the rifles, he reached for the detonator and pressed a button.
On the parking apron the third MIG 25 Foxbat in the row erupted in a ball of fire. Seconds later a secondary explosion blew fragments of the fighter plane one hundred feet into the air.
In the motor pool parking lot the truck Gentry had used to get into the air base exploded; a fiery cloud roared straight up into the night sky and shrapnel shattered glass in the base operations building.
Court did not stop to watch this handiwork. He rose to his feet, grabbed the RPK light machine gun off the wet turf, and brought it up to his shoulder. He aimed at the Iranian jet taxiing up the runway, just twenty-five yards away, and he fired three short bursts directly through the cockpit windscreen. He slung the big rifle over his shoulder and knelt back into the grass, then he grabbed the first of the two antitank grenade launchers.
Five seconds later a roar of light erupted from the launch tube, and a glowing rocket shot low over the air base, streaking toward the Russian AN-74. It impacted directly with the fuselage at the wing, penetrated the fuel tank, and the entire aircraft disintegrated in a fireball. The airfield came alive with lights and shadows as the fireball rose over the area.
Court left the second rocket tube in the grass and sprinted toward the JetStar, which was now motionless on the runway.
As he ran he began taking fire for the first time. He assumed some of the sentries in the outer fence positions had seen the rocket launch and were firing in the darkness at his position. He had intended for the massive explosions of the MIG and the truck and the Antonov to distract the guard force away from the center of the airfield, but the crack of supersonic rounds whizzing past told him that at least some of the sentries had not been taken in by the ruse. He was two hundred yards away from the nearest sentry, however, and the incoming fire was inaccurate and sporadic.
Searchlights began sweeping the ground all around him as he ran.
He arrived at the motionless executive jet on the runway, aimed his RPK at one of the cabin portals, and released a long burst of automatic fire, shattering the window and depressurizing the cabin. He attached a small stick-on “hinge-popper” to the cabin door, then he rolled under the aircraft to get away from the blast. As the explosive fired, ripping the door off its hinges, Court pulled a flash-bang grenade from his utility belt, and he tossed it through the now open hatch. Again he ducked down and away, and he dropped the RPK onto the runway. When the bang and the flash subsided inside the cabin, he spun back into the doorway, drawing his Glock 17 pistol and leveling it at the three terrified Iranian men inside.
A long burst of machine gun fire raked the runway, kicking sparks up just feet behind him. Court launched himself up and into the cabin of the aircraft, and shoved his pistol against the forehead of the first Iranian intelligence officer.
“Two seconds! Where are the drives?”
“What? What drives? I don’t know what you—”
Court shot the man in the head, then pulled him to the open hatch and kicked him out onto the runway.
He turned to the next man. “Two seconds! Where are the—”
“They are here!” he shouted, and he pointed to a silver case on the floor by his knee.
“Open it!”
The man did as requested, and Court saw three boxy-looking hard drives.
“Both of you. Take off your jackets.”
The men were wearing business suits. They pulled their coats off quickly, with no small amount of confusion. Outside sirens wailed across the airbase, and the bright searchlights locked themselves on the Iranian jet. No one had fired on it yet, but Court knew he couldn’t wait around for the Ukrainians to decide if they would just blow the aircraft off the runway with an antitank missile.
With their coats off, Court was satisfied they weren’t hiding any more computer drives. He ordered the men to climb out of the broken cabin door. They did as they were told, probably stunned that they were being allowed to live, and then both men raised their arms, waving at the searchlights, imploring anyone out there to hold their fire.
Court crawled to the cockpit now, pulled the dead copilot out of his seat, and started to climb into his place. The windscreen was riddled with holes, but Court ignored the poor visibility, and he pushed the throttle all the way forward.
He had less than half the runway to work with, and he was taking off with the wind instead of against it, but Court had done his math, and he knew he had enough concrete ahead of him to get into the air.
As he picked up speed, he adjusted the flaps for takeoff. Tracer rounds from automatic weapons began sweeping across the night sky in front of the jet, and he tried to lower his body down in the seat, but he did not have much room to work with, so instead just did his best to get his speed up as fast as possible.
A burst of gunfire hit the fuselage behind him, but he kept his focus out the broken windscreen ahead, and he pulled up on the yoke near the end of the runway.
The aircraft lifted into the air and was immediately enshrouded by the thick clouds.
As the damaged jet climbed past five hundred feet, Court left the controls, climbed out of the cockpit, and made his way over the body of the copilot and back into the cabin. The wind screamed through the open door, the black cloudy night pressed right up to the interior cabin lighting, giving Gentry the impression that he was flying inside a bowl of thick soup. He dropped to his knees, took off his backpack, and removed two items.
The first was a small parachute rig. It took up half the size of the backpack, and he was able to put it on in under twenty seconds.
The second item was smaller, just three pounds and no larger than a loaf of bread. The black box had a protective cap on one end, and he slipped his finger under the cap and flipped a switch. He placed the device next to the three hard drives on the floor of the cabin, and then, at an altitude of less than two thousand feet, Gentry rolled out of the cabin of the JetStar and into the wet black sky.
The aircraft continued ascending for another thirty seconds, and then the three pounds of Semtex plastic explosive detonated, obliterating the jet and everything inside it.
Russ Whitlock relayed the story he had just heard from Gentry, putting necessary details in the first person. On the other end of the phone, Ali Hussein did not say a single word while the American talked, but when Russ finished, ending the story in the field west of Kiev and telling Hussein that the rest of his exfiltration was none of the Iranian’s business, Ali Hussein finally spoke. “Mr. Gray, I am more than satisfied now. Your version matches perfectly with the testimony of our two surviving operatives. The contract is yours. I only need to know where you would like me to deliver the payment when the contract is fulfilled.”
Russ Whitlock smiled. There had been difficulties, setbacks, but his operation was finally back on track.
“I will send you the account information via text.”
“Very well.”
Russ said, “There is one more thing. When the contract is completed, regardless of the circumstances . . . my circumstances . . . regardless what you hear about me . . . you will pay the money.”
Ali Hussein did not understand. “Please make your conditions clear, Mr. Gentry.”
“Simply put, I will need to go to ground after this. You may hear that I have been killed. Of course it is possible that I won’t survive my attempt on Prime Minister Kalb, but more likely what you see on the news will be well-orchestrated disinformation.”
“I see.”
“Your organization will be tempted to keep the money owed me.” He paused a long time before saying, “That would be a mistake.”
“I understand. Be assured. Inshallah, when you fulfill your obligations in the contract, we will fulfill ours. Whether you are around to withdraw the money from the account or not, the money will be there.”
“Very good, Ali Hussein. I will text you the account number,” he said, and he ended the call.
FORTY
The signal room at Townsend House operated twenty-four hours a day during hunts run on the scale of the Gentry operation. Technicians, communications specialists, analysts, information technology experts, and other staffers, all wired via secure comms to the UAV and direct action teams in the field, had been searching throughout the night, local time, for their quarry for months.
Earlier in the day an analyst monitoring gait-pattern and physical pattern-recognition software had gotten a hit from several camera feeds pulled from Stockholm’s central train station. It was nothing conclusive; during the busiest parts of the day this new technology found on average one false positive a minute from cameras in the city, but the late-night walk through the station by the lone man wearing a coat and pack similar to those of their target and possessing a similar gait was enough to spin up Jumper team and call the Sky Shark from another part of the city.
By the time the UAV arrived there was no sign of the man outside the station, and Jumper was recalled to their safe house.
Jeff Parks had slept on the sofa in his office, right off the signal room, every night since Gentry had been sighted flying his microlight over the Gulf of Finland a week earlier. He’d just kicked his shoes off and put his feet up for a couple hours of shut-eye when his desk phone rang with the distinctive ring indicating an inbound encrypted satellite call.
He walked barefoot across the floor and answered with his code name. “This is Metronome.”
“Dead Eye here.” Parks was surprised to hear from Whitlock; he’d been trying to reach him for over twenty-four hours. Parks had not spoken to him personally since the shoot-out in Tallinn.
They went through their identity check, and then Russ told Parks he was in the city center.
“Why haven’t you answered your phone?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Fieldwork. You know how it is, right?” Parks presumed this to be some sort of slight, insinuating that Parks himself had no field experience. The second in command of Townsend sat down at his desk and considered reciting the list of third-world postings he’d served in with CIA all over the globe, but then he decided against it. Individualist NOC operators like Dead Eye and Gray Man thought everyone who wasn’t like them, meaning those who did not walk the earth with a gun and a knife and a kill mission in hand, was a lightweight. Even though Parks had been a case officer in the Directorate of Operations, that wouldn’t earn him the respect of a lone-wolf kook like Russ Whitlock.
Parks let it go and just said, “What do you need?”
“Have you found Gray Man?”
“Negative. We know he’s in Sweden, might still be in Stockholm, but that’s it for now.”
“When and where was the last sighting?”
“If you are there in Stockholm, why are you calling me? Why don’t you coordinate with Jumper and the UAV team?”
“Because the last time I tried to coordinate with your team on site, they got dead, I got shot, and Gentry got away.”
“I’m pushing you the safe house address. You need to go there. Jumper and his men aren’t surveillance experts. They could use your help.”
“Sure,” Whitlock said. “I’ll head over there and pull off their ball caps so they don’t look like Americans. What about the Mossad?”
“Unknown. We are not in contact with the targeting team in Stockholm. Apparently the chick running the show for them didn’t like the looks of Beaumont and his boys, so she broke off the relationship.”
Interesting, Russ thought, but he didn’t really have time to delve into the ins and outs of U.S.-Israeli intelligence coordination at the moment. He had another problem.
He could hear it in Parks’ voice. A hesitation. A more standoffish tone. It seemed as if Parks wasn’t buying what Whitlock was saying, and this uneased Whitlock.
What did Townsend know?
There was only one way for Whitlock to find out.
He’d go meet with Jumper.
Just after five A.M. Whitlock knocked on the door to the Townsend safe house. A few seconds later the door opened, and he nodded to a bearded operative wearing a ball cap and a leather jacket. Russ didn’t know the man’s name, but he recognized him from the Jumper team.
The man just called back to the room behind him. “Beaumont? The singleton is here.”
Russ did know John Beaumont, however. He stuck a hand out to the big southerner as he entered the dark living room of the large flat, and he nodded to Carl and Lucas at the UAV station at the same time.
“How’s the hunting?” Whitlock asked.
Beaumont did not extend his own hand.
“Is there a problem?”
“I just got off the phone with Babbitt,” the big bearded man said. The other guys in the room were mostly just tying up their bedrolls and drinking coffee. A couple of guys sat behind the UAV desk, where they had been watching Carl fly the Sky Shark, but now all eyes were turned toward the two men in the center of the room.
“Yeah? What about?”
“About Joel Lawrence.”
“Who?”
Beaumont spit tobacco juice into a plastic cup he carried in his hand. “Trestle Seven.”
Russ kept his face impassive, covering a slight concern about where this conversation was heading. “How’s he doing?”
“He’ll recover. Broken bones and shit like that. He’s gonna do some time over there, but not much. CIA is greasing palms in the Estonian justice system to get him a year, tops.”
“That’s good.”
After another spit Beaumont said, “Babbitt got one of his attorneys in to talk to Joel in Tallinn. He’s in the hospital, under guard, but the lawyer was able to interview him about what happened during the Gentry dustup the other night. I gotta tell you, man. Joel is saying things that don’t make a lick of sense.”
Fuck, Russ thought. Quickly he did a head count in the room, in case things turned violent. There were eight Jumper men and the two UAV geeks. Russ immediately discounted Carl and Lucas, determined he was up against eight real threa
ts, and scanned the men for weapons. They all carried pistols on their hips. He could see their Uzis lined up on cases along the wall, and other crates nearby held grenades, shotguns, and body armor that they would use for a higher-profile takedown.
Russ had weapons on him, his stiletto and his garrote. But no firearms.
Nonchalantly Russ asked, “What did he say?”
“He says you reported there was no attic access from the third floor of the hotel.”
Russ nodded. “That’s right.”
“He says there was a pull-down staircase on the east side of the third-floor hallway.”
“Must have missed it.” Whitlock shrugged. “I can’t fucking do everything.”
“Hmm,” Beaumont said, and he looked at his team. A couple of guys started moving in closer, but it was too early for Russ to determine if they were doing anything more than trying to intimidate him.
“There is something else. Joel says that when he got buried in the snow, he still had his radio in his ear. He heard Trestle Two report that he saw two targets.”
“Two targets?”
Beaumont spit juice into the cup again, not taking his eyes from the smaller Whitlock as he did so.
“Yep.”
Russ said, “Maybe he saw me when I engaged Gentry.”
“You told Babbitt you were behind the action. How do you suppose he would have gotten the impression the two of you were together?”
Russ said, “I don’t know, John. I know I couldn’t have made that mistake, but Trestle team was a bunch of dumb fucks. Hell, I have no idea what passes for a thought in any of you snake eaters’ brains.”
Beaumont’s low southern drawl slowed even more now. “Heard you got shot.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s the wound?” Beaumont took a half step toward Dead Eye now.
Russ did not back away. “It’s fine. Why?”
“I want to see it.” There was an accusation in the tone, and Russ picked up on this.
“What the hell for?”
“C’mon, bro. You caught a love tap from the Gray Man and survived it? You should be showing that shit off every chance you get.”
