The Moscow Cipher

by Scott Mariani

  But the attackers weren’t stupid. It wouldn’t take them long to inspect every inch of the kitchen and work out where they’d gone. Next thing, they’d be tearing up the flagstones and trying to batter and tunnel their way through.

  In other words, as Ben now realised, Grisha’s hidden disaster-prepping room might have just bought the five of them a little bit of time, but they were still well and truly stuck.

  ‘Rats in a trap,’ Ben said. ‘Unless you have another trick up your sleeve.’

  ‘What, you think I would have gone to all this trouble without giving myself an escape route, man?’ Grisha said, pointing into the shadows. He snatched another gas lantern from the clutter of a shelving rack, turned it on with a little whoof of flame and angled it towards where he’d pointed.

  Ben suddenly realised where all the countless tons of earth and stone excavated from the hole had gone. Grisha couldn’t possibly have disposed of them via the kitchen, wheelbarrowing them one at a time through the house. Old houses like these, Le Val included, had often been built up on the ground on which they stood without the benefit of modern foundations, and this place was no exception. Where the dug-away earth met the base of one thick stone wall, Grisha had created an opening beneath the skirt of the building, with a length of iron girder acting as a lintel to bear the weight of the wall. During the long, arduous dig the opening must have resembled the Lefortovo road tunnel while he made innumerable trips with barrow-loads of earth to dump about the property. Once the job was finished Grisha could have partly filled in the hole and built it up to appear like a culvert or a drain that from the outside would hardly be noticeable once the weeds had grown up around it.

  On the inside, Grisha had equipped his secret escape route with heavy metal doors that looked as though they’d been forged by a medieval blacksmith and could withstand a direct hit from a rocket. He wiggled open an iron bolt the size of a scaffold pole, and heaved. The heavy doors creaked open, letting in the first breath of fresh air the cellar had probably known in years. ‘Never thought I’d really have to use it,’ Grisha muttered.

  Still shaking his head in astonishment at the big guy’s ingenuity, Ben went first because he had the only weapon. The escape hatch tapered to a narrow opening just beneath the outer wall, partly covered with a pile of old sacking and empty goat feed bags that Ben pushed aside, careful not to make the slightest sound as he emerged into the night. Outside, the commotion of the assault team in their quandary was loud and clear. There were voices and the spit and crackle of a radio. Running shapes of armed men flitted here and there. The dog was in a greater frenzy of barking than ever.

  Ben clutched his submachine gun and peered cautiously around the corner of the house. The acrid smell of burning fuel and rubber was in the air. To the south, up on the rise overlooking the farm, he could see the glow of the blazing Mercedes and a tower of black smoke that blotted out the stars. That accounted for the first of the two explosions that had immediately preceded the team’s breaching entry. The second, he guessed, had been what had done for the power transformer whose remains were burning in the yard near the farmhouse door, live wires throwing off showers of sparks.

  Ben felt a wistful pang as he gazed back up the hillside at the burning Mercedes. His bag had been inside that car, containing all his kit and Kaprisky’s half million rubles in cash. Ben was less concerned about the money than the bag itself. Another old faithful companion bitten the dust.

  One by one the others crawled out after Ben, and the five huddled unseen in the shadowy lee of the farmhouse wall. All the activity was centred inside the house and around its sole doorway. The assault team had only to send a man to skirt around the corner and things would get interesting very fast. Had Ben been alone in this predicament, he’d have been less worried. To be in charge of a motley crew comprising a frightened child, a couple of jumpy conspiracy nuts and a silent, tense female detective whose mood he was having trouble reading, didn’t inspire a great deal of confidence.

  He was relieved that Valentina’s panic had left her. The kid was showing the same determined grit she’d made evident when she’d saved her father from capture at the service station on the M10 Federal Highway. Kaprisky genes, or Petrov? Valentina clutched her father’s hand tightly and rolled her anxious eyes up at him. ‘Are these men here to hurt us?’ she asked in Dutch.

  Yuri put a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh. But we won’t let them.’

  ‘What about Alyosha?’ she whispered.

  ‘We can’t leave the dog closed in the shed like that,’ Yuri said to Ben.

  ‘He’ll dig his way out eventually,’ Ben said, wishing they would shut up and let him concentrate on a plan to get away from here.

  Grisha tapped Ben on the shoulder. He pointed westwards, past the goat pens, in the direction of the woods. ‘We can make it to my trailer,’ he hissed.

  ‘How do you know they haven’t already found it?’ Ben hissed back.

  ‘Not a chance, man. It’s safe.’

  Ben weighed up the idea. Making a break for it in that direction would entail crossing a portion of the yard in full view of the farmhouse doorway. With the electricity cut off the house was in darkness, but by the fiery glow of the burning car and electrical transformer any running target would be easily spotted by the men milling around the entrance. Only luck would prevent them from being seen. Then again, staying here was totally out of the question. Unless they went and hid in the chicken coops, Grisha’s suggestion might just make the most sense.

  Ben considered the option for only three or four seconds before making his mind up. But that was three or four seconds too long for Grisha, who with a grunt of impatience shoved past him and broke away from the house at a lumbering run.

  Chapter 31

  Ben lunged to stop him, but Grisha knocked his hand away with a determined snarl and kept moving, waddling out into the open as fast as his chubby legs could carry his weight.

  Almost instantly, there was a shout from the doorway as Grisha was spotted. Two of the assault team burst into a sprint after the big guy, who threw a panicked look over his shoulder and tried to lumber faster, moving with all the stealth and agility of a baby rhinoceros.

  Before Ben could react, there was a sharp crack and something that glinted in the firelight flew through the darkness towards the fleeing Grisha, as fast as an arrow from a bow. Even before it hit him, Ben realised what it was.

  A normal Taser gun had a range of only about fifteen feet, its twin darts connected to the launching device by wires through which a pulsing 50,000-volt electric charge would incapacitate the victim with involuntary muscle twitches. Ben had heard of the longer-range models being issued to police forces and the military, but never seen one in action before now. They were considered the ultimate in ‘non-lethal’ weapons, even though Tasers had caused more than a few fatalities in their time.

  The dart struck Grisha in the left buttock. He let out a yowl and went straight down on his face in the dirt, jerking and convulsing like a landed fish as the powerful electric current made his muscles spasm out of control.

  A silenced submachine gun was decidedly less non-lethal in its ways, but Ben had no problem with that. Stepping away from the house, he pinpointed the hovering red dot of his laser sight onto the upper body of the nearest man, aiming for the spot between his throat and the top of his bulletproof vest, and pulled the trigger. Three-shot burst. The silenced Kashtan chattered like a sewing machine, its muzzle report suppressed so well that Ben could hear the rapid clicking of the bolt as it hammered back and forth, chambering rounds and spewing out the empties. No sooner was the first man down, but the second was getting a burst of 9mm copper-jacketed lead that scythed him backwards off his feet.

  Ben muttered, ‘Shit.’ Now the fight was on for real, any attempt to slip away unnoticed well and truly blown. He dashed over to Grisha and removed the high-voltage dart from his rump with a well-aimed boot. The big Russian immediately stopped convulsing and began struggling t
o get up, but he was dazed and disorientated from the electric shock. Ben signalled and shouted to Tatyana and Yuri to make a run for it. Every split second was critical. More men were streaming from the house. Five down already, but Ben could only guess how many more he might have to deal with. Any number of them could have been dropped by helicopter at a safe distance and hiked overland to the farm.

  In which case, he thought, he’d best get started whittling them down further, if he and the others were to have any chance of getting out of here alive. The first dark figure to come running from the doorway was met with the red dot of Ben’s laser sight, instantly followed up with a triple-stitch of bullets that punched his flesh from throat to temple and dropped him like a wet sandbag.

  Muted muzzle flashes lit up from the dark doorway. While Ben had only vague shadows to mark as targets, he himself was a lit-up ghostly yellow-green figure in the eyepieces of the assault team’s night vision goggles. He kept low, moving fast. Bullets skipped off the ground by his feet and smacked into the hulk of a derelict tractor whose final resting place was across the farmyard. Ben swept his laser left and right and returned fire at anything that moved, squeezing off bursts, chewing through the ammunition supply in his one and only magazine. He saw another dark flitting shape stagger and fall.

  Seven down. Two more he sent scurrying for cover along the front wall of the house, where they dived into the relative safety of the space between Yuri’s parked Beetle and the tin shed. Ben’s shots punched through the car’s side and the driver’s window shattered. No way to treat a classic.

  There was a brief lull in the shooting as the forces still inside the house fell back and regrouped; how many of them remained, Ben couldn’t say. Grisha was trying to get up but was still on his hands and knees, groaning. Ben lashed a kick to his ribs and yelled ‘Move it!’ When that didn’t motivate the big Russian, Ben reached down and grabbed a fistful of his scrappy beard, yanking him sharply to his feet. Grisha howled more loudly than he had when the dart had perforated his rear end, but now he was at least upright. Ben gripped his thick arm and half-steered, half-dragged him in a stumbling zigzag across the yard towards the southern perimeter fence and the woods in the distance.

  Shots whistled by, missing them by pure chance, though as the larger target Grisha was the luckier of the two. Ben rattled off a few more rounds one-handed, then let go of Grisha’s arm and sent him at a wallowing run towards the fence. Whether he could even climb it was uncertain, but Ben was more concerned about the others, especially Valentina, still huddled behind the shelter of the farmhouse’s side wall. His intention was to lay down a covering fire to enable her, Yuri and Tatyana to follow Grisha’s escape route to the woods – but now his submachine gun was almost empty. The way these damned things chewed through their ammo supply was a perennial problem no military mind had ever been able to solve.

  Ducking across the yard to the hulk of the old tractor he took cover behind one massive rear tyre. Every bullet counted with his magazine running perilously low, so he switched the weapon to single shot and let off two carefully aimed rounds towards the house. One of the men firing at him from over the bonnet of the perforated Beetle slumped and slid backwards out of sight. Another, hidden in the doorway, pushed his luck a little too far by stepping out where Ben could see him, and collected a bullet that caught him under the chin and exited through the top of his head. Nine men down, by Ben’s count. Not bad going.

  But now his gun was empty. Cursing, he glanced around him. The nearest of the dead men, one of the pair who’d come after Grisha, was lying slumped a few yards away, loose fingers still curled around the pistol grip of his firearm. Ben had no choice but to make a run for it across the stretch of open ground and grab the weapon to resume his covering fire.

  Ben broke away from the tractor, clutching the empty gun as a ploy to make the enemy think he was still in play. The deception failed. Two of the shooters hiding behind the Volkswagen jumped out, jostling each other to be the first to gun down the foreigner who’d messed up their neat assault plan.

  Ben was caught in the open with several paces to go before he reached the dead man’s weapon. But in their haste to slaughter him, one shooter made the other stumble against the shed door. He must have caught the latch lever with his elbow, because now the door swung open and Alyosha, driven wild by all the noise and commotion, burst out ready to sink his fangs into anything warm-blooded. The man scrambled into the shed and kicked the door shut to escape the dog. His companion was raising his weapon to line the sights up on Ben.

  Ben was almost on the fallen weapon when he saw the red dot of the guy’s laser suddenly appear on his chest.

  He was done.

  Then a tawny blur erupted out of the shadows with gaping jaws and sharp teeth that clamped onto the shooter’s upper arm and dragged him to the ground. His weapon flew out of his grasp as he thrashed desperately to free his arm, but Alyosha’s fangs were clenched tight. The dog began to shake him, the way a wild canid breaks the neck of his prey. The man struggled and screamed, kicking out wildly to get the dog off him but instead hitting one of the tall propane bottles by the house, which toppled over and rolled across the yard. Still the dog clung on. The guy could do nothing to defend himself, and at this moment none of his comrades were going to help him.

  Ben reached the body of the dead man and snatched the fallen gun free from his limp grasp. He fired a burst through the door of the shed, to take out the guy hiding in there. Then he ran back to the shelter of the tractor, pinned himself firmly into place and resumed his covering fire to drive back the attackers and let his remaining companions make their break for the woods.

  Grisha had somehow managed to clamber over the perimeter fence and was now nowhere to be seen. From the corner of his eye Ben glimpsed Yuri grabbing Valentina’s hand and the two of them running madly across the yard. He couldn’t see Tatyana, and thought she might have jumped the wire into the animal enclosures to make her escape by a different route.

  That was when things began to unravel.

  Ben hadn’t noticed the two men creep around the back of the house. When they unexpectedly appeared by the side wall where Yuri, Valentina and Tatyana had been sheltering moments earlier, they had an unimpeded field of fire towards the fleeing targets and Ben suddenly found his position open to a new angle of attack that forced him to scramble further behind cover, from where he couldn’t shoot back. The silenced reports of enemy gunfire came thicker and faster. Bullets pinged and bounced off the engine block of the tractor, inches from his head. One huge tyre burst and the machine sagged at one corner.

  The assault team might be under orders to take certain targets alive, but that didn’t mean they weren’t authorised to shoot to wound. Ben heard Yuri yell out and turned just in time to see him stumble and fall, still clinging on to Valentina’s hand. He took her down with her, but she hit the ground like a parachutist and rolled nimbly back up to her feet.

  ‘Papa!’ Her cry was a shriek of pure anguish at seeing her father hurt, blood leaking out from between his fingers as he clutched his right leg below the knee. Yuri shouted in Dutch, ‘Run, Valentina, run!’ For an instant the girl hovered indecisively, torn between wanting to stay close to her stricken father and to bolt for her life. But it wasn’t her decision to make. There were men sprinting towards her, intent on catching her. She wailed in terror and took off like a deer.

  More black-clad figures burst out of the house, spitting muzzle flashes as they came. Ben belly-crawled out from beneath the tractor and fired back. He saw one fall; then another. The enemy were now a dozen men down, plus the one mauled by the hound. How many more were there? They seemed to keep coming and coming. It wouldn’t be long before his replacement gun was empty, too.

  He wasn’t in a good place. Bullets struck the ground much too close for comfort, kicking dirt into his face and half-blinding him.

  Yuri was trying to hobble to his feet. He’d managed to get up on one knee when a Taser dart nailed hi
m squarely in the back. Like Grisha before him, he was instantly overwhelmed with the tremors and convulsions as the voltage seared through his muscles. The man with the Taser came running up, ready to fire another dart into Yuri. The man’s comrade was close behind, clutching his submachine gun. Spying Ben emerging from beneath the tractor he sprayed a burst his way, only to collect a return burst that punched him diagonally from chin to cheekbone. He dropped his weapon, clutched at his face and toppled over forwards, dead before he hit dirt.

  The one with the Taser wheeled around and fired his dart at Ben. Ben ducked. The dart flew over his shoulder. His magazine was down to its last four rounds, but there were other ways to use a firearm. Ben’s opponent was a large and powerful man, at least six-two, at least two hundred and thirty pounds. But Ben had fought much bigger men. Before the guy could fire another Taser dart Ben charged, reached him in three long strides and clubbed him viciously in the face and throat with the butt of the empty gun until he was down and senseless, blood streaming from his smashed lips and nose.

  Yuri was still in the throes of the electric shocks from the dart stuck between his shoulder blades. It was in too deep for Ben to swipe it out with the butt of his gun, so he grasped it with his fingers and plucked it out, wincing at the residual shock that sent a painful tremor up his wrist and arm. He could see the blood soaking Yuri’s right trouser leg where a bullet had taken him in the calf. The Russian was in no state to run very far, even if he hadn’t been rendered half unconscious by the Taser. Seizing his collar Ben started dragging his limp form to safety.

  He glanced back at the house and his mouth went dry at the sight of yet more men spilling from the doorway. To send so many, just to capture one fat country bumpkin, one ex-spook and a twelve-year-old child, made no sense.