Blood Play (Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan)

by Pendleton, Don

  “All right,” Ilyin told the woman as he removed the stocking cap. “We’re here. Get out.”

  Gwen’s hair was disheveled, but she made no effort to straighten it. She eased out of the backseat, then leaned back in and unfastened Frankie’s seat belt. The young boy stirred and opened his eyes.

  “C’mon, sweetie,” Gwen told him quietly. “We’re going to go see Paparoni and show him how brave we are, okay?”

  “Okay,” Frankie repeated with dubious conviction. He climbed out of his car seat and bounded from the car, wrinkling his nose. “What stinks?”

  “It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” Mikhaylov told the boy. He remained in the cart and left it idling.

  Gwen stared at the Butcher, first in anger, then with a glimmer of recognition.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she said.

  Mikhaylov smiled in a way that was devoid of warmth. “What’s that saying, ‘Let’s not go there’?”

  “This is your doing, isn’t it?” Gwen persisted. “You’re behind this.”

  “It would probably be better if you didn’t ask so many questions,” Mikhaylov warned her. “When the time comes, that will be my job.”

  “I’ve already told your men. I know nothing that could possibly interest you.”

  “But your husband does,” Mikhaylov told her. “You and your son…you’re what we could call ‘bargaining chips.’”

  “You’ll threaten us to make him talk, is that it?”

  “Again with the questions.” Mikhaylov turned to Ilyin. “Take them inside so they can have a little family time with ‘Paparoni’.”

  “Paparoni’s here?” Frankie said.

  “He’s our guest,” Mikhaylov told the child. “And now you and your mother are guests, too. Guests know how to behave themselves. I’m sure you were taught that.” Frankie nodded.

  “We’ll do our best,” Mikhaylov promised. He gestured to Ilyin. Ilyin moved in and began to escort Gwen and Frankie across the grounds to the main house, located fifty yards past the barn.

  Mikhaylov turned his attention back to the javelina pen. Another worker had already opened the gate and the stolen Camry was proceeding through. Mikhaylov followed close behind in the cart. Out in the pen, the nearest javelinas took flight in the other direction, disappearing beyond range of the Toyota’s headlights to the far end of the compound, where at least another two hundred of the creatures were cloaked by darkness. The two-vehicle procession made its way through the muddy turf for another fifty yards before coming upon a freshly dug trench and the backhoe-equipped Bobcat 963 that had performed the digging. The trench was more than six feet deep and nearly as wide as the cart Mikhaylov was driving. He parked alongside the opening and left the cart running as he got out.

  “Let’s do this quickly,” he told the driver of the Camry, who’d already gotten out and was opening the trunk. With him was the man who’d operated the backhoe.

  It took two trips for the men to dump the bodies of Jeffrey and Leeland Eppard. There was nothing ceremonial to their burials. One after the other, they were flung down into the trench.

  “Fill it back up and pack it down,” Mikhaylov told the Bobcat operator. “Once you finish, cover it with a load of feed, then do the same with all the tire tracks on your way out. Shovel and rake as much as you can, then spread around more feed so the javelinas will come over and finish the job.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mikhaylov turned to the driver of the stolen Camry. “Get the car in the barn and tell Hedeon to get started on it. He’ll know what to do.”

  The Russian waited by the grave while the driver got back in the Toyota and turned, then started back toward the gate. After he’d watched the Bobcat operator shovel the first load of dirt onto the bodies, Mikhaylov returned to his cart and pulled away, his mood darkening. All this work, all this manpower…none of it would have been necessary if Franklin Colt had been more corruptible. When they found out he was Walter Upshaw’s informant it would have been much easier to have just lured him into the fold. Mikhaylov knew that most men would cross over to his side without a second thought if the price was right. But in the time he’d worked with Colt at the casino, he’d come to know the man as one of that other breed; the ones high on principle and morally steadfast. And Colt was too smart, as well. It never would have been possible to bribe him into switching loyalties. He would have smelled the trap and realized his acceptance into the ranks would have ended, along with his life, the moment he disclosed all he knew and revealed who else had been given the information besides Upshaw. And so it had come to this: a half-bungled abduction and a trail of dead bodies that now meant they had to go about their business while avoiding what was sure to be a statewide manhunt. And, after all this, there was still no guarantee Colt would talk, although Mikhaylov felt confident that, one way or another, he would get the man to cooperate. Colt had been been able to hold his tongue while dealing with lesser means of persuasion, but come morning the security officer would learn that dealing with the Butcher was another matter entirely.

  Mikhaylov’s grim disposition was about to darken further. Halfway back to the gate, his black-market cell phone vibrated in his shirt pocket. He stopped the cart and took the call.

  It was Viktor Cherkow.

  As he listened to Cherkow’s account of the debacle at Colt’s property, Mikhaylov’s countenance hardened. A bison stampede? All but two of his men killed? And, for all that, none of the evidence they were hoping to find?

  “You checked everywhere?” Mikhaylov asked.

  “I’ve checked the house top to bottom,” Cherkow told him. “I’ll try the gristmill next, but first there’s something else I need to deal with.”

  “What?” Mikhaylov demanded. “The buffalo are still there?”

  “A few of them, but they’ve calmed down,” Cherkow said. “It’s one of the men who was in that taxi that went into the flood channel. There’s a chance he didn’t drown there like we thought.”

  “Like you thought,” Mikhaylov corrected. “Are you saying he was at the property?”

  “I’m still not positive it was him,” Cherkow said. “We managed to kill all the rest of them, but he’s still unaccounted for. I want to bring in the chopper and search the grounds.”

  “There’s no time for that!” Mikhaylov countered. “From the sounds of it, you’re going to have half the reservation showing up there any minute. Yes, bring in the chopper, but get on it and get out of there as fast as you can.”

  “Our men, the ones that were killed…”

  “Leave them! We need to cut our losses on this!”

  “But if they can be traced back to—”

  “They have no identification on them!” Mikhaylov interrupted. “They won’t be traced back here.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’ll see to it!” Mikhaylov shouted into the phone. “That’s all you need to know. Now get the hell out of there!”

  The Butcher clicked off the connection and stabbed the cell phone back into his pocket. He was seething and his jaw was clenched so tightly it ached. Idiots! Incompetents!

  Mikhaylov’s bottled rage came to a head moments later when a pair of eighty-pound male javelinas wandered into range of his headlights. The creatures froze in place and stared at the Russian with their small, myopic eyes. When they began rubbing their tusks together, giving off a chattering sound meant to ward off predators, Mikhaylov gave in to his wrath and pulled a PA-63 Makarov semiautomatic pistol from his coat pocket. He took aim and put a 9 mm slug through the skull of one of the beasts, dropping it into the mud. The second javelina bolted off into the darkness.

  Mikhaylov glared at the downed creature, then got out of his cart and shouted to the underling standing by the still-opened gate.

  “Get this pig on the cart and put it on ice for the night!” he commanded. “I have plans for it in the morning!”

  The other man jogged forward and they crossed paths without exchanging wo
rds. Mikhaylov strode out of the pen and away from the barn. The last thing he was interested in at the moment was dealing with Tramelik and the items he’d stolen from Alan Orson. All those plans suddenly felt as if they’d been shoved to the back burner, their place taken by the seemingly never-ending matter of Franklin Colt.

  Mikhaylov walked past the house, as well, seeking the sanctuary of the farm’s onetime milk shed. Behind the converted weapons depot was a renovated space Mikhaylov had turned into his personal quarters. The room was outfitted with a space heater, and Mikhaylov turned it on high before sitting down at his cluttered desk and propping his feet on the blotter. He started up his notebook computer, then reached for a half-pint silver flask he always carried in his hip pocket. He sipped its contents slowly, letting the vodka warm him incrementally as he considered the best way to deal with the unsatisfactory results of Cherkow’s assignment. It now seemed clear that, short of getting their hands on Walter Upshaw’s second cell phone, interrogation would be the only way to find out what kind of information Colt had unearthed about GHC’s covert operations on the reservation. That matter could wait until morning. More pressing seemed the matter of tending to the man who’d apparently survived Tijeras Arroyo and turned up at the reservation. If Cherkow had correctly identified the man, there was a chance that he, like Walter Upshaw, had been informed of Colt’s findings. As such, he needed to be dealt with in the same manner as the Taos Governing Council president. He needed to be taken out, preferably without dispatching SVR agents back to the reservation.

  By the time he’d emptied the flask and the room had heated up every bit as much as Mikhaylov’s inebriated metabolism, the Butcher had figured out his next move and how best to undertake it.

  Hopefully, it would only take one call.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  John Kissinger had rationed himself a few catnaps between calls to the Farm and the front desk at the El Dorado Hotel, but with dawn approaching he felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. He was starving, as well, and tired of staring at the walls of his hotel room, so he decided to go down to lobby and wait for the restaurant to open for breakfast. Thankfully the hotel was upscale enough that there was a coffee urn in the reception area along with an assortment of fresh fruit and pastries. Kissinger poured himself a cup and took a croissant over to one of the sofa chairs facing the lobby fireplace. There was a flat-screen television mounted from the ceiling just to the right of the fireplace, and as he snacked on the pastry Kissinger idly watched a tight-sweatered woman stride back and forth in front of a display map of New Mexico pocked with temperature readings, cloud symbols and blinking icons indicating which of the state’s major arterial highways were experiencing traffic problems. The sound was turned down, but the Stony Man armorer easily gathered that the previous night’s storm had moved north to Colorado. Watching the screen, however, he found himself less interested in the weather than wondering where Franklin Colt may have been taken after his abduction. He had little to go on but a gut instinct that his friend was still somewhere in the immediate vicinity, likely within a fifty-mile radius of the airport. Similarly, he had a sense that the man was still alive, but given what’d he learned about the murders of Alan Orson and Walter Upshaw he wondered if he was deluding himself about Colt’s fate.

  Kissinger’s thoughts had shifted to concerns about the welfare of Colt’s family and the outcome of Bolan’s stakeout when a woman in her early thirties made her way from the registration counter to the reception area.

  “Excuse me,” she told Kissinger, “but the man at the front desk said you’ve been asking about Alan Orson.”

  Kissinger glanced up at the woman. She was thin and plain looking, with her wavy auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail that trailed down the back of her teal-colored raincoat.

  “You know him?” he asked.

  The woman nodded and held out her hand. “I’m Leslie Helms. I’m here to help him run his booth at the NMT Expo.”

  Kissinger stood and shook her hand, producing his Justice Department ID and introducing himself as Special Agent John LaViellere. Leslie was taken aback.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked.

  “Have a seat,” Kissinger told her, gesturing at the chair across from him. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  Leslie shook her head as she sat down. “Orson and I are supposed to have breakfast here before we go to the expo,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen,” Kissinger told her.

  “Why not?”

  Kissinger saw no point in trying to sugarcoat things. “Orson’s been murdered,” he told the woman. “Up at his place in Taos.”

  “Holy shit,” Helms muttered. She could see that Kissinger hadn’t been expecting the profanity and quickly apologized. “Pardon my French. What happened?”

  Kissinger quickly informed the woman, keeping the details as brief as possible and avoiding any mention of the altercation at the airport involving Frankin Colt. Helms stopped him in midexplanation and reached into her raincoat.

  “Before you go on,” she said, “I wasn’t totally up-front when I introduced myself.”

  The woman handed Kissinger a business card.

  “‘Private investigator,’” Kissinger read.

  “Yes, I was going to be at his booth at the expo,” she explained, “but it was more a security thing than helping out, and that’s not the main reason he hired me.”

  “Let’s have it, then,” Kissinger suggested.

  “Before I do, can I ask why you’re involved?” Leslie asked. “If Orson was murdered, it seems like it’d be in homicide’s court back in Taos.”

  “There are some other things going on that he was connected to,” Kissinger replied.

  Helms nodded knowingly. “GHC? Or Shiraldi?”

  “I don’t know what either of those mean,” Kissinger confessed.

  “Global Holdings Corporation runs Roaming Bison Resort for the Rosqui tribe,” Helms said. “Same for the nuke dump there.”

  It was the first time the nuclear waste facility had come up on Kissinger’s radar. He instantly suspected it was tied in somehow with everything that had gone down since he’d arrived in Albuquerque.

  “Shiraldi Management was the outfit that ran things there before GHC,” Helms went on. “Orson hired me to look into both companies, particularly with regards to their handling of the fuel rod inventory.”

  “What was he trying to find out?”

  “He wouldn’t say,” Helms said. “I know he does a lot of work with depleted uranium, so I figured it had something to do with that.”

  “DU’s a component of some tank armor he developed,” Kissinger said, recalling his earlier research. “He was using it for a new generation of body armor, too.”

  Helms nodded. “Yeah, I got all that from him. I think he used a lighter version of the tank armor on a helicopter he’s built, too.”

  “That’s my understanding.”

  “My take was that he wanted to put in a bid for a uranium source once he cleared the patents on the suit and chopper. With the tank armor he sold the idea outright to DOD. This time around I think his idea was to produce at least the suits on his own so he could clear a bigger profit.”

  “That makes sense for the most part,” Kissinger responded.

  “What part doesn’t?”

  “Why have you looked into Shiraldi if they’re out of the picture?”

  “I was getting to that,” Helms said. “The other thing he wanted me to look into was how Shiraldi wound up getting booted off the reservation so GHC could move in.”

  Helms started to go into detail about the graft charges that had been made against Shiraldi Management while it was still partnered up with the Rosqui Tribal Council. Much as he knew the information might help explain matters, Kissinger had trouble following the woman’s explanation as he was distracted by a news segment airing on the television screen behind her. A male corresponde
nt was reporting live from an outdoor location against a backdrop of police cars with their light bars flashing. What caught Kissinger’s attention wasn’t the Breaking News logo at the top of screen so much as the superimposed subtitles below the correspondent, which declared that he was reporting live from Rosqui Pueblo.

  “I’m sorry, but excuse me a second,” Kissinger interrupted. He got up and strode to the television set. The controls were within reach, so he turned up the volume. Helms joined him. Together they listened to the newscast. Although they’d missed the initial disclosure, by the time the correspondent finished his update and quickly recapped the situation, Kissinger had a pretty clear idea of what had happened.

  “A bison stampede during the middle of a shootout?” Leslie said after Kissinger turned down the sound. “Sounds like something out of the Wild West.”

  “I’m sorry, but I need to cut this short,” Kissinger told the woman.

  Gesturing at the television, Helms asked, “Is that tied into what you’re investigating?”

  “I can’t get into that, either, I’m afraid,” Kissinger told her.

  “No offense, but I’ve got a stake in this, too,” Helms said. “If this is related to what Orson was paying me to—”

  Kissinger interrupted, “Look, do what you have to, but I really have to go now.” He pocketed the woman’s business card then veered over to the serving table long enough to jot a phone number on a napkin. He handed the napkin to the woman. “We can touch base later and finish this. I think we might be able to help each other.”

  “Thanks,” Helms replied, “but with Orson dead I’m out a client, not to mention the tab I’d been running.”

  “Stay on the case and we’ll cover his tab,” Kissinger offered. “If we can use what you come up with, we’ll pay double.”