“Tell me about this man,” Logan growled.
“He has red hair,” Janek said. “From England, I think.”
“Ireland,” Logan corrected, then cursed under his breath.
“You know him?”
Logan admitted that he did, and Janek spent the next fifteen minutes telling him everything he knew about the jail where Sean Cassidy was being kept. It would take a lot of guts and firepower to break the man out, but once they got out of Warsaw, they would probably not be pursued.
Unless they killed somebody.
But if they could break Cassidy out without managing to kill any of the guards, they’d be all right.
Wolverine thanked him, and turned to the office door. He reached for the knob, but something stopped him. A scent. Logan had noticed it before, of course. It had been there all along, the whole while that Janek had been speaking. But he’d paid no attention to it because it belonged there. What he’d failed to notice was that the scent had lingered, not as a trace odor in the air, but as a real, tangible presence.
He turned back to look at Janek, then glanced at the door that led into the garage where the mechanics worked. Janek couldn’t have missed Logan’s hesitation, nor the sudden diversion of his attention. The old man frowned, a thundercloud passing across his face as he took a step toward the door to the garage.
But Janek never got there.
Logan smelled the gun oil too late.
The door banged open. “Traitor!” Wladek Sniegowski shouted in Polish.
Then he shot his father twice in the chest. The old man was dead before his body hit the floor; his heart had stopped instantly, and Logan would later wonder if it was the heartbreak of his son’s betrayal that had killed him.
“You … animal!” Wolverine roared, completely unaware of the irony, and went after the killer, unsheathing the pair of large knives that had remained hidden at his back.
“Die, you dog!” Wladek screamed in terror, and swiveled to aim the pistol at Logan’s chest.
Wolverine planted one foot on the office chair and sprang off it, vaulting across the room. His blood raced, adrenaline surged, and the horror of seeing a man he’d cared for gunned down by his own son threatened to drive out any semblance of reason.
A bullet slammed into his lower left abdomen, kept from penetrating by the Kevlar woven into the black Team X jumpsuit he wore underneath his peasant clothes.
The mechanic had known his father worked with the KGB, had perhaps been approached by them as well. He executed his father as a traitor, and now intended to kill Logan.
A second bullet hit between Wolverine’s clavicle and shoulder.
Wladek Sniegowski would blow the whistle on Team X and the KGB would be all over them. The mission would be over if the young man with the grease-smeared face was allowed to live.
Logan landed on him, the gun fired again and missed, and then the knives fell and struck home. When Wladek Sniegowski stopped moving, Logan wiped the blades of his knives on the man’s already greasy shirt and stared down at him with a nauseating mix of emotions roiling within his gut.
“He was your father,” Wolverine whispered.
Then he walked out into the swiftly falling night and across the street to where his team waited for him. It was warmer here than it had been in East Berlin, but Logan didn’t notice. There was a coldness in his heart that he felt certain would be with him for some time to come.
“Tell me again why we’re doin’ this,” Creed whispered.
It was full dark now, after nine p.m., and the night sky was overcast and threatening rain. They’d gotten lucky with that. No stars, no moon, no lights but what Warsaw’s own energy would provide. On the main roads, that meant intermittent street lamps. But on side streets and alleys, it could just as well mean absolute darkness, black as pitch.
Garbage cans—mostly overfilled—lined the narrow street on either side. There was a restaurant on one side, and whatever aromas might have come from within were tainted irrevocably by the smell of rotting leftovers, particularly vegetables that had long since ceased to be edible. The smell was horrid, and distracting.
“Tomorrow had to be trash day?” Silver Fox asked aloud, but Logan knew she didn’t expect an answer. It was an observation, nothing more.
The four members of Team X stood in the darkness close to the brick wall, dotted with barred windows, that made up the rear wall of the Warsaw police headquarters. Inside, Sean Cas-sidy sat in a cell, more than likely being questioned by KGB agents, or awaiting their arrival. Why Cassidy hadn’t used that shriek of his to escape was a question Logan looked forward to having answered. But it didn’t change what they needed to do.
“I told you why we’re doin’ this,” Wolverine growled, narrowed his eyes, and stared at Creed. “Cassidy’s a good man. He’s on our side, if we even have a side, and he pulled me out of a one-on-one with the East German cops back in Berlin. I owe him one.”
“We could be endangering our mission,” Silver Fox whispered.
“Yeah,” Logan nodded. “You said that already.”
“I also said I’m with you,” she reminded him. “I just don’t want anyone to forget what we’re here for. In and out, nobody to recognize us. Hopefully they’ll think we’re Interpol or something, or just here for Cassidy.”
“Doubtful,” Maverick said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got to get Cassidy out of there. They’ll kill him if we don’t. Interpol asks around, Cassidy was never supposed to be here in the first place. We’re the only chance he’s got.” Maverick turned to glare at Creed. “What I don’t understand,” he whispered, “is what you’re doing here.”
Creed smiled, his mouth a jagged wound in the darkness, and his eyes glinted with mischief. When he spoke, his tone was patronizing.
“I’m here for the team,” Sabretooth said, almost a sneer. “All for one, one for all, all that crap. Doesn’t matter anyway. We break Cassidy out, I’ll still hold Wolverine to his word. The Irishman gets in our way, he’s just as dead as any of the others. Right, Logan?”
Wolverine felt six eyes on him, but he ignored them all. He was thinking about the pair of dead-eyed, dark-suited goons he’d seen on the front steps of the police station. KGB guards, no question. Your average Warsaw police officer probably didn’t own a suit other than his uniform.
“We ain’t gonna get past the KGB watchdogs,” he said. “And we can’t take ‘em out in public without riskin’ the rest o’ the city knowin’ our business too soon, includin’ the cops inside the building.”
He looked at Silver Fox. Her gypsy disguise wasn’t going to work so well up close. But if she covered her head until she was past them and they didn’t stop her… that was a lot of ifs, but it could work. And if it didn’t, well, there was going to be a lot of shooting.
“It’s on you, Fox,” he said. “There’s plenty of women spies, but they ain’t gonna be as suspicious o’ you as they would o’ one of us. Creed especially, with that blond hair o’ his. Here’s the idea …”
Seconds later, Silver Fox rounded the corner in front of police headquarters. The granite steps in front were wide but they led up to a single heavy double door, probably oak. On either side of that door, several steps down, stood KGB agents.
Wolverine counted Fox’s footsteps and after she’d taken twenty paces, he followed her. The KGB goons noticed her a moment later, a nice-figured woman with a scarf over her head coming their way. She started up the steps and the two men smiled at one another. One raised his arm and opened his mouth, about to say something to Fox.
The other had noticed Wolverine.
Though he wore Kevlar that would likely stop a direct shot to the heart or lungs—and though he was as hard a man to kill as God had ever made—he still felt vulnerable. They were deep behind enemy lines in the most frigid days yet of the Cold War. He was about to break into a jail in the middle of the Soviet sphere of influence, and the place was crawling with KGB.
He was cer
tain he’d done more foolish things in his life; he just couldn’t think of any at the moment.
As Logan started up the steps, Silver Fox walked right between the KGB agents and up to the front door of the police station. Several more steps, and the two goons started down toward him. Wolverine saw that Fox was inside the station, and he smiled at the agents and greeted them in Russian.
“Hello, my friends!” he said in their own language. “I have just heard that you captured the man I have been hunting for days.”
His accent was not perfect. The implications of this claim were almost preposterous. But this was the KGB. How were individual agents to know what the agency as a whole had been up to? Wolverine’s words were just confusing enough to distract them from a direct confrontation for several precious seconds.
A tiny, choked scream issued from the foyer of police headquarters. The KGB agents turned, saw the door was open slightly, and saw a limp hand lying across the threshold.
“Don’t move!” one of them barked at Logan in Russian.
They ran up the steps, and Wolverine was right behind them. Inside the foyer, Silver Fox waited. Logan stepped inside and closed the door. Swiftly, silently, the two agents were rendered unconscious in the space between the massive double doors and the more humble interior doors. A moment later, Wolverine opened the outside doors to the signal knock that told him Creed and North had arrived. Then they all stepped over the inert bodies of the KGB agents, and Fox opened the inner door that led into the station proper.
Maverick tossed a pair of concussion grenades into the room. They skittered across wide wooden floorboards, and Fox slammed the door again.
The explosion cracked the door down the middle and blew the hinges nearly off the frame. Creed kicked at the cracked center of the door, and it split in two. He and Logan went in first, ready to take whatever bullets might be coming at them. But most of the cops were still hiding behind their desks, hoping there were no more grenades coming.
“Maverick, Fox, check the cells,” Logan barked. “Me an’ Creed got your backs.”
The police started to rise then, at the sound of Logan’s voice, but they’d relieved the KGB agents of their AK-47s, and now brought those weapons into use. It wasn’t quiet, that was for certain. But if they could find Cassidy fast, they didn’t have to worry about quiet very long.
“Stay down!” Logan shouted in Russian, hoping they all knew the language.
He and Creed sprayed the desks and walls and windows with bullets. He was surprised that Sabretooth didn’t just start blowing away the cops, and wondered if Creed had a little bit more logic in his head than they gave him credit for. Kill a few policemen, and their comrades were more likely to try fighting back. They were also likely to get a taste for vengeance when it was all over.
No, if they could just get in and out without …
A door off to the left slammed open with a crack. The men’s room! The gunman who emerged wore a suit and tie—another KGB man—and he had the barrel trained on Logan’s face. Logan dove for the floor, and a bullet whizzed past his head as he went down.
Creed’s AK-47 coughed for three seconds, then silence reigned as the steaming, bullet-ridden body of the KGB man slid down the wall, leaving streaks of gore behind.
“Sabretooth, I told you …” Logan was shouting as he leapt to his feet.
The cops had started to go for their guns.
“Keep your heads down or all your wives are widows!” Creed snarled in German.
His tone said he meant it. So had his actions. Most of the men in the Warsaw police station apparently understood enough German to get the gist of it, or they could take his meaning just from the tone of his voice. In any case, they stayed down, and Logan was glad.
“Maverick, we don’t have much time!” he roared down the hall. “We’re gonna have company soon!”
“I don’t see him!” Maverick shouted back. “He’s not in a cell!”
Logan cursed under his breath. He walked to the nearest police officer, put the muzzle of his AK-47 up against the man’s forehead and poked him with it hard enough to make blood well up in a little circle.
“Where is the man with red hair?” he demanded in Russian. “Now!”
The man sputtered, closed his eyes and prayed, and finally told them that Cassidy was being kept upstairs in an interrogation room.
“Maverick, get back in here!” he shouted.
As soon as he saw Maverick at the end of the hall, Wolverine sprinted for the stairwell over to the right. Silver Fox followed and after a few strides she was right behind him. At the top of the stairs were three doors, two of glass and one of thick oak with a barred window in it. This, he guessed, was the interrogation room. Probably soundproof, he thought. When the KGB interrogator arrived, they would want to put Cassidy somewhere where it didn’t matter how loud he screamed—not knowing how loud the Irishman could scream when he put his mind to it.
“Check the offices,” he told Fox.
She slid with her back against the wall, gun in the air, and kicked open one office door. As she moved to the next, Logan peered into the narrow bathroom across the hall. Then he looked in through the barred window of the interrogation room door.
It was dark, but he could see Cassidy. The hair was unmistakable, as was the blood on his jacket and on his face. He stood in a far corner of the room, warily staring at the door, probably wondering if he was about to be rescued or executed. Best to be ready for anything, Logan thought. Cassidy was no fool.
Wolverine backed down the hall a ways, put his weight forward, and ran at the door, head down. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad and muscular, not to mention durable. If he’d had a concussion grenade, or if he hadn’t given his AK-47 to Maverick, he might have tried another mode of entry. But they didn’t have time for any but the most extreme actions.
With a final thrust, he threw all his weight against the door as though he were a human battering ram. With the shotgun crack of splintering wood, its hinges and lock tore through shattered frame to crash to the floor of the interrogation room with Logan stumbling in behind it.
His shoulder spiked shards of agony along the bones of his arm and up to his neck, but already they were subsiding. Blood dripped from a gash on his forehead. Wolverine saw the astonishment on Cassidy’s badly beaten face, and he grinned through the blood that stained his teeth and made him look like a wild animal.
“Hello, Irish,” Logan said. “I’d like to stand around and trade spy stories with you, but we don’t really have that kinda time.”
“Aye,” Cassidy agreed, his voice a mangled croak. “I don’t suppose we do at that.”
Sean bolted from the room, past Silver Fox—to whom he nodded his greeting and thanks—and started down the stairs with Fox and Wolverine close behind.
“KGB gave you a good workin’ over, eh?” Logan asked.
“They did,” the Interpol agent replied. “And the Widow give me twenty thousand volts or so to my throat.”
“I was wonderin’ why you were still sittin’ in that cell,” Logan admitted.
“Well, now you know,” Fox said sharply. “Can we get out of here, please?”
They reached the bottom of the stairs. The cops’ weapons were in a pile in the middle of the room, and they still had their heads down. Creed and North were near the interior doors, AK-47s still aimed into the room, but Logan’s concerns all had to do with what they’d find outside now.
“You boys all right?” Logan asked.
“Right as rain, runt,” Creed snarled. “Now you got your girlfriend, can we go?”
“Sabretooth managed not to kill anyone for all of the minute and a half or so that you were upstairs,” Maverick said, his voice clipped, angry.
“It’s a record,” Silver Fox taunted.
“Managed not to kill Maverick through this whole op,” Creed growled. “Guess I deserve a medal for that alone.”
“They don’t give people like us medals,” Maveric
k replied. “They don’t even admit they knew us when we get blown apart by KGB thugs or Soviet troops.”
“Your point is well taken,” Cassidy said.
By then, Logan had passed through the wreckage of the interior doors, while Maverick kept his AK-47 trained on the inside of the police station. None of the cops had moved. They weren’t idiots. They’d give chase, sure, but they’d wait until the threat of instant death had passed.
Wolverine cracked the double oak exterior doors and saw nothing.
“Stash your weapons but keep ‘em handy,” he said quietly.
He cracked the door again, but this time, he closed it quickly.
“What?” Silver Fox asked, her face stricken.
Logan knew what she was thinking: that the op had gone sour, and it had done so because he’d insisted on coming after Cassidy. There was still that possibility, but he smiled to show her that she was wrong. In fact, her fears couldn’t be further from the truth.
“You guys want to catch up to the Widow? Figure out where she’s headed next, where she’ll cross the border?” he whispered.
“Get to the point,” Creed snarled.
“Don’t kill the man coming up the steps,” Wolverine explained. “We’re taking him with us.”
When the doorknob turned, they pulled the doors open, throwing the KGB’s interrogator off balance so that he nearly stumbled into the foyer. He looked up, his face burning with righteous anger. Anger that disappeared the moment he saw the weapons aimed at him and the hardness of the faces of those who wielded them.
“Turn around,” Wolverine said in Russian. “Down the stairs, to the right, and all the way down the side street to the next block. If you turn around, if you call out, if you try to run, you’re a dead man.”
“For once, things are going our way,” Silver Fox said softly.
“Don’t worry, squaw,” Creed sneered. “It’s bound to get down to bullets and blood any time now.”
* * *
Natasha was exhausted.
If she’d simply flown back from East Berlin, none of this would have happened. She’d already be home in bed; alone and lonely but at least getting some rest. But that wasn’t the way these missions worked. Public airlines were simply too conspicuous, and a private flight sometimes even more so. The KGB didn’t want their most secret and covert operatives to be traceable by any other agency, ally or enemy.
Christopher Golden Page 18
