Gambit

by David Hagberg

Vetrov nodded. The man was decent, unlike the bitch flying right seat. He didn’t give a shit about her, he didn’t think that he would even fuck her given the chance, but it was too bad that the pilot would also have to die in thirty minutes.

  The men were stirring when Vetrov went aft.

  “Time?” Silin asked.

  “T minus thirty,” Vetrov told them. “If you have to take a piss, do it now. No time for a shit. I want a final check of weapons, oxygen masks, and night vision optics, which we will wear on the way down.”

  No one said a thing. They knew the drill, their objective, and their orders.

  Vetrov took a bottle of vodka from the locker Silin had opened, took a deep draft, and held it up in salute. “Yeb vas. Udachi,” he said. Fuck your mother. Good luck.

  He handed the bottle to Silin, who took a drink and passed it to Orlov.

  “This time tomorrow, each of us will be in Athens in bed with a whore,” Vetrov said. “And we’ll be rich bastards!”

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  In Monaco, Hammond got a bottle of Krug, and he and Susan went down to the beach, which was deserted at this hour of the morning. The chaise longues in all the cabanas had been covered. Susan held the wine and flutes as Hammond uncovered a couple of them and pulled the small table between them, and they sat down.

  “It’s to be tonight, then?” Susan asked. She’d been subdued ever since the baccarat salle.

  “It should start around two,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “In a half hour or so.”

  “Jesus,” Susan said. “And then it’ll be finally over with, right, Thomas? No matter the outcome?”

  Hammond opened the bottle of wine and poured. They touched glasses and drank. “No matter what,” he said.

  * * *

  Bender and Alicia watched from the top-floor windows facing the interior of the island as McGarvey and Pete disappeared into the darkness. The circular bedroom had floor-to-ceiling windows that opened in every direction. But the ceiling was very tall, and above them, the kerosene lantern, large Fresnel lens, and gear drive that rotated the system when the lighthouse was operational were still in place.

  It seemed surreal to Bender. Everything about the situation here and now seemed odd to him. He was an FBI agent but a deskbound man. An academic. A thinker, not a field officer like Alicia. And he wondered how the hell he’d managed to talk himself into it.

  “You’re an ambitious man, Clarke,” the director had told him the morning of his official welcoming to the Bureau.

  “Yes, sir, I am,” Bender told him.

  “You passed Quantico, though not with any distinction. But you did pass.”

  “I joined the Bureau not to arrest the bad guys but to figure out what they did wrong and where to find them,” Bender said. And thinking about that morning now, he realized just how cocky he must had sounded.

  “Which is why we hired you,” Kallek had said three years ago. “Be careful that your ambition doesn’t take you in the wrong direction.”

  Prophetic words, he mused now. But he needed an operation like this to add to his résumé, which would look good a few years down the line when he figured he would become the assistant director of the Bureau. And then Congress.

  “You okay, Mr. Bender?” Alicia asked. She was leaning against the frame of the open window, from where she could look out but still be in the shadows, all but invisible to anyone coming up the hill.

  “I’m a little nervous,” he said, surprised that he had made such an admission.

  Alicia smiled. “You’d be a fool if you weren’t,” she said. “I figure my heart rate is topping a hundred.”

  “I guess I’m no fool.”

  “But you’ve got guts. Anyway, whoever is coming will have to get past McGarvey and his wife, and the two of them have quite a rep. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to draw down against either of them.”

  “The man is fifty. And everybody loses their edge sooner or later, even the best of them.”

  “And he goes down to the Farm every four or five months to keep his edge, and from what I’ve been told, the kids and the instructors have a lot of respect for him.”

  “Has he done Quantico?”

  “A couple of years ago, and he passed with flying colors. I had a talk with Ed Ames when I found out we were going to have a chat with McGarvey. He said he was willing to offer the man the job of running the place, but he was too intimidated to pop the question. Ed’s a tough guy and isn’t easily intimidated.”

  “Everyone makes a mistake sooner or later. The odds sometimes get too big.”

  “Not this time,” Alicia said. “My money’s on them.” She nodded in the direction Mac and Pete had gone.

  * * *

  At his apartment in Moscow, it was coming up on four in the morning, and Tarasov was in bed with his mistress, Larissa Kiselnikova, the former Bolshoi prima ballerina whose feet were so ugly, he kidded her from time to time that it was a wonder he loved her.

  “But it’s your crooked nose, Mika, that makes me ashamed to introduce you to my friends.”

  They’d been out dancing at the Pravda Club, one of Moscow’s top spots, until just an hour ago, when they’d returned here, dismissed the chief of the house staff, took a shower together, and made love.

  Larissa was half-asleep lying next to him, one bare breast exposed, when his encrypted sat phone chimed. It was Yuri Sepelev, his computer geek contact in the GRU.

  “The EUTELSAT bird covering block thirteen will go dark in T minus five once I get the signal from the ground.”

  EUTELSAT was the European Telecommunications Satellite Organization, which administered all the communications satellites used by the forty-nine member states. Thirteen was the main bird that serviced Greece and its Aegean Islands, including Serifos.

  “Nothing must be traced back to us.”

  “I know my job, sir,” Sepelev said.

  He was just a kid barely out of his teens, but he was highly respected in the Russian intelligence community, and like most junior officers, his pay was terrible. Since he’d began doing favors for Tarasov, he’d been able to move to a nicer apartment and buy a BMW and all the computer toys he’d ever dreamed of.

  “You should be getting the call within the next quarter hour at the latest. Let me know when it’s done.”

  “Their techs will be all over it within minutes.”

  “How long will we have until they fix the problem or bring up another satellite?”

  “That’s just it. They won’t be able to pinpoint the problem, let alone fix it, and when they try to switch to another bird, my program will follow them.”

  “Very good,” Tarasov said.

  “But you must understand that nothing lasts forever. I’ll want word the moment I can withdraw.”

  “It shouldn’t be long.”

  “How long?”

  “An hour, tops,” Tarasov said. “If it took longer than that, it would mean that the team had failed.”

  “I can manage that,” Sepelev said. “The remainder of my fee will be paid into my account the moment the bird comes back online.”

  “Da,” Tarasov said, but the phone was dead.

  * * *

  Vetrov and his team got up on signal at 0155 and stacked up in the aisle aft of the portside hatch.

  He phoned the contact number stored in the sat phone he’d been given on base. It was answered by a man.

  “Da.”

  “We’re five minutes out from the drop site.”

  “Udachi,” the man said, and the connection went dead.

  SIXTY-NINE

  It was just before two when McGarvey and Pete got to the bottom of the saddle three hundred yards from the dark lighthouse above their position, and about the same distance in the opposite direction to the nearest buildings, on which no lights were showing.

  The scrub brush was thick here, but the rocks were mostly too small to offer any protection, though as long as they kept low, they wouldn’t be visible even with ni
ght vision goggles.

  “It’s beautiful at this time of the night,” Pete said softly.

  The lights in town across the bay came mostly from the hotels and the commercial docks on the other side of the inlet. The moonless evening sky up here was dark enough to see the stars and even some of the pale Milky Way.

  “Yes, it is,” McGarvey said.

  “Good for stargazing, but I wouldn’t want to have a picnic here.”

  McGarvey’s phone vibrated, but it had switched automatically from satellite to cell tower mode.

  “EUTELSAT’s thirteen just went off-line,” Otto said.

  “It’s started,” McGarvey said.

  “Yes, and Lou’s best guess is that it’s the work of a hacker in the GRU. They’ve got some pretty good people over there, same unit that hacked into the presidential elections in ’16 and again in ’20.”

  Mac looked up at the sky, searching for a small star or strobe light that was moving. “How long will it stay down until the system is cleared?”

  “Within twenty minutes, I’d suspect. But if the Russians are half as good as I think they are, they’ll infect the backup bird when the techs try to bring it up. And there’ll be no real urgency because the traffic is very light at this time of the morning. So I’d say that they’ve bought themselves an hour, tops.”

  “Can they take the cell tower down on this side of the island?”

  “There’s only the one west of you at nineteen hundred feet, the island’s highest elevation,” Otto said. “And yes, if they have the right equipment, they can block its signals indefinitely.”

  “We’re ready,” McGarvey said, and he thought he spotted something very high up and to the south. “Stand by.”

  “What is it?” Pete asked.

  “South, about twenty degrees below overhead. A thin line moving across the stars.”

  After a couple of moments, Pete spotted it. “There,” she said. “But what is it? A cloud?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” McGarvey said. “It’s the contrail of a high-flying jet.”

  “Hold on a mo,” Otto said.

  “Is it them?” Pete asked.

  “Otto’s checking.”

  “Nothing is scheduled from that—” Otto said, but was cut off in mid-sentence.

  “The cell tower just went down,” McGarvey said.

  “We can’t warn Bender or Alicia.”

  “They’ll figure it out,” McGarvey said. He unslung the MP7 from his shoulder and fired a short burst into the sky.

  * * *

  “Jesus, it’s started just like he predicted it would,” Bender said, going over to where Alicia stood at the open window.

  She held up a hand. “Wait.”

  “Maybe we should go out there; they might need help.”

  “Shut the fuck up, sir.”

  The night was deathly still—no other noise, no other gunshots.

  “What is it?”

  “That was the other room broom,” Alicia said. “But there was no return fire. McGarvey just warned us that the fur ball is about to go down.” She glanced at Bender. “Just take it easy, okay? I don’t want you shooting your own foot, and I especially don’t want to be shot in the back.”

  He was looking past her out the window toward the bottom of the depression. “But how the hell will we be able to tell who it is if someone comes up here? I mean, it could be McGarvey or his wife.”

  “When they’re close enough for us to shoot, they’ll be close enough for us to recognize them,” Alicia said. “Stay cool, because it’ll be a while before anyone gets this far. Try to reach them on your sat phone.”

  Bender holstered his Glock 19M and tried his sat phone. “No signal,” he said, looking up.

  Alicia laid the room broom McGarvey had given her aside and tried her cell phone, but she had no signal either. “Whoever is coming is well equipped enough to take out the satellite as well as the island’s cell phone tower. It means they know what they’re doing, and they’ll be well armed.”

  “Better than we are,” Bender said.

  The one round in the chamber and the four standard-issue 15-round magazines they carried gave them sixty-one pistol shots each, plus the half-dozen 40-round mags for the room broom Mac had left for them, for an additional 240 rounds.

  “But we have the high ground, and they won’t know that we’re here,” Alicia told him. What she left unsaid was that if whoever was coming managed to get past McGarvey and Pete, then this could end up as another Little Bighorn.

  * * *

  Vetrov and his five operators checked each other’s equipment, especially the parachutes, then they and the pilot and copilot went on oxygen.

  “Drop in two minutes,” Borisov called from the cockpit.

  Darina came back. “Are you ready?” she asked.

  Vetrov gave the thumbs-up.

  “I’ll be glad to get rid of you bastards,” she said. She undogged the hatch, but before she could pull it in and to the right, Vetrov took out his pistol and shot her in the head at point-blank range.

  The noise was soft but loud enough for the pilot to hear it and understand what was happening. He was reaching for a pistol in a compartment beside his left leg when Vetrov came forward and shot him in the back of the head.

  “Hatch,” he spoke into his lapel mic, and almost immediately, the inside of the aircraft was hit with near tornado-force swirling winds, the temperature dropping to nearly below zero almost immediately.

  He found the fuel dump switch, guarded by a red cover, and switched it, and by the time he got back to the open hatch, the plane had already began to climb because of the decreasing weight.

  “Teper, teper, teper!” he shouted. Now, now, now! He stepped out of the aircraft, the wind slamming into his body like he’d hit a brick wall.

  He immediately stabilized his altitude, head down, body angled forward, arms to either side for steering, and he began the long drop from ninety-five hundred meters to less than four hundred before he would open his chute. At forty meters, he would release his equipment bag, letting it fall five meters on its lanyard.

  He checked his helmet’s small rearview mirror to make sure that his crew was stacked up directly on his six, everyone’s chute in good order.

  The island, laid out like something from a virtual reality game, was exactly like the images they had studied over the past thirty-six hours while they were in transit. The harbor town of Livadi well off to the southeast to the right of his glide path was where it was supposed to be.

  He angled slightly left, which would bring him across the bay and put him on the ground at fifty meters below the lighthouse. His operators would assemble at his landing site, and within ninety seconds they would have stuffed their parachutes in one large plastic bag, taken out their submachine guns, switched on their night vision goggles, and started up the hill.

  They knew the drill, and they had their orders, so none would have to be given verbally. They were stealth fighters, and Vetrov was proud of what they were capable of.

  SEVENTY

  “Pick a bush and curl up next to it with your eyes skyward, your pistol in hand,” McGarvey said.

  Pete was momentarily confused. “What?”

  “Get down and roll up in a ball. If they jumped out around thirty thousand feet, it’ll take them three minutes of free fall before they open their chutes, and the clock has already started. They’ll be equipped with night vision goggles, but at any distance, the resolution won’t be good enough to tell us from scrub brush.”

  “I got it, but I hope they haven’t figured it out, too,” Pete said.

  “They’ll be watching the lighthouse, and we should be behind them if they’re accurate with their landing.”

  “If these guys are Spetsnaz, they’ll be just about as good as our SEAL Team 6 operators, and they should nail it.”

  “I’m counting on it,” McGarvey said. “Now get on the ground and make like a bush.”

  Pete pulled out her Glo
ck, lay down on her left side next to a bush, and pulled her knees up to her chest, putting her in a position so that her gun hand was free and she could look up at the sky as well as see McGarvey curled up a few feet away.

  “This okay?” she asked.

  “Fine. But don’t open fire until I do, and don’t waste ammunition shooting blind. Pick your target, and make sure he goes down. There’s bound to be six or more of them, and I want to even the odds as fast as possible before they turn around and start shooting back.”

  “By then, with any luck, Bender and Alicia should start, catching whoever’s coming in a cross fire.”

  “With any luck,” McGarvey said. “Keep frosty, wife.”

  “You, too, husband.”

  * * *

  Alicia had found a pair of Steiner mil spec binoculars hanging on a peg just within the doorway to the bedroom, and she laid her room broom aside and got them. First, she scanned the ground that sloped gently down to a narrow little valley where McGarvey said he and Pete would position themselves.

  But making several slow sweeps where she thought they might be, she couldn’t make them out. Either they had moved somewhere else or they were damned good at finding hiding spots.

  “What do you see?” Bender asked. He was nervous.

  “Nothing yet,” Alicia said, and she looked skyward toward the north in the direction McGarvey figured the jumpers would be coming from. But if they’d made a HALO jump and were already in the air, they would be moving above 150 miles per hour. They would be dressed in black and would be nearly impossible to spot.

  She laid the binoculars aside and picked up the submachine gun.

  “Still nothing?” Bender asked.

  “Nothing,” Alicia said. Earlier, her nerves had been jumping, but now that she knew an attack was imminent, she’d calmed down, her heart rate barely above sixty. It had been the same for her in the Marines. As soon as a firefight started, she’d gotten steady, almost completely forgetting any fears she would normally have, a slight smile on her lips.