by JT Brannan
Had the driver just been avoiding an accident?
But then the coach moved again, and the four people hiding in the small compartment were thrown violently to one side; and before they’d had time to recover, they were thrown back to the other.
The diesel engine was working overtime, blood and saline was spraying about the compartment from the drip, which had come away from Hejms’ unconscious body, and the vehicle continued to whip this way and that, this way and that; and through it all, Barrington could hear . . .
Gunshots.
Automatic gunfire, coming from all around them. They were well protected, in the center of the luggage compartment, but the others . . . the others . . .
‘What the hell’s going on out there?’ Drake gasped as he struggled to reapply the drip, still trying to do his job despite the world falling apart around them.
But they both knew what was happening; they’d been compromised, found by the Russian security services. How it happened, they might never know, might never live to find out.
Barrington left Navarone – who reverted to rocking himself back and forth, not seeming to notice the wild rocking of the coach – and grabbed her MP7 submachine gun. Then she pulled out a pistol and handed it to the doctor. He looked at it reluctantly, looked back at the body of Hejms, weighing what to do; then finally decided that if they didn’t fight their way out of this mess, then the man would be as good as dead anyway, and took the handgun from her.
He checked the magazine, verified there was a round in the chamber, and nodded to her in acknowledgement of their situation.
The bus was still sliding wildly from side to side, the sound of gunfire as loud as ever, and now Barrington thought she could hear screams coming from above, although whether they were from pain or terror, she couldn’t tell.
And then the walls of the compartment slewed to one side and Barrington felt her stomach lurching, vomit in her mouth, and she knew the bus was tipping . . . tipping too far . . .
The point of no return was reached, and the large vehicle finally lost its battle with the laws of physics and crashed heavily down onto its side; everyone in the compartment fell sideways, lying one on top of the other in a chaotic jumble as the coach continued to slide for some distance across the smooth highway, across rough land . . .
‘Hang on!’ Barrington warned.
‘To what?’ Drake gasped, dazed from the impact.
‘Anything!’
Another impact followed as the sliding bus crashed into something larger and more solid that it was, smashing Barrington and the doctor into the sideward-facing floor of the compartment, driving all the air from their lungs. Drake’s head struck the floor, and he fell, barely conscious, to the wall below. Barrington had braced herself, and yet the impact left her badly shaken and almost incapable of thought, of action.
Then her instincts took over and she shook her head, getting a grip of herself.
The coach was at a standstill, the great diesel engine silent now; and above the roaring blood rushing in her ears, she heard shouts, gunshots, breaking glass, explosions, and – above it all – the screaming, so much screaming.
She wondered how her teammates were doing, what they were doing, even as she subconsciously checked the safety of her submachine gun and started to take deep breaths to center herself, to prepare her for action.
Because she knew this hidden compartment wasn’t going to stay hidden for long, and there was only way that she was going to survive.
She would have to fight.
5
Killing the men who had been following Irina Makarova had been easy.
She had simply lured them down an alleyway, away from the prying eyes of the mobile surveillance teams in their cars, then doubled back on herself, coming out behind them. A few quick strokes of her knife, and that was that.
Strangulation was her specialty, but it was hard to accomplish against two opponents, and she was happy to use a blade. She was an expert shot with a pistol and a rifle too, but the two men had hardly necessitated such measures.
Makarova had already known they were there, of course; she hadn’t needed the warning from her superiors that the mission might have been compromised. The way she saw it, her discovery here in Athens as Kristīne Ozoliņš was a part of the mission, although it had been planned for the revelation to come after she had completed the assignment.
But the fact that the intelligence services had been pre-warned mattered little to the outcome; all it meant was that she would have to exercise additional caution for the remainder of the operation.
Now that she had taken care of the active surveillance, she could move unimpeded, and she was already on her way to her final destination.
When the SVR station had contacted her with the warning about the CIA operation, she had asked how they had found out, was surprised to hear about the infiltration of Yasenevo. She’d thought back to that figure outside Dementyev’s office, the man who had suddenly retreated back into the shadows. Had her initial gut reaction been right? Had the man she’d seen been a foreign agent?
But it no longer mattered; Makarova was a pragmatic woman, and what was done, was done.
She had been surprised to hear about the raid on Akvadroma, the injuries to Dementyev; but she had been assured that the foreign agents were being dealt with, and she had no reason to doubt the efficiency of the SVR when it came to violence.
She was a shining testament to that herself.
Killing the two CIA agents, Irina Makarova reflected, had been easy because killing had always been easy – one of the reasons she had been selected by the SVR in the first place, she supposed.
Part of it was due to her upbringing, of course; although Makarova’s place of birth was given as Perm, she had actually been born in the huge prison complex sixty kilometers north of that town, in the foothills of the Ural Mountains.
Her mother had been arrested for speaking out against the Soviet regime, put into the forced labor camp as a political prisoner. Her father had been one of the prison guards, and Makarova’s existence was due to the violent rape of her mother by that drunken son of a bitch.
Her mother had concealed the pregnancy, but there had been no hiding the baby that eventually emerged, and Makarova’s early memories of life in that prison camp were just images really – dark and shadow, men coming to her mother’s cell, hurting both of them, forcing them to do things, bad things . . .
But she had cut the details out of her memory altogether.
Pain and shadow, that was all she could remember.
And then, in 1991, her mother had been pardoned and released, Irina along with her; a tortured and brutalized eight-year-old girl who had never seen the real world.
Her mother had been a broken woman, barely able to work and certainly not capable of looking after a small child on her own. She therefore fell into a string of relationships, boyfriend after boyfriend, and Irina didn’t remember a lot about these people either, beyond the fact that they were cruel and hard, and always made clear that they objected to having to support a child. Within the sea of faces, most shunned her, some hurt her, others did far worse, and none were ever kind.
She could not recall ever feeling the warmth of love from her mother either, and – looking back – she could understand why. Irina was a constant reminder to her mother of the rape, of the cruel blow she had been dealt in life. It was only her mother’s strict Orthodox upbringing that had forced her to keep the girl at all.
They had moved from town to town after being discharged from Perm, eventually settling in Nizhny Novgorod, a small city four hundred kilometers from Moscow, where her mother had eventually remarried.
Irina Makarova was in her teens by that time, surly and withdrawn and yet – even then – almost otherworldly in her beauty. It had, of course, brought the wrong sort of attention, both from boys at her high school, and from her stepfather. The boys, she had been able to handle; she been brought up fighting, and – after
the first couple of broken noses – they soon learned to leave her alone. Her stepfather, however, was a different story, and he would visit her every night, taking from her what he wanted.
After he left her room, she would hold herself tight and rock herself to sleep, forever dreaming of what she would do to him, how she would finally take her revenge.
It had been one day after school that she had done it, returning home to find him arguing with her mother, hitting her time and again, without stopping. She’d raced in, thrown herself on the man only to be slapped hard and thrown straight off. She’d looked across the kitchen tiles at her mother lying there on the floor, eyes staring up, open but empty, and she’d snapped, gabbed a steak knife from the table and run it right through her stepfather’s chest.
The blade had pierced his heart, and she knew that he was dead before his eyes were closed, his huge, sweaty body slumping to the floor next to his wife.
Even at the age of fifteen, she had managed to regain her composure with remarkable speed. She went to check on her mother, already sure of what she would find when she took her pulse – nothing.
Her mother was dead, but Irina did not mourn her as other daughters might; after all, the woman had hardly been a mother to her over all these years, the brutality of prison draining the milk of human kindness from her in its entirety.
With no desire to return to prison herself, Irina had wiped the knife handle clean of her prints, then placed it into her mother’s hand, arranging the bodies into more suitable positions. It would be clear what had happened – a man was beating his wife (and the neighbors would certainly attest that this hadn’t been the first time), and she had finally snapped and stabbed him, before succumbing to the injuries she had already sustained.
Looking back on events now, Makarova could see that this was probably not a typical reaction for a fifteen-year-old; but, she understood, she’d had a far from typical life.
A natural athlete, most of the girl’s friends were from the various sports teams she was a part of, and she had left the bodies where they were and gone to meet some friends from her volleyball team at the large Fantastika shopping mall nearby, pretending she had gone straight there from school.
She’d asked her friends back to her house afterward, and – when they opened the front door and saw the shocking scene in front of them – Irina had a ready-made alibi, and several witnesses.
Irina had gone to live with one of her volleyball friends while the police had investigated, but they didn’t take long; such a case was open and shut, as simple as they came.
She was allowed to stay with her friend’s family after the investigation, as they had grown to like her; she was already developing the ability to mask her true self, and project the type of person that people wanted her to be.
Her looks continued to attract plenty of attention, and she had even been offered modelling work; but at the interview, it was obvious that work was the last thing on the man’s mind, and he had tried to take advantage of her.
She had killed him in his own studio, smashing his skull in with his camera; and while she had not enjoyed it, she wouldn’t have been completely honest if she didn’t admit to a certain feeling of satisfaction with her work.
She had covered her tracks again, but vowed never to get involved in that industry again, no matter what she was offered.
She had finally graduated from high school with exceptional grades and – with the thought in her head of moving to America, to start life afresh – she had enrolled at Moscow State University to improve her English.
It was there that her talent for languages had been discovered, and there that she was first contacted by the SVR.
It had not been work that she had even considered before, but there was something about it that appealed to her, and she had agreed to undergo the tests.
Her psychological profile – along with her looks – had ensured her recruitment to the Sparrow School, a unit which trained women – and sometimes men – in sexual entrapment, the so-called ‘honey trap’ tactics that were still used by the Russian Federation.
She had proved herself more than capable in this area, learning not only the physical skills but also the more subtle psychological aspects of seduction, but one of her trainers identified in her something else, a hidden streak of hatred and anger that illustrated where her true talents lay.
She was subsequently indoctrinated into the world of ‘wet work’, what the Russians used as a euphemism for assassinations, and finally – at the age of twenty-one – she discovered something that she was truly good at, something she had a gift for, and which satisfied her both personally and professionally.
It wasn’t that she enjoyed killing people; rather, she enjoyed the difficulty, the chess-game of planning the attack and then getting away with it afterward. The killing, she could take or leave, it was simply a task that needed to be done; it was everything else that made life worth living.
And as Irina Makarova headed through the streets of Athens to her target, avoiding street CCTV and the gazes of police officers and security guards, she found herself pleased that the mission might be discovered, that people were looking for her.
It heightened the thrill, and she knew that she needed that thrill, to fill the void that was her life.
6
Barrington knew that they had to move; they were sitting ducks in the hidden compartment, and it was only wishful thinking to believe that they wouldn’t be found. And with the bus side-on, the protection of the luggage on either side of them was gone; only the metal chassis floor remained, and it was conceivable that it wouldn’t stand up to repeated gunfire forever. There was also the possibility of explosions, of fire, and the last thing she wanted was to be burnt to death in a steel box.
She moved carefully to the rear of the compartment, where a small concealed hatch – the only way in or out – opened up into the small onboard toilet. She put an ear to the door and listened, but all the could hear was gunfire, shouts and screams.
She took a deep breath and – MP7 raised in front of her – pushed open the hatch and edged out slowly.
There was a sharp intake of breath, a muffled scream, and Barrington was about to fire when she realized it was two small girls, cowering in fear, using the tiny bathroom for shelter.
She put a finger to her mouth, telling them to keep quiet, and called back to Drake. ‘Two kids,’ she whispered.
‘Shit,’ came the reply. ‘Shit, I’m coming.’ The doctor shuffled through the hatch and nodded. ‘I’ll keep an eye on them,’ he whispered back to Barrington. ‘Get on out there and see what the hell’s happening, okay?’
Barrington nodded in response and unlocked the bathroom door, which lay sideways on; she peered through, saw stairs running across her to the main passenger area. She moved through quickly and heard the door close behind her.
She edged sideways across the stairs, and eventually came out into the passenger area, devastation all around her.
The body of a woman – the children’s mother? – was draped around a seat just on the other side, face embedded with shattered glass from the bus windows, a bullet hole in her gut.
Other bodies lay strewn across the bus’s interior, men and women, young and old. Some were injured, others were clearly dead.
She could hear rounds continuing to pepper the vehicle, but not the sound of return fire from inside. She looked up the aisle, looking for the rest of her team, but could only see . . .
A chill passed through her when she saw the body of Gary Hart, half of his face shot away, weapon abandoned at his side.
No!
But there was no time for emotion, and she crawled past the dead and broken bodies to the rear window, pausing to get her breath before she edged further forward, peering outside for the first time.
They were in a stand of trees just off the highway, snow piled up high around them, flecked with blood. Open countryside stretched off in every direction for miles around, with
not a building to be seen anywhere.
On the highway, a bank of vehicles had stopped, blocking the road and providing cover for the masked shooters, outfitted in body armor and assault vests. They were blasting away with everything in the arsenal, but had not yet moved in, and Barrington crawled further out into the snow until she could see why.
The light was fading with the rapid onset of dusk, but Barrington could see that the two CIA chase cars were nearby, twenty feet apart and at angles to the broken coach. She saw Mike Devlin behind one, using the hood as a rest as he fired off his shots nice and slow, obviously picking his targets. Another man – an agent from the CIA that had been in one of the cars – was busy reloading his own weapon, and Barrington could see two more bodies in the snow nearby. One was another CIA officer, the other was . . .
Damnit, it was Ken Walgren, arms and legs splayed unnaturally across the frozen ground, rifle lying several feet away, dark blood covering the distance between them.
She bit down hard on her anger, on her sorrow, and looked to the second car, where Daw Chaiprasit was holding off the attack with another CIA officer.
The bodies of tourists that had tried to escape and been killed in the crossfire lay everywhere, and Barrington was sickened by the carnage, the horrifying death and destruction picked up in the reflection of car headlights across the snowy ground.
Two of her own men were dead, two more injured and trapped inside the bus. The others were doing a good job of holding off the assault force, but they only had so much ammunition and time was something they didn’t have; they’d run out of bullets soon, and then there would be nothing to stop the Russian forces moving in.
Barrington sighed deeply as she decided what she needed to do.
And in the end, there was only one thing she could think of.
Barrington was out of the bus now, sheltering on the far side, using the bulk of the bus for cover. Next to her were the CIA doctor, Kurt Hejms, Jake Navarone and the two little girls. Together with Drake, they’d dragged some of the dead bodies into the hidden compartment, left the rest of the dead where they were, and taken out those still alive from the bus, pulling them into deep snow a few feet away from the vehicle.
