The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  Or his spying skills were just a little rusty these days.

  McCall moved forward again. He could hear a low murmur of voices from the front of the church. He took out the Beretta. He turned a corner, pausing beneath a particularly grisly set of skulls and bones where a green ceramic snake had slithered through a hole in the cheekbone of one skull with its head sticking out of its left eye socket.

  Light was refracted through the stained-glass windows at the front of the church. McCall could see Kirov with the bodyguard talking to a man he hadn’t seen before, dressed in black. The second man, whom McCall had almost run into, had just walked up to them. They were conferring softly. McCall got it. That’s why Kirov needed a Ford Escape, besides perhaps the four-wheel drive capacity. He was picking up passengers. This Church of Bones was not their final destination. It was a rendezvous point. So not all of the local thugs knew the final destination at the same time. Kirov shook hands with the two new men, then they all turned and walked out the front door of the church.

  McCall ran back through the overlapping shadows to the side door, wrenched it open, spraying moonlight across the canopy of skulls and bones, then closed out the horrors behind him.

  He was glad to get out of there.

  He ran to the Pontiac Grand Prix, slid behind the wheel, fired it up, and pulled out of the small courtyard. He clipped his iPhone back onto the dashboard. On the LED screen, the small red blip in the lower right-hand corner began to pulsate again.

  McCall followed the Ford Escape out of the village of Kuntá Hora, going north-northwest into more rural areas. The two-lane highway ran through the fields and forests. The Ford Escape took a left turn. McCall was a mile behind them, using the GPS, but keeping his eye on the red pulsating blip down in the right-hand corner. He almost missed the side road in the darkness, turning into it at the last minute. It was badly paved and twisted and turned through a heavily wooded area. McCall passed four farmhouses, set back in the woods on either side of the road. But as soon as they dropped behind him, there were no further signs of habitation. The forest stretched out on both sides, dark and impenetrable.

  McCall wondered if they knew he was behind them.

  If they were leading him into a trap.

  The Ford Escape drove on for another six miles, the road deteriorating to almost a track, barely large enough for an oncoming car to pass—except there were no oncoming cars. McCall killed his headlights. He was still pretty far behind the Escape, but he didn’t want them to pull up and see his lights, even for a few seconds, in their rearview mirror. There might be another car on this road, going in the same direction, but McCall thought that would be unlikely. They were pretty deep into this forest. He still didn’t have the Escape in sight. He looked down at the red blip.

  It had stopped moving. Flared again. Another lit cigarette.

  McCall slowed. The moon came out of some streaming clouds like ragged dark banners across its face. He noted there was a stone wall on the left side of the road. He came to a small building, just a shell of bricks, no door or windows. He had no idea what it had once been. Ahead the road made a sharp right. He took the turn cautiously.

  There was no sign of the Ford Escape.

  McCall slowed again. The trees marched right down to the thin ribbon of road on both sides. There was nowhere McCall could see for the big four-wheel-drive vehicle to have pulled into. No clearing large enough for it to turn around. Then he noted a dirt road meandering into the forest on the right. He would have missed it if he’d been driving even at a slow speed. But he was at a walking crawl. He went past it, stopped, reversed back, and turned into it.

  The forest closed in around him like the trees wanted to envelope the vehicle. Moonlight shafted through the branches. He saw no shape of the Ford Escape through them. He had no choice but to continue down the thin, winding track. There was no way to turn around. He could reverse back to the other road, but then what? The red blip was in a dark mass on the GPS map, where there were no roads or distinguishing features.

  Ahead of him some vague buildings started to take shape. At first they were just dark smudges against the translucent sky. Then they came into sharper focus and McCall could see they were farm buildings. A house, another narrower building, a large barn and two smaller barns in front of it. He noted the stone wall had returned, now on both sides of the dirt track. Some of the stones had been dislodged and lay in the ditches on either side. McCall had to swerve to miss one of them lying in the center of the road. Branches scraped along the driver’s side of the Grand Prix as he avoided having one of his tires blow out.

  He saw the shape of the Ford Escape up ahead, parked near the large barn. Figures were standing beside it. Cigarette ends glowed like angry fireflies in the darkness. McCall saw a sign that said LITVINOV FARM in faded red letters, almost gray now with age. There was a narrow niche carved in the trees on his right. He pulled the Grand Prix into it, branches scraping on both sides of the vehicle. He stopped and killed the engine. The trees were too thick on his left side for him to see anything. He got out and discovered they were too thick with foliage for him to make his way through without a machete like he was in the Amazon jungle. He had no choice but to run back to the dirt road.

  He turned right on the road, bent low, running along the crumbling stone wall. As he got nearer to the farm buildings, he saw there were no lights anywhere. Windows in the big farmhouse were boarded up. A wooden porch was disintegrating. There were no lights on in the long, narrow building. Now that he was closer, he could see that a portion of the big old barn had fallen in on itself. Some kind of heavy windstorm. Maybe even a tornado. The smaller barns were intact, but their doors were buckled and they seemed to be sagging, ready to collapse at any moment. No one had worked this farm for a very long time.

  Another rendezvous point.

  McCall moved to a place where the stone wall turned at a sharp right angle and meandered along the front of the property. He crouched down, waiting. He regulated his breathing. Slow and easy. He had no idea what he was waiting for, but it must have been the same thing as the others, who made no move to any of the derelict farm buildings.

  Seven minutes later McCall heard it.

  The thump, thump, thump of helicopter blades.

  The chopper came over the farm buildings like some monstrous insect that had been freed from its lair. It was a black PZL W-3A helicopter, which once would have belonged to the Czech Air Force. It had been commandeered, or stolen, or decommissioned and put on the black market. The wash of the rotor blades swept across the small knot of men waiting for it. It landed in front of the partially collapsed main barn.

  The door to the chopper opened. Just for a moment there was the silhouette of a man in the doorway, not the pilot. McCall could see the shape of his face, long hair framing it.

  McCall had no way of knowing for sure, but his gut told him this was Diablo.

  The figure motioned, as if impatiently, to the knot of waiting men. They jogged forward from the parked Ford Escape.

  Unless McCall was going to hang on to one of the struts when the PZL W-3A ascended, he realized he’d better get the hell out of there.

  He ran along the stone wall, still bent low, back down the road. Looking to his left now, he saw there was an opening in the trees, barely room enough for a man to get through. He had an instant sense memory of the corridor of pipes he’d squeezed through in the subterranean tunnels below the streets of Manhattan. How claustrophobic and scary that experience had been. But he plunged into the woods, because it was a shortcut back to the Grand Prix, and he was out of time.

  Behind him he heard the helicopter lift off the ground.

  He scratched and bullied his way through the spaces between the trees, branches tearing at him, sharp needles of blood trickling down his face. He came out into the narrow cut where he’d left the vehicle. He jumped inside, fired it up, and reversed out at speed. He had no choice but to drive right onto the farm property in order to turn ar
ound. If the occupants of the chopper looked down, they might see him, but luck was on his side. The flags of dark clouds spread across the moon again and darkness descended on the farmland. McCall was still not using his headlights. He turned around in front of the derelict farmhouse and drove out of the farm, down the dirt track until he reached the smaller road. He took it back to the main road, turned north again and accelerated. There was no traffic on the road whatsoever. He could still hear the helicopter in the sky, but the thump thump of the rotors was getting more distant. He looked at the forest to his left and could just make out the shape of the chopper peeling off and disappearing as if being swallowed up in the trees.

  In another thirty seconds the sound of it had echoed off to silence.

  McCall turned on his headlights. They bathed the empty road ahead in such glaring contrast to the prior darkness that it was like someone had switched on beacons in a stadium. He looked at his iPhone still clipped to the dashboard. It showed the Grand Prix moving slowly down the glowing strip of road with blackness on both sides. The red blip in the lower right-hand corner was pulsating and moving again.

  McCall drove fast down the two-lane highway. He needed to find a turnoff on the left that did not dead-end in the forest. On the GPS it showed there was a slim thread of road about a hundred yards ahead. He turned into it.

  The red blip from Kirov’s lighter was growing fainter.

  It was almost out of range.

  McCall glanced at the speedometer. He was doing a hundred kilometers. The patchwork moonlight kept coming and going as the fingers of clouds grasped the moon and let it go. There could be rocks or other obstructions on the road that McCall would not see in time. If he broke down out here he’d be stranded. So he pushed it: 110 kilometers, 120. He glanced down at the right-hand corner of the LED screen.

  The blip was fading in and out now.

  McCall came to a crossroads, the forest a barrier in front of him, stretching away to the right and left.

  Which way?

  It was a toss-up.

  McCall turned left, following his gut, but that didn’t mean it was the way to go. But after five minutes, the pulsating red signal got a little brighter. It didn’t feather in and out as much. He was closer to the helicopter.

  There were no signs on the road. It just threaded its way through the dense forest on either side. McCall came to another turn on the right and took it. After ten minutes the red blip wavered in and out and got fainter. He stopped in the middle of the road, turned around, the back wheels driving into a ditch, and went back the way he’d come. He hit the road he’d been on and turned right and carried on down it. Three minutes later the red blip had gained in strength and kept pulsating.

  There was a sign up ahead in Czech that McCall could not read. It was rusted and grimy. Ahead of it a smaller road, unevenly paved, turned off at right angles. There was another sign, like the first one, just as cryptic.

  McCall took the turnoff.

  He drove for two miles with darkness crowding him on both sides, the moon buried under more cloud. Only the headlights washed brightly what was ahead.

  Which was nothing.

  Then he slammed his foot on the brake.

  The Grand Prix rolled right up to an immense tree that had fallen across the road, making it impassable. McCall got out of the car. In the headlights he saw that there was charring along the trunk. It had been hit by lightning, but not recently. No one had bothered to move it. Obviously this road was not used by anyone and led nowhere.

  Or led to somewhere completely remote that no one visited.

  McCall got into the Grand Prix, pulled it off the road on the edge of the trees, and turned around. It took five turns, but then he was facing back the way he’d come. He took a small flashlight out of the glove compartment that he’d put in there earlier. Checked the Beretta in the holster on his hip and the small Ruger .357 Magnum in the small of his back. He leaned down and touched the Circus Faka knife that was taped on his calf, the hilt facing up. Then he unclipped the iPhone from the dash and got out of the Grand Prix.

  The moon came out from under the cloud cover. It was like McCall had been hit by a spotlight. He felt completely vulnerable, out in the open. Nothing moved or stirred. There was only the sigh of the wind through the trees. He looked at the LED screen on the iPhone. The red blip pulsated. The signal was fairly strong again.

  And it was not moving.

  McCall climbed over the huge trunk of the dead tree. He ran down the road until it just petered out four hundred yards ahead. Forest converged and the road was gone. McCall plunged into the trees, keeping the iPhone in front of him, like a compass.

  The way ahead was almost impassable. McCall climbed over fallen tree trunks and slid through narrow gaps in the trees with the branches once again clawing at his face and body. He kept looking at the LED screen, but the red blip did not waver or lose its intensity of signal.

  He was close.

  Finally, a hundred yards farther on, the trees began to thin out a little. In two more minutes he was out of them. Ahead he could see some kind of installation through a high wire fence. There was coiled barbed wire running along the top of it, but it sagged in several places. It had been installed a long time ago. Beyond the fence was a series of pipes and buildings like a kind of alien landscape. McCall moved right up to the fence. There was a large building to his left in the center of several white interlocking pipes. More one-story buildings emanated from it. There were several blue pipes, twenty feet vertical, with a steering wheel device around them in rusting red, with spokes to turn them. Three huge silver canisters, looking like upended coffee cups, stood in front of the main building. Away in a haze of moonlight he saw what looked like three metal cigar holders, six feet high and twenty feet long, separated by wire. To his right were what looked like three big gray generators.

  He ran along the fence. Inside the facility there was a fat white pipe, also heading toward one of the low concrete buildings, but it lay in large pieces, rusting on the ground. There were several ditches dug in the ground, how deep he couldn’t tell, but he could see pipes in the one closest to the fence. One big fat pipe and a narrower one, running side by side. The ground itself was rocky with areas of weeds between the series of pipes and the low buildings. Behind the buildings were three gray concrete storage mounds, each one about thirty feet high.

  McCall ran farther on, looking for a break in the fence.

  There wasn’t one.

  He came across a rusted sign that said DRUZHBA PIPELINE and a map showing the myriad pipelines traveling down from Russia, snaking and crisscrossing their way into Europe. The pipeline started in Almetyevsk in Tartarsan, in the heartland of Russia, then to Mozyr in southern Belarus, where it split into a northern and a southern branch. McCall traced the spiderweb of oil pipes down to Uzhhorod where it split into lines to Slovakia and Hungary and then divided again at Bratislava, one branch going northwest into the Czech Republic.

  But this pumping station had been abandoned long ago. McCall was sure there was no oil gushing through any of the pipes. Something must have gone wrong with the equipment, or the company had run out of money, or else they had rerouted the oil coming in from Germany. This pumping station was a ghost station, rusting and eroding in the elements, nothing of value left there—no need for guards or a security system or a high fence, although no one had bothered to tear it down.

  McCall ran on another thirty feet and stopped.

  The PZL W-3A Czech helicopter was on the ground near the three huge fenced-off cigar-holders. A pilot was sitting in the doorway, smoking. There was no sign of anyone else.

  McCall took hold of the fence and climbed toward the top.

  It swayed alarmingly, like this section was just going to fall over with his weight.

  He stopped climbing, looking over at the helicopter. The pilot had his back to the fence. McCall climbed higher. The fence swayed some more, but held. McCall reached the top, climbed carefully o
ver the coiled barbed wire and down the other side. He jumped lightly to the ground and turned.

  The helicopter pilot still had his back to McCall, smoking, staring out at the forlorn, eerily deserted oil pumping station.

  Except McCall knew it was no longer deserted.

  This was Kirov and his assassin’s final destination.

  CHAPTER 41

  McCall didn’t want to kill the helicopter pilot. He might be part of the assassination mission, or he might have just been hired to fly a helicopter to this location, no questions asked.

  Besides, McCall might need a ride later.

  He headed toward the main pumping building, the one that the big white pipe—if it hadn’t been lying in pieces—fed into, also the maze of smaller white and yellow pipes and the three silver coffee-mug containers that reached up twenty feet. At least, McCall guessed that this was the main pumping building.

  The first black-suited guard was walking past where the three huge cigar holder-type pipes were fenced off. He was carrying a Skorpion vz 61 submachine gun. McCall recognized him as the man Kirov and his bodyguard had been talking to in the front of the Bone Church, before the bigger man whom McCall had nearly run into had joined them. The guard in front of him was just under six feet, dark curly black hair, his body language a little jumpy. Maybe it had been some time since he’d taken on a job like this.

  McCall came up behind him like a wraith, grabbing him, one arm going around his throat, the other twisting the submachine gun from his right hand. The Skorpion vz 61 hit the ground at their feet. McCall twisted and broke the guard’s neck. He slumped down into McCall’s arms. McCall lowered him to the broken concrete and dragged him behind one of the three squat gray generators. He debated whether to take the submachine gun, decided against it. Too bulky to carry, too constricting. He needed to move more freely. And he was carrying two handguns.

  McCall stepped out in the intermittent moonlight and looked toward the parked helicopter. The pilot had climbed back inside. McCall could see the shape of his figure moving briefly and then it was gone. Not a concern. Not yet.