by Mark Greaney
Gentry descended, hand over hand, quickly and adroitly climbing down the ladder.
“Who the hell is flying the microlight?” someone asked.
“No one,” said Parks. “He’s stabilized the wings, trimmed them to maintain a straight descent, probably by tying the control bar in position. He’s trusting that it will stay on its glide path till he lands.”
“Bet he’s going for the roof,” someone said into his mic. And then he added, softly, “Jee-sus, this guy is brazen.”
Lee Babbitt pulled off his headset and grabbed Parks by the arm, drawing him closer. With his eyes still on the screen, Babbitt spoke quickly, “Deploy the assets. Trestle to the target location. Alert Jumper Actual in Berlin and tell him to get his team on standby, ready to react to intel from the UAV. I want everyone on the move and prepared to tail Court off the X to his safe house, or wherever the hell he’s going, before the last shell casing hits the floor at Sid’s place.”
“Roger that.” Parks then asked, “What about the singleton?”
Babbitt turned away from the screen for the first time since entering the signal room. He blew out a long sigh. “He called it, didn’t he? Gentry is doing just exactly what the singleton said he’d do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Babbitt thought for a moment. With a quick nod he said, “Okay. Establish comms with Dead Eye. Have him drop his current op. I want him wheels up within the hour.”
Parks left his boss’s side and headed to a glass-enclosed office off the signal room’s main floor.
Babbitt stayed where he was; he watched the image of the man below the microlight again. Gentry was now less than eighty feet above the ground, just a few moments from crossing over the outer wall of Sid’s dacha.
Babbitt reached behind him and, without taking his eyes from the screen, pulled a rolling chair away from a desk.
He sat down. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing left for us to do but to sit back and observe a master at work. It’s not every day you get to watch the Gray Man kill in real time.”
THREE
Court hung halfway between the cockpit of the microlight, thirty-five feet above, and the bottom rung of the rope ladder, thirty-five feet below. A few weeks earlier, in a manner he tried to pass off as idle conversation, he’d asked his Russian glider instructor if someone could hang suspended from a microlight in flight, and the young man had looked at the American like he was insane. He explained that it could be done, in theory, if the wings were stabilized and the center of gravity of the suspended person was directly below the vehicle, but a craft the size Gentry was using could not handle the weight of two people and, needless to say, no one would be foolish enough to try such a stunt below the microlight with no one at the controls. Court laughed off his stupid question, nodded politely, and then went back to his room to fashion the hooks and straps to act as his copilot, and a rope ladder carriage that could pull from both sides of the cockpit equally.
Several times when flying alone over snow-covered fields south of Moscow, Gentry had sat in the microlight with his hands in his lap, the hooks and straps doing the flying. He’d also practiced power-off landings, piloting the craft back to earth without using the engine, usually placing his wheels within a few yards of his target touchdown point, although a few times he tumbled into the snow after coming down too fast and hitting too hard.
Now Gentry flew through the night above the southern wall of the compound, more or less on course, though he was coming in a little lower than he’d planned. He looked down at the property below and saw several outbuildings south of the main house, and near them two fire pits, around which several men sat, still awake at four A.M. Simple tents were erected here and there, and on the muddy drive and snow-covered lawn, snowmobiles sat parked haphazardly, some with their headlights on and illuminating the southern portion of the compound. Trucks were parked near a tin-roofed barn, and two men with flashlights walked between them.
And Court Gentry sailed above them all. He knew he was silent, and there was no way anyone below would see him without night vision optics and a reason to be looking up in the sky, but he could not help but wish he had a free hand with which to draw his pistol.
There were a lot of guys down there in the open air, which meant there would probably be even more guys inside the warm buildings.
But Court knew this going in. Gregor Sidorenko was no typical mobster. While he himself was urbane and mega rich, his personal security needs were handled by a rough crew of young Russian skinheads, all well armed, if not particularly well trained. Sid was their patron, and in return for his patronage they lived on and around his various properties, committed low-skill crime on his behalf, and kept gangsters and competing Bratvas off his territory.
Court’s intelligence reports suggested there would be more than forty goons on the property tonight, since most every Saturday they all came to the compound to drink and to party and to engage in their favorite pastime—bare-knuckled brawling, beating one another to a bloody pulp and then falling over piss-drunk.
Though Court would much rather pit himself against the normal guard force of twenty or so, he knew that many of those on the premises tonight would be shitfaced or passed out completely, and the large number of armed warm bodies would lead to a groupthink around the compound that no one in their right mind would come after Sid this evening.
As Court hung on, flying through the sky toward the roof, he allowed for the possibility that anyone who thought this might well be correct.
He was not in his right mind.
But now all his attention was focused on his immediate objective. The roof was steeply angled and just darker than the snow-covered forest beyond, and in the center of the mansion, a round clear dome bulged out like a blister. Court had seen the dome on overhead photos; it was an odd architectural feature for a forest dacha in Russia, even one as monstrous as this.
Court scanned the length of the roof as he neared, looking for stationary guards or lookouts positioned there, but he saw no one.
When he was less than fifty yards from contact, he realized he was veering to the left and dropping too low. He knew that by descending the ladder he would lower the center of gravity under the wings and cause the craft to lose altitude, and he’d allotted for this, but it seemed now he’d underestimated just how much effect hanging below the cockpit had on his flight path. As he watched the building rush up closer, he realized he now ran the risk of passing wide to the left, missing the roof altogether and tumbling to a landing on the lawn surrounded by drunk and armed goons or—and this could conceivably be worse—slamming into the flat wall of the mansion below the roof. If that happened, he knew the Russians would wake up in the morning to find a battered and frozen dead man on the ground next to the wall, surrounded by bloodred snow. He would be ID’d as Sid’s nemesis, the microlight would be discovered, and everyone would have a good laugh about the world’s greatest assassin dying while executing the world’s most asinine plan.
But Court wasn’t going to let that happen. He race-climbed the ladder, putting himself back in line with the lower portion of the ceramic-tiled roof. At the same time he pulled on the right toggle cord of the delta wing, wrenching the microlight back to the correct flight path.
He made it just in time. Eight feet from impact he let go of the ladder and made a controlled collision with the snow-covered ceramic tiles on the southwest corner of the building. He ran up the pitched roof several feet to slow himself, hands and feet scampering up to bleed off energy, and then he dropped down, his gloved hands and his soft padded kneepads absorbing most of the shock and the noise, and he found purchase with the rubber soles of his shoes.
The rope ladder dragged across the snow on the roof, but silently, sliding behind the empty microlight, which missed the apex of the building by no more than twenty feet. Court steadied himself as he looked up and saw the rear of the vehicle
in his NOD’s as it disappeared over the dome, sailing on toward the dense forest on the other side of the compound’s northern wall.
The aircraft was lower than he’d envisioned, much lower. He could only hope now that it made it over the northern wall, and he hoped when it crashed there in the impenetrable forest it wouldn’t make too much noise.
Court turned back around to face the property, and he scanned the grounds four stories below with his NOD’s, seeing all the men on the ground either stationary or moving idly in the distance.
There were no shouts of alarm, no cracks of gunfire, and no movement that seemed out of place.
Court took off his backpack, unzipped an outer pocket, and removed a second, smaller, snaking fuse full of fireworks, also attached to a wireless igniter. This string was a battery of Yanisars, a dozen four-inch cardboard tubes filled with a lift charge of black powder under a paper shell filled with more powder designed to create a bright flash and a loud report. He took off the rubber band, uncoiled the strand, and threw it over the south side of the mansion. It fell the four stories, landing in the snow.
He re-donned his pack and moved up the roof, heading to an attic window jutting out of the ceramic tiles. He knelt down; there was no alarm system he could see. The lock was ancient and would be a cinch to defeat, had Gentry’s hands not been so damn cold.
But he shook his fingers to warm them and got the window open in under a minute, then slipped into the attic, shut the window behind him, and drew his suppressed Glock 19 pistol. He flipped up his wet NOD’s and actuated a red light under the barrel of his gun; with this he searched the expansive but cluttered space for motion detectors. Instead he saw rat droppings in the dusty corners of the room, and he knew the attic was accustomed to unwanted guests that would render motion detectors useless.
He kept his silenced Glock out in front of him as he made his way forward through the attic toward a door ahead.
He’d done it. Ingress to target complete. Court was in.
Lev and Yevgeny were cold, but not as cold as they would have been without all the vodka in their bloodstream. Tonight’s festivities were long over; most of the security forces in the compound were in tents or the dacha’s barracks, a long, coal-furnace-heated shack just north of the barn. Inside, two dozen skinheaded neo-Nazis slept, most of them facedown on bunks or on the floor with puke-stained olive drab winter gear, many with unattended cuts and bruises from the evening’s fights, and all of them passed out from the marathon session of drinking that had taken place for much of the past ten hours.
But Lev and Yevgeny were among the twelve men forced to work the night detail, and though they had consumed nearly as much vodka and beer as the rest of the toughs around the property, they still had a job to do. They were off on the second of three half-hour patrols of the forest tracks and dirt roads just north of the property.
Both men were armed with AK-47s, radios, and thermoses of vodka-laced tea. They shuffled through wet snow, their flashlights swinging low, not really looking for anything, just killing time until they could return to the north guard shack and warm themselves at the stove.
Both men were just twenty-one years old, and they had been working with the Sidorenko organization since they were adolescents, manning mobile phones in St. Petersburg to report police presence in the red-light district. They pledged no allegiance to the effeminate millionaire in the dacha they guarded. No, they were fascists and Sid would hardly be the one to rule their ideal Russia. But Sid was a means to an end for them; he provided them safety and security and enough money to pay for their basic needs, and in return they spent a few nights a week guarding his property when he was here west of the city.
A single frozen mud road led through the forest from the compound gate to the north, and it ran straight for almost a kilometer before coming to a T. Lev and Yevgeny walked the length of the road, occasionally shining their flashlights into the thick larch that ran on either side. They expected no trouble but if trouble came, both young men were drunk enough and replete with enough testosterone to know unequivocally that they could handle it.
They stopped for a moment so Lev could piss; he shifted his rifle to his shoulder and opened his coat and pants right there in the road while Yevgeny took a sip from his thermos.
From the dark above them came a quick movement, sending both men diving headlong into the snow. Something large shot past just feet from their heads, and then a dark form was silhouetted against the white bark of the larch trunks for an instant before it slammed into the trees, cracking and popping branches before a last thud of impact with the ground.
The two young Russians scrambled to their feet and ran toward the noise. Yevgeny chambered a round in his Kalashnikov and Lev shined his flashlight on the big dark mass in the snow.
It was a hang glider, its frame twisted, its dark blue wings torn to shreds by the broken larch. A propeller jutted from the broken tree limbs.
“What the fuck?” Lev muttered, his flashlight scanning all around the forest, searching for a hint as to where the hell this thing came from.
Yevgeny did not answer Lev’s question, because he did not know what the fuck. But he did know what to do. He reached for the radio inside his coat. “North patrol to north shack! Something’s going on out here!”
Court moved up a quiet fourth-floor hallway with his pistol leveled in front of him. He’d wiped moisture from the lens of his night vision monocle, and through it he had a narrow, dim, green view of the way ahead over the top of his long silencer, and he saw no threats.
The intel he had been provided by the Moscow Bratva had not given him a clear picture of the inside of the mansion, so Court was doing much of this by feel. Court had been inside another of Sid’s St. Petersburg properties, and there Sid kept an office and bedroom on the top floor, no doubt because he felt he was safer up here. Court decided he would clear the top floor first, imagining Sid’s paranoia would force him to keep the same setup for all of his properties.
The dark hallway ended at a balcony that overlooked a wide circular atrium. He peered over the railing and, four stories down, he saw a low fountain in the center of a courtyardlike space, along with a few tables and chairs nestled between potted plants and trees.
Above him, over the center of the atrium, the glass-domed roof, some thirty feet across, was rimmed with ornate iron support beams, from which lights hung. The lights were off now, and only a faint glow of the moonless night through the glass hazed his night vision monocle.
Scanning the open balconies on the floor below him, he saw two guards one floor down on the other side of the atrium. They sat in chairs by an open staircase. Court thought it likely there would be more men directly under him.
Gentry had no plan to return to this part of the house, but he took a quick mental picture of the area. If he needed a fallback option, he might well find himself here again, and with no time to get a proper look at the layout.
This done, he left the balcony and began heading up a hallway that shot off to his right. It was dark here; there were electric lighting sconces along the corridor, but they were turned off for the night. Upon making a turn in the hall, however, he saw a single sconce shining brightly outside a heavy wooden door at the far end of the passage. The rug that ran all the way down to the end of the hall was more ornate than the bare floor of the hall he had just left, and there was an unmistakable scent of wood smoke and incense in the air.
Court got the impression he was nearing his target.
He’d made it only a few feet up the hall when a door on his right opened. The muzzle of his pistol swiveled toward the movement, and his finger left his trigger guard and took up the scant slack of the Glock’s trigger safety. At first he saw no one in the doorway, but he lowered his aim and centered his pistol on a small boy, no more than six or seven years old. The boy looked at him with sleepy, unfixed eyes. Behind the boy Gentry saw a child’s bed
room.
There was little light in the hall and no light in the bedroom, and Court doubted the boy could see the gun or even identify the man standing in the hall five feet in front of him.
Court knew who the boy belonged to. His intel indicated that Sidorenko, a bachelor, had family who lived with him: two male cousins who were part of his organization and a sister, and his sister had several children. Court braced himself to encounter kids here in the mansion, but he hoped that hitting in the dead of night would help keep them from straying downrange of his gun barrel.
No such luck.
“I can’t sleep.” The boy said it in Russian, but Court understood.
Court lowered his pistol and hid it behind his leg, but his long night vision optic protruded from between his eyes. The boy noticed it and peered closer.
“Back inside,” Court replied in Russian. “Lock the door.”
“Who are you?”
“Back inside,” Court repeated.
“Are you a monster?” the boy asked.
Court knelt down, his NOD’s monocle inches from the boy’s face. “Yes, I am. I am a monster. Run. Back inside. Get under your bed and hide until your mother comes for you.”
The boy’s eyes widened in fear. He stepped back in the room and shut the door.
Court stood back up and began moving quickly up the hall toward the light by the heavy door.
FOUR
One thousand ninety-one miles south of St. Petersburg, the Lipscani neighborhood of Bucharest, Romania, had quieted down much in the past hour. For most of this Saturday evening the district had been full of young partygoers, as many of the city’s best clubs were located in this warren of winding streets and back alleys. But it was four A.M. now, and the late hour along with an icy wind had driven everyone indoors, either to the dance floors at Kulturhaus or Terminus or Club A, or back to flats and hotels around Romania’s capital.
