by Mark Greaney
He stood by a bench, waiting in the cold, watching his breath fog the air in the faint light from the street that reached this deep into the park. The sounds of millions of snowflakes hitting the ground made a noise like soft static.
Whitlock waited a few seconds to be polite, then cleared his throat. “Where are the rest of you?”
There was no answer.
With a sigh he added, “I don’t have a tail. Cut the crap.”
After a few more seconds a voice in the trees behind him said, “No one likes a show-off, Russ.” Soon the crunching of three pairs of boots came from behind as well, just audible over the snowfall. Russ turned to face three men, all in their thirties, all wearing high-tech winter gear.
The same man who’d spoken before said, “We flew in. The rest of the team is coming over water with our equipment. They will be in the city by oh two hundred.” He stuck out a hand. “How’s it going, Russ?”
“Nick,” Whitlock said, and he nodded to the other two.
Nick was Trestle Actual, team leader of Trestle. Russ had worked with all the strike teams involved in the Gentry operation in his year working for Townsend. To Whitlock’s thinking, all the men were excellent shooters and door kickers, but he knew they could not spend any time at all in Court Gentry’s area of operations without Court picking up their scent. These guys weren’t low profile. They wore Oakley specs and Woolrich Elite pants and G-Shock watches and Salomon boots, efficient gear for combat ops, but too high profile for Russ’s tastes. Russ knew that even though Nick and his dudes could double-tap Court’s brain pan as well as anybody else on the planet, Court would see these guys coming a mile away if Russ wasn’t there to set the whole op up first.
Whitlock grabbed a pen and a notepad from one of the Trestle men and then took a knee in the snow. Under the beam of a tactical flashlight he drew a quick rendition of the hotel, indicating the exits, stairwells, and Gentry’s room at the end of the hall on the third floor. The diagram was passed around among the three men standing in the snow, and they looked it over.
“What about access to the roof?” Trestle Actual asked.
“I scouted the third floor and the adjacent properties. No way upstairs from the hallway at all. The attic is space that belongs to the apartment building next door, not part of the hotel.”
“You’re certain?”
Russ nodded. “No access above the third floor of the hotel without blasting a hole in the ceiling.”
Trestle Actual made a note on his own pad.
Russ added, “One other thing. That hallway outside the target’s door is creaky as hell. Old loose floorboards. Suggest you start the assault from back at the stairs, just up the hall from the target’s room, because there is no way you can hit that door without him hearing you coming. Just move dynamically up the hall and take the door down.”
“Understood.”
Russ looked around at the snow. It was blowing around now; it had picked up even since he’d arrived in the park. “You’re going to have a problem with this weather if he makes it outside.”
“Roger that,” said Nick. “Latest meteorological report says we’ll be in a blizzard by oh three hundred. We won’t get UAV support tonight. We didn’t even bother to bring the team over with us from Finland.”
“You want to stand down till the weather clears?”
“Negative. We can work around a little snow. I’ll send four men to his room. Distribute the rest downstairs in case he tries to squirt.”
Russ said, “I’ll stay in the stairwell. Cut off his escape if he makes it past your team.”
Trestle Actual shook his head. “Negative. Babbitt wants you off the X.”
“We don’t have to tell him, do we? You will have blizzard conditions outside. All Court has to do is make it out a door or window and your op is going to go tits up.”
“Babbitt wants—”
Russ said, “I don’t give a shit what Babbitt wants. You are the onsite commander. It’s your call. You’ll take the heat if you fail. Be flexible about this, man. Babbitt’s in the rear with the gear; we do what we have to do in the field.”
Nick would not relent. “I don’t want you in the way.” He pointed his finger in Whitlock’s face. “That’s fucking final.”
Whitlock shrugged. “It’s your call, dude. Just trying to help.”
Nick added, “Relax, Dead Eye. Gentry’s not going to squeeze by us. We’ll lay waste to his room, put his ass down right there.”
Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport is no bustling airport compared to the major air transit hubs of Europe, but this Tuesday morning, at three A.M., in a full-on snowstorm, there was virtually no activity in the outer hangars northeast of the end of runway 26, some half mile from the main terminal.
Virtually no activity.
One small hangar did have a few lights on, and a large portable fan heater blasted warm air across the floor. A Gulfstream 200 was parked in the center of the space, still wet from its flight over from Helsinki and its long wait on the tarmac in the customs clearance portion of the airport. Next to the G-200, a white twelve-passenger van sat parked facing the exit.
Eight men also occupied the small hangar; some sat on trunks and loaded weapons, others affixed knee and elbow pads to their bodies, and one man stood near the closed hangar doors, pacing back and forth, frustrated in his attempt to get a signal from his phone to bounce off a satellite somewhere up through the thick soup of clouds.
Their makeshift staging area was far away from security and customs, but they prepared themselves as quickly as possible, because they knew their luck could not last. Some airport rent-a-cop might get curious or some ramp agent might come looking for a place to sneak a quick nap, and their activities here would be discovered.
The team prepped with extreme efficiency; they’d been doing this sort of thing for years. Each man had his primary, the HK MP7 PDW, or personal defense weapon. It was built for close-quarters battle, as it was both more powerful than a submachine gun and less bulky than an assault rifle.
They also carried SIG Sauer nine-millimeter pistols on their hips, Peltor ComTac II radio headsets under their helmets, and light Kevlar body armor across their chests and backs. They had the option of wearing full SAPI (Small Arms Protective Insert) plates made of high-tech ceramic that would stop a rifle round, but all their intelligence had led them to believe that their target was not carrying a rifle with him. The Kevlar would stop any handgun round, so it would do for this evening’s operation.
The men checked their watches, actuated the laser sights and flashlights on their guns to test them, and finished double-checking their Velcro pouches to make sure everything they needed was in place.
Trestle Actual finally got through to Townsend House, though he had to leave the hangar and stand in the snow to get a signal. It took a moment for the two-way ID check, but just like the preparation of their equipment for tonight’s operation, both Trestle Actual and the recipient of his call had executed enough ID checks to make them second nature and correspondingly fast.
Lee Babbitt, code name Graveside, knew better than to ask the team leader of his strike force a lot of unnecessary questions. Babbitt knew Nick considered him to be an REMF, a rear-echelon motherfucker, and the last thing Babbitt wanted to do was give any of his front-line men the impression that he was micromanaging his shooters from four thousand miles away. So instead of asking questions, he used these quick briefs before missions to provide last-minute intel to his operators in the field. “Weather isn’t going to get much better till midmorning. Might slack off a little before dawn, but the front is basically stalled right over the Baltic, so you’ll just have to contend with the snow. We’ll have no overhead viz on you.”
Nick’s gear and helmet were already covered in white from standing outside the hangar. “Understood.”
“You’ve spoken to Dead Eye?”
“He’s a singleton,” replied Babbitt, as if that explained everything.
“He’s got a room one floor below the target, he can hear it when Gray Man moves around, and he’ll let us know if there is any change of disposition.”
“Dead Eye wanted to do the action himself.”
“Yeah,” said Nick. “He made that clear. I told him to sit his ass down in his room and stay the hell out of our way.”
“Good.” Babbitt paused a moment. Cleared his throat. “We end Gentry tonight, got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We had hoped to do this on the ship. Not in an urban environment. Less messy that way.”
“Roger that. We’ll keep it contained.”
Babbitt’s voice took a lower, graver tone, the change noticeable even over the crackling sat phone. “Do that, but know this. Collateral damage, in this very special case, will be understood as a necessary evil. Mr. Gentry is a clear and present danger to the United States of America. We cannot and we will not forfeit this opportunity to eliminate him.”
Nick had been briefed on this, of course. This was no kill/capture mission. This was get in, shoot the son of a bitch till he was flat on his back, shoot the son of a bitch some more, then get out. If some locals got in the way, then, Nick understood, he was to shoot his way through them to get to his target.
Nick, and the other seven men of Trestle, were all good with that.
“Got it,” he replied. It was no small thing to steel oneself to shoot noncombatants, but Nick had done it before, and Nick knew Townsend Government Services had been brought into this hunt not because they were saints, but because they got shit done.
Babbitt added, “When it’s over, you get pictures, that’s mandatory, but you leave the body, get back to the airport, and get out of there. If the weather is below minimums, just exfiltrate overland and we’ll get you extracted ASAP.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good luck, Nick. Remember . . . For America.”
Now there was a pause on Nick’s side of the conversation. “You know . . . if you ever wanted to tell me what this prick did to earn his shoot-on-sight sanction . . . now would be the time.”
Babbitt replied tersely, “Just do your duty. Graveside out.”
Nick ended the call and stowed his sat phone. As he stepped back into the hangar, Trestle Two came up to him; he’d already put on his helmet and goggles, he was head-to-toe in black ballistic gear, and his MP7 PDW hung straight down from his chest. In his hands he carried Trestle Actual’s primary weapon. “We’re ready,” he said, and he held out the HK.
Nick took the gun. “Good.”
“I don’t suppose Graveside finally came through and told you what this is all about?”
Nick shrugged now, dropping the sling over his head and positioning the PDW on his chest. “Same as ever. Management doesn’t tell labor anything except the rah-rah shit. ‘Do your duty, God and country, Gentry is a clear and present danger.’”
Trestle Two rolled his eyes and made a gesture like he was performing a hand job.
Nick finished adjusting his gear on his chest. Normally he would have laughed, but his game face was on now. He looked up to his second in command. “It’s all good. Gentry did something to make himself an enemy of the state. We’re the state. Well . . . sort of. Close enough, anyhow.” He smiled now. “Let’s go kill that miserable fuck.”
“Yeah, let’s.”
The two men headed back to join the others loading into the van.
THIRTEEN
Court lay awake, listening to the wind whipping fine grainlike snow against the window of his tiny third-floor room. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly four A.M., and as near as he could tell from his view out the window, there was one hell of a storm raging outside.
He wanted to sleep; he’d dozed off and on for hours, but he couldn’t seem to shut off his mind. He often took a few days to decompress after an action, and this was no different. The good result of the Sidorenko hit notwithstanding, he found himself stressing, reliving everything that happened.
Maybe it was the kid that was getting to him. The little boy he’d run into in the hallway of the mansion. Court had done his best to scare the living shit out of him to make sure he would go back into his room and hide. He’d probably saved the boy’s life; had he been wandering the dark hallways when the shooting started he could easily imagine one of the drugged-up gun-wielding skinheads on the property spooking at the movement and shooting the boy dead.
Yes, Court acknowledged, he’d done the right thing, in the short term anyhow. But long term?
Would the boy have nightmares about his encounter with the monster who broke into his house in the dead of night and killed his uncle? Surely he would put together that a rival had sent an assassin to the house, and the assassin, while obviously talented, was no ghost. No monster.
Or was he?
Court stared out the window. What are you, Gentry?
Court was known by many names. His given name, of course, but almost no one referred to him by that anymore. His mom died when he was young, he hadn’t spoken to his dad in years, and he’d lost his brother a few years earlier.
At the CIA he had first been known as Violator, a code name he’d been given when he was admitted into AADP, the Autonomous Asset Development Program, a school of sorts in Harvey Point, North Carolina, where lost-boy renegade-types were taken in and taught how to channel their wild side into doing dirty jobs for the United States of America.
After 9/11, Court was pulled out of solo work and folded into a tip-of-the-spear unit called Golf Sierra, jokingly referred to as the Goon Squad, an anti-terror task force in the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and during those years Violator became Sierra Six, the low man in the six-member team. He spent his days on snatch-and-grab missions, rendering America’s greatest enemies to black sites for interrogation, or shooting them in the head when so ordered.
And then suddenly—extraordinarily suddenly, as a matter of fact—he was no longer Sierra Six, no longer part of the team. The Goon Squad turned on him; clearly they’d been ordered to kill him.
But Sierra Six retained enough of his training as Violator to single-handedly take down his entire team, one against five. It also marked the end of his life in the USA. He left the country a day later, running to stay ahead of the hunters on his trail.
To survive on the lam from the most powerful nation on earth, Court, Violator, Sierra Six, became the Gray Man, an assassin for hire, executing private contract killings only against those he deemed worthy of capital punishment for their crimes. In five years he had eliminated terrorists, drug lords, mafia leaders, despots, and even other assassins.
His goal, through the years living abroad and off the net, had always been to win his way back to the United States. While his one attempt at reconciliation with the CIA had ended poorly, on the banks of the Red Sea with a former friend and Special Activities Division operative declaring his intent to chase him to the ends of the earth, Court had not given up hope that somehow, someday, he would be allowed back into the USA, either into the open arms of the CIA or at least with their grudging approval.
But the years were adding up, and his relationship with Langley had not improved.
And there was something else. He’d spent the last months preparing for the Sidorenko hit, putting all of his efforts into this task to the extent that he had thought of little else. Now that it was over, something had entered the forefront of his consciousness that he could no longer avoid thinking about. His relationships with nefarious personalities like Sidorenko had created so many new enemies for him to deal with, the CIA situation had become a back-burner problem for him. His killing of Sid had been necessary, but now that it was done, it felt like time wasted.
/>
There were so many others out there who wanted him dead. A French oil concern he’d worked against, and then worked for, now held a grudge because of the manner in which they had parted ways.
A Mexican cartel boss he’d worked for, then worked against, had recently placed a video on YouTube. In it, Constantino Madrigal, one of the most wanted men on earth, addressed the camera with his face all but obscured by a cowboy hat and a bandanna.
He said, “This message is to José, the gringo pistolero. Your amigos, the Cowboys, have some advice for you. Don’t buy any green bananas.”
Madrigal ended the video with a raspy laugh and a wave of his gold-plated AK-47.
The first appearance of Madrigal on camera in years made the international press, and Court had caught the video while living in his safe house in Moscow, prepping for the Sidorenko operation. Though the clip was cryptic to everyone else, Court got the message. He had called himself José in Mexico, and the reference to green bananas was clear.
In Moscow, Court triaged this problem well behind the Sidorenko situation. He was in Russia, after all, and Sid was a bigger fish to fry than a Mexican drug lord.
But now Sid was dead, and Court wondered how much trouble Madrigal, or the French energy company LaurentGroup, could still make for him.
All the bad guys out there on his ass were really cutting into his free time.
Court knew the only way around this problem, long term, was to stop making deals with these devils. He knew he had to get out of the industry, to stop working for handlers he could not trust and accepting patronage from those who had as much blood on their hands as the evil men he targeted.
Court knew he had to, somehow, cease his life as the Gray Man.
