Out of Range

by Hank Steinberg

  “Damnit! You need to task a satellite on that location right now! Byko’s probably already there. He may even be gone by now.”

  There was a long pause. “Actually, we’ve already got a bird on that location.”

  Hopkins felt his face grow hot. “And when the hell were you planning to tell us about that?”

  “Hey, hey, easy, pal. You asked us to check out the whole area. So that seemed like our next logical step.”

  “Might have been nice if you’d told us.”

  “Nothing’s popped up yet, okay? But we’re on it.”

  How many birds did the Americans have? How many locations were they watching? It was a waste of time even asking. He’d been down this road before with the Americans. The CIA was bad enough. But the NSA? There had been a time when they had employed more than twenty thousand people and had a budget that was literally bigger than the GDP of 90 percent of the countries in Africa, and the Americans wouldn’t even publicly admit that it existed.

  “Do keep us in mind if you find anything, Eric,” Hopkins said acidly. Then he broke the connection and turned to the comms tech. “Put Sturbridge on the line.”

  A few seconds later, Hopkins was connected to the commander of the SAS. “We may have to change the destination,” he said. He gave Sturbridge the GPS coordinates of the command center.

  Sturbridge repeated the numbers back to Hopkins, then asked, “Any word on authorization?”

  “Not yet,” Hopkins said tersely.

  “We’re twenty minutes from Uzbek air space. What’s the holdup?”

  “It’s a diplomatic issue. You’ll be the first to know when it’s resolved.” Hopkins hung up the phone. It was decision time. The UK had only one satellite in that quadrant of the globe. Should he take the chance and vector to the new location?

  “Sir?” The satellite tech looked up expectantly. There was no question what he was asking.

  “Do it,” Hopkins said.

  Chapter Forty-three

  As Charlie and Salim approached the turnoff that led to Byko’s bathhouse, Charlie grabbed for his phone and dialed Garman again. This time, Garman picked up immediately.

  “I got hold of my guy,” he announced without prelude, “but I still haven’t heard back.”

  “Well, I’m almost at the compound. How about trying him again?”

  “He’s going to call me as soon as he knows anything, Charlie.”

  “Try him again.”

  “Hang on,” Garman said, sounding a bit exasperated.

  The phone went silent for a moment. The next thirty seconds felt like an eternity. But finally Garman came back on. “I’m assuming you have a GPS in your car?”

  “I do,” Charlie assured. “Does that mean you have the coordinates?”

  “You ready?”

  “Hang on a sec,” Charlie said and pulled over to the side of the road. “Okay, go ahead.”

  Garman read them off slowly, “N41 16.00253 E69 12.99875.”

  Charlie input the digits then repeated them back to Garman.

  “You got it,” Garman said. “I’d wish you good luck, but I’m not sure luck’s gonna have much to do with it.”

  “Probably not, though I could use all the help I can get,” Charlie quipped.

  “Well, good luck then,” Garman said.

  Within a minute or so, a map appeared on the GPS screen. Their destination was nine minutes away. And it appeared to be part of the same compound. Which meant MI6 believed that Byko and company were still there.

  Charlie smiled for what seemed like the first time in days and pulled onto the road again, checking his rearview to make sure the van was still following them.

  The navigation program, as it turned out, couldn’t locate any of the local roads and Charlie was forced to improvise. There was one road—a small dirt track that twisted up into the hills to the north—that appeared the only sensible choice. He took that road and endured its winding, meandering nature as it alternately moved closer to and away from the blinking yellow dot on the small screen.

  The nine minutes turned out to be more like sixteen, but at last they were rounding a bend and approaching the small hill that aligned with Garman’s coordinates.

  Charlie pulled his car to a halt and stared at the wretched little outpost. Could this be it? A couple of corrugated steel sheds and a rusting antenna tower? Even during the Soviet era this must have been a place of no importance. And now it was just a forgotten remnant from the edges of an empire that no longer existed. Two dinky little shacks, no cars, no trucks, no fences or imposing guard towers. Nothing.

  Garman’s guy had blown it. He’d led them to nowhere.

  “This is the place?” Salim asked incredulously.

  As the rattletrap van pulled in behind them, Charlie frowned, then backed up the Mercedes so that it was out of view of the sheds, put on the parking brake and took a moment to think. The well-worn dirt road on which he had been driving seemed to simply end, not four hundred yards from the car, and Charlie needed to take a more thorough look. He grabbed the Sig Sauer pistol one of his hired men had given him, shoved the holster onto his belt, then jumped out of the Mercedes and crossed the road.

  He found shelter behind an outcropping of rock and pulled out a pair of binoculars. As he scanned the area, he realized that earlier he had been looking at the end of the road from the wrong angle. From his new vantage point, he saw that the road sloped down into some sort of underground parking structure, its entrance disguised to look like a natural feature of the landscape.

  This was it. They’d been holding Julie underground. Here. The only question now was whether or not she was still down there.

  By the time Charlie got back to the Mercedes, Omar, the leader of the ragtag Ragdovir gang, was out of the van waiting for him. As Charlie explained the situation, the other three joined them.

  “I don’t like it,” Omar said. “We go through those doors, guards might be waiting.” He mock machine-gunned with his hands. “Boom, we’re all dead.”

  The other three men nodded.

  “We want the rest of our money now,” Omar said.

  Charlie shook his head. “That wasn’t the deal.”

  Omar grinned. “You don’t trust us?”

  “You don’t trust me?” Charlie countered.

  “We don’t know if you make it out of this alive,” Omar said. “Then we don’t get our money.”

  “The money’s on me,” Charlie said. “I die, you can take it off me then.”

  Omar’s smile faded. He exchanged glances with the other men and suddenly all four submachine guns were pointing at Charlie’s face. Much to his own surprise, Charlie didn’t feel frightened. Mostly just pissed off. They were underestimating him and wasting his goddamn time. He was about to tell them this when he heard the sharp clack of a rifle bolt.

  He looked to his right and saw Salim, weapon pointing directly at Omar’s head.

  “After,” Salim said.

  Omar turned to Charlie. “You got your own personal bodyguard?”

  “Why do you think I brought him? Now you want to get to work?”

  Omar laughed brightly and motioned for the others to lower their weapons.

  “Okay,” Omar said. “How we going to do this? You got big plan, Mr. Charlie?”

  Charlie weighed the alternatives. They could go down into the “cave” where the road disappeared. If there were any guards, they were sure to be there. Or they could go to the sheds and see if one of them hid an entrance to the facility. Again, if it did, the shed was likely to be guarded.

  Or they could try the ventilation shaft.

  “There’s a hole in the grill,” Charlie explained. “We climb down it, get into the building, catch everybody by surprise.”

  “Let me see,” Omar said, beckoning for Charlie’s binoculars.r />
  Charlie handed them over. Omar looked through them for a few seconds, surveying the area, then lowered them skeptically. “There are cameras,” he said.

  “Salim’s going to take them out,” Charlie replied.

  “The noise will give us away,” Omar argued. “And if someone’s inside watching, the picture going out will warn them we are coming.”

  “We leave the cameras operational, they’ll see us go into the ventilation shaft. We knock them out, at least they won’t know which direction we’re coming from.”

  Omar looked at the other men and reluctantly bent to Charlie’s logic.

  Charlie took back the binoculars and handed them to Salim. “There’s one on that large tree, just above the shed. The other one’s—”

  “I see it,” said Salim. “I’ll need to go to the rock.”

  “We all will,” Charlie replied. “In case there’s any guards in those sheds.”

  Charlie looked at his men. There wasn’t exactly great enthusiasm for the plan, but at least no one was arguing.

  They crossed the road as quietly as possible and settled behind the boulder.

  “Now we split up,” Charlie said. “Omar, you and Vlad get yourselves behind that bush, you’ll have a clear sight line on the first shed from there.” He turned to the others. “You two, there’s an old tree stump thirty yards to the right that’ll put you close enough to the second shed, though you’ll probably have to come out from behind it to get off a shot.”

  The men looked at Omar for final confirmation. He nodded his approval and only then did they follow Charlie’s orders.

  Meanwhile, Salim settled into a crouch behind the boulder, resting the stock carefully on the hard surface of the rock. He took a careful bead and waited for Charlie’s command.

  “You got it?” Charlie asked.

  Salim nodded. “Are the others in position?”

  Charlie surveyed Omar and his men. They appeared to be ready.

  Charlie took out his Sig Sauer, clicked off the safety and contemplated what was about to happen. He’d never thought when his old man was teaching him to hunt deer in rural Ohio, or even when he’d shot a few rounds from an M4 carbine with Navy SEALs in eastern Afghanistan, that he would be going into battle against hardened mercenaries and trained soldiers in God-knows-where Central Asia. That he would be holding a weapon in his sweaty right palm, ready to kill. Or be killed.

  He’d come face-to-face with his most primal self back at the river when he’d slain the mercenary under a pile of rubble, and again when he’d used that Mercedes like a battering ram to take out the drug dealers, but in both cases he’d been acting on pure instinct—an animal doing what it needed to do to survive.

  This was something different. This was premeditated. A choice to enter the battle.

  Charlie realized he would have to dispense with the childish revulsion he had felt after that first killing. In fact, he would need to savor and cultivate the rush of power that was his first reaction to the murder. That was the only way he was going to get through this and find a way to save Julie. And there was something crystallizing about that epiphany—the sheer rawness of it—that was oddly freeing.

  “Take your shot,” Charlie said.

  Salim hesitated for a long moment, then squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet thudded harmlessly into the shed at least a foot wide of the camera, but the loud crack of the shot echoed and faded, reverberating from one side of the valley to the other.

  Salim wiped his forehead and muttered to himself, “Wind. I forgot the wind.”

  Charlie’s eyes darted back and forth between the two sheds. Thus far, no guards had emerged.

  Salim took aim again and squeezed off another round. This time the camera exploded in a cloud of shattered glass and broken plastic.

  “You got it,” Charlie said.

  The kid lined up his second shot and was just about to fire when one of Quinn’s mercenaries came out of the first shed.

  “What you want me to do?” Salim asked.

  “Take out the second camera,” Charlie instructed.

  As Salim took aim, Charlie watched the mercenary lift his rifle and scan the area in front of him. The man’s eyes widened just as there was another sharp crack from Salim’s rifle.

  “Down!” Charlie whispered.

  They ducked as the shots ricocheted off the boulder. Then there was a burst of automatic weapon fire from their left. When it was over, Charlie looked up to see that Quinn’s man was down. Omar and Vlad had taken him out.

  Charlie held up his palm as if to say, “Wait.” He wanted to see if there were more guards stationed outside. When none showed, he signaled to both twosomes, “Let’s go,” and they bounded toward the ventilation shaft, guns ready in case they were running into an ambush.

  Charlie reached the shaft first and levered himself underneath the rusting grate. It was a tight fit and his pant leg snagged on the jagged metal. “Hurry!” Salim hissed.

  Charlie yanked his leg and a sharp piece of metal raked across his shin. He cursed under his breath, then slid under the grate to find himself at the top of a dark concrete cylinder.

  Looking down, all he could see was an inky blackness. But there was enough light at the top to make out a steel ladder embedded in the wall. He grabbed the top rung and swung himself out into the shaft. For an unbearably long moment he hung by his fingers, feet pawing the air until he found purchase on one of the lower rungs.

  Heart pounding, Charlie descended into the darkness.

  Chapter Forty-four

  Charlie could see Salim, Omar and the others moving down the ladder above him. But the farther down the shaft he went, the darker it became and soon he couldn’t see anything below him. He knew that he was getting closer and closer to the thrumming fan that propelled air up the shaft as the artificial wind tore relentlessly at his clothes. From the sound of it, the thing was spinning fast enough to chop his feet off. Was there any sort of grill to keep him from sticking his feet into the fan? He looked down again, squinting, hoping perhaps that his eyes might become adjusted to the darkness.

  Suddenly, he saw a seam of light directly in front of his face. It was barely more than the width of a hair and he realized it must be a crack around some kind of hatchway. He pressed his eye to the crack and could make out a lightbulb attached to a concrete wall maybe five feet away.

  Feeling around with his right hand, he found a rough metal handle on the edge of the door.

  He considered his options. Go deeper, hope to find an entrance that afforded him a better view—and hope he didn’t get his feet chopped off by the ventilation fan—or take a chance and burst blindly out this door into the hallway.

  He opted for the hallway. But there was no way to signal the others in the darkness and yelling would potentially alert Byko’s men inside. So he was just going to have to hope the men followed quickly.

  He took a deep breath, his pulse hammering in his throat. Then he twisted the handle and yanked the door open. Its rusty hinges screamed and he swung into the hallway, imagining a half-dozen guards training their guns on him as he burst out the door.

  Instead, he found himself in a completely empty space. At the far end of the corridor was a large, heavy door with a circular handle like the doors of a submarine. That must have led to the old Soviet command center.

  It made sense. This place had been designed to take a hit from a nuclear bomb. If the ventilation duct had passed directly into the main working space, it would have been able to transmit fallout into the shelter. So the air had to pass through some kind of filtration while the access tunnel was shielded by an air lock.

  Charlie left the door open, which would flood the shaft with light and alert his troops to his route, but it was a painful ninety seconds as he waited for them all to arrive, and when they did, they were sweating heavily.
As their supposedly fearless leader, Charlie hoped he didn’t look as nervous as they did.

  “Okay, listen,” he said. “We’ll probably have to split up once we get into this place. You’re looking for an Englishwoman with brown hair. If you find her, don’t do anything that would harm her. Just call me. Okay?”

  Omar swallowed and nodded, apparently on behalf of all of them.

  They made their way to the end of the hallway, where Charlie began twisting the big round handle of the “submarine” door. It was about four inches thick and moved with glacial slowness. When it was far enough open, he peered out, seeing a long, empty hallway that went in two directions. He could hear voices, speaking urgently in Uzbek, but he couldn’t tell from which direction the sound was coming. Charlie squeezed through the door, followed by the rest of the men. He pointed to Omar, signaling for him to go to the left. Omar nodded and headed that way, the other rogues following close behind him. Charlie started to cry out, to indicate that he and Salim needed one of them to even the odds, but they were already too far away. He and Salim would go to the right. Alone.

  They began moving rapidly down the bare concrete hallway. Behind them, Omar and his men disappeared in the other direction. In front of them, Charlie could hear voices. Bathed in sweat, clutching his pistol with both hands, he moved forward, twisting and turning through the maze of tunnels.

  The acoustics of the concrete caused strange echoes and dead spots, the sound of the voices getting louder and softer by turns, seemingly unconnected to the distance from the people who were speaking, and Charlie still couldn’t make out where the voices were coming from.

  Finally, as they continued to move forward, the voices became clearer. There was an urgency to the speaker’s tone and Charlie felt certain that the guards must have been discussing the intruders. But then he began to discern the words. It was someone complaining about the hours they’d been working. And there was a soft clinking sound—someone stirring sugar into a glass of tea?

  His eyes communicated relief to Salim. Somehow, no one in this bunker was aware that they’d shot out the cameras and killed the guard outside. As they rounded the corner, approaching the room where the voices were coming from, there was suddenly shouting from somewhere in the other direction and a deafening clatter of automatic gunfire.