by Tom Clancy
DOM’S PHONE RANG moments later, he looked down and recognized David’s number. The D.C.-based Mossad officer would be calling for an update, hoping his American confederate had made a positive ID of the target so he could send down a team of shooters on a vengeance mission. The Mossad’s interests were clear and unchanged, they wanted Ethan Ross’s head on a pike, but Dominic’s mission had changed with the call from Albright. He didn’t even see how he could tell David, an agent of a foreign nation, about the intelligence scrape. Israel was an ally of the United States, maybe the CIA would notify them at some point, but Caruso knew it sure as hell wasn’t his call to make.
He did not answer his phone. David would be pissed, but right now there was nothing Dom could do about that.
He shifted positions in his hide and moved the fern a little in the process. He reached up to stop the stems and leaves from moving, and as he did heard a noise nearby.
Dom froze, but after twenty seconds of holding his breath he saw the source of the noise in the dark. A pair of howler monkeys moved along the lawn in front of him, not forty feet away. Either they didn’t see him or they didn’t care that a human being was lying in the brush at the edge of the trees.
Once he relaxed his nerves with a few sips of water from his canteen, he realized it was time to check in with Sherman. Even though it was midnight, she answered on the first ring; Dom was continually impressed with her abilities as a supporting agent.
He told her about seeing Ross and about getting the call from Albright that meant this tropical island would soon be running with hyped-up and pissed-off American federal law enforcement officers.
Adara said, “You want me to start heading that way?”
“No. I’m going to keep eyes on the compound all night.”
“It’s midnight now. There are still a few boats moving between the islands. If I don’t get you now, you run the risk of getting stuck there. If you call me for an extraction at three a.m. or some other time in the middle of the night, I’ll be on the only boat on the water. The Venezuelans will hear me coming for miles, or the Panamanian police will stop me. A blond tourist cruising alone in the middle of the night is going to draw some attention that neither of us wants.”
“I understand. HRT will be here in the morning, and I need to give them real-time intelligence on the area. I’m on my own till the Feds get here. Then I’ll have you come and pick me up.”
“Roger that,” said Adara, and Dom hung up. He lay there surrounded by the flora and fauna of Central America, hoping like hell nothing larger than a mosquito would dine on him this evening while he kept tabs on the American traitor tucked in and comfortable in the big house across the lawn.
36
IT WAS STILL DARK at six a.m., although the rain clouds had moved on and faint moonlight filtered it down to Bastimentos Island. Dom rubbed his eyes, slowly realizing he had fallen asleep for a few minutes, though it hadn’t been enough to provide him any real comfort. His position happened to be right in the habitat of a group of small colorful frogs, and throughout the night the hopping creatures in the ferns by his face or on the ground in front of his backpack startled him and ensured he’d stayed awake the vast majority of the time.
He lifted his binos off the ground next to him, wiped condensation off all four lenses with a rag, and then brought them up to his eyes to scan the area. He saw a pair of guards on the far side of the property; their flashlight beams made them obvious even at distance. There was no movement inside the building other than a couple patrolling guards he could see through the windows just inside the main door at ground level.
An aircraft passed high above, and Dom realized it had been the faint engine hum that roused him. Dom couldn’t see the plane with the thick canopy directly overhead, but he could hear drone of a single-engine turboprop and guessed it was probably about five thousand feet above ground.
He kept scanning the house; his eyes were impossibly tired, but he did his best to focus.
As he scanned, he was surprised by the sudden crack of a tree branch on his left. It wasn’t close to his position, but it was loud enough to stick out among the other sounds of the night. Chirping frogs fell silent with the noise. A moment later, a second breaking tree branch followed, and then a quick succession of rustling leaves and more cracks of breaking limbs came from another part of the jungle, also on his left.
Dom pulled the M9 pistol from his hip and then he tucked himself lower under the fern, unsure what was happening thirty or forty yards off his left shoulder.
Before he could ponder the question, a figure appeared on the lawn in front of him, and above the figure, the silhouette of a deforming parachute. The dark canopy covered the man, and Dom watched as another figure dropped from the sky not twenty yards away from the first man, just outside of the lights of the house.
Dom almost launched to his feet in surprise.
Now another crash in the trees, this time to his right. From the noise, Dom concluded another jumper had landed short of his intended landing zone and was now hanging from one of the oaks or yellow trees here in the rainforest.
Dogs began barking in the kennel of the far side of the house now, and then two more figures landed on the darkened lawn, and they collected their chutes in their arms and then followed the others back into the trees.
That made a total of six men that Dom had seen or heard falling from the sky, all in the space of no more than ten seconds. They had all pulled back into the edge of the rainforest, and were now likely stowing their chutes and preparing their gear somewhere very close to his position.
Holy shit, Dom thought. Could it be the FBI Hostage Rescue Team? Albright hadn’t said a damn thing about an airborne mission on the compound, but Dom couldn’t rule it out. He’d love to check with Darren right now, but he wasn’t about to make a phone call with a crew of unknowns around him. Even if they were FBI and aware he was here and providing overwatch on the property, Dom knew announcing his presence in the middle of a bunch of itchy trigger fingers wouldn’t end well for him.
No way. Dom decided he would lie right here and watch.
Surely, he told himself, this had to be the FBI. Who the hell else could it be? Mossad? No. David had called Dom a half-dozen times in the past few hours, and Dom had not called back yet. He didn’t think it likely Mossad would launch its own mission against this location without any reconnaissance from the man they knew they had on the ground.
A pair of flashlight beams emanating from the driveway illuminated the lawn. This would be the two-man guard team Dom had seen patrolling the perimeter all night long. From the casual sway of the beams, the Venezuelans didn’t seem to be too worried about the dogs alerting to something in the jungle, but they were coming this way nonetheless. Dom assumed the men had heard noises, but considering the prevalence of monkeys, sloths, toucans, and other wildlife large enough to rustle the trees, the guards would be dulled into complacency, no matter what official threat level their leadership had imposed for the safe house.
Dom caught glimpses of the approaching men at first due to the flashlight beams in his face, but when they passed his position, moving closer to the water, the beams tracked away and Dom could clearly make out the men behind the lights. The two Venezuelans had taken their G3 rifles off their shoulders and they held them one-handed, with the lights in the other. Again, to Dominic these guys didn’t look like they were ready for a fight.
But those six men in the trees would be ready, Dom had no doubt. And as soon as the two guards passed, Dom saw a second pair of dark figures moving behind them. He could discern no weapons in their hands, but they closed on the armed guards quickly and quietly, and as one they took them by the necks from the rear, spun them, disarmed them, and silenced them with a series of blindingly fast strikes to the torso and face.
The two guards crumpled into a single heap on the dark lawn, and Dom knew from the damage inflicted on vital parts of their body, they were dead. The mysterious killers then drug the men and their weapons
back into the trees to the right of Dom’s hide.
Dom had seen the entire fight from twenty yards away, and even though not a word had been spoken, even though Dom could not see the faces of the men who’d just parachuted onto the island, and even though the men wore no insignia or recognizable uniforms, Dom knew who they were, because he knew the fighting style. The two men had employed an efficient and lethal flowing attack against the guards that was not dissimilar to Krav Maga, but it was distinct enough for Dom to recognize it. It was Systema, and it was a style developed in Russia and used by Russian special mission units.
Damn. Things around here just got even more complicated, because Spetsnaz had dropped from the sky.
A minute later, Dom saw the six silhouettes moving across the lawn to the west, closer to the trucks and the swimming pool. He made out the distinctive shape of the Heckler & Koch MP7 Personal Defense Weapon in each man’s hand, and they, of course, moved like a paramilitary force, covering and advancing in pairs. But they weren’t heading directly to the colonial mansion just yet. It looked to him that they would not attack the house immediately; instead, they disappeared up the driveway. Dom thought they were going to do a little recon themselves to get a feel for the situation inside by finding cover near the pool house and watching the building from there.
He tried to call Albright, but got no answer. Dom assumed he was on the aircraft heading down and couldn’t get a signal at the moment. And even if the FBI agents from Panama City were already here in the area, that wouldn’t do him much good since they were financial crimes experts and not paramilitary trained like HRT, and they would probably be in Bocas Town, where even if they could secure a boat it would still take them a half-hour to get here.
Whatever was about to happen would be over in much less than a half-hour. Dom recognized he was on his own.
Well, he thought, not exactly.
He called Adara.
She answered quickly. “It’s only been an hour since last check-in. Is something wrong?”
“It’s more than wrong. It’s all about to turn into a battle zone over here.”
“I’m moving to the boat. Keep talking.”
Dom said, “Don’t head this way yet. Just be ready by the boat if I need you.”
“But—”
“No buts. Stay right there till I call for you.”
“What’s going on?”
Dom told her about the Russian Spetsnaz troops and their killing of the guards. He explained he thought they’d probably move toward the house soon, and when they did, they would take Ethan Ross and his intelligence scrape with hundreds of thousands of documents detailing the thousands of paid agents for U.S. intelligence around the world.
“Yeah,” Adara agreed. “The Russians would love to get their hands on that, and killing a few Venezuelans to pull off an intelligence coup of that magnitude would be no big deal to them at all.”
Twice more Dom had to tell Adara to stand fast at the dockside hotel. She was champing at the bit to come in support of him, but Dom didn’t even know what he was going to do yet. The last thing he wanted was to have to watch over her.
Dom strained through his binos for any glimpse of the dark figures near the pool house around the side of the house, but he saw nothing but blackness. He figured the next time he would be aware of the Russians’ presence was when he saw the flashes of the MP7s in the windows of the colonial mansion.
He saw it as almost a fait accompli that these half-dozen Russian commandos would take Ross. They would have some avenue of escape already set up; Dom assumed there was a boat to get them off the island or maybe even a helo inbound to the property. They would all be long gone from the scene before Albright and his HRT team arrived on-site.
He slammed his fist into the ground, his body desperate to expel some of the frustration building up as he lay there thinking about losing the man responsible for the Yacobys’ deaths to a nation that would use him and his intelligence to ruin the CIA.
“No,” he said softly. He could not let this happen.
Dom decided he knew only one thing for sure: Ethan Ross in the hands of the Venezuelans was not good, but it was a whole lot less bad than Ethan Ross in the hands of the Russians. No question that more damage could be done to America by Moscow’s spies.
Dom knew he couldn’t stop the Russians, but he could give the Venezuelans a heads-up. He would have to reveal himself and then suffer the consequences, which likely meant taking fire from the Russians and the Venezuelans, but he decided he would much rather have Ross and his scrape in the Venezuelans’ hands than the Russians’ hands.
He called Adara, and as soon as the call was connected he said, “Remember when I told you I would keep you out of danger?”
“Is this the part where you tell me you were lying?”
“Of course not. This is the part where I tell you I was mistaken.”
“I’ll forgive you, if you forgive me for ignoring your instructions. I’m on the water and on the way to you already.”
“Good. Stay on the boat. I’ll come to you.” He thought for a moment. What if he could actually get his hands on Ross? It sounded implausible, but he expected an incredible amount of chaos in that house in the next few minutes, and the prospect of taking advantage of the confusion and somehow taking control of Ross and his scrape seemed like it might be worth the risk. He said, “If I get really lucky I’ll have a guest with me.”
“Ross? You’re actually going after Ross?”
“I can dream, can’t I?” Dom hung up, then climbed to his knees and began working on a plan, all the while still utterly bewildered by the fact he was about to go into battle partially on the side of an American traitor and the enemy intelligence agency that spirited him out of the United States.
“Crazy,” he said softly, and then he broke into a low sprint across the dark lawn.
37
AS DOM MOVED LOW and fast across the property, the barking of the dogs on the far side of the house seemed to grow louder, even though there was no way they could see him in their kennels. Two men standing the veranda ringing the second floor shined flashlights all around the lawn facing the inlet and the dock, but Dom moved laterally to avoid them, and he ran on to the side of the house near the driveway. More men shined their lights at the back of the property; Dom could see the beams raking across the pool area and the vehicles, and as he ran he wondered if the Russian paramilitaries hiding somewhere back there might find themselves spotlighted and shoot the guards on the veranda before attacking the building.
Dom made it to the side of the big colonial house, he pressed his body flush with the cool wall, and then began moving along the wall through thick, flowering hedges. He came to a darkened window, chanced a look inside, and saw nothing but black on his first glance.
He stood to the side of the window, waited a moment, then looked again.
It took a few seconds for his eyes to pick up any features inside, but soon he realized the room was some sort of a storage area. Banquet tables were stacked high against the far wall, sporting equipment, small soccer goals, a croquet set, and several balls in net bags hung from hooks on the wall.
The door to the room was closed. He tried the window but found it securely locked. He thought about breaking one of the panes near the lock, but just as he prepared to use the butt of the Beretta to do this, he stopped, took his flashlight and flicked it quickly on the little room, his eyes locked on the ceiling near the window.
Yep, as he expected, a glass-break sensor jutted an inch from the ceiling. If he smashed the windowpane, sirens would blare all over the property.
As he turned away to look for another point of entry, a sudden crackle of gunfire echoed off the trees of the rainforest and all over the lawn. It had come from the rear of the property, near the pool, and Dom knew this meant the Venezuelans and the Russians were engaged in a firefight.
Alarms started blaring throughout the house. Dom took advantage of this by turning back to the
windowpane and smashing it with the grip of his pistol. In seconds he had the lock open and the window lifted high enough for him to enter.
ETHAN ROSS WOKE from an alcohol-aided sleep and leapt to his feet with the loud crackling sounds. He thought it might have been gunfire, but he’d never been around actual shooting, and he’d expected it to sound like it did on television. He stuck his head out the door of his bedroom, on guard but more curious than afraid, but almost instantly he panicked when the sirens began blaring. A guard stood close to his door, but the man had turned away to look over the mezzanine down at the main room of the mansion.
“What’s going on?” Ethan shouted, but the man did not respond. He knew just enough Spanish to ask, “Qué pasa?”
“No sé,” the man shouted back. He had his big black gun against his shoulder and he waved it around at the first floor below.
Just then Mohammed came running around the corner in his stocking feet. He made a beeline straight to Ross, passing Gianna Bertoli with utter indifference as she came out of her room with a robe held around her shoulders.
Ethan noticed Mohammed had a mobile phone in one hand and his computer in the other. He’d left his shoes, but he hadn’t left his computer or his phone.
Mohammed shouted, “The Americans are here! We have to leave!”
Ethan turned and ran back into his room. He tried to shut the door, but Mohammed was right on his heels and followed him in. “Get the drive! Do you have the drive?”
Ethan looked toward his laptop, and Mohammed caught the look. “It’s on the computer?”
Ethan didn’t answer. The drive was still attached with moleskin to his hip, but he snatched the laptop off the table, threw it into his backpack, and slung it over his back.
When they raced back out onto the mezzanine, Ethan saw the Venezuelan intelligence chief Leo had arrived with two more of his men, making a total of four armed Venezuelans. Leo wore a sweatshirt and cotton pants, but he carried a machine pistol in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other. “Quickly, come with me! I have a man in a truck waiting for us by the kennels. The Americans will expect us to try for the Expeditions on the other side of the house. We must hurry.”
