Authors: Phillip Finch
Heart attack
was the first thought that came to Yuri. But in the same instant, he took in the odd angle of Kostya’s head, twisted at an unnatural angle.
A hand clamped over Yuri’s face, an arm reaching in from behind. Yuri’s training took over. He reacted instinctively, shoving the butt of the rifle behind him,
trying for a blow to his attacker’s abdomen to make him release his grip.
But the attacker was waiting for the move. He shifted, and the rifle butt found just air.
Uh-oh, he’s good,
Yuri thought.
The hand was still firmly on his mouth. It was the left hand, Yuri thought. And the right…
Well, Yuri knew what the right hand was about to do.
So he wasn’t surprised to feel the pressure at the top of his spine, the sudden roaring pain as the tip of the knife blade pierced the hollow behind his neck, angling upward toward the brain.
Real good,
Yuri thought, and the blade slid in to the hilt.
Cockeye Teddy lay sedated on a bed in a presurgical prep room. The OR actually had two of these rooms, reached by separate doors from outside: one on the south side of the building that was used to prepare the unwilling donors, the other on the north side, for the patients. The arrangement was designed so that the client was kept separate at all times from the source of the transplanted organ.
Lazovic entered the room, checked the handwritten notations on the medical chart that hung from the foot of the bed. He pulled back the sheet that covered the patient up to his neck, revealing the bare chest, shaved smooth within the past few minutes. He touched a black marking pen to the skin and traced a single line, about a foot high, in the middle
of the chest.
In a corner of the room, Ilya Andropov was checking his security detail, calling them individually on the radio net.
“Surin? … Gorsky? … Malkin? … Any unusual activity at your position, Malkin?”
Lazovic waited until Andropov was finished, then said, “Is there any reason we shouldn’t proceed?”
“Apparently not,” Andropov said.
“Then let’s proceed.”
Favor dragged the second body out of the shed, back into the undergrowth, and laid it beside the first.
He picked up the Dragunov, examined the scope. He brought it to his eye and made a slow 360-degree scan to be sure that he was alone.
Infrared thermal imaging, he saw. Generation 4—the Russians weren’t scrimping on the goodies. He wondered how many more like this were on the island.
The two dead men wore almost identical clothing, dark T-shirts over dark fatigue-style pants. He went through their pockets. A key ring, two keys. Cigarette lighter. Spare ammo magazines.
Favor’s wet suit had no pockets. And it was hot. He was sweating under the neoprene shell.
He peeled it off quickly and stripped the clothing from the first body. He pulled on the pants, then the T-shirt. He put the lighter and the keys in one of the pants pockets.
He picked up the Dragunov. It was a potent tool, with a killing range that extended from one end of
the island to the other. He didn’t need it yet, but it was too good to leave behind. He dropped the spare magazine into another pocket.
He moved out of the undergrowth, to a spot where he could see more clearly. He lifted the rifle and looked through the scope, making another long, thorough sweep across the dark mass of the island before him.
He picked up four ghostly white figures.
One, on the far left in his field of view, was a man standing alone in one of the thatched-roof shelters. Favor knew that this man must be near the northern tip of the island.
About ninety degrees to the right was another lone man, this one seated near the dock, facing out to sea.
Farther to the right, and nearly out of his vision, was the helipad, where two men were refueling the chopper. Favor knew that the main group of buildings—his ultimate target—was still farther to the right, to the south of the helipad. But it was out of sight, through the trees and on the other side of a hump of land, and he wasn’t ready to go there yet.
Operating alone, Favor knew that he had to keep his back secure. That meant clearing the area north of the helipad before he advanced on the structures to the south.
Favor slung the Dragunov over his shoulder. Wearing a dead man’s clothes, with the knife held ready in his right hand, he stepped out into the darkness to the north.
Like all the others on the perimeter, the guard at the north end of the island had the use of night-vision binoculars that would easily have detected the approach of a man from one hundred yards or more. And, like the others, he had orders to watch the sea.
When the rain stopped, he left the small shelter and stood at the edge of the rocky shore with the binoculars around his neck. Looking constantly through the glasses was tedious and—he thought—completely unnecessary. But he did raise the binoculars every few minutes and scan the sea from left to right and sometimes back again.
He was doing that when he heard someone walking behind him, legs brushing against the high grass that fringed the shore. The surf was loud, so he knew that whoever was coming up must be close already. But this didn’t alarm him. He was sure that the interior was secure. The danger, if there was any, would come from the sea.
He put down the glasses and turned. He saw the outline of a man dressed exactly as all the guards were dressed, with a Dragunov slung over his shoulder.
Who had been issued a Dragunov?
He said, “Yuri?”
The approaching figure was three strides away, and he closed the distance quickly but without rushing.
“No,” said the figure, and the knife sliced through the darkness.
When they finished refueling the chopper, the pilot and the medic sat together in the open cabin door, legs dangling, looking out toward the shoreline and the dock. The pilot held an AK-47, cradling it self-consciously. A second AK lay beside the medic on the cabin floor.
The orderlies had brought the rifles when they drove down to get the client in the middle of the storm. One of the orderlies had passed the rifles up while the other helped the client into the front seat of the Gator.
“What’s this?” the medic had said.
“Your weapons. Also, refuel as usual, but don’t depart until you receive permission from Andropov. You are to assist the security detail if necessary.”
“I’m a medic, he’s a flier. We aren’t responsible for security.”
“You are tonight.”
So now they sat at the open cabin door, rifles in their laps, waiting for permission to leave. The control panel was powered up, and the volume on the radio was cranked to the maximum. They wanted to hear that time-to-go notice when it came.
They expected it at any time. The night seemed completely normal.
Then the medic said, “I smell jet fuel.”
“I don’t smell anything.”
“Did you have a spill?”
“Of course not.”
“I smell fuel,” the medic insisted. “Don’t you?”
“You’re crazy,” the pilot said. But he drew in a deep breath through his nose.
He said, “Maybe.”
He breathed in again and said, “I’d better check.”
He put the rifle aside and reached into a pocket of his cargo shorts for a small flashlight. He turned on the light and hopped down to the ground.
The pilot started around to the front of the chopper. The bright spot of the flashlight beam bounced on the ground in front of him as he walked, and then he turned along the chopper’s nose and disappeared from sight.
The medic sniffed the air. Jet fuel? Suddenly he wasn’t sure. An intermittent breeze was blowing from over the water, and when it picked up—as it did now—it was in his face, and he could smell only the ocean’s salty dampness.
The flashlight reappeared where the medic had last seen it, then moved around the nose of the helicopter, not pointed down at the ground now but held higher, angled so that the beam caught the medic full in the eyes.
The light was very bright in the darkness, and the medic turned his face away and said, “What did you find?”
He got no answer. The light kept coming, not bouncing anymore but fixed on his face, blinding him. The medic said, “Hey, asshole—” and put up his left hand to block the glare.
The light went off, and in the next instant the medic took a hard blow to the head that knocked him back.
His left arm flew back, and in that instant another hard blow came under it, slamming against his chest. It was not like any punch he had ever felt—it punched
into
his chest—and as the life drained out of him, he thought,
No, not that
…
Favor walked quickly around the nose of the chopper, back to where the body lay on the packed dirt of the helipad. He hooked his arms under the shoulders, dragged it to the open door of the helicopter, lifted it in. He dragged it to the back of the cabin where the second body lay, blood pooling.
He went out and got the Dragunov where he had left it. He crouched near the nose of the chopper and looked through the scope, up the hill toward the clump of buildings. The nearest one was within two hundred yards. It seemed dark and quiet.
He shifted his attention to the second building up the hillside. He could make out the outline of incandescent lights behind three shuttered windows, and the rifle’s scope picked out the figures of three men near the building, one of them standing in a doorway.
Favor didn’t think that he could reach the building without being seen. The hillside was mostly open, broken only by a thin scattering of palms. And to his left, still looking out over the water, was the sentry near the dock. He, too, would be hard to approach: between the helipad and the dock, there was virtually no cover.
A voice came over the radio in the cockpit. It was Russian, spoken too quickly for Favor to understand.
Seconds later, the same phrases, the same voice, only this time more insistent. Up on the hillside, the light went off behind one of the shuttered windows and the shutter opened. A man was standing at the window. He held a rifle. At the top of the rifle receiver, where a telescopic sight would be, Favor could make out a blocky shape that looked a lot like the thermal imaging sight on the Dragunov.
As the rifle swung toward him, Favor scuttled up into the cabin.
He would be invisible there. The Plexiglas window would block his body heat.
In a pocket beside the pilot’s seat was a loose-leaf binder of aeronautic charts. Favor took the book and ripped out several pages.
On the wall of the helicopter’s cabin was a slim steel cylinder with a valve and a pressure gauge. A clear plastic breathing tube ran off the valve. Oxygen.
The cylinder was held in place by locking metal straps that came open when Favor released them. He grasped the neck of the cylinder and pulled it free.
He was ready to announce himself.
The cataclysm erupted when Andropov wanted another roll call, a security check. He had the radio operator start with the helicopter, which was on a different frequency from the radio net.
Vladimir Raznar was the radio operator. He called down to the chopper for a status report. No response.
He called again. No response.
Andropov said, “Put a scope on them.”
Vladimir turned off the lights in the room and picked up the Dragunov. He pushed open one of the shutters, just enough to give a clear view of the chopper.
He said, “I don’t see them.” He kept looking through the scope for several seconds, then said, “Something’s funny with the ground around the chopper.”
“You’re picking up a heat signature?”
“No. The opposite. It’s
cool
down there.”
“What do you see in the chopper?”
“I don’t. But I’m telling you, something is really funny down there under the bird.”
Andropov got on the radio and spoke to the guard at the dock.
“Sergei, what do you see at the chopper?”
The guard turned and looked back up the hill to the helipad. He was using his night-vision binoculars.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nobody, nothing.”
“Go up there and take a look.”
Vladimir kept looking at the dark blotch below the helicopter. It seemed to be spreading.
He said, “I think I know.…”
In the helicopter, Favor squatted behind the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the cabin. He tore the breathing tube away from the valve on the oxygen cylinder and turned the valve all the way open. Pure medical grade O
2
began to hiss out.
He tossed the cylinder out the door, onto the ground below. It made a muffled
clank
as it hit.
Down by the dock, the sentry named Sergei had just turned to walk toward the chopper. The soft
clank
got his attention. He stopped and brought the binoculars to his eyes once again.
He saw Ray Favor raising the Dragunov, bringing it level so that the barrel seemed to disappear. There was only the front glass of the scope and the black dot of the rifle’s muzzle, and they were both pointed directly at Sergei.
Favor fired, and the sentry went down.
The crack of the gunshot ripped through the night. The muzzle flash briefly lit the cabin’s interior. Andropov, standing behind Vladimir, saw it blaze, strobe-like. Vladimir, looking through the thermal scope, perceived it as a white fog on the Plexiglas window.
In the chopper, Favor slung the Dragunov and jumped to the ground. He landed in a puddle of jet fuel. A few feet away, the steel cylinder was still expelling oxygen.
The fuel was flowing from a drain valve in the tank beside the helipad. The flow was hard enough that the hardpan earth, already wet from rain, didn’t absorb it all. The fuel was pooling, and the pool was spreading.
Favor bent down low with the torn map pages in one hand and swiped the paper through the
fluid. He was quick, but not in a hurry. He knew that the helicopter’s fuselage blocked the view from the hill.
He began to move away from the pool in a crouch, trying to stay behind the chopper’s shield for as long as possible. Five, six steps to the edge of the helipad.
He jumped into a drainage ditch that ran beside the pad.