Authors: John Strauchs
“Count on it.
We’ll take care of him, be assured.
And, as long as he avoids the
local police, you can have him back afterwards. We really don’t care,” said Anderson.
“And you too,” asked Sasha.
“Yes, we’ll watch over him too. Not to worry,” said Reisinger.
“If, for some unforeseen circumstance your professor fails in his assignment, is
there a backup?” asked Anderson.
“Of course,” said Sami.
“You think Sami fool?
First, Smolenskiy never miss.
Never miss. Second…”
Sasha stepped into the conversation. “The backup is my assignment. I have a team
of Cubans who will finish the job if Smolenskiy fails.”
“They Colombians,” said Sami.
“Cubans. Colombians. What is the difference?” said Sasha.
“OK, it sounds like you have it worked out. I don’t need to remind you that the
hand of the American government cannot be seen in this.” said Anderson.
Sami was perturbed. “Why we come to Bonn for this?
I answer question.
There
no purpose. We expose selves to discovery.” Pointing his finger at Reisinger and Anderson, “No one knows us. Your faces known. It mistake to come here.”
Reisinger spoke. “Telephone calls are too risky Sami. It was essential that we understand what you were planning to do. Beyond that, we really don’t want to know any of
the details.
It’s best that way. You should have no concerns about John and I being recognized. Aside from the fact that we are not that recognizable in Europe, we were driven
in private cars from different origins.
No one knows that we are in Bonn. As John already told you, he’s here to pick up a new car he ordered.
As for me, I have a private
apartment in Hamburg and people are accustomed to seeing me in Germany. I come here
at least once a month. On this trip I drove in from Brussels. My car is ordinary looking
but has tinted glass. My driver drove in circles for miles until he was certain that he
wasn’t being followed. I was dropped off a block from the club.”
“I also think it was important that we all meet and get to know one another better.
This is an important mission,” said Anderson.
“Sami think you had information for us,” said Sami.
“You waste time for meeting.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Reisinger.
“I don’t think it has been a waste
of time.”
“Neither do I,” said Sasha. “It was good that we could meet.”
“When is the assassination going to take place?” asked Anderson.
“Smolenskiy
will
decide
when
right
moment
to
kill
Ziemelis.
Maybe
now…maybe week…maybe month,” said Sami. “We go now.”
Sami and Sasha walked out without looking behind.
There were no hand shakes
and there were no good-byes.
Sasha was leading the way. Sami was following. They walked up Wessel Street
and then up Rathaus Alley. They reverted to speaking Russian.
“Where are we going?” asked Sami.
“Let’s get something to eat. Some place where we can talk. I liked the restaurant
in the basement of the old town hall but I believe it is closed. I think I remember a decent
place right next to it. Do you know the one I mean?”
“No. I don’t like German food. It’s all sausages and pig’s knuckles.”
“You just don’t know what to order. You must improve your German, Sami.”
“I’ll wait until they speak Russian. How long can that be? Not long!”
Sasha was right. The Brauhaus Bönnsch was right there. He wanted to find a restaurant that he had never been to before so no one could have anticipated where they
might end up. Jared obviously knew they would be in Bonn. But how? He needed time to
think.
They were greeted as soon as they walked in and were immediately seated.
It
helped that Sasha’s German was impeccable.
“I will say this, Sasha, our miserable restaurants could learn a thing or two from
German waiters. The Germans see it as a profession.”
“Yes, that’s true. I think the Austrians make even better waiters. Do you like venison?”
“Of course. Just no sausages,” said Sami.
Sasha ordered two Dortmunder Union Pils beers and two orders of Hirschbraten,
Eifeler Art.
“So what do you think, Sami?”
“I don’t know,” said Sami. “Maybe I should call the Colombians and get them
into Canada right away. This Anderson is an idiot,” said Sami.
“He is not an idiot. On the contrary, it is extremely intelligent and very powerful.
Don’t underestimate him. The problem with Anderson is that he doesn’t know much
about the intelligence business.
Nothing at all!
Worse, he is a religious zealot.
That
makes him irrational, and therefore dangerous, when it comes to anything that touches on
religion,” said Sasha.
“I can understand Anderson’s obsession with Ziemelis, but why is Reisinger so
interested in killing Ziemelis? I know that they don’t have any official backing from the
White House. I heard another source that said that they are working entirely alone in this
matter and that the White House has no knowledge of their activities,” said Sami.
“I’ve heard those stories as well. With regard to Reisinger, I think he is cooperating as a favor to Anderson. Reisinger is a very politically astute fellow.
He has been in
intelligence since college. I doubt he gives a damn about killing Ziemelis. He is currying
favor with Anderson and Anderson thinks that God wants Ziemelis to die,” said Sasha.
“Reisinger is close to involuntary retirement. He wants to find a comfortable home after
he leaves the CIA.”
“I am glad I don’t have Anderson’s fucking God. Jews don’t have God speaking
to them to do things.”
“Are you serious or is it that you just don’t read the Old Testament?”
“OK, let me rephrase that. My kind of Jew doesn’t have God speaking to people.
For that matter, I’m not much of a Jew.”
The food arrived. They drank and ate but didn’t speak much more for the rest of
the evening. They both had a lot to think about.
Smolenskiy was highly skilled with the
Mir
assassination crossbow favored by
Speznaz
, but now he finally had what he was really longing for. He slowly opened the
aluminum case and took out the rifle.
He never failed to appreciate its dark beauty and
cold elegance. His brother had saved it for him all these years, waiting until Smolenskiy
returned from Afghanistan and eventually got to America.
Smolenskiy drove it down
from Canada just a month ago. It was his beloved Dragunov. He mouthed the name like
he was beckoning a lover.
It used a NATO 7.62 mm round with precisely 3.1 grams of
powder.
He always loaded his own shells. Hot loads were too risky.
Smolenskiy had
considered requesting a .50 caliber sniper rifle, but he wasn’t accustomed to it. Moreover,
he knew that it might attract attention if he tried to sight it in.
As far as he was concerned, there was no sniper rifle like the Dragunov anywhere.
Everyone knew that the Russians were the masters of weaponry, especially rifles.
His
Dragunov could theoretically kill at two kilometers but its reliable accuracy—by an expert—was about 800 meters. It was the wind, not the rifle that sometimes failed him. He
had often done far better than that. The muzzle velocity was a remarkable 830 meters per
second. It was a marvelous tool if it was in respectful hands.
Smolenskiy was very respectful.
He set up the tripod, pushed the anchors into the dirt, rolled over on his back and
closed his eyes.
He was tired.
He felt fatigue constantly in recent months. That was an
alien feeling for him. He always seemed to be tired. He let is mind drift to whatever places it longed to go.
He waited until his heart stopped racing. He felt the early morning
chill deep in his bones. Cold was a familiar feeling and he liked it.
He test fired the Dragunov several times in the past month to zero in the sight. He
even tried the crossbow because it had a flatter trajectory and was utterly silent, but the
range was unreliable. It has to be the Dragunov. No one in Maine paid attention to a single shot now and then—as long as there weren’t too many.
He saved his vodka bottles
for this. People in America were accustomed to trash lying around their parks and beaches. No one would pay attention to the broken bottles.
He was hitting them with the first
shot out to 500 meters. It was too risky to try much farther. He knew he could make the
shot at 1000 meters, but this was too important to take any chances. Still, he knew he had
to keep his distance from Ziemelis. There was risk in being too close.
He tied fluorescent orange fishing line from a tree near a popular fishing spot near
the kill zone to act as a wind sock. He could now estimate the wind speed at the target by
how much the fishing line was deflected.
He stopped drinking two days ago so that his
breathing would be slow and relaxed. Once he braced, he thought he was still rock solid.
He could not miss. It was as certain as a sun rise.
He turned fifty last month. The return of his beloved Dragunov was his birthday
present.
“
Yes, the years were beginning to show
,” he thought.
He recently lost the last of his natural teeth.
He had probably waited too long to
give in.
He was not growing old gracefully.
He tried to fight back. His vitamin E regimen had almost put him in the hospital. Despite an hour of exercising each morning, his
hard, angular Slavic face had developed jowls. He could pinch almost an inch of fat at his
waist. He was disgusted by his own weakness. He wasn’t doing enough.
Despite everything to the contrary, he was still hard.
He was still strong. He was Cossack.
His blue
eyes were testimony of a savage family lineage. He was very proud that his hair was still
jet black. It was a family trait. His father hadn’t turned white until he was almost ninety.
It was at least something he could hope for.
Smolenskiy had hours to wait.
He would wait for days if it was needed. It was
not a difficult thing for him. His mind drifted to better times.
His father was a
mujik
, a
peasant farmer in the Ukraine.
He remembered stories from his parents.
When he was
an infant his mother would tightly bind him from neck to toe to a swaddling board and
prop him up beneath a shady tree while she and his father worked the fields. At times, he
would be like that for ten to twelve hours. Father O’Connor, a cultural anthropologist
Smolenskiy knew personally, used swaddling as a working theory to explain the passive
nature of the Russian peasant, but when unbound, the
mujik
could be fierce.
According
to O’Connor, peasants were accustomed to being subdued from infancy.
Leave it to the
undisciplined Western mind to concoct simple explanations for complex social phenomena.
Smolenskiy thoughts drifted to his early years. During his youth, stories were retold hundreds of times at the kitchen table beneath candle light. Most told was the tale of
Grandfather Bear taking young Ivan, but finally abandoning the baby and board in a
thicket after failing to unwrap the infant. The pale scar across Smolenskiy’s forehead has
been a lifelong reminder that it had really happened.
Then there were the Cossack stories.
He heard raucous stories over and over
about Taras Bulba writing insulting letters to the Czar.
The family was vaingloriously
proud of its Cossack roots.
His paternal grandfather never tired of reading the letters,
over and over again, laughing again and again.
And, there were the stories of the Cossacks bleeding Napoleon’s army as it was retreating from Russia and how it was the
cause of his eventual defeat.
He heard how his maternal grandfather was hung from a lamp post by the mobs
during the 1905 Revolution.
He had been a policeman in St. Petersburg.
He heard the
account of his maternal great-grandfather racing from a pack of wolves in a blizzard and
throwing his grandfather’s younger brother from the
troika
to appease the pack so that the
family could escape. Better had it been his grandfather. Ivan always regarded that particularly family story as being pure fable, but he grew up with the shame of having a
Chekist
in their bloodline. Whether fact or fable, the stories swirled in his thoughts and lodged
in his heart.
Smolenskiy was the product of everything that he was and everything that
he had heard, and above all, he was an officer of the
Speznaz
.
He never needed to remind himself how much he hated Latvians.
They weren't
Slavs and they always had their noses in the air. Stalin hadn't hurt them nearly enough.
Of course, who knows what he would have done if he hadn't died in 1953. Stalin should
have lived longer.
He visited Riga a year ago and still felt the humiliation of having to deal with the
dregs of the former Soviet Union. Everyone in the new independent Latvia spoke fluent
Russian but wouldn't speak it. He was forced to speak English. Still, he had been resolute
in not speaking that bastard language, Latvian. He should have gone to Tallinn, where at
least they didn't put on airs about being better than everyone else. The Finns and the Estonians were reasonable. Every last Latvian and Lithuanian should have been sent to the
Gulag
. Many were sent, but not nearly enough. Stalin should have lived longer.
Young Ivan had been a brilliant student. He had achieved the equivalent of a doctoral degree in psychology at the Leningrad Polytechnic University by the age of 25. He
had been selected, coached and groomed by the GRU. Eventually, he was sent to
Speznaz
. Why anyone needed a psychologist in Afghanistan was only known in the Kremlin,
but he went without hesitation or contemplation.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a
nine-year struggle starting in 1979. Smolenskiy was there in the thick of it. He was
Speznaz
for life!
He was, after all, a Kalmyk Cossack, the descendent of a famed warrior
class that dated back a thousand years.
He kissed the anchor tattoo on the web of his hand for a benediction and then
slowly took his position.
He panned the cove with his scope. Jared's boathouse was still
closed. He could see that the Boston Whaler was still in its moorings. He would wait. He
would wait as long as he needed to. The sun would be above the horizon soon.