10
SICILY
Gil and Dragunov arrived on the Sicilian coast near the small town of Sampieri about twenty-five minutes behind Kovalenko and his men. The Maltese P21 patrol boat was already sinking by the stern in thirty feet of water and would disappear long before the sun came up.
Gil killed the engines on the
Palinouros
and dropped both bow anchors. “You up for another swim? If we leave the skiff on the beach, it’ll be obvious somebody came ashore.”
Dragunov pulled on the hood to his wet suit, saying grimly, “Let’s get wet, Vassili. In two hours the sun rises.”
They weighted Brody’s body with a scuba tank and watched him sink beneath the surface at the stern before stepping into the water and swimming the hundred yards to land. The two of them came ashore on a stretch of empty beach concealed from an adjacent village by a long wood running the length of the cove. They ditched
their wet suits and moved east through the trees parallel to the road.
“Will they move inland on a direct route to Messina?” Gil asked. “Or stick to the coastal road?”
“They will steal the first car they can and take the coast road. We’ll have to do the same if we want to catch them before they make it to Italy. Are you prepared to kill Sicilians?”
“Only to stay alive and out of prison,” Gil answered. “Not to steal a car.”
“What if stealing a car is the only way to stay alive and out of prison?”
“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”
They moved into the village and found a small black Fiat with the keys in the ignition. Dragunov slipped behind the wheel, and Gil pushed it down the dirt road away from the house before Dragunov started it up. Soon they were riding along the coastal road, headed east.
“I think they’d take the highway inland,” Gil said. “It’s a lot faster to Messina that way.”
“Oh, you are Spetsnaz?” Dragunov asked in his gravelly voice, shifting gears, his eyes glued to the winding road. “You know how they were trained?”
Gil chuckled. “Well, maybe we could take the highway and get to Messina ahead of them. We could cover the ferry.”
“And do what?” Dragunov said, stealing a glance. “Shoot them in front of everyone?”
“Hey, I’m just thinkin’ out loud here.”
“Think quiet,” Dragunov said. “Your thoughts give me a headache.”
Twenty minutes later, they rounded a bend and saw, in the taillights of another black car pulled off to the right, a man just finishing up with changing the left rear tire. Dragunov gunned the engine and swerved toward the car.
“Watch it, Ivan, you’re gonna hit the fuckin’ guy!”
“Blyat!”
Dragunov snarled, slamming the front right fender of the Fiat into the man as he jumped too late to get out of the way. The body flew up over the top of the car and landed in the road behind them as Dragunov slammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a stop in the dirt. “That was Lesnichy—one of Kovalenko’s men!”
Gil pulled his pistol and dove from the vehicle, rolling into a shallow depression at the side of the road. Dragunov disappeared in the darkness on the far side.
Both the black car and the badly broken—but not dead—Lesnichy were faintly visible in the taillights of the still idling Fiat. Lesnichy’s right leg was folded grotesquely beneath him, the other leg twitching involuntarily.
Gil heard the faint sound of a suppressed pistol shot, and Lesnichy’s leg stopped moving. Two more whispered pistol shots took out the taillights of their Fiat in quick succession, throwing the road into almost total darkness. Screwing the suppressor back onto his Strike One, Gil knew they were all equally pressed for time by the coming of dawn.
The red dot of a laser sight glinted off the chrome fender of the Fiat, and Gil grabbed a handful a dust from the road, throwing it into the air behind the car. The powder instantly formed a cloud, illuminating the beam of the laser. The laser disappeared in that same instant, but it was too late. Gil had been shooting azimuths by eye for too long. His brain worked with computerlike speed to trace the angle of the beam back to its source through the darkness. He fired three shots from the Strike One on pure instinct.
A man grunted.
Hearing him scramble to displace, Gil fired two more shots, and the man cried out, swearing in Russian. Gil could tell by the sound of the voice that he’d struck vital organs, so there was no reason to fire again.
A suppressed rifle shot hissed through the air, and a chunk of flesh the size of a quarter was torn from Gil’s right shoulder. Recoiling from the suddenness of the impact, he rolled back into the
road against all prudence, hoping the sniper would expect him to roll the opposite way. Another shot hissed through the air, striking the ground three feet to his left, and Gil froze, knowing the sniper would now be listening for the faintest hint to his location.
“Comrade Dragunov!” someone called out from behind the enemy car.
“Kovalenko!” Dragunov called back.
Gil used this noise as cover, inching his way backward around the front of the car. He listened as the two Spetsnaz men exchanged brief insults in Russian, sitting against the front bumper of the Fiat, probing the wound. It wasn’t life threatening, but it was bleeding and would be difficult to conceal without a proper field dressing and a change of clothes.
“It will be light soon,” Kovalenko was telling Dragunov. “We should finish this another time. Otherwise we may spend the rest of our lives washing one another’s backs in an Italian prison.”
“You’ll wash
my
back, traitor!”
Kovalenko laughed uproariously from the far side of the car. “Even so, there will soon be light enough to see.”
“You’re the one with your back to the water!” Dragunov shouted. “I have all day!”
“Do you, comrade? We both know I am the man with the rifle.”
Dragunov thought that over, believing Gil dead and realizing he’d be no match for Kovalenko’s rifle once the sun came up. “What do you propose, traitor?”
“You in your car, me in mine—now! While it’s still too dark to see one another. I reverse, you go forward, and we both live to fight another day.”
Dragunov decided to let discretion be the better part of valor. “On three?”
“We count together!”
Together they counted: “
One . . . two . . . three
!
”
Then each man darted for his car.
With no idea what the hell had been said, Gil heard Dragunov
come scrambling from the rocks. When Dragunov jumped into the car, he reasoned what must be going on and moved quickly around to the passenger side where the door still hung open.
Dragunov nearly shot him when he appeared. “Get in! I thought you were dead!”
Gil got in, and Dragunov gunned the motor before he even had a chance to close the door.
“What the hell was all that about back there?”
“We called a truce before it got light,” Dragunov said. “Kovalenko doesn’t want to risk being caught by the police, and I couldn’t fight him without a rifle. If I’d known you were still alive, I would not have agreed, but at least this way we can beat him to Messina.”
“How do you know he won’t change his plan?”
“The rest of his men will be waiting for him in Rome.”
In the beam of the headlights, Gil saw clothes hanging on a line in front of a house up ahead. “Stop there. I need a new shirt.”
Dragunov pulled to the side and Gil jumped out, grabbing a shirt and some socks to use for bandages. They were under way again a few seconds later.
“Do you guys have a safe house in Italy? Someplace I can get stitched up?”
“Don’t you, American?”
Gil shook his head. “Pope still has no idea who we can trust in Europe. I can’t risk being tracked.”
“I thought you said the GRU was just as bad.”
Gil was shrugging out of his shirt. “You said they were clean. Besides, any port in a storm, Ivan. I won’t be effective for long unless I get this fixed.”
Dragunov shifted gears. “You killed one back there, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, Vassili. Maybe you Americans would have given us a fight after all.”
Gil wrapped a sock around his wound. “Yeah, well, I’m glad we never had to find out.”
“It does not matter,” Dragunov remarked a few moments later. “There would have been nothing left for anyone. We always knew that. It was all a stupid waste. War is a stupid waste.”
“So why do we love it so damn much?” Gil wondered.
Dragunov smiled in the light of the dash. “That is a good question.”
11
TIJUANA,
Mexico
Thirty-eight-year-old Daniel Crosswhite was a former Green Beret captain, former Delta Force operator, and Medal of Honor winner, but since his discharge from the army almost two years earlier, he had devolved into someone less than a model citizen.
Just months after his return to civilian life, he and former Navy SEAL Brett “Conman” Tuckerman formed a two-man vigilante squad, dressing up at night as FBI agents to knock over drug dealers in the cities of Detroit and Chicago, killing a few of the hapless dealers in the process. They were ultimately apprehended in Chicago by the Eighty-Second Airborne Division during that city’s brief period under martial law, which had been imposed in response to the menace of nuclear terror then gripping the nation. Only the timely intervention of Robert Pope—director of the Special Activities Division of the CIA—had saved them from life in prison. In exchange for covering their tracks, Pope had required they assist Gil Shannon
in his hunt for a Russian RA-115 “suitcase” nuke. Sadly, Tuckerman was killed during the hunt, leaving Crosswhite to carry out further missions alone.
What Pope had never known, however, was that in the moments before Crosswhite’s and Tuckerman’s apprehension by the Eighty-Second, they managed to hide a half million dollars beneath the foundation of a dilapidated building, and Crosswhite had long since returned to Chicago to retrieve it. Now he lived in relative obscurity back and forth across the California-Mexico border, having fallen off the grid and mostly out of contact with both Shannon and Pope.
However, as an avowed adrenaline junky, he had also made it known in the right circles that his services were available on the international mercenary market—if the price was right.
It was two in the morning, and Crosswhite lay naked on a hotel bed with his arm around an equally naked Mexican prostitute when his cellular chirped on the nightstand. With a curious glance at the clock, he sat up and switched on the lamp. The adrenaline began to pump as he read the lengthy text message, supplying him with names, flight numbers, and the location of a CIA drop box in San Diego, where he would find the money to cover his expenses should he decide to accept the mission.
“You gotta be shittin’ me,” he muttered.
Crosswhite replied at once, confirming his acceptance and his intention to begin immediately. Setting aside the phone, he reached for a powder-covered mirror on the nightstand. He used a rolled-up hundred-dollar bill to snort a thick line of cocaine and then reached over and gave the girl a sharp slap on her backside. “Up at ’em, baby! We got shit to do!”
The twenty-three-year-old girl woke up pissed, taking a swat at him and missing as he got off the bed. “
Pendejo!
Don’t fucking hit me when I’m sleeping!” Her name was Sarahi. She had obsidian eyes and long, raven hair. “
Pinche puto
!
”
He stopped short of the bathroom and whipped around, his
devil-may-care grin splitting his handsome, dark face. “Hey, you wanna take a fuckin’ trip with me, baby?”
She sat up, her gaze narrowing with suspicion. “Where?”
“Fuck you care, where? The fuck outta here!
That’s
where!”
“You gonna pay me?”
“Hell, yes. Now get that hot little ass into some jeans. I just got a mission, and the CIA pays fucking
bueno
, baby!”
Her eyes lit up like black fire. “CIA money?”
He laughed. “Yeah, CIA money. Now get your ass moving, you sexy little bitch. We’re on the clock!”
She did a couple quick lines of coke and then sprang out of bed, reaching for her jeans. They were dressed and out the door a few minutes later.
Crosswhite fired up his black Jeep Wrangler and sped out of the hotel lot.
“So where we goin’?” she asked, opening her purse.
“San Diego.” He lit a cigarette and tossed the lighter onto the dash. “I gotta pick up some
dinero
.”
“Can we stop to see my
tía
?” She pulled down the vanity mirror to check her makeup.
“We don’t have time to visit your fucking aunt, baby. This is a goddamn mission.”
“A mission to do what? What
kind
of mission?”
He stopped at a light and looked at her, his face suddenly serious. “We’re gonna kill a motherfucker, baby. We’re gonna kill a motherfucker, and it’s gonna be the most exciting, most
dangerous
fucking thing you’ve ever been involved in.”
She stared at him, thinking at first that he was joking. When she saw that he was not, she felt her pulse quicken. “Is it legal?”
“Legal!” He laughed again. “Baby, this is the CIA. Whatever you can get away with is legal.”
“What if you get caught?”
He took a drag from the cigarette and flicked the ash out the window. “Well, if you get caught, that’s just your tough shit.”
“Then we ain’t getting fucking caught,” she said, looking back into the mirror. “How much are we getting paid?”
The light turned green, and he stepped on the gas. “Two hundred grand.”
“What?!” She smacked the vanity mirror closed. “Two hundred fucking grand? Shit! My
primo
Migue will kill a guy for fifty bucks!”
He gave her a look, keeping an eye on the road. “This dude we’re goin’ after, he’d turn your cousin Migue into a fucking piñata. Now get those jeans off and slide over here. That coke’s makin’ me horny as fuck.”
“
I’m
making you horny.” She started to undo her pants, then stopped. “Half the money is mine, right?”
“Yeah, it’s half yours. Now get over here and straddle this thing, baby. You’re killin’ me with those eyes!”
She laughed and wriggled out of the jeans. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”
He laughed with her as she climbed aboard. “You ain’t foolin’ nobody.” He had to look around her to keep from going off the road as she got into position. “What you like are dead presidents.”
She grabbed his chin as she slid onto him, looking into his eyes. “That’s right, and you’d better not fucking rip me off!”
He clipped the curb, and the Jeep bounced back into the lane. “Don’t worry,” he chuckled, one hand on the wheel holding the cigarette, the other gripping her ass. “I don’t want your
puto
cousin trackin’ me down.”