12
HOUSTON,
Texas
Twenty-nine-year-old Jason Ryder was not a Medal of Honor recipient, though he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery during the Afghan War. He was lean and wiry at 145 pounds and stood no taller than five foot six. He was fast on his feet and even faster with a gun. Ryder was also a man with a severe case of post-traumatic stress, and since returning home from the war, he had been virtually ignored by the Veterans Administration. “Backlogged” was the official term they used.
It hadn’t taken Ryder long to give up on the VA, turning to a private military company (PMC) named Obsidian Optio, where he took a job leading offshore security details. The work was boring and tedious, and it made his nerves hum with anxiety. When he wasn’t working, he spent his time drinking and smoking pot, sliding ever deeper into the hole of PTSD until he finally began to consider sui
cide. It was during a detail in Brazil that Ryder had first met Ken Peterson of the CIA.
Peterson was very coy at first, feeding Ryder’s anger at being brushed aside by the VA. He said there were factions within the US government working to change things from the inside out, but key people were standing in the way. It didn’t take more than three hours over beers for Peterson to have Ryder talked into accepting a private contractor’s
role with the agency.
“Sure, it’s against our legal charter,” Peterson said, “but the agency’s been turned upside down since the nuke attacks last year.” He went on to exaggerate further the severity of a genuine administrative problem. “Nobody really knows who’s in charge of anything, and nobody can get anything done according to policy. So we’re operating outside official parameters to keep the ship afloat, fighting a holding action against the old guard back in Langley while Washington decides how it wants us to function in the age of ‘nuclear terror.’ ” He smirked. “Hell, the president can’t even get Congress to confirm a new director. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so damn tragic.”
Ryder now sat in George Bush Intercontinental Airport, waiting impatiently to catch an early-morning flight to Washington, where he would assassinate Bob Pope, one of the traitors Peterson claimed was standing in the way of a safer, stronger America.
What Ryder did not know—nor did Peterson or Tim Hagen—was that Pope was the director of a newly formed top-secret Special Mission Unit of the CIA called the Anti-Terrorism Response Unit (ATRU). Though the ATRU was similar in concept to other SMUs such as SEAL Team VI and Delta Force, it was much smaller. It did not operate under the auspices of the Special Activities Division. In fact, the ATRU was not even officially part of the CIA. It answered directly to the Office of the President. It did not conduct large-scale operations, it did not gather its own intelligence, and its operations certainly weren’t subject to congressional oversight. Operators within the ATRU had one purpose and one purpose only: close with and
destroy Muslim terrorists wherever they could be found and do so without leaving a trace of having been there. To use the cliché, they didn’t exist.
Ryder sat at the gate and looked at his watch, his leg jiggling up and down. He needed a cigarette, but there was no place to smoke. He’d gone to the restroom to sneak a drag, but there’d been a pair of chubby National Transportation Safety Board cops standing right outside the door, jawing and laughing about some foreign national they’d just denied entrance into the country. So instead, he popped a Xanax and chased it with a swig of water, wondering idly if Peterson understood how close to the edge he really was these days.
Part of him didn’t trust Peterson—the guy was a spook, after all—but fifty grand was good money, and if this guy Pope was only half as bad as Peterson made him out to be, the disloyal bastard still deserved what was coming to him. He’d seen much better men killed on the battlefield for a whole lot less. But in the end, it didn’t really matter to Ryder. He was itching to take his aggressions out on someone in government, and Pope was probably more deserving than most.
An hour before boarding, he managed to nod off, but a bickering couple sat down across from him. A young Mexican woman was bitching about something in Spanish. She was in her early twenties, accompanied by a man easily fifteen years older, and she had long black hair, dark sunglasses, and jeans so tight they fit her like she’d been poured into them.
“Would you shut the fuck up for five minutes?” the guy said irritably. He was tall with dark features, built like a professional baseball player.
Ryder pulled his black Craft International shooting cap down tighter over his eyes, tuning them out.
“If your mother pulls that shit on me again,” the girl said in English, “I’m slapping that bitch right in her fucking mouth!”
“Calm down,” he repeated. “We’re not the only ones in the airport.”
“Hey!” the girl said. “Hey, you.”
Ryder lifted the brim of his cap. The girl was looking right at him. She’d taken off her glasses, and he could see the bloodshot drift of her black eyes, the cocaine shine. “You talkin’ to me?”
“Would you let your mother call your girlfriend a whore?”
Ryder stole a glance at Crosswhite. “Depends on if she was.”
Crosswhite snickered, and Sarahi sat back in the seat.
“Pinches putos,”
she said under her breath.
Ryder pulled the cap back down and drifted off again. He awoke a short time later to the toe of someone’s shoe tapping against his. He looked up to see the tall man standing over him.
“This your flight?” Crosswhite asked, drinking from his coffee. “It’s boarding.”
13
MESSINA,
Sicily
Gil and Dragunov were parked on the side of the road, waiting for Kovalenko to show his face at the ferry crossing to Villa San Giovanni on the far side of the Strait of Messina. It was late in the day, and Gil sat dozing in the passenger seat when Dragunov spotted Eli Vitsin and three other Spetsnaz men driving off the ferry in an old Italian LaForza SUV.
“That’s them!” Dragunov said, starting the motor.
Gil looked around. “Who them?”
“Kovalenko’s men.” Dragunov pointed at the red LaForza. “It looks like they’re coming to him.”
Gil watched the unusually wide SUV turning north. “Why are they doing that?”
“I don’t know.” Dragunov pulled out slowly from the side of the road. “Maybe they plan to kill us here on the island.” His satellite
phone began to ring inside the zipper pouch on his hip as he shifted gears. He answered the phone, saying,
“Da?”
Then he handed the phone to Gil. “It’s for you.”
Gil took the phone. “Yeah, who’s this?”
“Gil, it’s Bob. Federov gave me the number.”
“Whattaya got?”
“It’s definitely a shadow op,” Pope said. “Looks like black elements of the CIA and the GRU are planning to disable the BTC pipeline.”
“What the hell for?”
“One can only speculate,” Pope said. “Listen, Gil, there’s something you need to know. Hagen’s made a move to have me assassinated. I’ve scheduled a meeting with the president for tomorrow to brief him on your new mission profile, and I’m going to request permission to bring Acting Director Webb into the loop. That way SOG can take over in the event something happens to me.”
Gil was so pissed that he forgot the pain in his festering shoulder wound. “Who does Hagen think he is, Al Pacino?”
“I’ll handle him,” Pope said easily. “But I want you aware in case the impossible happens. Where are you now?”
“Looks like we just got lucky,” Gil said. “Kovalenko’s men showed up here at the ferry crossing in Mes—”
The windows of the car shattered in an implosion of flying glass as a second SUV sped past them on the left, a bald gunman in the passenger seat spraying their Fiat with 9 x 18 mm fire from a suppressed Kashtan submachine pistol. Dragunov rammed the SUV to send it careening toward the far side of the road, where it swerved briefly onto the berm and then back onto the street. Another burst from the machine pistol, and the front left tire of the Fiat was blown out.
“Sukiny dyeti!”
Dragunov shouted, pounding the steering wheel in a rage as the SUV sped away. Sons of bitches!
“Stop the car!” Gil urged, tossing the shattered satellite phone
aside. “Gimme your weapon!” One of the bullets had struck the phone as he was ducking down in the seat. “There are too many people around.”
Dragunov pulled off and tossed his pistol into Gil’s lap. “What are you going to do?”
Gil jumped out, sliding quickly beneath the car to wedge their pistols between the fuel tank and the chassis. “Now pop the trunk. I’ll see if there’s a spare.”
“You’re bleeding again,” Dragunov said, pointing at Gil’s hand, where he’d been nicked by the bullet.
“What the fuck else is new, Ivan? Come on. Let’s get the tire changed before the local— Shit!” A black police car with “Carabinieri” stenciled along the side pulled past them and off the road with two cops inside. “All I got’s my Russian passport.”
“I’ll do the talking,” Dragunov said, getting out. “Just mumble what we taught you at the airport—and act stupid. I’ll tell them you lived in Chernobyl and that the radiation rotted your brain.”
Gil chuckled sardonically, pulling the bloody sock from beneath his shirt to get the shoulder wound bleeding for effect. “And if that doesn’t work?”
Dragunov shrugged. “We kill them.”
14
PALERMO,
Sicily
Kovalenko would have preferred to stay and finish his enemy while he held the advantage of rifle over pistol. But the real reason the Wolf had struck the truce with Dragunov was that one of Gil’s blindly fired .40 caliber rounds had penetrated the back of his right thigh and passed clean through, leaving him with a four-inch-long hole through the femoral biceps muscle. It was late in the day now, and he occupied a cottage on the outskirts of Palermo near the northwestern tip of Sicily, waiting for Vitsin and the rest of his men to arrive from Rome. Kovalenko knew that by now Dragunov or someone else from the GRU would be covering the Messina ferry crossing, so he’d called Vitsin and changed the plan, warning him to watch for the Spetsnaz major as they came ashore. The Wolf’s wounds were clean and stuffed with cotton wadding to stanch the blood. The bullet had passed dangerously close to the sciatic nerve, so he counted himself lucky not to need major surgery.
He stood in the kitchen looking down at the bodies of a dead goat farmer and his wife, whom he’d shot in the middle of their breakfast. He took a seat and broke open a couple of cold biscuits, smearing them with marmalade and pouring himself a cup of cold coffee from a tin pot.
Vitsin and the other five Chechen operatives arrived a short time later, sharing the news about their failure to kill Dragunov at the Messina crossing.
Kovalenko was annoyed by their failure, but Dragunov had an uncanny knack for survival, so he wasn’t entirely surprised. “Who the hell is the other guy?” he wondered aloud. “I saw him on the bridge of the
Palinouros
but didn’t recognize the face.”
“It has to be that American operative Gil Shannon,” Vitsin said. “The US Navy sniper. Before we left Rome, our CIA contact told us he was spotted at our embassy in Paris.”
Kovalenko knew a lot about Shannon. He grunted. “So the GRU is working with the old guard of the CIA.” He thought back to the gunfight by the road, remembering how the red laser beam had shone in the dark, and he realized that it was Gil who’d had the immediate presence of mind to toss a handful of dust into the air. “The dot must have reflected off the car,” he muttered.
“What dot?”
Kovalenko told them how Dragunov had rammed Lesnichy with the car and how Gil had used the laser beam to accurately place his shots. “That’s how Anatoly got himself killed—and very nearly me.”
“We have to get back to Georgia,” remarked the bald man named Anton, who had failed to kill Dragunov and Gil in Messina.
“
Da!
As soon as possible,” seconded one of the others.
“At first I thought so too,” Vitsin said, “but now I disagree.”
Kovalenko eyed him, waiting for an explanation.
“Dragunov will follow us wherever we go,” Vitsin went on. “If we escape back to Georgia, the bastard will surely appear when we least expect him—
like he did in Malta.
And back in Georgia, he will have
the close logistical support of the Russian army. So I say it’s best to deal with him here on Sicily, where both sides are equal.”
“But Dragunov is only one man,” Anton protested. “There will be others.”
Kovalenko spoke up. “True, there
will
be others—but not like Dragunov. He knows me better than anyone, and like Vitsin says, he’s a cagey whoreson.”
“And what about the American?” asked another.
“Well,” Kovalenko said thoughtfully, “
someone
in the CIA obviously sent him to France, which either means our American friends are not as well informed as they say, or they’re lying to us.”
Vitsin straightened in his chair. “Regardless, there’s no reason to assume Shannon won’t accompany Dragunov to Georgia—especially if the Americans know we plan to hit the pipeline.”
“That, too, is correct.” Kovalenko sat quietly for a moment, trying to see ten moves ahead into his chess match with Dragunov. “In the end, the Americans will do whatever is necessary to protect their oil profits—short of war. And Moscow will do whatever is necessary to avoid provoking them—within reason. So, my friends, the decision is thrust upon us: we deal with Dragunov and Shannon here on Sicilian soil . . . then we go back and help Umarov hit the pipeline.”
15
MEXICO CITY,
Mexico
Hagen met with Peterson in the restaurant El Cardenal on the south side of Mexico City in a zone densely populated with hotels and restaurants. It was a quiet place with good food. “So what’s going on?” Hagen asked, spreading the linen napkin in his lap. “What couldn’t we talk about over the phone?”
“We have an anomaly,” Peterson said, opening the wine list. “A number of them, actually. Eight Maltese sailors were killed last night by machine-gun fire, and their patrol boat is still missing. Also, the
Palinouros
was found anchored off the coast of Sicily with her entire crew murdered.”
“Miller?” Hagen asked.
“Dead,” Peterson said, scanning the wine list. “Shot right between the eyes—or so I’m told.”
“Who killed the Maltese sailors?”
Peterson looked up. “Shannon. Who the hell else?”
“It might have been Kovalenko if he was—”
“Kovalenko doesn’t exist,” Peterson said. “There is no Kovalenko. Only Gil Shannon—
murderer
. Get it?”
Nettled, Hagen spoke through gritted teeth. “Who the fuck killed the Maltese sailors?”
“Quick answer is,
we don’t know
,” Peterson said. “But it gets pinned on Shannon. I’ve already put the word out to the right people in Malta, and they’re moving on Sicily.”
“Well, my first guess for the Maltese sailors wouldn’t be Shannon,” Hagen said. “So you’d better tell your people not to waste too much time on that lead.”
“Why not?”
Hagen sucked on a shrimp cocktail. “Because Shannon’s a fucking idealist, Ken. He doesn’t like to kill people who don’t have it coming. I’d tell you to ask your buddy Lerher about that, but, then, Lerher’s already dead, isn’t he?” He closed the menu and nudged it aside. “You’d better find a way to kill him, and soon. I’m telling you!”
Peterson reached for a tortilla chip. “You’re the one who insisted on fucking the guy.”
Hagen’s temper flared. “And
you’re
the one who said it could be done, no problem!”
“Lower your voice,” Peterson warned, cutting him a glance as the waitress approached.
They ordered their food and drinks and sat in strained silence until the other patrons were entirely refocused on their own tables.
“So what about Pope?” Hagen asked, smoothing the table cloth.
“The contract has been accepted. He’ll be dead within thirty-six hours.”
“Oh, really? And suppose he never comes out of that damn cave of his?”
“He’s coming out tomorrow.” Peterson wanted to punch Hagen in the face. “There’s a meeting scheduled with the president for the afternoon. He’ll be exposed all the way from Langley to DC and back.”
“It’s not exactly going to look like an accident, is it?”
Peterson shook his head. “This isn’t TV, Tim. It’s war.”
“I’m glad you realize that.” Hagen took a drink of water. “By the way, I need a security detail. Do you have one you can supply me with?”
Peterson gaped at him.
“What’s that look?”
“You can hire your own team—locally.”
“You mean Mexicans?”
“No, Chinese!”
“You’re the Central America chief of station,” Hagen said. “You’re telling me you don’t have a detail you can spare?”
Peterson made an effort to keep his own voice down. “Any detail I could spare would be made up of indigenous personnel:
Mexicans
. And the allocation could draw attention from within the agency—which we don’t need—so hire your own team. There are plenty of private firms here in the city.”
Hagen’s lips puckered, and he looked almost as though he were pouting.
Now it was Peterson’s turn to smirk. “Jesus, it’s the money, isn’t it? All those millions, and you’re too cheap to pay for your own goddamn security.”
Hagen sat back so the waitress could pour their wine. “Find me a firm that isn’t going to cost me an arm and a leg. I don’t think that should be
too
difficult, considering where we are.”
Peterson waited for the young woman to leave the table. “Remember, tight-ass, you get what you pay for.”
Hagen took umbrage. “It should occur to you that I have money because I know how to manage it.”
“You have money because your father left it to you,” Peterson retorted. “Speaking of which, you’re picking up the tab for this meal. I flew down from Monterrey at my own expense.” This was, of course, untrue, but Peterson had learned to enjoy the small victories in his dealings with Tim Hagen.