Only the dead, p.41
Only the Dead, page 41
Dashkov threw his feet to the side of the bed and looked at the clock. It was almost 3:00 a.m. It would be good to get out of Cyprus. He had only stayed to confer with Sokoloff and head off any questions in the event the boat, bomb, or mercenaries surfaced. He had to keep his schedule, as much as he desired a return to Moscow.
Soon enough.
He grabbed his robe from the bedpost and tightened the sash around his waist.
If sleep wouldn’t come, he would continue trying to distract himself from the catastrophe at hand. Another vodka was a necessity. Perhaps he would have the girl sent back up, or better yet, a different girl? Maybe a more experienced set of hands would do the trick?
Dashkov felt a slight difference in the room. What was it? A change in pressure? Temperature? A ghost? It had been a long time since Dashkov had believed in ghosts.
In the dark it was hard to tell, but had the door to his room opened?
Had he not been looking at it, he wouldn’t have believed it.
It was a ghost, or at the very least a ghoulish entity. Was it the manifestation of death?
Dashkov stood transfixed as a black-clad specter slid quietly into the room. In the dark it was seemingly just a shadow. The FSB director felt a cold sweat at his temples as another one entered, moving along the wall in the opposite direction of the first one. They were followed by two more, who floated to the sides of the door. They seemed to be suspended in the darkness, almost disappearing. Then he felt, rather than saw, them move. They were coming for him.
As the apparitions closed in, he thought for a moment that they would float right through him. Instead, he felt the very real sensation of a metal cylindrical object make contact with his face, shattering his front teeth. His mouth filled with blood, and he was thrown to the floor. His arms were violently twisted behind his back as knees and hands held his head and legs in place.
With his face pinned to the floor and a mouth full of blood and broken teeth, he attempted to cry out for help, but it ended up coming out as a stifled grunt, which earned him a smack to the side of his head.
Where was his security detail? You couldn’t throw a rock at the villa without hitting a Wagner Group thug with a gun.
He was forced into a tuck position and then rolled up on his knees.
He thought he heard a whisper in heavily accented English.
Was that Hebrew?
Then it became clear. Israelis. They knew.
Someone took a knee in front of him.
Then he heard a voice he recognized from the deck of Open Passages. It was a voice he had scoffed at. It now came to him not over a phone but inches from his face. It wasn’t so much a whisper—there was emotion in whispers. This was different.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No,” Dashkov managed.
“For an intelligence professional, you’re a shitty liar.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“In case you are wondering, your security detail is dead.”
Shit.
“As you know, your stunt with Sokoloff didn’t work.”
Dashkov felt the man stand and move away. He heard hushed voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then the man he knew was James Reece returned.
“I’m only going to ask you this once. Where is Andrei Sokoloff?”
What? He should be here.
“I have his phone but no Sokoloff,” Reece said.
That fucking Sokoloff. He was staying in the villa next door, but he left his phone here in mine? Dashkov felt the anger rising. If he was going to die for Sokoloff’s incompetence, he was not going to be the bait that let the Wagner man escape with his life.
“He’s staying in the villa next door,” Dashkov said, spitting blood and tooth fragments onto the floor.
Headlights flashed across the front of the villa and, through the windows, the whine of an accelerating engine was audible in the still night air. Reece sprang from his position and went to the window. That brief moment of light once again gave way to the darkness, but it was enough time for Dashkov to see who had come for him. Men in black. Commandos with night vision and suppressed weapons. Assassins. Americans and Israelis?
Dashkov’s breathing grew heavy as the American assassin returned and knelt once again.
“You missed him,” Dashkov said between breaths. “He’s a snake, that one.”
“He won’t make it far. Before we go, what do you want to tell me about the Collective?”
Dashkov coughed up blood.
“Just because you know a name doesn’t mean you know anything about it.”
“I know enough,” Reece said.
“Enough to what?”
“Enough to burn it to the ground.”
Dashkov felt the man stand.
“You are an enemy of the United States and a traitor to your own people. You had no problem ordering your Wagner underling to shoot your secretary. She was right next to me.”
“My mistake was not killing you first,” Dashkov said.
“It was. And it’s one you will not have a chance to make again.”
Reece depressed the trigger on the MP7 and sent eight rounds of 4.6x30mm into Dashkov’s chest. He stepped forward and finished the Russian spymaster with two shots to the head. The loudest sound in the room was the brass casings cascading to the floor.
CHAPTER 82
“WE DO NOT HAVE authorization to push further inland,” the Shayetet 13 commander said. “We need to extract immediately.”
He had already made the call. The Israeli commandos were collapsing into a prearranged room on the ground floor.
Reece had made it to the window in time to see a lime-green Lamborghini speed off into the night. A man with an eye patch was at the wheel. The oligarchs loved their flashy planes, boats, cars, and women—all that money bought a lot of obnoxious toys.
At the base of a massive staircase, Reece stopped. The ground-force commander turned.
“Come on,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Reece said, unslinging his MP7 and handing it to the commander. “Sokoloff almost wiped Israel off the map three days ago. You can’t pursue him past this target, but I can.”
“Don’t be crazy. It’s time to move to extract. We will have to get him another time.”
“There might not be another time. Thank you for all you risked tonight, sir. Sokoloff is not leaving Cyprus.”
Reece bent down and took an AR from the body of a dead Wagner man.
The Israeli commander looked at Reece in disbelief.
“It’s okay. I do this sort of thing all the time.”
“Fucking American.”
“Oh, I need to keep the NODs,” Reece said before turning and taking off at a sprint for the garage.
* * *
Reece ran through the villa and out a side door toward the detached garage that he remembered from the brief. He stopped briefly to press-check the rifle and ensure a round was in the chamber—just in case.
He stepped over a dead Russian and opened the door to the outbuilding. Even under night vision the sight that met his eyes was a surprise.
Reece flipped up his NODs and hit the lights.
It looked like a Ferrari museum. He counted two rows of eight. Some looked like they dated back to the 1940s, while others looked brand-new. Right now, all he needed was one that worked. There was an old Grand Prix car, a Formula 1 racer, a few that looked extremely new, and a couple he recognized from 1980s television shows. Reece hit the garage door openers above the light switches and both doors began to rise.
As Reece descended the steps, he noticed that all the older Ferraris were parked in front of the newer ones. They seemed to be arranged by year. His eyes fell on the car closest to him in the front row. It was the newest unblocked vehicle. There was no time to waste. Reece ran to the vehicle, opened the door, and slid inside, placing the M4 barrel down against the seat next to him. Keys were in the ignition.
Reece pressed in the clutch and turned the key.
The engine sputtered.
Come on!
He tried again and the vehicle came alive.
Reece turned on the lights, let off the parking brake, and tore out of the garage in a red 1978 Ferrari 308 GTS.
CHAPTER 83
FROM THE BRIEFING, REECE knew that the road out of the villa complex led down to the Limassol–Paphos Highway. That road paralleled the coast to Limassol and then continued on to the airport in Larnaca. Sokoloff had a head start, but Reece had an advantage as well. When he got to the base of the hill, he turned off his headlights, pulled down his NODs, and sped onto the highway.
Reece’s first impression of the car that looked so fast was that it wasn’t, at least not as fast as he thought it would be. He worked through its five-speed manual gearbox as he raced east, the cliffs of the Mediterranean on his right.
The Ferrari was a left-hand drive, so there was nothing new to adapt to there. What did take adaptation was the fact that Cyprus was a left-hand-traffic country, but with no vehicles on the road at 3:30 a.m., staying on the left-hand side of the road was not Reece’s main concern. He was focused on catching up to Sokoloff.
The classic sports car passed 80 mph, then 90 mph, then 100 mph. Reece shifted down to fourth and third gears in some of the turns and back into fifth on the straightaways.
He didn’t see any lights on the road ahead through his NODs, which was concerning. The Lamborghini that Sokoloff took off in looked a lot newer than what Reece was driving. He started to second-guess his decision.
What if they moved the plane to a different airport? What if he wasn’t even going to the airport? Drive, Reece. He’s going to the airport. He thinks he’s home free.
Reece downshifted again into a corner and accelerated out.
Where is he?
Then Reece saw taillights in the distance. Under NODs it was unmistakably a car. But was it the Lamborghini?
He pushed the vehicle faster. Reece knew he was on the edge of being out of control. He also knew that he could not allow Sokoloff to get to the airport. He thought of the smug look on the colonel’s face across the bar after he had injected Reece with fentanyl. He thought of the dead Iraqis who had fought for their country and for the United States, men whom Sokoloff had turned years before. He had inserted them into the heart of the West to use the skills taught to them by the CIA to assassinate President Christensen. It was a plan meant to end in Reece’s death or imprisonment.
Reece pinned the accelerator to the floor, gaining ground.
He could now clearly identify the Lamborghini. It was moving quickly, but not so fast that Reece couldn’t catch it. He was sure the Russian was looking in his rearview mirror for cars in pursuit. On this open road along the coast, one could see for miles. There was urgency in the Wagner man’s speed but not a life-or-death urgency. Reece’s urgency was fueled by atonement. Reece was coming out of the darkness.
The SEAL saw taillights as he came out of another turn. They were larger and brighter now. It was almost time.
The high-performance evasive driving training Reece had received over the years in the SEAL Teams left him confident behind the wheel: hotwiring vehicles, mobile surveillance, attack recognition, J-turns, driver-down drills, close-proximity driving, evasive maneuvers, barricade breaching, and something called a Precision Intervention Technique, more commonly referred to as a PIT maneuver. Reece was going to turn his Ferrari into a weapon.
He was going to get only one shot. Once Sokoloff was aware that Reece was behind him, he would leave the old V-8 in the dust.
You are a sniper. You need only one shot.
Reece floored the Ferrari, watching the Russian disappear into a turn. He downshifted, took the turn, and exploded out of it, pulling to the Lamborghini’s back right quarter panel and placing the nose of his Ferrari just behind Sokoloff’s right rear tire. Reece turned his vehicle to the left, made contact, and turned more sharply into his prey.
Even at lower speeds a PIT maneuver can be exciting. On a coastal road at night at high speed, it can be deadly.
The Lamborghini started spinning to the right as Reece completed the technique in what was essentially an aggressive lane change. That lane change saved Reece’s life. The road turned sharply to the left, and with no control, the Russian’s car shot from the highway halfway through its spin. Reece turned his head as he sped past, watching it go over the side and disappear from view.
Reece locked up the brakes, scarcely avoiding plunging over the cliff on the sharp curve as well. He quickly shifted into reverse and pulled the car off the road and onto the shoulder on the side across from the drop-off. He put the vehicle in neutral and pulled up the parking brake. Grabbing the M4 from the seat beside him, he exited the Ferrari and sprinted across the road.
Where is he?
Reece never would have found him without the NODs.
The lime-green Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato had cartwheeled down the jagged cliffs and impacted the rocks below.
Did he survive? Was that movement or steam? No way he survived that crash.
Knowing the resiliency of the human body, Reece examined the M4 in his hands.
What kind of Russian or Chinese knockoff sight is this? No IR aiming device. Might have to walk these rounds in.
Reece saw movement from the driver’s-side window of the upside-down vehicle. He went prone on the edge of the cliff.
Just get close with your first shot. Identify the impact through these NODs and then walk the rounds into him.
Reece pushed the rifle’s selector to “fire” and began taking up slack in the trigger.
The shot wasn’t necessary.
Just before the shot broke, the Italian sports car went up in a ball of flame.
* * *
As Reece drove toward Limassol, now with his Ferrari’s lights on and traveling at normal highway speeds, he fished a Ziploc bag from a cargo pocket of his pants. The Wagner M4 was in the passenger seat, along with his helmet and NODs.
He powered up the E&E mobile phone he had been given in Israel. Before they left, he had entered a number into the contacts. He called it now.
A male voice answered in Greek.
“Water taxi?” Reece asked.
“That’s us,” the Maritime Branch operator said, switching to English.
“You guys still in business?”
“We are.”
“Great, I’d love a ride.”
“Sure thing. When?”
“Right now.”
CHAPTER 84
The White House
Washington, D.C.
THE PRESIDENT ROSE FROM the Resolute Desk and greeted her visitor halfway across the Oval Office.
“Welcome home, Commander Reece.”
“Madam President.”
“Please,” she said, motioning toward the sitting area by the fireplace.
“After you.”
“Have you been in the Oval Office before?”
“No, this is my first visit.”
“I like this area by the fireplace,” she said. “I do find it odd that the colors and patterns of the couches match the wallpaper. Makes me feel like I’m visiting a Florida retirement community. You might notice that the two sofas are pretty far apart, but for some of the people who come in here, they aren’t far apart enough.”
She laughed, and Reece recognized that she had the politician’s gift of making everyone feel as if they were her best friend.
A portrait of Franklin Roosevelt hung above the fireplace, flanked by portraits of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.
“So much history in this room,” Reece commented.
A door opened and a Navy steward approached with a tray.
“Coffee?” President Olsen asked.
“Always,” Reece said.
The president took her coffee black, while Reece quickly doctored his up with the honey and cream provided on the side.
“How do they know?” he asked as the steward left the office.
“One of the great mysteries,” she said, taking a sip and setting her cup on a coaster with the Presidential Seal on the table at the far end of the sofa.
“Some things are best left that way,” he said.
“Some,” the president acknowledged. “Commander, I received a briefing from Director Howe and took a call from the Israeli prime minister on the events of the past few days. He offered his sincere thanks and appreciation. I believe medals are forthcoming.”
“It’s been an interesting couple of weeks,” Reece admitted.
“This country owes you, Commander. Without your efforts, the world would be a different place today.”
“It was a team effort. Without Vic Rodriguez, Andy Danreb, William Poe, Raife Hastings, and Katie Buranek, we never would have put together what we did. I’m more of the blunt instrument.”
“Modesty becomes you.”
“It’s also true.”
“I understand that Mr. Danreb is back at the CIA, now as a contractor, at least until he has deciphered the Morgan Holdings clientele list. And I believe we have Ms. Buranek on the calendar for an exclusive interview.”
“Thank you for that,” Reece said.
“It’s the least I can do. What are your plans, Commander?”
“I think I’m going to get off the grid for a while. Go back to Montana. I have some personal items to attend to.”
“A wedding, perhaps?”
Reece raised an eyebrow.
“This is the most powerful office in the land,” she said.
“I’ll remember that,” Reece replied.
“Commander, according to my classified briefing, if that suitcase nuke had detonated, Israel would have hit back quickly and decisively, probably with land-based and sub-based nuclear weapons. We evaluated this scenario using CAE’s Single Synthetic Environment, the most advanced simulation platform in the world. It allows us to predict and demonstrate the outcomes of attacks like this. The impact on Tel Aviv would have been devastating. We would have supported Israel and played right into the Collective’s hands. As it stands, Russia and the Collective lost billions, possibly trillions, from what Director Howe briefed. Russia remains bogged down in Ukraine, and China has not invaded Taiwan. Israel has recovered most of the debris through an undersea salvage operation that has given them insights into Iran’s nuclear program they would not have had otherwise. The Israeli prime minister has managed to keep the number of those who know what really happened to an absolute minimum. They don’t mess around with security violations over there.”
