Dead Eye (8 page)

Babbitt said, “I’ll have Trestle moved into the area. They can fly over from Helsinki and be there before Jumper can move up from Berlin.”

Whitlock said, “Do what you have to do, but keep them far back out of the way until I call them to the target. Gray Man will find a place to stay tonight, and I’ll find it. There is no reason to bring Trestle and his boys in too close. I’ve got everything under control.”

“Very well.”

“Of course,” Russ added, “if you like, I can just go ahead and take care of this. No sense in spinning everyone up. I’ll do it myself.”

Babbitt responded in a stern voice. “You are
not
to take him down on your own. The word from the Russians is Gentry killed eight men at Sid’s house. Wounded several more. As impressive as that is, there were fifty-some-odd armed personnel on the property.”

Russ sighed and made sure Babbitt heard it through the satellite connection. “I understand. I’ll just keep tabs on the target and provide the strike team whatever support they require. Trestle will do the deed.”

“Good.” And then, “If you are waiting for me to say I am impressed with your ability to discern his every move, I am.”

“Gentry is easy for me to read. He and I are one in the same.”

Lee seemed confused by the remark, and he had no direct response. Instead he said, “I’ll put you in touch with Trestle Actual when he gets to Tallinn.”

“Roger that.”

Now Babbitt’s tone turned fatherly. “Obviously your handlers here would like a little more communication from you, but I’m not going to read you the riot act. I know you are accustomed to a certain amount of operational flexibility, and I can respect that.”

“But?”

“But the one thing I will not be flexible with is the takedown. That
will
be done by the direct action team. I want you out of the way when the time comes.”

“Message received. I’ll help Trestle get into position, and then I’ll get out of the way.”

Babbitt let Dead Eye’s compliant comment hang for a moment. Finally he said, “Very well. Graveside out.”

ELEVEN

Court walked the streets of Tallinn for hours, then spent another hour shopping for a hotel that suited a laundry list of needs. The one he settled on was a three-story stone building on Kooli Street built into a long row of buildings, all running along the fifteenth-century city wall that partially circled the Old Town. Court’s tiny room was cold and damp due to the fact that it shared a stone wall with the town’s ancient battlements. The room did not, however, have much else going for it. Just a bed on a low platform off the floor, a tiny desk, a toilet, and a small window that looked through the stone wall and out to a park to the north.

But the room was perfect for him; it was at the end of a hall full of creaky floorboards, and he knew if he was attacked, he would hear anyone approaching, and he could quickly get out the window and descend to the ground, using the rope he’d already tied to the leg of his twin bed and stashed under it.

He took a long hot shower down the hall, soaking his bruises and sore joints picked up from slamming his body around Sidorenko’s property. After he redressed himself and put his boots back on, he packed his backpack up with all his belongings and secured his heavy coat between the straps. When Court was operational, his training taught him to sleep with his clothes on and keep everything he owned ready to snatch and run if he had to bug out at a moment’s notice. And since Court was virtually always operational, he had been living this way for years.

He sat at the little desk in the room and ate a can of beans and a tin of salmon he’d bought at a market during his SDR, washing it down with a large bottle of A. Le Coq, the local beer. He would have preferred heading out to a little bar for a drink and a hot meal, but he liked to take a day or two in a new place before venturing out. This first night he would remain in his room, listening to the sounds of the hotel, getting a feel for the normal action around him.

He sat on the bed and turned the TV on to CNN. There was no news about the action near St. Petersburg, but that was no surprise. Mob shootouts in Russia only received international coverage if there was gripping video to play along with the reportage, and although Gentry assumed there were CCTV cameras all over Sid’s place, he was equally certain that whoever was running Sid’s
Bratva
now would have no interest in releasing that video to the public.

Court flipped through the channels as he lay in bed. He hoped to relax now; this was his first real downtime in weeks.

It felt good to get the Russian mafia off his ass; it let him concentrate on the main threat to him. The United States of America. For five years Court had been on the run from the CIA after a shoot-on-sight order was placed on him by his Langley masters. He did not know why they wanted him dead; he only knew they had sent wave after wave of men after him, and he did not expect that to change any time soon.

The CIA’s manhunt for him had kept him out of the USA for the past half decade, living off the net, in the third world mostly, taking contracts for hire to fund his run. He’d worked for a string of handlers and benefactors over the years, from a venerable British spymaster who’d double-crossed him, to Sid, the Russian mobster whom Court had double-crossed and now killed. He’d also double-crossed a Mexican drug cartel boss along the way.

Court had developed a habit of subverting the goals of the men who paid him in order to achieve a greater good.

Gentry didn’t feel bad about fucking over his employer when his employer was scum of the earth. But achieving these little victories had never been his ultimate goal. Court wanted, more than anything else in this world, to return to the USA. To be free of the CIA’s shoot-on-sight sanction.

But for now he was a man without a country, an expatriate assassin for hire.

He flipped channels on the television in the dark, found a French comedy, and despite the persistent worries hanging heavily over him, he started to laugh at the absurdity of the story.

Outside gentle snowflakes began drifting in the breeze, and two floors below him, another solitary traveler entered the tiny lobby of the hotel.

It took hours of hunting, but Russ Whitlock hit pay dirt on his fourth try.

At one hotel he had trouble getting information about the other guests, so he went ahead and rented a room, then learned from the innkeeper that he was the first new guest of the day. He went up to his room, unmade the bed, and then immediately slipped away out the back. At the second location he learned the only other guests were a group of Asians in town for a boat show, so he politely demurred at the nightly rate, making his apologies and leaving before the woman behind the counter could offer a negotiated price.

A third location also turned into a dry hole.

It was dark by the time he found the fourth hotel that had everything he would look for if he were the man on the run after an op. It was in the Old Town, the touristy part of the city, which meant a steady influx of foreigners and strangers, but it was small and out of the way at the northern tip of the quarter, which meant it was quiet enough at night, and anyone entering the building might be noticed.

The windows in front overlooked an open parking lot that was surrounded on three sides by other buildings, making a small square open space in front of the hotel that amplified the echoes of approaching vehicles and shouted voices.

He walked around back to find a park, and here he saw that the wood-and-stone building was built along the wall that had surrounded this part of the town for six centuries. A large circular stone tower, peaked with a conical wooden roof, was attached to it, and there were windows in the stone wall that must have led to the hotel rooms in the back of the building.

Yeah,
Russ thought.
This looks right.

He entered the lobby, asked the girl behind the desk for a room, and then looked down at the ledger.

Someone had taken room 301 just an hour earlier. Russ saw the signature, just a scratch of a pen on a line. He did not expect it to say
Court Gentry
and it did not, but the timing was right. He was sure it was his man.

The girl wanted to put him on the third floor as well, but he told her he had hurt his knee falling on the ice and asked if she had anything lower. She complied with a sympathetic smile, giving him room 201, directly below his target.

He paid in euros for three nights; she asked to see his passport and he slipped it out confidently. Russ knew his paperwork was solid, thanks to the document people at Townsend. Their special relationship with the CIA allowed Townsend personnel to operate with credentials that came directly from a program the Agency operated with the Department of State.

Whitlock, unlike Gentry, could go wherever he wanted in the world, and he knew his credos would hold up to scrutiny.

After heading upstairs and dropping his backpack, he walked around the hotel for several minutes more to take a mental picture of the layout of the building. He then zipped up his coat and returned outside into the cold air. Snow fell steadily now, blowing in the breeze under an overcast sky. He entered the neighboring buildings, still creating a mental map of his surroundings. Then he moved around back to the park that ran along the city wall and determined which window corresponded to Gentry’s room. Once finished with his recon, he headed back to the town square for dinner.

He called in to Townsend, reported that he had located the target, and asked to be put in touch with the leader of the strike team as soon as he arrived.

Just south of Old Town he enjoyed a meal of elk stew and a bottle of red wine; he ate and drank slowly, sitting alone in a dark corner of the restaurant. While he dined he used his smart phone to study the greater neighborhood around his new hotel, adding a bird’s-eye-view perspective to the area he had seen with his eyes. When he had completed this task, he pulled up a map of the country and traced several routes along train lines and highways that would get him out of town quickly and easily.

A call came through his headset when he was almost finished with his meal.

“Go,” he said, speaking softly.

“Trestle Actual here.”

“Say iden,” Russ instructed, and then he picked his last bite of soda bread off his plate, dipping it in the elk stew before popping it in his mouth.

“Iden key, niner, three, three, oh, eight, seven, two, five, niner.”

“Confirmed. Dead Eye here. Iden number four, eight, one, oh, six, oh, five, two, oh.”

“I’m at the airport. Will be in the AO in an hour. Have you located the target?”

“Of course I have.”

“All right. We can meet at twenty-two hundred.”

Russ pulled his paper map of the city from his pocket and looked it over for a few seconds. “Open your map. You’ll need to write this down.”

TWELVE

Whitlock walked alone with his hands in his pockets and his head down, making his way through a steady snow shower across Freedom Square, a large plaza illuminated by the floodlights of St. John’s Church. Light traffic rumbled by on the streets, but there were few pedestrians passing through the square or walking along the sidewalks at this time of night.

He crossed the street and entered a park, left the path, and walked through the trees, trudging up a hill, his boots gripping the frozen ground below the fresh snowfall. He saw no one around save for the light traffic on Falgi Tee and a few people waiting at a bus stop at the edge of the park. He gave them a wide berth and moved deeper into the woods, finally making his way to a ring of park benches on the top of a little hill.

He stood by a bench, waiting in the cold, watching his breath fog the air in the faint light from the street that reached this deep into the park. The sounds of millions of snowflakes hitting the ground made a noise like soft static.

Whitlock waited a few seconds to be polite, then cleared his throat. “Where are the rest of you?”

There was no answer.

With a sigh he added, “I don’t have a tail. Cut the crap.”

After a few more seconds a voice in the trees behind him said, “No one likes a show-off, Russ.” Soon the crunching of three pairs of boots came from behind as well, just audible over the snowfall. Russ turned to face three men, all in their thirties, all wearing high-tech winter gear.

The same man who’d spoken before said, “We flew in. The rest of the team is coming over water with our equipment. They will be in the city by oh two hundred.” He stuck out a hand. “How’s it going, Russ?”

“Nick,” Whitlock said, and he nodded to the other two.

Nick was Trestle Actual, team leader of Trestle. Russ had worked with all the strike teams involved in the Gentry operation in his year working for Townsend. To Whitlock’s thinking, all the men were excellent shooters and door kickers, but he knew they could not spend any time at all in Court Gentry’s area of operations without Court picking up their scent. These guys weren’t low profile. They wore Oakley specs and Woolrich Elite pants and G-Shock watches and Salomon boots, efficient gear for combat ops, but too high profile for Russ’s tastes. Russ knew that even though Nick and his dudes could double-tap Court’s brain pan as well as anybody else on the planet, Court would see these guys coming a mile away if Russ wasn’t there to set the whole op up first.

Whitlock grabbed a pen and a notepad from one of the Trestle men and then took a knee in the snow. Under the beam of a tactical flashlight he drew a quick rendition of the hotel, indicating the exits, stairwells, and Gentry’s room at the end of the hall on the third floor. The diagram was passed around among the three men standing in the snow, and they looked it over.

“What about access to the roof?” Trestle Actual asked.

“I scouted the third floor and the adjacent properties. No way upstairs from the hallway at all. The attic is space that belongs to the apartment building next door, not part of the hotel.”

“You’re certain?”

Russ nodded. “No access above the third floor of the hotel without blasting a hole in the ceiling.”

Trestle Actual made a note on his own pad.

Russ added, “One other thing. That hallway outside the target’s door is creaky as hell. Old loose floorboards. Suggest you start the assault from back at the stairs, just up the hall from the target’s room, because there is no way you can hit that door without him hearing you coming. Just move dynamically up the hall and take the door down.”

“Understood.”

Russ looked around at the snow. It was blowing around now; it had picked up even since he’d arrived in the park. “You’re going to have a problem with this weather if he makes it outside.”

“Roger that,” said Nick. “Latest meteorological report says we’ll be in a blizzard by oh three hundred. We won’t get UAV support tonight. We didn’t even bother to bring the team over with us from Finland.”

“You want to stand down till the weather clears?”

“Negative. We can work around a little snow. I’ll send four men to his room. Distribute the rest downstairs in case he tries to squirt.”

Russ said, “I’ll stay in the stairwell. Cut off his escape if he makes it past your team.”

Trestle Actual shook his head. “Negative. Babbitt wants you off the X.”

“We don’t have to tell him, do we? You will have blizzard conditions outside. All Court has to do is make it out a door or window and your op is going to go tits up.”

“Babbitt wants—”

Russ said, “I don’t give a shit what Babbitt wants.
You
are the onsite commander. It’s your call. You’ll take the heat if you fail. Be flexible about this, man. Babbitt’s in the rear with the gear; we do what we have to do in the field.”

Nick would not relent. “I don’t want you in the way.” He pointed his finger in Whitlock’s face. “That’s fucking final.”

Whitlock shrugged. “It’s your call, dude. Just trying to help.”

Nick added, “Relax, Dead Eye. Gentry’s not going to squeeze by us. We’ll lay waste to his room, put his ass down right there.”

Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport is no bustling airport compared to the major air transit hubs of Europe, but this Tuesday morning, at three
A.M.
, in a full-on snowstorm, there was virtually no activity in the outer hangars northeast of the end of runway 26, some half mile from the main terminal.

Virtually
no activity.

One small hangar did have a few lights on, and a large portable fan heater blasted warm air across the floor. A Gulfstream 200 was parked in the center of the space, still wet from its flight over from Helsinki and its long wait on the tarmac in the customs clearance portion of the airport. Next to the G-200, a white twelve-passenger van sat parked facing the exit.

Eight men also occupied the small hangar; some sat on trunks and loaded weapons, others affixed knee and elbow pads to their bodies, and one man stood near the closed hangar doors, pacing back and forth, frustrated in his attempt to get a signal from his phone to bounce off a satellite somewhere up through the thick soup of clouds.

Their makeshift staging area was far away from security and customs, but they prepared themselves as quickly as possible, because they knew their luck could not last. Some airport rent-a-cop might get curious or some ramp agent might come looking for a place to sneak a quick nap, and their activities here would be discovered.

The team prepped with extreme efficiency; they’d been doing this sort of thing for years. Each man had his primary, the HK MP7 PDW, or personal defense weapon. It was built for close-quarters battle, as it was both more powerful than a submachine gun and less bulky than an assault rifle.

They also carried SIG Sauer nine-millimeter pistols on their hips, Peltor ComTac II radio headsets under their helmets, and light Kevlar body armor across their chests and backs. They had the option of wearing full SAPI (Small Arms Protective Insert) plates made of high-tech ceramic that would stop a rifle round, but all their intelligence had led them to believe that their target was not carrying a rifle with him. The Kevlar would stop any handgun round, so it would do for this evening’s operation.

The men checked their watches, actuated the laser sights and flashlights on their guns to test them, and finished double-checking their Velcro pouches to make sure everything they needed was in place.

Trestle Actual finally got through to Townsend House, though he had to leave the hangar and stand in the snow to get a signal. It took a moment for the two-way ID check, but just like the preparation of their equipment for tonight’s operation, both Trestle Actual and the recipient of his call had executed enough ID checks to make them second nature and correspondingly fast.

Lee Babbitt, code name Graveside, knew better than to ask the team leader of his strike force a lot of unnecessary questions. Babbitt knew Nick considered him to be an REMF, a rear-echelon motherfucker, and the last thing Babbitt wanted to do was give any of his front-line men the impression that he was micromanaging his shooters from four thousand miles away. So instead of asking questions, he used these quick briefs before missions to provide last-minute intel to his operators in the field. “Weather isn’t going to get much better till midmorning. Might slack off a little before dawn, but the front is basically stalled right over the Baltic, so you’ll just have to contend with the snow. We’ll have no overhead viz on you.”

Nick’s gear and helmet were already covered in white from standing outside the hangar. “Understood.”

“You’ve spoken to Dead Eye?”

“Met with him a few hours ago. He’s a squirrelly motherfucker, isn’t he?”

“He’s a singleton,” replied Babbitt, as if that explained everything.

“He’s got a room one floor below the target, he can hear it when Gray Man moves around, and he’ll let us know if there is any change of disposition.”

“Dead Eye wanted to do the action himself.”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “He made that clear. I told him to sit his ass down in his room and stay the hell out of our way.”

“Good.” Babbitt paused a moment. Cleared his throat. “We end Gentry tonight, got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We had hoped to do this on the ship. Not in an urban environment. Less messy that way.”

“Roger that. We’ll keep it contained.”

Babbitt’s voice took a lower, graver tone, the change noticeable even over the crackling sat phone. “Do that, but know
this
. Collateral damage, in this very special case, will be understood as a necessary evil. Mr. Gentry is a clear and present danger to the United States of America. We cannot and we will not forfeit this opportunity to eliminate him.”

Nick had been briefed on this, of course. This was no kill/capture mission. This was get in, shoot the son of a bitch till he was flat on his back, shoot the son of a bitch some more, then get out. If some locals got in the way, then, Nick understood, he was to shoot his way through them to get to his target.

Nick, and the other seven men of Trestle, were all good with that.

“Got it,” he replied. It was no small thing to steel oneself to shoot noncombatants, but Nick had done it before, and Nick knew Townsend Government Services had been brought into this hunt not because they were saints, but because they got shit done.

Babbitt added, “When it’s over, you get pictures, that’s mandatory, but you leave the body, get back to the airport, and get out of there. If the weather is below minimums, just exfiltrate overland and we’ll get you extracted ASAP.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good luck, Nick. Remember . . . For America.”

Now there was a pause on Nick’s side of the conversation. “You know . . . if you ever wanted to tell me what this prick did to earn his shoot-on-sight sanction . . . now
would
be the time.”

Babbitt replied tersely, “Just do your duty. Graveside out.”

Nick ended the call and stowed his sat phone. As he stepped back into the hangar, Trestle Two came up to him; he’d already put on his helmet and goggles, he was head-to-toe in black ballistic gear, and his MP7 PDW hung straight down from his chest. In his hands he carried Trestle Actual’s primary weapon. “We’re ready,” he said, and he held out the HK.

Nick took the gun. “Good.”

“I don’t suppose Graveside finally came through and told you what this is all about?”

Nick shrugged now, dropping the sling over his head and positioning the PDW on his chest. “Same as ever. Management doesn’t tell labor anything except the rah-rah shit. ‘Do your duty, God and country, Gentry is a clear and present danger.’”

Trestle Two rolled his eyes and made a gesture like he was performing a hand job.

Nick finished adjusting his gear on his chest. Normally he would have laughed, but his game face was on now. He looked up to his second in command. “It’s all good. Gentry did something to make himself an enemy of the state. We’re the state. Well . . . sort of. Close enough, anyhow.” He smiled now. “Let’s go kill that miserable fuck.”

“Yeah, let’s.”

The two men headed back to join the others loading into the van.