Deep Black (17 page)

27

The weapon was simplicity itself. A stainless steel barrel, an aluminum frame, a plastic stock. The bolt eased bullets into
firing position, treating them like the perfectly selected hand-prepared rounds they were. The sight itself was not particularly
powerful at 6X42, but it was more than adequate and perfectly matched to the weapon. With the proper preparation, the assassin
could guarantee a hit at 600 meters. Even at that range, the 7.62mm bullet would slice through a man’s skull as easily as
if it were an overripe cantaloupe.

Once, the assassin’s commander had objected to the fact that he preferred the British gun—an L96A1, procured at a ridiculous
cost that included two lives—to the more readily available and homegrown Snaiperskaya Vintivka Dragunov. The SVD was not,
in fact, a poor weapon and, depending on the circumstances, might surpass the L96A1. If the assassin still did his work in
the field, for example, he would perhaps have preferred the SVD for its reliability.

But he did not do his work in the field. He was stationed now in the second story of a hotel in Doneck on the Black Sea, waiting
for his target’s limousine to appear on the street. He had waited here in fact for two days. Another man might think, after
so long a wait, that the information that had been provided to him was incorrect. Another man might have sought other instructions.

But the assassin did neither. This was, in large part, his great value. He did not need to sleep—a bottle of blue pills, one
every six hours, took care of that. He kept a large chamber pot and never drank or ate while waiting. He had been at his post
for eighteen hours straight and could stay for at least another twelve, if not eighteen or twenty-four. He had waited three
entire days to kill a leader of the Chechnya criminals, so this was nothing.

The assassin had killed twenty-three people, not counting the men he had slain as a paratrooper. Besides the L96A1 zeroed
in on the entrance to the hotel across the street, the assassin had a submachine gun at his feet. This was not intended for
his target—the L96A1 was more than adequate. But the assassin did not trust his employers—for good reason, he knew—and in
fact much of his preparation had involved finding an acceptable escape route.

The phone on his belt began to vibrate. Still watching the window, he reached down and pressed the talk button.

“Yes?” he said.

“It is postponed,” said the voice on the other end. “Go to Moscow. Be there the day after tomorrow.”

Without saying another word, the assassin punched the end button and began to take down his weapon.

28

When they returned to the highway, Lia and Dean went back in the direction they’d come for about ten miles, finding another
highway running to the southeast. Just after turning off they stopped and refilled the truck’s gas tank, hand-pumping it.
They had passed at least two gas stations, but Lia told him the gas sometimes couldn’t be trusted.

“Everybody’s out to make a ruble,” she said. “Country’s going to hell.”

With the girl out of the truck, Lia told him where they were going. All three locations they had to check were near the Kazym
River, the first about a half hour’s drive. Dean looked at the map on the handheld. They were more than two hundred miles
north of where they had left the Hind and well to the east; they’d followed a rather twisted route to get here.

“How do you know the helicopter’s still there?” he asked.

“May not be,” said Lia. “We’ll just scout around, see what we see. Kind of your job description, isn’t it?”

“It wouldn’t have been able to get to any of these spots without refueling,” he told her. “And if it refueled, it could have
gone anywhere.”

“The Art Room coordinates all kinds of data, Charlie. Eavesdropping, signal captures, satellite pictures. Just relax.”

“Garbage in, garbage out.”

“Gee, that’s original.”

“Well, your gadgets and gizmos haven’t done too well so far.”

“Sure they have.”

Dean scoffed. “Why don’t we look for the MiG?”

“That’s not our job.”

“Somebody should.”

“Did you do this in the Marines?”

“Which?”

“Question every stinking thing.”

“All the time.”

“Good.”

Surprised by her answer, Dean pulled himself upright in the seat.

“The girl will be OK,” said Lia, as if they’d been discussing her. “Really, she’ll be OK.”

“You told her to go become a prostitute.”

“
I did
not.”
Her face lit red. Then, in a much lower voice, a voice close to a whisper, she repeated herself. “I did not. She’ll be OK.”

As Lia shook her head, Dean noticed two very small creases near her eyes, aging marks she wasn’t old enough to have.

“It’s not my job to save people, not like that,” said Lia. “It’s not why I’m here.”

“I think it is.”

“You know, Charlie Dean, that’s the same attitude that got a lot of people killed in Vietnam,” said Lia.

“What do you know about Vietnam?” he snapped.

“My dad was there, my adopted dad,” said Lia. “He told me what it was like.”

The last thing Dean wanted to hear was warmed-over Vietnam stories. They were all well-constructed set pieces of horror. People
trotted them out to show that they had been
touched, moved
by war. They still had nightmares. They still thought about it.

Except that most of the people who spit out the stories were full of shit.

He liked her better when she was being an asshole, he decided.

The first spot they were supposed to check out was an oil machinery plant, which dealt with companies like Petro-UK. It lay
right off the highway. Lia saw the rusting fence and the sign with its Cyrillic letters as she passed, hit the brakes, and
wheeled through a one-eighty, narrowly missing the only other vehicle they’d seen for the last fifteen minutes or so.

“Jesus,” said Dean as the large tractor-trailer whipped about an inch from their bumper.

“They’re not used to other drivers on the road here,” said Lia. She glanced at her watch. It was before seven, but already
there were people in the building. “Here’s the deal. We’re looking for a helicopter. You’re the new accountant from Australia.
I’ll do most of the talking.”

“I can’t do an Australian accent,” said Dean.

“I doubt they can, either.”

Lia parked the car in a muddy lot, then hopped from the truck. They locked it; Dean adjusted his pistol under his sweater
and followed her inside.

Accountants held a more important position in Russian businesses than in most Western companies. One token of this was the
fact that they were the ones who tended to be arrested when the required permits or bribes weren’t paid. So it wasn’t surprising
that when Lia mentioned Dean’s cover to the man they met in the front room, he bowed deeply, put up his hands, and practically
ran to the back to get the big boss. Lia’s story was that they needed a helicopter. The boss protested that they were not
in the business of selling aircraft—but then he proceeded to add that they did, as a matter of fact, have several available.
He led Lia and Dean outside to a small jeeplike truck and drove them out through a yard filled with rusting tractor blades
to a packed gravel yard filled with large pumps, pipes, and vehicles at least twenty years old. At the center of the field
sat a thick cross of asphalt that obviously functioned as a helipad. Large plastic barrels sat at the far side, half-buried
in the ground—obviously a fuel farm of some kind.

Lia pushed out her story, complaining that they needed a heavier helicopter than the Alouette the manager showed her. That
led to two identical rather tired-looking machines parked at the farthest end of the large yard. They were squat, with two
sets of rotors, one atop the other, and a double-fin tail. Dean could guess from looking at the machines that neither was
what they were looking for, but Lia played through, checking the craft and even asking if one could be started up. The manager
didn’t know how and the pilot wasn’t available. Perhaps they’d come back, Lia said.

As they were walking back to the truck, she stopped to tie her shoe. The manager began talking to Dean in English about the
difficulties of doing business here. Dean simply shrugged. He worried that he might have to eventually say something about
Australia and decided he would divert the manager with a story about being educated in America—he could bullshit plausibly
about that, he thought. But Lia caught back up with them and it wasn’t necessary to say anything else.

“We have more stops,” she said, taking the manager’s card. “We will be in touch.”

“Those were Helixes we looked at?” Dean asked as they got back in their truck.

“Kamov KA-27s,” she said. “Match the pictures the Art Room gave me.”

“How do you know the Art Room’s right about what kind of chopper it was?”

“You really are a Luddite, aren’t you?”

“No. I just don’t trust everything I’m told.”

“They’re the right kind of helicopters.”

“So civilians have military helicopters?”

“Well, civilians
do
have military
type
helicopters, even in the West,” said Lia. “But here there’s a bit more flow back and forth. You have to trust us on this one,
Charlie Dean.”

“If they don’t sell helicopters,” said Dean, though he knew he was being stubborn, “why do they have so many?”

“Oh, they always say that,” said Lia. “See, if they sold helicopters, they would need certain licenses. We might be from
Moscow instead of spies.”

She laughed and started the engine.

By the time they reached their next site, the morning had turned almost balmy, which brought the bugs out in full force. A
swarm seemed to attach itself to them as they drove into a small town. Several rows of fairly large houses sat in a staggered
semicircle next to the main road; beyond them were oil fields. The town gave way to a tall fence, which at first seemed to
contain empty land. Nearly a half-mile from the start of the fence it veered toward the road. A hundred feet farther down
it crossed at a gated cul-de-sac. A large building sat at what would have been the middle of the road had it continued. There
were other buildings behind it; the complex seemed to stretch a fair distance. A guard stood in the middle of the road; there
were others beyond him. All had AK-74s, and there was at least one machine-gun post inside the gate.

“I think it’s time to turn around,” said Dean.

“Yup,” said Lia, who nonetheless drove right up to the guard and started talking to him. He didn’t buy whatever she tried
to sell. He gestured sharply for them to turn around and finally showed his anger by raising his gun. Still chattering, Lia
put the truck in reverse and backed down the road.

“Not much for chitchat,” she said after they had gone back through the town to the main highway.

“What’d you say to him?”

“I asked if he knew someone who wanted to get laid.”

“What’d you really say to him?”

She laughed. “Why don’t you think that’s what I said?”

“What’d you really say to him?”

“I told him I was looking for my brother. Didn’t even break the ice.”

“This has got to be the place.”

“You think, Charlie? But what if the Art Room agrees? Then what? They can’t be right.”

They refilled the truck’s gas tanks. Lia consulted the map on her handheld, then got back on the highway, heading to another
town about five miles farther south. As they drove, Dean took the binoculars and looked back at the area, trying to see something
beyond the forest of oil pumps and fences.

“It’s some sort of school,” said Lia. “They used to send KGB officers there for what we’d call SWAT training. That was fifteen
years ago.”

“Now what do they do there?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Lia. “We’ll ask when we check in. In the meantime let’s go see what’s behind door number three.”

29

Foreigners throwing around wads of cash attracted several different types of attention in Russia. The most dangerous was the
fawning, sell-my-brother-for-a-ruble attention; Karr realized that anyone being overly nice to his face was more than likely
calling a
mafiya
connection to tip them off to a potential kidnapping candidate. The Russian gangs were considerably more difficult to deal
with than the security police simply because they were unpredictable. Not even the NSA had the resources to track the myriad
groups that operated throughout the country. A few were aligned with fairly well-known political or business figures, and
a couple were essentially military units moonlighting in the open season for graft. But the vast majority of Russian gangsters
were smalltime hoodlums with very small operations, many of which either were quasi-legal or would be entirely legal if the
proper permits were obtained.

The corruption pained Karr, even as he took advantage of it to do his job. The price for the jet fuel and the two large drums
to transport it was so low that the fuel was either watered down or stolen.

Fashona swore it wasn’t watered down, and since they pumped it themselves, they got reasonably close to the amount they had
paid for. They rolled the barrels up the single wooden plank into the back of the ancient Zil they’d hired, and moved out
of the airfield. Karr fingered his pistol as they passed the guards, but he could tell from the men’s faces they were too
depressed to even bother stopping them to ask their business.

His mother had come from Russia as a young girl, the daughter of a refusenik. Though she loved America, she still talked fondly
of Russia and often spoke of going back to visit now that the country was a democracy.

He wanted to tell her about the country, but security concerns absolutely forbade him to. It probably wouldn’t have done much
good; she wouldn’t believe what he’d tell her. At best, she would blame the woes on the Communists.

Karr wouldn’t completely dismiss that. But it seemed to him that the problem had more to do with greed—a disease imported
from the West. As Russia tried to catch up to America, it had lost something of its nobility.

Most people had a depth and warmth that hardship only enhanced. But others were deeply infected with greed and cynicism. It
was if it were one of the mosquito-borne viruses plaguing the new oil fields.

Heading back toward Sitjla, the driver of the truck became somewhat talkative. In his early thirties, he owned the truck with
his brother, who was riding in the back and carried a small pistol concealed—or at least intended to be concealed—on his calf.

“I can tell my children I helped the CIA,” said the driver, whose name was Varnya.

“If I was with the CIA, I wouldn’t have run out of petrol,” laughed Karr. “And I would have paid you twice as much.”

The man laughed, though he insisted he knew that the two men were both American and members of the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to Varnya, the CIA ran Russia, but this was an improvement from the days when the KGB had. Varnya’s grandfather—it
may have been his great-grandfather, as Karr couldn’t quite stay on top of the accented and slightly drunken Russian—had been
a political prisoner in one of the camps. After twelve years, he had been released with the understanding that he would stay
out of western Russia. A similar story could have been told by half of the local inhabitants, if not more.

Varnya began to speak of things that his grandfather had told him—bodies in the river, a forest of skulls. His anger started
to build. He offered to share his vodka. Karr agreed, knowing that to refuse would be a serious insult. He blocked the mouth
of the bottle with his tongue every time he tipped the bottle back. The sting of the liquor helped keep him awake on the long
ride.

It was dark when they got back to the helicopter. Varnya and his brother volunteered to help roll the barrels toward it. Then,
as Karr knew they would, the two men pulled out weapons and tried to rob them.

“What would your grandfather think?” said Karr, shaking his head.

Varnya’s chest inflated, alcohol-fueled anger rising within him. He looked at Karr as if he were the KGB man who’d locked
his grandfather in exile and tormented the family for three generations. He raised his pistol to fire, pushing his arm toward
the American.

Fashona’s first bullet caught him in the side of the head. He didn’t bother firing another. By the time Varnya dropped, Karr
had shot the brother twice in the forehead with a Glock 26.

“Motherfuckers,” said Fashona. “I told you they’d wait to see if we really had the chopper.”

“Yeah,” said Karr. He slid the Glock 26 back into its hiding place up his sleeve. “Kinda pains me that they didn’t believe
us. Nobody trusts anybody these days.”