The Skorpion Directive (28 page)

Dalton got a pen and the rental receipt for the Lancer.

“Okay . . . Yes, four-five degrees zero minutes two-point-eight-zero seconds north . . . Three-five degrees three minutes four-five-point-eight-five seconds east . . . Can you send me the JPEG? Right below the mountain . . . Three kilometers southwest . . . One road in . . . Take the last lane on the west end of town, turn south . . . Okay . . . No, I promise. We’re just following up on a friend . . . Really, Big Bear . . . No risk at all. Anyway, I’m with a terribly competent fellow—” She looked over at Dalton, saying, “Big Bear says to tell you anything happens to me and he’ll—” “Well, I’m not going to tell him
that
, sweetie. I’ll just tell him you’re worried, shall I? . . . Yes, I promise . . . Thanks so much! Bye, babe!”

She clicked off, turned to Dalton.

“I think we’re going back to Staryi Krim.”

THEY
could see the upper levels of the compound from the outskirts of the village. It was sitting in a hollow below the tallest hill for miles around, a collection of white-painted outbuildings and one central structure, also white, with a long, peaked roof and a turret at the western side capped with red shingles.

It was only about two klicks away, as the crows flew, but for the Lancer it meant negotiating a long, curving track, little more than a gravel road, all the way around a lower slope and then working back along a narrow road running beside a little river and on into the hollow itself, some of it in plain sight of who or whatever was in that compound.

“Not an easy place to creep up on,” said Dalton. “Let’s see the JPEG again.”

Mandy handed him her BlackBerry with the aerial photo of the compound taken by Earl Ford’s consulting company. In the shot, according to the digital readout taken from five hundred feet, they could see the layout: the scattered outbuildings, the main structure, large and rectangular with a sharply peaked metal roof, a series of low tin-roofed sheds in a long row behind the main structure, and, on a cleared and paved area beside the structure, a landing pad, and, in the middle of the pad, the Kamov in its plain brown wrapper.

A few yards away, parked next to one of the outbuildings, was a large light brown flatbed truck and what looked like a long black sedan, almost a limousine, boxy, blunt-ended, shining like a polished stone in the lemon-colored winter light. The time stamp on the shot and the snow that lay everywhere around in it indicated that the shot was taken in early February of that year. Dalton handed the BlackBerry back, a look of resignation on his face, which Mandy correctly interpreted a few seconds later.

“Oh bloody hell. We have to walk?”

Dalton gave her a broad grin.

“We do.”

And walk they did, following a dry riverbed that meandered down from the hills, their boots crunching on rock and dead brush, Mandy leading the way, her SIG in her hand and down at her side, and Dalton following a few yards behind with one of the AKs on a sling. For two and a half klicks, the bed ran along roughly the same path as the gravel road that led up to the compound. The road was built on a cleared track about eight feet higher than the riverbed, its bank giving them very good cover until, with less than a hundred yards to go to reach the compound, the river veered sharply away from the roadway.

If they wanted to cover the last one hundred yards, they’d have to do it in the open, across a stony field. Mandy stopped at the crest of the road and looked across the rising slope to the compound and then she slid back to the bottom of the riverbed in a little landslide of pea gravel.

“Can you smell that?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

“I can,” said Dalton. “I’ve been smelling it for almost half a klick. Haven’t you?”

“I smoke more than you do,” she said. “And a damned good thing. What is that vile stench?”

“Pigs,” said Dalton, who had worked summers on a cattle ranch in Tucumcari only a few miles downwind of a large pig farm, which was not nearly far enough.

“Smell like that, you don’t forget.”

“I’ll make a heroic effort.”

Dalton was silent for a moment, listening hard. The wind had dropped as the day was dying down, and now they both could hear, faint and muted, a kind of guttural singsong tone—irregular, harsh, sustained—with a definite note of squealing desperation in it.

“What is that unholy sound?” asked Mandy, holding a very nice Liberty kerchief up to her nose.

“It’s the pigs. They’re in the sheds along the back, or at least that’s where the sound is coming from. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re hungry. Wait here a minute.”

He worked his way around the bend of the road, got to within sixty yards of the compound. Even from that distance, he could see that the windows were closed and shuttered on the big house, and there were no vehicles in the lot, other than one rusted tractor and another tractor without wheels sitting on cement blocks.

The place looked—and felt—empty.

He came back around the bend to Mandy, took a knee, leaning on his AK. “I think they’ve bolted. Just like in Kerch.”

Mandy gave him a look.

“What? You mean scarpered?”

“Looks it. One way to find out,” he said, handing her the AK. Mandy stared at it as if he had just handed her a live flounder.

“Oh great. Is this the part where you say, ‘Cover me, Tex, I’m a-goin’ in’?”

Dalton gave her a quick kiss, turned away and went back to the curve, climbed to the top, his Colt out. He took careful aim. And he blew a large hole in the side of the main house, just beneath a small slit window that dominated the eastern side, right about where a sniper would be hiding if the house weren’t really empty.

The sound of the gun rolled away into the hills and died. The large, splintered hole in the white-painted clapboard did not run with blood, and nobody opened up on him from another window. His experience with the people back down the road suggested that no one in the house would have the fire discipline to hold off after getting a round like that through the wall.

He got up and walked slowly across the field, his boots crunching down on the sliced-off stalks of corn freshly harvested. He reached the main gate, checked it for a trip wire or an IED, opened it, and walked slowly through the entire compound, looking for mines, explosives, traps, trying doors and shaking the shutters. He walked up to the back door of the big house, booted the glass to shards, and stepped inside. He was in some sort of mudroom, filthy boots caked with dried pig shit, coat hooks laden with farm smocks. Equally squalid, the rest of the interior rooms were in semidarkness.

The big house ticked slowly but steadily as the beams cooled in the gathering chill of sundown. Dalton did a quick walkabout through a large main room. Reeking of Russian cigarettes and spilled beer, it was set up like a military mess hall, with scruffy couches and mismatched chairs scattered about, a large stone fireplace, smoke still rising from the coals. There was a huge kitchen, and the trestle tables were bare and the cooking pots clean, but the smell of baked beans and boiled turnips still hung in the musty air.

The house was as empty as the yard, he decided. The noise from the pig sheds was getting louder and more shrill. Maybe they could sense someone was in the area. He went back outside, walked over to the helicopter pad, went out into the middle of it, pulled his gloves off, and got down on one knee to touch a fingertip in a pool of greenish liquid.

It was still warm.

Hydraulic fluid, leaking from the Kamov. He had hit the damned thing, all right. Vukov had flown it back here, patched it up somehow, maybe picked up another passenger . . .

And then he had taken off again.

Where to?

The grunting and squealing from the sheds was getting hysterical. So was the stench. He walked back to the gate.

“Mandy,” he called out, his voice echoing back from the hill behind him. “It’s okay. They’re gone.”

 

 

 

DALTON
was using a crowbar to pry a lock off one of the shuttered outbuildings when Mandy reached him, looking nervously back across the yard toward the pig sheds.

“You’re not going to let those little brutes out, are you? From the sound of it, they’re ready to eat anything. Including us.”

“Vukov and his people were growing corn out in the fields. For the pigs,” said Dalton. “I think they’ve stored it in here.”

The lock popped off, and the double doors swung slowly open. Inside the low, dimly lit barn was a huge mound of corncobs, along with some open feed bags and assorted bits of farming gear.

Dalton stood there for a moment, mulling it over, and then said to Mandy, “You might want to go inside. I checked the main house. It’s empty, but they’ve left a lot of stuff behind. Do you feel like taking a look around?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Listen to those poor little guys,” he said, grinning, looking at that moment more like a cowhand than a fixer for the CIA.

“I can’t leave them to starve.”

“I can,” said Mandy. “Watch me.”

A few minutes later, Dalton pushed his way out of a small stampede of hungry piglets—possibly fifty of them—gathered around the corncob mound, curly tails twitching, snouts buried in the pile. He walked back across the yard in the fading light, his shadow stretching out over the gravel, his boots kicking up stones as he looked up at the sky—
Cooling fast, rain or even snow soon
—and then he looked down at the house in front of him. Mandy was waiting at the door, the scarf at her nose again, her face bone white.

“The pigs getting to you?” he asked cheerfully.

In the golden light from the setting sun, her face was snow white, and her gray eyes misted. She looked at him over the silk cloth, took it away, and said, “This is where they killed Galan.”

 

 

 

THEY
did it in the basement, of course. These things are traditionally done in basements. Closer to Hell. Or just to kill the sounds. And if there’s a dirt floor, as there was here, then that just makes it all the more convenient to bury the leftovers. As he and Mandy walked slowly down the rickety wooden stairs, the basement, reeking of mold, raw earth, old sweat, and other things less easily identified, opened up in front of them. It was a low, almost medieval, space, with massive wooden beams running the length of the open area and a dirt floor pounded flat by time and the hobnailed boots of heavy men walking back and forth.

The stone walls were lined with hooks for the storage of gear, and a few of them still had antique harnesses and oxen yokes hanging from them. There were no windows, and the light came from a row of new-looking clear bulbs hanging from wires looped around the beams. Along one wall there was a battered wooden table with a large television set on it and some VHS tapes piled up next to an old Panasonic VCR. Next to that table, set into the corner, was a marble slab set on two carved pillars, the slab draped in white-and-gold cloth with a Greek Orthodox cross set in the center and flanked by six tall gold candlesticks.

In front of the cross was a gold chalice, covered with a silver plate, the plate draped with a white linen cloth.

In other words, an altar for the Christian Mass.

On the far wall was a banner hanging from an old cavalry lance. The banner was black silk cloth with the image of a large green scorpion in the middle.

And on a side wall, beneath a pair of crossed swords, was the clenched-fist image they had both seen before.