Dead or Alive Read online

  “Everybody stay put and stay quiet,” Driscoll ordered, then got the Chinook on the line. “Blade, Sickle.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Our UAZs have taken up position at the eastern end of the canyon.”

  “Roger, we see ’em. Be advised, Sickle, we are eight minutes to bingo.”

  Eight minutes until the Chinook was at the do-or-die turnaround point. A delay beyond that and they wouldn’t have enough fuel to RTB, or return to base. For Rangers, working with thin margins was par for the course, but there were some things you fucked with at your peril, and your ride home was chief among them.

  “Understood. Engage UAZs. Anything on wheels is yours.”

  “Roger, engaging.”

  The Chinook appeared over the top of the plateau, its nav lights flashing as it wheeled and started easing west down the canyon. Driscoll could see the door gunner swiveling the minigun about. Driscoll radioed, “Gomez, get your team moving up the ramp.”

  “Roger, boss.”

  “Eyes on the target,” the Chinook pilot called. “Engaging ...”

  The Dillon M134 minigun opened up, casting the side of the Chinook in orange. The barrage lasted less than two seconds, then came another, and one more, then the pilot was back: “Targets destroyed.” With a firing rate of three thousand rounds per minute, in those five or so seconds it had poured two hundred fifty 7.62-millimeter bullets into the approaching UAZs. The Chinook reappeared, sideslipped over the LZ, and touched down. The ramp came down.

  Gomez called, “Up on overwatch, Santa.”

  “Roger, moving to you.”

  Driscoll gave the order, and again in pairs the remainder of the team crossed the canyon floor, leapfrogging from cover to cover until Driscoll and Tait were across and headed up the ramp.

  “Target!” Driscoll heard over his headset. Not one of his, he decided, but somebody aboard the Chinook. “On the tail, seven o’clock!” West across the plateau came the chatter of automatic weapons—AK-47s, quickly followed by the crack of returning M4 fire.

  Driscoll and Tait reached the top of the ramp, dropped to their bellies, and crawled the last few feet. Fifty meters ahead, from inside a ravine and atop the ridgeline, muzzles were flashing. Driscoll counted at least three dozen. Down the canyon four pairs of headlights appeared in the dark. More UAZs.

  Peterson’s voice: “RPG, RPG ...”

  To their right, something bright streaked past. The ground beside the Chinook erupted.

  “Move away, move away,” the pilot called, then did something Driscoll had never seen: Neat as you please, the pilot lifted off, stopped in a hover at six feet, then wheeled, bringing the door gunner to bear. “Heads down, heads down!” The Dillon opened up, arcing fire into the ravine and ridgeline.

  “Runner!” Driscoll heard faintly in his ear. “Heading west!”

  Sidelit by the Dillon’s tracers, their prisoner, still hand-cuffed, was staggering away from the Chinook and toward the draw. Tait muttered, “I got him, Santa.”

  “Drop him.”

  Tait’s M4 popped and their prisoner went down. The AK fire tapered off, then died. Driscoll called, “Blade, we got UAZs in the canyon. Two hundred meters and closing. Your three o’clock.”

  “Roger,” the pilot replied, and brought the Chinook around. Again the minigun opened up. Ten seconds was all it took. The dust drifted away, revealing the four demolished UAZs.

  “Head count,” Driscoll ordered. No response. “Head count!” he repeated. Collins replied. “Two KIA, Santa, and two wounded.”

  “Motherfucker.”

  The pilot called—calmly, Driscoll thought, Sickle, what say you fellas get aboard and we go home before our luck runs out?

  9

  IN ALL HIS YEARS living in Saint Petersburg, Yuriy Beketov had walked its darkened streets hundreds of times, but this time was different, and it didn’t take much contemplation to understand why. Wealth—or at least potential wealth—had a way of changing one’s perspective. And this kind of wealth was of a different sort. He wasn’t proud of the money in and of itself but rather the way in which he planned to apply it. What he was less certain about was whether that was truly a distinction or just a rationalization. If you danced with the devil for a very good reason, have you not still danced with the devil?

  Of all the cities in his homeland, Saint Petersburg was Yuriy’s favorite. The city’s own history was a near-perfect reflection of Russia’s history. In 1703 Peter the Great had founded the city during the Great Northern War with the Swedes; during World War One, Saint Petersburg’s name, deemed excessively Teutonic by the powers-that-be, was changed to Petrograd; in 1924, seven years after the Bolshevik Revolution and a few days after the death of Vladimir Lenin, it was dubbed Leningrad; and finally, in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was renamed once again—reverted to—Saint Petersburg.

  Saint Petersburg, a Time Capsule of Russian History. Not a bad title for a book, he thought. Too bad he had no literary aspirations. The tsars, the Bolsheviks, the fall of the empire, then finally democracy—though perhaps democracy tainted with a bit of totalitarianism.

  Tonight was especially chilly, with a brisk wind blowing off the Neva River and whistling through the branches of the trees. Unseen in the darkness, bits of litter skittered across concrete and cobblestones. Down a nearby alley came the clink of a bottle on brick, then a slurred curse. Another bic had either run out of vodka or spilled his last bit of it. For all his love for Saint Petersburg, Yuriy knew she’d fallen far from her zenith. This was true of the whole country.

  The collapse of the Union had been tough on everyone but had been especially tumultuous for his former employer, the KGB, now known dually as the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). These were only the latest in a long string of acronyms under which the Russian intelligence services had operated, starting with the dreaded Cheka. Arguably, though, the KGB—the Committee for State Security—had been the most effective and the most feared of all its alphabet-soup predecessors and descendants alike.

  Before taking retirement at a fractional pension in 1993, Yuriy had worked for the cream of the KGB crop, Directorate S—Illegals—of the First Chief Directorate. The real spies. No diplomatic cover, no embassy to which you can run, no deportation if caught but rather imprisonment or death. He’d had some successes, but nothing that had cast him into the stratosphere of the KGB’s upper echelons, and so at forty-five years of age he’d found himself unemployed on the streets of Moscow with a set of skills that left him few career paths: contract intelligence and security or crime. He’d chosen the former, opening up a consultation firm that catered to the hordes of Western investors that had in the early days of post-Soviet rule flooded Russia. Yuriy owed, at least obliquely, many of his early successes to the Krasnaya Mafiya, the Red Mafia, and its biggest gangs, the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the Dolgoprudnenskaya, and the Izmailovskaya, all of which had wasted even less time than had foreign investors in pillaging Russia’s chaotic economy. Of course, the Krasnaya Mafiya was unconcerned with the subtle niceties of business conduct, and investors from Europe and America were only too aware of this, a circumstance Yuriy was only too happy to exploit himself. That was the operative word back then—exploit—and the only difference among himself, the Mafia, and the common street hood was the methods each employed to obtain the desired ends. For Yuriy, the method was simple: protection. Keep visiting businessmen alive and out of the hands of kidnappers. Some of the lesser gangs, too small to run their own sophisticated protection and extortion games, had taken to kidnapping well-dressed Europeans or Americans staying in Moscow’s finest hotels, then sending a ransom note along with a severed ear or a finger or toe—or worse. The local militia, underpaid and overwhelmed, was of little help, and more often than not the victim was killed, ransom paid or unpaid. There was no honor among kidnappers. Only brutal pragmatism.

  Yuriy
had hired former KGB colleagues and paramilitary types—mostly former Spetsnaz commandos who’d been similarly disenfranchised—to escort clients to and from their meetings and make sure they left the country alive and still in possession of all their parts. The money had been good, but as Moscow’s economy (both official and underground) had burgeoned, so too had the cost of living soared, and while many entrepreneurs like Yuriy were seeing more money than they ever thought existed, they were also seeing it bleed away into the volatile market and an insanely high cost of living. It was sad irony to make so much money while having the cost of bread rise right along with your income.

  By the late nineties Yuriy had saved enough money to see his three grandchildren through university and into self-sustaining adulthood but not enough money to retire to that idyllic remote cottage on the Black Sea he’d been dreaming about for twenty years.

  The opportunities came, slowly at first and then with more regularity, just before, and then after, the events of September 11. On that morning America awoke to a fact the KGB and many non-Western intelligence services had long known: Islamic fundamentalists had declared war on America and her allies. Unfortunately for the United States, these fundamentalists had in the last half-decade evolved from the disorganized and irrational madmen they were so often depicted as in Western newspapers to organized, trained soldiers with a clear goal. Worse still, they had learned the value of intelligence networks, agent recruitment, and communication protocols, all things that had traditionally been advantages at the sole disposal of national intelligence agencies.

  For all her achievements and boons, America was the archetypical giant, blithely ignoring arrows and stones in favor of the notional cannon on the horizon, the mini-9/11s that were few and far between, and impossible to quickly consign to the back pages of The New York Times or off the fifteen-minute rotation at MSNBC or CNN. Historians would forever be arguing whether American intelligence could have or should have heard the galloping hoofbeats of 9/11, but the escalation certainly could have been tracked, going as far back as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, up through the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Only to the CIA had these been isolated incidents; to the affiliated terrorist cells that had carried them out, they’d been battles within a war. It was only when war had been loudly declared on the United States—in both word and deed—that the U.S. intelligence community started to realize these arrows and stones could not be ignored.

  Worse still, the U.S. government and CIA had only in recent years steered themselves away from what Yuriy had dubbed the “golem mind-set”—the obsessive focus on the enemy giant’s head while ignoring its fingers and toes. Of course, that would never fully change, especially when it came to Public Enemy Number One, the Emir, who had become by design as much as by default, Yuriy believed, American’s golem. Nations needed definable enemies, someone they could point to and cry “danger!”

  Of course, Yuriy had little to complain about. Like so many of his countrymen, he’d benefited from this new war—though only recently, and with much reluctance and not a little regret. Starting in the mid-1990s, cash-bloated Islamic fundamentalist groups had begun knocking on Russia’s door, seeking to hire errant intelligence officers, nuclear scientists, and Special Forces soldiers. Like so many of his countrymen, Yuriy had answered the door, but he was old and tired, and needed only a bit more money for that Black Sea cottage. With luck, tonight’s meeting would solve that issue.

  Yuriy shook himself from his reverie, stepped back from the railing, and continued across the bridge, then down two more blocks to a neon-lit restaurant bearing the name Chiaka in both Arabic and Cyrillic. He crossed the street and found a park bench in the blind spot between a pair of streetlights, then sat down and watched. He lifted his collar against the wind and shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his greatcoat.

  Chiaka was a Chechnyan restaurant, locally owned and operated by a Muslim family who’d thrived under the aegis of the Obshina, or Chechen Mafia. Similarly, the man he was meeting—known to him only as Nima—had likely slipped into Russia by the graces of the Obshina. No matter, Yuriy reminded himself. He’d dealt with the man twice before, once to consult on a relocation of what they had called an “associate,” and more recently as an intermediary for a recruitment. That one had been an interesting affair. What these men wanted with a woman of that particular caliber he had no idea, and he didn’t care. He’d learned long ago to stifle such curiosity.

  He watched for another twenty minutes before satisfying himself that nothing seemed out of place. No watchers about, police or otherwise. He stood up and crossed the street and entered the restaurant, which was brightly lit and spartanly furnished, with black and white vinyl tiles, round Formica tables, and hard-backed wooden chairs. It was the late dinner rush, and almost every table was occupied. Overhead, speakers emitted the tinny sound of Chechnyan pondur music, similar in sound to that of the Russian balalaika.

  Yuriy scanned the restaurant. A few customers had looked up upon his entry but had almost immediately returned to their meals or conversation. While Russians weren’t a common sight in Chechnyan restaurants, neither were they rare. Despite their reputation, Yuriy had never had much trouble with Chechnyans. For the most part they were live-and-let-live, but woe betide the person they decided to kill. Few organizations were as brutal as the Obshina. They liked their knives, the Chechnyans, and they were handy with them.

  In the rear, down a short hall, he saw Nima sitting at the last booth against the wall, beside the kitchen door and the bathroom. Yuriy walked back, held up a “wait a moment” finger to Nima as he passed, then slipped into the bathroom to wash his hands. His hands were perfectly clean, of course; his interest lay primarily in confirming that the bathroom was unoccupied and offered no alternative entrances. Care and caution that the normal person would think excessive had kept him alive as an Illegal for many years, and he saw no reason to change his habits now. He dried his hands, then took a moment to ensure that the Makarov 9-millimeter pistol was seated safely in its holster in the rear waistband of his trousers, then walked out and sat down in the booth, facing the front of the restaurant. The swinging kitchen door was to his left. While Yuriy had been in the bathroom, Nima had removed his sport jacket. It lay draped across the back of the booth. The message was clear: I’m unarmed.

  Now the Arab spread his hands and smiled at Yuriy. “I know you’re a careful man, my friend.”

  In return, Yuriy opened his sport coat. “As are you.”

  A waiter appeared, took their drink orders, then disappeared again.

  “Thank you for coming,” Nima said.

  His Russian was good, with only a slight Arabic accent, his skin light enough that he could pass for a local with some Tartar in his blood. Yuriy absently wondered if the man had been schooled somewhere in the West.

  “Of course. It’s my pleasure.”

  “I was unsure if you were available.”

  “For you, my friend, always. Tell me: Your colleague arrived safely at his destination?”

  “He did indeed. The woman as well. As I understand it, she is everything you told us she would be. My superiors are very pleased with the help you’ve already offered. I trust the compensation was satisfactory? No problems?”

  “No problems.” In fact, the money sat securely in a Liechtenstein account, admittedly earning very little interest but safe from the prying digital eyes of curious intelligence and police agencies. How he would move the funds once he needed them he hadn’t decided, but there were always ways, especially if you were careful and willing to pay for such services. “Please pass along my thanks to your superiors.”

  Nima tipped his chin. “Of course.” The drinks came—vodka for Yuriy and sparkling water for Nima, who took a sip, then said, “We have another proposal, Yuriy, something we believe you are uniquely qualified for.”

  “I am at your disposal.”

  “As with our other
two arrangements, it is a delicate matter, and not without some risk to yourself.”

  Yuriy spread his hands and smiled. “Anything worthwhile in life usually is, yes?”

  “Very true. Of course, as you know ...”

  From the front of the restaurant came a shout, then the shattering of glass. Yuriy looked up in time to see a man, clearly drunk, pushing back from his chair, a plate of unidentified food resting on his upraised palm. The other customers stared at him. The man uttered a string of what Yuriy assumed were Chechen curse words he felt best described the subpar quality of his meal, then stumbled toward a waiter in a white apron.

  Yuriy chuckled. “An unhappy customer, it seems ...” His words trailed off as he realized Nima had never turned in his seat to watch the commotion but was instead looking squarely into Yuriy’s eyes with something akin to regret. Alarm bells began ringing in the former KGB officer’s head. Distraction, Yuriy, an arranged distraction.

  Time seemed to slow.

  Yuriy leaned forward, his hand reaching behind him toward the Makarov in his waistband at the small of his back. His fingers had just reached the gun’s checkered grip when he realized the swinging kitchen door to his left was standing open, a man-shaped figure standing at the threshold.

  “I’m sorry, my friend,” he heard Nima say in some distant part of his mind. “It is for the best. ...”

  Over the Arab’s shoulder, Yuriy saw another waiter walking toward them, holding up a tablecloth, ostensibly going through the motions of folding it.A curtain to shield the deed ... Yuriy saw movement in the corner of his eye. He rotated his head to the left in time to see the figure in the doorway—another waiter in a white apron—raising something dark and tubular in his hand.

  Somewhere in a still-calm, analytical part of his brain, Yuriy thought, Makeshift noise suppressor. . . . He knew he would hear no noise, see no flash. Nor would there be any pain.