The Skorpion Directive Part 18

"I guess not. Yes, it's about him-"

Joko held up a ma.s.sive callused palm.

"I knew knew the man, you know. The dead man in the trunk of the Saab. He was my training officer. An old and valued friend. Also a patriot. A hero. His wife and kids, after he does not come back from the Negev and goes to Venice instead, we took care of his family. Whatever they needed-money, college, medical, dental, friends.h.i.+p-whatever was needed. For all those years. Took care also that they not ever know too much of what those Jordanian pigs did to him. You remember Ya'el Bar Zev?" the man, you know. The dead man in the trunk of the Saab. He was my training officer. An old and valued friend. Also a patriot. A hero. His wife and kids, after he does not come back from the Negev and goes to Venice instead, we took care of his family. Whatever they needed-money, college, medical, dental, friends.h.i.+p-whatever was needed. For all those years. Took care also that they not ever know too much of what those Jordanian pigs did to him. You remember Ya'el Bar Zev?"

"Wiry. Looked like a starving ferret? Dark, brooding kid?"

Joko inclined his head, not taking his small eyes off Fyke, his voice a thick rumbling rasp deep in his throat.

"Yes. He and some others, they hunt down and punish every Jordanian officer what did this thing. Only Ya'el does not come back out of Jurf al-Darwish . . ." Joko shrugged, his shoulders lifting and falling with huge seismic shudders. "This is business, you know? Like with your people. You lose somebody you love, then somebody on the other side pays. Is the rule."

Fyke's smile was in place but now carried more threat than warmth. "Just as long as the right right people pay." people pay."

Fyke leaned forward, speaking in a low, flat tone.

"Hear me, Joko. The boys should know-you should know- should know-it wasn't him. The boys should back off. He and your friend, they were comrades. Fought a nasty little street war in Venice and then across the Adriatic in Kotor. In Trieste too. The man we're talking about, he did not do this."

Joko leaned in close to Fyke, inches apart.

"I know of this nasty little war. I also know when it is over. And Shrike goes on killing Serbs in Venice anyway. Kills four men with his bare hands. Hunts an old man named Mirko Belajic through the streets, puts a bullet in his eye. Inside a Christian chapel! My friend says to him, 'You are crazy. Suicidal crazy. Get out of Venice.' Galan says to him, 'Get out of Venice and do not come back.' "

"Shrike did not kill Issadore Galan, Joko. He has been-"

"Set up? Hah. Proof, we have been given, Ray. Hard proof."

"No. Not possible. Faked."

" 'Faked'?" said Joko in a growl. "Faked is Shrike's own voice? Your friends, the Amis, they have him on tape, from his cell phone, when he is in Vienna hunting Galan-"

"His cell-phone tape? How did you you get it?" get it?"

"From his own people. The CIA. There is internal investigation of Shrike. For stealing Agency funds, for going crazy. Once he cut off a man's head with a hatchet and send it to some American cop, did you know that? There is picture of this. Did you know he owns a town house in London? On agent salary? Also apartment in Venice, also has a big boat? How does he do all that? I am a bar owner only, for which I still pay fat slug mortgage, and I am thirty years with the Mossad!"

"The house in London, far as I know, he inherited from-"

"Oh yes. From old maiden aunt. Ray, our friend is on tape threatening Galan. I myself have heard it. I know Shrike's voice- "Joko, that's bulls.h.i.+t, and you know it."

"Yeah. What he says, and I have heard it. He is talking to some woman at Langley, she is not identified. He makes the call from the bar at the Regina Hotel in the Ring. On the tape he says, 'Galan's a problem, a nasty one. I need to take care of it.' "

That stopped Fyke for a moment.

Joko pressed his point.

"See. He says so himself. Galan is a problem. He needs to take care of it. And he does. He kills Galan, puts him in Saab-"

"Why, Joko? Ask yourself. Why would he do that?"

"Why? Because Galan chases him out of Venice. Maybe Galan also knows too much about his money, where he gets it. Time to shut up an inconvenient old Jew."

"So he tortures tortures him to death, Joko?" him to death, Joko?"

Joko shrugged that off with a flat look of cold dislike.

"Got to know what the old man knows."

Something seemed to leave Fyke then. He leaned back in the booth, looking at Joko as if seeing him for the first time.

"So you're not going to call the boys off?"

Joko shrugged, looked around the room as if he were expecting somebody, came back to Fyke.

"Ray, listen good. When I hear you are in the bar, I make a call."

"You s.h.i.+t. You called the Office."

"Yes. I did. They think you know where Micah Dalton is."

Fyke got up, put his hands on the table, leaned in close to Joko, who pulled back, lifting his hands up to ward off a blow.

"Here's a promise, then, Joko my old friend. You tell the lads when they get here that if they want to go to war with Mikey and me, we'll give them all the war they want. You follow?"

"I follow," said Joko, looking over Fyke's shoulder as three lean military-looking men in faded jeans and light summer jackets came in through the gla.s.s doors, already scanning the bar.

"But maybe you tell them yourself ?"

Staryi Krim CENTRAL CRIMEAN HIGHLANDS, HIGHWAY P 35, 100 KILOMETERS NORTHWEST OF SIMFEROPOL, TWO P.M. LOCAL TIME.

Under a sky of Prussian blue, the central highlands of the Crimean Peninsula spread out in front of the Lancer like a patchwork cape. As they gained alt.i.tude, the lush farmlands slowly gave way to stony outcroppings and bare-bones ridgetops, the spring green and gold of the tilled lands fading into prairie foothills, relieved here and there by a darker green cloak of scrub forest. There wasn't much in the way of civilization up here, just a few cleared acres with squat little farmhouses tucked into lee corners out of the winter winds. Cruising at a steady eighty klicks on what was fairly good two-lane blacktop, they soon reached alt.i.tudes where the Crimean winter still lingered, a harsh, semidesert landscape dotted with weathered and deeply scored outcrops of rock rising above a sea of prairie gra.s.s, here and there a stand of stunted trees and a patch of plowed field, a few head of skinny cattle, mixed in with s.h.a.ggy little goats, picking a scarce living out of the gorse. It was a sullen and wintry desolation that soon grew tiresome, which Mandy dealt with by fluffing a pillow behind her neck, reclining the pa.s.senger seat, and drifting off into quiet contemplation of the previous evening.

Dalton found a tape-an actual audiotape-stuffed into the glove compartment, turned it over in the light. Theme music from Memoirs of a Geisha Memoirs of a Geisha, with Yo-Yo Ma. It seemed to fit the landscape. He looked over at Mandy, at the taut skin along the side of her neck and her face at rest in the pale light. She was not a young girl anymore, but every year she seemed to grow more lovely, as if, like Merlin, her beauty was traveling backward through time.

He reached over and pulled her cloak up around her shoulders. She sighed, said something he could not make out, and slipped back into her dreams.

Around noon, they broke out of the gra.s.slands and crested a summit of the inland range, where they found a fair-sized town called Bilohirsk. It was a rickety collection of concrete storage sheds and transit yards, with some Soviet-era concrete housing blocks scattered around the terrain laid out in a distorted grid on the southern slopes of a razorback mountain.

Since he hadn't seen a gas station since Simferopol, Dalton turned off the road and pulled into a bleak little square lined with shabby shops and crowded vodka bars. He was hoping to find a trucking depot or a car lot where, if he was prepared to pay an outrageous markup, perhaps they'd sell him some gasoline that wouldn't immediately destroy the engine. The Lancer, by the local standards a vehicle roughly equivalent to a UFO materializing in a luminous green cloud, attracted a lot of sullen attention.

Dalton's fingernails' grip on the Slavic languages wasn't much help, but after getting a lot of blank stares and muttered rejections he was able to find a black-market stall on the eastern edge of the town and a grizzled old Kalmuck there willing to sell him some gas at about twice the going rate.

Dalton paid him in euros. The old man handled the crisp new bills as if they were pieces of the True Cross, smiling so broadly that his bright blue eyes disappeared in the folds of leathery skin around his eyes, the sunlight glinting off his silver tooth, which was also his only tooth. Mandy, who because of her father's mining interests in the region spoke Ukrainian and Russian fairly well, stayed asleep-or pretended to-throughout the entire exchange, a half smile playing on her slightly puffy lips.

A few miles on, and they were crossing a winding river valley filled with pine forests. Theirs was the only vehicle moving along a deteriorating road that snaked between low stepped hills, with roughly two hundred klicks between them and Kerch. Mandy sat up, looking off to the south, where she could see a faint brown object floating in midair along a forested slope. She used a pair of binoculars supplied by the hotel to take a closer look at the small beige dot.

"It's a helicopter. One of those ugly Russian things with the two stubby engines and all those propellers."

"You mean a Kamov. And I think they're called rotors."

Mandy took the binoculars away and pulled out the folded map that she had stuffed into the side pocket, unfolding it with some difficulty.

"Odd," she said, drawing a circle around the closest village, a place called Staryi Krim, "Nothing here but the ruins of a monastery and a museum for some writer named Alexander Grin. Even the Amosov heart clinic only runs in the summer. It's just a wide spot in the road, less than five thousand people, and there's nothing else in the region that would justify a helicopter. Unless they use them to herd the goats, which seems a tad excessive."

"Yes. Down in the farmlands, they use Kamovs as crop dusters. What's it doing up here?" he asked, straining to see the dot against the backdrop of green trees.

"Well," said Mandy, studying the chopper through the binoculars. "If I were in the espionage game, I'd say it was tracking us. It seems to be moving in a parallel line along the highway . . . he's keeping his distance . . . But it's definitely possible we've attracted somebody's attention. Any suggestions?"

"Yes. Look innocent."

Mandy put the gla.s.ses down, gave him an eyebrow.

"Too late for that, dear boy."

She studied the little brown dot for a time.

"Not trying very hard to avoid detection, are they?"

Dalton, who didn't like this development at all, was looking for some sort of cover anywhere up ahead just in case the chopper was hostile. "We just pa.s.sed a little village back there . . ."

"Hrus.h.i.+vka," said Mandy, catching his tone. "But there was nothing there we could stick this truck in. Besides, the people around here don't seem all that friendly. Not a smile as we went through. Nothing but frowny faces, like a Young Republicans float in a Gay Pride parade. Anyway, it's too late for escape and evasion, I think."

"Why?"

"He's coming in for a closer look."

Dalton, craning his neck to look out the side window, saw the little brown dot getting bigger, turning into a stubby little ball with two fat attachments on the sides-the housings of its two piston engines. As he watched, the chopper tilted forward, its six rotors divided into two glittering disks, one above the other, sunlight reflecting off the machine's gla.s.s snout.

"A Kamov Two-Six," he said in a low tone, recalling the machine's capabilities. "Crew of two, can carry six pa.s.sengers with the optional cargo box. Top speed around one-sixty, ceiling maxes out at nine thousand feet, range: four hundred and fifty klicks."

"Aren't you the little fountain of utterly useless data. He's coming in pretty fast. I'd suggest you do something clever."

Dalton, watching the chopper getting larger and larger, could see a white oval through the winds.h.i.+eld, the face of the pilot, and another oval, a second man, beside him. The crackling mutter of the chopper's piston engines was getting louder. At about five hundred feet out, the chopper banked right, less than fifty feet off the pine canopy, and began to track the Lancer, matching its speed. As the chopper showed it angular profile-a lot like a dragonfly-Dalton could see that there was no pa.s.senger pod.

So, two people: a pilot and a spare.

"It looks like someone is pointing a camera at us," said Mandy. "Shall I wave?"

"Are you sure it's a camera?"

Mandy lifted the binoculars, studied the craft.

"Yes. No. Binoculars. What should we do?"

"It's their play," said Dalton. "Maybe they're just curious about the truck. And, yes, wave if you want."

Mandy, rolling the window down, gave them a gay flutter and a charming smile, and then rolled the gla.s.s back up. n.o.body waved back. Dalton kept the truck steady, pa.s.sing a sign: STARYI KRIM 15 K.

"If the pilot wants to do something snaky about us," said Mandy, "he's only got a few klicks left before we reach about five thousand witnesses."

"Yes," said Dalton, checking the rearview mirror, seeing nothing but a curve of eroding blacktop lined with dense pine forest. Up ahead, there was more of the same. "What's he doing?"

"He's . . . He's banking again. Coming our way."

"Okay. Put away anything loose and check your pistol."

Mandy shoved anything that was hard-edged or pointy into the glove and side compartments, got her SIG out and made sure there was a round in the chamber, checked her mag as well, her movements calm and steady as they always were when they had to be. Dalton kept his eye on the chopper, which was now on a course to cross the highway about a half klick in front of them, running very low, just skimming a tree line. As he flashed past the opening of a small side road on his right, barely a rutted track, he saw something brown and bulky out of the corner of his eye.

He checked his rearview mirror and saw a large mud-colored flatbed truck pull out of the lane, jolting into the road behind him, and then accelerating quickly.

"Okay," he said, pulling the Anaconda out of its case on the rear seat, "now it begins. We have a truck behind us."

Mandy looked back, her face registering the truck and going a little whiter. "Not a coincidence, is it?"

"No. And look at the chopper."

The chopper had come to a hover just above the tree line at the edge of the highway. Painted a dull tan, it carried no registration numbers, no corporate or service markings of any kind, which was highly illegal even here in the Crimean.

They watched as it rotated around to face them, sliding sideways and down, rocking as the rotors kicked up a cloud of leaves and dust. It lowered, touched the pavement, settled into its struts, and now sat dead in the middle of their road about three hundred yards away. They were on a narrow stretch of deserted highway, scrub forest or prairie gra.s.s on either side, stony hills all around, with a chopper sitting on the road ahead and, behind them, down to a slow crawl, the flatbed truck, its motor chugging roughly. Two men were visible behind the dusty winds.h.i.+eld.

"A neat little trap," said Mandy. "Any suggestions?"

"See the stand of forest up there on our left?"

Mandy nodded.

"I'm going to put us next to it. We'll have some cover there. Okay? One thing, Mandy. If it comes down to it with these guys, save yourself a round, Mandy. Save a round."

She smiled at him, nodding, but said nothing, not a tremor showing, her expression calm, although she was even more pale than usual for an English rose. Dalton braced his arms on the wheel and accelerated, pus.h.i.+ng the Lancer up through the gears, redlining the pedal, getting some distance between them and the truck to their rear, trying to get level with a small scrub forest about a hundred feet up the road. He watched as the chopper rocked on its struts, the two side doors popped open, and two men got out, both wearing rough farmhand clothing: tan bib overalls, heavy boots, dark s.h.i.+rts. Both men were big and hard-looking, and both were carrying AK-47s. One was an older man with a grizzled Mohawk. The bald one on the right was Smoke, his burn scars glistening in the light, his eyes two slits, his mouth a rippled, distorted leer.

"Dear G.o.d. What a hideous troll troll. Is that-"

"Yes," said Dalton. "That's him."

Smoke lifted the AK, aimed it at the Lancer, sighting low. Dalton hit the brakes and cranked the wheel to the left as the AK's muzzle burst into a sparkle of blue-and-red fire. The grille of the Lancer took three heavy rounds, from headlight to headlight, shuddering from the impacts. A ricochet starred the winds.h.i.+eld. Dalton fought the Lancer to a grinding stop up against the stand of pines, cracked the door, and said to Mandy, "Into the forest. Go in deep. Take a good position and go to ground. Cover up. Stay hidden. Hide your muzzle flash. Pick them off one by one. Go."

She was out of the Lancer and racing into the woods just as the flatbed truck, air brakes hissing, shuddered to a stop a hundred feet down the road. Dalton, his blood rising up, one image flooding his mind-Galan's butchered corpse in the trunk of the Saab-stepped out into the middle of the highway. Smoke and Mohawk were coming in at a dead run-now perhaps a hundred yards away-a very long shot for his Colt. Smoke stopped and aimed his AK.

Dalton, not expecting a hit, just hoping to rattle these guys enough to throw off their aim, fired three quick rounds, the Colt jumping in his hands. Amazingly, both men went to the ground. Smoke, his rifle clattering away, rolled to his left, got to his feet, grabbed his AK off the tarmac, and stumbled into the prairie gra.s.s on Dalton's right.

A hit, thought Dalton. thought Dalton. A hit. A hit.

Mohawk, still in the game, was up now in a firing crouch, his AK muzzle lighting up as Dalton watched. But his aim was too high, and heavy rounds hummed over Dalton's head and bounced off the roof of the truck behind him, the rest cracking into the pines a long way down the road. Dalton heard a shrill cry from someone inside the truck. Taking his time, he aimed three more rounds, and Mohawk flinched backward, falling flat to the pavement. Dalton pulled an autoloader out of his pocket, reloaded, snapped the cylinder shut, and turned to deal with the men in the flatbed truck.

He saw a brief flash, heard the solid crack of an AK, and flinched as a round hummed by his ear, smacking into a little pine tree by the side of the road and cutting it in two. Another wisp of muzzle smoke, more flashes, more thudding cracks.

At least one of the 7.62mm rounds, a slug as big as a lipstick tube, hummed by inches from his cheek. A second one pa.s.sed so close to his neck that he could feel the heat of it on his skin and the slug plucking at his hair. The shooter, who was too d.a.m.ned good, was firing from the flatbed behind the cab, steadying his barrel on the cab's roof. Taking this guy out was a priority. Zeroing in on the patch of shadow in the middle of the truck's rear window, Dalton fired twice, the pistol bucking in his hands. The winds.h.i.+eld shattered, and the shadow behind it fell away.

He heard a high-pitched shriek and saw a skinny figure tumble off the side of the flatbed, landing on the tarmac like a sack of meat. Another crack, another muzzle flash, this time from the side of the truck. Behind him, Dalton could hear the sound of a man running and turned to see how close he was. Still no sign of Smoke, but Mohawk was on his feet and coming in. With a good seventy feet to cover, his weapon at port arms as he lumbered down the road, he apparently was not confident enough about his shooting skills to take a shot at Dalton or was too worried about hitting the flatbed again. Dalton heard the man's breath chuffing, his boots thumping on the pavement, something metallic jingling at his belt. He had a few seconds.