The Moscow Vector Page 8

  He grimaced. Trying to cross that open space would be a fatal error. Long before he could possibly make it back into cover, the gunman pursuing him would have a clear shot. He had run right into another damned kill zone. Good move, Jon, he thought wryly. He’d managed the difficult trick of leaping out of a frying pan straight into a nuclear furnace.

  Smith spun around, looking back the way he had come. The forest there, a mix of widely scattered evergreens and small, leafless saplings, was too thin to offer real concealment. Nor were any of the rock slabs poking through the earth big enough to provide decent cover.

  That left the cliff.

  Heart pounding, Smith turned again and moved out into the clearing. With his pistol in hand, he loped along the edge of the precipice, trying to spot a path—or even just a series of handholds and ledges—that he could use to make his way down to the forested valley floor. He craned his head over the side, peering intently down the jagged, jumbled rock face. Up close, he could see that there were clumps of brush and even a few small trees growing out of the cliff, clinging somehow to narrow fissures and outcroppings in the angled layers of gray limestone. In other places, rivulets of water seeped from cracks, trickling slowly down the rock wall.

  He stopped, again considering his chances. They narrowed down awfully fast, ranging from pretty damned slim on that cliff face to none at all up here out in the open. Sighing, Jon made sure the pistol’s safety was on and then shoved it into the waistband of his jeans. He leaned farther out over the precipice, breathing deeply now, mentally preparing to lower himself over the edge. The trees and moss-covered broken boulders at the base looked tiny, as though they were miles away. His mouth went dry. Go on, Smith told himself angrily. There isn’t much time left.

  And then, quite suddenly, there wasn’t any time at all.

  Another sharp, staccato burst of gunfire rang out, shredding the earth and air all around him in a sudden hailstorm of lead.

  From fifty meters away, Georg Liss heard the American cry out, and saw him spin round and topple over the edge of the cliff. He bared his teeth in a vicious, satisfied grin. So much for Dr. Smith, he thought coldly.

  Slowly, very slowly, the dark-eyed man lowered the smoking muzzle of his MP5K and rose from behind the shallow slab of limestone he had used for cover. He moved forward cautiously, stripped the nearly empty clip out of his submachine gun, and slapped in a full magazine. Then he brought the weapon back up, slowly swiveling from left to right, scanning the open ground before him over the MP5K’s front and rear sights. He kept his finger poised on the trigger.

  There was only silence—and then, still far off in the distance, the sound of sirens drawing nearer.

  Liss scowled. He would have to break away soon, before the Czech police arrived and began searching the woods. The American must be dead, he thought. No one could survive a fall from that height. Nevertheless, it would be best to make sure. If nothing else, Moscow One would insist on a confirmation of the kill.

  Still grinning in cruel satisfaction, the man code-named Prague One prowled closer to the precipice. He leaned out over the rim, peering straight down that jagged wall of rock, eager to see Smith’s corpse lying broken at the foot of the cliff.

  Jon Smith lay sprawled on a shallow ledge only a few meters down the cliff face, with his back wedged against the trunk of the small evergreen that had helped brake his rapid, nearly uncontrolled descent. Through narrowed eyes, he stared up through the sights of his own weapon, holding it extended in a two-handed marksman’s grip—waiting, just waiting.

  Then he saw the dark-eyed man’s head and shoulders appear over the edge. This close, he could even see the faint dried bloodstains on the bandages covering the man’s broken nose.

  Say good-bye, Smith thought grimly. He pulled the trigger twice, holding the pistol down firmly as it kicked back after each shot.

  The first 7.62mm round hit the bandaged man in the throat, shattered his spine, and tore out through the back of his neck. The second blew a neat hole right between his eyes.

  Already dead, the dark-eyed man dropped to his knees and then tumbled headlong off the rim of the cliff. His limp body thudded onto a rock outcropping, bounced off, and plunged downward, cartwheeling and spinning in eerie silence all the way down the jagged wall.

  Smith lay quietly for several seconds, staring up at the cloud-covered sky. Every bone and muscle in his body ached, but he was alive. When that last submachine gun burst had ripped through the air around him, he had taken the biggest chance of his life so far, allowing himself to fall backward toward the tiny shelf of rock he had just marked as the start of a relatively safe path down. By some miracle, his wild-eyed gamble had paid off, using up every ounce of luck he could reasonably expect in any one lifetime.

  Slowly, he lowered the pistol, flipped the safety on, and tucked it inside the pocket of his windbreaker. His hands shook slightly as the adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream ebbed away.

  Still feeling weak and with his nerves twitching, Jon turned over, sat up, and then looked carefully over the side of the narrow shelf of rock. There, forty meters below, the body of the man he had killed lay twisted and broken atop a large boulder. Blood smears around the corpse marked the final point of impact.

  In the distance, he heard sirens, still faint, but growing steadily louder. It was way past time to get out of Dodge, Smith thought wearily. NATO allies or not, there was no way the Czech government was going to look kindly on an American military officer involved in a murderous, gangland-style shootout on the outskirts of its national capital. Again he glanced down at the dead man heaped at the base of the cliff.

  Smith frowned. Before he ducked back into the shadows, he needed a closer look at that guy and at whatever he was carrying. Right now Jon had no idea what the hell was going on. One thing was only too clear, though. Somebody was very interested in making sure that he wound up dead.

  Slowly at first, and then with growing speed and confidence, Smith climbed down the rugged limestone bluff, making his way from outcropping to outcropping and handhold to handhold. He dropped the last meter or so onto the floor of the Sarka gorge and then moved determinedly toward the shattered corpse splayed across a nearby boulder.

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Baghdad, Iraq

  Darkness had fallen across Baghdad. In the eastern half of the city, bright lights shone along the wide, modern avenues, gleamed from the windows of barricaded government ministries, and illuminated the still-crowded bazaars. West of the Tigris River, the cramped alleys of the Sunni-dominated Adhamiya district were lit only by the dim lamplight spilling from tiny shops and shanty teahouses, and out through the latticed windows and gates of older homes. The night air was cool and crisp with just a hint of the clean smell of rain lingering from a brief storm earlier that evening. Men in traditional Arab kaffiyehs, checked pieces of cloth worn over the head, lounged in small groups outside the teashops, smoking cigarettes and exchanging the day’s news and gossip in low voices.

  Abdel Khalifa al Dulaimi, a former colonel in Iraq’s once-feared Intelligence Service, the Mukhabarat, walked unsteadily down one of the narrow alleys. He was much thinner now than in his days in power, and his hair and mustache were streaked with gray. His hands trembled. “This is madness,” he hissed in Arabic to the woman following modestly in his footsteps with a full shopping basket in her arms. “This place is still a stronghold of the mujahideen. If we are caught here, death would be a kindness—and one we would not be granted either quickly or easily.”

  The slender woman, cloaked from head-to-toe in a shapeless black abaya, drew a step closer, narrowing the gap between them. “Then the trick is not to get caught, isn’t it, Abdel?” she said coolly in his ear in the same language. “Now shut up and focus on your job. Let me worry about the rest.”

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” Khalifa grunted sourly.

  “Oh, I think you do,” the woman reminded him. Her voice was ice
-cold. “Or would you really rather face a war crimes tribunal? With your choice of the gallows, firing squad, or a lethal injection? The ordinary people you and your thugs terrorized for so many years haven’t exactly been forgiving, have they?”

  The former Mukhabarat officer swallowed hard and fell silent.

  The woman looked ahead over his shoulder. They were drawing nearer to a large, two-story mud-brick house, one built around an inner courtyard in the traditional Iraqi style. Two hard-faced young Iraqi men stood in the open courtyard gate, carefully eyeing passersby. Each guard held a Kalashnikov AKM assault rifle casually at the ready.

  “All mission teams, this is Raid One,” the woman murmured in Arabic, speaking into the throat microphone concealed beneath her abaya. “Source One and I are moving into position now. Are you set?”

  In turn, other voices ghosted through the small radio receiver fitted in her right ear. “Sniper teams ready. Targets zeroed in. Assault teams ready. Extraction team ready.”

  “Understood,” she said softly. She and Khalifa were only meters away from the gate now. “Stand by.”

  One of the AKM-armed guards stepped out into the alley, blocking their way. His eyes were narrowed in suspicion. “Who is this woman, Colonel?” he growled. “The general summoned you to this meeting. Only you. No others.”

  Khalifa grimaced. “She is my wife’s cousin,” he stammered uneasily. “She was afraid to walk home from the market alone. She has heard the Americans and their pet Iraqi dogs, the Shia collaborators, are raping women caught on their own, without a man to protect them. But I only agreed to bring her this far.”

  The woman lowered her dark eyes modestly.

  The guard moved closer, still frowning. “You have compromised our security,” he muttered. “The general will need to know this. Bring the woman inside.”

  “Raid One, this is Sniper Lead,” she heard over her radio. “Just say the word.”

  The slender woman looked up again with a faint smile on her lips. “You may fire when ready, Sniper Lead,” she said quietly. “All teams move now. Now!”

  The guard’s eyes widened in sudden alarm at the expression he saw on her face. He began raising his Kalashnikov, thumbing the firing selector off safe.

  There were two soft thuds. Both guards crumpled in a mist of blood, shot through the head by high-powered rifle rounds fired from a rooftop more than a hundred meters away. Before they even finished falling, a group of six men who had been lounging outside one of the nearby tea stalls rose briskly and moved toward the open gate, bringing silenced Heckler and Koch MP5SD6 submachine guns out from under their loose-fitting jackets. Two of the gunmen dragged the bodies into the courtyard and dumped them in the deep shadows near one wall. Then they turned and sauntered back to stand at the gate in place of the dead sentries. No one looking out from the house would see anything amiss.

  The woman pulled her own weapon, a 9mm Beretta pistol fitted with a silencer, out from under the food piled in her shopping basket. Together with Khalifa and the four other men, she drifted silently into the courtyard, carefully staying in the concealing shadows. She checked her watch quickly. Less than thirty seconds had passed. Faint sounds of music, the eerie keening of a popular Arab male singer broadcast on Syrian State Radio, filtered out through the shuttered windows of the house.

  Satisfied, she signaled the assault team toward the front door of the house.

  Moving in pairs, the four men sprinted up the steps. Covered by the others, the point man gently tested the solid wood door, making sure it was unlocked. He nodded once to his teammates and held up three fingers to signal the beginning of a three-second countdown.

  They tensed. One. Two. Three.

  Suddenly the point man kicked the door open and burst inside, followed closely by his comrades. There were a few muffled shouts, but they were immediately cut short by the harsh stutter of silenced submachine guns.

  The woman crouched near the open door, holding her pistol ready. Trembling openly now, Khalifa waited with her. The former Mukhabarat colonel was praying frantically under his breath. Ignoring him, she listened closely to the staccato reports pouring through her radio earphone.

  “Hallway secure and front rooms secure. Two hostiles down.”

  “Back rooms secure.”

  Another submachine gun chattered briefly.

  “Staircase secure. One enemy down.”

  There were more shouts somewhere inside the house, followed by yet another quick burst of silenced gunfire.

  “Top floor secure,” a calm, confident voice said over the circuit. “Two more hostiles down. We have one prisoner. Raid One, this is Assault One. The house is clear. No friendly casualties.”

  The woman rose to her feet. “Understood,” she said again quietly into the throat mike hidden by her abaya. “Source One and I are coming in.” She motioned Khalifa ahead of her with the Beretta.

  Inside the house, bodies littered the tiled floors, along with spent shell casings. Most had been shot while reaching for their weapons—a mix of Soviet-made assault rifles and pistols. The faintly metallic smell of blood blended with other odors, harsh, unfiltered tobacco, cheap aftershave, and boiled chicken. A radio somewhere still played music.

  With Khalifa in tow, she took the stairs up to the second floor two at a time and made her way to an expensively furnished room at the back of the house. Thick carpets covered the floor. There were imported teak tables, chairs, and a desk topped with a softly humming portable computer. The machine appeared undamaged. She smiled.

  One man wearing a robe and slippers lay facedown on one of the carpets with his hands bound behind him with strong plastic twist ties. Two of the attackers stood close by, covering their lone prisoner with their submachine guns.

  At her signal, they rolled him over.

  The woman stared down intently, mentally comparing the hawk-nosed, bearded visage before her with the file photographs she had studied. Angry, red-rimmed eyes stared back at her. She nodded in satisfaction. They had captured Major General Hussain Azziz al-Douri, one-time commander of the Mukhabarat’s Eighth Directorate, the unit directly responsible for developing, testing, and producing Iraq’s biological weapons.

  “Good evening, General,” she said politely, with a faint smile on her lips.

  He glared back at her. “Who the devil are you?”

  The woman flipped back the hood of the abaya, revealing her short blond hair, straight nose, and firm chin. “Someone who has been hunting you for a very long time,” CIA officer Randi Russell told him coolly.

  Dresden, Germany

  Large flakes of wet snow drifted down from a dark, overcast sky. Spinning lazily in the calm, cold air, they settled softly across the plaza surrounding Dresden’s floodlit Semper Opera House. A thin white blanket softened the stark outlines of the equestrian statue of King Johann of Saxony rearing high above the open square.

  People bundled up in overcoats hurried across the plaza with their umbrellas hoisted high to ward off the falling snow, joining the excited crowds gathering outside the brightly lit entrance to the Opera House. Placards and banners posted around the city announced this evening’s premiere of a new, ultra avant-garde version of Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischutz, the first real German opera.

  Jon Smith stood in the shadows near the long-dead Saxon king’s statue, carefully observing Dresden’s self-anointed aficionados of high culture stream across the square. Impatiently, he shook the wet snowflakes out of his dark hair. He hunched his shoulders, feeling the cold bite through his thin windbreaker and black turtleneck.

  He had arrived on the city’s outskirts roughly an hour before, dropped off by a Hamburg-based truck driver from whom he had bummed a ride all the way from Prague across the Czech-German border. Two hundred euros in cold, hard cash had more than satisfied the trucker’s curiosity about why an American businessman needed so long a lift. He had allowed Smith to ride in the sleeping berth at the back of his cab, safe from any prying official eyes. F
ortunately, crossing the frontier had proved uneventful. Now that the Czech Republic was part of the European Union, there were very few active checkpoints between the two countries.

  But moving any deeper into Germany or getting a plane back to the States or anywhere else would take a lot more than luck. The murderous ambush on the road to Prague’s airport had cost him both his laptop computer and his carry-on bag. European hotelkeepers and airport security officials alike frowned on people arriving without luggage. More important, he needed new identification. Sooner or later, the Czech authorities would start casting a wider net for the American doctor and army officer who had missed his plane to London and vanished so mysteriously. They might even tie him to the bullet-riddled corpses found near the road to the airport.

  Smith spotted a short, bearded man in evening dress and a bright red scarf walking slowly toward the statue. He wore a pair of thick glasses that reflected the dazzling lights silhouetting the Opera House. The newcomer also carried a colorful program for Mozart’s Don Giovanni conspicuously beneath one arm.

  Jon moved out to intercept him. “Are you here for the performance?” he asked quietly in German. “They say the maestro is in top form.”

  He noticed the little man relax slightly. Maestro was the recognition word Fred Klein had given him when Smith called to arrange this emergency rendezvous.

  “So I understand,” the short, bearded man replied. He tapped the program under his arm. “But I prefer Mozart to Weber myself.”

  “That’s quite a coincidence,” Smith said pointedly. “So do I.”

  The little man smiled tightly. His blue eyes were bright behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Those of us who love Europe’s greatest composer must stick together, my friend. So take this, with my compliments.” He handed the taller American his Don Giovanni program. Then, without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away, vanishing into the crowds milling around outside the Semper’s arched entrance.