Devil's Fortress, page 33
Breathing hard, Flynn kicked the knife away and stepped back from the writhing man. He raised his submachine gun again and sighted down the barrel. His finger curled against the trigger.
“Wade’s gone, Nick,” he heard Kossak sigh. The Pole had his hands pressed against the other man’s torn neck in a futile effort to stanch the terrible wound, but the flow of blood had stopped.
Without taking his eyes off Voronin, Flynn nodded slowly. “Yeah, I figured.”
Cradling his mangled wrist, the Russian stared up at him with the cold light of fury still gleaming in his pale eyes. “Who are you?” he demanded, slurring the words through his broken and bleeding mouth.
“None of your business,” Flynn replied evenly in English. “All you need to know is that you fucked with the wrong people.” His finger tightened slightly on the trigger. “Proshchay, Pavel.”
Abruptly, Voronin’s mad rage seemed to vanish. The blood drained from his face and his eyes widened in sudden fear. “Wait, wait, wait!” he stammered. “I’m worth billions of your American dollars! I can pay you―”
“Not interested,” Flynn told him flatly. He fired a short burst directly into Voronin’s terrified face, riding the recoil of the Vityaz-SN to stay precisely on his chosen target. When the submachine gun fell silent, he turned away without a second glance.
CHAPTER
FORTY-FOUR
inside voronin’s private office
that same time
Somberly, Flynn moved back to the hole blown in the wall between Voronin’s outer and inner offices. He squatted down and whistled loudly. Firing on the move to keep the Raven Syndicate troops pinned down, Van Horn, Cooke, and Hynes fell back from their positions. First, Hynes stuffed the last of their equipment bags through the narrow opening, and then the three agents scrambled through, one after the other.
“Where’s Wade?” Hynes asked, looking around the room.
Flynn swallowed hard. “He’s dead, Cole,” he said in a gentle tone, laying his hand on the other man’s broad shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Who got him?” Hynes asked. “That son of a bitch Voronin?”
Flynn nodded. “He’s dead, too.”
“Well, damn,” Hynes said, his jaw working as he processed the news. “Somehow, I don’t really call that a fair trade.”
“Me neither,” Flynn agreed.
After several seconds, Hynes sighed. “I always knew Wade was a damn bullet magnet. He’s managed to get himself shot every op we’ve gone on. But you know, I never really thought he’d ever catch one bad enough to kill him.” He shook his head. “Guess I was wrong about that.”
Flynn looked him over carefully. “You going to be okay, Cole?”
The other man nodded with a serious expression. “Yes, sir. I know we’ve still got work to do—like getting our sorry asses out of this dead end we just fought our way into.” He shrugged. “I’ll hold it together until we’re back home.”
“Copy that,” Flynn told him. He turned back to where Cooke and Kossak were now crouched at the blast-torn hole in the wall, ready to kill the first Russian who showed himself at either barricaded doorway in the outer office. Even after looting the bodies there for more ammo, they were down to fewer than twenty rounds apiece. Flynn passed them his submachine gun, holding up a hand with five fingers indicating the five bullets he figured he had left.
“It will suffice,” Kossak told him soberly. “With so many already dead, our Russian friends have become more cautious. But they may also only be waiting for more reinforcements. I would not suggest we linger here much longer.”
Flynn nodded. “Not planning on it,” he assured the Pole. He grabbed the heavy equipment bag and tossed it off to the side where Van Horn was waiting. She caught the bag, placed it on the carpet, and opened the seal. Quickly, she began laying out their carefully folded wingsuits and base jump parachute packs.
Each wingsuit was crafted from layers of connected nylon. Starting a couple of decades before, skydivers had begun taking to the air wearing what were, in effect, individual flying suits. The fabric panels joining their arms and legs created an airfoil, a winglike surface that generated more lift than drag—enabling their wearers to glide downward through the air, greatly extending the duration and range of any parachute jump. Thrill-seekers also used them for high-risk jumps off cliffs and tall buildings. Tall buildings just like the Mercury City Tower, Flynn had realized when developing this part of their plan for NEMESIS.
Along with Van Horn and Hynes, he quickly stripped off his assault vest and body armor and struggled into the tight-fitting wingsuit. Once they were ready, Van Horn and Flynn took over guarding the hole while Cooke and Kossak donned their jump gear.
Meanwhile, Hynes retrieved a handful of miniaturized explosive charges Vucovich had been carrying in one of his equipment pouches. Each was about the size of a firecracker and included a tiny, quarter-inch-wide squib as a detonator. He brought them over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows which formed the outer wall of Voronin’s private office. He quickly peeled away the adhesive backing on each miniature charge and systematically placed them in a pattern across the already starred and cracked glass. When he finished, Hynes stepped back into the middle of the office, carefully adjusted the frequency on a small radio, and then pressed the transmit button on its side.
POP-POP-POP-POP-POP. Fired by the squibs responding to his radio signal, the charges went off in a rapid sequence. Shattered by the repeated succession of small explosions, the huge window fell outward—spilling seven hundred feet down the side of the bronze-tinted skyscraper in thousands of tiny, glittering shards.
Hynes swung back to Flynn. “The way’s clear, sir,” he called.
Flynn and Van Horn abandoned their post at the blast hole and joined the others. He touched Hynes gently on the shoulder. “I need you to handle one more task, Cole,” he said quietly. “We can’t just leave Wade for the bad guys to find.”
Hynes nodded his comprehension. “I’ve got it, sir.” He went over to where they’d moved Vucovich’s body. Kneeling beside his dead friend, he reached inside the other man’s assault vest and armed one more explosive device. With that done, he laid a hand on Vucovich’s forehead. “Rest easy, brother,” he murmured. Then he stood up and moved back to the group, unashamedly wiping away tears. “Everything’s set,” he told Flynn. “But we’d better move.”
Flynn nodded. “Roger that, soldier.” He swung to the others. “All right, people, saddle up. It’s time to go. Now, follow me!”
He sprinted ahead and dove headfirst through the open window. Instantly, he spread his arms and legs into tapered V shapes—creating a wider surface to bite into the air now rushing up past him. Despite his grief over Vucovich’s death, Flynn suddenly experienced the wild, gleeful exhilaration of completely unfettered flight, birdlike and free of artificial machinery. The rest of his Quartet Directorate team followed him, plunging through the opening one by one to avoid any risk of collision.
They were all caught by the strong winds funneled between the towering skyscrapers of Moscow’s International Business Center. Blown eastward by gale-force gusts, they slanted toward the ground far below at a shallow angle—dragged earthward by gravity, but buoyed up by the wingsuits’ wide surfaces as they surfed the winds.
From above and behind them came a sudden, bright orange flash, followed by a new torrent of smoke and blast-blown debris curling out of the Mercury City Tower. The powerful demolition charge Hynes had armed had gone off, further wrecking Voronin’s office suite and ensuring that the Russians could not successfully identify Vucovich’s body.
A few seconds after he’d jumped, Flynn judged that he’d glided several hundred feet east of the skyscraper and was getting close to the minimum safe altitude for his parachute to deploy. He reached behind him and pulled the cord on his pack. The parachute’s canopy streamed out swiftly and snapped open with a tooth-rattling jolt. Tugging on its front risers to control his descent, he slid downwind over the low flat roof of Moscow’s enormous Exposition Center—heading straight for the green, tree-lined expanses of the Krasnaya Presnya Park, which had once been the gardens of a wealthy Russian family. A brief glance over his shoulder showed four more canopies blossoming across the blue sky behind him.
When his boots thumped to the ground, Flynn hit the quick release button on his parachute harness and shrugged out of its straps. The billowing canopy skidded away across the grass. Van Horn and the rest of his team landed near him and ditched their own parachutes. They ignored the buzz of excitement from the mostly elderly parkgoers who were astounded by the unexpected experience of parachutists suddenly drifting down out of the air into their midst.
Flynn had just grabbed the zipper of his wingsuit when three uniformed Russian police officers broke out of the murmuring crowd with their pistols already drawn and aimed. “Halt!” one of them shouted. “Get your hands up!”
Slowly, Flynn, Van Horn, and the three others raised their hands in surrender. Caught in these awkward wingsuits while they were effectively unarmed, it was clear that any attempt to resist would be futile and almost certainly fatal. While one of the officers held them at gunpoint, the other two shackled their wrists with plastic flex cuffs and marched them to a Ford Transit van waiting along the curb just outside the park’s fenced boundaries. One by one, the bound prisoners were roughly bundled into the back of the van and shoved down onto folding benches.
Two of the police officers climbed in beside them. Their companion slammed the doors shut, sealing them away from the curious eyes of the onlookers who’d gathered around the van to watch these “crazy daredevils” get their comeuppance from the law. Then he went back around to the front, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine.
The van pulled away from the curb, drove north along the park access road, and then turned left onto a wider avenue that ran west toward Moscow’s elevated Third Ring Road—and, not-so-coincidentally, in the direction of the nearest district police station. On the street outside, fire trucks, ambulances, and other police vehicles screamed past with flashing lights and wailing sirens, racing toward the Mercury City Tower.
CHAPTER
FORTY-FIVE
near the third ring road, moscow
that same time
Inside the back of the Ford van, Nick Flynn yanked his wrists and easily snapped the pre-cut flex cuffs. He looked across the narrow aisle at the wiry, brown-haired man sitting there proud as a peacock in his neatly tailored Russian police uniform. “Nicely done, Tony.”
Tony McGill, who commanded the Quartet Directorate’s European action team, shrugged his shoulders. “We’ve had all the easy jobs in this operation.” McGill and two other team members, Rytis Daukša and Einar Haugen, had been prepositioned in Moscow to support Flynn’s NEMESIS force. Right now, Haugen was up front, driving the getaway van, while Daukša was squeezed into the back with the rest of them. McGill nodded at the bloodstains seeping through the arms of Flynn’s wingsuit from the grazes and cuts he’d taken. “Meanwhile, it looks as though you’ve been in the wars, mate,” the former SAS sergeant remarked. He glanced around the crowded rear compartment. “As have the rest of you lot.” The corners of his mouth turned down. “Vucovich didn’t make it?”
Hynes shook his head in the sudden, heavy silence.
McGill nodded sympathetically. “That’s a bloody shame.” His eyes clouded. The Englishman had lost comrades in past operations, so he understood how much it hurt. “Wade was a damned fine man,” he said simply. “He’ll be missed.”
“That he will,” Flynn agreed quietly. “For now, though, we have to keep moving. The timing for our next sleight of hand is a bit tight.”
McGill nodded. “That it is, Nick.” He reached under the folding bench he was sitting on and hauled out a large duffel bag while Daukša retrieved another one from his side of the van. “You and yours need to ditch those circus act flying suits, and it’s high time my lads and I resign from the Moscow police force. I don’t reckon Russian coppers fancy impostors any more than ours do.”
“I don’t imagine so,” Flynn replied. Quickly, he stripped out of both his wingsuit and black Spetsnaz fatigues. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he wrapped gauze around the flesh wounds on his forearms. Medical care could wait until they had more time. All he needed for the moment was to stop the bleeding. With that done, Flynn put on the clothes McGill handed him—a pair of slacks, a button-down shirt, a sports jacket, and a pair of brown loafers. He made sure to retrieve the solid state drive he’d liberated from Voronin’s personal computer from the Spetsnaz uniform. He carefully tucked it away in the inside pocket of his new jacket. With luck, the data it contained would give the Quartet Directorate valuable insights into the new bioweapons atrocity the now-dead Russian oligarch had been planning.
By the time Flynn finished, everyone except for Haugen had changed their own clothes, too. At a stoplight, the Norwegian doffed his police cap and shrugged out of his own uniform jacket. Now, at least when seen from a distance and through the tinted windshield, he looked pretty much like any other ordinary citizen. When the light turned green, he drove sedately past the local district police station. More patrol cars zoomed by on the other side of the avenue, undoubtedly responding to additional frantic radio calls for assistance from the units already at the increasingly confused scene around the Mercury City Tower.
Reaching the end of the avenue, Haugen turned left again—this time onto a smaller street that led directly past a massive, multi-level parking garage built parallel to the elevated Ring Road. He turned into the garage, drove up a level, and pulled directly into a parking space. Once he switched off the engine, Haugen reached up to the sun visor over his seat and triggered what looked like a simple garage door opener. The day before, McGill’s team had surreptitiously fitted small electronic devices to this level’s two working CCTV cameras. Responding to the signal the Norwegian had just sent, those devices shorted out, frying the cameras at the same time.
Haugen looked back over his shoulder with a satisfied smile. “All is good, Tony,” he reported. “Now there will be no pictures of us abandoning this vehicle.”
McGill nodded and turned to Flynn and the others. “End of the line, ladies and gents, if you please,” he said in a bad Cockney accent. “Transfer here for the airport shuttles.” Daukša already had the van’s rear doors open. Moving quickly but calmly, the two Quartet Directorate action teams fanned across the parking garage—heading for different vehicles they had prepositioned earlier. Flynn and his team got into their dark blue Mercedes S-class sedan, while McGill and his two men slid into a white Toyota Camry. A minute later, both vehicles left the garage, turned one after the other onto the street outside, and drove sedately away, as though nothing at all unusual had happened.
bykovo airport, southeast of moscow
an hour later
Located roughly twenty-two miles from Moscow’s city center, Bykovo had once been a small regional airport serving the Russian capital. It had officially closed more than a decade before, unable to compete economically with Moscow’s other, larger international air hubs like Sheremetyevo, Vnukovo, and Zhukovsky. As part of the closure, its old passenger terminal and hangars had been demolished and replaced with massive warehouses and industrial buildings. Now its mile-long runway was used primarily by cargo planes ferrying in large aircraft engines, like Soloviev D-30 turbofans, for overhaul and repair at an adjoining factory. Apart from these freight airplanes, only occasional private charter flights flew into and out of Bykovo, taking advantage of its relative proximity to Moscow as well as the discretion and anonymity the nearly deserted old airport offered celebrities and businessmen who wished to avoid the public eye.
First the Mercedes and then the Camry turned onto a wide road near the end of the runway. They stopped in front of a twin-engine Hawker 4000 mid-sized business jet already in position. This aircraft was painted in the sky blue and pale green livery of Procyon Services Unlimited. The Hawker’s pilot and copilot stood at the foot of their airstairs, obviously awaiting the scheduled arrival of their VIP customer and his entourage.
Once Cooke, Kossak, and Hynes had formed up around the Mercedes, surveying the scene through dark sunglasses as though they were wary personal bodyguards for a powerful and wealthy employer, Flynn and Van Horn slowly emerged from the rear of the sedan. Behind them, McGill’s team climbed out of the Camry and fanned out across the tarmac.
Wearing polite, deferential expressions, the Procyon air crew came forward to greet their expected passengers. “Mr. Voronin?” the pilot asked, looking at Flynn.
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, Mr. Voronin won’t be coming,” he said. “I’m afraid he’s had a rather serious business setback.”
“A permanent one,” Van Horn added.
Unable to hide his surprise and confusion, the charter pilot stared at them. “Then who the hell are you people?”
“The ones who plan on borrowing this nice Hawker jet of yours for a little while,” Van Horn told him coolly.
The Procyon pilot frowned. “If this is some sort of practical joke―” He froze, as did his copilot, suddenly seeing the pistols discreetly, but quite unmistakably, aimed at them by Cooke, Kossak, and Hynes.
Cooke twitched his weapon toward the airstairs. “If you please, gentlemen,” he murmured. “Let’s not have any unpleasantness, shall we? Your plane’s already been chartered for the day, hasn’t it? So why cause a fuss about who actually makes use of it?”
