A lone street lamp appeared in the distance, ahead of the lead car, as his sedan followed a tight curve and emerged from a stretch of treelined road. Grisha reported from the car thirty meters ahead.
“Approaching the first roundabout. Looks clear.”
“I see it. Take it slow,” Farrington said.
Once they cleared the rotary, they had six more kilometers until they reached another rotary on the outskirts of the city district. They would have to be careful after the second rotary. The roads twisted and turned throughout the city district, dead-ending in large apartment building complexes or university parking lots. Driving would be tedious and confusing, requiring several turns to navigate the poorly designed university area before finding the road that would take them across the highway.
His satellite phone activated, bathing the front seat in an orange glow. He retrieved the phone from the center console.
“Blackjack actual,” he answered.
“This is Berg. Sanderson wanted me to pass NSA intercepts directly. They caught a high-level transmission emanating from the Koltsovo area. Encryption conventions and codes phrases correlated to known Vympel protocols.”
“How long ago?” Farrington asked.
“One minute after Vektor burned. They must have a response team in the area. Watch your back,” Berg said.
It made sense. Vympel Spetsnaz units formed the backbone of the Federal Security Service’s counter-sabotage capability, tasked to protect key strategic installations across the Russian Federation. Major transportation centers, crucial industrial hubs and nuclear facilities fell under Vympel’s protective umbrella. Experts themselves in the art of sabotage and deep-penetration operations, Vympel operatives were among the most highly trained and lethal instruments in the Russian Federation’s current inventory.
“We’ll be looking over our backs all the way to the border. Any word on Black Magic?” Farrington said.
“They’ll arrive at Alpha within three hours and shut down until you’re closer to the border. Remember, Black Magic will RTB thirty minutes prior to sunrise. That gives you a little under five hours.”
“We won’t be posing for pictures along—”
Farrington stopped in midsentence. He’d detected something moving fast in his peripheral vision, headed toward the rotary from the right. A car on this road wasn’t cause for worry but something had triggered an internal alarm. He peered through the thick row of trees lining the road that dumped into the rotary from Koltsovo, wondering for a brief moment if he hadn’t imagined it. At the same time he detected the red glow of the brake lights in front of him, he saw it again, but this time closer to the intersection. His mind interpreted the danger within in instant. A large SUV, driving without headlights, was headed into the rotary at high speed.
Senior Warrant Officer Grigory Limonov gripped the ceiling handle above the front passenger window as his driver accelerated the UAZ Hunter into the rotary. His detachment of eight men had been woken by a direct alarm activated within Building Six at the Virology compound. All of their beepers sounded at once, triggering a prearranged response that brought all eight men together at the main intersection of Koltsovo within ten minutes. On the way to the rendezvous, he placed two phone calls.
The first call went to Vektor’s security director, Alexei Ivkin, who explained the situation. Deadly biological samples had been stolen from Building Six in a sophisticated operation, leaving several guards murdered and the basement of the building destroyed. Guards at Vektor reported seeing a single SUV speeding out of the gate.
He placed the next call to the Federal Security Service’s Center for Special Operations. The alarm set off in Vektor had already set things in motion at headquarters, and he was immediately transferred to a surprisingly senior government official. By the time he arrived at the intersection to join the detachment, Vympel Spetzgruppa “Victor Two Three” (V23) had its orders from Moscow: capture or kill the terrorists responsible for the attack. Retrieval of the stolen biological samples had not been mentioned, but was implied within the constructs of the primary order.
Since it was obvious that the terrorists’ vehicle had already passed through Koltsovo, he separated the detachment into two groups, sending one north along the road leading to the town of Baryshevo. If the terrorists planned to seek shelter in Russia’s third largest city, they would have to pass through Baryshevo. As soon as his operatives sped north, he alerted local authorities in the town, with the hope that they might be able to stop the terrorists. At the worst, they could buy his team some time. By his calculation, the terrorists had a twelve-minute head start.
He’d put his own car on the road leading south, in case the terrorists decided to connect with Highway M52 and flee in that direction. This was the less likely scenario in his mind, but he had to cover both directions without splitting the team too thin. When he first saw a set of headlights appear on the east-west road, heading to the rotary, he had a strong suspicion they had stumbled onto their suspects. As his SUV cleared the line of trees obscuring a clear view of the approaching vehicle, he had a sudden moment of doubt. Guards at Vektor had reported an SUV. This was a sedan.
He grabbed the wheel to yank them out of the way, but spotted a second, nearly identical car emerge from the same direction. Two cars speeding along a back road after 11:00 PM on a Sunday? He turned the wheel into the crash, adjusting the center point of their impact from the sedan’s engine block to the front passenger door. He needed to kill or incapacitate everyone in at least one of the cars to give his men a chance to succeed, even if it cost him his own life.
Farrington dropped the satellite phone and issued a quick warning to the lead car, which he could already tell would be pointless.
“Grisha. Contact right!”
The brake lights disappeared momentarily, giving him the false hope that they might accelerate past the speeding SUV. The rotary had slowed Grisha’s vehicle to one third of its original travel speed by that point, making it an easy target. In the orange glow of the single street lamp jutting from the center of the rotary, he helplessly watched the SUV “T-bone” the sedan with horrific results.
The two vehicles plowed into the grassy center of the traffic circle as one mass of warped steel and shattered glass. Misha braked hard and turned left, exposing the car’s right side to the wreck, in a semi-controlled slide that ended at the edge of the rotary. Anticipating Misha’s maneuver, Farrington had braced his assault rifle against the bottom of the open passenger window, trying to line up the weapon’s sights for a shot.
He didn’t bother trying to use the ACOG scope, instead opting for the iron sights mounted at a forty-five degree angle along the weapon’s rails. He canted the weapon slightly and fired in full automatic mode at the SUV. Gosha’s weapon started firing three-round bursts at nearly the same moment.
The AK-107’s Balanced Automatics Recoil System performed as advertised, allowing him to keep the weapon well controlled at its cyclic rate of 900 rounds per minute. Within two seconds, Farrington had pumped thirty rounds of 5.45mm ammunition into the SUV, shredding the metal frame and obliterating any remaining glass. He opened the car door and crouched low, sprinting beneath the barrel of Gosha’s rifle, which continued to fire controlled bursts of steel at potential targets within the traffic circle.