The rope snapped in two; Court dropped like a stone, breaking his fall with his arms and legs, but still he slammed into the ground next to the fountain on his right side.
The wind was knocked from his lungs, but he knew he could not stay there. Instead he began rolling; he’d dropped the Glock on impact, but he felt for it and grabbed it up, kept rolling, still not breathing, and he banged into tables and chairs, knocking them out of the way as he crawled forward and then scrambled to his feet. He could not see the way ahead in the thick red smoke but he moved anyway, still struggling to catch a breath.
Above him he heard the rattling gunfire, and all around him he heard cracking strikes of the 7.62-millimeter rounds.
He ran out of the smoke choking the atrium floor and into a large banquet room that ran off the north side, hoping like hell he could either find an exit or make one.
“That one! There! Where is he going?”
Jeff Parks ran to the screen in the front of the signal room, and he used the tip of a ballpoint pen to point to a single white-hot heat signature that exited a side entrance on the north side of the massive dacha. The lone figure passed two men rushing toward the entrance, and they did not break stride.
“He walked right by them!” someone shouted.
Parks said, “That’s him. He must have clothing that matches what the goons on the ground there are wearing.”
The figure continued walking. All around the signal room, commands were given to the drone pilots to tighten up on the figure, to the audio techs to focus mics hidden in the forest on the north side, to those in contact with Trestle Actual to let him and his unit know that it appeared the Gray Man was hoofing it off the X in some sort of disguise.
On the screen figures poured out of the building now, mostly through the main door on the south side but some on the west and north. Men ran in one direction and then another; the audio picked up cracks and booms and shouts and barking dogs and then the sounds of gas engines firing up, but soon the tap-tap-tap-tap of cyclic Kalashnikov fire piped through the tiny surveillance mics. Someone was blasting his AK on the south side of the building, apparently at nothing in the darkness.
One of the signal room techs counted twenty-four pax moving about the property and announced it through the commo net. But the one lone heat signature walked on, first between a metal shed and an uneven row of snowmobiles, and then straight toward the north gate, where three men stood at the wall next to the guard shack, facing in his direction.
“Tell the UAV operator I want it as tight as he can make it,” Babbitt demanded. “Don’t worry about image quality; I want to see this up close.”
A moment later the camera zoomed in on the lone man approaching the guard shack along the wall at the north gate. For the first time signal room personnel could make out folds in clothing, could see a hood over the man’s head, and they could also see that his hands were empty.
A female voice muttered into her mic, “He’s gonna try to talk his way through—”
A male voice with a southern drawl spoke over her. “He ain’t talkin’ his way through shit.”
The room fell silent as the figure closed to within ten feet of the armed men at the gate. He did not stop, just kept moving toward them. The three guards had been holding their guns at the low ready, but something must have alarmed them because all three raised their weapons at once and backed up; one bumped against the wall. The approaching man moved the last ten feet in the blink of an eye, knocked the first AK to the side, and drove his arm up; it looked like his open hand connected with the first guard’s throat, but it was hard to tell. The Russian left the ground, kicked back, and fell into the second guard; two rifles were on the ground and Gentry — of course this was Gentry — leapt forward, pushed off the stone wall with his right leg to give himself more lift, and launched himself on the third man. He got inside the guard’s weapon just as he fired, a flash of light from the barrel and a thump of noise through the surveillance microphone in the forest to the north. But the round missed; the Gray Man had the guard in a violent embrace and they spun in the snow, the AK twirling through the air. The guard flailed, but the Gray Man got his arms around the man’s head, turned him around, and shoved him violently, face-first, into the wall.
The second man leapt upon the Gray Man from behind, but a right elbow knocked him off balance, and then a high roundhouse kick to the face crumpled the man in the snow in a heap.
“My God!” someone yelled.
All three guards were down now. Motionless. The Gray Man had landed on his back after his roundhouse kick, but he sprang to his feet, pulling a Kalashnikov up with him from the snow as he stood.
He seemed to look up, back at the activity near the house, and then he turned away, slinging the rifle on his back and heading out through the gates.
Babbitt, Parks, and the others in the Townsend signal room watched the glowing silhouette cross a road and enter the forest; his signature was intermittent now as he passed under the trees, but within seconds it was clear that he was moving faster.
Much faster.
The UAV tightened up on the movement; arms and legs pumping from the body were evident at this magnification.
“He’s running.”
Lee Babbitt walked forward to the front of the room and stood in front of the plasma screen facing his surveillance personnel. “And just like that, ladies and gentlemen, he is clear of his target. Sidorenko is dead; we won’t need to wait to hear that from official sources.”
There were claps of amazement in the room. This team had been tracking Gentry for months with no joy, and now they had a fix on his position.
Court had lost his night vision monocle during his jump in the atrium, and there was little illumination here under the snow-covered larch branches to guide him, but the low light and dense canopy was more help than hindrance.
While still in the building he’d pulled the top article of clothing from his backpack, a thin camouflaged pullover. He’d ripped off his ski mask and donned the green and black garment, and out here in the dark he looked much like everyone else running around in the snow. He made it past the guard shack and out through the front gate just as the frantic men came outside, looking desperately for the assassin.
At that point the men with radios shouted and screamed into them, and the men without radios shouted and screamed even louder, and the hunt for the killer in their midst turned into a shambles and young men full on testosterone, booze, and coke ran all over the property pointing guns at one another in the dark.
The chase did lead out past the walls, finally, but most of the goons headed out to the south, following the noise and lights from the fireworks there, and several men opened fire on parked trucks, the silhouette of a garbage can, and even a patrol of two men in the forest that had become separated from the rest of the group. By then Court had taken out the three guards at the north gate and entered the forest. Once under cover of the trees he reached under his camo pullover, pulled out a white nylon hooded windbreaker, and zipped that over his other layers.
After this he knew his only job was to move and to keep moving. He wanted to put space between himself and the dacha, and he needed the heat generated by the activity to keep him alive.
Sid’s skinheads had dogs, but they were untrained, and Court wore a silver-lined base layer that shielded 90 percent of his body’s natural odors, cloaking him to a scent tracker. He pulled a freezer bag from his backpack and out of it he took six hunks of raw, putrefying bear meat, and as he ran he flung the steaks in all directions. The dogs would focus on the meat, not for long, but hopefully it would screw with their hunt long enough to get him some distance off the X, and render what little bit of his smell did emanate from him faint and untraceable.