The lead Townsend commando looked over his shoulder and reached back a hand, and a teammate placed a syringe in it. He popped the cap of the needle with his mouth, held it there between his lips, and reclamped his hand over the captain’s mouth, just as the man started to scream and thrash, the fear of what was about to happen engulfing him.
The black-clad commando jabbed the needle into the captain’s neck and pressed the plunger down, and the man in the bunk went still.
It was Versed, a powerful muscle relaxer. The captain would not die, but he would be out for hours. Though his memory of what had happened the previous evening would likely be fuzzy, the aim was not to wipe away the appearance of the commandos. It was to keep the captain from raising the alarm until long after Trestle piled into their Zodiacs and left the boat.
Five minutes later the Zodiacs reappeared alongside the Helsinki Polaris, and the six-man boarding party descended into the two boats via the climbing poles. When everyone was back on board the Zodiacs, both craft turned to the north, leaving the cargo ship to continue on to its destination in Mariehamn.
In Washington, D.C., the signal room had been watching the drone feed of the non-event on the main monitor, but it remained Trestle Actual’s duty to call Babbitt on the sat phone and fill him in once they were clear of their target.
Trestle had to all but shout over the Yamaha outboard motor that churned the water just feet behind him. “Negative contact. The target has been off the boat over an hour. Left on a white Bayliner with a canopy. Destination unknown.”
“Understood,” Babbitt replied. “Head back to Helsinki. We’ll check radar data and determine where he went, but it might take a few hours.”
“Helsinki it is. Trestle out.”
TEN
Snow had fallen overnight in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, but the morning sky was crisp and blue with only a few puffs of white. Monday road traffic was heavy; tires turned the streets to slush, and coughing exhaust pipes blackened the ice and snow on the roadside.
Thirty-four-year-old American Russell Whitlock sat on a park bench high on a hill, breathed vapor, ignored the stinging cold on his exposed cheeks, and sipped glogg, a spiced wine consumed in plentiful quantities in the Baltic during the winter.
He looked past the road below him and out to the sea beyond.
Russ had come to Tallinn not because he had been ordered here by his employer, Townsend Government Services, but rather because he’d made an educated guess. He’d arrived late the evening before; taken a cab from the train station to a three-star hotel on Toompea, the Cathedral Hill; thrown his luggage on his bed; and then immediately headed out into the light snowfall to scout a perfect location for his work the next morning.
It took him less than an hour to find this bench and then make it back to the warmth of his room, and he’d returned here at first light, equipped with food and a thermos full of glogg provided by the hotel restaurant. His spot was high on a hill along a thin band of park that ran with the northern portion of the medieval city wall that circled the Old Town and Cathedral Hill. Just behind him was the Oleviste Church and one of the city’s twenty conical-roofed wall towers, built in the 1400s when Tallinn was a wealthy Hanseatic League capital.
From this hilltop position he could see the length of the Port of Tallinn below him, and this was what made the location perfect for his needs.
His backpack sat next to him on the bench. In his lap lay a powerful pair of 20 × 80 Steiner binoculars. He also wore a Canon camera around his neck, just another tourist shooting pictures of the town and the ships in port below him from his high vantage point. He wore a black down coat that he’d purchased in Berlin the day before, and this kept him warm, though the sips of hot spiced wine certainly didn’t hurt in this regard.
A car ferry the size of a small shopping mall was in its berth by the terminal at the mouth of the port, and farther along to the east, dozens of smaller boats were docked. Most large cargo ships were moored offshore in the Bay of Tallinn, but more than a dozen midsized cargo ships were closer to land, their tenders occasionally offloading men and goods.
There was also a constant influx of even smaller watercraft, tiny fishing vessels returning with the morning’s catch.
He lifted his Steiner binoculars to his eyes and checked out to sea, monitoring the small vessels as they came in, and then he shifted them back to a spot a half mile below his position. At the mouth of the port near the massive Tallink Ferry terminal was a choke point that anyone who had disembarked from a vessel in the port would need to pass on the way into town, and this was the main focus of Whitlock’s attention. Most people leaving the docks did so in groups, clusters of three to ten men, heavily bundled in coats and hats to protect them from the cold sea air. They would then head to buses or cars and trucks in one of the parking lots in the area.
Russ ignored these groups; he was on the lookout for a loner.
Although he had not checked in with his masters at Townsend House in well over a day, he was reading the secure messages about the target and the status of the hunt for him that they sent to his mobile. From this data he knew the Helsinki Polaris had been a dry hole, and this had not surprised him in the least. Russ did not think for a moment that Court would sit on that boat and wait to get sold out by the Russian mob or tracked by boarding parties sent to conduct underway assaults on all ships in the Gulf of Finland near the Sidorenko hit.
Court was too smart for that, and Russell Whitlock gave him full credit for being so. Court would have arranged a third party to collect him from the boat, someone not aligned with the Russians and not aware of any part of Gentry’s mission in Rochino.
That was what Whitlock would have done, so, he decided, that was what Gentry would do.
Russ took a short break to finish his glogg and eat a few bites of an egg sandwich he’d made himself from the offerings at the breakfast buffet in the hotel, and then he brought the binos back to his eyes. He waited for the vapor in the air around his mouth to clear, and then he noticed a small white craft pulling up to a pier midway between the western and eastern sides of the port. He thought it possible he was looking at a twenty-foot Bayliner runabout, though there was no canvas top visible. He knew his target might have had the top removed during the journey to Tallinn, and almost immediately he saw a lone man stepping onto the dock without glancing back to the captain. He had with him only a single black backpack, and he slung this over his shoulder and trudged purposefully up the dock toward the exit of the port. Whitlock followed him for several yards with his twenty-power lenses, then checked the area quickly for other possibles before returning his attention to the only solo traveler in sight.
The individual left the port, walked past the taxis waiting for fares, passed the bus stop, and then turned to the southwest. He was moving in Whitlock’s general direction now, walking up a snow-covered sidewalk along a busy road leading toward Old Town Tallinn.
Whitlock continued tracking him through his binoculars. With the magnification of the Steiners the individual appeared to be only fifteen yards away from Whitlock’s position, but Russ still could not identify his target. The man wore the hood up on his black coat and a wool scarf over his nose and mouth, and this made a positive ID impossible, irrespective of the distance.
But Russ had a feeling. “That you, Court?” he asked aloud.
Russ put the rubber lens covers back on his binoculars, then slid them and his Canon camera into his backpack along with his thermos. He slung his pack over his back and began heading toward the entrance to the Old Town, more hopeful than confident that he had found his man.