Sid operated in a state of rage and fear and obsessive compulsion. Sid knew that if he did not kill Gentry, then surely Gentry would kill him. Gentry realized this; he knew Sid would never stop throwing men and money at the task, so Court knew he could not keep running.
He had to attack into this threat.
To this end Court made contact with a competitor of Sidorenko, the leader of a Moscow-based Bratva, and the two men negotiated a contract price. The Muscovite mobster used his extensive organization to help Gentry with equipment and intelligence, and this, along with training Gentry underwent near Moscow, had all coalesced into this evening’s operation.
Court didn’t like partnering with the Muscovite and his shitty gang any more than he liked taking on Sidorenko and his shitty gang, but he knew he had no choice.
Court had to take out Sid, and in so doing reduce the incredible number of threats against him by a grand total of one.
It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Court flipped the NOD’s back up for a moment and made a slight course correction. He reached down and unfastened his seat belt, then grabbed the metal hook at the end of a bungee cord attached to the fiberglass cockpit of the vehicle. This he hooked into a hole drilled into the right side of the control bar. He pulled a slightly less taut cord on the left side of the cockpit, and this he hooked on the left side of the bar. A third bungee connected the center of the bar and the front of the cockpit.
He let go of the control bar, and the microlight continued to fly, steady in its descent, its fluttering wings held in place with the bungee cables. Each end of the control bar had a long cord tied around it and stored in a bag, and Court removed the cords and tossed one over each side of the cockpit.
Stowed under his knees on the floor of the cockpit was a small vinyl gym bag. He retrieved it, opened it up, and pulled out a banded string of fireworks, sixty in all. There were several different sizes, shapes, and functions. Glowing rockets; super loud, flashless boomers; and multistage aerial shells. Like Christmas lights, each of the fireworks was attached with a wick to a long fuse, and the fuse terminated in a small black metal box, inside which was housed a wireless igniter. Court quickly pulled the band from the collection, then let the fourteen-foot-long snake of small explosives drop over the side of the craft, whipping through the darkness to the forest below.
Quickly now Court unhooked a rope ladder attached to the left side of the aircraft, then gingerly turned, kicked his legs out and over, and found the first rung of the ladder with his foot.
The wings did not like the jarring movement; the craft banked left, then back to the right when Court leaned back over the cockpit to right the turn. Gentry worried he’d given up more altitude in the past few seconds than he had to lose, but the tailwind kept him steady enough, and he knew there was little he could do now but hope for the best.
With one last glance to check the stability of the control bar, he disappeared over the side, descending into the darkness over the treetops, sailing forward at just over twenty-five miles an hour. As he descended he reached out and found the control bar cords, giving him basic ability to steer the delta wing while under the cockpit.
Lee Babbitt watched the ten-foot plasma display while he barked instructions into his headset. “I want that UAV down closer. No thermal, no infrared. We need visual confirmation of the target. He isn’t Sid’s only enemy. If this turns out to be some other asshole who—”
Babbitt stopped talking as the black-hot figure moved off the side of the small vehicle but did not fall; instead he hung there, below the cockpit, and then he lowered into thin air.
Fourteen men and women gasped into their live mics.
This was clearly not some other asshole.
“Never mind,” Lee Babbitt said. “That’s Gentry.”
Babbitt felt the hair stand on the back of his neck. It had been a long wait, tens of thousands of man-hours of prep and hold, but there was money in the budget for the hunt, and there were incentive bonuses and cost-plus billing and hazard pay bumps that kept his employees on task and his drones in the air.
And a wide-open spigot of black fund dollars from the CIA made this all possible.
The ScanEagle’s sensor operator switched from the thermal camera to the night vision camera, and he zoomed in on the man below the cockpit, revealing a rope ladder some seventy-five feet long.
Gentry descended, hand over hand, quickly and adroitly climbing down the ladder.
“Who the hell is flying the microlight?” someone asked.
“No one,” said Parks. “He’s stabilized the wings, trimmed them to maintain a straight descent, probably by tying the control bar in position. He’s trusting that it will stay on its glide path till he lands.”
“Bet he’s going for the roof,” someone said into his mic. And then he added, softly, “Jee-sus, this guy is brazen.”
Lee Babbitt pulled off his headset and grabbed Parks by the arm, drawing him closer. With his eyes still on the screen, Babbitt spoke quickly, “Deploy the assets. Trestle to the target location. Alert Jumper Actual in Berlin and tell him to get his team on standby, ready to react to intel from the UAV. I want everyone on the move and prepared to tail Court off the X to his safe house, or wherever the hell he’s going, before the last shell casing hits the floor at Sid’s place.”
“Roger that.” Parks then asked, “What about the singleton?”
Babbitt turned away from the screen for the first time since entering the signal room. He blew out a long sigh. “He called it, didn’t he? Gentry is doing just exactly what the singleton said he’d do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Babbitt thought for a moment. With a quick nod he said, “Okay. Establish comms with Dead Eye. Have him drop his current op. I want him wheels up within the hour.”
Parks left his boss’s side and headed to a glass-enclosed office off the signal room’s main floor.
Babbitt stayed where he was; he watched the image of the man below the microlight again. Gentry was now less than eighty feet above the ground, just a few moments from crossing over the outer wall of Sid’s dacha.
Babbitt reached behind him and, without taking his eyes from the screen, pulled a rolling chair away from a desk.
He sat down. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing left for us to do but to sit back and observe a master at work. It’s not every day you get to watch the Gray Man kill in real time.”
THREE
Court hung halfway between the cockpit of the microlight, thirty-five feet above, and the bottom rung of the rope ladder, thirty-five feet below. A few weeks earlier, in a manner he tried to pass off as idle conversation, he’d asked his Russian glider instructor if someone could hang suspended from a microlight in flight, and the young man had looked at the American like he was insane. He explained that it could be done, in theory, if the wings were stabilized and the center of gravity of the suspended person was directly below the vehicle, but a craft the size Gentry was using could not handle the weight of two people and, needless to say, no one would be foolish enough to try such a stunt below the microlight with no one at the controls. Court laughed off his stupid question, nodded politely, and then went back to his room to fashion the hooks and straps to act as his copilot, and a rope ladder carriage that could pull from both sides of the cockpit equally.
Several times when flying alone over snow-covered fields south of Moscow, Gentry had sat in the microlight with his hands in his lap, the hooks and straps doing the flying. He’d also practiced power-off landings, piloting the craft back to earth without using the engine, usually placing his wheels within a few yards of his target touchdown point, although a few times he tumbled into the snow after coming down too fast and hitting too hard.