He started back toward shore, the dog playfully following along at his heels.
Perfect, Gilea thought, peering at the beach through the double circles of her NVD goggles.
“How’s our friend doing?” a male voice said behind her.
“He’s apparently broken from his rapture and turned back to the dacha.” She lowered the binoculars, blinking away spots of green as normal darkness flooded around her. “Perhaps he’s sensed that the cold black sea waits for him tonight. Do you think, Adil?”
The tall, rawboned man grunted neutrally. Like Gilea and the others on the trawler, he wore a black spandex wet suit and swim fins, and had a diving mask pushed up over his forehead. There were depth gauges on all their wrists and waterproof weapon and equipment cases over their shoulders. Once they were underwater, the closed-circuit breathing apparatuses on their chests would recycle their own breaths, absorbing exhaled carbon dioxide, mixing the cleansed air with oxygen supplied by pressurized tanks.
“We’ve got the Subskimmers ready,” Adil said.
She looked at him. Nodded. In her pupils, the reflected light of the moon looked like slivers of broken glass.
“Then it’s time,” she said.
Light and quiet, the ATVs tooled across the strand, hopping rises and troughs with nimble ease, sound-baffled engines humming as they powered the vehicles forward. Specially designed for Sword by an UpLink subsidiary, they were equipped with fully automatic trannies, accommodated two-man driver-gunner teams, and had pintle-mounted VVRS weapons aft of the cockpit. There were blackout shields over their off-road lights. The riders wore black Nomex stealthsuits, shock vests, and protective goggles, with microfilament radio headsets under their impact helmets. Their faces were daubed with camo paint.
There were a dozen vehicles in total, Blackburn and Perry’s out front, the rest following behind in single file.
Gripping his handlebars with confidence, Blackburn peered anxiously through his goggles at a procession of low dunes, wishing Starinov’s cottage would come into view, wishing he’d had more than a few hours to organize this mission, wishing he’d known when and how the hit team intended to strike so he could have picked up a phone and given Starinov and his guards some warning. But he had been concerned that the cottage might be bugged, and that any attempt at contact might provoke Gilea Nastik to accelerate her plans. In the end, he’d had to balance one evil against another and resign himself to living with his choice — just as he’d done earlier that morning when striking a devil’s bargain with Vostov.
Now he jockeyed the ATV over a big wave-shaped dune, cresting it easily, sand whipping his cheeks, thoughts of their agreement clipping through his head. It had been a simple trade-off: The Russian mobster’s role in the bombing plot would be swept under the rug, and his cojones would remain intact, in exchange for complete disclosure and cooperation. He had spilled everything, not only about Times Square and the Bashkir setup, but also what he knew about tonight’s planned takeout of Starinov… which was plenty. He had provided Gilea with manpower, weapons, and transport in exchange for a million dollars American currency. The assault would have an aquatic element, and perhaps additional land-based support. And its aim was to be decisive and final — Starinov would die. No more Machiavellian games, no more subtleties, no more waiting for governments to grind and groan through their weighty processes.
A good man would die, and that would be the end of it, the coup de grace against democratic reform in Russia.
Unless he and his ad hoc counterstrike team, cobbled together from survivors of the ground station raid and a handful of reinforcements from Sword’s Prague headquarters, headed the bad guys off at the goddamned pass.
Blackburn goosed his ATV to full speed, issued a command to the riders behind him on his radio’s proprietary frequency, and heard their engines revving to keep pace.
He remembered resisting the temptation to make a cavalry charge the night the ground station was burned, and realized grimly that circumstances had forced him to do something very much of that nature this time around.
It went against instinct and training, went against his every fiber.
Because the worst fucking thing about cavalry charges was that they could turn into headlong suicides if the enemy happened to be waiting for you.
Their flotation bladders deflated, the air vented from their buoyancy boxes for underwater action, the Subskimmers glided beneath the chop like manta rays.
The sleek rubber submersibles had been easily transported aboard Gilea’s trawler and offloaded with coordinated precision. Each was powered by compact but muscular twin outboards and carried a trio of divers, shadows on the shadowcraft, toward the beach. Silent running and undetectable, they could travel seventy nautical miles on their electric motors. The divers themselves could have stayed under for over four hours without having to worry about the telltale bubbles produced by standard scuba tanks. If they went any farther down than forty-five feet, however, the greater water pressure would have caused the pure filtered oxygen produced by the apparatus to have a toxic effect on their systems. Neither time nor distance was a concern tonight; the shore was in short range, and their method of approach called for a rapid and shallow dive.
Within minutes of their deployment the skimmers resurfaced and gunned to top speed, streaking at better than eighty knots, moving like hot oil on Teflon. As they leaped from the surf, narrow wakes of foam kicking up in their slipstream, the divers rapidly abandoned the craft, extracted their rifles and nightscopes from their watertight cases, and began stealing inland on foot.
Several hundred yards downbeach, Vladimir Starinov’s cottage perched on its low, isolated bluff, its guards unaware of the approaching killers, its windows still throwing their fragile light into the darkness.
Lifting the teapot from the stove, Starinov moved to his table nook and poured boiling water into his cup.
Before sitting down, he took a dog biscuit from the box on his counter and called Ome through the kitchen archway, holding out the treat, hoping it might settle the animal. The dog glanced at him but didn’t budge. Moments earlier, he had padded out of the room and flattened onto his belly near the front entrance, whining and sniffing, his tail switching back and forth.
At first Starinov had thought the shrill whistling of the teapot was the cause of his pet’s skittishness, but now, despite repeated goading, Ome continued lying by the door, ignoring his master.
Starinov shrugged, dropped the spurned biscuit into a pocket of his robe, and blew on the tea to cool it off. Although the dog’s behavior was perhaps a little unusual, he didn’t think too much about it; Ome sometimes became agitated by the guards making their rounds, and this was probably the case tonight.
Well, fine, let the dog stay where he was, Starinov thought. The minister was feeling rested and relaxed after his walk on the beach, and wanted to savor that rare state of affairs.
The little nuisance was certain to be underfoot soon enough.
Outside the dacha, the guard in the Russian army uniform had thought he heard a sound at the foot of the bluff and had gone to investigate, aware it was most likely nothing — the wind rustling up sand or a twig, some sort of foraging rodent.
Now, glancing over toward his teammate at the far side of the cottage, he wondered if he ought to beckon him over, but then he saw the orange glow of a cigarette in his hand, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to leave him be.
He climbed down to the foot of the embankment, stopped, looking and listening. Moved a little farther out onto the beach and paused again. His brow furrowed. While he’d seen no sign of movement in the sand, he thought he heard a different noise now, a drone, like that of an approaching engine. No—many engines. Still a distance away, but getting nearer. It sounded like wasps to him. A whole nest of wasps. But what did it have to do with the whispery rustling he’d heard? And might it signal a threat to the minister?