She turned slightly, feeling the bamboo slats creak beneath her. Her face was just inches from his. “You are in love enough that you have me here, alone, and do not even make a flirtation.”
Quinn chuckled. “Our bed isn’t strong enough for that sort of thing. Anyway, ‘making flirtations’ is more Bo’s department.”
“I’m sorry about him,” Aleksandra offered, snuggling closer, drawing on the comfort of muscle and strength of bone.
“He’s too tough to die,” Quinn said, a catch of worry in his voice. “If he was here, I’m sure he’d be flirting, bullet wound or not.”
“You are a b’elaya vorona, Jericho Quinn,” she whispered.
“What’s that?”
“A white crow,” she said. “In Russian it would be like your black sheep — one who stands apart from the rest. Some say a white crow is bad, but I believe it is a good thing to stand apart.”
For a short moment Aleksandra allowed herself to be comfortable. The shriek of a monkey somewhere deep in the blackness of the jungle reminded her that comfort was a fleeting thing. Baba Yaga, the Bone Mother, was out there, nearby. She could feel it in her teeth. And they shared a secret she could no longer hold inside.
“I should have told you this before,” she said before Quinn had a chance to doze. “Please understand, I could be executed for divulging such information.”
“Okay…” Quinn’s voice was muffled against his arm.
“Do you remember the second North Korean nuclear test in 2009?”
“Of course,” he said.
Aleksandra took a deep breath, and then plowed ahead. If she could not trust this man, she could trust no one.
“The arming unit on that device was an older Soviet model. Thought to be much the same as the one used on Baba Yaga.” She raised her head, her face close enough to smell the sweet odor of cunape on his breath. “The North Korean detonation wasn’t a test at all. It was an accident.”
“You’re saying the bomb detonated on its own?” Quinn was now wide awake.
“Not quite,” she said. “The Korean bomb was indeed armed, as part of a testing procedure, but there was no delay with this particular detonation. We believe the Bone Mother will malfunction the same way. There will be no final countdown, no last-second clipping of the red wire to save the world. The moment the arming sequence is entered into the Permissive Access Lock, the Baba Yaga will detonate with immediate effect… ”
DETONATION
A zest for living must include a willingness to die.
CHAPTER 65
Quinn lay flat on his belly in the shadowy haze of a jungle morning. He ignored a beetle half the size of his hand that scuttled through the dead leaves in front of him. They’d risen well before dawn, braving possible booby traps and venomous creatures, knowing Borregos would want a pickup as close to daybreak as possible. Clouds of steamy fog hung here and there among the various layers of canopy. Two troops of monkeys, apparently angry at the intruding airplane, screamed from opposite ends of a grass runway. Night birds gave their last few shrieks before sunup. Egrets and other early birds squawked and flitted in the branches.
Aleksandra lay beside him, green eyes burning a hole in the foliage. Dense cover had allowed them to get within a few meters of a wooden supply shack off the side of the dirt runway hacked out of the jungle.
His initial assessment of eight men looked correct. Borregos stood at the aft of a Cessna Caravan supervising two younger men as they struggled to get a long green footlocker into the swinging cargo door. An older man, bald and much thinner than the drug lord, stood at the tail of the plane.
“The Bone Mother,” Aleksandra whispered. “We cannot let them leave.”
“I don’t intend to,” Quinn said, eyes darting around the narrow clearing.
The professor’s face was visible leaning against a forward window in the aircraft. Apart from the four at the aircraft, four more of Borregos’s men stood guard, each taking a corner and facing outbound into the jungle. The one nearest Quinn was less than thirty meters away, to his right. A Kalashnikov clutched in his hand, he looked capable enough, peering into the wall of foliage in front of him. He wore sunglasses, so it was difficult to see which way he was looking. On his belt was a Glock pistol with a set of extra magazines, much like a police officer would wear on duty. A rectangular pouch on his left hip, opposite his pistol, held extra magazines for the rifle. The long sleeves of his camouflage uniform blouse were rolled neatly over muscled forearms.
Quinn took a quick moment to study the other three. All were similarly armed; two looked much younger and one had a full beard with black hair that stuck out from under a green Castro-style cap. None were as squared-away as the professional soldier to Quinn’s right. This one was the type to clean his weapon every night and practice weekly because he enjoyed the smell of gunfire.
Quinn didn’t want a man like this shooting at him while he worked and the only way to see that didn’t happen was to take him out at the beginning.
He cocked his head toward Aleksandra, keeping his eye on the soldier. “Five rounds against a squad of eight well-armed men,” he said. “I’ll need two for what I have in mind. You take the other three along with this.” He gingerly slid the grenade from the booby trap out of the length of bamboo, keeping his hand around the compressed spoon. “We need to get this under the plane. I’ll get into place and cover you. You count to sixty and start shoot—”
The Caravan’s single Pratt & Whitney engine began to whine to life, the prop slowly catching up to the spinning turbine until whirred contentedly.
“Better make that twenty,” Quinn said, already scuttling backwards.
Her mouth hung open. “You only have two bullets.”
“And I hope that’s one more than I need.”
Quinn moved quickly through the brush, thankful now for the rising whine of the aircraft engine. The three other guards looked back and forth at each other in the orange light, eager to give up their posts and make a run for the plane. But the professional soldier stood fast, manning his station until properly relieved.
In order for this to work Quinn needed the soldier DRT — dead right there. He’d seen too many fighters on both sides of a battle absorb a great deal of lead only to keep fighting long past the time they should go down. He needed a target that would ensure that didn’t happen.
The moment Aleksandra fired her first shot Quinn rose up from the vines and bushes, approaching from the side, moving obliquely. The soldier spun toward the racket, bringing his rifle to bear and firing as Quinn moved up behind him less than five yards away.
Intent on firing his weapon at the threat to the aircraft, the soldier never heard the real danger padding up behind him. Ten feet out, Quinn let the front sight of his pistol float over a spot at the base of the man’s skull. He squeezed the trigger twice, using both rounds.
Borregos’s soldier fell in the peculiar corkscrew motion of someone shot in the brainstem, one leg folding before the other did. Quinn dropped the empty 1911 and was on him before he hit the ground. He scooped up the rifle and let the soldier fall away, leaving himself clear to engage the other guards. He was relieved to see one of Aleksandra’s shots drop the guard with the beard and Fidel Castro hat.
A man on the plane leaned out to pull up the boarding door. Quinn sent him tumbling onto the ground with two quick rounds to the chest. Incoming fire from one of the other sentries sent Quinn diving for cover as the pilot spun the Caravan and threw on the power, causing it to gain speed quickly since it was five people lighter than expected.