The plan was perfect. Volkov never moved on a target with anything less.
Then Nicolai, who had been assigned to the south approach, had forgotten to take out the pit bulls that were known to guard that area. It was the first thing he was supposed to do after short-circuiting the electric fence and scaling the compound walclass="underline" find the sleeping dogs using his thermal night vision goggles, fix the silencer on his gun, and put two well-aimed bullets in the dogs’ heads.
Instead, Nicolai just inexplicably blundered on through, forgetting about the dogs entirely. The brutes woke up, making a bawling racket as they charged. Nicolai was able to kill the first from about five feet, but the second one managed to sink its teeth into Nicolai’s thigh. Nicolai beat the dog with the gun butt and finally shot it dead. But by that point, the dogs were no longer his biggest problem. He had not had time to put his silencer on, so if the baying dogs hadn’t alerted everyone to his presence, the gunshots surely had. Nicolai was still trying to pry the dead dog’s jaws open and get the thing’s teeth out of his thigh when a security guard put a double tap between Nicolai’s eyes.
From there, everything was just a mess. An alarm sounded. Floodlights positioned all around the main house instantly flashed on, illuminating the two hundred feet of lawn surrounding the house. Lights also came on inside the guard house and the main house. The guards sprang to life. They were surprisingly well coordinated, as if they had trained for this sort of thing and were merely implementing an oft-drilled exercise. They fanned out over the compound, immediately discovering two more of Volkov’s men, making their approaches from the southwest and southeast, respectively. A gun battle ensued. Yes, Volkov’s men got their shots in, killing one guard and wounding another. But they didn’t last long. Just like that, it was five against two. There was only Volkov, coming in from the northwest, and Viktor, approaching from due east.
Then they found Viktor. He also put up a fight, taking out two more security guards. But he was ultimately outflanked and ended up taking a bullet to the side of his head.
Volkov didn’t know any of this yet — or at least he didn’t know precisely. He had just heard a lot of gunfire and was aware his men were no longer responding on radio. This was more than enough to tell him his carefully constructed plan was now a pathetic shambles.
Any other man might have at least considered aborting the mission. Not Volkov. He just retreated and reassessed, scrambling up a chunky baobab tree that gave him a view of the entire compound. This was not yet a loss. Just a setback.
He surveyed the scene with his thermal goggles, using their telephoto function to zoom in and out until he located all four of his men’s bodies, confirming that he was now alone. He also found the three dead security guards and watched as the wounded one joined the healthy three in withdrawing back to the main house.
Volkov knew that for whatever training they had, they would still be terrified and uncertain. If he waited, they might think the attack had ended and then he’d be able to move on the house and pick them off. Four against one — rather, three and a half against one — was not particularly daunting to a man of Volkov’s ability.
That changed quickly when the South African Police Service arrived. They came in force, with five marked cars and three unmarked pulling through the front gate and parking in the broad, circular driveway adjacent to the main house. Volkov counted fourteen cops disembarking from those vehicles. Fourteen cops plus three remaining healthy security guards. Volkov could handle four-to-one. Seventeen-to-one was beyond even him.
Then more forces arrived. Crime scene techs. Other cops, whose purpose he could not immediately identify. Some uniformed. Others not. It was a small army against one man.
All the one man had was the element of surprise. They didn’t know he was out there. They would make the assumption that they had either killed all of the invaders, or that any other thugs had run off when the gun battle turned against them.
Sure enough, the cops soon began overtaking the grounds as if they owned the place and had nothing to fear. The bulk of them busied themselves by throwing up lights over the bodies of Volkov’s fallen teammates, then hustling and bustling around the corpses, taking photos and collecting shell casings.
But four of them, all uniformed officers, began combing the compound with flashlights, likely looking for other evidence. They spread out — ten acres was a lot of ground to cover — and made the terrible mistake of not working in pairs. Volkov noted their vulnerability, but hadn’t decided how to capitalize on it until a meat wagon from the local coroner’s office arrived. It was as he watched Nicolai getting carted away that he formulated his new plan.
Volkov waited until one of the officers, a young constable, was directly under his tree. He dropped on him from above. With two hundred twenty pounds landing on top of him at high velocity, the man immediately went down, letting out a muffled grunt as he fell. Not giving him a chance to make another sound, Volkov clamped one hand on the cop’s mouth then wrapped his arm around the constable’s neck. The young man — really, not much more than a boy — struggled briefly but was soon asphyxiated. He was no match for Volkov’s enormous strength.
Once he was sure the constable was dead, Volkov released his grip and began pulling off the man’s uniform and then putting it on himself, starting with the hat and working down. It was far from a perfect fit, but Volkov wasn’t attending a police fashion show. Mostly, he was relying on the fact that it was dark. He rolled the sleeves of the shirt and used his knife to do a quick, barbaric alteration on the length of the pants. He donned the man’s utility belt and his gun. He could feel the weight of the constable’s car keys in his front pocket and a wallet in his back one.
Volkov knew he had no time to get rid of the body properly. He improvised, leaning it up against the trunk of the tree on the opposite side of the house, where it would remain in shadows until morning. Good enough. He began walking through the trees toward the main house.
Now for the nervy part: the two hundred feet of open turf between the wooded parts of the property and the house. Pulling the dead cop’s hat low over his face, he passed by teams of crime scene techs and medical examiners, albeit with his face in shadow. They paid him no attention. Volkov entered through the front door without encountering any resistance.
Once inside, he was relieved to discover there was no police presence. The assailants, as far as the investigators knew, had not made it in or near the house. Volkov moved through the rooms with confidence, until he came across one of the security guards, sitting in a chair outside a closed door. Volkov could hear classical music coming from inside. He squared his body to the man.
“Can I help you, mate?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Volkov said. “Can you tell me what time it is?”
The moment the man looked toward his watch, Volkov reached down, grabbing the man’s chin and the back of his head simultaneously and giving them a violent, counterclockwise twist. For Volkov, it was like unscrewing the cap of a large tube of toothpaste. The man’s neck snapped easily. The crunching of vertebrae was the only sound it made. Volkov dragged the man off the chair, hauled him into a nearby closet, and left him there. Volkov was not absolutely certain the man was dead, but it didn’t matter: He was unconscious, and if he ever did awaken, it wasn’t as if he would be able to crawl out. Volkov would be long gone by then.