“Spetsnaz!” he’d hissed, dropping to the deck and setting up the rifle’s bipod. By the time he was ready to fire a few seconds later, Dragunov’s men had stepped on their cigarettes and waded into the water. His first shot to Brody’s groin had not been accidental, wanting to inflict as much psychological damage to the enemy Spetsnaz team as possible. His second shot was to the throat of the man who had chosen to shout a warning rather than stay alive.
By the time the swimmers drew within fifty yards of the Palinouros, he believed he had killed two more but couldn’t be sure. It was possible they were swimming beneath the surface.
“Start the motor!” he ordered, getting to his feet. “We’ll finish them as they try to board the yacht.”
At this moment, they saw a Maltese P21, a seventy-foot inshore patrol boat, coming toward them from the southern rim of the bay. Its spotlight snapped on, and the charter craft was bathed in light. Kovalenko left the rifle on the deck, where it couldn’t be seen immediately.
“Ready yourselves,” he said to the other three. “If they attempt to board us, we kill them all.”
As the P21 approached off the starboard beam, Kovalenko and his men spaced themselves apart.
“Boris, switch on the riding lights. That’s why they’re approaching — because we’re dark. And put smiles on your faces!”
Boris went into the wheelhouse to switch on the riding lights, and Kovalenko waved at the crew of the P21, smiling and shielding his eyes from the spotlight with the opposite hand. He could see that the Browning .50 caliber machine gun on the foredeck was manned and trained directly on their vessel as they came alongside. “Boris, stay in the cabin until I call. Then kill the gunner on the foredeck.”
“Right!” Boris called from inside the wheelhouse.
The P21 had an eight-man crew. There were three men on the foredeck besides the .50 gunner, one on the quarterdeck behind the wheelhouse, two manning the portside rail, and one at the con. Five of them were armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, but only the man on the .50 caliber appeared ready to fire.
The P21 shifted into reverse, backwatering until the vessel came to a stop alongside. The only unarmed man on the foredeck, the officer, threw a line to Kovalenko, signaling that they intended to board.
Kovalenko waved, making like he was going to tie the line to one of the bow cleats. “Now, Boris.”
Boris sprang from the wheelhouse with an AK-47, firing a perfect six-round burst that struck the .50 gunner in the chest, knocking him backward and clean over the starboard rail into the water. He continued to fire until the magazine ran dry, killing the officer and both MP5 gunners on the foredeck before ducking back inside to reload.
The remaining three MP5 gunners opened up on the wheelhouse with blazing fire, killing Boris instantly but leaving Kovalenko’s other two men free to pull Glock pistols from behind their backs, picking off the gunners in quick succession along the portside rail.
Even as the MP5 gunners were dropping, Kovalenko was pulling the line to haul the P21 in close, jumping aboard and scrambling into the wheelhouse where the first mate was grabbing for the radio. He shot him in the back of the head with a 9 mm, and the bullet exited through the first mate’s face, hitting the radio and causing sparks to fly.
“Get aboard!” he shouted. “We have to run for Sicily.”
One of the two remaining Spetsnaz grabbed up the AWS sniper rifle, and the other took a moment to put a bullet into Boris’s head, making absolutely sure he could never be interrogated. Both of them leapt aboard the P21, and Kovalenko applied the throttle, motoring steadily away from the shattered fishing charter.
“Take their jackets and toss the bodies overboard,” he ordered. “Then man the machine gun. We have to look like Maltese navy.” The radio was destroyed, but that didn’t matter. Kovalenko’s English wasn’t good enough to convince anyone that he was from Malta, where all they spoke was English and Maltese. Their best hope was to make it to Sicily before anyone in the Maltese military could piece together what had happened and give pursuit.
He increased speed toward the Palinouros as one of his men came into the wheelhouse to hand him the AWS. “Take the con,” Kovalenko told him. “I’m going to kill as many aboard that pig yacht as I can on the way past.”
8
Gil continued to cover the rear as Dragunov led the hurried search of the Palinouros, finding no one alive. In one of the smaller state rooms, they came across a couple shot to death in the midst of lovemaking, a single 9 mm hole in each of their heads. Judging from the white uniforms on the floor beside the bed, Gil guessed there was no one aboard other than crew.
Making their way below decks to the crew quarters, they found a veritable slaughterhouse, eleven of the crew knifed in their sleep and two more bodies littering the passageway, one with a vicious wound under the jaw where a blade had been rammed upward into the brain stem. They found another pair of bodies sprawled in the engine room, blood pooled on the otherwise spotless white deck beneath their heads.
“They went through these people like shit through a goose,” Gil muttered.
They accounted for nineteen dead crew members by the time they arrived at the bridge, where they found two more bodies. The first mate’s throat was cut, and the captain, a man of about fifty, lay faceup on the deck with a single bullet through the forehead. Gil recognized him at once.
“This asshole’s ex-CIA.” He holstered the pistol and took a knee beside the body.
Dragunov stood over him. “How do you know?”
Gil rolled the dead man onto his belly to search his back pockets. “I worked a mission with him when he was attached to SOG.” There was no need to tell Dragunov what SOG was. Spetsnaz operators knew more about the Special Operations Group of the CIA than 98 percent of Americans. Nor did Gil see any need to mention that the dead man was also a former navy destroyer captain who’d been kicked out of the CIA three years earlier for malfeasance. He found an unusually long key in the bottom of the captain’s back pocket and tucked it into a zipper pouch on his wet suit.
“Hate to tell you this, partner, but I’m pretty sure shit’s about to get complicated. Covert elements of the CIA are working with covert elements of the GRU.”
Dragunov leveled his gaze. “The GRU is clean.”
“So’s my ass, Ivan.” Gil got to his feet and put his foot on the body. “This sorry motherfucker here was thrown out of the CIA for raping a fourteen-year-old girl in Thailand three years ago. He only escaped prison because the girl disappeared before she could testify. And now he’s here — on this boat — working for a Russian Spetsnaz team that turned back around and shot him in the head. Somebody’s tying up loose ends, and they’re not gonna—”
One of the windows shattered, and Terbish’s head blew apart, splattering gore all over Gil and Dragunov, who both hit the deck.
“You were saying about the GRU being clean?” Gil said, wiping the gore from his eyes.
Dragunov’s blood-spattered face split into a malicious grin. “Are you going to help me kill these sukiny dyeti — or run home like a little girl?”
Gil drew the Strike One, unscrewing the suppressor. “Oh, we’re definitely gonna kill ’em.” He got into a combat crouch, moving to the hatchway leading from the bridge to the gangway. He could see that the P21 was already out of pistol range, heading north at her top speed of twenty-six knots, almost double that of the Palinouros.