Women screamed, and men began shouting from what seemed like all over the building. Chaos reigned during the next ten or fifteen seconds, as panicked customers stumbled into the corridor, hopping clumsily into their pants as they made for the exit.
“Grab the Uzi!” Gil ducked clear of the doorway as both Russians from the front of the house came barreling up the hall, slugging the customers aside with their pistols in their haste to reach the kitchen.
Gil shot one dead the second he appeared, and the other pulled back, throwing himself into one of the bedrooms.
Dragunov made sure the Uzi pistol was ready to fire, and stole a look through the blue-beaded curtain. “There are more men in back.”
“Any idea how many?”
“Enough that I should shoot you and offer them your fucking head,” Dragunov growled in his gravelly voice.
Gil changed out the partial magazine for a full one. “Think it would do any good?”
“It’s worth a fucking try!”
Gil stole a look down the corridor leading to the exit. The woman with long black hair stared back at him from two doors down. “Come here!” he said, beckoning with his hand.
She stole a glance toward the exit and came scurrying into the kitchen. He grabbed her arm and swung her around him into the corner. “Where do they keep your passports?”
“A safe in the office.” Her Russian accent was strong, but she was easily understood.
“What fucking passports?” Dragunov snarled from across the room. “What are you talking about?”
“Extraction! You think I’d let him beat that girl if I wasn’t getting her out of here?”
“That’s not our mission!”
Gil chuckled. “Yeah, well mission parameters change, Ivan.” He looked at the woman. “What’s your name?”
“Katarina.”
“Who can open the safe besides that asshole over there?”
She glanced at Vlad’s body. “His brother Lucian. The bald one out front with the big belly.”
“Hear that, Ivan? Don’t shoot the fat bald fucker. You clear the back while I clear us a way out.”
Dragunov didn’t like the idea of splitting up, but they were fighting a battle on two fronts. He slid one of the dead men’s pistols across the kitchen floor to Gil. “Don’t get killed, you fool.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
Gil wrapped around the corner with a pistol in each hand, stalking boldly into the first bedroom, where the Russian had taken cover. He caught him completely unprepared and shot him twice in the head. A teenage girl cowered on the bed in the corner, and he waved her into the corridor, signaling for her to gather the others from their rooms and take them to the kitchen. There was a burst of fire from Dragunov’s Uzi down the back hall, and she grabbed onto Gil, but he pushed her away, hazing her toward the kitchen.
“Katarina, call them to the kitchen!”
Katarina poked her head around, calling the others out of hiding, and five more girls emerged from their rooms.
“Lucian!” Gil shouted through the red-beaded curtain.
Someone answered in Russian from around the corner to the right.
“Dumb fuck,” Gil thought to himself, now knowing his target’s location and that the hall entrance was bracketed to the left and right.
There was a wild exchange of gunfire in the back of the building, Dragunov’s Uzi followed by a few lengthy blasts from an AK-47. Seconds later, men were screaming in hand-to-hand combat. Gil jammed one pistol down his belt and stepped to the right side of the hall, peering through the beaded curtain to his left, visually cutting the lobby into sections as if it were a pie, each minute step forward revealing another thin slice of the room. He glimpsed a man’s shoulder and fired through the beads.
The Russian twisted into the wound, grabbing it with his right hand, and Gil shot him in the spine between the shoulder blades. The women in the foyer cried out, and he shifted to the left side of the hall, cutting the pie to the right in search of Lucian.
A fusillade of shots rang out, and several severed strands of beads showered to the floor. Gil summersaulted through the curtain over his right shoulder, twisting to his left and shooting Lucian three times in the brachial nerve bundle of his shoulder, instantly paralyzing his gun arm and knocking him over backward.
The women in the room jumped to their feet and fled through the curtain to the kitchen. Gil checked Lucian for additional weapons and hauled him to his feet. “Game over, fuck stick!”
Dragunov appeared through the curtain with dark red blood covering his face from the nose down. “All clear in the back.”
Gil saw the blood. “How bad are you?”
Dragunov swiped at his face, spitting blood and viscera onto the floor. “It’s not mine. I had to bite the big bastard’s throat.”
A minute later, they were in the back office with Lucian on his knees in front of the safe.
“Open it!” Dragunov thumped him in the head with the muzzle of his M9.
“Fuck you!” Lucian sneered in Russian.
Gil looked at Dragunov. “We don’t have all night here.”
“Tie his hands,” Dragunov said. “I’ll be back.”
Gil kicked Lucian onto his face and ripped the phone cord from the wall, using it to bind the Russian’s hands as tightly as he could. The man groaned in pain.
Gil then rolled him onto his back as Dragunov returned with four women in their midtwenties. “What’s goin’ on?”
“They’ll make the man talk.”
That’s when Gil realized each of the women held a serrated steak knife from the kitchen. They swarmed over Lucian, ripping and sawing through his clothes. He tried to reason with them in panic, but they swore at him and spit in his face. One of them grabbed his ear and began to saw it off. He screamed, and they slashed at his exposed groin. He kicked at them, but one of the girls jumped on his legs to hold him down, and he howled like a man put to the rack.
Dragunov allowed the mutilation to continue for a few seconds before calling them off. Then he stood glowering over the hyperventilating Russian. “Are you going to open the box or let them feed you your balls?”
“I’ll open it!” Lucian gasped, an ear and part of his nose already carved off, his genitalia slashed and bleeding. “Let me up!”
Gil cut his hands free, and Lucian flexed his fingers, quickly working the combination, his clothes half torn from his body.
“He’ll have a gun in there,” Gil warned.
Dragunov gave him a wink. “Probably the reason he’s agreed to open it.”
The second Lucian turned the handle, Dragunov shot him in the back of the head and kicked the body aside. Inside the safe was a Tokarev pistol, along with multiple bundles of Turkish lira and a stack of eighteen red passports bound with a thick rubber band.
Gil stuffed the passports into his pocket, and the women began to protest immediately. He saw Katarina standing in the doorway. “Kat, explain to them I don’t want them losing their passports before we get to the airport. There’s gonna be a lot of confusion between here and there.”
Katarina told the others what he’d said, and that seemed to settle them for the moment.
“Get them dressed and ready to go,” Dragunov said to Katarina solemnly in Russian. Then he looked at Gil. “You’re going to make a lot of trouble for the Kremlin with this.”
Gil knelt in front of the safe, stacking the bundles of cash on top of it. “Not if you guys know a damn thing about PR.”
“Putin is not exactly a PR specialist.”
“Fuck Putin,” Gil said, getting to his feet. “I don’t work for his ass.”
“I do.”
“Then I’ll take them back to Moscow by myself, and you can blame it all on me — however you want it. But I’m blown here, so I gotta get the fuck out of Turkey before word of this gets around.”