“I don’t like operating in the blind, Bob. I’m not an espionage guy. I need a well-defined target.”
“Suppose I can give you one.”
“What, a target?”
“The yacht that Yeshevsky took to Marseille is slowly making its way back to Athens. It’s called the Palinouros, currently anchored at Malta. It belongs to a Turkish banker with loose financial ties to Chechen terrorists, but the owner’s not aboard. He’s at his home in Istanbul.”
“So who’s aboard?” Gil asked.
“Good question. Maybe your Spetsnaz friends would be interested in helping us find that out. The GRU has resources in Rome they can bring to bear on a seaborne operation of this nature. And Dragunov has operated with the Black Sea Fleet.”
“Yeah,” Gil said dryly. “He mentioned that.”
“If you’re not interested, Gil, you can ditch the Russians and head for our embassy. I’ll make sure you’re brought home ASAP. It’s your call.”
Gil glanced over at the Spetsnaz men. One of them caught his gaze and grinned mischievously.
“You there?” Pope asked.
“I’m thinking, damn it.”
The grinning Russian came over, shaking an unfiltered Russian cigarette from a crinkled pack and offering it to Gil. “Brody,” he said pointing at himself.
“I’m Gil.”
“Vassili,” Brody said with a chuckle. He had pale blue eyes and a narrow face, the youngest of Dragunov’s men at twenty-five. Gil accepted the smoke, and Brody lit it for him from the end of his own cigarette. Gil took a deep drag, and the unrefined tobacco hit his central nervous system like a truck. Brody saw his eyes start to drift and laughed, clapping him on the arm, saying something over his shoulder that made the other four men laugh with him.
“Are you there, Gil?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, letting the dizziness pass. “Go ahead and upload the intel on the Palinouros to my phone. I’ll have a talk with Dragunov and see what he can put together. If his people are game, we’ll take the yacht and gather whatever intel there is. But after that, I’m done. I’m not chasing all over Eastern Europe so these yahoos can get me killed.”
5
Though Sasha Kovalenko was an ethnic Chechen, he too was a member of the Spetsnaz Spetsgruppa A, and he was no stranger to violent combat. His years as a sniper in the Chechen wars had left him with a frazzled nervous system and a supernatural ability to sense danger over long distance. It was this sixth sense that had allowed him to pull the trigger on Gil in the rail yard a split second before being shot himself.
When the French gendarmes had first appeared in the rail yard, he’d concluded that Agent Lerher must have betrayed their cause. This sent him into a rage, causing him to shoot down as many of the encroaching French as he dared before leaving for the agreed-upon rally point where he was to rendezvous with Yeshevsky. But owing to trouble avoiding the police en route to the apartment, he had not arrived until a full minute after Gil had cleared the scene.
The sight of his friend Yeshevsky’s body on the floor had enraged him further, but seeing Lerher’s body had given him pause to reconsider his assessment of a CIA double cross. There were too many possible scenarios to bother speculating, but one thing was for sure: he and his team needed to tie up loose ends and find a place to lie low until they could figure out what was going on.
“I’m taking three men with me to Malta,” Kovalenko said, coming out of the bathroom and tossing his cellular onto the hotel bed. “Use the French credit cards to buy the plane tickets. The ones we were given by the CIA may be compromised.”
“Why Malta?” asked his second-in-command, Eli Vitsin. “It’s an island. You could be trapped there.”
Kovalenko took him by the shoulder. He was a tall, muscular man with greenish eyes and black hair. Vitsin was a head shorter, dark complexioned with a thick mustache. “We can’t risk being backtracked. Someone told the French we were in that warehouse. There’s no way to guess how soon they were on to us, but if Yeshevsky was spotted in Athens or seen coming ashore in Marseille, the Palinouros could be their next target. We can’t allow the crew to be questioned — especially Miller, the CIA captain.”
“Moscow has sent Dragunov to track us down,” Vitsin warned. “He’s been seen at the embassy in Paris, and where he goes, his men are sure to follow. We need to get back home to our mountains, where it’s safe.”
“Don’t worry about Dragunov,” Kovalenko said, stepping into the kitchenette. “I can handle him. The trouble is the CIA. Whoever killed Yeshevsky also killed Lerher, and that could mean that Lerher’s people have been found out. If that’s happened, we’re entirely on our own, so we have to wait to see if they make contact before we can head home. In the meantime, I’m going to Malta.”
Kovalenko took a loaf of bread and some lunch meat from the refrigerator and stood in the kitchenette eating a sandwich while Vitsin sat at the computer scheduling the Malta flight for Kovalenko and three other Spetsnaz operators.
“You’re sure about this, Sasha?” Vitsin closed the laptop and pushed it aside. “Moscow may have submitted our photos to Interpol. You could be taken into custody at the airport.”
Kovalenko shook his head. “Moscow wants us for themselves. They can’t risk us telling what we know to anyone else. That’s why they’ve sent Dragunov: to make sure we don’t talk to anyone — ever.” He took a bottle of vodka from the freezer and unscrewed the lid, taking a drink and passing the bottle to Vitsin. “After we’ve taken care of the crew of the Palinouros, we’ll lay a trap for Dragunov somewhere; lure him in for the kill.”
“Bad idea.” Vitsin took a pull from the bottle and set it down on the table, shaking his head. “He’ll absolutely expect a trap.”
“Of course he will,” Kovalenko said, capping the bottle and putting it back in the freezer. “That’s why it’s going to work. He’s arrogant enough to think he can outsmart me.”
They stood in silence for a while, each lost in his own thoughts, until Vitsin said at last, “Who was the sniper on the railcar? He wasn’t French.”
Kovalenko looked at him, nodding pensively. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
6
The nation of Malta is an archipelago located roughly fifty miles south of Sicily in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea and is home to almost a half million people. Only the three largest islands are inhabited, the largest being the island of Malta, around which there are no less than nine sizeable bays providing safe harbor from the open seas, making Malta a highly popular maritime destination for both tourism and commercial shipping.
Anchored in the darkness, not far from St. Paul’s Island near the mouth of Xemxija Bay on the north coast of Malta, the Palinouros was a 223-foot Kismet yacht manufactured by the German company Lürssen in 2007. She featured six staterooms, both a formal and an informal dining salon, a Jacuzzi deck, a disco, a galley to rival the kitchens of most restaurants, separate crew quarters, a laundry service, various lounges, and a state-of-the-art navigational system. Fully crewed, she carried twenty-two hands, and her twin 1,957-horsepower Caterpillar diesel engines gave her a cruising range of 5,000 miles, boasting a top speed of 15 knots. Brand new, she had cost her Turkish owner well over $100 million.
Gil stood beside Dragunov on the rocky shore of the uninhabited island of St. Paul, studying the starboard beam of the vessel through a pair of Russian binoculars. The night was calm, and the Palinouros rested easily at anchor, having fallen off slightly to the north with the current. “The lights are on,” he muttered, “but nobody seems to be home.”