They put the final touches on their assault tactics as they marched through the snowstorm toward the dacha. Latest intel from Washington told them no one had left the complex and that Alex was still inside, but beyond that neither Jack Brooke nor anyone else knew what sort of danger she was in. They knew time was of the essence.
Now, Hawke moved forward through the snow and led the others closer to the enormous dacha complex, partially obscured by black Siberian pines and the swirling blizzard. They used the harsh conditions to their advantage and moved through the trees in the heavy snow to keep themselves out of sight.
Somewhere ahead of him was Agent Nightingale — the woman whose name he now knew was Alex Reeve, and she needed his help. Beyond that, he thought he might finally be nearing the truth that had evaded him since all this started — the truth about Scarlet Sloane never having been in MI5 — the truth about what Eden and Lea had kept from him.
He stared at the outline of the building in the snowy distance and was amazed by its size. He hadn’t expected anything quite like this. “When they said ‘holiday home’, I wasn’t exactly expecting all this — it’s like a sodding castle.”
“And who says crime doesn’t pay?” Lea said.
Phillips opened the fence up with a pair of collapsible bolt cutters and a moment later the six of them were inside the grounds of the dacha. In front of them was a narrow stream, which ran freely in the summer but was now frozen solid. They stepped on the ice and climbed up the far bank to find a small clearing. They were now no more than fifty yards from the west wing of the dacha.
“Look over there!” Lea said, pointing to their right. “Looks like they’re preparing to clear out.”
Hawke looked to where she was pointing and saw several men in thick black coats and ushanka hats readying a sleek silver helicopter for flight. It was parked on a landing pad beside a hangar a hundred yards or so from the main house, and a second chopper was parked behind it.
Hawke sighed. “Not the best news I’ve had today…”
“Maybe they got what they wanted from Nightingale,” Ryan said with a shudder. Ice was forming in his eyebrows.
“Let’s hope not,” Hawke said. “If they don’t need her any more there’s nothing to stop them killing her.”
Zimmerman raised his rifle and squinted through the sights.
“No!” Hawke said, pushing the barrel away and down toward the snow. “Are you crazy?”
“I could take them all out right now!” he replied.
“No, Zimmerman! He’s right,” Dempsey said. “You could take those guys out, sure, but then our cover’s blown and the Secretary’s daughter is dead. You want to be responsible for that?”
Zimmerman lowered the rifle but said nothing. Hawke knew the tension was running higher than usual on this mission. The failure to rescue hostages always made the news, and a bungled attempt to save the life of the American Defense Secretary’s daughter would make headline news on every network for weeks. It wasn’t the sort of publicity any of these Special Forces operatives would ever desire.
For Hawke, nothing mattered except saving Alex’s life. He couldn’t give a damn either way what the press said, but the thought of failing Alex at her moment of need — when she had saved his life back in that Balkans hellhole — just wasn’t worth contemplating.
They drew closer to the hangar and Hawke stood on a disused engine block to look through one of the windows. He pulled himself back to avoid being seen by an aviation mechanic who was whistling to himself and working casually inside the small building. Luckily, he hadn’t seen him, and Hawke took a second look. The interior of the hangar was brightly lit by strip-lights and mostly empty now that the helicopters had obviously been rolled out ready for Vetrov.
“We need to get to the house, fast,” Hawke said.
They moved toward the house and in line with their plan, they used grappling hooks to ascend to the roof where they moved low and cautiously until they found the atrium.
Hawke cleared some of the snow away and peered down through the thick glass.
“What the hell is this place?” he said, confused. “Looks like some kind of swimming pool.”
“I don’t think so,” Ryan said.
“What do you mean?”
“I might be mistaken, Joe, but I think that’s pretty much the last place you want to go swimming — look carefully over there by the artificial island.”
Hawke followed where Ryan was indicating with his gloved hand and saw to his horror what had to be at least a twenty-five foot-long crocodile submerged a few inches below the surface of the brown water.
“Bloody hell! It’s some kind of enclosure.”
Ryan nodded. “Unbelievable. Who the hell has a crocodile enclosure in their house?”
“I’m learning more about Maxim Vetrov with each passing minute,” Lea said. “And I don’t like it…and just what the hell is that?”
Hawke looked closer and saw a woman suspended over the enclosure.
“Could that be Nightingale?” Ryan said, squinting through the snow.
“Holy crap, that’s the asset,” Dempsey said, and began radioing information into a concealed headset.
Hawke gave him a look. “It’s not an asset, Dempsey, it’s a person, and she happens to be an old friend of mine.”
“Sorry…”
“Forget it,” Hawke said flatly. “Listen up, here’s the plan.”
Alex Reeve had spent an agonizing length of time being slowly winched down toward the crocodiles. As each link in the chain had clunked in the housing, inching her ever closer, she had felt sick as her death drew ever nearer. In that time, Vetrov had been busy preparing to move out — mocking her as he gave his men orders and loaded his gear into the helicopters. Now he was ready for the short chopper flight to Moscow where his private jet was fuelled and ready to go.
She watched Vetrov and Kosma move to the door for the final time as the chain hoist lowered her slowly toward the snapping crocodiles, but then she heard the sound of smashing glass and glanced up to see something fall from the atrium roof into the water. A second later there was an enormous underwater explosion which sent a colossal wave of spray into the air, followed by flying bloody chunks of what she could only presume were crocodile, blown apart by the force of the grenade.
Vetrov staggered backwards and stared upwards at the roof in horror, the smile officially wiped from his face. Another grenade came down into the water and a second explosion made an even more lethal impact inside the enclosure.
The Russian called out with his arms wide open in shock. “Anubis! Osiris! My darlings!”
The calm, controlled madness of the enclosure room had now turned to chaos as Vetrov began to scream orders at his men, starting with Kosma, who snatched up a closed-bolt Uzi pistol and began spraying nine mil parabellum bullets in a lethal arc across the glass-roofed atrium.
The other men followed suit and discharged their weapons in the direction of the atrium, spraying the glass with lead and shattering it into thousands of pieces. It fell through the air like crystal, followed by tons of the snow which had been accumulating on it since the start of the blizzard. The snow blew into the expansive room and added a further degree of confusion to the chaos.
“Kill them all!” Vetrov screamed hoarsely as his enraged eyes searched the destroyed enclosure for any signs of life.
Then the main doors blew off their hinges in a cloud of dust and splinters and a second later a man in a black Special Forces mask rushed into the room. He slung a shotgun over one shoulder and pulled a submachine gun off the other, firing in controlled, short bursts at the men in the room. His aim was lethally accurate, and he took out three of them with only six bullets in less than ten seconds.