“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just turn around and go back to the marina before you kill both of us!”
“I will, but bear with me a sec. Spend a lot of time in Chechnya, Yurin? Whupping Chechen ass?”
“Never been there.”
Stoke put the wheel hard over to port, and the boat fell off the steep climb and started skidding sideways down the wave. Then the wildly cavitating props caught water, dug in, and she was headed on a better diagonal course down into the trough. Stoke had just enough control for a second to pull the 9mm Glock from inside his foul-weather jacket. Yurin saw the gun, and it seemed to make his already perfect day even more complete.
“Yurin, listen up. Get out of your harness.”
They were in the trough for the moment. Stoke pulled the throttles back to idle and unsnapped his own seat harness. If you planted your feet wide, you could probably stay on them. At least long enough to do what he had to do.
“What?”
“You heard me. Get your ass down on the deck. On your knees, Red Rider. You’ve got three seconds before your brains won’t work so good anymore. One…two…
“Three,” Stoke said. He turned and fired a round about a foot in front of Yurin’s nose.
“Fuck!” Yurin unbuckled the fasteners and slid out of the harness, one hand still clenching the sissy bar, what the Navy called the “oh-shit bar.” They were still moving uneasily along the trough. The Magnum was rocking and rolling, and it wasn’t easy, but the Russian managed to kneel on the deck between the two seats without getting thrown out of the boat.
“Jacket off. Everything off, waist up.”
“Jesus. A fucking giant black homo with a death wish.”
“Now.”
Stoke tapped him gently on top of the head with the pistol butt. Yurin ripped at the zipper on his yellow slicker, somehow managing to get it off. The wind whipped it right out of the cockpit, and it disappeared aft in a cloud of spume.
“Now the shirt.”
He was wearing a black T-shirt, the same kind he had on the night of the party. Macho muscle-boy crap. People who had Ferraris didn’t wear Ferrari shirts. And people who had real muscle didn’t wear muscle shirts.
The shirt came off as Stoke carefully moved around behind him and jammed his left foot into the back of Yurin’s neck, shoving him forward, facedown on the deck, the man’s neck and shoulder muscles all thick cords and knots bulging as he tried to squirm away. Made the image Stoke had expected to see a moving picture, but yeah, there it was, all right. He saw just what he thought he’d see.
The Head of the Tiger.
34
The tiger’s head was tattooed right between Yurin’s shoulder blades. Stoke had to admit it was impressive, even though it was only about the size of a softball. But it was the work of an artist, beautifully etched into the skin. Below the scowling tiger’s face was the tattooed name Stoke had been thinking about ever since he’d first met Yurin and his black-shirted bully boys at the birthday blast.
OMON.
The Russian special forces, the so-called Black Berets. Death squads who had roamed Chechnya before and after the carpet bombing of Grozny, killing anything and everything in their path that remained alive. Elite forces during the war, paid killers after. He’d kept his mouth shut, hadn’t told Brock about his suspicions that night. He thought he’d pry around the edges a little and see what broke loose first. But he’d been doing his research.
Now that Putin’s second Chechen war was long over, OMON worked for the new dark forces of the interior ministry inside the Kremlin. They roamed Moscow in armored personnel carriers, wearing their trademark black and blue camo fatigues, doing odd jobs for the powers that be. When they got bored, or loaded, they picked up gutter drunks in Red Square, hauled them off to the tank at Lubyanka in the APCs, and beat the shit out of them. Or worse.
Stoke leaned down to speak directly into Yurin’s ear. He kept his foot planted on the guy’s neck, just to keep him from getting any frisky ideas. The kid had stopped squirming and bitching, but only because Stoke had put a little more weight on the back of his neck, compressing his vocal cords.
“What brings you bad boys all the way to Miami?” Stoke asked.
“Sunshine,” Yurin croaked as Stoke increased the pressure. And leaned down again to scream into his ear.
“You want to go home tonight, Yurin? Hit the vodka? Sleep in a nice warm bed? Or do you want to be just another accidental drowning in a storm? Too many beers, taking a piss off the stern, oopsy-daisy. A tragic mistake, officer, happens all the time. Your call.”
“What’s your fucking problem?”
Stoke’s immediate problem was that he felt the Magnum starting to roll over on her beam ends as the sea started piling up rapidly on the port side.
“Whoops, another big one coming. Hold on, Tiger.”
Stoke grabbed the back of his seat, struggling to stay upright with one foot braced against the Russian’s head and the other on the deck. They were in free fall again, speeding down the face of a huge wave, rudder amidships, but now no one was at the wheel. Stoke couldn’t let go of the seat to grab it for fear of being thrown from the cockpit. The boat’s motion was ridiculously violent and disorienting, but Stoke had seen worse. He’d once ridden out a mid-Pacific typhoon solo in a two-man Zodiac. Six days of that, this little blow was cake.
“Who do you work for, Yurin? I want a name!”
“Get the boat out of this c-crazy-shit ocean, and m-maybe I’ll tt-talk,” he sputtered, his nose and lips mashed against teak decks that were now awash, seawater sloshing in and out of his damn mouth, just the kind of modified water-boarding technique Stoke had been shooting for out here.
“Talk now, before we bury the bow again and wash both our asses into the drink. Who do you work for?”
“The Dark Rider.”
“The what?”
“Dark Rider. What he’s called. No one knows his real name.”
Stoke leaned forward and grabbed the spinning wheel. He held it hard over, keeping the nose from burying itself and instead starting up the next wall on a reasonable angle.
“You get orders from somebody. Who?”
“Directly from General Arkady Zukov. Retired now, from the KGB. A great Russian patriot. We are all patriots, working to restore Russian pride.”
“Shitty job so far, Yurin.”
“Piss off.”
“Rostov? Is Rostov the Dark Rider?”
“No. Not Rostov. Higher.”
“Higher than the president?”
“Maybe.”
“What was that? I can’t hear you.”
The boat was totally out of control.
“I said yes! Higher!”
“Here’s the big one, Yurin. Ready? What the fuck are Russian OMON troops doing here in America?”
No answer.
Stoke shifted his foot to the back of Yurin’s head, driving his face hard into the deck as they crested the thirty-footer. In a few seconds, they’d drop sickeningly down the other side.
“Tell me about OMON. Now!”
“Fuck. A mission. We’re here training for a mission.”
“What kind of mission you on, Yurin?”
“Hostage rescue.”
“Like you rescued those schoolchildren in Beslan?”
“Fuck you. Shoot me.”
Stoke mashed his nose hard into the deck and heard a howl of pain.
“Where you training?”
“Oh, shit! Out in the Everglades. An abandoned airstrip.”
“OMON is going to rescue hostages here in Miami? Is that it? Why doesn’t that make any sense to me, Yurin? Unless maybe you’re training to prevent a hostage rescue, know what I’m sayin’?”
Yurin was silent.
Stoke removed his foot from the back of the big Russian’s head, stepped over Yurin, and carefully slid back into the helm seat. He didn’t have it all, but it was a good start. It was enough to get Harry Brock’s attention. Harry was headed to Bermuda for a high level powwow with Hawke. Stoke had gotten what he’d come for, good hard intel. Russia was on everybody’s mind now, especially Alex Hawke’s.