Dead Eye (43 page)

Again Babbitt nodded nervously. “We will do just that.”

Whitlock backed through a grove of bushes, into a neighboring backyard.

Leland Babbitt dropped to his knees in the deep snow, his suit pants doing nothing to protect his legs from the bitter cold.

FIFTY-FIVE

Five minutes after Whitlock left Babbitt in the snow, the Townsend men left the safe house in a three-vehicle convoy. An Audi led the way with two Jumper men. Behind it was the black Mercedes E-Class, with Beaumont in the front passenger seat and Jumper Two behind the wheel, along with Parks and Babbitt in the back. And a Ford Galaxy minivan brought up the rear with two more Jumper operatives. All vehicles were in radio contact with one another.

Beaumont had a map in his lap, and he directed the lead car to a lot near a traffic circle a few blocks east of the safe house on Rue Kelle. He addressed Babbitt while looking over the map. “We know Whitlock took a sniper rifle from the cache, so we need to patrol high ground near the Dieweg Cemetery. Someplace out of range of the Israelis protecting Kalb, but still in range for the rifle. Gentry will have figured that out already, so that’s where we’ll find him. Dagger will meet us there and we’ll split up and begin the hunt.”

Beaumont conferred with Babbitt for another minute, and they found a location on the map on the other side of a small valley from the cemetery. He radioed the lead car and directed him to the location.

“ETA ten minutes,” Jumper Four said from the passenger seat of the lead vehicle.

Once they had a destination, the eight men in the three vehicles rode in silence. As the motorcade passed the Eglise St. Piere, the front car slowed to make a ninety-degree left turn on a small one-lane street, Petite Rue du Eglise. This brought its speed down to nearly a complete stop, but as soon as it turned the driver began accelerating.

The front passenger of the Audi noticed him first. A lone man running up the narrow street in his direction, just a few car lengths ahead. For an instant he thought the man was just an afternoon jogger, but he was head to toe in black, and wearing a ski mask, and he wasn’t jogging; he was sprinting. There was nothing leisurely about his mannerisms.

The driver leaned forward to the windshield. “What the—”

The masked runner reached behind his back now and brought out a short-barreled sawed-off shotgun. Before either Townsend man in the Audi car could speak, the runner leveled the shotgun and it boomed on the narrow street, the windshield of the Audi exploded, and the driver’s head disappeared in an explosion of red.

The man next to him was coated from the waist up in blood and tissue, and he screamed as the masked man continued sprinting right at him. The masked man leapt onto the hood of the moving Audi, slamming his foot onto the roof with his next sprinted step, making a sound like a gunshot inside the vehicle’s interior.

None of the four men in the Mercedes had seen the shooter in front of the Audi, but they certainly heard the shotgun blast. Beaumont began drawing his handgun almost immediately, but the strange sight ahead slowed him. A masked man appeared above the lead car, leaping up and off the roof, windmilling his arms and legs for height and distance. He rose ten feet above the street; Beaumont saw the sawed-off twelve-gauge in his right hand as he seemed to hang there in midair, kicking and swinging his arms.

The driver of the Mercedes stomped on his brakes and frantically reached for the gearshift lever on the console next to him.

The attacker dropped through the cold air, toward the hood of the big black luxury car.

In the backseat Babbitt shouted, “It’s him!”

Court crashed onto the roof of the Mercedes and then hit the windshield, directly in front of the driver. He flipped himself up to his knees and leveled the short-barreled Remington, and then the car lurched into reverse.

Court flew onto his back with the momentum of the Mercedes but as he did so he fired through the windshield at a distance of three feet, beheading the driver of this vehicle as he had the one in the lead car.

He tumbled off the front of the hood and onto the icy street below, losing his grip on the shotgun as he fell.

Jumper Five sat behind the wheel of the Ford Galaxy minivan. He slammed on the brakes when the Mercedes lurched back in his direction.

After the second shotgun blast he could no longer see the man on the hood of the vehicle in front of him. The Mercedes kept rolling back to him, and he presumed the driver was dead and the car was unable to evacuate the area.

“Bail out!” he ordered, and he opened his car door, leapt out onto the ice, and drew his SIG pistol. He began running laterally across the tiny street, trying to find cover for himself in a shallow doorway in the middle of a long brick wall.

As he moved he scanned the snow-covered street near the Mercedes, his gun at eye level.

The black figure rolled out into the street, just in front of the rearward-moving Mercedes, his arms outstretched over his head and a pistol held in a combat grip.

Jumper Five tried to get his gun down and aimed in on the threat, but Gentry fired his pistol twice, striking the Townsend man twenty-five feet from him twice in his Kevlar vest. He fell to the ground but made it into the doorway. As soon as he tucked himself behind the cover he checked his vest and saw that he was not wounded, then he waited to hear Gentry engage other targets before exposing himself again.

Court scanned the street in front of him while lying on his chest on the icy cobblestones, but when he did not immediately see more Townsend men in his line of fire, he took one hand off his firing grip and reached down to a pouch on his chest. He yanked out a fragmentation grenade, pulled the pin, and then side-armed the baseball-sized explosive under the Mercedes. It skidded out the other side and slid up the street, stopping under the parked Ford Galaxy.

Court did not wait for the explosion; he scrambled on the ice, crawling, slipping and sliding in the other direction, back toward the Audi, which was still rolling down the street, with a dead man behind the wheel.

Boom!

The grenade detonated under the Galaxy, erupting the gas tank and turning the vehicle into a massive fireball. The passenger of the van had sought shelter behind it, ducking behind the right front fender.

He was killed instantly in the explosion.

Beaumont thought he’d been shot at first, but he quickly realized it was Jumper Two’s blood that had covered the entire front seat of the Mercedes, filling his eyes and temporarily blinding him. His second-in-command was slumped next to him, behind the wheel, unrecognizable as a human being with the loss of his face and the top of his skull.

Beaumont wiped blood from his eyes with the arm of his coat as gunfire cracked in the street just outside his vehicle. Behind him, both Babbitt and Parks screamed in terror.

Twenty feet behind them, the Ford Galaxy exploded in a fireball.

Beaumont bailed out of his passenger-side door and fell into the street, crawling away from the Mercedes as it rolled backward slowly toward the burning wreckage. He ended up in the snow on the sidewalk; here he drew his pistol and began whipping it around looking for a target.

Twenty yards in front of him the Audi came to a stop in the entryway of a narrow apartment building. Jumper Eight was still alive, only now climbing out of the wreckage with his pistol in his hand but down to his side as he staggered in a daze.

Beaumont spun around quickly, looking up the street in the other direction. Just ten yards from him, the Galaxy was engulfed in rolling black smoke in the middle of the narrow street. A burning body lay next to the open passenger-side door.

But where was the fucking Gray Man?

Beaumont rose from the snow into a crouch, used the back of his left arm again to wipe blood from his eyes, then spun toward movement to his left. Babbitt opened the door to the back of the Mercedes and fell out. Crawling on his hands and knees onto the sidewalk, he rose and crab-walked over to Beaumont, keeping his head low. Jeff Parks crawled out just behind him, his silver automatic pistol waving in the air as he stumbled out of the car.

Gunfire on Beaumont’s right turned his attention in that direction. Jumper Eight fired at someone on the far side of the Mercedes; Beaumont could not see what he was shooting at, but he kept his head down and moved toward the rear of the vehicle to approach from the opposite direction. Return gunfire snapped, round after round in rapid-fire succession, and Beaumont saw his subordinate spasm as a bloom of red blossomed from his coat, and then he flew back onto the trunk of the Audi as he was hit again in the lower torso.

Beaumont stayed low, knowing now Gentry was on the opposite side of the Mercedes, either flat in the street or, like himself, down in a crouch. Babbitt and Parks passed on Beaumont’s left, but he ignored them, focusing all his attention on moving quickly around the car to get in behind his target.

Court dropped the man up by the Audi with five rounds from the Glock 19, then turned back to the minivan just as the man who’d found cover in the doorway spun out into the street and fired at him. The round slammed into Gentry’s Kevlar vest, just below the collarbone, and it knocked him back onto his heels, but not all the way down to the ice.

Court returned fire, hitting the Townsend man in the pelvis and spinning him. He dropped his pistol and fell awkwardly on his knees and elbows. He reached out for his gun on the ice and Court shot him again, this time through the top of his head.

The Townsend man dropped face-first onto the cobblestones; blood poured into the street.

Now Gentry heard movement back in the opposite direction; he spun to it and aimed at two men in wool coats running away along the sidewalk. He fired a single round, shooting the second man in the back. The man toppled forward and a silver automatic pistol skittered on the ice; his body knocked the first man down as he landed on him. As Court put the first man in his sights he sensed new movement, close on his right, behind the black Mercedes. He whipped his pistol to this threat and saw a big bearded man aiming a handgun at him.

Court squeezed the trigger of his Glock and fired a single round. At the same instant his arm kicked up in the air and his pistol twirled out of his hand. It felt like he’d been hit in the forearm with a baseball bat. He saw blood splatter up into his face and felt himself spinning and then slipping and then falling down onto the street, and he knew he’d been shot even before he landed face-first on the icy cobblestones.

He lay there for a moment, shaking his head, trying to get back in the fight. He saw the road around him smeared with his own blood, steam pouring into the air. Along with it gray down feathers from where the bullet tore through his coat drifted about him like gentle snowfall.

Gentry’s arm was broken midway between his wrist and his elbow; it tingled and ached and burned and throbbed all at once. He pushed pain and shock from his mind, fighting to turn himself back around toward the threat, the big bearded shooter by the wrecked-out Mercedes. He saw his pistol on the cobblestones first; he dove for his gun with his left hand, but before he reached it he saw that the bearded man was down as well. He thrashed on his back, clutching his thigh, as arterial spray launched five feet into the air.

Court continued crawling toward his Glock pistol, his right arm hanging down and useless, and he looked back over his shoulder toward the man who was running away. It was Babbitt; he could see it now even at thirty yards. The director of Townsend neared the corner at the end of the street, but in his haste he slid on the ice there and fell down, then struggled to climb back up to his feet.

Court still didn’t have the pistol in hand yet. He turned from Babbitt, concentrated on it again, and reached out with his left hand.

But just as he put a fingertip on the Glock’s grip, new gunfire echoed on the narrow street.

Two policemen were in front of the Eglise St. Piere at the top of the street and they fired on him, their pistols cracking.

Court took his hand from the gun, turned, and rose to his feet. He began running down the street in the opposite direction of the cops, doing his best to use the burning Galaxy and the Mercedes for cover as he did so. He clutched his wounded arm as he ran.

The gunfire stopped; he heard shouts behind him as the cops yelled at him to stop, but he kept running. He turned the corner where he’d lost Babbitt and found no one there. He looked in all directions, then screamed in frustration at losing the head of Townsend. He ran to where he’d parked the van, climbed inside, and struggled to reach the keys on the right side of the steering column with his left hand.

In seconds he was moving, the van skidding on the hard-packed snow in the middle of the street as it raced off to the south.

Behind him seven men lay dead or wounded in the street.

Lee Babbitt had crashed through a small fence and hidden behind a child’s playhouse in the backyard of a private home. Here he lay huddled in the snow, his hands shaking too hard to pull his phone out to call for help.

FIFTY-SIX

Gentry drove through the afternoon traffic in southern Brussels, leaving the sound of sirens behind him. He knew that although the shootout he’d survived minutes before would be the most dramatic and shocking event to hit this city in years, it would not immediately be linked in any way to the secret visit by the Israeli prime minister in Uccle, more than ten miles away from the gun battle.

Kalb would arrive as Russ expected him to, which was good news for Court.

Court no longer gave a damn whether or not Ehud Kalb lived or died. He was operating out of simple vengeance, pursuing Whitlock not because he threatened a world leader and not because he threatened Gentry himself, but because he’d ended the life of a woman Court both liked and respected. A woman who was doing her best for what she believed.

Russ Whitlock was right—Court would seek revenge.

It occurred to him that he might be able to save the prime minister by driving his van directly to the cemetery and creating such havoc that the PM’s security would hustle their protectee away, but he knew the Israelis would just shoot him dead, and he’d have no way to be certain Kalb would not go ahead with his graveside visit after the fact.

And again, this wasn’t about Ehud Kalb.

This was about Ruth.

His arm throbbed and the blood ran freely down his hand. He had a trauma kit in his backpack in the backseat, but he did not take the time to deal with his injury yet.

At twelve forty he neared the neighborhood of Uccle, and he immediately saw the most obvious location for a sniper to hide himself. The steeple of the Eglise St. Job was commanding over the cemetery on the hill in the distance, and just a few hundred yards away from the cemetery. It was an obvious location for Whitlock to use.

But it was too obvious. The Israelis would have that covered, no question, and there was no question but that Whitlock would know this himself.

Way off to the east in the hazy afternoon, far beyond the steeple of the Eglise St. Job, Court saw a forested hillside covered in snow. It was the highest ground in the area, but it was also another five to seven hundred yards from the church, making it a good ten to twelve hundred yards to the cemetery.

Could Whitlock make the shot?

Court thought about it for only a moment.

I could do it. He could do it.

He parked the van at a pharmacy on Sint-Jobsesteenweg, climbed out, and fought the urge to rush inside for medical supplies. He had no time, and he couldn’t let anyone see him in this condition, because they would almost certainly call the cops.

He found a tiny one-lane road that led up the hill toward the woods and he began climbing quickly, clutching his wounded right arm with his left hand, stanching the flow of blood and preventing the broken bones from moving as he walked. The little road turned into a footpath, still rising up the hill, and the homes on either side gave way to forest. The fresh snow covered the trees and blanketed the ground.

Court passed a stack of loose branches of all sizes, piled there along the path after being cleared from the forest, and stopped, then pulled his trauma kit from his backpack. He searched a moment to find a reasonably straight branch about a half inch in diameter, and he cleaned off leaves and shoots with his free hand and teeth, then broke the stick in half. Next he struggled to take off his leather motorcycle jacket and unstrapped the Kevlar vest that had saved his life, revealing a white long-sleeved thermal undershirt beneath it. Even though the entire lower half of the right arm of the shirt was bloodred, he felt he would blend into the winterscape much better with the white top, although his pants and boots were black.

He dropped to his knees in the snow now, placed his broken arm on the ground, and put a piece of the stick on either side of it. For the first time he looked over the injury. It hurt like a bitch, but he was somewhat relieved to discover only one of the bones had snapped from the impact of the bullet. He fought through the pain, wrapped his arm and the two sticks tightly with a compression bandage from his trauma kit. He couldn’t avoid scooping up a healthy amount of bloody snow inside as well.

He cinched the splint tight enough to make him cry out in the quiet forest and tied it off. He stood back up with difficulty. Even in the frozen air, sweat dripped from his forehead. He left his backpack and his coat and his bulletproof vest and his blood there in the snow, and he started climbing deeper up the forested hill.

He had no weapon, only one good arm, and he knew the pain would slow him down. But he had to push on. He had no choice.

He had no time.

Russ Whitlock lay in his hide in the tiny greenhouse on the hill, his rifle in front of him. Though the week-old gunshot wound on his hip burned like fire after the action on Rue Kelle and the walk through the woods to his hide, he felt good, certain he would be able to achieve his objective today.

He checked his watch and saw that his target was due to arrive any moment.

After peering through the scope for a few seconds, he took a moment to relax himself, and to think of how things stood.

By killing the Ettinger woman, Russ knew Gentry would likely still take the fall for the Kalb hit because Babbitt would not reveal to the Israelis that one of his employees assassinated their prime minister. If the Townsend operators finished Gentry here in Brussels today, Russ felt confident he wouldn’t have to worry about the Mossad hunting him for the rest of his life.

CIA would issue a shoot-on-sight sanction against him, just as they had done to Gentry, and that sucked, but it almost felt inevitable to Russ that he would pick up the mantle for Gentry; Russ would be the new singleton on the run, the new freelance killer for hire.

The new Gray Man.

Russ marveled at the irony.
He
would be the Gray Man.

He shook the thought out of his mind, and refocused his attention on his mission. He clicked the windage knob on his Leupold scope to account for a five-mile-per-hour full-value southerly breeze at a range of seven tenths of a mile. He centered his reticule on the iron gate at the entrance to the Dieweg Cemetery in the distance, and then he shifted his aim to an Israeli security officer standing to the side.

He’d like to shoot the man right now. He had no quarrel with the Israeli, but Russ truly enjoyed killing at distance. Striking a man dead with complete impunity. That he had no reason to kill the man meant nothing to Whitlock. What that sentimental fool Court Gentry called collateral damage, Russ knew to be simply natural selection. The survival of the fittest. The culling of the herd of irrelevant people populating the earth.

Still, he fought the urge to shoot the security man through the forehead. He’d get his chance to kill in moments, and that shot would reward him with much more than the burst of pride he got when he ended a life.

It would reward him with twenty-five million dollars.

He whispered to himself, his words so soft they made no frozen vapor between his eye and his rifle scope.

“Come on, Kalb. Let’s dance.”

A small murder of crows flitted between the high branches of the bare trees around Gentry, their angry accusing calls piercing the air, adding even more ominousness to the low dappled light of the gray woods.

Court climbed on, off the path and through dense forest now, certain he was closing in on danger but uncertain what he would do when he found it. He thought of Ruth and told himself that if he stood for anything at all, he stood for someone who had sacrificed everything to stop a psychopathic killer.

Maybe Court was crazy himself. Maybe the CIA had determined him to be unfeeling and uncaring and remorseless. But what was this emotion in him now if not empathy and compassion?

He also felt the bitter anger, felt it compel him forward, but he would not let the bitter anger control him.

No, he would slow himself, use his training and his cunning.

He would not, however, use his right arm. His hand was swollen and barely functional, and the arm itself quivered and throbbed inside the broken-branch splint.

He came to a clearing, and from it he could see the cemetery on a distant hill to the west. He looked around, tried to determine where a sniper would position himself, and realized the best place would be in the woods on the far side of the clearing.

Court pushed himself back into the trees and moved to his left, finally following fresh footsteps that crossed in the clearing far back in the hilly pasture, fifty yards or more below the crest of the hill on the far side of the cemetery, and surely behind any sniper overwatch. From here he made his way over a waist-high barbed-wire fence and into the trees again.

The crows of the forest cried, their movement above him in the bare branches constant, as if they were shadowing his progression in the forest. An audience to the impending show.

He was close now, he had to be. Another thirty yards and he would be at the front edge of the forest, the perfect location for a sniper to secret himself, giving him both a clear view of his target on the far hillside and cover from the woodline.

He followed the footsteps past a little ditch on his left that wound away to the south, and then, also on his left, a frozen pond lay at the bottom of a steep drop-off.

He followed a narrow walking path on a hill over the pond; with the frozen ground and the six inches of fresh snowfall his footfalls were soft and quiet, but he knew he had to leave the path to close on his target. He moved as slowly as he could, only once looking at his watch and finding he had run out of time, but unwilling to rush forward now, so close to his destination.

He had gone only a few yards off the path when he placed his right foot down on a large felled tree hidden under the snowfall. It felt sturdy, so he stepped up on it, then reached his right foot out to find another solid step.

Below his foot he felt a tree branch that jutted from frozen mud, and he decided it was large enough to take his weight. He stepped down on it, swung his other leg over.

The branch cracked, the sound shockingly loud in the still forest.

Shit. The noise was enough to send the crows above flying from their branches.