Operator - 01 (17 page)

When Sammie called he also gave me information on the two Russians. Michail Alekseev was the son of a minor communist party official who attended military school before joining the FSB, the post-soviet successor to the KGB. Alekseev was assigned to a unit called the Special Operations Service, a Spetznaz unit. He quit just over two years ago, more than a year after I parted ways with the Army. Alekseev had no known associations after leaving the FSB until he was sponsored for an H1-B visa by a New York corporation called the Hudson Valley Service Group, which owns the building I’m looking at. The pockmarked Russian, Victor Sherbatsky, on the other hand, has been linked to the Tambov Gang. This is a St. Petersburg-based gang that originated in the Tambov Oblast. The gang specializes in the drug trade, prostitution and protection. They also own a huge number of legitimate front businesses. They’re the most powerful criminal enterprise in St. Petersburg. Sammie was able to verify for me that the tattoo I’ve seen on Yuri’s neck as well as Alekseev’s is an identifying symbol of the Tambov gang.

I asked Sammie to get me blueprints for the building I’m watching, which he obtained from the commercial realtor. The brick warehouse is shaped like an “L.” The main section is two stories high but the smaller section that houses three administrative offices is just one story tall, built onto the side of a hill so that it shares a single roof with the main warehouse floor. The entire building is small by commercial standards: the main section is just 10,000 square feet. There are half a dozen cars in the parking lot and three panel vans. Three loading bays jut from the main warehouse and one of the vans is backed up to the middle one. The aluminum roof is slightly canted, looking more modern than the rest of the brick structure. There are skylights bored into the rooftop at regular intervals, undoubtedly installed to cut electricity consumption in the warehouse. The offices on the administrative level are accessible directly from a blue metal staircase in the back parking lot. Three windows look over the parking lot from the offices and a high-positioned narrow slit window stands above the parking area on the warehouse section, allowing additional indirect light onto the warehouse floor. The warehouse doesn’t have any windows at all facing the road or other buildings. It is an ideal location for storing and distributing things you don’t want anyone else to see.

By 5pm, I’ve given up on the hope that the Russians will try to move Veronica quickly. It looks like they are pulling girls from all of their houses. My best guess is that there are at least 50 children in that warehouse. That makes my task infinitely more complex. I also have to assume that the men inside the building will be expecting me. My Army file – my real file – is deeply classified; it is hard to imagine that these men could have gotten hold of it. But even if the Russians Google me they’ll learn I was a decorated Special Forces soldier who served in Afghanistan. So they’ll be expecting trouble. Adding fifty human shields to the equation – plus Veronica – makes it a logistic nightmare. I have to assume they have a picture of me, too, so I can’t do any reconnaissance in disguise. They’d most likely see through me. So I spend the day planning and preparing.

It’s a difficult conversation I have with Menetti. I tell him the full story, from the moment I arrived in Conestoga. I tell him the locations of the houses that the Tambov Gang has been using as well as Vanderhook’s role, and where to find his little black book. That goes well enough. But then I have to ask him to use all of his political juice to send the most elite unit in the FBI halfway up the eastern seaboard without informing the local authorities and assure him that I will give them ample probable cause to enter the warehouse building when they arrive, followed by lots of glory and a first rate photo-op for the media. I have to get a very firm time commitment from him down to the second, even if it means that UH 60 helicopters will be hovering a town away for ten or fifteen minutes. And Menetti knows full well that I’m going to have to commit some capital crimes to give his guys the right pretext to enter the building. He warns me again that he can’t shield me from the consequences. There’s only one way I know to buy myself immunity and it involves a step down a path I swore I would never tread again. Even for that to work, I’ll need more information than I have at the moment. So the taste in my mouth is bitter as I hang up the phone. If I believed that Veronica would survive the night, I’d make a different call and just walk away. I keep telling myself that, anyway.

But it’s too late now. As darkness descends, I slip off the roof and quietly, carefully make preparations for what is to come. There’s real work to do because the clock is now ticking and I have motion sensors, an alarm system and video feeds to defeat, and some nasty tricks to rig up.

* * *

When the white Ford panel van explodes, the blast wave slaps me like a pro bowl center even though I’m 100 feet away, lying flat on the rooftop of the warehouse. I’m momentarily worried that I’ve overdone it – it’s hard to be very precise with the ingredients you can buy at Wal-Mart. Fortunately, the primary force of the explosion is upward, as I’ve intended it to be, although it blows out all the windows in the warehouse and incinerates a seven-series BMW parked next to the van. On this far edge of Conestoga, I figure I have at least seven minutes until the volunteer fire department responds.

I count to three before I hit the detonator that blows in the two skylights to the largest office in the administrative wing of the warehouse, as well as the power to the building. Everything now depends on timing, and a countdown is running on my watch and in my head. The skylights don’t make the kind of mess the van did because I found Primacord at Stokely’s along with some other illegal treats seemingly destined for the very men I’m about to drop in on.

As soon as the skylight is clear, I drop a CTS model 7290 flash bang grenade through the hole, directly onto the conference table that sits beneath it, then pull away from the opening before it detonates. It’s a police model, not mil-spec, and without it and the Primacord I probably wouldn’t be attempting this foolishness at all, so my feelings are mixed about finding the unexpected jackpot. The flash bangs weren’t all that surprising – there are plenty of meth labs in Greene and Columbia counties and Conestoga has a SWAT unit within the sheriff’s department. The detcord is strictly regulated, though, and highly illegal.

As soon as the flash goes off, I’m through the skylight headfirst, anchored by a carabiner to the rooftop. Three of the men in the room are kneeling or crouching with their hands over their ears and their eyes shut. But there are still five good men with automatic weapons, waiting for something to come through one of the skylights. I hit them one by one with the P90 on its burst mode while hanging upside down halfway through the skylight. Only one Russian, a bear of a man holding an AK-47, manages to raise his weapon toward me before I put a third round through his right eye. All of the men are dead by the time I swing my legs over my head and flip, simultaneously pulling myself up on the rope a bit, creating enough slack to unhook the carabiner anchoring my Blackhawk CQB belt to the mountaineering rope secured to the roof.

I drop silently onto the conference table, securing the P90 to my back and drawing the Kimber. I screw on the silencer as I drop to the floor. I survey the bodies to ensure I’m not going to be shot in the back as I move through the room by a man I failed to disable. Eight men are dead. I have some sympathy for them. I’ve been on the other side of this scene. During Delta training, it’s one of the first things you experience, in a hanger specially set-up to practice nothing but these types of entries. Even if you’ve been in combat, there is nothing as disorienting as a quick detcord explosion followed by stun grenades and precision shooting. The Delta exercises are conducted with live ammo, so when the mannequin standing in for a live terrorist two feet from you takes two rounds through the forehead, it’s hard not to check your own body for holes. After you make the entries yourself four or five hundred times, some of the magic goes out of it, but it’s just as effective. Explosive entry is practiced in teams of four by Delta, so I count myself lucky to have my feet on solid ground without having been shot.

Twenty seconds.

The door to the large office is open, revealing a hallway flanked by two smaller offices. The hall ends at a steel door that connects the administrative area to the main warehouse floor. As I move into the hallway, a thick Russian with a scar running from his right eye to the edge of his dark mustache steps from the door to the office on the left, holding an assault rifle. I put two rounds into the man’s neck, not breaking stride as I reach into a pouch attached to the checkerboard molle system on my TAG vest and pull out another flash bang.

I roll the grenade into the first office, the windowless room to my right whose doorway is nearest to the bigger office. I hear a shout as I duck behind the wall, then the flash bang detonates. I flip my night vision goggles down from the tactical helmet and enter the room low, shooting two men. One is swinging a SCAR-H assault rifle wildly like a club, the other is waving a Beretta, a hand over his eyes.

I step back out into the hallway, which is still illuminated by the fire from the van, and flip the night vision goggles back up. I proceed down the hallway toward the steel fire door. As I reach the second office, a burly Russian comes flying through the door, nearly colliding with me as he passes. I stick a foot out in time to trip the man and start to turn toward him and away from the open doorway. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I stop cold, deciding in an instant to draw the flat-bladed SOG seal pup left-handed from its downward-facing sheath on the Blackhawk vest. I swing the knife backward without looking and bury it cleanly in the side of the man’s neck, severing the carotid artery. At the same time, I raise the Kimber in my right hand and fire two rounds point blank into the chest of a second man who has just appeared in the doorway. This Russian is older and is carrying a sawed-off 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun. The weapon discharges as the man drops, nearly tagging me even though I’ve thrown myself instinctively to the side. I blink once then pick myself up, moving at a crouch into the last office. A lone man remains, huddled over a keyboard. He is unarmed and trembling.

Forty seconds.

I pull the man roughly backward, toppling him off of his swivel chair. He is bespectacled and thin, completely unlike the other Russians I have encountered in this place. I roll the thin Russian onto his stomach and put a boot on his neck while I fish through a pouch on my vest until I find a string of plastic whip-ties I’ve liberated from a box of heavy-duty trash bags, and a roll of duct tape. I bind the man’s wrists behind his back and lash his feet together. Then I hog-tie the man’s feet to his wrists with duct tape and roll him over.

“I’m letting you live so you can pass on a message. Don’t cross the
Solntsevskaya Bratva
,” I say to him in fluent Russian, picking the name of the only other Russian mafia cartel I can think of. The thin man’s eyes widen and a damp patch blossoms on the front of his polyester trousers.

Ninety seconds.

I don’t have much time. I was hoping to find Veronica in the administrative section of the warehouse, but she’s not here. I step out of the room and examine the door to the warehouse. There is a deadbolt, which I slide closed. Then I pull two doorjambs from a pouch attached to my vest and kick them into place under the door. I leave the building the same way I came in, and soon I am back on the roof, running swiftly toward the main section of the warehouse.

I see a car pulling out of the parking lot just as I breach the skylight at the far end of the main warehouse. A lone man drives the Taurus, but I can’t identify him or read the plates as he peels away. I can’t waste any more time, though. I drop two flash-bangs down the hole and run a dozen feet to drop two more through another skylight. Returning to the first, I hook myself into a line and rappel down ten feet, where I drop onto a massive steel beam that runs the length of the warehouse floor. The room is shrouded in darkness, only faintly illuminated by the dying flames from the smoldering van that leak in through the high slit window above the loading bay doors, which are shut. The lights that were illuminating the parking lot have been extinguished as well.

I drop prone on the beam, unstrapping a rifle from my back as soon as I’m stable. It is my best find at Stokeley’s: a VSS sniper rifle. I appreciate the irony as I adjust the scope: this piece was undoubtedly smuggled in for the men I’m aiming it at. The Vintorez, as it’s commonly known, was developed in the Tula Arsenal south of Moscow for Spetznaz commandos of the MVD in the late 1980s. It isn’t the most elegant or even accurate weapon, but it has two huge advantages over most other sniper rifles for the kind of close-quarter nighttime work I’m about to engage in. First, it is very compact, with a folding rear stock. Second, it has an integrated silencer and a large twenty-round magazine. With any luck, it will help keep me concealed for long enough to finish the job I’ve started.

Two minutes.

I peer through the PKN-03 night scope on the Vintorez. The scene below me is mayhem. The warehouse has an enormous open floor with six large cages set in the middle, about six feet from each other, organized like the dots that form the number six on dice. In the green illumination of the sniper scope, I can see clusters of figures in the cages, some huddled together and some crouched alone. Among the Tambov men, the smartest are huddling between the cages, crouched down while they wait for their eyes and ears to recover from the flash bangs. Others are not so wise, running about wildly in the dark. One man has collapsed near the stairs to the upper extension of the warehouse, and he’s screaming loudly, adding the perceptible feel of panic to the confusion.

I count eighteen men in total. As I watch, three of them break cover at once and make a beeline for the door adjacent to the loading bay that leads to the parking lot. I see that they are armed and I caress the trigger of the Vintorez, smoothly dropping them one, two, three. I sweep the scope across the warehouse floor and catch the motion of two more men with SCAR-H assault rifles, one with his right hand on the other’s shoulders, run at a crouch towards the upper landing. I take down the leader first and then the man behind him. They didn’t make it fifteen feet. I am scanning for more targets when I feel the ricochet of bullets against the steel beam below me and hear the characteristic crack of an AK assault rifle. I twist sharply towards the muzzle flash I’ve caught from the corner of my eye and I spot the shooter. As light blossoms from the rifle again I put two rounds into the man. I feel a searing pain in my shoulder and, pulling off my glove, explore it with two fingers. A bullet has grazed the fleshy part of my upper arm. I am bleeding, but not badly. The body armor can’t stop a rifle projectile, but has nevertheless diverted the off-angle shot enough to spare me serious injury. It can wait. I shake my head. It is an unbelievable shot with an assault rifle in the dark at a prone target 100 yards away. Either the shooter was lucky or I was.