Operator - 01 (24 page)

There’s a turn off of Plateau Mountain Road to Jaymos Lane, which I’m relieved to see, although I don’t take it. Then the road switchbacks and shoots two hundred feet up the side of the mountain before dead-ending. I pull the G8 up at the edge of the woods and pop the truck before I jump out, a stopwatch ticking in my head. I grab the soft case with my father’s Winchester from the trunk, slinging it over my shoulder along with a small black bag. Thinking for a second, I scrounge the camouflage jacket that Jeff lent me for the deer hunt from my duffel bag and ditch the black raincoat I’m wearing. I glance at Veronica. It could be worse. She’s in stretch casual pants and Nike running shoes, her concession to me in the morning. The Nikes won’t give her much traction, but they’re not terrible, either. I’m in much better shape with Merrill Trail Runners. I take Veronica’s hand and gently pull her into the woods. I figure we have about thirty seconds before the Cadillac finds us.

Veronica strains her head to look upward at the seemingly vertical, 3000-foot climb. “Where are we going?” she asks.

“Straight up,” I say. She gives me a look and I shrug. I know what at least one of the guys chasing us is wearing and he’s not dressed for hiking. I climbed this particular mountain a dozen times as a kid. There’s plenty of cover, even though a lot of the trees have lost their leaves at this time of year. Most importantly, we have a chance to get above our pursuers on higher ground. I’m pretty sure it’s the best we’ll do under the circumstances. I think about how to explain this to Veronica as we start into the woods.

“That Cadillac is a much faster car than ours and the road runs almost dead straight all the way to the Thruway. There aren’t any big cross streets or intersections, either. Their driver knows what he’s doing: there’s no way we could have lost them. They would have caught us in another three or four miles, tops. Before that, probably one of the guys in that car would have gotten off a good shot and we’d be dead. Those guys are pros – more disciplined than any of those Russian mob guys who kidnapped you, better than any of them except Yuri. The only way to even the odds is with terrain. I grew up here. I know these mountains. It’s our only chance.”

“Where are we?” she asks as we start to climb the mountain, picking our way through the brush. The terrain slopes up at an improbable angle and Veronica starts slipping on the dense leaves almost immediately. I have to grab her wrist and pull her behind me, physically hauling her up the slope. She starts to make a joke about skiing uphill but I hush her. After we’ve ascended a hundred yards, we pause as I hear the Cadillac pull to a halt below. Even in October with half the leaves gone from the deciduous trees, the foliage is dense enough to prevent us from seeing the road. I count the sound of doors opening. Four. There are four men. At least we managed to lose the pickup with the RPG and the .50-caliber rifle. As I start moving up the hill, I fish a grenade out of the black bag. Veronica’s eyes bug out. I answer the question she’s already asked instead of the one written all over her face.

“This is Plateau Mountain – it’s 3800 feet tall. That’s big for the Catskills but tiny for just about any other range. But what this neck of the woods lacks in vertical elevation, it more than makes up for in terrain. Most people from other places don’t quite believe how challenging the combination of wet leaves and smooth, round, muddy stones can make things. If you think you’re having trouble with those Nikes, just imagine how those guys behind us are going to feel in Rockports. We’re bushwhacking – making our own way up. There’s a trail on the other side of this mountain. It’s called The Devil’s Path.” That silences Veronica, who realizes she has to focus to stay on her feet.

We’re about a quarter mile up the hill and another five or six hundred feet up in elevation when the grenade detonates. I tied a length of nylon cord at ankle level between two trees along our path and attempted to conceal it under leaves. The grenade was triggered by the rope.

“Do you think it got them?” Veronica asks.

I shake my head. “They may want us to think that, but I doubt it. Those guys are pros; I doubt they’d fall for a simple snare. But it will slow them down a little. They know I have a few tricks and they’ll guess I could do something more devious. They’ll have to go slower. It may buy us a little time.”

We reach the first plateau after another fifteen minutes of hard climbing. I’m exhausted by the effort of dragging Veronica from tree to tree up the side of the mountain at the quickest pace I dared risk. I motion for Veronica to sit behind a big oak as I drop prone behind a downed tree. I pull the Winchester Model 70 from the padded case and feed three of the Holland & Holland .375 Magnum rounds. Then I rest the rifle on the log and look through the sight.

I spot Dmitriev first. He’s the one tracking me and he’s made up some ground. He is doing surprising well on the leaves and muddy rocks although he doesn’t look happy in his suit. He is smart enough to realize that he’s vulnerable and he’s using the trees as cover, trying to leave himself as little exposed upslope as he can while following our tracks. The man with him is not as graceful. He is a bear, standing a full head above Dmitriev. He looks like the type who would be more comfortable in wrestler’s gear than the chalk stripe suit, which doesn’t fit him well. I watch him slip, nearly twisting his ankle, and recover his balance by pulling himself up on a slender tree, bending it over to the point where it seems close to snapping. I can see the curses on his lips as he struggles on.

That leaves two men unaccounted for. I start a pattern search scanning the woods in grids through a pair of binoculars I pull from the small black case. Time is running perilously short. It takes me about a minute to spot the two operators. Dmitriev has done what I would have, if the situation were reversed – flanked one man out on either side of us. Veronica and I are climbing the spine of the mountain, which broadens out to a plateau at the peak, so we can’t be easily out-flanked in a tactical sense. But Dmitriev has sent one man running through the woods along either side of the mountain, not gaining much elevation but attempting to skirt around and summit the peak behind us, which would expose us to crossfire. It’s ambitious, but I would have tried it, too.

I admire the progress one of the men is making as I spot him somewhat past our position but five hundred feet lower. He looks like a genuine trail runner, moving gracefully through the foliage. He’s not wearing a suit, perhaps that’s why. It looks like he’s decked out as a fall jogger – good cover if they needed to trail me through Saugerties. I’m sure I never spotted him, though.

The fourth man is a little less elegant. He has a blond buzz cut and is proceeding in a very workmanlike fashion on the old railroad tracks that skirt Plateau Mountain on the West, to my left. Unlike Dmitriev and the runner, however, he’s not being particularly careful about his cover. He probably doesn’t think he’s in any danger.

I make a quick decision and sight in on the trail runner to my right first. He’s the man most likely to cause us trouble if he manages to get around behind us. It’s a tricky shot because my view of him is partly obscured, and he’s moving at a good clip. I have to lead him while anticipating the tree cover. I run through the calculations, then still myself and focus on the shot. When I squeeze the trigger, I know I’ve made the shot. The Winchester booms and I pull the scope back down on him just as he crumples to the ground. Without wasting time, I turn the rifle on the man on the other flank. He has stopped dead and has his hand on his ear, apparently speaking to Dmitriev through a comm device. This is a longer shot, perhaps 500 yards, but considerably easier as he is not moving. I squeeze the trigger again. He hits his knees clutching his throat then topples forward.

I look straight down the mountain for Dmitriev and the last Russian but as expected, they’ve gone to ground. It should slow them down further, though, and make them nervous. I’m counting on it. But now they’re bound to be watching upslope, looking for movement. I flatten myself beneath the tree and slip my hand into the soft black bag, finding a familiar shape. I pull the pin on the grenade and release it in an arc, a shallow toss of just twenty yards or so. Then I toss another grenade just to the right of it. They start streaming smoke after three seconds, and soon there’s a thick cloud between Dmitriev and us. I slip the Winchester back into its case and grab Veronica’s hand.

“What happened?” she whispers.

“Now there’re just two of them,” I answer, “so we might just live after all.” In truth, I’m still not sure.

We continue upward for a half hour before reaching Devil’s Path on the flat top of the mountain, just a couple hundred feet shy of the 3800-foot peak. There’s little view from this angle and the trail, as I’d remembered, winds its way through dense woods at the top. Many of these are evergreen, which makes this better ground for my purposes. There are tracks from other hikers on the trail and a few even look fresh. It may confuse Dmitriev, but I don’t count on it. It’s true that he didn’t strike me as a backwoods type – a lot of Spetznaz guys spend their careers in urban combat situations – but he also seems exceptionally competent. Not knowing how to track would be a serious gap in his skill set.

I finally find the spot I’m looking for around a bend in the trail, where a profusion of bushes and a few old knotty pines look promising. I hand Veronica the rifle and the soft case, and zip up the camouflaged jacket. Then I pull a small Beretta from a holster on my leg. I chamber a shell and show her how it operates. She hasn’t fired a gun before, so I’m not very hopeful. On the other hand, if she needs to use the gun I’ll already be dead, so it’s as good a play as any.

“Follow the trail three hundred paces and then step off into the woods and find a place to hide yourself where you can see the trail. If I come to get you I’ll say your name before I get too close. Shoot anyone else who steps off that trail in your direction.”

“What are you going to do?” she hisses.

“Try to end this,” I say. Then I step backwards a dozen paces, careful to place my feet back in the tracks I’ve already made. I look up and spot a sturdy branch and jump to reach it. In a few moments, I work myself up ten feet. I find a position where I’m well covered but have a clear field of view directly below me. Then I slip an SOG Seal Pup knife from its sheath, which I’ve attached to my belt at the small of my back next to the Sig. I settle in to wait.

In the end, they’re closer to us than I expect, less than five minutes behind. I hear the big Russian first, although he’s walking a few feet behind Dmitriev. He seems to drop his feet like sandbags with every step. The hike can’t be easy for someone his size. Despite what you’d think, most operators are not built like that – too much of our job is based on moving quickly and unobtrusively in confined spaces. Dmitriev moves like a jungle cat; there’s no question in my mind that he’s at the top of his class. As I’ve guessed, he knows how to track. In fact, he steps only a few paces past my hiding spot before he stops, looking puzzled. He has evidently looked ahead and seen that my trail evaporates. The big Russian stops almost directly below me. I drop from the branch. Despite what you might think, hitting a man in the neck with a flat bladed knife between C4 and C5 from a ten-foot drop is not all that routine. It would be impossible to do cleanly if the blade arrived first, so I land on his back, using my momentum to knock him forward off of his feet, and only drive the blade into the back of his neck once we’ve hit the ground. The moment I do, Dmitriev is turning with a Heckler & Koch M5SD, and I pull the big man over on top of me, praying that the relatively lightweight 9x19mm Parabellum rounds don’t pass entirely through the enormous Russian’s burly chest. The bullets trace an arc down the corpse, but I don’t feel any bee stings. I draw the Sig from the small of my back with some difficulty and fire point-blank over the dead Russian’s shoulder. Three of the rounds hit Dmitriev squarely in the chest. The fourth gets him in the neck.

I get up and walk over to Dmitriev, kicking the MP5 away from his hands. Then I lean over him. He’s not dead – he’s wearing a vest, and only the neck shot has wounded him. It will be enough, though. He stares at me with uncomprehending eyes. Even though I can do nothing for him, I linger for a moment. There’s something I want to ask him. I pull a clean cloth from my pocket and hold it over his wound, momentarily staunching the flow of arterial blood.

“How did you track me to Woodstock?” I ask gently. “I didn’t see you.”

“The envelope,” he gasps. There is the dim reflection of professional pride in his eyes. “The envelope I gave you has a radiologic signature…not hazardous,” he says. He exhales and the life flows from him with his breath. I look at him and see myself. It’s a horrible waste of a good man. I think about the manila envelope with the pictures of Yuri and his associates. I have to appreciate the irony – even Yuri’s photograph is radioactive.

It takes me a few minutes to collect Veronica. I’m careful to speak her name repeatedly on the trail, worried that she might shoot me accidentally. She’s done well so far, but you can never tell with amateurs. From the rate her hands are trembling when I help pull her from the hollow of a tree, my fear is not misplaced. I don’t take her back toward the bodies, but continue forward. In fifteen minutes, we reach the summit of Plateau Mountain. We sit on a rock.

“They’re all dead?” she asks after what seems like a decent interval. It’s colder on top of the mountain and we huddle together.

“Yes,” I say.

“Who were they?” she asks.

“The man who met me in Constantine’s place for lunch and his team. I think they were Spetznaz – commandos – in the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service.”

“Why did they want to kill you?” she asks.

“They were after you, not me. Like I told Menetti, if Dmitriev was trying to kill me, his best play would have been right in Saugerties, outside the restaurant. With Buddy Peterson dead, you’re the only link between the Tambov Gang and the Russian government. This whole scandal will be highly embarrassing to the Russians if it points back to them. I don’t know whether Constantine sent them to clean up his mess or somebody above him is trying to mop up the entire operation. Either way, this was a very good team they sent after us.”