Renegade (2013) (28 page)

“I don’t know. Maybe there was something. Maybe Evstafiev was just carrying information.”

“How do you know that?”

Pike shook his head. “I’ve been doing all the giving.”

Bekah nodded. “Lieutenant Bridger has developed some contacts within the black market.”

“How?”

“Bribery.”

Pike laughed. “Not exactly in the Marine Corps playbook.”

“The lieutenant says he learned that working court cases with his father. Anyway, during the investigation, he turned up another name that connected to Evstafiev’s. A guy named Deyneka.” Bekah struggled with the pronunciation.

Pike pronounced the name correctly.

She looked at him with renewed interest. “You know that man?”

“No.” At that point, Pike knew Bekah had deliberately stumbled over the name. He mentally kicked himself. “I’ve been around Russians. Heard the name before. So who is Deyneka?”

“A munitions dealer handling Russian ordnance. The same kind of ordnance we turned up in the machine shop.”

Pike picked up another piece of lamb and chewed thoughtfully for a moment before swallowing. “There was a Russian that called Zarif. I overheard the conversation. If it was Deyneka, he was after some merch that went missing.”

“‘Merch’?” Bekah looked puzzled.

Pike chuckled and licked juice from his thumb. “You’re new to this cops and robbers stuff, ain’t you?”

She flushed slightly but didn’t say anything.

“Merch. Merchandise. Deyneka was looking for goods that got misplaced. Maybe the tangos weren’t the only people Evstafiev was supplying.”

“Deyneka thought Zarif had his missing . . .
merch
?”

Pike shrugged. “If he was the guy on the phone that night, yeah.”

“I’ll let Lieutenant Bridger know.” Bekah pushed herself to her feet and bundled up her trash. She put Pike’s in the bag as well. “This still doesn’t mean we can get you out of here.”

“I never thought it did.”

“But the lieutenant wanted me to tell you not to lose faith.”

“Sure. Maybe I’m not as big a believer in the system as Bridger is.”

Bekah eyed him, hesitating. “Faith’s an important thing. Living without it makes a hollow life. I’ve just recently learned that. Could be something you need to think about.”

Pike had noticed this deployment that Bekah seemed changed, more accepting and less fretful. She’d always been a good Marine and a solid person, but he’d noticed the difference.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Oh. Something else.” Bekah reached into a pocket and took out a letter. “Mail call.”

That surprised Pike. He’d never gotten a mail call. He accepted the small letter but didn’t look at it, thinking maybe it was from
Mulvaney, but that would have been a serious breach in witness protection protocol.

Bekah glanced at it. “You got a son you’ve never mentioned?”

“No.” Pike figured he knew who the letter was from now, but he didn’t know how Hector had written to him.

“That’s from a young boy.” Bekah smiled. “I recognize the handwriting. I get letters that look a lot like that one. Usually has crayon pictures.”

Pike nodded, not saying anything.

Bekah knocked on the door and left.

Heart beating a little faster, emotions tangled in a goopy ball in his stomach, Pike glanced at the letter. It was addressed to Private Pike Morgan, USMC, and the Marine address was underneath it. After all the time spent helping the boy with his homework, Pike would have recognized the handwriting anywhere.

He opened the letter carefully.

Hi Pike!

I hope you are okay. I am okay. I miss you. I pray evry nite that God will keep you safe. He sees you all the time, you know. So I asked him to look out for you becuz I am here and I cant look out for you. I am doing the best I can with math, but I hope you get back soon.

Pike kept reading—there wasn’t a lot because the message got repetitive—and when he finished, he read the letter over again. For the first time since he’d been arrested, Pike truly felt caged. There was another life out there, and he couldn’t get back to it.

Or away from it.

He leaned his head against the wall, closed his eyes, and tried not to feel the emptiness that echoed within him.

TWO DAYS LATER,
Heath caught up with Illya Deyneka. The Russian black marketer had pulled out of sight even more in the wake of Evstafiev’s death. Heath and Gunney Towers had been hard-pressed to find the man even with the money Heath had spent looking for him. Bribery was a secondary and desperate economy that flowed through Kandahar.

Finally, though, an informer came up with the intel that Deyneka was staying at a small warehouse in one of the industrial sectors of the city. Heath assigned his unit to cover the area, then closed in on the warehouse early in the morning before dawn.

“You roust them this early, they’re gonna know straight off this ain’t nothing they want to hang around for.” Gunney Towers stood beside Heath in an alley across the street. He held binoculars to his eyes and studied the warehouse through the predawn dark.

“Deyneka’s already on edge.” Heath adjusted his gear, tightening the straps on his ammo rack. “He’s going to run as soon as we hit the door, but we’re ready for him.”

Towers lowered the binoculars. “How do you want to do it?”

“During the morning prayer session.” That was only moments away. “Things will be loud and busy. The Russians will ignore the
prayers because they’re used to them. They’ll have their guards down. We’ll take advantage of that.”

Nodding, Towers put his binoculars away. “Sounds good to me.”

“Then let’s do it.”

Heath sat in the passenger seat of the Humvee while Towers drove. Two more Marines sat behind them. Towers pulled the Humvee to a stop at the warehouse next door to the one they’d targeted.

As he climbed out of the Humvee, Heath felt the eyes on him. He adjusted his helmet, making certain his chin strap was tight. Then, when the ululating call to prayer rang out over the city, he headed toward the target warehouse.

“I’ve got movement inside the building.” Bekah’s voice was calm and controlled. She was in the alley across the street, keeping watch through binoculars.

“Make sure we contain anyone who leaves the building.” Heath unlimbered his M4A1 and picked up the pace, jogging toward the warehouse door. At his side, Towers already had a shaped C-4 charge in his left hand ready to go.

“Roger that.”

At the door, Towers slapped the charge into place beside the door lock. “Fire in the hole.” He rolled away from the door as Heath backed off and raised his assault rifle.

Towers triggered the detonator, and the small explosion barely made a dent in the call to prayer that echoed over the city. A fist-size hole appeared in the door where the locking mechanism had been. Smoke climbed swiftly into the air and dissipated.

“Move in.” Heath grabbed the door in his gloved hand and yanked it open. He shoved the M4A1 inside, then followed the weapon. Towers came at his heels. From the corner of his eye, before
he stepped inside, he spotted the other Humvees racing forward to close the cordon around the building. The two Marines who had accompanied Towers and Heath held their position at the entrance to provide an extraction point if it became necessary.

Heath hoped Deyneka was on the premises and that the Russian would agree to tell what he knew. Otherwise Heath was going to be in a lot of hot water for the unauthorized raid.

The warehouse held several crates, but with a lot of empty space too. Evidently the goods Deyneka dealt in didn’t have much of a shelf life. Then again, with all the renewed attacks within the city, munitions were cycling quickly.

Heath kept moving forward, working through the stacks of crates. He’d gotten blueprints on the building, but even though the structure was fairly new compared to the rest of the city, the layout inside the warehouse wouldn’t necessarily match the original schematics.

Towers covered his six, never more than one long stride away. Radio chatter over the mission freq let him know some of the warehouse’s occupants had already stepped outside into the Marines’ trap.

Although he knew he couldn’t afford the distraction, Heath kept listening for Bekah’s voice. As long as he could hear her, he knew she was okay. He was still surprised at how she’d gotten Pike to open up to her. Unfortunately some small part of him wasn’t happy about that for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He also knew he didn’t want to go exploring that particular unease too much.
Keep your head in the game.

A man peered around the corner of the stack of crates ahead.

“United States Marine Corps.” Heath made his voice loud and strong. “Stand down. Get on your stomach.”

Before the man could move, gunshots sounded. Behind Heath, Towers cursed and staggered away.

Swiveling, Heath aimed at the head and hands of a man lying atop
crates ahead and to the right. Heath squeezed the trigger and watched as splinters leaped up from the crates. The man fired again. Heath’s next burst tattooed across his face and he went slack.

The man at the corner in front of him started shooting a pistol. Heath stayed where he was, covering Towers, who had taken a round in his back. Heath fired two more bursts and plucked the shooter from the corner as Towers started shoving himself back to his feet.

“I’m okay.” Towers grimaced, his dark face etched with pain. “Armor stopped the bullet. Got the wind knocked out of me for a minute.”

“When you’re ready, Gunney.”

Towers nodded and adjusted his helmet. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

Heath led the way, taking longer strides now, eating up the distance and listening to the crackle of gunfire outside the warehouse. As he passed the dead man beside the crates, he kicked the pistol away and the weapon slid under a forklift in the next aisle.

Deyneka and three of his men were at the rear door, peering out anxiously, weapons in their hands. They didn’t see Heath or Towers closing in on them until it was too late.

Twenty feet away, one of the men turned and started to pull away from the door. He spotted Heath and yelled what Heath believed was a warning in Russian, then opened fire.

Heath spaced a burst across the man’s chest and watched him fall away as the other three men wheeled. Deyneka stood to the left, a large-caliber Israeli handgun in his fist. The Russian was thin and dark. His salt-and-pepper hair was buzzed close to the skull and he had a short-cropped salt-and-pepper beard as well. Tattoos coiled around his neck, creeping up from the sweater he wore. One was in the middle of his forehead, and Heath knew from Pike’s discussion of Russian crime tattooing that Deyneka had probably gotten it when he’d been ousted from some Mafia organization.

“Deyneka.” Heath held his assault rifle centered on the man while Towers covered the other two. “Put down your weapon and you get to live today.”

“Why are you here?” The Russian’s English was heavily accented.

“The United States Marine Corps wants to talk to you about ordnance you’ve been helping deliver to al Qaeda operatives in Kandahar. We’ve got proof of your involvement. You can live or die in the next minute.” Heath paused. “You decide or I’ll decide for you.”

Towers’s voice was thick with threat and boomed inside the warehouse. He was in full gunnery sergeant mode. “You heard the man. Me? I’ve got an itchy trigger finger and you been supplying guys that have been killing my men. I might not be able to wait long.”

The two men beside Deyneka tossed their weapons aside and held up their hands. Deyneka cursed, then tossed the big pistol aside as well.

Heath let out a tense breath and moved forward. “Get down. Down on your stomachs, hands behind your heads.”

Sullenly, the three men obeyed. Heath moved among them, securing each man in turn with disposable cuffs while Towers watched over them. The gunfire outside had tapered off to occasional pops.

“Bekah.” Heath pulled Deyneka roughly to his feet.

“We’re here. We got them.”

“The team?”

“Standing up. We’re all good here.”

Some of the tension in Heath unraveled and went away. He put a hand against Deyneka’s back and pushed him into motion. “Roger that.”

“Who is that man?” Major Hollister stared through the grille in the brig door. The major wasn’t happy, and it had taken Heath two hours to get the man to break his schedule.

Inside the room, Deyneka sat on the bed.

“Illya Deyneka. He used to be Russian military back in the eighties.” Heath flicked through the images on his iPad, showing Deyneka in a Russian military uniform. The man had been young and earnest. Heath had gotten the images from a helpful CIA agent who’d done background research on Deyneka. “Then, in the nineties, Deyneka joined up with the Russian Mafia.” More images followed, police reports from three different countries. “Somewhere in there he ended up working on his own here in Afghanistan.”

Hollister looked away from the door and focused on Heath. “The Mafia? Like the Russian your team turned up at the bomb-making facility.”

“Yes sir.”

“What does this man have to do with me?”

Heath cycled through the scanned pages of a document on his iPad. “What I have here is a signed confession from Deyneka. He had an arrangement with Evstafiev, the Russian that Captain Zarif executed after my team discovered and shut down the bomb-making facility. Evstafiev had brokered a deal for munitions, which he was selling to al Qaeda and to Deyneka. Evstafiev hadn’t delivered the weapons to Deyneka before he was killed.”

“Do we know where those weapons are?”

“No sir.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate.”

“Yes sir.” Heath paused, then got back on track, knowing he had to keep his explanation short, the same way he had to in the courtroom to keep a jury focused. “When Captain Zarif killed Evstafiev, he recovered contact information for Deyneka. Deyneka says that Zarif called him and said he knew where the weapons shipment was. It was going to cost him to recover it.”

Hollister’s eyes narrowed in understanding. “Zarif was blackmailing Deyneka?”

“Trying to, yes sir. The night that Captain Zarif was killed, Deyneka was on his way there to finish negotiations.” Heath pointed to the iPad screen. “He admits to that in this. Says he was outside the building when the Marines arrived.”

“Deyneka was there to take possession of the weapons.”

“Yes sir.”

Hollister considered that. “Zarif didn’t have a weapons cache with him that night.”

“No sir.”

“And we didn’t recover any information regarding those weapons.”

“No, we did not.”

“Then I don’t understand why I’m here. Unless you’re wanting congratulations for capturing this man and getting a confession out of him. You could have written that up in a report. This is just part of your job, Lieutenant.”

“Yes sir, it is. So is taking care of my unit.” Heath put his iPad at his side and gazed into Hollister’s eyes. The play was on the table, and he wasn’t about to back away. “I want Pike out of the brig, sir.”

Hollister frowned and shook his head. “The man killed three Afghan National Police officers.”

“Pike killed men who were planning to resell the munitions Evstafiev brought into Kandahar.”

“Alleged weapons. As you said, you didn’t recover any of those.”

“No sir, we did not, but we did recover a lot of Russian ordnance from the site where Evstafiev was initially taken into custody before Captain Zarif murdered him. I’d say the circumstantial evidence for the existence of the munitions is strong. Deyneka tells a believable story. If Pike hadn’t been there, that transaction might have taken place and those weapons would be out there in the streets.”

“You don’t know that they haven’t ended up there already.”

Heath took a breath. “No sir, I don’t. But I do know that Pike’s presence there that night exposed the operation for us. Deyneka is cooperating, naming names. We’ve got more targets to hit over the next few days. I’m confident that the situation we have now will enable us to make a difference in pursuing al Qaeda and those weapons.”

Hollister’s frown deepened and his displeasure was palpable. “Private Morgan isn’t an innocent, Lieutenant.”

“I didn’t say he was.” Heath paused to set himself. “But he’s one of my Marines. That night Pike was following Captain Zarif, a man suspected to be corrupt, in an effort to find out what had triggered the execution of a Marine prisoner.”