Vektor (52 page)

“I’m not that bad of a shot,” Berg said.

“Not saying you are. There’s no safety on this pistol, so—”

Berg released the slide, chambering a round. “Double action only?”

“Correct. But it’s a light pull. 5.5 pounds.”

Berg placed the pistol inside an easily accessible Velcro pouch within his briefcase. The nylon bag held a mock file and a 750 milliliter bottle of expensive vodka, which Reznikov would never taste.

“All right,” Berg said.

“Perfect. Reznikov has ordered breakfast for 8 o’clock, which is earlier than usual. I’ll send a cleanup crew down instead,” Sheffield said.

Berg nodded, feeling suddenly anxious about what he had calmly envisioned doing for the past month. The look on his face must have betrayed his apprehension because Sheffield put a hand on his shoulder.

“You don’t have to do this. In the three years I’ve been here, we’ve retired eight guests. Nobody from Langley has ever showed up for one of the retirement ceremonies,” Sheffield said.

“Do you really call it a retirement ceremony?”

“That’s what they’ve always been called,” Sheffield said.

“This guy doesn’t deserve the euphemism. I’ll take you up on the coffee and breakfast when I get back. I might have a shot of this vodka too,” Berg said.

“Fair enough, Mr. Berg. I’ll show you out.”

A few minutes later, Berg turned down path number five and entered a thick stand of pine trees that concealed Reznikov’s soon-to-be-vacated residence. He rang the doorbell, expecting to wait several minutes for the drunken maniac to answer. Reznikov had used his fifth satellite phone call yesterday afternoon to confirm that Vektor bioweapons program had been successfully destroyed. His Solntsevskaya contact confirmed that the operation had succeeded at the laboratory. A brief description of several simultaneous plumes of fire at the site had been enough to convince Reznikov that Berg’s team had succeeded. Sheffield said he celebrated well into afternoon before passing out without ordering dinner.

Berg was caught slightly off guard when Reznikov opened the door. He’d expected to find the scientist stumbling around in a cotton robe, nursing a massive headache and rubbing his perpetually bloodshot eyes. Instead, Reznikov looked rested and alert, wearing an outfit suitable for a day hike in the mountains. Something seemed off about this.

“Oh. It’s you?” Reznikov said.

“Going for a walk?” Berg said.

“Uh, well. Now that I am a permanent resident, I figured it might be time to embrace my surroundings. So, I suppose congratulations are in order?” he said, glancing nervously over Berg’s shoulder.

“They are. I thought we’d celebrate,” Berg said.

Berg withdrew the bottle of vodka from his briefcase and offered it to Reznikov, who accepted it reluctantly.

“I really do feel like getting some fresh air this morning. I celebrated a little too hard yesterday afternoon,” Reznikov said, taking a step forward.

Berg blocked the doorway, flashing a disingenuous smile. “I insist that we take a moment to celebrate. It should help you take the edge off. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Reznikov took a moment to consider Berg’s offer, displaying an anguished look out of character with someone who routinely downed a bottle like this before ten in the morning. The Russian’s eyes shifted to the forest again before he finally relented and stepped back into the cottage.

“Where are my manners? Of course. A quick toast, then I really should get out for some fresh air. You’re welcome to join me,” Reznikov said.

Berg pulled the door shut and followed him inside, sliding his hand into the black nylon briefcase. He felt for the Velcro flap that covered the hidden compartment, suddenly hardened for what he needed to do.

***

Greg Marshall yawned and rubbed his eyes. A few more minutes and his eight-hour shift monitoring the compound’s remote sensor network would come to an end. He’d eat a massive breakfast and crash out for several hours upstairs, until his natural biorhythms forced him out of bed. He closed his eyes and imagined the grease-laden farmer’s breakfast waiting for him in the sunroom. Security work at the compound might be tedious, but the food was plentiful and he had plenty of time between shifts to work it off. He could imagine worse work within the agency.

When he opened his eyes, he immediately saw that one of the eastern-based sensor arrays had detected movement. Damn it. Now his watch turnover would be delayed by at least fifteen minutes while a team was dispatched to investigate what would undoubtedly turn out to be another bear. The system could eliminate most non-human signatures based on speed, size and thermal characteristics, but it had a hard time differentiating between a young black bear and a human being. The system would track the bear accurately while it ambled along on all fours, but suddenly flash an alert when it rose up on its hind legs to pick berries. Now his breakfast would have to wait. He pulled his chair up to the desk and started the checklist.

The fifty-inch LED screen mounted at eye level in front of his desk displayed a digital map of the area surrounding the compound. Two sectors showed movement, which was a little unusual. He moved his hand to the red phone at the edge of the workstation and considered ringing Sheffield. Not yet. Sheffield hated when they rang him without gathering any information. He dragged the cursor over to the closest red sector and double-clicked, activating the two screens flanking the center monitor.

The top screen displayed multiple camera feeds from the sector, which he could change from traditional full color day view to thermal imaging. The bottom screen presented information from the motion sensors, pressure plates and thermal scanners in numeric and map form. The sector boundary map on this screen indicated that the signals were rapidly approaching the fence line. Multiple signals. The data flowing next to the map told him which cameras to search for a view of the targets, presenting hyperlinks that would change the view on the top screen to reflect what he had selected. He clicked on of the links and momentarily froze in his chair.
What the fuck?
Two heavily armed men sprinted toward the only section of fence exposed directly to the security complex beside the front gate. He didn’t bother to check the second sector before charging the entire eastern fence line and picking up the red phone.

***

The former Russian GRU Spetsnaz soldier raced toward the ten-foot-high section of chain-link fence directly ahead of him and threw himself to the ground several feet in front of it. He quickly extended the bipod attached to his RPK-74S Light Machine Gun and pressed the weapon firmly into the ground. Through the 3.4X ACOG sight attached to the RPK’s top rail, he sighted in on the front door of the gray two-story house and disengaged the weapon’s safety.

His partner had already stopped several meters back, having found a thick tree stump to support his .50 caliber sniper rifle. They would both start engaging targets as soon as it became apparent that the alarm had been sounded. The RPK would be used against security personnel, while the .50 caliber sniper rifle would initially target the building’s communications array. Based on the second team’s progress, they would breach the fence and provide close-up support as requested.

Nearly on cue with his arrival, three men spilled out of the front door onto the gravel driveway. One of the men peeled left and crouched against the front bumper of a black SUV, aiming an assault rifle in his general direction, while the other two took off in the opposite direction. He fired a sustained burst through the fence at the man next to the truck, kicking up gravel around the truck and connecting with the SUV’s metal frame. The man flailed backward, obviously hit by at least one of the rounds, so he shifted his aim to the two men fleeing toward an outcropping of dark ledge near the house.

A massive detonation sounded in the distance on his right, rippling the fence as his next burst of bullets caught the first man and sent him tumbling to the ground in a tangle of collapsed limbs. His partner stopped and crouched low to return fire, but was struck in the head by a well-aimed, short burst from the machine gun.

The RPK’s longer and heavier barrel, designed to allow accurate, sustained automatic fire in an infantry support role, combined extremely well with the combat telescopic sight to yield an effective sharpshooting weapon. He reacquired the front door of the house and demonstrated the light machine gun’s true purpose on this mission, pulling the trigger and cycling through the remaining seventy seven rounds of 5.45mm in long sweeping bursts that raked the front of the house from top to bottom, splintering the cedar siding and shattering all of the windows.

***

Karl Berg’s hand froze when he heard the first muffled staccato burst of gunfire. His first thought was that Sheffield had picked a really shitty time to conduct target practice for his security team. He dismissed that thought when the house shook violently, followed immediately by the thunderclap of a nearby explosion. He put it all together before the next burst of gunfire tore through the compound. Reznikov had somehow led the Russian mafiya to Mountain Glen.

He fumbled with the Velcro flap in his briefcase, almost missing Reznikov’s sudden attack. The thick bottle of vodka he’d given the scientist appeared overhead, plunging toward his head. Berg abandoned the effort to draw his pistol and raised the briefcase upward to deflect the heavy glass bludgeon. With most of his hand-to-hand combat training years behind him, the CIA officer’s instinctual response was far from graceful.

The bottle crashed into his forearm with a sickening thump, driving his arm down below his head. Reznikov raised the bottle to strike him in the head, but Berg kicked him in the sternum, disrupting the attack. The Russian stumbled backward, dropping the bottle onto the hardwood floor, where it shattered. Berg considered trying to retrieve the pistol from the briefcase at his feet, but Reznikov charged the door, and he had no intention of losing the Russian that easily.

The Russian grabbed the doorknob with both hands, unable to defend himself from Berg’s front kick, which was aimed at his hands. Berg’s sturdy hiking boots crushed Reznikov’s fingers against the brass knob, causing the Russian to recoil from the front door, howling in agony. Less than a second later, a klaxon sounded in the house, and Reznikov threw himself at the door, screaming. Now Berg understood why he had been so focused on the door. The house could be put into lockdown mode from the security station, which would complicate whatever plan the lunatic had conjured.

Reznikov yanked at the door to no avail and quickly scrambled left to one of the picture windows. Berg glanced at the window to his immediate right and saw metal shutters descending outside of the windowpanes. He heard glass shatter and turned his attention back to Reznikov. The crazed scientist had cracked the other window with the base of a table lamp. Judging from the shutters’ rate of descent, Berg wasn’t worried about Reznikov escaping through the window. The security shutters next to him had already blocked most of the light from the outside. In a fit of rage, the Russian repeatedly struck the window frame in an ineffectual display of fury, yelling orders to his hidden rescuers.

Berg decided that this would be a good time to grab his pistol. Trying to ignore the excruciating pain in his left arm, he opened the flap and withdrew the pistol, just as a fusillade of bullets tore through the door and the drywall next to him. The CIA officer dropped flat against the floor and fired three hastily aimed shots through the cloud of obliterated drywall dust at Reznikov’s silhouette. Another long burst of gunfire penetrated the front of the house, ripping through the furniture and collapsing the closest end table.

He hadn’t fully processed Reznikov’s verbal tirade, which had obviously directed indiscriminate automatic weapons fire into the left side of the house. He needed to get clear of the free-fire zone before Reznikov directed the next barrage right onto him. Searching for a target with his pistol, Berg scrambled forward, quickly reaching the archway to find the library room empty. He heard a chair scrape across the kitchen tile and turned his attention to the doorway leading out of the library and deeper into the house.

Before he could process the thought any further, he heard two separate Russian voices outside of the house yell, “Clear!” Berg’s options at this point were extremely limited, but one of them wasn’t standing in the library, exposed to the front door. He passed through the doorway less than a millisecond before a small explosion shook the house. The explosion cleared his mind and engaged some of the mind processes buried under years of bureaucratic deskwork at Langley. He hoped this temporary reboot would be enough to keep him alive.

He’d been one of the CIA’s premier case officers in Europe during the Cold War’s final decade, sidelining as a “black ops” field supervisor long before retired Special Forces operators filled those roles. He knew what would come through that door, and that his chances of walking out of here alive were poor, but Berg was a survivor, and he still had plenty of fight left in him. He immediately started forming a strategy.

Reznikov’s Solntsevskaya benefactors would have used highly trained professionals for this job, most likely former Russian army Spetsnaz, which didn’t bode well. Spetsnaz operators were notoriously savage and barely restrained by rules of engagement within the Russian military. As hired guns for the Russian mafiya, there would be no limit to their brutality. The only factor working in his favor at this point was an intimate familiarity with Special Operations tactics.

Special Forces teams worldwide could attribute their incredible success rate to training. Repetitive training. Especially in close-quarters combat. There was little variation in training and tactics, which is why he wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear metal objects hit the hardwood floor somewhere in the front of the house. Flashbangs. He glanced toward the staircase off the kitchen and made a quick calculation. He had at this point all but forgotten about Reznikov, who was nowhere in sight.