he had expanded into drugs and prostitution, human trafficking, gunrunning—all the staples of an up-and-coming hardman yearning to breathe free.
His number two was thirty-five-year-old Dmytro Levytsky—“Dimo” to his friends—another ex-con from Ukraine who blamed his arrests back home on political persecution. The State Department had been mulling over his petition for asylum for the past four years, which Bolan took as evidence that they were either being paid to let him stay, or else were mentally incompetent—a possibility he couldn’t automatically rule out, based on his personal experience with members of that sage department’s staff.
Opposing Melnyk’s effort to expand was one Alexey Brusilov, lately of Brighton Beach, a Russian enclave at the southern tip of Brooklyn, on the shore of Sheepshead Bay. Most people didn’t know the bay was named for a breed of fish, not a decapitated ruminant. Mack Bolan had acquired that bit of information somewhere and it had risen to the forefront of his mind unbidden.
Brusilov was well established in his Brooklyn fiefdom, had defeated two indictments on assorted federal charges, and was well connected to the Solntsevskaya Bratva outfit based in Moscow, boasting some nine thousand members that the FBI could list by name. He was a stone-cold killer, though no one had ever proved it in a court of law, and had impressed New York’s Five Families enough to forge a treaty of collaboration with them, rather than engaging in a messy, pointless turf war that would be good for nobody. The Russian’s stock in trade was much the same as Stepan Melnyk’s: drugs and guns, women and gambling, neighborhood extortion, smuggling anyone or anything that could be packed into a semi trailer for the long haul.
Brusilov’s most able second in command was Georgy Vize, a young enforcer who was said to favor blades but didn’t mind a good old-fashioned gunfight if the odds were on his side. He was a person of interest in three unsolved murders, but willing witnesses in Brighton Beach were an endangered species. Raised from birth to mistrust the police at home, they’d had no better luck with New York’s finest on arrival in the Big Apple and mostly kept their stories to themselves.
Why stick your neck out, when the mobsters only killed each other, anyway?
And if they iced one of your neighbors by mistake, that was life.
Bolan saw opportunity in the uneasiness between Melnyk and Brusilov. It was the kind of rift that he could work with, maybe widen and exploit with careful handling, playing one side off against the other. War was bad for business in the underworld, but it was good for Bolan, just as long as he could keep the blood from slopping over onto innocents.
And that could be a problem, sure, since neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians were known for their discrimination when the bullets started to fly. Where an older generation of the Mob had certain basic rules, albeit often honored more in the breach than in the observance, Baltic gangs had more in common with outlaws from south of the border. They were full-bore savages, respecters of no one and nothing, as likely to wipe out a family as to bide their time and take down one offending member on his own.
So Bolan had his work cut out for him, and that was nothing new.
He finished off his last burger and hit the road.
Northbound on Interstate 95
THE MAIN DRAG from Washington, DC, to New York City was the I-95, a more or less straight shot for 225 miles, four hours’ steady driving at the posted legal speed.
Bolan used the travel time to think and plan, which were not necessarily the same thing. Planning was a kind of thinking, sure, but it required at least some basic information on terrain, opposing personnel, police proximity and average response time. Even weather factored in. A wild-ass warrior pulling raids with nothing in his head but hope and good intentions might as well eliminate the middleman and simply shoot himself.
Bolan’s rented Mazda CX-5 had a full tank when he started rolling north from Washington, meaning he wouldn’t have to stop along the way. He wore the Glock and had his long guns on the floor behind the driver’s seat, concealed inside a cheap golf bag he’d bought in Arlington, midway between the gun shop and the burger joint. The small crossover SUV had GPS and cruise control, two less things for him to think about while he was looking forward to the shitstorm in New York.
Brognola’s digital files included various addresses and phone numbers, both for Melnyk’s gang and Brusilov’s, along with photos of the major players on both sides. Bolan could find their homes and hangouts when he needed to, plot them on Google Maps and make his final recon when he reached the target sites, to maximize results and minimize civilian risks. An app on Bolan’s smartphone had the city’s precinct houses plotted for easy reference and made him wonder, as he always did, how seventy-seven patrol districts wound up being numbered 1 through 123.
Go figure.
He had certain basic limitations, going in. Bolan’s weapon selection in Virginia covered close assaults and sniping from a distance, but he’d had no access to explosives or Class III weapons: full-auto, suppressors and so on. He could absolutely work with what he had and make it count, but tools dictated tactics on the battlefield, as much as the terrain and numbers on the opposition’s side.
The good news: Bolan had a built-in conflict he could work with, Russians and Ukrainians reflecting the eternal strife between their homelands. They had lit the fuse already. Bolan’s challenge was to keep it sizzling, fan the flames and do his utmost to direct the final blast so that it damaged only those deserving retribution.
Making things more difficult, while waging war on two fronts, was the fact that Bolan also had to gather intel on Stepan Melnyk’s connection to the massacre in Washington. If the man had supplied the tools, as Hal suspected, was it strictly business, a labor of love, or a mixture of both?
Behind that question lurked a larger one. The conflict in Ukraine had been confused from the beginning, talking heads on television squabbling over whether Russia planned the whole thing as a power play or simply took advantage of a split within its former subject country. On the ground inside Ukraine and in Crimea, both sides longed for US intervention to assist in the destruction of their enemies, but military aid had been withheld so far, as much because of gridlock in DC as obvious concern about the right or wrong of it.
Could the attack in Washington have been a false flag operation? Viewed from one perspective, it made sense: unleash a handful of Ukrainian fanatics in the US capital, to swing the people and the government against their side. Whether America weighed in against the rebels overseas with military force or simply closed its eyes to Russia’s not-so-covert moves against them, the result would be identical, handing the independence movement yet another grim defeat.
That wasn’t Bolan’s problem, on the face of it. He couldn’t solve the troubles in Ukraine that dated back to sixteen-hundred-something, any more than he could cure the common cold. Bolan was not a diplomat, much less a peacekeeper. He was a man of war—The Executioner—and he had a specific job to do, first in New York, then following the bloody bread crumbs eastward, settling accounts as he proceeded.
By the time Bolan got to Newark, he had a sequence of events in mind. It was a plan of sorts, but flexible, bearing in mind that things would start to shift and change the moment that he squeezed a trigger for the first time. Nothing would be static, much less guaranteed. The battle would unfold, and Bolan would be swept along with it, correcting course whenever he could manage to, otherwise going with the flow until it crested and the losers drowned in blood.
It was familiar territory. Names and faces changed, but otherwise it felt like coming home.
