hall.
Bolan stepped out long and lunged forward, sinking to one knee as he came to the edge of his ambusher’s door. He made no attempt to slow his momentum but instead let it carry him down to the floor. He breached the edge of the enemy door, letting the barrel of the Glock 17 pistol lead the way. He caught the image of a dark-clad form sprawled out on the floor of the room.
The 9 mm pistol coughed in a double tap, catching the downed figure in the shoulder and head. Blood splashed up and the figure’s skull mushroomed out, snapping rudely to the side on a slack neck. A chunk of cottage-cheeselike material splattered out and struck a section of bullet riddled wall.
Bolan popped up, returned to his feet. He moved into the room, weapon poised, ready to react to even the slightest motion or perceived movement. After the frenzied action and brutal cacophony of the gun battle, the sudden return of silence and still felt deafening, almost oppressive. Approaching the dead man, Bolan narrowed his eyes, trying to quickly take in details. Muzzle-flash had ruined his night vision.
Frustrated, Bolan dragged his NVGs back into position and turned on the infrared penlight. The room returned to view in the familiar monochromatic greenish tint. Bolan looked over at the dead gunman’s weapon. From the unique silhouette he recognized the subgun as a PP-19 Bizon. Built on a shortened AKS-74 receiver, it had the signature cylindrical high-capacity magazine attached under the fore grip and the AKS folding buttstock. The weapon was usually associated with Russian federal police or army troops, but international arms merchants had been turning up with them more and more as the Russian economy went through its series of shortfalls.
Bolan rolled the man over. Any hopes for identification were gone. The man’s face held all the structural integrity of mush. Bolan could easily see the man’s thick, tangled beard, however. One of Garabend’s bodyguards who had survived the attack?
Bolan knew he didn’t have a lot of time. In a city locked down under martial law, the sound of the assault rifle he had been forced to use would draw unwanted attention very quickly. Bolan patted the dead man down. He found a leather wallet filled with Russian bank notes but devoid of identification.
The soldier pulled a thin, flat-faced digital camera from one of the carriers on his harness. He clicked off the IR light and settled his goggles on his forehead. He turned the camera on and opened the lens protector. Without preamble he grabbed the doughy-fleshed hand of the dead man by his index finger. Cradling the camera securely in his palm, Bolan rolled the man’s finger across the lens facing of the camera as carefully as any police desk sergeant at a big city precinct house.
Bolan held up the camera, letting the dead killer’s hand drop unceremoniously. It struck the bare floor with a dull clap. Bolan pointed the camera at a blank stretch of wall unmarred by his penetrating gunfire. He closed his eyes against the flash and snapped a picture. Later, he would download the snapshot and send it back to Barbara Price, mission controller at Stony Man Farm, for analysis. If the shooter was a bodyguard, that was fine. If he was something else, then Bolan needed to know.
He stood and put the camera away. He grabbed his Glock. It was time to go. Past time.
4
Bolan’s forward operating station in Grozny was an old CIA operations safehouse left over from the Chechen conflicts. Maintained as part of a Global Deployment Readiness Plan by the Operations Division, the residence was little used but constantly prepped. It provided stripped down, untraceable tools for Western intelligence operatives who found themselves working outside of normal geographical station mandates.
Working outside of normal geographical station mandates was something Mack Bolan knew all about.
Upon returning to the house Bolan immediately downloaded the picture of the dead assassin’s fingerprint and e-mailed it through an encrypted, anonymous server along with a brief sitrep, to a Stony Man capable site. Aaron Kurtzman would access all federal and international databanks in an effort to find a match.
Bolan drank a beer and made himself a sandwich from the pickings in the refrigerator. He surveyed his surroundings from every window in the place, looked in closets and behind closed doors until he felt like he knew the layout of the place well enough to navigate it in the dark, under fire if need be. He’d made the decision to delay his extraction until Hal Brognola and the Stony Man team could reconfigure operational alternatives based on the changed situation.
Jack Grimaldi was poised to infiltrate Grozny from a merchant ship anchored in the Caspian. The ship was run under a triple sponsor program combining Naval Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA. All offices were coordinated by the post 9/11 Director of National Intelligence office. Task Force 280, as it was coded, provided civilian-use cover of ocean-based assets for government operations. Brognola had managed to insert the veteran Stony Man pilot into the group with a minimum of fuss.
Bolan paced, calm, but filled with a pent-up energy left over from his confrontation with the assassin. Across the room, where he had left it on the table while fixing himself something to eat, his sat phone began to buzz.
Bolan crossed the room quickly and picked it up. He instantly recognized the gruff voice of Hal Brognola on the other end of the encrypted line. The soldier walked over and looked out the window at the quiet residential street from behind the window blinds. He turned his back on the scene and stepped farther into the old house.
“Striker?” Brognola asked.
“Go ahead,” Bolan answered.
“You safe? Things quiet?”
“For now. What do you have?”
“I’ve got a whole bunch of questions and not too many answers,” the big Fed said.
“You manage to get an ID off that print I sent you?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure did. We have a situation. The DNI has reacted to the intelligence and asked me to intervene in the matter.”
“What problem would this be?”
“The print you got off the shooter came back to one Andre Nicolov, former GRU commando.”
“Okay, so he was with the Main Intelligence Directorate. Lots of ex-military types run for-profit ops these days,” Bolan said.
“Problem is, this guy is known to be the chief operator for a player known as Sable, also ex-GRU, ex-SVR and now a freelance information broker. Sable has been the source of a CIA counterintelligence operation in Grozny. A consortium of ex-Soviet physicists and various research scientists of Chechen ethnicity opened a think tank group called the Caucasus Data Institute. The SVR, among others, was hot to get their hands on what they were cooking up. The CIA approached them undercover as a private firm about security in an effort to get our fingers into the pie.”
“How does Sable fit into this?”
“She ran a surveillance and procurement operation against the institute. By all accounts, the most successful one. She was always one step ahead of Grozny Station.”
“She?” Bolan said. “Go on.”
“Last year a field officer named Sanders was put on the case. He began making some headway, running stringers, planting misinformation, that sort of thing. Apparently, about two weeks ago, Sable went to Sanders and stated she wanted to explore life in the Federal Witness Protection Program. As a millionaire.”
Bolan
