Authors: David Hagberg

Countdown (38 page)

BOOK: Countdown

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KURSHIN COULD HARDLY BELIEVE his senses. The shots had come from somewhere aft, and had raked the hull of the twenty-foot auxiliary launch that he had been about to lower into the water.

From where he crouched behind the now useless boat, oil and gasoline leaking from its pierced tanks, he peered into the darkness, looking for a movement, anything.

Who was it? Had Grechko hidden an extra crew member for just such a contingency? He didn't think so, but then the KGB captain had been no fool â¦ only slow.

He glanced quickly at his watch. The missile was due to launch
in less than twenty minutes. Was this then to be his fate? Was he meant to die here like this? He could not accept such a thing. There were so many projects Baranov had promised him.

“Together we will do great things, Arkasha,” the KGB director had said. Kurshin could hear his words clearly. “We will have a great future, you and I.”

There were rubber rafts aboard. He had seen the canisters up on the bridge deck. It would be a long haul to the Syrian coast, but he had been made to do even more difficult things in his life. It was possible. Anything was possible.

But who had come for him â¦ ?

Then he had it. Budanov. He could see the man's jaw shattering, he could see him pitching onto the engine-room floor in his own blood. It had been a stupid mistake on his part, not making certain the man was dead. It was the only possibility.

“Viktor Georgevich,” he called out softly. “Can you hear me?”

He thought he heard a gurgling sound, as if someone were choking on their own saliva.

Tensing his muscles he fired a shot aft, the bullet ricocheting off the metal superstructure, and then he leapt away from the protection of the launch toward a half-open door across the portside passageway.

Budanov's returning fire slammed into the boat, ricocheted off the deck, and blew the door off its hinges.

Kurshin cried out as he dove into the forward staterooms corridor. “My eyes! My eyes!” he screamed.

He pushed his way farther back into the relative darkness and raised his pistol. Moments later he heard the sounds of someone coming, and his finger tightened on the trigger.

He was hardly prepared for the apparition that suddenly filled the doorway, and he nearly missed his shot. Budanov, his entire lower jaw shot away, blood streaming from his half-destroyed tongue, stood there weaving on his feet, the big AK74 with night-spotting scope clutched tightly.

Budanov started to bring the rifle up, but Kurshin finally fired, the shot catching the KGB officer in the right eye, shoving him violently backward against the rail, his knees collapsing beneath him.

Kurshin rushed out on deck, where he stood over Budanov's
body for just a moment. The man's left leg was twitching in death. Kurshin raised his pistol again and fired a second round into the shattered face.

“No mistake this time, Comrade,” he said, smiling.

Now it was time to leave.

Turning, he raced to the ladder up to the bridge, holstering his pistol. Topside he glanced down at the missile in its last few minutes of countdown to launch. Again he smiled.

“Succeed in this for me, Arkasha, and the world will be yours.” Baranov's words came clearly to his ears. “Money, women, status, and prestige.”

But he had never wanted any of those things. Always there had been only one constant in his life. Killing.

“Then you shall have that,” Baranov had said, laughing. “The streets will run red with blood wherever you walk.” Baranov had touched a finger to the side of his nose. “Believe in me, there is enough killing to be done in this world â¦ even for a man with your appetites.”

Kurshin found the two life raft canisters attached to the deck wings on either side of the bridge house. He quickly released the retaining straps holding the starboard-side canister down, and was about to toss it overboard when something hot and unbelievably hard slammed into his side, picking him bodily up off his feet and knocking him backward against the bulkhead.

He sat for several long moments, dazed, scarcely believing he had been shot. He looked down at his side. There wasn't much blood, but the bullet had passed beneath a rib and had exited out of the small of his back. He had been lucky.

Pulling himself half erect, he cautiously peered out over the edge of the rail, but he couldn't see a thing. The sea was pitch-black. He couldn't even distinguish the horizon.

Then he heard the sound of an outboard motor. Incoming. Very fast.

McGarvey, the single thought crystallized in his brain. The sonofabitch had come after all, and in a way Kurshin was glad for it. They would finish here now, the two of them, one way or the other.

Keeping below the level of the rail, he scrambled back to the
bridge door, opened it, and inside grabbed Sokolov's AK74 still leaning against the helmsman's chair.

Once again out on the starboard wing deck, he cycled a round into the firing chamber, keyed the night-spotting scope, and rose up. In one smooth motion he brought the scope to his eye, scanned the sea â¦ finding, then missing, then finding again the rubber raft. He got a brief impression that there might have been four men aboard. The raft was very close, well within twenty-five yards.

He fired, keeping his finger on the trigger, playing the rounds back and forth across the rubber raft, which literally exploded under his fusillade. And still he fired, until finally the assault rifle's firing pin hammered on an empty chamber.

Slowly, stiffly he rose up, as he continued to scan the water with the scope. There was a lot of debris in the water, but he could not tell if there were bodies, or if anyone lived.

Raising the scope a little higher he scanned the surrounding waters, but he could see no other boats.

Against all odds he had finally triumphed. This made up for everything. Baranov would forgive his previous mistakes.

“The world is
my
will and
my
idea, Arkasha. Never forget this.”

He laid the gun down and stood there for a long time wavering on his feet, his eyes coming in and out of focus.

Give yourself the chance, Arkasha. Minimize your risks wherever possible.

Stumbling to the portside wing, he released the other life raft canister and shoved it overboard. The instant it hit the water far below, the canister broke open and the raft began to automatically inflate.

He could not survive such a long fall into the water. Not now. Not wounded.

It seemed to take forever for him to climb down to the main deck, and when he reached the bottom of the ladder he fell, pain raging through his body, nearly causing him to black out.

Pulling himself up again, he worked his way past Budanov's body, where he opened an electrical panel on the bulkhead and hit the switch that lowered the boarding stairs.

Ainslie was gone and Newman had taken at least two rounds in the chest. He was unconscious but still alive. Potok, wounded himself, had managed to inflate his life jacket, and he held on to the Pentagon man.

They had spotted the single figure on the bridge deck, and McGarvey had fired a quick burst from the sniper rifle. The man had gone down, but seconds later all hell had broken loose.

Potok looked around. “Kirk?” he called out softly.

There was no answer.

The
Stephos
had drifted down on them and now was barely fifteen yards away. Potok could clearly see the Tomahawk missile raised in its launch position.

They had come so close, he thought bitterly. And they had failed.

“McGarvey,” he shouted.

But still there was no answer.

Kurshin stood at the head of the boarding stairs, his ear cocked. Had he heard a voice? Someone calling out? He held his breath to listen, but the night was silent.

There was no one. Even McGarvey could not have survived.

He started down. The fully inflated life raft had drifted with the current back down against the hull of the ship. Somehow he was going to have to paddle it away before the missile fired, and before the explosive charges below took the ship to the bottom.

Kurshin was halfway down the stairs when a dark figure suddenly rose up from the water and scrambled aboard. Blood flowed down the side of his face from a head wound, and as he straightened up to his full height Kurshin could see that he held a stiletto in his right hand. The holster strapped to his chest was empty.

His eyes!

The knowledge exploded in Kurshin's head.

“You're the devil,” he shouted.

“You knew that I was coming for you,” McGarvey said, starting up.

Kurshin backed up a step before he came to his senses. The man wasn't the devil â¦ he was nothing more than a man. He
grappled his pistol out of its holster and thumbed the safety off. But McGarvey was too quick.

They fell back against the stairs, each of them scrambling desperately to bring their weapons into play while holding on to the railing. Kurshin managed to yank his gun hand free, and he raked the barrel against McGarvey's skull with every ounce of his strength, causing the American to reel away.

McGarvey was like an animal driven by wounded rage. He recovered instantly, batting the gun away as Kurshin fired, the shot going wide, and the automatic slipping from his grasp and falling overboard.

An incredible pain stitched Kurshin's side, just below the gunshot wound. He had a split instant to realize that he had been stabbed, McGarvey's knife hand coming around again, when he kicked out, the heel of his boot catching the American full in the chest.

He turned and clambered on all fours back up the stairs to the deck of the ship, mindless of his wounds.

At the top, he raced forward to Budanov's body where he snatched up the man's Kalashnikov rifle, spun back on his heel and fired off a burst just as McGarvey started to come over the side.

The American either ducked or fell back, but Kurshin didn't wait to see. He turned again and raced forward around the superstructure to the foredeck where he flattened himself against the bulkhead. His breath was coming raggedly, and he didn't know how much longer he could hold on.

He raised his left wrist to his eyes and tried to focus on the watch numerals. It was 9:55. The missile would fire in five minutes.

He looked across at the Tomahawk elevated in its cradle, barely ten feet away. When its engines fired he would die. But he would have succeeded. He would have won. And that was all that counted now, because in the end McGarvey would be dead too.

McGarvey eased up again over the top of the rail and peered down the length of the port-side deck toward the bow of the ship. A man lay crumpled in a heap by an open doorway. But it wasn't Kurshin.

Time. It always came down to a matter of time, he thought. By
now the missile was most likely in its countdown mode. But the Russian would have set it to launch after he was clear of the ship.

Or would he? Or had he been delayed? Or didn't he care?

Kurshin had called him the devil. They were two men cut, in many respects, out of the same cloth. Both of them were killers. Only an accident of geography at the moment of their births had determined which side they killed for.

But Kurshin had murdered his own people for expediency's sake, hadn't he? Was there any difference between that and what he himself had done? By his own mistakes he had caused the deaths of a lot of good people. Their names and faces were always with him.

Who then was the worst: the killer by commission or the killer of innocent people by omission?

McGarvey pulled himself the rest of the way over the rail, paused in the darkness for just a second, and then raced forward on the balls of his feet toward the open doorway halfway up the port-side passageway.

Kurshin reached around the corner and fired a quick burst, raking the deck just as McGarvey ducked inside.

Without hesitation, McGarvey raced down the corridor to the starboard side, where he flung open the door with a crash. Then, careful to make no noise, he turned and hurried back the same way he had come.

Kurshin would be watching the starboard-side passageway now. He hoped.

Nothing moved on the port side as McGarvey emerged from the doorway, and stepping over the body of a man whose face had been mostly shot away, he sprinted forward.

Sensing something behind him, Kurshin started to turn as McGarvey reached him, shoving him up against the bulkhead, the point of the stiletto beneath his chin.

“When is it set to launch?” McGarvey shouted.

Kurshin tried to struggle, but McGarvey increased the pressure on the stiletto, drawing a little blood.

BOOK: Countdown

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