Authors: Russell Blake
Leo fell forward, his legs crumpling beneath him, and the shooter took two steps and fired a third shot into his head with the calm deliberation of a professional. After a final glance at the Russian’s body, the pair left Leo lying facedown in the trash-strewn grass and strolled back to the ambulance.
She waited until its brake lights had turned the corner and disappeared before running to the field to confirm that it was really Leo. The side of the man’s face was bandaged so she couldn’t tell at first, but when she turned him over, the other was undamaged, and Leo’s wide eyes stared into eternity with the puzzled shock of the dead.
Jet frisked him but found nothing in his pockets, and was on her way back to the bike when the sound of a motor from down the road startled her. She barely made it back to the dumpster when a small cargo truck paused by where Leo was lying and three men descended from the back, one of them carrying a body bag. Thirty seconds later Leo’s body had been tossed into the back of the vehicle like a sack of manure and the truck was pulling away, leaving Jet alone behind the dumpster. Obviously the attorney had crossed the wrong people – who, was immaterial to her – and his luck had run out.
She climbed back onto the motorcycle and thumbed her phone to life. When Matt answered, she gave him a brief summary of what she’d witnessed.
“Would have been nice if you’d known that yesterday, huh?” he asked gently after a short pause.
Jet sighed and closed her eyes. “It’s always nice when things work out.”
“I’ll say. Are you coming home now?”
She checked the cheap stolen watch and smiled in the moonlight. “About time, don’t you think?”
“Be careful.”
“Always.”
Dudarkiv, Ukraine
A ground fog blanketed the fields north of the Boryspil International Airport, lending the farmland a spectral appearance beneath the stippling of midnight stars. Yulia sat cross-legged in the freshly turned soil with a pair of binoculars glued to her face and two Igla-S shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile launchers beside her. A rusting Nissan Pathfinder was parked nearby, its lights extinguished. The driver, Pavel, lounged against the passenger door, staring at the glittering complex a few kilometers away.
The airport glowed like a Vegas casino, its runways illuminated and the terminals alight with night traffic on long-haul flights to and from Europe and Russia – as well as one in particular that Yulia was watching with rapt attention as it pushed back from the gate. A Boeing 767 bound for London, scheduled for takeoff in just a few more minutes, with well over two hundred passengers aboard, including three American diplomats critical to ensuring there would be swift international outrage at the flight’s destruction shortly after takeoff.
The wreckage and the abandoned launch tube would bear out that a Russian missile had been used, indicting the pro-Russian separatists and solidifying the administration that Yulia worked for as the morally superior choice to run the country. The civil war, in which Russia had been supporting the separatist rebels fighting what they claimed was the illegal military coup and ouster of the democratically elected government, had been bloody and violent – but this would serve as the deciding blow, at least per the analysts who’d devised the plot to shoot down an airliner with a Russian missile, making it straightforward to blame the separatists for the unconscionable act of terrorism.
That it had been hatched by anti-Russian forces wouldn’t matter. The world would believe what it was told by the media, which had already been primed with fake threats from unnamed insurgent factions aligned with the Russians. Now, a few hundred innocents would have their lives sacrificed to achieve a noble cause, and it didn’t bother Yulia in the slightest that she was about to commit a crime against humanity. She’d watched her country torn apart, and if some airline passengers had to die in order to bring about a new world order with nukes on Russia’s border, as well as anti-Russian forces controlling the most valuable corridor for Western goods to Russia, so be it.
She didn’t understand all the geopolitical nuances at play, nor did she much care whether her country was being used as a pawn in a larger chess game. What she knew was that she hated the Russian pigs with a consuming passion, the venom originating in a teenage atrocity at the hands of two drunk Russian tourists that she’d spent her adult life putting behind her.
Anything that would hurt Russia was good in her book, and if the entire nation was nuked into the Stone Age, so much the better. She’d never shared her motivations with anyone, but the thought of the headlines the following day, the Russian bear tarred and feathered in the world’s eyes before it even had a chance to react, made her heart beat faster.
She adjusted the binoculars to better track the airliner, whose running lights were blinking as it trundled slowly in its departure taxi to the runway. Those who’d planned the attack had given her all the information she’d require, right down to the exact position where she would need to wait in order to be directly in the plane’s path on takeoff. Yulia had been in the cold field for almost an hour, the surroundings pitch black, the area uninhabited except for a few remote farms whose residents had long before gone to sleep.
“Won’t be long now,” she said.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Pavel said, his voice gruff from years of smoking and a taste for the distilled spirit.
“I’m fine. It’s getting ready to make the turn onto the runway.”
She lowered the spyglasses and armed one of the missiles, as she’d been shown how on the afternoon the missiles had arrived by a nameless advisor who’d come and gone like a ghost. She hadn’t cared who the man was or asked any questions. It was unimportant. She was doing her duty, following orders – that was all she needed to know.
The missile had an infrared guidance system that would home in on the heat signal of one of the pair of jets that powered the plane. She’d been assured that a direct hit at low altitude would result in, at the very least, a catastrophic failure of the aircraft’s fuel, hydraulic, and propulsion systems, resulting in a fatal crash if she was lucky or a badly damaged crash landing if not – the latter still enough to accomplish the outcome on the world stage; although, as the advisor had stressed, not as favorable as a messy crash with hundreds of casualties.
She shouldered the launch tube, peering through the sights at the tiny blip that was the airfield. Yulia didn’t need the binoculars to see with better definition any longer. There was only one plane taking off in the next few seconds and flying overhead. There could be no mistaking it.
Yulia held her breath as the blip began moving, and then it was airborne, clawing its way into the night sky with a distant roar. She’d been told to fire as it approached, the aircraft’s altitude likely in the two thousand meter range, giving her ample opportunity for a second shot if the first failed for any reason. With a ceiling of three thousand meters, the missile was relatively accurate, and in this case, against a civilian aircraft, would likely be deadly.
The underside of the onrushing plane was stark white against the dark backdrop as it approached, and when it was nearly overhead, she squeezed the trigger. The missile launched with a hiss of smoke, trailing a tail of flame, and streaked toward the jet. Yulia watched in disbelief as it passed just behind the wings and continued harmlessly into the night.
She scrambled for the second tube, armed the missile, and adjusted her position, the plane now past her.
Pavel’s voice called from the truck. “What happened?”
Yulia didn’t answer, maintaining her concentration as she took aim and loosed the second missile. She followed its course using the launcher sights and swore as it too failed to lock onto the jet and streaked wide.
Pavel came running, his breathing a rasp. “What the hell?”
“Something went wrong. Both almost hit it, but they didn’t home in.” She eyed the spent launchers. “The infrared didn’t work.”
“Damaged?”
“Both of them, in the exact same way? Hard to imagine.” She paused. “More likely they were defective from the factory, or…sabotaged.”
“We’ve had them under lock and key the entire time.”
Yulia nodded. “And the advisor checked them. He verified they were fine. I don’t understand…” Her voice trailed off as she remembered Sandra – the mystery woman who’d helped her escape from Russia. They’d discovered that she’d broken into the armory, but only taken a few trivial items.
Could she have disarmed the weapons?
It was the only answer that made sense.
And yet…why?
Yulia considered the question as she and Pavel ran for the Pathfinder, the wail of distant sirens from the city signaling that the missiles had been spotted on radar. Sandra must have figured out that there was only one logical reason for the Ukraine to source Russian antiaircraft missiles, and had taken steps to render them harmless.
Why she would have risked her life to do so when she’d been trying to escape the camp was the real mystery. Yulia threw herself into the Nissan as Pavel started the engine, her focus turning to the convoy of vehicles racing their way and the flashing lights of a military helicopter on the horizon.
“Keep the headlights off and drive like the wind,” she said, buckling up, painfully aware that without the chaos of a downed plane, her odds were low of surviving the night. She also knew that capture wasn’t an option – her group had to be kept out of the public eye under all circumstances, and exposure in this case could well bring down the puppet government.
Her fingers brushed the butt of her pistol and she steeled herself for the chase to come, furious with herself that she’d underestimated Sandra – an oversight for which she would likely pay with her life.
Câmpulung Moldovenesc, Romania
The bus stopped beside the town square and several figures disembarked: an old man carrying several cloth-wrapped bundles, a youth with baggy pants and an oversized soccer jersey lugging a rucksack and a battered guitar case, and a woman with a headscarf worn in the traditional manner, a red sweater draped over her shoulders, carrying only a small tote bag.
Jet adjusted the sweater as she scanned the square. She didn’t see anyone suspicious, but so ingrained was her caution after the last week’s events she assumed that any watchers were better than her ability to spot them. She walked across the pavilion to the ancient church and entered and, after rushing through the building past a startled priest, ducked out the rear exit and hurried across the street to a small park. At the perimeter she dodged a bicyclist and cut across the manicured grounds to jaywalk across a busy boulevard, earning several outraged horn honks as the stream of cars created a moving steel barrier between her and any pursuit.
The trip to Romania had been easy after she’d had Matt courier her one of her clean passports, and the flight to the nearby international airport had been thankfully uneventful. She’d spent the time waiting for her document’s arrival dying her hair lighter and modifying the cut by several inches. For a finishing touch, she’d taken the time to purchase some local garments in order to present an older, less striking figure, and had opted for the bus for the last leg of her journey due to its anonymity – much of the native population used the ubiquitous conveyances for any long-distance travel, cars being a luxury in the impoverished rural reaches. Jet posing as just another down-on-her-luck passenger wouldn’t raise any eyebrows, and her research had indicated that there were few identification checks on the land routes.
Satisfied that she wasn’t being followed, she made her way down a cobblestone street, past a flea market, to a three-story maroon building. She looked up at a hand-painted sign over the double wooden doors with a stylized depiction of three lambs in a large bed, announcing the Three Sheep Traveler’s Inn. After a final glance around the surroundings, she ascended the steps and placed a call.
“I’m downstairs,” she whispered, ignoring the stern eye of the desk clerk.
“Second floor, first room on the right.”
At the top of the stairs, she approached the green door and rapped softly. Matt opened it, a grin in place, and took her in his arms. Hannah’s cry from behind him came a second later.
“Mama!”
Matt released her and Jet knelt down to hug her daughter, who was simultaneously laughing and crying, tears streaming down her plump cheeks as Jet held her to her bosom and stroked her hair.
“I’m back, sweetie. Mama loves you.” After several long moments she held Hannah at arm’s length, inspecting her, and wiped the tears away. “I’m so happy to see you again, my angel.”
“Me too.”
“I missed you, too,” Matt said from behind her.
Jet looked at the bed, where Matt and Hannah’s few possessions were gathered, ready for departure, as agreed. Jet ran her fingers through Hannah’s hair and stood. “Go wash your face and use the bathroom,” she said. When Hannah had closed the door behind her, Jet sat down on the bed and looked up at Matt.
“New haircut and color?” she said, inspecting his close-cropped military-style cut, nearly black from dye.
“To match the new goatee.”
“You look like a pirate.”
He shrugged. “Hopefully enough to fool any facial recognition software.”
She grew serious. “Any ideas on where to go?”
“I’m thinking Budapest or Prague, to start. We can drive to either, ditch the car, and there are thriving markets for slightly used passports there. We can reload our cache, maybe get a little surgery, and pick someplace permanent once we’ve had time to research it more.”
“No idea how they spotted us?”
He shook his head. “None at all. Any chance there will be blowback on your Russian?”
“I left no trail.”
Neither of them voiced the obvious: that as careful as they’d been, somehow their enemies had found them in an eastern European backwater, and without knowing how, it could happen again.
“I don’t suppose it’s worth bringing up the possibility of splitting up, at least for a while?” Matt said softly.