36. Chapter 36
Chapter thirty-six
Day 17 Petropavlovsk, Russia
The Heemitia, full and round in her silver finery, glowed down on Wolf as he and his warriors snowshoed through skeletal thickets of birch and alder. The air was cold and dry. It burned down his throat and into his lungs. He and Aggress One were snowshoeing around the northeastern edge of Petropavlovsk. Thirty minutes earlier, Aggress Two had split off and headed north to the electrical pole at the entrance to their prey’s compound. There, they would cut the power. Then both teams would strike.
When the backup generator rumbled to life and the perimeter cameras came on, the aggress would be over, and their quarry, along with his ominous new weapon, would be theirs.
So stood the plan.
Their abrupt departure for the far east of Russia had proven beneficial. The Thunderbird had landed in the hills above Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky before the low-pressure ridge arrived. If the Shadow Warrior smiled upon them, they’d lift off with their quarry before the escalating winds and heavy snow settled over the area.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky was in the badlands of Russia. Why, in Hee-nes’s glory, would Kuznetsov hide out here in this remote town where he was sandwiched between the volcanoes of Kamchatka and Russia’s largest naval base? Where the only way in and out was by boat, plane, or helicopter.
Mackenzie wasn’t the only one who’d questioned Benioko’s knowledge. The elder gods in the Shadow Realm were the Taounaha’s standard source of information, and they did not offer physical proof. Yet the photos and videos provided by the Old One were physical. Concrete. And accurate.
Still, the location Kuznetsov had chosen seemed irrational. Why would the world’s most hunted arms dealer hide within the country of his exile? Perhaps because it was unlikely USSOCOM would risk the sleeping giant’s ire by sending a special ops team so deep into Russian territory. Besides, their prey had two means of escape. A chopper squatting in his bluff-side compound, and a massive, opulent yacht moored in Avacha Bay below. It was Wolf’s job to ensure Kuznetsov didn’t reach either.
At the edge of the tree line, next to the chain-link fence that surrounded Kuznetsov’s snow scraped compound, Wolf and his warriors shucked their snowshoes. They didn’t bother hooking them to their kits. They wouldn’t need them again as the thunderbird would lift them from the Russian’s doorstep.
On his belly beneath the scratchy, sparse branches of a dwarf Siberian pine, Wolf scanned the dark compound through his rifle’s scope. The wind had picked up. It howled through the trees, flinging needles and dead branches in every direction.
“ Aggress Two, countdown to first mark?” Wolf asked into his comm.
“Five minutes to strike,” Tomas Beck, the team two leader, said over the comm.
Mark one was the electricity. They needed to bring down the security cameras. Beneath the infrared cameras, Wolf and his warriors would stand out like pulsing red flames on the camera feeds.
“Gotta say, boys,” a low, southern drawl whispered through Wolf’s headset. “It’s a damn good thing we included snowshoein’ in our PT. That would have been brutal if we weren’t used to it.”
Low grunts of agreement hit Wolf’s headset.
“The wind’s a bitch, though. Could do without that,” one of the former SEALs added softly, either Zane or Cosky. Wolf couldn’t tell them apart through the headset.
“Like I told y’all, this place is the ass crack of Russia,” that slow, southern drawl said. “Cold as a witch’s tit during a blizzard.”
A what?
The puzzled inquiry came from Samuel, who was often baffled by Rawlings’s idioms. But the query didn’t come over the comm, or through the mouth. It came through the Neealaho, the neural web that linked all his warriors’ thoughts. All except for the former SEALs.
The four woohanta had not been invited to submit to the merging ceremony. They would not have survived. Thus, they were not bound to the Neealaho , and unable to communicate telepathically with the rest of his warriors. This put them at a distinct disadvantage, although they were unaware of it. The headsets he and his men reluctantly wore were for the benefit of the former SEALs, since there was no way to communicate with them outside of modern technology.
Wolf absently listened to the woohanta ’s complaints as he scanned the compound again. He almost told them to hold their tongues, but it was unnecessary. His scope held no one in sight. Between the wind and whispering voices, the guards would hear nothing spoken here.
Samuel. Fence. Wolf instinctively sent the order through the Neealaho , but on Samuel’s neural path.
It was easy to send an overall message through the neural web. But it took concentration to identify and follow an individual warrior’s mental pathway and link with them privately. Of all his warriors, Samuel was the easiest to reach. They’d been hee-javaanee since grade school, joined Shadow Mountain together, even been linked to the Neealaho through Jude at the same time. Touching Samuel’s mind was akin to touching his own. His second eased up to the chain-link fence and started cutting the links.
“Once through the fence, spread out. Stay low. Strike on my command,” Wolf said softly into the comm and through the Neealaho.
“Don’t seem right without Aiden beside us.” The southern twang gave the speaker away.
A grunt of agreement came through the comm. It sounded tense. Worried. Probably Cosky, then. Kait, Cosky’s anistino, was waiting in front of Aiden’s isolation chamber, desperate to heal him. Wolf had forbidden this until the final medical results came in. She had not been pleased, but they could not have their strongest healer compromised when they might have need of her gift.
Wolf agreed with Rawlings, though. It felt wrong not to have his javaanee beside him. But the elder gods had reasons for the paths their chosen’s feet took. In Aiden’s case, to the ER instead of Petropavlovsk.
It was not for Wolf to question the path taken.
Samuel cut the last link, stuffed the bolt cutters into his kit, and pulled it back on. Crouching, Wolf shuffled to the hole and shimmied through as Samuel peeled the chain link to the side. The snow was thigh deep on the other side. He waded through it alongside the chain-link until he was out of the way. Dropping belly-flat again, he scanned the compound through his rifle scope as the rest of his warriors wiggled through the hole and spread out across the snow. The north end of the compound was higher than the south, so even with the berm of ice and snow fifty feet ahead, he still had an excellent view of the compound and the houses it contained. The wind was gentler this close to the ground, stroking instead of buffeting. He scanned again. Still no movement.
With the weight of his body spread across the snowpack and the top layer beneath him more ice than snow, Wolf didn’t sink far into the layers below him. But that wouldn’t hold true once he moved.
Finally, the last man crawled through the hole in the fence—which must be Mackenzie because of all the motherfucker this and motherfucker that’s .
“ Aggress Two, countdown?” he asked into the comm as he continued scanning the compound with his scope.
One minute . The update came through the Neealaho .
“One minute to strike,” Wolf said into the comm for the woohantas’ sake.
A flicker of movement at the guard’s shack froze his scope in place. The door opened, and a parka clad guard with his hood pulled up, stepped out the door with his rifle hanging.
“ Aggress Two, we have movement at mark three. Repeat. Movement at M3. Guard turning south.”
“Understood.” The affirmative was cool, almost casual.
Mark one was the electricity. Mark two, Kuznetsov and the weapon. Three, the guards.
Wolf watched the guard, the edges of his parka flapping, stagger directly into the savage wind. The door opened again. A second guard, dressed like the first, stepped onto the house’s porch. This one turned north, away from the wind.
“Second guard headed north,” Wolf whispered.
“Understood,” Tomas said with his habitual calmness. “Thirty seconds to strike. Repeat. Thirty to strike.”
One…two…three…
Wolf counted the seconds off in his head while monitoring their mark’s house through the scope pressed to his right eye.
When the electricity went down, the guards might return to their shelter. Eight…nine…ten… Or they might not. Fifteen…sixteen…seventeen. Professionals would immediately head toward their betanei, their boss, determined to protect their paycheck.
He shifted his scope in the direction the first guard had taken. Nothing. Twenty-five…twenty-six…twenty-seven…
The compound went dark.
“ Aggress !” Wolf said through the comm and the Neealaho .
With his men beside him, he bolted up. The thigh deep snow sucked at his legs, turning the charge across the snow into a slog. It only took seconds to force their way through the boot sucking snow to the berm of ice and snow that separated them from the plowed parking lot.
Teddy reached the top of the mound and dropped to his belly. With the infrared scope attached to his rifle sweeping the compound, he’d knock down any guard who presented a problem.
The snow and ice squeaking beneath his boots, Wolf and the rest of Aggress One flipped their NVDs down and scrambled up and over the ridge, then advanced steadily along the huge snow pile that flanked the east fence.
If the Shadow Warrior favored them, they’d blend into the snowbank, camouflaged as they were with their white kits and winter fatigues. Still, his heart and pulse hammered in his ears, the combination as loud as the roar of the Thunderbird on lift off. The lack of Teddy’s rifle fire assured him the guards hadn’t returned from their walkabout…yet.
The electricity was still down as they reached the edge of the east snow pile. Twenty feet to their quarry. One by one, they darted to the back of the house and spread out along the rear wall. They’d employ a double breach, assaulting into the house from the front and rear, where they’d pinch Kuznetsov between the two aggress teams. The four SEALs, along with O’Neill, would breach the rear entrance, while Wolf and his warriors would strike from the front.
Winters presented his kit to Simcosky, who untied it and pulled out one of the pneumatic door breachers.
“Blades, not rifles,” Wolf reminded them through his comm, keeping his voice to a low, toneless whisper. Even suppressed, a rifle blast would alert Kuznetsov to their presence. “Breach on my command.”
Samuel pulled another breacher from Wolf’s kit and followed Wolf around the side of the cabin to the front entrance. Aggress Two should have surrounded the guard’s shack by now.
Still no shots hitting the air. Not from Teddy. Not from the guards. Only the static cry of the wind. He took a second to listen…to scan the compound through the green wash of his NVDs.
A-2, countdown to breach? Wolf sent the question through the neural web.
Their plan called for all doors to open simultaneously, followed by immediate aggress .
Ready. Tomas’s confident voice filled Wolf’s mind.
“ Aggress in ten,” Wolf said softly through the Neealaho and the comm.
He kept watch for unwelcome eyes and ears, as Samuel inserted the thin ledge of the breacher into the gap between the door and the frame. The sound of the pneumatic thrust, and the ripping of the bolt from the frame was barely audible and masked by the rattle of the cabin’s windows as Sister Wind picked at the glass. The door hung open, listing forward. Samuel dropped the door breacher next to the wall and unsheathed his knife.
As one unmatched in knife work, Samuel went in first—low, fast, and silent—his knife pinched between his thumb and index fingers. Wolf followed, the rest of his warriors sliding in behind him.
A green-tinted guard slouched in an armchair next to a crackling fire. The guard jackknifed up as they burst through the door. Lifting his rifle, he swung the muzzle in Samuel’s direction. The knife was a blur as it left his Caetanee’s fingers .
The blade sank deep and true, silencing the shout rounding the guard’s stubbled mouth. Samuel’s victim dropped his rifle to claw at his throat, where the black of the knife handle bristled against a stream of red. Wolf launched himself across the room as the dying man yanked the blade free and the trickle of red became a fountain. If the guard grabbed the rifle and pulled the trigger before he died, their advantage would be lost, a dangerous position to be in when a mind-rending weapon was possibly on the premises.
He snatched the rifle from the guard’s lax grip and turned to scan the room. A saggy couch. A couple of recliners that listed to the side. Another armchair. But no other guards. He half turned toward the stairway in the middle of the room. It rose sharply and curved to the right. No rail, just plank walls.
Daniel, Samuel’s jenaaee , took position with his back against the wall beside the door. This was the young one’s first aggress , but he already showed the sharp instincts, intelligence, and steady nature that made his anisbecco such a lethal warrior. Samuel had done well in shaping him.
Wolf scanned the living room again. So far, the interior of the house matched the plans the Taounaha’s contact had dug up. There should be four bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. Kuznetsov was likely up there.
“We’re clear back here,” Mackenzie said through the comm.
Kitchen secure. Dining room secure. The updates came through the Neealaho as his warriors search the lower level of the house. Wolf relaxed as the clears hit his ears or mind.
The silence was holding. Their success looked certain.
His thoughts proved a reckless dare.
From outside, rifle fire lit the night. Loud and continuous, it easily caught Wolf’s ear. It caught another ear, too. On the floor above, high-pitched maniacal barking challenged the gun fire.
Small. Trivial teeth. No jaw strength or size to cause damage.
He dismissed the danger the dog presented, although if the rifle fire hadn’t woken Kuznetsov, the noise the ankle biter was making would. Concern for his outside warriors slid through his mind. He shut it down. His own battle stood before him. Pivoting, he launched himself at the stairs.
Success rode the back of silence, but their silence had fled and alerted their quarry to the hunt.