Chapter 2
When Lev Nikitin and Matvey Orlov burst out of the woods, they were focused on the big Jeep and getting into it.
Orlov reached it first. He threw the spotting scope and its tripod on the floor of the back seat and jumped in after it, pulling the door shut behind him.
Nikitin, carrying the rifle, took an extra three seconds to skid around the back of the truck to the front passenger door, popped it open and vaulted inside, putting the butt of the rifle on the floor and trapping it between his legs.
Katerina Abramova was behind the wheel and was rolling before Nikitin had his door shut and she was chanting, “Fast, fast, fast…”
Nikitin: “What! What!”
She was looking in the rearview mirror: “In the street behind us…”
She was leaning on the gas pedal as the bullets started popping through the back of the truck. Orlov cried out and said, “Hit!” and then, the impacts coming like hail on a tin roof, “Hit again…”
Nikitin was hit next, then Abramova was hit in the rim of her left ear, blood spattering the windshield, but she ignored it and put a phone to her other ear and shouted into it, “Crash pickup, three wounded, three minutes.”
The incoming bullets had all been fired in four or five seconds and they ran away from them and Nikitin turned in his seat, groaned and asked Orlov, “Matvey…how bad?”
Orlov groaned and Nikitin said, “Matvey…”
“One above my belt in my back…no exit. One in my butt and down my leg. Bleeding is bad. Bleeding is bad.” He groaned again. He was slumped over in the back, but held up a hand, saturated with scarlet streaks of blood.
Nikitin: “Katya. How bad?”
“I have a new hole in my ear,” Abramova said. “I will not bleed out. And you?”
Nikitin had pulled down the sun visor, then pushed up the cover on the mirror on the back of the visor, and was peering at his neck.
“In my butt and the side of my neck. I don’t think it hit the carotid, it’s not pumping but it’s bleeding, small hole in, bigger out, but it might have been a fragment. I think it hit the headrest first…”
“Two minutes or less,” Abramova said.
Orlov: “I can’t walk.”
“We’ll carry,” she said.
The truck ricochetted off a pothole and Orlov screamed, groaned, said, “Don’t do that…”
She did it again, because she couldn’t slow enough to miss the potholes, and Orlov screamed each time and began farting, and he screamed with the farts and Nikitin half-groaned and half-laughed and said, “Mat, you dirty piece of shit…”
Abramova glanced over the seat at Orlov in the back and asked, “Mat, can you put on your mask? Can you get your mask out?”
“Yes…” Another groan.
Nikitin had taken a black ski mask out of his pocket and was pulling it over his head, and when it was on, reached across to Abramova and pulled a mask out of her parka pocket and dropped it in her lap. She waited until she was clear of traffic and then quickly pulled it over her face.
Three miles away, Melor Titov was sitting in a cream-colored Subaru and when the call came in—“Crash pickup”—he smothered a groan, blurted, “On the way,” and put the little SUV in gear.
He’d had some training in avoidance and escape driving, but much more in computer systems and language, and he wanted nothing to do with this hit team.
His job was acquiring papers, not doing crash pickups for killers.
If he didn’t do it, he might be next on the kill list; surely would be, if he didn’t show up at the motel parking lot, and it wouldn’t be a gentle death.
Some display of bravery and resolution was critical, but the quicker he could get back to his regular job in Chicago, the happier he’d be.
He pulled a black ski mask over his head and took off.
· · ·
Orlov couldn’t see out of the truck, but Nikitin could, and he feared that Abramova was going to kill them with speed, if the bullet wounds didn’t do it first. She was cutting through traffic like a great white shark going through a pod of sea lions.
Three minutes later, just as she’d said, she cut into a motel parking lot and yanked the truck to the left into a parking slot.
Abramova: “I don’t see…Yes! He’s here!”
The small SUV was right there, behind them, and Nikitin opened his door and Abramova shouted, “Lev, don’t wait, get in if you can! Melor and I will take Mat!”
Nikitin nearly fell but managed to stagger and hop to the open back door of the Subaru and crawl inside, his injured leg numb with the impact of the bullet, the neck wound burning like fire.
Behind him, he could see a bystander staring at them as Abramova shouted, “Move, move,” and he dragged himself farther across the back seat and Abramova and the burly driver of the Subaru shoved Orlov almost on top of him.
Orlov looked at them with glassy eyes and his lips moved but nothing came out of his mouth, then a rifle, pistol, and spotting scope hit the floor at his feet and the back door slammed and then the Subaru driver and Abramova were in the front seats and the car was moving.
· · ·
Titov, the Subaru’s wheelman, had them out of the motel parking lot and around a corner in ten seconds, took them down the open highway at ninety miles an hour.
Abramova said, conversationally, not critically, for a bleeding woman, “Don’t want to attract traffic police,” and Titov said, “Nobody on the road coming in.”
He slowed to the speed limit as he approached a cross highway, took them onto the highway, accelerated to speed again, for half a mile, then took them into a residential neighborhood, watching the mirrors, accelerating when he safely could, and three or four minutes later, pulled into a narrow, heavily wooded lane that led back to a little-used boat-launching ramp.
Another Jeep, this one black, a Wrangler, Titov’s personal car and positioned as the disaster pickup vehicle, was waiting for them. The wounded trio were in the new car in a minute, and the Jeep rolled out of the lane, through the neighborhood, and out on the highway again.
“Fifteen minutes to the house,” Titov grunted. “This is fucked. This is so fucked.”
“They were very fast, too fast,” Abramova said. “Two shooters, a tall one and a short one.”
“Sokolov?” Titov asked.
“I missed him, I might have hit his wife,” Nikitin said. “It was like he knew it was coming. He ducked down just as I squeezed the trigger. I fired a second time but couldn’t see what happened and then we were running.”
Titov looked at Abramova: “How much damage?”
“Not much, hit in the ear,” she said, brushing back her blond hair to show him the sticky blood still leaking out of the rim of her ear.
She was Circassian, with the pale white complexion and long blond hair of her particular tribe, and the pallor vibrated with the crimson blood.
“Lev and Mat are bleeding badly, we need to stop it.”
“Thirteen minutes, maybe twelve,” Titov said. He slowed as a police car, light bar flashing at them, sped past in the opposite direction, headed for the hideout.
Abramova, sitting in the passenger seat, unlocked her safety belt and got to her knees to look at the men in the back.
“Drive straight and easy,” she told Titov, got her feet underneath her, and climbed over the seat into the back, between the two men.
Orlov groaned when she tumbled onto one of his legs and Nikitin asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to plug Matvey, if I can find his wounds…and you, too.”
The three members of the team had gotten Russian Army combat medical training, which was barely adequate under the best circumstances, before they’d moved on, individually, and several years apart, to GRU Unit 29155—GRU being the Russian Federation’s equivalent to the CIA.
Members of the Unit were not expected to encounter full-on combat.
Titov had different training, as an expert in exfiltration and life as an American.
So, knowing not much, Abramova dug into a pants pocket and pulled out a five-inch switchblade, flicked out the blade.
She stripped off her parka and pulled off her flannel shirt and cut it into patches.
Orlov was lying on his side, with the wounds up, and Abramova pulled up his coat and Orlov groaned again.
He had a pistol in a clip on his belt, and she set it aside.
Using the knife, Abramova cut away his shirt and undershirt, found a bullet wound in his back, with no exit wound.
Blood was squeezing out onto his sodden clothing, and she pushed a wad of flannel into the wound, saw blood on Orlov’s leg, cut his jeans away, and put another wad of flannel into the bullet hole in his butt. Again, there was no exit wound.
As Titov said, “Six minutes,” she turned to Nikitin and said, “Show me.”
He showed her, and she plugged the wound in his leg as best she could, although she didn’t think it was very good.
The neck wound was more superficial, and no longer bleeding heavily.
“We need the medical kit, the bleed-stop,” she said.
“Lev could be okay long enough to find a plane ride, but Mat…Mat needs a doctor, and soon. And, I think, he might need blood.”
Titov said, “One minute.”
· · ·
Titov—Leon Jackson, as American as borscht, a sleeper agent—had spent the last two weeks in a furnished, rented house in the town of Minnetrista.
He worked in Chicago as a real estate agent for a Serbian-owned agency.
The agency boss knew better than to ask questions when Titov had to take days off for what the boss referred to as his “side hustle.”
He’d been activated when the Russian SVR, one of the country’s foreign intelligence services, learned that Orono, Minnesota, had been chosen by Sokolov and the Marshals Service as the place where Sokolov would live under the name Leonard Summers.