CHAPTER 91
Port of Baltimore
We had fifty million dollars’ worth of Egorov’s stuff. Of course he wanted Joseph and Natasha released, and the cash and the art delivered to a place of his choosing. If I complied and played nice, he would release our girl.
The message from Egorov was simple and to the point:
Bring me my money in a moving truck. Come alone.
I will watch you until I am satisfied that you are not being followed too closely by your friends in Chesapeake Security.
I will call you from a number you won’t bother to trace and tell you where to park.
You stand in front of truck, and I bring Ms. Fuller to you.
We make the trade, and we are done. Once I leave, you call your friends and have them pick you up. Simple.
I had to hand it to the guy—he was thorough when it came to instructions. But I was going to find out what he really wanted from me—clearly it was something besides delivering his dough.
In ten minutes, we had loaded everything and everybody into the 4Runner and the Florida Moving and Storage box of fun.
The Black Star folks had their own cleaning crew wheels up before we finished packing. The cops hadn’t posted yet, so we would leave it to the cleaning crew to deal with the dead bodies and remove any prints, shell casings, or other items that might connect us with the assault.
We picked up Si from his house and headed west to the sugarcane fields.
Stu had the pilots dialed in on his Iridium, and within five minutes we heard the blades cutting through the sky and assumed the PZ posture.
At touchdown, Oliver, JP, and Jimmy loaded the two Russian passengers into the Bell 429, which left seconds later.
The second exfil was slightly trickier in that the heavy load going out with me and the rest of Team Rhino would require a much larger helicopter.
The Black Star guys had a heavy-lift, modified Chinook available, but it would need to change crews and refuel somewhere in the Carolinas before it could get to us.
We picked an alternate PZ north of Lake Okeechobee and waited there for our exfil.
Every one of us was thinking the same thing, but knew enough not to bring it up.
We’d had a gunfight, with no friendly casualties.
We’d killed some bad guys and captured two high-value targets.
We’d changed the plan on the fly and had met no resistance from the boss.
Our first package was en route to home base and the last moving piece of our puzzle was inbound in an hour.
Achieving these markers defied staggering odds.
My only mission now was to bring Meg home safe and sound.