Road Of Bones. Don Pendleton

“You say I give them too much credit for stupidity, Tanni,” he said, using her nickname. “I think you make them omniscient when they’re not.”

       “We’ll see,” she answered, thinking to herself that twenty minutes was a lifetime.

      * * *

      “SPREAD OUT and sweep the terminal. Eyes sharp,” Valentin Grushin said.

       “And if we spot them?” Pavel Antonov inquired.

       “No shooting in the terminal,” Grushin replied. “No shooting, period, unless they leave no other choice. Remember they’re wanted for questioning.”

       Mikhail Krylov snorted at that. “They may prefer to be shot.”

       “It’s their choice, then,” Grushin said. “Just follow your orders.”

       They fanned out to cover the terminal, three hunters seeking their prey. Outside the terminal, watching the exits, their fourth man—Fyodor Dushkin—sat at the wheel of a Lada Riva sedan, waiting to signal if the targets slipped past them somehow.

       If they were even at the airport now.

       Grushin trusted the tip they’d received, but the caller had mentioned no flight in particular, no destination. By now, the targets could have flown the coop on any one of nine airlines, with destinations ranging from China and Thailand to Egypt, Tunisia and most of Europe.

       What they would not do, if they were sane, was try to hide in Russia. That was tantamount to slow and painful suicide.

       Grushin was tasked to find and seize the targets, not pursue them if they managed to fly out of Yakutsk Airport. If he missed them, his part in the hunt was finished.

       But his trouble would have just begun.

       The people who employed him paid for positive results in cash. Their currency for failure was a very different proposition altogether.

       As he moved along the concourse, Grushin watched for uniformed Militsiya officers, acutely conscious of the PP-2000 machine pistol that he wore beneath his long coat on a leather sling. The weapon measured only 13.4 inches with its stock folded and weighed about five pounds with a fully loaded magazine of forty-four 9 mm Parabellum rounds. For this job, Grushin had foregone the 7N31 +P+ armor-piercing loads, but had some in the car, in case the hunt became a chase on wheels.

       In which case, he supposed, they likely would have failed.

       A crackle from the tiny earbud that he wore almost made Grushin jump. Krylov’s voice telling him, “I’ve found them. Ural Airlines.”

       Flushed with instantaneous relief, Grushin changed course and walked more rapidly across the terminal.

      * * *

      “SON OF A BITCH!” Dollezhal spit the words as if they tasted foul. “I know that man in the blue windbreaker.”

       Anuchin found the man he was referring to and felt her heart skip as she realized that he was watching them.

       Five minutes left until their flight was called for boarding, and the chance was lost to them. How many other trackers were there in the terminal, converging on them even now?

       “Let’s go,” Dollezhal said urgently.

       “Go where?” she countered. “He’s already seen us.”

       “Seeing’s one thing,” he replied. “Holding’s another.”

       Fearing that they were already lost, she nonetheless stood and shouldered her carry-on with the laptop inside. There was nothing in it to hang them if she had to ditch it, running. All the details were inside her head and in her companion’s, ready for bullets to scramble and wipe out the warning they carried.

       Even now, they didn’t run, but walked with purpose, swiftly, Anuchin having no idea of Dollezhal’s plan or destination. When they missed their flight, as they were bound to do, what avenues remained?

       “In here,” he said, ducking into a men’s restroom without looking back.

       Cheeks flaming from childish embarrassment, Anuchin followed, prepared to ask what he was doing when he clutched her arm and pulled her away from the door.

       “Find a stall,” he commanded. “Lock it. Put your feet up.”

       As if that would help, when the man had seen them both enter. Still, she followed instructions, chose the middle of nine toilet stalls, closed the door and secured its cheap latch. Then she climbed up on the seat, crouching awkwardly over the bowl.

       Anuchin heard the restroom door swing open, followed by a scuffling sound and muttered cursing.

       Dollezhal was fighting for his life.

       Her first instinct was to rush out and help him, but the phut of a silenced weapon stopped her. Teetering on top of the commode, she waited, trembling, as footsteps advanced toward the stalls and their doors began to slam open.

       The first touch on hers met resistance. A gruff voice said, “Here,” and the scraping of shoe soles converged. Knuckles rapped and a voice like a wood rasp inquired, “Are you there, little traitor?”

       Irrationally, she kept silent, then bit her tongue to keep from squealing as another phut punched a hole in the cubicle’s door and cracked the tile behind her, stinging her neck with splinters.

       “Open up!” a second voice commanded her. “We’re tired of playing now!”

       She stood, unlatched the door, leaving room for herself as it opened, with the commode pressing against her calves. Three faces leered at her, three pistols aiming at her face.

       “Surprise!” the middle gunman said. “We’re going for a ride.”

      CHAPTER ONE

      Yakutsk, seven hours later

      Yakutsk owed its existence to the tide of war and tyranny. Constructed as a fort by Cossack warlord Pyotr Beketov in 1632, within seven years it had become the seat of power for an independent military fiefdom whose commander sent troops ranging to the south and east. Discovery of gold and diamonds in the late nineteenth century turned Yakutsk into a mining boomtown. The Sakha Republic still supplied twenty percent of the world’s rough diamonds, but Yakutsk owed its final growth surge to Russia’s Man of Steel.

       Joseph Stalin was one of those people who chose his own name and made grim history—like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac killer, but on a grand scale. Born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, he didn’t like the sound of it, and so renamed himself Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin—Russian for “steel”—after joining the early Bolshevik movement and being convicted of bank robbery. Exile to Siberia couldn’t tame him, but it gave him ideas.

       Climbing the revolutionary food chain with ruthless cunning, Stalin was Vladimir Lenin’s strong right hand in 1917 and beyond. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin rushed to fill the power vacuum in Moscow, exiling or executing his rivals and consolidating power in a dictatorship that scuttled any dreams of a Communist Utopia on Earth.

       And he remembered Siberia. Over the next three decades, an estimated twenty-two million passed through Stalin’s Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, better known as gulags for short. Based on figures released after communism’s collapse in 1991, some 1.6 million internees died in Stalin’s camps between 1929 and his own death in 1953.

       But killing hadn’t ended with the cold war in the Russian Federation. Life and death went on as usual. Mack Bolan was in Yakutsk to prevent one death—and likely to inflict more in the process.

       Business as usual for the Executioner.

       It was a rush job, with time being of the essence. Bolan drove his GAZ-31105 Volga sedan along the Lena River’s waterfront with barges and an island to his right, warehouses on his left, looking for the address where he could—hopefully—collect his package from some people who weren’t