Gambit by David Hagberg (fantasy novels to read txt) 📕

SIXTY-SEVEN

McGarvey had lain down for a couple of hours of sleep in the top-floor bedroom, the windows facing the Aegean open to a light breeze that ruffled the curtains. Pete had gone to bed with him, but she laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Kirk.”

He woke instantly and looked up at her. She was fully clothed in the dark jeans and black shirt. “What is it?”

“Otto and Mary are on the phone; they have something for us.”

McGarvey sat up, and Pete handed him a cup of coffee first. He took a sip and set the cup aside, and Pete handed him the phone on speaker mode. “What have you come up with?” He looked at the clock. It was just past twelve thirty.

“There’s a 72 percent connection with Hammond, just like you’d expected almost from the beginning,” Otto said.

Pete sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Go ahead.”

“It looks like Hammond is working for or with a Russian multibillionaire by the name of Mikhail Tarasov, who has some upper-echelon position with Gazprom, though exactly what he does for the company is not clear for now, except that he’s also pals with Putin,” Otto said. “Anyway, it’s likely that the company wants to build a pipeline into Western Europe, France, and Belgium, for starters.”

“Neither of them likely to welcome the Russians with open arms.”

“Right. But Hammond has some solid financial connections in both countries, as well as with the Netherlands.”

“Okay so far, but where’s the connection between Hammond and the attacks on me?”

“This is the bad part. Tarasov apparently went out to visit with General Oleg Kanayev, who holds a position on the general staff that runs Russia’s Special Forces.”

“Spetsnaz,” McGarvey said, and he knew what was coming next.

“Kanayev’s son-in-law is the commanding officer of the 329th Spetsnaz Special Purpose Detachment. Six of their officers were given dishonorable discharges—we think thirty-six hours ago. Afterward, they disappeared.”

“Jailed? Executed?”

“It’s possible, but at this point unknown,” Otto said. “They just dropped out of sight.”

“They’re on the way here.”

“That’s Lou’s best guess, and I agree with her.”

“So do I,” Mary said. “We have a small naval support base at Souda Bay on Crete, which is home to a Greek air force base flying F-16 aircraft. If the Spetsnaz team is coming in high and slow to make a HALO drop on your position, a couple of F-16s might give them second thoughts.”

“No,” McGarvey said.

“For God’s sake, Mac, think it out,” Mary said. “We’re talking six-to-one odds. And these guys will be younger than you, highly trained, and almost certainly better equipped than you are. How are you going to handle it? You have to have some strategy.”

“They’ll be dropping onto unknown terrain, they can’t know that we’ll be expecting them and that we’ll be in a defensible position at their rear. And the odds are better now.”

“Yes, you have your wife.”

“Don’t count me out; I’m not such a bad shot myself,” Pete said.

“Six-to-two is still lousy,” Otto said. “Mary’s right.”

“Clarke Bender and Alicia Sherman, the assistant SAC at the Bureau’s New York office, showed up this afternoon and refused to leave.”

“Bender’s never even been a street cop. He’s been an academic and adviser his entire career.”

“But Alicia tells us that she’s a Marine with two tours as a cop in Afghanistan,” Pete said. “So don’t count us women out.”

“You’re stubborn,” Mary said. “I get that. But why run such a terrible risk of getting you and the others shot to death? What’s the point?”

“I want to find out who’s behind this and why.”

“Hammond.”

“Lou is a good program, but she’s not given it 100 percent because everything you’ve come up with is circumstantial,” McGarvey said. “Hammond is an asshole who holds a grudge, but he might not be a crazy asshole willing to hire people to kill me because of a deal gone bad. A deal he backed away from.”

“Tell him, Otto,” Mary said, frustration in her voice.

“Mac is right,” Otto said. “Just don’t let Bender get killed, kemo sabe. Kallek would be all over Taft in a New York minute.”

“I tried to get rid of the man. He has a free will, and he and Sherman decided to stay.”

“Nobody has a free will around you, Mac,” Mary said. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Including you?” McGarvey asked, and he was sorry he asked the moment it came out of his mouth.

“I married your best friend, didn’t I?”

Their camos were off-the-rack black, all Spetsnaz markings removed. Their weapons were German-made Heckler & Koch and Austrian-made Glock pistols with silencers in holsters on their chests. The only papers they carried were in the standard-issue, behind-the-lines kit that identified them as Ukranian civilians and included a few thousand euros in various denominations.

Their drop bags, which they would release at less than one hundred meters, contained civilian clothes, as well as the submachine guns, suppressors, and a lot of ammunition.

Their parachutes and oxygen equipment they would need jumping around nine thousand meters were Chinese made. And the four-tube night vision goggles were from the same manufacturer that equipped the U.S. SEAL Team 6 units.

The only thing they’d not swapped out were their Spetsnaz tattoos, just below the shoulder showing an inflated parachute, beneath which was the head of a snarling tiger. They hadn’t been mentioned by the colonel because the understanding was that the team had been dishonorably discharged, were working a rogue operation, and in any case, the only way the tattoos would be seen was if someone lifted the bare arms of their corpses.

Captain Borisov called Vetrov, who’d been lying back with his eyes closed like his men, forward.

“We’re thirty minutes out. Are you and your people ready?”

Vetrov checked his watch; it was just one thirty local on the ground. “Taip,” he said in Lithuanian. Yes.

Darina glanced at him, her left eyebrow raising, a smirk on her lips.

“Ten minutes out, we’ll all go on oxygen. Five minutes out, your team will stack up, we’ll throttle back, and Darina