examined once the Japanese pilots had made their way into the terminal, the Executioner found hardware waiting for the next phase of his task.
Bolan checked the gear, confirmed as best he could that all of it was functional, the magazines fully loaded. He couldn’t test the flash-bangs without wasting them and raising hell outside the airport terminal, but that was life.
Or death, if any of the hardware let him down.
“How many men are guarding her?” he asked Fedchenko.
“Four were seen at the airport. Whether they have more at the warehouse, I can’t say.”
“What are they? Do you know?”
The Russian looked confused. “Sorry, please?” he said.
“The crew,” Bolan said. “Are they FSB? FSO? Mafiya?”
Fedchenko shrugged and said, “It could be anyone.”
“Where can I drop you?” Bolan asked as they climbed into the sedan, Bolan behind the steering wheel.
Fedchenko named an all-night coffee shop along the route marked on his map, and Bolan reached it seven minutes later, thanked the man and then continued on his way alone.
The next potential ambush site would be the warehouse. Bolan hadn’t smelled a setup yet, but caution kept him breathing. He had known Yuri Fedchenko less than half an hour, hadn’t met the men behind him who had dealt with Brognola, and trust could only stretch so far.
There’d been a time when Bolan and Brognola both had faith in Langley, but a brutal act of treachery had changed all that. Today, the big Fed kept the Company at arm’s length when he could and triple-checked their information prior to putting agents in the field, if time allowed.
This night, there was no time to spare. No room for judgment by committee. It was either take the job and run with it, or leave a brave agent to die.
Some people Bolan knew would probably have let her go without a second thought. Why help a Russian agent, even if her information might jail felons in the States and drag some of her homeland’s dirty laundry into daylight? Russia and the U.S. had been rivals for the best part of a century, with only slight improvement under glasnost, perestroika and the rest of it. One less Russki was good, no matter how you sliced it.
Bolan disagreed.
He honored courage, sacrifice and good intentions—though it was a fact they often paved the road to hell. If he could save Tatyana Anuchin’s life and put her on a witness stand back home to land some spies and mobsters in a prison cell, Bolan felt bound to try.
But recognizing sacrifice didn’t mean that he planned to offer up himself as one. Bolan had never been a kamikaze warrior prone to suicide. He weighed the odds on every move he made, once battle had been joined, and if some of those moves seemed suicidal to the uninitiated, that was an illusion. He was thinking all the time, six moves ahead.
He did his best, anticipating what an enemy might do in any given situation, but he couldn’t know exactly what would happen. Not until he pulled a trigger and sent death streaking downrange. At that point, Bolan knew that flesh and blood had to yield to firepower.
His own included, sure.
And if he failed, that was the end of it. There’d be no time for Brognola to find another operative, get him in the air to Yakutsk before Anuchin broke or simply died under interrogation. It was now or never, all or nothing.
He drove along the waterfront, the Lena River on his right and flowing northward toward the Arctic Ocean. On its far side lay the Lena Highway, accessed during spring and summer via ferry, or across the frozen river’s ice in winter.
When Bolan spied the address he was seeking, he immediately checked for lookouts on the street and snipers on the rooftops. Finding none, he sketched the outline of a plan and drove once more around the block to verify his first impression of the target.
All that now remained was for the Executioner to act.
He would postpone consideration of the future until he had Anuchin safely in his hands.
CHAPTER THREE
Yakutsk
Bolan drove aimlessly, letting the woman calm down. She was hurting, of course. He’d seen the marks of torture on her flesh before she dressed, and while they all looked superficial, he knew he couldn’t judge her pain threshold or personal resilience on such short acquaintance.
“You’re safe now,” he told her.
“Safe?” She made a little hissing sound that could have been sarcastic laughter filtered through exhaustion. “What is safe?”
“We’re getting out of here,” he said.
“You think so?”
“That’s the plan.”
After a silent interval, she said, “I told them nothing. It was close, though. If the dry ice had arrived…”
Bolan recalled the first goon he had met, the plastic cooler leaking smoky vapor as he dropped.
“You showed them how strong you are,” Bolan said.
“Then why do I feel weak?”
“You’re losing the adrenaline rush.”
In fact, it didn’t matter if she’d cracked or not, as long as she survived and followed through on testifying when the time came. The opposition had to have a fair idea of what Anuchin and her partner had uncovered, and the use to which it would be put. The torture was to verify her knowledge, prior to silencing the final witness and securing—as they hoped—a free pass on impending charges.
“I am cold, as well.”
“That’s shock,” he said. “You need to rest. Stay warm. I wish we had a place where you could shower, maybe get some better clothes.”
“There is a place,” she told him, sounding groggy. “Keep on this way, then turn north on Ordzhonikidze Street.”
“You’ll stay awake and help me spot the sign?” he asked, not teasing her.
“I’ll try. If not, you’ll see a large Pervaya Pomosch pharmacy located on the northwest corner of the intersection. Let it be your guide.”
“And after that?”
“I’ll be awake, don’t worry. I have too much pain for sleep.”
He let that pass, knowing from personal experience that a commiserative stranger couldn’t help. Instead, he asked, “Is this a safehouse that we’re going to?”
“I hope so,” she replied, forcing the vestige of a smile.
“It isn’t FSB?” he asked.
“Private,” she informed him. “Rented with Sergey so we could meet, collect our evidence, discuss what we had learned without an ear in every corner.”
Bolan wondered if there had been more between the partners than idealism and a scheme for cleaning up the agency they served. Maybe the safehouse doubled as a love nest when they felt the need.
And if it had, so what?
If Anuchin and the late Dollezhal were hoping for a long-term cleanup of the FSB—much less the Russian Federation—Bolan pegged them as naive. Assuming they could bring down the top men, clean house beyond the normal game of hanging scapegoats out to dry, what then? Had either one of them imagined that they would be welcomed back as heroes to resume their duties for a grateful state?
Fat chance.
Still, they had tried. And Anuchin might succeed to some extent, if he could get her out of Russia in one piece and safely back to the United States.
Huge if.