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‘What the hell?’ Kilkenny cursed quietly as he watched the distribution of weapons and other equipment among the men.
Using hand signals, the leader of the crew ordered the others into position. One remained on the loading dock while the others went back into Nieuwland Hall.
With his SUV screening him from view, Kilkenny searched the cargo area for a weapon. In the row of bins where he kept his tools, he found a combat knife – a memento from his navy days. He strapped the sheathed blade to his right thigh and carefully closed the lift gate.
As the mover paced along the elevated platform, Kilkenny surveyed the area between the loading dock and the rear of the semi trailer, timing the man’s movements. The short span of the platform meant that the trailer blocked the man’s view of the parking area for only a few seconds in each circuit.
Realizing that he would have to move quickly, Kilkenny crouched behind his truck, tensed and ready. When the man turned at the far end of the platform and began walking back toward the semi, Kilkenny sprinted across the entire lot using the trailer as a shield. His heart pounded as he slipped under the truck, adrenaline coursing through his body and his senses charged. Loose gravel and chips of broken glass dug at his forearms and shins as he stealthily snaked his way beneath the trailer to the platform.
When Kilkenny reached the space between the double axle at the rear of the trailer, he pulled himself back on his feet and again began timing the man’s movements. As the man turned away, Kilkenny shifted closer to the platform, hiding in the space between the right-side tires and the steel-frame bumper.
Soon the man turned facing the driver’s side of the semi, walking back toward the open trailer doors.
Kilkenny slipped out from beneath the vehicle and stood next to the rear tires. Carefully, he unfastened the door catch. As the sound of the man’s footsteps grew closer, Kilkenny timed it perfectly and thrust the heavy metal door forward. The sudden rush of the door caught the man broadside, striking hard against his shoulder.
‘Blat!’ Vanya cursed as he rolled from the force of the blow.
Kilkenny followed the rotation of the door forward and leapt up on the platform behind it, releasing his grip on the handle and unsheathing his knife to press on with the attack.
Despite the burning pain, Vanya reached for the Glock 9-mm pistol strapped to the left side of his chest. He snapped a glance over his battered shoulder in time to see Kilkenny emerge from behind the steel door.
‘Krasny adín!’ Vanya shouted as he twisted the holstered weapon up and fired from beneath his armpit.
The first round drilled through the muscle of Kilkenny’s left thigh, a point-blank shot that struck at almost the same instant it left the Glock. After boring a bloody tunnel, the bullet erupted from Kilkenny’s leg and ricocheted off the concrete dock. A second shot flew just inches wide because of the recoil of the first.
Momentum still carrying him forward, Kilkenny grabbed the holster strap and held tight as he drove his combat knife into the man’s back. The knife shuddered as its serrated back edge sawed through the cartilage that connected a rib and vertebrae.
Vanya’s grasp on his pistol weakened as his heart spasmed, the blade puncturing the muscular walls of the organ. Kilkenny pushed the knife sideways as he extracted it, widening the gash in the man’s blood-soaked back. Vanya’s legs gave out, and Kilkenny let him fall to the dock.
Kilkenny then rolled the body over onto its back; a blank, open-mouthed stare gaped back at him. Using his knife, he cut two strips of cloth from the man’s shirt and hastily wrapped a pressure bandage around his thigh.
Kilkenny found a German-made military-grade radio transmitter clipped to the man’s hip, the kind of communications equipment favored by special forces. He flipped the SEND switch into the off position, then removed the earpiece/lip mike component from the man’s ear and slipped the gear on himself. His right ear filled with a faint hiss of static, then two sharp clicks crackled harshly in the ear-piece. The clicks repeated a few seconds later.
These guys are operators, Kilkenny thought as he ignored the clicks – a request for the dead man to report in to his commanding officer.
A quick pat search of the man revealed little. The mover carried a silenced 9-mm Glock and two spare clips of ammunition. Kilkenny found no identification of any kind. He pocketed the two ammo clips, chambered a round in the Glock, and carefully moved back into Nieuwland Hall.
One shitbag down, he thought, four more to go.
5 (#ulink_abd19d8c-f3c2-5e1e-8226-9911a2f293a3)
JUNE 23 (#ulink_abd19d8c-f3c2-5e1e-8226-9911a2f293a3)
South Bend, Indiana
Krasny adín? Dmitri puzzled over Vanya’s urgent warning in his mind.
Yuri, the radioman, sent two more rapid clicks and waited.
No reply.
Yuri looked over at Dmitri, the team leader, and shook his head.
Dmitri knew that things went wrong on missions – it was a fact of life. The Americans had a name for this phenomenon: Murphy’s Law. He’d lost radio contact with men before; nine times out of ten it was an equipment failure. But Vanya had broken radio silence and called out Krasny adín – Red One – alerting them that his position was under attack. Now Vanya was off the air, and his brief warning had stopped Dmitri and the rest of the team just as they got off the freight elevator.
Dmitri carefully moved to a window that overlooked the rear of Nieuwland Hall. Below, he saw the trailer extending from the loading dock and, in the far corner of the paved lot, a black Mercedes truck. The scene appeared just as they had left it moments ago. Other than a few people walking on the campus pathways, he saw nothing to indicate that their mission had been discovered, nothing that would cause Vanya to report that he was under attack.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Dmitri said quietly, wishing he could, ‘but Vanya’s position is almost beneath us.’
His men were all professionals; each had served under him in the Spetsnaz, the Red Army’s elite special warfare unit. He’d handpicked them for this private operations force when paychecks in the Russian military became scarce. Today, they were well-paid and well-equipped mercenaries in the employ of Victor Orlov.
Dmitri scratched at the stubble on his chin. A gritty film of dried sweat covered his muscled frame, the result of moving dozens of heavy boxes containing the equipment, books, and experimental documentation that he had been sent to retrieve.
‘You want me to go check on Vanya?’ Josef asked.
Dmitri pondered the question, then shook his head at the swarthy, black-haired Georgian. ‘Nyet. We proceed as planned, but stay alert. It may be nothing more than garbled communications and equipment failure.’
‘If not?’
‘If not, Josef, then I want you here with the rest of the unit.’ Leskov turned toward the two movers watching the hallway. ‘How’s it look, Pavel?’
‘Clear,’ Pavel replied confidently. Not so much as a shadow had moved in the empty hallway.
Dmitri smiled, proud of the professionalism his younger brother displayed. Pavel was on point, checking the path ahead as the unit moved forward.
‘Move out,’ Dmitri ordered.
Pavel strode into the hallway, followed by Yuri and Dmitri, who guided a flat four-wheeled cart. Josef took up position a few steps behind the others, covering the unit’s rear. Sandstrom’s lab was down at the far end of the corridor.
‘This looks like the last of it,’ Dmitri announced as they entered the lab, his English flawlessly Middle American.
Dmitri’s men spread out, moving toward the last remaining boxes. Paramo was seated in a chair near where Kelsey stood by the windows; Sandstrom sat up on a lab bench, reclining back on his elbows.
As he closed within ten feet of Sandstrom, Dmitri’s right hand deftly slipped to the holster nestled in the small of his back and drew his weapon. The muscles in his body coiled tightly as he gripped the Air Taser with both hands and fired.
Propelled by a charge of compressed nitrogen, two needlelike metal probes silently flew toward Sandstrom. In less than a tenth of a second, the twin probes tore through the physicist’s cotton shirt and struck his chest. A pulsating electrical current raced from Dmitri’s weapon, through the probes, into Sandstrom’s body.
Sandstrom shuddered involuntarily and fell back onto the lab bench. His head struck the thick black countertop with a muffled thud.
Across the room Yuri and Pavel’s attack mirrored that of their leader. Only the briefest change in expression on the faces of Kelsey and Paramo preceded their sudden incapacitation.
‘Josef,’ Dmitri called out.
‘Corridor is clear,’ the Georgian replied.
‘The man with the red hair, Kilkenny, he is missing. His truck is still parked by the loading dock. He must be somewhere in the building. Keep an eye out for him.’
As the Taser’s pulsating charge attacked Paramo’s nervous system, the aging physicist’s heartbeat became erratic. The muscle fluttered, struggling to find a steady rhythm until the already weakened organ stopped beating altogether.
‘I think I killed the old one,’ Pavel announced unemotionally. ‘He’s not shaking like the others.’
‘So much the better for him,’ Yuri replied. ‘Put those boxes on the cart while I set the explosives.’
Yuri pulled the quilted blanket off the cart, uncovering four pistols in shoulder holsters and a pair of sealed translucent bags, each containing about a quart of fluid. As Pavel loaded the last two boxes, Yuri picked up the two plastic bags and carefully placed them on the lab bench near the sink. He then closed the drain and turned on the water until the sink was about a third full.
‘Ready,’ Yuri announced.
Dmitri looked at his watch. ‘On my mark.’ The second hand swept closer to twelve. ‘Now.’
Yuri placed the light-colored bag into the water first, followed by the darker bag. Tiny bubbles immediately began to form on the surface of the bags.
‘We have five minutes,’ Yuri announced as he hastily strapped on his shoulder holster and checked the Glock.
Dmitri nodded. ‘Pavel,’ he said, handing his brother one of the silenced pistols, ‘take the point.’
6 (#ulink_eac4cf88-feca-5c04-8b0d-c82cc93de92d)
JUNE 23 (#ulink_eac4cf88-feca-5c04-8b0d-c82cc93de92d)
South Bend, Indiana
Kilkenny carefully worked his way back into Nieuwland Hall and up the building’s center staircase. He encountered no one during his ascent to the second floor. On the landing, he cautiously peered through the slit window of wiremesh glass in the fire door. The hallway on the other side was empty, but the window was too narrow to provide a view of Sandstrom’s lab farther down the hall.
Slowly Kilkenny pulled open the fire door until a quarter-inch gap appeared. Sandstrom’s lab was on the same side of the corridor as the stairwell, so he studied the reflection in the glass doors of a display case on the opposite wall. There he saw one of the movers standing watch beside the lab door.
He had to assume that Kelsey, Sandstrom, and Paramo were in the lab with four armed men. For the sake of the two physicists and the woman he loved, Kilkenny focused on the situation at hand rather than trying to fathom the motive behind it.
The faint hiss of static filled his right ear, as it had for the past several minutes. Unable to raise their man on the loading dock, the Russians had gone off the air completely.
The reflected image in the glass moved as the man in the doorway stepped back into the lab. Another man appeared and moved out into the corridor. He moved cautiously. Visually sweeping the entire length of the corridor, he held a suppressed semi-automatic pistol pointed low in a two-handed grip.
Kilkenny flattened himself against the painted cinder-block wall and slowly closed the fire door. It slid quietly into its frame. As he released the handle, the mortised latch bolts in the head and toe of the door slid home with a metallic click.
Pavel had just raised his hand to motion the rest of the unit forward when he heard the sound of the closing door. He signaled for Dmitri and the others to remain in place while he investigated.
‘Damn!’ Kilkenny cursed under his breath, knowing that the errant sound had exposed his position. He quickly moved against the wall, out of view through the slit window.
A shadow flickered in the thin strip of light beneath the stairwell door, catching Pavel’s trained eye. He moved along the wall, approaching the door from the side. With his back against the wall, Pavel inched forward until his shoulder reached the edge of the door.
He adjusted his grip on the Glock and folded his arms close to his chest as he filled his lungs with air. Exhaling with a low, throaty growl, he stepped forward, spun around, and struck the door with a vicious kick. The panic bar slammed into the hollow metal skin of the door, releasing the latch bolts. The door sprang open, and Pavel lunged into the stairwell.
As the Russian leveled his weapon, Kilkenny swung his left arm down in a sharp block that drove Pavel’s forearms toward the floor. He then wrapped his hand tightly around the barrel of the Glock. Pavel squeezed the trigger.
Click.
Kilkenny smothered the action of the Glock with his grip. He then brought the muzzle of his own pistol against the side of Pavel’s head and fired twice. Blood and bone exploded against the gray metal door.
Pavel shuddered and collapsed to the floor. Kilkenny quickly scanned the hallway for more threats, then retreated down the stairwell.
7 (#ulink_21ac4a41-d804-59ff-9399-507848d47be4)
JUNE 23 (#ulink_21ac4a41-d804-59ff-9399-507848d47be4)
South Bend, Indiana
Pavel’s offensive was over almost as soon as it started. Two muffled shots and then silence. Dmitri moved to the stairwell and found the door held ajar by the body of his dead brother. He quickly shut down the rage he felt, knowing he still had a mission to complete. There would be time to mourn, and to seek revenge.
‘Pavel’s dead,’ Dmitri said quietly as he went back into the lab. ‘Yuri, time?’
‘Three minutes, forty-five seconds,’ the explosives expert replied.
Lying atop the lab bench, Sandstrom groaned and tried to lift his head. Kelsey began to stir as well. It took several minutes to recover fully from a Taser’s shock, more time than anyone remaining in the lab possessed. Paramo lay motionless on the vinyl-tile floor, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
‘Put the woman on the cart,’ Leskov ordered, his mind sifting through his options. ‘We may need a hostage.’
Yuri and Josef grabbed Kelsey by the legs and shoulders, quickly loaded her onto the four-wheeled cart. Leskov turned the pistol in his hand and struck Sandstrom in the side of the head; the groggy physicist fell to the floor, unconscious. He would be left for dead.
‘Three minutes, Dmitri,’ Yuri called out.
Inside the lab sink, the skin of the first bag ruptured and its contents slowly leaked to form a thick layer along the basin.
‘I’ll take the point,’ Leskov announced. ‘Yuri, take the cart.’
‘And I’ll cover our backsides,’ Josef said, a mouthful of bad teeth smiling beneath his thick black mustache.
With Kelsey as hostage, the Russians carefully moved into the corridor, wary of who or what might be lying in wait. Leskov held up his hand when he reached the stair-well door, halting his men. He then pointed at Yuri and, with two fingers, motioned for his comrade to join him by the door.
‘When I open the door, pull Pavel’s body in.’
Yuri nodded. This was not a matter of sentimentality on his leader’s part; it was simply the law in the world of special warfare that, dead or alive, no man is ever left behind.
Leskov braced himself against the wall on the hinge side and pushed the door open with a backward sweep of his hand. Crouching, Yuri reached forward and grasped Pavel’s leg. He took two steps back, dragging the young soldier’s lifeless body through the doorway as a slick red stain spread from the open wound in the side of Pavel’s head.
Leskov stepped through the doorway and found the stairwell deserted. ‘It’s clear.’
‘Dmitri, do you see his pistol?’ Yuri asked, looking down at Pavel’s empty hands.
‘Nyet, his attacker must have taken it. Put Pavel on the cart. We have to get out of here.’
8 (#ulink_7881646e-5a02-5f49-bf75-ac7a2d1d15a3)
JUNE 23 (#ulink_7881646e-5a02-5f49-bf75-ac7a2d1d15a3)
South Bend, Indiana
After the shoot-out in the stairwell, Kilkenny fell back to regroup. The loading dock was empty when he reached it, save for the body of the man he’d killed earlier.
A bell sounded nearby, indicating that the service elevator had descended to the main floor. Kilkenny searched for a place to position himself.
