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Young Yuri Trofimov had a gift, he soon learned, when among his peers and even his teachers in school. He had a talent for influencing others, for captivating them with his stories and with the expression of his opinions. People cared about what Yuri Trofimov had to say. They cared about his opinions. They wished to hear him when he spoke. He learned, therefore, that he had power. With a taste of power came the desire for more.
As the infrastructure he had always taken for granted began to crumble, as the ships of the former Soviet navy began to rust in their docks and to sink from neglect, Trofimov gave up the last hopes he’d held of serving in that force. Already, his mind was alive with possibilities, with ways to use his talents both to enrich himself and to extend the power he believed was destined to be his. Power over his fellow men: that was Yuri Trofimov’s greatest goal, his greatest hope and his fundamental desire. He began to make plans.
When the time had come to leave the smoking ruins of what had once been proud Mother Russia, he had done so without looking back. Russia could do nothing more for him. The post–Cold War years hadn’t been kind to the once-powerful nation and, while the crime-infested world of business in Russia held certain attractions, the market was saturated. Better to move to the West, where untapped, unexploited markets still remained. Trofimov hated the West; he hated it for what it had done to his nation, for the Cold War that had denied Russia its once-proud destiny. He hated the strutting, arrogant Americans who believed they owned the world and could tell everyone within it how to live and what to do. But he also knew that the West was his best hope for achieving his still only vaguely defined personal goals. He swallowed his pride temporarily, which was the hardest thing of all.
The teenage Trofimov had managed to immigrate successfully to the United States, illegally at first, then legally, after a fashion, many years later. He found himself, almost to his surprise, in Florida, and there he realized that his ambition alone wouldn’t be enough. He needed contacts. He needed resources. It was all fine and good to know he could influence, control, even manipulate his fellow human beings. There were few enough opportunities to do so when one was penniless and homeless on the streets of an American city.
Trofimov, growing increasingly desperate, had prowled the streets of Miami, increasingly worried that he would find himself among the city’s population of street people before much longer. Then came the break he had sought, the opportunity he needed: he saw two men bullying a third, demanding money owed them.
He had crept up the alleyway until he was close enough to hear the conversation. The two men worked for a local loan shark. The third man owed a great deal of money. He grew increasingly combative as the two enforcers threatened him. It quickly became evident to Trofimov that these men were overmatched. The third man was bigger and appeared stronger. As Trofimov watched, the big man suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, punched one of the two enforcers square in the jaw. He kneed the second, dropping him. Breaking into a run, the third man hurried past the very spot where Trofimov stood.
He tripped him.
The big man hit the pavement of the alleyway. He struck his head as he fell. He was either dead or unconscious as Trofimov stood over him, checked his pockets and took his wallet.
“Hey, kid,” one of the enforcers said. It was the one who had taken a knee to the groin. “Gimme that wallet.”
Trofimov tossed the wallet to the man without hesitation, as if this had been his intent from the start. He regarded the enforcer coolly; the enforcer stared back. Finally the other man said, “What? What the hell you want?”
“I want a job,” Trofimov said.
The enforcer seemed to think about that for a moment. He looked down at the debtor and then back to his partner, who was slowly struggling to his feet. “What do you do?” he asked.
“Name it,” Trofimov had said.
The enforcer laughed. Eventually he nodded. “Come on, then.”
That had been the humble beginning from which Yuri Trofimov built his empire. He had at first worked his way up in the hierarchy of organized crime in Miami, learning the violent ropes. His talent for persuading people, his guile, his natural, snake-oil charm served him well. He moved up within the ranks. When he had enough support, when he had co-opted enough of the organization, he took it over from within, then fought a war with those who disagreed with his palace coup. Finally he ruled uncontested. He leveraged his money and his power into several legitimate enterprises; the boom in consumer electronics and the new Internet age helped him along the way.
When he had the time, he attended college. In business school he learned the formal terms behind what he had found through hard-won and bitter experience. Then, in journalism school, he found the true means of channeling his natural abilities. Always, he branched out, expanded, reinvested. His legitimate empire, on the backs of his criminal enterprises, became truly, remarkably, breathtakingly powerful.
He expanded from electronics into heavy industry, buying shares in the few Russian businesses that showed financial promise, greasing the wheels back home and in the United States with plenty of bribes. When he couldn’t use his power or his money to get what he wanted, he knew who to hire. He learned just how much was possible if one sought the services of armed, amoral men, the types of men who fought wars for hire, the types of men who could be counted on to take their money and quietly go about their business. As his ties to such mercenaries deepened, his reach grew. Those who wouldn’t bend to the will of Yuri Trofimov often found themselves dead, victims of random street violence, presumed gang shootings or even open massacres whose perpetrators were never caught.
Always, Trofimov was careful to keep his own record, his own reputation, clean. He knew as well as anyone that the government of the United States had its suspicions, but was hamstrung by its own rules. For all its tough talk about homeland security, its posturing and its saber rattling, it didn’t have the killer instinct it needed to deal with the likes of Yuri Trofimov. Thus he would continue his work, under their very noses. They would be able to prove nothing. They would never be able to assign to Trofimov the blame for the storm that was to come.
Eventually he bought his United States citizenship. It was easy enough—a bribe here, a favor there, the gentle application of political power over there. He followed the models established by other businessmen before him, never reinvented the wheel if he didn’t have to do so. When TBT and its news network finally burst on the scene, Trofimov was more than prepared to take market share by giving his viewers what they wanted. He traded in the sensational, the outrageous, the bloody, the messy. Always, his hatred of the West came through, and it tapped the streak of self-destructive, self-loathing guilt some of his now-fellow Americans seemed to feel about themselves and their nation.
For many men, this would have been enough. Riches. Influence. Swaying the cultural pendulum and affecting the collective consciousness of the most powerful nation in the world.
Yuri Trofimov wasn’t most men.
He wouldn’t be truly satisfied until the United States, the embodiment of the hated West, suffered as his homeland had suffered. Only when the arrogant United States knew the pain of losing its military might abroad, only when the miserable United States was humiliated on the international stage as the Soviet Union and later Russia had been, only when the United States military—the truncheon with which the Americans beat all around them—was utterly disgraced would Yuri Trofimov be truly satisfied.
And thus he had, using the great wealth and power available to him, embarked on the elaborate plan that was to be his life’s crowning achievement. He was going to destroy the United States military, using the Americans themselves to help him do the work.
He had, of course, no compunctions about breaking the law. He had begun his life as a criminal; laws were for other men, not the rich and powerful like Trofimov. As long as he was smart enough not to get caught, and he had always been smart enough not to get caught, he could do as he willed, pay whom he wished to kill whom he wished. It was the way of things. Simple violence solved many problems. Complicated, crafty, deceitful violence…well, that solved so much more. And of what use was power if it wasn’t applied, used to shape the world in the way the man wielding that power saw fit? That was, after all, what had first attracted Trofimov to wielding power over others: the ability to manipulate and shape the world by affecting the will of other men and women. He let his hatred guide him. He would shape the world.
He started by infiltrating and then co-opting most of the Peace At Any Cost group. It was the largest and had the most influence on the antimilitary scene within the United States, a fact born out by the copious research his people at TBT News conducted at his direction. It was simple enough to liberate from the group those members willing to take the next step, to use actual violence in fighting the hated American military and what it represented. Trofimov himself had selected the first targets. He had made certain that these baby killers, these returning war criminals, knew that they weren’t safe in their own country, weren’t safe from the horrors they had inflicted overseas.
He hadn’t counted on the American government covering up the crimes, however. This robbed his murders of the impact they were to have. He fought his propaganda campaign on many fronts, including spreading and sensationalizing the reports of the latest high-profile military atrocities, and he manufactured these accordingly when it was required. This helped, but it didn’t fully compensate for the covered-up killings of returning military personnel. Then TBT News had run a report on the growing popularity of protests of military funerals, and Trofimov had another stroke of brilliance. He had his PAAC people use their groups to promote more such protests, and when the time was right, he had the elements within PAAC that he controlled break away and begin the killings anew.
Of course, the peace activists were difficult to control, and had no training in violence or the use of weapons. That didn’t matter. Trofimov had access to more than enough men and matériel to train and direct these useful idiots. He had called in his mercenaries and made sure they knew what he wanted, then allowed them to run the operations as they saw fit. He still suggested targets, but on the whole, the operation ran without his direct involvement. This was good; it increased the level of plausible deniability he held, further insulating him from exposure, keeping him and his reputation safe while his people brought his will to fruition.
But all of this was just the start. It was a taste of what was to come, the barest tip of the operations his personnel were running. When Trofimov actually stopped to consider the vast scope of the operation, the world-changing audacity of it, it awed even him. It was a fitting life’s work, as he saw it. It was an appropriately bold testament to the power wielded by one Yuri Trofimov, and the legacy left behind by the application of that power would be a different world. That world would be one in which the United States military, humiliated and diminished, would have far less power over the lives of every other person on the planet…and thus, the United States, the West itself, would be diminished. That was Trofimov’s goal and his life’s work. That was, he had decided some years earlier, the true end goal of his life, the end toward which the means of his wealth was working. He would not fail.
He would change the world.
The clearing of a throat broke him from his introspection. He swiveled in his chair again, facing the interior of his office, and steepled his fingers.
Trofimov frowned as he looked over his guests. These men were, truthfully, really more employees than guests, but he prided himself on his cultivated manners, and so he treated them as if they weren’t simply hired help. Yuri Trofimov might be nouveau riche in the eyes of what passed for aristocratic society in this part of Florida, but manners were as important to him as all the rest, the trappings and the plans and the plots and the schemes. He was a rich man, first and foremost; he could afford himself a few affectations, could allow himself a few indulgences and even pretenses.
“You just gonna sit there mooning all day?”
Trofimov’s frown deepened as he focused on the speaker. Gareth Twain lounged insolently in the nearest padded office chair. Trofimov spared him a withering glance and then scanned the other visitors to his high-rise office. He had taken little notice of them when they filed into the room; now he supposed he would have to deal with them.
One of Twain’s people, an agitated Korean, paced back and forth by the door. In the lounge chair on the facing wall, cigarette smoke curling up to the ceiling, Mak Wei watched with feigned indifference. Mak was yet another Chinese operative late of the People’s Liberation Army. Trofimov had enough information on Mak and his handlers to know that the Chinese had tried more than once to mount plausibly deniable operations on American soil. Trofimov also gathered that several of Mak’s predecessors hadn’t fared well, either failing in their missions directly and fatally, or failing only to return to China to face the wrath of their superiors. Trofimov hadn’t bothered to look too deeply into this; it would have nettled Mak to discover the probing, anyway, and the man was touchy enough at the best of times. Trofimov supposed he didn’t blame him, given just how notorious the Chinese government was when it came to operations of this type.
The shaven-headed Twain, who looked and dressed like a surly stevedore, was head of the many mercenary forces in Trofimov’s employ. He performed his work well, and always did as asked with no complaints and no argument. Trofimov imagined he could tell Gareth Twain to drive to the nearest elementary school and shoot dead every child on the playground, and Twain would merely quote a price before calmly leaving to perform the deed. It wasn’t clear to the businessman exactly why Twain did what he did, or what the man cared about. Perhaps he cared about nothing; perhaps he had no goals save the earning of money through the relative ease of his casual brutality. It didn’t matter to Trofimov—though Twain’s arrogant, cavalier manner irritated him. The big, ruddy, bullet-headed Irishman seemed always to be laughing at him, and at everyone else he met. Trofimov imagined that this was because, in his mind, Twain was picturing the murder of every human being he encountered. The Russian could live with that. The money he paid Twain kept the man in check, or at least directed his madness toward the targets of Trofimov’s choosing.
The slight, dark-haired, sallow-skinned and physically gaunt Mak Wei was more of a mystery personally, but his personal motivations were irrelevant. Mak was a Chinese operative, and thus he did as he was told. His goals were the goals of his government. In this case, Communist China wanted very much to see the power of the United States diminished, so much so that it was willing to risk running black operations such as Mak’s current mission. The agent was funneling Chinese equipment and munitions to Twain’s mercenaries, and providing Chinese security personnel of his own to augment Twain’s forces. Both men, working in concert, pursued the goals Trofimov set for them. Mak was smart enough to know that Trofimov’s master plan was sound but, more important, he knew he had to allow for a certain degree of distance between his government and Trofimov. That meant that whenever possible, he would defer to Trofimov so that his government wasn’t directly involved in the violent actions that resulted.
Trofimov had first made contact with the Chinese through diplomatic back channels years before. Communist China was the last of the truly powerful, centralized command nations. If the world were to have a new superpower, it would have to be China; only China was poised to fill the vacuum that would be left by a faltering United States. At first, Trofimov’s overtures were rebuffed. As he grew in power and influence, however, China’s government began to take notice. Eventually they had assigned Mak Wei to Trofimov, and a very profitable alliance was born. Through Mak, the Chinese supported Trofimov’s efforts. When America ultimately fell, it was the Chinese who would benefit. Trofimov knew that the gratitude he hoped would be shown him by the resulting Chinese superpower wasn’t guaranteed. That didn’t worry him, however. His own power would be as great, if not greater, once America fell. He would be in a position to command China’s respect, if not its thanks. The world order that emerged would be closer to the one he desired, and that was really all that mattered to him. In this manner, Mak and his government were also “useful idiots,” after a fashion. The difference was simply that they weren’t stupid like the peace protesters Trofimov used so easily.
Trofimov finally spoke. “You requested this meeting, Gareth. You tell me what it is you want.”
“It isn’t what I want,” Twain said. “It’s a new wrinkle. A new problem.”
“Then tell us what it is,” Mak Wei said quietly, breathing out a plume of blue-white smoke, “and we can all address it that much more efficiently.”
“You’ve met Kwok Sun.” Twain jerked a thumb toward the man by the door. “Poor bugger’s gone and lost his brother, hasn’t he?”
“Lost him? How?” Trofimov asked.
“Jin was assigned to that bunch out in Wisconsin,” Twain said, “handling the PAAC splinter bunch.”
“They turned on him?” Trofimov asked.
“Nah, nah.” Twain shook his head. “He was ambushed. They moved on the funeral like you wanted. Full kit, armed to the teeth. Only, somebody was waitin’ for them. Shot down every one of the civvies, then ran down Kwok Jin and plugged him.”
“How do you know this?”
“Paid me an informant in the police department out there.” Twain grinned, as if this were the most brilliant maneuver ever conceived. The man’s mannerisms were that of a much less professional killer, and Trofimov knew this for the ruse that it was. Gareth Twain was cunning, vicious and completely pragmatic. He liked to be underestimated. It was habitual with him, Trofimov was sure.
“You are saying your men were intercepted by law enforcement?”
“Are you kidding me?” Twain was suddenly indignant. “First, they wasn’t my men, except for Jin. Second, no cop or even Fed, hell, not even a Royal loyal would ha’ done as this fellow did. Shot them all down without so much as even a by-your-leave, no warnings, no ‘Stop, police,’ or whatever the hell else. Just bang-bang-bang, you’re all dead, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Spare me the colorful argot,” Trofimov said. “You forget that I know you’re not quite the Irish rube you pretend to be.”
Twain frowned, but wisely said nothing.
“This is an unfortunate complication,” Mak Wei put in, sucking the last of his unfiltered cigarette down to his stained fingers. “It could indicate that we—that you, Trofimov—have finally raised the attention of some governmental or legal entity. The operation could be in danger.”
“Not buyin’ it,” Twain said. “You know who I think it is? I think it’s the Mob. Some competing ‘interest,’ and the kinds of folks who don’t mind plugging a few of the other side’s boys to make a point.”
“That makes no sense,” Mak said disdainfully. “Why would a criminal concern care about political protests or political murders?”
“An investment in the status quo, perhaps,” Trofimov offered. “The Mafia and the CIA once worked together in an attempt to kill Castro, perhaps more than once. There are criminals, and there are patriots. They aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.”
“Perhaps,” Mak conceded. “But you forget, I have knowledge of operations, of actions against United States interests, that you do not. The methods employed are brutal, yes. They are not consistent with the usual manner in which the Americans do things officially. Unofficially, my government is quite certain that elements at least affiliated with the United States government are quite prepared to use violence, and to use it preemptively and overwhelmingly to protect American interests.”
“What can you tell us about this?” Trofimov asked.
“Only what I have said just now. There are few specifics.”
“Well, that hardly helps us, does it?” Twain snapped. “And in the meantime now I’ve got to watch my back, and yours, and wonder where this trigger-happy goon is going to show next. The entire operation could be compromised.”
“Is that a problem, Twain?” Trofimov asked directly. “Are you saying you aren’t up to the challenge?”
“Not hardly.” Twain grinned wolfishly. “I’m just warning you. It’s going to get bloody.”
“Then let it get bloody,” Trofimov said. “Now go, and do what I pay you to do.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The neighborhood around the assembly plant outside Cedar Rapids was fairly sparse and largely industrial. Mack Bolan was grateful for that; it reduced the chances of innocents wandering into the cross fire. He parked his rental truck a block away, scanning the area for threats and spectators. He saw no one.
The care package he had requested from the Farm was in a hard-shell case in the back of the truck. It was a Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle fitted with a 40 mm M-203 grenade launcher. The 5.56 mm modular Israeli bullpup-style rifle, which looked like something out of a science-fiction movie. This gas-operated select-fire rifle had a cyclic rate approaching fifteen rounds per second on full automatic. The compact weapon, coupled with the power of the grenade launcher, was just the thing for the mission on which Bolan was embarking.
The soldier made sure his movements were concealed within the rear of the truck, checked his weapons and slung the Tavor along the side of his body. The weapon wasn’t truly concealed, but it didn’t need to be. Bolan intended to make a significant first impression, and fast. He slung his OD canvas war bag across his chest on its broad shoulder strap, making sure his extra magazines, explosives and other weapons were in place in the bag and in the pockets of his combat blacksuit. He didn’t bother to don his field jacket.
A parking lot fronted the assembly plant. Three or four cars were parked here; none of them was remarkable. Bolan gave them a casual glance as he passed, stopping at the double doors to the plant itself. He pushed one open and quietly stuck his head inside, looking left and then right.
Nothing.
The foyer was empty, the floors a dusty and ancient linoleum that hadn’t seen a good waxing in years. Bolan walked through the first set of doors and paused, peering through the gap between the inner doors. Beyond, he could see a fairly typical light industrial area. Workbenches were arrayed across the plant floor, which had a high ceiling and walls dotted with dusty, multipaned windows. Many of the windows were painted over. Fluorescent lights suspended from the high ceiling buzzed and cast a greenish-yellow hue over the interior. At the rear of the floor space, which was at the far end of the building, Bolan saw a sign that read, simply, Office.
The benches held many cardboard boxes, plastic racks and rows of what, from this distance, appeared to be circuit boards. Men in casual street clothes—Bolan looked carefully, but saw no women—were standing among the benches, half-crouched as they bent over their work. Some of them wore magnifying lenses on straps around their heads, presumably for seeing the fine details of complicated work.
In short, the plant looked like exactly what it was supposed to be.
Bolan was mildly surprised by that. He had expected to see something far more nefarious. He started to back out the way he came in, careful to keep the Tavor out of sight behind his leg.
A shadow moved on the other side of the door, and Bolan’s combat instinct prompted him to hit the floor. A bullet burned past him. The gunner on the other side of the double doors continued to shoot through the barrier, apparently sighting through the gap between them.
Bolan rolled out of the path of the bullets, bringing up the Tavor, surging to his feet. He angled his fire down, careful to avoid indiscriminately spraying the room beyond the doors, instead triggering a withering blast at knee level. The gunner on the other side of the doors screamed.
The soldier kicked the doors in, stepping over the writhing gunman as he did so. The workers beyond scrambled for cover. Pausing over the wounded man, Bolan kicked his handgun away.
“No one move!” he ordered. “Lay down your weapons and place your hands behind your head!”
Movement from two directions caught his eye. A stream of full-auto fire, the unmistakable, hollow metallic clatter of Kalashnikov rifles, ripped through the space, shredding the components on top of several benches between the shooters and Mack Bolan. The soldier dived and rolled to the side, angling toward a heavy metal rolling toolbox. The toolbox rang like a bell as 7.62 mm fire from the assault rifles ripped into it.
The Executioner fished a flash-bang grenade out of his war bag, considered it and grabbed a second. He yanked the pins from each bomb in succession, then whipped the grenades in opposite directions, toward the points of fire converging on his location. Curling his chin into his chest, he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth and covered his ears.
The searing flashes were accompanied by a deafening wallop. Even though he was prepared for it, Bolan’s ears were ringing in the wake of the powerful light-and-sound explosions. He surged to his feet, breaking cover with the Tavor’s integrated red-dot sight seeking targets. The first AK gunner had dropped his rifle and was holding his eyes, staggering back and forth in place. Bolan put a 5.56 mm round through his head and made a quarter turn, bringing the second man into line. That man was starting to recover, and clawed for a handgun in his waistband. Bolan burned him down with a short burst.
The soldier checked his six, then each point of the compass, assessing his surroundings. Somewhere, a worker whimpered. Bolan tracked the noise and found a twentysomething man with lanky blond hair, dressed in a flannel shirt and ripped jeans. He was cowering under one of the workbenches. He still wore a wrist strap connected to a ground wire, a precaution against electrostatic discharge.
Bolan gestured with his rifle. “You.”
The young man’s eyes went wide. He looked left, then right, crouched on his back in a near fetal position. “M-m-me?” he stammered.
“You.” Bolan nodded. “How many armed guards?”
“What?”
“Armed guards. Men with firearms. How many in this facility?”
“J-ju…just those two,” the young man managed to tell him. “Plus the guy at the door. Jesus, you killed them. You killed them both.”
“Stay with me,” Bolan said, kicking one of the man’s feet with his own combat boot. He didn’t bother to point out that he hadn’t, in fact, killed the door guard. “Focus, kid. Why were they here? Why attack me?”
“I don’t know,” the young man admitted. “We…we just work here, man. We just work here.”
“Work here doing what? What are you building?”
“How should I know?” the man said, indignant. “They give us the specs and we build the boards. I don’t ask. I get paid by the board. I just do my job.”
“Get up,” Bolan said. “Get the rest of the workers together. Get out of here.”
“Why?” the kid asked, pulling himself up, using the workbench for support. He was rapidly regaining his composure; it was dawning on him that Bolan didn’t intend to kill him.
“You’re out of a job, kid,” Bolan told him. “Get the others and get gone. Don’t make me tell you again.”
The young man did not need any further urging. He ran among the benches, grabbing each of his fellow assemblers, urging them on and even shouting at them when they hesitated. Under Bolan’s watchful eye, the workers hit the bullet-pocked double doors and ran for it.
The numbers were ticking down in the soldier’s head. One of those workers was bound to call the police, if a silent alarm hadn’t already been triggered. He thought it unlikely, though, that there was such an alarm, at least not one connected to local law enforcement. Those whose facilities were guarded by gunmen wielding presumably illegal, full-auto Kalashnikovs probably didn’t welcome police involvement in their affairs.
Still, one of the assemblers was probably on a wireless phone to the cops right now. Bolan would have only a little time before the place was overrun.
The wounded gunman was still rolling around on the floor, holding his legs and groaning. Bolan walked up and stood over him, the Tavor held loosely in one hand, the barrel of the rifle pointed at the man’s forehead.
“I want to know everything you know about your employers and this facility,” Bolan said. “I don’t have a lot of time. If you can’t tell me anything, your usefulness to me is limited. If I have to hurt you to make you talk, I will.” This was a bluff, of course; Bolan, the man once known as Sergeant Mercy, would never torture a helpless, unarmed and wounded man. The Executioner had seen far too many victims of torture and interrogation in the course of his personal war. He would never join the ranks of the butchers who did such things to prisoners. This particular prisoner, however, couldn’t know that.
“Don’t, man, don’t,” the gunner said, clenching his teeth through the pain. “I got nothin’ here.… Let me—”
The revolver appeared in the man’s hand as if by magic, pulled from a holster in his waistband, behind his hip. Bolan triggered a single round from the Tavor into the man’s head, the shot echoing across the assembly plant floor.
