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  “Now, what were we talking about again?”

  Baden Wurttemberg, The Black Forest

  THE BOAR WAS BLOODIED and cornered. The hunter had called off the hounds. The hunter’s rifle was a Merkel Drilling. One barrel was bored for 16-gauge shot shells. The one beside it was chambered for the powerful European 9.3×74 big game cartridge. The third barrel beneath them was a .22 Hornet for small game. One of the joys of hunting the Black Forest was that one could hunt deer, wild boar, pigeons and fox simultaneously. This day the hunter wanted a trophy boar, and he’d found one.

  The $40,000 dollar combination rifle rested in its saddle scabbard. He reached back with one hand and one of his huntsmen pressed the eight-foot, ash shaft of the boar spear into the hunter’s hand. It was a three-hundred-pound boar, with curving, two and a half inch tusks that would hamstring a man or horse and shred them when they fell. The snow-white Arabian the hunter rode was trained for the hunt.

  The hunter spurred the horse forward.

  The boar squealed and leaf duff flew beneath its hooves as it charged its tormentor. The boar’s body was pyramidal, built low to the ground and tapering toward the spinal crest with thick layers of gristle armoring its shoulders. One had to get dangerously low to reach the vital organs.

  The hunter leaned completely out of the saddle, his head hanging a bare two feet over the ground as the enraged boar came on. Horse, rider and pig flew at one another in a terminal collision course. At the last second the hunter slung his spear forward, putting the combined weight of him and his horse behind the blow. The pig’s squeal rose to a scream as the diamond point sank between its throat and collarbone. The blade slid its eighteen inches into the pig’s vitals, only stopping on the stainless-steel crossbar behind the blade. The hunter released the spear and yanked himself back up in the saddle as the pig passed. The boar’s snout punched down into the ground as it went limp. The spear haft snapped as the boar’s momentum sent its entire three-hundred-pound frame into a somersault to fall in an explosion of leaves to the forest floor.

  The hunter expertly wheeled his horse and leaped from the saddle. The twenty-two-inch blade of his hunting sword rasped free from the sheath on his hip. There was no need for the coup de grâce. The spear’s massive, leaf-shaped blade had sheared the boar’s heart in two.

  The ring of mounted huntsmen and assistants clapped politely.

  Laurentius Deyn sheathed his sword and lifted his head as he heard the sound of rotors. He stepped to his boar and pulled the shattered spear shaft from the pig’s breast. His huntsmen swarmed the pig to behead it, skin it and butcher it. A red-and-white Hughes 500 helicopter swept over the treetops and landed in a glade fifty yards away. A huge black man lowered his massive head beneath the rotors as he disembarked to stroll toward the hunt. He nodded curtly to the hunter.

  “Mr. Forbes.”

  Clayborne Forbes regarded his employer. The man was sixty-eight years old but held himself erect with casual ease. He wore the traditional loden-green hunting garb and feathered cap of a German jager. Forbes would have considered the archaic clothing ridiculous save for the arterial spray staining the waistcoat, the bloody, broken spear held casually in the man’s hand and the penetrating gaze of the man’s eyes. The man had been a hunter all his life, and he had hunted and killed far more men than beasts. Deyn jerked his head and his huntsmen moved away.

  Forbes grinned. “Pork for dinner, Larry?”

  “Clay.” Laurentius Deyn smiled. “It is good to see you. Thank you for flying out on such short notice, but I must know what is happening in Moscow.”

  “We got troubles,” the big man conceded.

  “This Navy SEAL of yours? Calvin James?”

  “And his friends.”

  “They are related?”

  “Most definitely. I positively ID’d Calvin James’s ass at the warehouse, and another son of a bitch was shouting with an English accent. Just like Dushanbe, and the English son of a bitch seemed to be in command.”

  “English?” Deyn scowled. “I have a difficult time believing the United States and the British are running combined Special Forces operations on the streets of Moscow.”

  “No, not a combined op. These guys were tight. They were a team.”

  “Yes, they killed fifteen of my men, and forced the survivors to extract, leaving weapons and evidence all over the scene.”

  Forbes shook his head as he remembered the battle. “They still don’t have shit. The Russian authorities have the bodies and money has been put in place to have them cremated.”

  “They have this coroner, Dr. Sokolova. They also have Kopeck.”

  Forbes rolled his massive shoulders. “What does that give them?”

  “Kopeck can lead them to the Rurikid brothers, who could conceivably lead them to our Russian friend, and from there…” Deyn let the implication hang.

  “That’s a pretty goddamn Byzantine path to the top if you ask me.”

  Deyn spiked the broken spear into the ground like a giant lawn dart. “They have you, Clay.”

  “Yeah, I hear you.” Forbes let out a long breath. “How do you want to play it?”

  “Extract our Russian friend, but you have my permission to kill him if it becomes expedient. Kill Sokolova. Have the Rurikid brothers send some of their men to do it, and then kill them, as well.”

  “You got it.” Deyn hunted and killed men the way some men played chess. Forbes kept the nervousness off his face. “What about me?”

  “Pig for dinner?” Deyn’s face suddenly broke into a smile. The killer could turn congenial without warning. “I have a Gewurztraminer from Alsace I believe you will appreciate. Will you join me?”

  Forbes turned to watch the huntsmen. They had hung the boar from an elm and were cutting huge slabs of steaming meat from the carcass. He had a lot of killing to arrange in the next twenty-four hours. He could use a sit-down dinner under his belt. “Damn straight.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Krylatskoe suburb, Moscow

  Dr. Sirpa Sokolova awoke with a scream. A hard, calloused hand clamped implacably over her mouth and smothered her cry. She had been dreaming of the killers that had come after her in the morgue, and now the assassins were in her home. Sokolova fought, clawing for her assailant’s eyes, but suddenly both of her wrists were expertly pinned in a cross over her breasts. She had put her father’s Tokarev pistol beneath her pillow, but it had been of no avail. She was silenced, pinned and at the mercy of her enemies.

  David McCarter spoke very low into her ear. “Someone’s in the house.”

  Sokolova sagged and McCarter eased his hand from her mouth. “Get your gun, get out of the bed and get low.” The naked Englishman rolled out of her bed with his Hi-Power pistol in his hand. Sokolova reached back and curled her fingers around the worn, hard rubber grips of the Tokarev.

  McCarter reached down into his ditty bag, and pulled a pair of night-vision goggles on over his eyes and extracted his cell phone. The interior of the doctor’s bedroom lit up in grainy greens and grays. Sokolova’s house was small and old. It was nicely furnished but size wise it was little more than a cottage. McCarter catfooted to the far side of the bedroom door as he heard a floorboard gently squeak in the narrow hall outside. He punched in a number on his phone and rapidly thumbed a text message.

  “Pheonix One. At Docs. About to get hit.”

  The bedroom door smashed back as someone put his boot to it. A fat man in a coverall stood in the doorway holding a gigantic revolver in each hand like a gunfighter. He leveled the immense 12.3 mm UDAR revolvers at the bed. The pistols rolled in his hands with recoil, booming like cannons as he emptied them into the bed as fast as he could pull the triggers.

  McCarter’s Hi-Power barked once in short, sharp response to the thundering fury of the assassin’s firearms. The 9 mm +P+ hollowpoint round stove in the killer’s mandible and transversed his skull. The hollowpoint expanded as it traveled to carve a channel that skimmed the man’s hard palate and the bott
om of his brain before blasting out the other side of his jaw.

  The killer collapsed bonelessly to the floor.

  McCarter jerked back from the door as a submachine gun ripped wood from the frame. His pistol barked twice and the man fell back against the wall with a thud, but the assassin’s weapon kept ripping the space where McCarter had been a moment before.

  Sokolova snarled something that sizzled in Russian and her antique Tokarev blasted at the wall. McCarter smiled harshly as he heard the thump and clatter of a body and gun hitting the hardwood floor in the hallway.

  Everything was suddenly silent.

  McCarter crouched, listening for long seconds. “Wait here.”

  Sokolova let out a breath that shuddered with adrenaline reaction. “I will wait.”

  McCarter knelt by the first shooter. He was still gurgling but his jaw hung from his head by threads of tendon and his limbic region was jelly. McCarter risked a look out the door. The second shooter lay facedown on the floor, blood spreading around his head in a pool. A Stetchkin machine pistol with the wooden shoulder stock attached lay a foot away from his limp hand.

  Sokolova whispered from her crouch by the dresser. “They are dead?”

  McCarter put a finger to his lips. “Shh…”

  Instincts won the hard way told McCarter there was another killer in the house. He willed his heart to slow, and he breathed silently in and out through his mouth. The leader of Phoenix Force waited. Dogs were barking up and down the street from the sound of the guns. Five minutes passed.

  An urgent voice whispered from the kitchen. “Dimochka! Feydor!”

  McCarter’s smile was ugly.

  Bloody amateurs.

  He could see everything in his night-vision goggles, but the light from the streetlights came in through the window and the gloom was enough for Sokolova’s night-adapted eyes to see by. McCarter waved his arm in a circle until he had her attention, then pointed at the holes she’d punched in the wall with her pistol. He made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger meaningfully.

  Sokolova nodded and took a shooting rest on the top of the dresser, pointing her pistol where he’d indicated.

  “Dimochka!” The voice hissed again. “Feydor!”

  McCarter only spoke a few phrases in Russian, but like any soldier who’d fought in a foreign land he knew the choice ones. “Dimochka and Feydor are dead.”

  The other assassin roared in rage and fear. Guns began detonating from the kitchen and feet thudded on the floor as the enemy charged the bedroom with guns blazing. There were two of them. McCarter dropped prone as bullets ripped overhead. He waited until he could see both men clearly and they closed on the body of the man in the hall.

  “Shoot!” McCarter shouted.

  Sokolova began to shoot. Tokarevs shot small bullets at very high velocity, and with full-metal-jacketed rounds they had a well-warranted reputation as drillers. They passed through the interior wall of the house with ease. McCarter’s pistol spoke out loud in brutal accompaniment.

  The would-be assassins in the hallway jerked and fell in the withering cross fire.

  “Empty!” Sokolova whispered.

  By his own count McCarter had three rounds left. “Don’t move.”

  He rose from the floor.

  Sokolova screamed as the bedroom window smashed in and the twin barrels of a 12-gauge shoved through the broken pane and blasted blindly. McCarter spun like a turret and fired. The man outside screamed as the 9 mm bullet expanded violently into his right hand and broke apart in all directions as it hit the stock of his weapon. The shotgun fell to the floor and McCarter’s second shot punched into the man’s shoulder and spun him back out of the shattered window.

  The Briton leaped on top of the bed to avoid the broken glass all over the floor. Out the window a man was staggering toward the sidewalk clutching his right arm and hand.

  The Hi-Power barked and the man screamed as the bullet hit the back of his thigh and smashed his leg out from under him. McCarter punched a button on his phone and Calvin James instantly answered. “What is your situation, Phoenix One?”

  “We got hit. Three suspects down. One prisoner. The doctor is alive. We’re extracting.”

  Secure communications room, U.S. Embassy, Moscow

  “THEY WERE AMATEURS.” McCarter scowled. “Bloody cornershop killers. Not the same caliber of lads who came for us at Kopeck’s warehouse at all.”

  T.J. Hawkins flipped through a file. “Yeah, intelligence confirms that. You brought down Dimochka Vishnenov, Feydor Ulanov and Vasily Shulko. The guy you brought in is one Constantine Markakov. All have impressive rap sheets with Moscow P.D., but they’re street soldiers, not much more than thugs and leg-breakers, and known associates of the Rurikid mafiya group here in Moscow.”

  There was a knock at the door and Dr. Sokolova entered. The leggy Russian took a seat at the table. She looked shaky, but her jaw was set determinedly. “Good morning.”

  “Thank you for joining us.” McCarter glanced at the thick sheaf of files the doctor held. “Did you get anything useful from Kopeck’s warehouse?”

  “The assault team was armed with Russian AKSU carbines loaded with RPK, 45-round light machine magazines. Each individual had Gurza semiautomatic pistol and Spetsnaz combat knife. Several had silenced pistols as well, two men carried handcuff and plastic restraints.”

  It was typical Russian raid equipment. “How about the bodies? Did you get any IDs?”

  Sokolova shook her head. “Fingerprints and dental records of assailants are in no Russian military or police database that I have access to.”

  McCarter leaned back in his chair. Their mystery assailants were remaining a puzzle.

  Sokolova chewed her pencil for a moment and then tapped it on the pile of files in front of her. “However, while it is only hunch, I do not believe your opponents at warehouse were Russian.”

  Calvin James had been thinking the same thing. “What makes you think that?”

  “We had no dental records of victims, but some cadavers had signs of dental work. Most Russians with bad teeth simply get gold ones or dentures or do nothing. Several victims had dental work not typical of Russian dentists. Higher quality and more expensive than Russian soldier can afford. More typical of Western European medicine. Other small things, such as vaccination scars. Russian Special Forces receive them like assembly line. These men had none or atypical. Another man had tattoo on biceps. It was, how do you say, a broken heart, with word ‘Mother’ written across, but not in Cyrillic, it was spelled m-u-t-t-e-r.”

  Manning perked an eyebrow. His mother had been born in Munich. “That’s ‘mother’ in German.”

  James nodded. “This German connection keeps coming up.”

  “That’s another thing.” Encizo raised a finger pointedly. “The guys who hit us at Kopeck’s place, they didn’t act like ex-Russian military. They were tip-top.”

  McCarter’d had the same feeling. Russian Special Forces were good, but since the Soviet Union had collapsed they had become something less than the clandestine special operations force they had once been. Their mission had shifted from infiltrating NATO targets on the eve of Armageddon to dealing with bloody civil wars and internal Russian conflicts. Special Forces funding in the former Soviet Union had also dried up. Russian Special Forces were still better armed, equipped and trained than their regular Russian army counterparts, but the decade-long war in Chechnya with the endless street fighting and suppression of the civilian population had turned them into door kickers and shock troops rather than real operators in the Western sense.

  McCarter smiled sardonically. The lads at Kopeck’s place had been operators, and crackerjack ones at that. “Let’s call them bloody German Special Forces and be done with it, then.”

  Manning shook his head unhappily. German commandoes were neck and neck with the U.S. and UK for best in the world. “That ups the ante.”

  “That’s right,” McCarter agreed. “Our boys came in with overwhel
ming force and firepower. Their only problem was they weren’t ready for what Phoenix brought to the table. They surprised us and we surprised them right back.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy it.” Encizo considered the competition. “But why? What are German operators doing in Moscow, much less operating against us?”

  “Let’s call them former German operators for the moment, private contractors, and they’re here to get the nukes and suppress resistance. The question is, who are they working for?”

  The answer was obvious but still left a gaping mystery.

  “Whoever Forbes was talking to in Dushanbe would be my bet.” James snorted. “Figuring that out is going to be the fun one.”

  Encizo reviewed the battle in his mind once more. “You know we were in place outside Kopeck’s three hours before we hit the place. We did a full recon. The warehouse was isolated. We would have detected a surveillance team anywhere within range. We had good hides and we would have detected anyone coming to the party late, but they were on us, instantly, the moment we moved in.”

  McCarter frowned. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying they had to be several miles away but they still hit us like lightning.” Encizo grimaced. “I’m saying they were watching Kopeck’s place by satellite.”

  Hawkins grunted. “You’re assigning them some pretty big assets.”

  McCarter agreed with Encizo’s assessment. “But it makes sense. Put Bear on it. We need to know every satellite in the sky last night that could have been watching Kopeck’s place, and I want to know who owns it.” McCarter turned back to Sokolova. “What do you know about the Rurikid mafiya family.”

  Sokolova’s eyebrows rose over her glasses. “You did not hear?”

  “We’ve been in conference for the past hour. What have you heard?”

  “Ivan and Andrej Rurikid were found dead forty-five minutes ago. Shot to death, in their beds. Their families were killed too. It is all over television. It is being called the worst gangland hit in Moscow in ten years. Moscow P.D. fears there will be war in the streets.”