‘You were.’
‘I don’t snore.’ She smiled, shyly. ‘I’m a lady.’
‘A very beautiful lady.’
She couldn’t help but smile wider. ‘I can’t sleep if you’re not there. Come back to bed, please.’
‘Give me five minutes to finish up and I’ll be in. How does that sound, my love?’
Kasakov watched Izolda turn and leave. He didn’t like lying to his wife, but sometimes it was unavoidable. He was not working. Burliuk and Eltsina were running the business in his absence and he’d left instructions he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Burliuk had been opposed to Kasakov taking a vacation when they were in the middle of trying to repair the damage done by the many attacks the network had suffered in the past few weeks, but Kasakov had gone regardless. He didn’t have the patience to deal with scared employees and North Koreans who were furious their order had been delayed, and even angrier to learn they would only receive eighteen fighter jets instead of the promised twenty. That mark to Kasakov’s reputation would take a lot of work to repair.
He hadn’t lied about his inability to sleep. However, it wasn’t his business that kept him awake, nor was it his nephew’s death; with Illarion avenged, he was finally at peace on that score. No, it was his wife who occupied Kasakov’s thoughts. Her reluctance to concede to his advances had not gone unnoticed, nor had the increased frequency of shopping trips and salon visits and lunches with friends.
Her footsteps were too quiet for Kasakov to hear, so he waited a couple of minutes to make sure she wasn’t going to suddenly reappear before reinserting his earbuds. He settled into his chair and clicked the mouse to continue the video. The recording had been made using a sophisticated camera, as Kasakov had requested, and both the picture quality and sound were excellent, even if the camerawork could have been better. Had it occurred to him beforehand he would have hired a professional cinematographer to handle the shoot. However, given the video’s content, such an individual would probably have been impossible to find.
Kasakov had watched an hour of footage already and there was another two hours to go. He would check on Izolda shortly to make sure she was asleep. If she wasn’t, he would climb into bed with her and wait until she was snoring again before returning to the video. This was the second time Kasakov had viewed it, and like any good movie he was able to appreciate it even more on a repeat viewing.
He blinked away tears and closed his eyes to picture Illarion’s face while through the earbuds flowed the exquisite screams of Ariff and his family.
CHAPTER 50
It had rained all week. Victor lay in the undergrowth that covered the outcrop. With the limited viewpoint over the back of the dacha, he hadn’t seen the arms dealer arrive, but had become aware of Kasakov’s guards patrolling the property. Soon afterwards, Victor glimpsed the Ukrainian as he passed one of the visible window on the second floor, but he didn’t loiter long enough for Victor to put the binoculars down and shoot accurately. Victor hadn’t expected to complete the contract with such a shot, but that was why he’d trimmed the trees that screened the house.
A very beautiful woman accompanied Kasakov, who from the dossier Victor knew to be his wife, Izolda. She was tall and slim, carrying herself with the confidence of a runway model. There were no other guests. Victor counted five bodyguards in total, just as he’d been told there would be. They slept in the guesthouse in shifts, so there were always at least three awake and ready. As in Minsk, they weren’t particularly big, but spec ops and intelligence guys usually weren’t. Each had the gait and manner of a serious operator, and the dossier stated that Kasakov had a penchant for hiring ex-Spetsnaz soldiers. Victor’s last run-in with the Spetsnaz was not something he was eager to repeat.
He lay in a shallow between two trees on the highpoint. With binoculars, he continuously watched the rear of the dacha. The branches he’d cleared provided a small corridor of space through the otherwise overlapping foliage of the three trees. The line of sight was far from ideal, but he could see the back entrance and a thin sliver of ground outside of it. A limited view, but enough to put a bullet into Kasakov should he use the door.
Victor had prepared the ground by removing stones and branches from where he would be lying and landscaping the soil flat. He knew he could be in the same spot for several days and every annoying lump and bump on the first day would be agony by the fifth. Any distraction had the potential to throw a shot and he wanted to squeeze the trigger just once and be gone.
Birds chirped above his head. They were used to his presence now, not scaring even when he was forced to move. A waterproof sheet stretched across the two trees formed a makeshift shelter. It only partially covered him, due to where he needed to lie, but it kept some of the rain off and allowed him to keep his weapons and equipment dry.
The CIA-supplied rifle Victor planned to kill Kasakov with was a Dakota T-76 Longbow chambered for. 338 calibre Lapua Magnum ammunition. Victor wanted to be able to kill Kasakov from as far away as possible and, short of using a huge. 50 calibre, a. 338 offered the best range and power. The. 338 Lapua Magnum was designed to penetrate five layers of military body armour at one thousand metres and have enough force left for a one-shot kill. Victor knew from painful experience the round’s effectiveness against supposedly bulletproof glass.
As well as generating over five thousand pounds of muzzle energy, the Longbow was extremely accurate. The manufacturers even guaranteed. 5 minutes of arc at fifteen hundred metres. It was an impressive claim but Victor would be shooting from half that. As long as he did his part, the Longbow would deliver.
He wouldn’t be using a suppressor, to guarantee accuracy and killing ability, and a. 338 made a lot of noise. The back door was seven hundred and twenty yards away so the sound of the shot would reach the dacha a little under two seconds after the bullet left the barrel. He could potentially get another two shots off before the noise reached the area, but Victor favoured doing things right the first time.
The Longbow came with a matte black finish that he’d sprayed with green and brown paint. He was dressed in the same green Gore-Tex clothes as he’d worn for his reconnaissance of the dacha’s grounds. They hadn’t been washed and Victor hadn’t bathed. He didn’t want the smell of soap and shampoo to alert the local wildlife and give him away if Kasakov’s bodyguards were extra diligent and patrolled outside of the mansion’s grounds.
A nearby rucksack contained rations and other equipment. In the pockets of his tactical harness were full magazines, a torch, waterproof matches, binoculars, compass, GPS reader and a combat knife. He had a bottle and plastic bags to serve as a toilet. There was no way of knowing when Kasakov might appear within Victor’s limited target area and he couldn’t afford to move in case the call of nature coincided with that moment.
Should things go wrong, either with the kill or the extraction, Victor had two other guns to assist him. Strapped to his right thigh was a tactical holster containing the Heckler amp; Koch MK23. Near to the rucksack was an MP7A1 with a forty-round box magazine. The MK23 was a fine handgun, designed to meet the requirements of US Special Operations forces. It fired the. 45 ACP cartridge and had a twelve-round capacity. The gun was very accurate, considered match grade, capable of two-inch groups at fifty yards. The. 45 ACP also struck with substantial stopping power but was naturally subsonic and almost silent when shot from a suppressor.
The MP7, also made by Heckler amp; Koch, fell somewhere between a sub-machine gun and an assault rifle, and had the designation of a personal defence weapon. In Victor’s opinion such a designation was an awkward one. There was nothing defensive about the gun. The MP7 was all about offence. Lightweight at 4.19 pounds, and just over twenty-three inches in length with the stock collapsed, the gun was effective beyond four hundred yards. It was chambered for the high velocity 4.6? 30 mm round, which dismissed lead and brass in favour of a hardened steel penetrator, making it better suited for use against targets in body armour than the traditional pistol-calibre ammunition used in regular sub-machine guns.
Kasakov’s men had worn body armour in Bucharest and if Victor had to tangle with them he didn’t want his bullets lodging in their vests. Using a suppressor would have been pointless with the high-velocity ammunition and using subsonic rounds would have countered the benefits of using the MP7 in the first place.
So far, Kasakov hadn’t stepped outside the back door, which wasn’t surprising as it had rained continuously since the Ukrainian’s arrival. Lying in wait for hour after hour was boring, but Victor did not let his concentration lapse. With his restricted line of sight, he needed to stay focused at all times. The second after Kasakov fell he would be fleeing north-easterly through the trees, hiking two miles around the hillside to where his getaway vehicle
