would need both weapons soon. Then he felt and heard a crack. Someone had swiped at his head with a bat or stick. It was a glancing blow, or he would have been dead instead of seeing stars.
The men dragged Jack out of the vehicle and dumped him onto the pavement. He rolled, dodging kicks, to their frustration. Finally the big man with the lightning tattoo bent down to pry his arms apart. Jack kicked him in the groin with all his strength. A scream cut the night and Jack lashed out again, seizing a handful of the man’s long braids. He used them to drag his head down and strike it against the pavement, stunning him into silence.
Jack backed against the car and rose, Glock in hand. Most of the crowd scattered then, ducking behind cars or fleeing into the street. But five men stood their ground, whipped out guns of their own. If they’d fired just then, Jack would have been a dead man. Instead they began to wave their weapons around in an absurdly threatening manner, hurling insults and threats.
“You want to start shooting, mother—”
“Hey man, go ahead, you pull your trigger and we’ll pull ours—”
“You gonna die, asshole, ’cause you don’t know who you’re messing with—”
They were untrained, unskilled, not particularly bright, but they made a lot of noise. Punks, not professionals, but they had him outgunned five to one. Jack knew from experience standoffs like this never lasted long. Someone always got impatient or scared or stupid or all three. And no matter how the situation ended, someone was bound to end up dead.
Jack had to break the impasse, the only way he knew how. He raised the Glock and aimed.
Georgi Timko knew the four men were trouble the moment they walked into his tavern.
Up to that time, it had been a quiet night, by Tatiana’s standards at least. Some fists were thrown early in the evening, but the tussle was dealt with by Alexi, the bar’s three-hundred-pound bouncer and veteran of the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Both Olga and Beru were making nice tips from eager young men who tucked dollar bills into their skimpy G-strings, whether they were dancing on stage or serving drinks on the floor. The pool tables were both crowded, and the clientele — mostly bikers from a Queens “motor club”—were generally behaving themselves while consuming copious amounts of beer.
Icing on the cake for Georgi this night — the satellite broadcast had just ended and the Bulgarian soccer team, heavily favored in the match, had lost to the Armenians — which meant a big payoff for Georgi, who almost always bet on the underdog. He’d brewed some tea in his private samovar in celebration.
Then, eight minutes ago, the men in the long blue coats arrived and spoiled Georgi’s evening. They’d come through the door silently, not speaking to anyone, not even one another. They ignored old toothless Yuri, who always sat by the entrance nursing his beer, hand extended to anyone who entered in the hope someone would spot him another one.
Without even a glance at Beru, who swayed topless on stage to some mindless hip-hop song, the men sat down together in one of the booths along the wall. With a professional eye, Georgi noted that’s exactly the place he would have chosen. From that booth the men could watch the crowd at the pool tables and keep a watchful eye on Alexi near the cash register, and Nicolo drawing beers behind the bar.
Olga sauntered over and tried to engage the men in a little flirtatious banter, but failed to elicit more than a mumbled demand for a pitcher and four mugs— another bad sign.
Now the men had finished their beers and were stirring. They stood when Georgi rose from his chair behind the bar to fill his teacup at the steaming samovar. As the men approached him, Georgi turned his back to them as he sweetened his tea. He could feel their eyes watching him, and the base of his spine tingled — one of the many danger instincts he’d acquired as a juvenile delinquent in his native Ukraine thirty years ago.
In those days the dangers were the police or the KGB — a branch of the Soviet intelligence apparatus directed against Western espionage, but always eager to imprison a fellow member of the Soviet brotherhood for dealing in U.S. dollars, which Georgi and his peers in the mob did on a regular basis — how else was one to grow prosperous in a Soviet state were the national currency was worth less than the paper it was printed on?
Fortunately for Georgi, America was fertile ground for the kind of criminal enterprises he’d practiced in the old Soviet Union. So when the Iron Curtain rose and the KGB files were opened to the public, certain information Georgi had provided to the secret police came to light. That information proved damning to Georgi’s rivals in the Ukrainian Mafia, many of whom were sent to Siberia. A few others — particularly nasty sorts, in Georgi’s estimation — ended their lives facedown in a filthy prison shower, a KGB officer’s bullet placed behind their ear, solely on the evidence he had provided.
Unfortunately, those men had relatives, friends, and criminal associates. When the truth was revealed, many sought revenge — and so Georgi was forced to emigrate in a hurry.
Here in America, he was able to start anew in a less economically repressive world. In America the police were much less of a problem, and a fascist organization like the KGB nonexistent. There were, of course, dangers. But here in America, here in Georgi’s adopted country, that danger came courtesy of four young gangsters wearing dusters on a warm summer night.
Georgi shot a glance at Alexi. The bouncer seemed prepared, his beefy hand poised to reach for the bulge in his safari jacket.
Georgi always had a soft spot in his hard heart for veterans of the Afghan war, though he despised Russians in general. Only now, at this tense moment, did it occur to him that his compassion might cause his death this night.
With a degree of fatalism, Georgi Timko sniffed the steaming mug of tea as if it were his last. Then he turned to face his assassins.
That’s when all hell broke loose — but not the way Georgi expected it.
Suddenly the tavern’s thick, glass block windows exploded inward in an avalanche of broken shards. On the ceiling, a light fixture shattered in a shower of hot sparks, plunging much of the bar into darkness. Two spider- webbed bullet holes cracked the smooth surface of the wall-sized mirror behind the bar. A third whizzed by Timko’s brow, to punch a hole in the stuffed buffalo head mounted on the wall.
A final shot smashed a gallon jug of Jack Daniel’s, and in the silence that followed, Georgi listened to the rich brown elixir drip onto the scuffed hardwood floor.
As the echoes faded, the patrons who’d thrown themselves under tables when the shooting started now stumbled to their feet. With angry shouts they crowded around the single exit as they all tried to escape the building at the same time.
The punks were stunned into paralysis when Jack fired the Glock into the crowded tavern. Jack was careful to keep his shots high, far over the heads of the patrons inside.
Instantly, a dangerous horde of furious customers poured out of Tatiana’s. Jack dropped the empty Glock and held up his hands.
From the bar’s doorway, a biker with a long oily ponytail pointed at the gun-toting young men. “There they are! There’s the bastards shooting at us!”
The punks bolted, vanishing among the parked cars. Jack stood alone, hands raised. The bikers approached, not friendly.
“What the hell are you doin’?” one yelled. He drew a police special from his pocket.
Jack kept his arms raised, but if they searched him, they would find the other gun — and more. Suddenly a sustained barrage of automatic fire discharged inside the darkened tavern. Then the bartender burst through the front door, running full tilt for the street. He only made it a few steps before a stream of 9mm slugs chased him through the doorway, tearing bloody red holes in his back. The bartender staggered for a moment, then pitched headfirst onto the concrete.
When he saw that, the biker with the police special turned tail and ran, too, as yelling men and two screaming women in thongs and high heels stampeded. Engines roared to life all around Jack. Cars, trucks, motorcycles, until the noise drowned out the chattering guns.
Inside the tavern, the shooting continued. The automatic weapons’ fire was first met with single shots from a large-caliber handgun. Then Jack heard a familiar sound, easily recognizable from his service with Delta Force in
