experimental new team they were assembling.
Everyone selected had several things in common. No family. No real friends. No husbands or wives; nobody close. Emotional detachment and fluid sense of morality. And nearly superhuman reflexes and skills with weapons.
Jet never knew how many were approached, or how many went into the program only to falter during the brutal and uncompromising training. She had been trained alone. Though she’d seen a few others coming and going, Jet had been kept in a separate area, segregated except for her three instructors. At one point, one of them had explained that the isolation was for her safety; nobody knew who was on the team except for those who’d made the grade and had to work together, and the man assigned to act as its control — a man known only to the team by the code name Ariel. Jet didn’t even get to meet him until she had been approved in the final weeks before her specialized training ended. She’d been surprised to find that he was relatively young — no more than his mid-thirties — and extremely intense. Brooding would have been one description that would have fitted perfectly.
She snapped back to the present. There was nothing to be gained doing a trip down memory lane. She needed to focus.
Her footfalls crunched on the dry twigs, and she slowed as her GPS indicated she was getting close to the compound. With any luck, the mission would be over within fifteen minutes from the time she deactivated the first motion detector. Maybe less. There were twelve sentries guarding the target, but they worked split shifts, so she only needed to contend with six. The others would be neutralized in their sleeping quarters, using gas. The two small aluminum canisters were wrapped in neoprene sheaths to protect them on approach.
The compound’s lights were visible from several hundred yards, even through the dense vegetation. She’d been following a trail the advance surveillance group had told her ran near the property. She paused in the underbrush to flip her night vision goggles out of her field of vision, and brushed a bead of moisture off her forehead. There were a few other minor loose ends to attend to, but it was almost showtime, and her first piece of business was to render the motion detectors useless.
The guard never knew what hit him — a throwing knife penetrated his ribcage from behind, piercing his heart, the neurotoxin on the blade instantly paralyzing him even as his life ebbed from him. Jet knew there were four sentries outside and two inside, and her strategy was to take out the exterior guards silently.
She moved like a wraith, nearly invisible in the shadows. The second guard would be rounding the building within one minute — the Mossad watchers had confirmed the security detail was on a tight timetable with its patrols, a throwback to the highly disciplined training the men had received in the Russian special forces — Spetsnaz GRU, the most elite of the elite.
The little PSS pistol popped, driving a 7.62mm bullet through the second guard’s throat. He crumpled to the ground, his weapon dropping soundlessly on the grass beneath him.
Jet crouched by his motionless form, confirming he was dead before dragging him behind a hedge so the other guards wouldn’t be alerted.
Only two more to go outside.
The third was in the process of spinning around to identify the odd noise he’d heard when Jet’s second throwing knife punctured a lung. He joined his colleague behind the hedge — then Jet’s blood froze when his radio crackled at low volume and a voice demanded a status update in Russian.
She opted to let the call go unanswered. Her Russian was excellent, but these men knew each other, and even if she faked a garbled response in a low voice, they’d instantly know it wasn’t one of them. Now she would need to neutralize the fourth exterior guard before he made it from the rear of the compound, where he spent most of his nights doing nothing.
Sergei leaned against the wall as he answered the open call from inside the house, and confirmed that there was no news to report from his end. The latest in a long string of non-events, a routine weeknight in the boonies, in a shithole of a country, living amongst barbarians. He really hated his time in Chechnya and was anxiously anticipating the group’s departure at the end of the week. The boss moved around a fair amount, and they’d been told that their next posting would be in Malta, in the Mediterranean, for a month. That was more like it.
He was fumbling in his jacket pocket for a cigarette when the PSS slug blew through his skull, fragmenting on impact and sending several chunks of lead shredding through his cerebrum. He never knew he was dying; he’d merely stopped being alive, his stay on the planet ended before his body hit the cold stone slabs.
Jet ran full speed for the back door, knowing that she only had seconds to plunge the house into darkness. She’d affixed a small charge to the cabling that carried power to the villa — she depressed the remote trigger a few moments after she squirted the contents of a small canister into the lock, which dissolved with a smoking hiss. A muffled crack from beyond the wall preceded the power going off and the lights shutting down, and then four seconds later, the backup generator kicked on — just long enough for her to wrench the door open, slip inside and punch in the alarm code without the camera capturing her.
The first interior guard fell to her throwing knife, his blood gurgling in a froth as he groped for the slim handle that had suddenly appeared in the side of his throat. She was able to catch him and break his fall just as he tumbled forward, and she lowered him gently to the carpet, leaving the knife in place, his eyes losing focus during his death rattle.
Jet crept to the two bedrooms that had been identified as the guard quarters and slipped a plastic tube over a nipple on one end of the first canister before sliding it under the door and emptying the contents into the room. She repeated the process at the second room, and then listened for any sounds. The floor creaked upstairs, near the office that adjoined the master quarters. Someone was up there, awake. Maybe the guard, maybe the target.
Every sense in her body was on alert, trying to isolate any clues that would give away the final bodyguard’s position. Perhaps he was in the security center off the kitchen — the little study that the detail had set up to use for monitoring the surveillance equipment. That would be the most likely place.
She crept down the main hall and past the empty living room, her steps muffled by the carpet as well as the rubber soles of her boots — Doc Martens knockoffs that were all the rage in Moscow, and spuriously crafted in China, the Shangri-La of piracy. When she reached the study, she swung into the doorway with her pistol at the ready and was greeted by an empty room.
A door opened down the hall, and a man stepped out holding a magazine —
Jet heard another creak from upstairs as the dead man slid down the wall, leaving a ragged smear of blood. She was already at the stairs by the time gravity had finished with him.
Arkadi’s stomach was in knots. Something was wrong. The power had gone off, and since it had come back on, he hadn’t seen anyone patrolling outside. But more unusual was that he could make out a few faint lights from other buildings across the field at the surrounding farms. The night blackouts so far had always darkened everything, not just his compound.
He keyed the two-way radio he used to communicate with his security men and murmured a demand for them to call in. He released the button and waited for a response that never came.
It was always possible they hadn’t heard. But he wasn’t in the business of assuming the best about anything. His gut said he was in danger.
Arkadi moved to his desk and extracted a pistol from the center drawer — a SIG 225R — then tiptoed to the office door, listening intently for any sounds. He was working up the adrenaline to swing it open when the window burst inwards and a black-clad form rolled towards him. He pivoted, bringing the gun around, but then a blinding flash of pain spiked up his leg from where Jet’s razor-sharp combat knife had sliced his Achilles tendon. His leg buckled, and he screamed as he pulled the trigger, but the shot missed, and the pain transferred to his stomach. He dropped the gun on the floor as he gazed down to see Jet’s masked face staring up at him, her knife plunged to the hilt in his abdomen. She rose to her feet, gripping the knife and holding him upright, then sliced up into his heart as she’d been trained to do in countless hours of close quarters combat exercises.
Arkadi’s eyes opened in shock from the rapid exsanguination, but also with his last living thought — the
