Will smiled at the CIA SOG officer. “Indeed we are.” He looked at the other men. Laith Dia was one of them. He was the only other SOG paramilitary specialist to have survived Will’s last brutal mission to capture the Iranian mastermind Megiddo. Will was overjoyed that Patrick had sent the two CIA men. He asked Laith, “How’s your stomach?”
The tall, black-haired American shrugged. “I’ve got a scar right across it. Makes me look like I’ve had a darn hysterectomy.” The ex-Delta Force man laughed, shook Will’s hand, then nodded toward the third man. “Ross Tark. SAS Increment.”
Ross was slightly shorter than the two CIA men but was still six feet tall. He was an athletic, handsome man with close-cropped blond hair. When he looked at Will, his brown eyes looked dead, a common appearance among special forces men who had seen sustained action. The SAS soldier shook Will’s hand and spoke to him with a Scottish lilt. “Nice to meet you. Now, if you don’t mind, we need to check through the kit.”
Roger, Laith, and Ross silently removed items from diplomatic bags and laid them out on the large dining room floor. Sentinel was standing in one corner of the room beneath a cut-glass chandelier, talking to one of his assets on his cell phone. Will stood watching them, his arms folded across his chest.
They were in a beautiful fourteen-bedroom seventeenth-century house set in the middle of sixty acres of gardens containing whitebeam trees, manicured lawns, wild heathland, stone paths, red and musk deer, and kennels for big Caucasian Ovcharka guard dogs. The house and its grounds were thirty miles south of the Russian city of Kursk.
An elderly lady with white shoulder-length hair and wearing an expensive-looking skirt and jacket walked slowly into the room holding a tray containing five bone china cups and saucers and an ornate teapot. She placed the tray on a twelve-seat oak dining table, frowned, moved across the room, stepped over a Chinese QBZ-95G assault rifle placed on the floor by Laith, and walked to the opposite wall, where many gold-framed paintings of landscapes and stallions were hanging. After straightening one of the paintings, she turned and walked back across the room, this time stepping over magazine clips, and began pouring tea into the cups. Squeezing lemon into the drinks, she looked at Sentinel and spoke a few words in Russian.
Sentinel snapped his phone shut, walked up to her, gently kissed her on both cheeks, and smiled. The woman hugged him, holding the MI6 officer for a long time, then released him and walked out of the room. Roger, Laith, and Ross finished extracting all of their kit. The floor now contained four QBZ-95Gs, five QSZ-92 handguns, spare magazine clips, military communication systems, binoculars, cell phones, battlefield medical kits, plastic waterproof envelopes containing wads of cash, piles of white arctic warfare clothes, stun grenades, and one Chinese AMR-2 12.7 mm sniper rifle.
A silver-haired man came in, carrying a plate of cakes. He was in his seventies and dressed in a three-piece suit and tie. He nodded at the men and said in a soft Russian accent, “Gentlemen, this food is all we have, but my wife and I are honored to give it to you.”
Sentinel immediately grabbed two of the plastic envelopes of cash, took the plate, and gave him the money. The man looked hesitant and said something in Russian. Sentinel replied with something inaudible. A slight smile emerged on the Russian’s face, and he clicked his heels together, gave a sharp nod of his head, turned, and walked out of the room. Placing the cakes next to the teapot, Sentinel spoke quietly to Will. “They come from previous generations of tsarist Russian aristocracy. Most of their relatives were wiped out in the 1917 revolution; the few that survived were imprisoned or managed to go into hiding, penniless and homeless.” He looked around the room. “The couple you’ve just seen are the grandchildren of some of those survivors. They spent their lives trying to accrue enough money to purchase this house, which was seized by revolutionaries from the husband’s grandfather. It belonged to his family line for three hundred years, but in buying the property, the couple used up their entire savings.” He looked at Will. “They live in splendor and poverty, waiting here with the vain hope that one day Russia may once again be ruled by nobility.”
Roger called across the room, “We’re ready.”
Will and Sentinel joined the men. Roger stood on the other side of the military hardware, holding a cup of tea in one fist. Ross was sitting on a chair, munching a cake. Laith was sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette.
Sentinel looked at them all. “Gentlemen, Barkov must be protected at all costs, because if we fail to kill Razin he’s our last remaining hope to pin down Taras’s location.” He looked at Will. “Unless my friend’s private operation has any legs.”
Will smiled.
Laith asked, “You’re sure he won’t use his Spetsnaz men in the assault?”
“He’ll be alone.”
Ross shrugged. “Then we’ll easily take him down.”
Sentinel looked sharply at the SAS man. “Don’t think that way.”
Roger set his cup on the table. “When’s the meeting?”
“I’m waiting for Barkov to call me.” Sentinel looked at the weapons. “How do you want to play this?”
Roger answered, “Laith and I will be in the house.” The former DEVGRU SEAL nodded at Ross. “Tark will be our sniper.”
“All right. Well, there’s nothing we can do now but wait.”
Sentinel walked out of the room.
Roger picked up his cup and saucer and moved to the window. Will joined him.
Speaking quietly while looking at the garden, the CIA officer said, “My grandfather fought in Russia as a paratrooper in the Wehrmacht’s Fallschirmjager Division in ’41. He nearly died here. When I was a kid, I remember him telling me about the Second World War, his battles in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Greece, Crete, Sicily, and Italy and how he earned the Iron Cross.” He shook his head. “He reckoned that none of them was as bad as what he experienced in Russia.” He leaned against the window frame and looked at Will. “We might have a bigger and better-equipped army, but this ain’t a place for American soldiers.”
W ill stood in the vast grounds of the seventeenth-century house, several hundred yards away from the property. Sprouting through the snow were many pink Luculia flowers.
He folded his arms, deep in thought. He was glad that the paramilitary men were here, but he still felt deeply uneasy about Sentinel’s plan to kill Razin. Not for the first time, he wondered if Sentinel was intending to sacrifice his life to take his revenge on Razin.
Movement in the woods. A large brown shape, now gone. In a flash, he withdrew a QSZ-92 handgun and pointed it at the place where he had last seen the movement. His eyes darted left and right, searching the areas of open land between the trees. Big flakes of snow began to fall slowly through the windless air. He heard bird calls, nothing else. His heart pounded, but his hands and gun were steady. He saw the shape again, in a narrow gap between two trees, and swung his weapon toward it, but just as quickly the shape disappeared. Keeping his gun at eye level and held with both hands, he braced his body, ready to shoot.
He saw it again; his finger instinctively started pulling back the trigger, but after a few millimeters the finger released its grip. His body relaxed.
Fifty feet away from him, standing between trees and easily visible, was a huge stag. The antlers of the red deer towered over its magnificent physique. The stag stared at Will, keeping very still. Will lowered his weapon and stared back at the beast. They stayed like that for thirty seconds before the stag moved a few feet toward him and stopped again. Will expected the deer to turn and bolt into the woods, but it remained in front of him, and then it walked even closer, its breath visible out of its large nostrils. The stag lowered its head and moved a hoof back and forth over the snow. For the briefest moment, Will wondered if it was going to charge at him. But then the animal looked up, again fixing his large eyes on Will, came forward, stopped, and tossed his head.
The deer’s ears twitched. It stepped back, turned, and darted off into the woods.
“Remarkable.” The elderly Russian man who owned the house was walking toward him. “The stag came to my grounds a year ago, most likely from the nearby forests. He’s wild and has a doe and two fawns to protect.” The man reached Will. “They’re very shy creatures, and we rarely ever see them. And I’ve never seen a wild stag walk that close to a human being.” He turned to Will. “He’s received the call. You’re all to leave.”
Chapter Twenty-five
