Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (59 page)

“That’s our train. We need to go,” Nolan said. Their group was at the edge of cover with no sign of the CIA, which was both a relief and a concern. Maybe it wasn’t a kidnapping, but purely a straight assassination play with the NSA files being, what . . . a thank-you to Russia for killing Watermen and him? That didn’t make sense.

“Why should I allow you to go out there?” Chumakov asked.

“Because the NSA files are on the train, and if I don’t give the signal you’ll never find them, even if you search everyone on board. If the train doesn’t stop, the exposé goes up on the internet, and you end up in the gulag.”

Chumakov spoke in Russian and his underling came up to Watermen’s side. Nolan couldn’t tell, but it looked like Pit-stain had a gun in Godson’s ribs. From afar, Watermen and Nolan were more or less identical in appearance, with the 5’9” skinny Watermen looking larger as the wind filled out his oversized scrubs. On his right, Yuri took hold of Kaili’s upper arm. She shook him off, and he grabbed her again with such force, she was nearly yanked off her feet.

The train was two hundred fifty yards away and speeding toward them. They stepped out of cover, blinking in the bright sun, and started walking between the lap pool and the retaining wall. Nolan and Chumakov stepped up and over the top of the wall, which had a four-foot drop onto hard-packed ground on the other side. Nolan waved at the locomotive to stop, but the driver braked late. The train would overshoot their position. Chumakov knelt on one knee at the seawall as the others climbed up and over.

The locomotive screeched to a halt twenty yards forward of where it should have been. Passengers flocked to the windows and yelled in various languages, angry at the unscheduled stop. To reach the concealed Glock, Nolan had to get to the other side of the tracks. Nolan turned to Chumakov and said, “The three of us are walking across the tracks alone while you stay on this side. Someone on the train will throw you a thumb drive once the train starts to move. If you have any issues with me, settle them now, but leave my family out. Be warned, I have a sniper with his sights on your head.” Chumakov reflexively hunched and duck-walked back toward the seawall as Nolan strode purposefully toward the front of the train.

*  *  *  *  *

At exactly 10:25, the driver stopped the stolen concrete mixer at the top of the Racquets Club’s sloped driveway. The wrought iron gate was a relic of the colonial past, a twenty-foot-wide monstrosity that the septuagenarian guards labored to swing open in the morning and shut at night. Balendra signaled for the driver to park the truck as he closed the gate against the protests of the ancient security man. Nine hundred pounds of fresh concrete slid out the rear spout. The driver opened the hood, sabotaged the engine, pocketed the keys and disappeared up the driveway and onto Galle Road. No one was driving in or out of the Colombo Racquets Club for a very long time.

Balendra’s jog back to the main building changed to a sprint as he heard two shots in short succession.

*  *  *  *  *

Kaili was leading Watermen and Pit-stain toward the front of the stopped locomotive. Chumakov was shouting in Russian. The henchman let go of Watermen just as Nolan raced past. Kaili took off her hairnet and reached back to fumble with her bun.

Watermen’s head disintegrated, showering Nolan with blood and brain tissue. Watermen tumbled to the ground in slow motion just as the noise of the shot reached them. A suppressed cough coincided with the death of Pit-stain, a crimson blossom spreading at the neckline of his Oxford cloth shirt. Nolan kept running and rounded the locomotive with Kaili. Another shot sounded. He expected himself or Kaili to fall over, but the victim was an SBS commando who lay dead twenty yards down the beach, submachinegun beside him. More shots came from behind, but Nolan couldn’t tell if they’d found targets. They climbed onto the motionless train. It was bedlam with passengers crouched down between the seats or on the floor, screaming and shouting.

“Give me the grenade!” he shouted. Kaili already had it in her hand. He looked for a target and saw Chumakov hunched up against the seawall, a bleeding Yuri flat on his back next to him. A bloody drag mark showed where Chumakov had pulled him to shelter. Pit-stain was sprawled facedown on the beach, a discarded rag doll. Fernando was earning his money. Nolan pulled the pin out of the grenade but kept the lever clenched.

Pathmarajah came back into the first passenger carriage and yelled, “The driver has been shot dead! I’m getting out of here!” He pulled out the yellow thumb drive secured inside a small plastic bag and taped to a cricket ball. He went to a train window, but before he could pitch the ball, Nolan used his left hand to grab his arm and leaned in to shout, “Throw it near the seawall, twenty feet in front of that fellow with the gun!” Pathmarajah made a good toss, within Chumakov’s view but far enough away from the seawall to give Fernando a shot.

Chumakov looked up, and Nolan leaned out the window holding the grenade below the interior windowsill. The Tartar looked as if he would take a shot, but instead bear-crawled the short distance to the cricket ball without exposing himself to the snipers. Nolan raised his arm, released the handle and breathed, “One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three—”

He lobbed the grenade toward the prone Russians, but it exploded closer to the train than the FSB agents. The shock wave staggered and deafened him. Cowering Lankans cushioned his fall as he collapsed backward. The passengers were now in full cry, the screams of the wounded comingling with the shouts of the terrified. He pushed himself up and looked for Kaili, who was similarly horizontal atop writhing passengers.

“Bob, you’re hurt!” she said, but he couldn’t hear.

Was Chumakov dead? He had been completely exposed in front of that wall, but the grenade had detonated too soon. Nolan used the seat back to pull himself upright, a mix of Watermen’s brains, blood and his own gore decorating his scrubs. A glance out the train window showed the Russian down and unmoving. There was no time to empty Pathmarajah’s pistol at the prone body, particularly with a sniper around. “We have to get to the boat!” he shouted, though his ringing ears registered no sound. She followed him down the steps.

Pathmarajah was in front of them, running toward the inflatable manned by the surviving Navy commando. The sniper’s bullet hit the hacker off-center on the right shoulder blade, spinning him around and leaving an exit wound the size of a teacup saucer. Pathmarajah was conscious on his back, but they had no choice but to keep running if they wanted to avoid his fate.

“Stay near the train!” Nolan cried. At the last car, Kaili dodged between fleeing passengers and angled down toward the waterline and the boat. Nolan followed, waiting for the impacts that would end one or both of their lives.

*  *  *  *  *

Prior to this flight, Sam Hecker and Dick Constantine hadn’t spent more than a cumulative ten minutes in conversation. They made up for lost time, speaking obliquely about MH370, Teller, Matthews and Nolan. Constantine kept to himself his suspicion that Nolan and the DEA were right about a hijacking operation, but dead wrong about the Company being the sponsor. Nolan would be long gone very soon, and Hecker wasn’t from their tribe. The assignment of culpability for MH370 would be a delicate subject best handled internally. Hecker told him most of what he’d already learned from reading the transcripts of Barling’s phone calls, but it was good to get the information from a legitimate source, too.

Three rows up, Matthews was working through a bottle of decent Chianti. He’d picked up snippets of their conversation twice when he’d gone to the john. They’d avoided his eye and didn’t even bother to pretend they weren’t conspiring against him. Whether anything would stick in Tokyo tonight was unclear. Hecker and the DEA had disobeyed orders, crossed turf lines and most importantly, had unilaterally undertaken a US Army-staffed mercenary operation in a foreign country. In addition, Matthews had secret recordings of two phone conversations where Burns had spoken about Teller’s tenure with Golden Elephant. If someone wanted to get pissy about Robin Teller hiding under a CIA umbrella, then Matthews would not take the fall alone.

On the negative side, the MAS logo on the packing crate and the radioactivity both pointed to a hijacking with high-value cargo offloaded. Matthews and his people had nothing to do with either of them as far as anyone could tell. Handling low-grade security issues for Mr. Jay Toffer didn’t make him complicit in anything Robin Teller may have done on his own. With Teller dead, that avenue of inquiry wouldn’t yield results. Matthews could be found guilty only in the court of CIA internal opinion. Those were the sorts of rumors that could retard, if not derail, a career. He tapped his empty glass to get the hostess’s attention. He might as well drink a few more glasses; this would be a crappy trip any way he sliced it.

*  *  *  *  *

“There you are,
machan
.” At last Aja Fernando spied the competition, perched on a corner low down in the Grand Hyatt’s concrete shell. His shots would be at less acute angles than he’d anticipated. On the whole, this was good news, but now he had to move the bipod and rifle onto the balcony. With two shots already fired and a light haze above the stepladder, it was no longer a secret where he was hiding. He figured since no one had come after him, he would be safe outside the shelter of the overhang. That same instant he heard an automatic bark twice in the corridor, and whirled around with his Colt .45 at the ready. No one came through the door, so that rugby player must have done his job.

Turning his attention back outside, he balanced the bipod’s legs on the balcony railing. The Hyatt snipers were intent on their targets and paid him no heed. The elevation was approximately ninety feet, and the spotting scope read two hundred ninety two feet to the target. The breeze was four knots based on the actions of the flags flying on the poles lining the lap pool. He would only get two shots. Fernando’s first effort was inch-perfect and took the shooter through the throat. The second sniper on the spotting scope rolled right, but couldn’t move far because of his comrade’s corpse on top of him. In the moment it took him to push the body away, Fernando’s round impacted him behind the left armpit. Fernando could tell from the bloody mist that it was a solid hit. The shock of the fifty-caliber bullet would take the second man out of the fight even if the wound wasn’t fatal.

Fernando turned his attention out to the back of the club where the moderate surf and wind competed with the distant screams and shouts. He couldn’t hear any more gunshots, and saw an inflatable boat zigzag away from the beach at high speed. Through the scope, he saw two of his people in blue-green hospital wear with a man on the tiller. Only three instead of six: they’d lost half their number, including his hacker nephew.

*  *  *  *  *

Burns was in a muddle. Carrier-based recon flights suggested Japan’s ten-man Senkaku garrison had suffered air and sea bombardments followed by an amphibious assault. This was overkill, as the lightly armed Japanese garrison had flown a white flag from the outset. There might have been a Keystone Kops aspect to this senseless invasion if Japan hadn’t lost a pair of frontline fighters in air-to-air combat, while shooting down or damaging three of its adversary’s jets. China had offered no official comment—not even a denial—and Japan had now formally invoked the mutual defense obligation of the US to protect the islands as sovereign Japan soil. Burns was a spectator at the possible outbreak of WWIII, and yet was sourcing his information from unsecure lines, the BBC and, believe it or not, decrypted one-time pads that an old-timer had pulled out of the storeroom.

Meanwhile, the MH370 disappearance was beginning to look more and more like the work of the late Robin Teller. Despite the antics of that wacko Bob Nolan, the DEA agent’s photo of the Malaysia Airline logo on the crate containing a radioactive device supported a hijack theory.

At the very minimum, Burns had to create separation. Matthews had long been complicit in concealing Toffer/Teller, but there was nothing to tie Burns to Teller other than Matthews’s word. There was no way Charles Tecumseh Burns was going down for this trifle. He called out to his secretary, “Get someone from HR up here. I’m suspending Lloyd Matthews, effective immediately. I need a letter. Get legal in here, too, to massage the wording.”

*  *  *  *  *

Kaili and Nolan hung on the rope ringing the interior of the inflatable as they bounded from wave top to wave top. They hit the peaks with wrenching jolts; clenched teeth prevented them from speaking. Nolan found his left grip useless, which doubled the stress on his right forearm and slammed him into a prone Kaili as the boat swerved back and forth. After another minute, they were out of sniper range, and their tiller man reduced evasive moves while adding throttle. Nolan’s eyes stung from the salt spray, and his glasses were covered in spatter. They headed south down the coast, mercantile Colombo on the left and the Indian Ocean on the right. His eyes wouldn’t focus and his brain was scrambled. He was also in shock from his godson’s death and increasingly cognizant of his own wounds. The buzzing in his ears was subsiding, and he could now distinguish the roar of the outboard from the slap of the waves. They started toward shore, running with the wind and waves so the bouncing halved. Nolan stared at the bloody stains on his smock. For starters, his left forearm looked like a Doberman had given it a rip.

*  *  *  *  *

Gretchen Doyle was frantic. “We need eyes on the Racquets Club! What in the hell is happening?” The venue switch from the Cinnamon Grand Hotel to the club was on too short notice. Following Pat Long’s murder and Perkins’s “Do not touch Nolan” directive, Doyle had no option but to move carefully. The best she could do was assign three men to the Grand Hyatt construction site to cover over forty floors. Once the shooting started, they concentrated their efforts on the lower levels. The show was over by the time all three arrived on the podium block, out of breath.