State of the Union (17 page)

T
he powerful man circled Gary Lawlor’s chair like a bull zeroing in on an injured matador. He hadn’t introduced himself when he entered the bunker, and he didn’t need to. Though very much the worse for wear, Lawlor was still with it enough to know who the man was. Someone from the Russian Military High Command, especially someone like General Sergei Stavropol, was a person whose reputation preceded him.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” said Stavropol.

“It was only a matter of time before someone from Mother Russia showed up,” mumbled Lawlor, his cracked and swollen lips revealing a mouth full of broken and damaged teeth. “I’m just surprised at the poor level of help you are hiring to do your dirty work these days.”

“Helmut took a personal interest in your case. He can be very persuasive, but he doesn’t seem to be having that effect on you. Not to worry, though, I’m here now and I’m sure the two of us are going to get along just fine.”

Lawlor laughed. It was a dry, hacking cackle, the best he was capable of, but he choked it out nonetheless.

“You’re laughing. You don’t think I’m serious?” asked Stavropol.

“You may be serious, but you won’t be successful,” spat Lawlor between his laughs, which turned into a fit of coughing.

“You don’t sound so good. You may have aspirated some of your own blood. Or maybe you have a punctured lung? Have they been a bit rough on you?”

The understatement caused Lawlor to begin laughing again, which in his condition invariably led to another coughing fit.

“You need to relax. You’ll cough yourself to death, and that wouldn’t be good. Not at least until we’ve had a chance to talk.”

“I’ve got a manicure in a half hour, so let’s get on with it,” rasped Lawlor.

“Very funny. You like to joke, don’t you?” asked the Stavropol. “You like to have a good time?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Judging by some of the photographs I have, I guess it is.”

Photographs
, wondered Lawlor.
What the hell is he talking about?

“I assume you’d like to see them?” said Stavropol.

“I already have naked pictures of your wife,” replied Lawlor.

“Actually, these are pictures of your wife. Though she’s not naked, I thought you would appreciate some of the final surveillance photos that were taken of you both before her tragic accident.”

“
Accident
,” repeated Lawlor, the bile rising in his throat. “Fuck you.”

“So that means,
no
? You don’t wish to see the photos? That’s a shame. We were actually quite proud of that operation. But, it’s all water under the bridge, I can understand that—”

“Not water under the bridge. Now that I know you were involved, I am going to kill you too.”

“Me?” asked Stavropol, feigning surprise. “Considering your current situation, that would really be something to see.”

“First Draegar and then you,” hissed Lawlor.

“All in due time.”

“I promise you it will come.”

“Be that as it may, I have other photos you might like to see,” said Stavropol as he produced another set.

“Paste yourself up a fucking scrapbook. I’m not interested.”

“Don’t be too sure. There’s some people in here you might recognize.”

Lawlor turned his face away and Stavropol nodded to Draegar and Überhof, who came over and grabbed hold of Lawlor’s head and forced him to look at the pictures.

“You’re quite an enigma, Mr. Lawlor. You and your wife never had children. You don’t have any other family to speak of. You’re not even particularly close with any of your coworkers, except,” said the man presenting a new photo, “for this one.”

The picture was of one of Gary Lawlor’s barbecues. From the angle it was taken, Lawlor figured the photographer must have been using a long lens somewhere in the woods behind his house. Two things about the photo disturbed him deeply. One was that the picture had to have been taken sometime in the fall, which meant that they had been watching him for several months and he had never noticed it. Two, and this was probably the worst thing, was the person singled out on the photo with a red circle drawn around his head complete with mock crosshairs. That person was like family to him.

“Your silence speaks for itself,” said Stavropol.

“I can guarantee you’ll never get to him,” replied Lawlor.

“Really? So he’s that good? Is he as good as the men on your Dark Night team?”

There was no point in pretending. Lawlor knew that they were on to the Dark Night operation. How, he had no idea, but the key was not to give them anything that they didn’t already have, anything that would aid them in shutting down the operation altogether.

“He’s even better,” said Gary.

“Well, that’s good for him, because from what my people tell me, your other operatives were some of the easiest kills they have ever made.”

Lawlor couldn’t believe his ears.
It wasn’t true.
Stavropol was lying. This was his way of breaking him down, trying to get him to talk.

“Would you like to see pictures?” asked Stavropol, as he ran through a series of photos that all but confirmed for Lawlor that his team was dead. Except for one, it seemed.

“So what?” said Gary.

“So if you don’t want to see what happened to them happen to this fellow,” responded Stavropol as he brought back out the picture of Harvath with the crosshairs through his head, “I suggest you tell me about your contingencies. What was the next step if your team failed? Certainly your pathetic operation wasn’t your country’s last hope.”

Stavropol was much cooler, more controlled in his interrogation than Draegar. He referred to what he
wanted
to know rather than
needed
. That made him all the more dangerous in Lawlor’s book.

“I don’t care how good you think you are,” said Lawlor. “You’ll never get him.”

“Really?” asked Stavropol. “What about Helmut? I’m thinking about letting him do it. I think he’d have a very good chance of succeeding.”

Gary knew that Stavropol was serious. He had no doubt that the man would fulfill his black promise to the very letter. He wished there was a way he could warn Scot, but that didn’t look as if it was going to happen. The one thing that Lawlor could take solace in was that he knew Scot Harvath would avenge his death. No matter how much cajoling, favoring, swapping, and pressure he had to put on people, Harvath would discover Gary’s real past and would eventually track down his killers. Gary only hoped that Harvath would do a better job avenging his death than he had Heide’s. The mere fact that Helmut Draegar was still alive, much less had managed to get the better of Gary and take him prisoner was more than he could bear. No, Scot was a better operative than Gary had ever been. Scot would see to it that Gary’s killers were brought to justice—the
right
kind of justice.

“So,” said Stavropol, removing a magnificently engraved pistol from beneath his suit coat, which shone with an amazing brilliance in the murky, semi-darkness, “are you going to make it easier on your friend, or harder?”

Lawlor’s mind struggled under the weight of what he was being asked to do. It was one of the most painful decisions anyone could ever be faced with. Scot was like a son to him. At the same time, there wasn’t room for choosing. He had an assignment and the freedom of his country hung in the balance. The only reason that Stavropol hadn’t killed him yet was because he had something they not only wanted, but
needed
to know. He had no choice. He would take the information with him to the grave. Based on the photos of the slain Dark Night operatives he had seen, they hadn’t gotten to Frank Leighton. And if they hadn’t gotten to Frank Leighton, then there still was hope.

Gary cleared his throat and repeated, “Like a ghost. By the time you realize he’s in the room, it will be too late.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Stavropol as he pointed the gun at Gary’s chest and cocked the hammer. “I am not going to waste any time torturing you. Either you answer my questions or you die. Your decision is that simple.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” replied Lawlor. “Fuck you.”

At that moment, the rusted bulkhead door came flying open. It slammed against the inside wall where it cracked and fell off its hinges. Draegar yelled, “Grenade!” just as two flashbangs were pitched into the room.

Helmut and Überhof dove for cover, but not Stavropol. The roar of his Tokarev reverberated throughout the room as two blinding flashes of light accompanied by a pair of deafening concussion blasts erupted from the flashbangs.

The cacophony of sound bounced off the stone walls and came racing back with twice the amplitude. As Harvath and Herman entered the chamber, Überhof and Draegar, who had shielded their eyes with their arms and opened their mouths to counterbalance the overpressure effect of the grenades, began firing toward the entrance from different sides of the room.

The air had immediately filled with smoke and dust. With the reduced visibility, it was hard to tell where anybody was, much less who anybody was. The only thing for sure was that the room was much larger than any of the others they had seen in the bunker. It looked like some sort of abandoned command and control center.

Herman let loose with a high barrage from his twin Berettas in an effort to pin down their opponents while Harvath tried to pinpoint exactly where the shooters were, so that he could take them out without accidentally hitting Gary.

The echoing gunfire that filled the chamber was extremely deceptive. Harvath knew that they were looking for at least three men, but the intensity of shooting quickly dropped so that it seemed to only be coming from one person. The shooter was firing as he moved along the other side of the room.
Where the hell were the other two
? wondered Harvath.

His question was momentarily forgotten as Überhof, who had stopped to reload, now opened up from a new position—crouched behind a long row of antiquated communications equipment. For a moment, Harvath could almost picture the ghosts of operators sitting there with bulky headsets straddling canvas military caps, but a bullet whizzing by his ear snapped him back to the seriousness of the moment.

The communications console was perched upon a raised platform against the far wall, putting Überhof on the high ground, which provided him with a considerable advantage.

As Harvath studied the man’s position, he noticed that hanging behind the console was what appeared to be an enormous light-up map of Berlin, and it gave him an idea. After finally getting Herman’s attention, he motioned to the map and indicated what he wanted to do. After loading two new clips, Herman nodded his head and once again created a blanket of cover fire.

Harvath rolled out from his position and started shooting at the two brackets holding the heavy illuminated map to the ceiling. When the first bracket shattered and began to give way, he turned his H&K on the second. In a shower of sparks and twisted metal, the enormous map came crashing down, filling the narrow space behind the communications console and the wall, sending more dust and debris into the air.

Harvath and Herman waited, but nothing happened. It was all quiet.
Too
quiet. They knew that there were at least two more bad guys in that room,
but where were they
? Harvath motioned to Herman to hand him the Specter scope. He pushed the power button and waited for what seemed like an eternity for the device to power up. As he scanned the room, he caught movement in the far corner. Was it the other two hostiles, or was one of them holding Gary at gunpoint while another remained in hiding somewhere in the chamber? That was the problem. With the Specter scope, there was no way to tell.

“Don’t move,” yelled Harvath raising his weapon. “Stop where you are.”

The figures in the scope kept moving. Harvath was about to fire a warning shot, when all of a sudden they disappeared from view. It didn’t make any sense until he heard the unmistakable slamming of a heavy metal door.

Without thinking twice, Harvath got up and ran for the back of the chamber. When he reached the door and tried to raise the heavy iron handle, he was too late. It had already been locked from the other side. Once again, he was stopped dead in his tracks by another blast door with a red sign marked
Betriebsraum
, framed by two lightening bolts.

“Damn it,” he swore under his breath.

“Scot,” yelled Herman. “Get over here. I think I’ve found Gary.”

Harvath rushed to where Herman was trying to saw off the flexicuffs that bound Lawlor to his chair. Scot pushed him aside and knelt down. Taking the knife away from him he began working on the cuffs himself and said, “Check that guy behind the communications console, then get back over here. I’m going to need your help.”

Gary had been shot. A large red stain covered his chest and his breathing was slow and shallow. He had been knocked over backwards in his chair and once Harvath had the felxi-cuffs cut away, he sat him up, trying to make him as comfortable as possible.

Looking at his face, Harvath was amazed that Herman had recognized Gary at all. He had been beaten to a pulp. Both of his eyes were practically swollen shut, and his lips looked like they had been pumped up to five times their normal size. His face was covered with various cuts and contusions and his hair was matted with dried blood.

“What the hell did they do to you?” asked Harvath, more to himself than to Gary.

Lawlor tried to speak, but Scot told him to be quiet. He was gurgling as if blood was in his lungs.

Harvath tore Gary’s shirt open to the waist and tried to wipe away some of the blood from around the entry wound. This was what you always worried about in a hostage situation—that the hostage takers might go down swinging, starting with a defenseless hostage. It was every counterterrorism operative’s nightmare—not getting there in time.

As Harvath assessed Lawlor’s injuries, the man tried to push his hands away. He was rasping again in his fluid filled whisper, which Harvath couldn’t understand. When Herman began to make his way back over to them, Gary became even more insistent.