The Skorpion Directive (26 page)

In the taut stillness, Dalton heard no movement from the little wood where he had last seen the man, no stealthy flanking approach coming through the long grass. Just silence, other than the soft breeze hissing in the grasses and the chuffing sound of the man’s breathing, which was short and sharp, and getting shorter and sharper as his body reacted to the adrenaline racing through his body. Mohawk’s eyes were fixed on Dalton’s face, pale brown eyes with a gold fleck in them. His leathery skin was seamed, weather-beaten, scarred, and he had not shaved for a couple of days, the beard on his face showing ash gray against his sunken cheeks. Dalton could hear his mind working.

Something changed in the air between them. The man’s eyes widened, his knuckles whitened on the stock of his rifle, the muzzle began to move, and Dalton put a .44 Magnum round through the man’s forehead. The round blew the back of the man’s head apart, the crown of the skull spinning away like a saucer. What remained of Branislav Petrasevic went straight down, collapsing into itself, until the knees struck the ground. And then his body toppled forward, hitting the pavement face-first, no bounce. The jagged bowl of his exploded skull dumped blood and pink brains out in a lumpy arc across the tarmac.

 

 

 

DALTON,
reloading, ran back to the flatbed truck, found the man with the belly wound lying at the side of it. He was a very young, very skinny kid with a wet white face and wild blue eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks. He was lying in a lake of blood, his lips blue, his hands clutching his belly, purple ropes of intestine bulging through his bloody fingers. His breathing was shallow and rapid.

He looked up as Dalton walked over. He opened his mouth, started to say something, Dalton had no idea what. Dalton leaned down, touched the muzzle to the kid’s temple. The kid jerked his head backward, said, “Jesus no, Jesus,” but Dalton put a round into his head anyway, shattering the kid’s skull like a pumpkin..

Then he walked around the tailgate to the far side of the truck, found the other man sprawled in a ditch, his AK a few feet away. Another half-formed kid, barely in his teens.

Dalton’s round had struck the boy in the throat, blowing it wide open. His head was almost completely severed from his neck, attached only by some stringy sinew and what was left of his spinal column. Dalton stared down at the ruins.

What were these clowns
thinking
?

And who was
training
them? Or failing to train them?

Raise them up on stupid hate, prattle on about glory, about the motherland, but teach them fuck-all about fire control or small-unit tactics and then stuff them into the grinder. Such a waste.

Dalton picked up the kid’s AK, checked the magazine: seventeen rounds left. He stuffed the Colt into his belt, hefted the AK into patrol position, moved through the long grass and up into the little wood of twisted trees where he had last seen Vukov.

It was cool and shadowed inside the thicket, although sunlight dappled the rust-colored, needle-strewn ground, and beams stirred like golden straws in the rich green darkness. He moved as quietly as he could, which was very quietly indeed, slipping over the ground, stepping carefully across the deadfall and the broken branches of long-dead trees, breathing through his open mouth, listening with all of his mind and heart.

He saw something flit through a pillar of sunlight a hundred feet away, got a glimpse of a squat, bulky figure dragging an AK, limping badly. Dalton
had
hit him, at least once, but he was still covering the ground, moving very fast.

“Vukov!” he shouted.

The running figure stopped abruptly, a dun-colored shadow barely visible through the trees and the prairie grass like a lion on the veldt, and shouted back at him, “Kill all my boys with that fucking big gun? You pretty damned good, Slick. No matter. Next time coming. And the woman. I do her first, make you watch!”

“Talk, Vukov. Gutless talk. Come and finish it.”

“Fuck you, Slick. Come and get me.”

And then he was moving again, nimble, fast, darting through the grass and scrub trees, going up a slope,

Getting away.

Dalton, his blood up, started after him, got no farther than three steps, and then he realized that he couldn’t leave Mandy alone. She would be waiting for him to come back or for Vukov to double around, find her, and kill her. Which was what would happen if he was stupid enough or angry enough to take the bait.

Protect your base of fire, the first principle of combat. Mandy was good, but Vukov was probably better. And Vukov wasn’t the main point right now. The main point was reaching Kerch, finding Dobri Levka, trying to take this whole thing apart.

As a consolation, Dalton fired off a three-round burst. He saw Vukov in the distance dodge, tumble down into the long grass, get back up on his feet in a second, his tan figure melting into a stand of poplars. Dalton sent another long burst into the trees. The muzzle blast slammed and boomed and echoed in the stillness. The cocking bolt locked open, and the weapon was empty, the sounds of the gunshots dying away into a rumble. Slender showers of bark dust came drifting down through the shafts of sunlight all around him, the gun smoke curling inside them too, the cool air full of the coal oil and carbon reek of burnt cordite.

“Soon, Vukov,” he shouted into the silence, his voice echoing off the hills all around him. “Soon!”

Dalton stood there for another minute, his heart rate slowing, his anger cooling, suddenly very tired, his unprotected ears ringing painfully from the gunfire, half deaf, in a muted, muffled world.

He sighed heavily, turned, walked out of the thicket, crossed the road, and went in again on the far side. The stand of trees here was dappled and silent as well, as if waiting for something to happen. He stood there for a long moment, listening.

“Mandy? It’s Micah. Are you here?”

A rustle forty feet to his left, and Mandy, rising up out of a little hollow filled with dead leaves and pine needles, got to her feet, needles and leaf bits clinging to her hair, her jeans, and her leather jacket. “Yes, I’m bloody here.”

Dalton walked over to her, started to help her brush the needles off, but she smacked his hand away, handed him the SIG, pulled the leather jacket off, and then her turtleneck sweater, Mandy frantically running her hands all over her body, swearing like a trooper.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, picking her jacket up.

“Go to ground, you said.” To his damaged hearing, her voice was sounding as if it were coming through cotton. “And didn’t I just? Something was eating me! Something crawly and horrid. Can you see anything?” she said, turning around and brushing at herself.

“Yes, I can,” he said, his voice too loud in his own skull, “And it’s all quite lovely.”

She stopped, gave him a look through her tousled hair.

“Bugs, I mean, you toad! God, I
hate
nature. We’re not paving it nearly fast enough! Soon the whole bloody planet will be infested with bloody nature. ‘Go to ground,’ he says!
Chipmunks
go to ground, Micah. Next time,
you
go to ground and have crawly things climb up
your
bum. I’ll be happy to stand around and shoot people. Have I got anything horrible crawling on me? Stop leering, you pervert. I mean it. Have I?”

“Nope. You’re bug-free,” said Dalton, keeping the grin under control as he shook out her sweater and her jacket, handing them back in the appropriate sequence. As her head popped up through her turtleneck, her hair in a state, she nodded toward the road.

“How did it go? I heard that hand cannon of yours. I trust you were of some practical use out there? I certainly wasn’t.”

Dalton was about to tell her what happened when they heard the sound of the chopper’s engines beginning to whine.

“Dammit,” he said. “Vukov!”

Dalton, followed closely by Mandy, ran back out to the edge of the highway, getting there in time to see the rotors spinning, smoke rising from the Kamov’s exhaust. Even at two hundred yards, they could make out the face of Vukov through the windshield.

Dalton, dumping his empty magazine, ran back to the truck where the dead kid with the belly wound was lying, found a spare mag in his pocket, smacked it home, released the cocking lever, set the fire selector to single shot, got the butt up against his shoulder and his cheek on the stock, and started firing methodically at the chopper, taking his time, adjusting after each shot, the weapon kicking back into his shoulder. He was putting out aimed fire at a target that was right in the middle of the AK’s effective combat range. And he was getting hits. Yellow ricochet sparks flickered off the fuselage of the Kamov as each round came in.

Armored,
thought Dalton.

Now the rotors were at full speed, and the chopper was off the ground, banking hard to the left, showing the underbelly of the cockpit.

Dalton switched to full auto and put out another ten rounds, walking his fire onto the rear slope of the cockpit floor. He saw the airframe judder from hits, but Vukov tilted his machine forward, full military power, and clawed his way into the sky, gaining distance with every cycle, the prop wash shaking the tall grass and whipping the tips of the trees into a lashing blur.

Dalton, frustrated, angry with himself—
I should have chased him down—
emptied the rest of the magazine into the rotors, which ought to have been shredded by the rifle fire. But somehow the Kamov held steady, going straight northeast toward Staryi Krim, shrinking into a small brown dot that finally, after a flash of sunlight off the tail boom, disappeared into the blue.

Mandy walked over and stood beside him, looking around at the dead men on the ground, at the flatbed truck sitting in the middle of the road, its engine still ticking over, at the litter of spent shells scattered all over the highway.

“Christ, what an ungodly mess,” she said. “What now? We sit here and wait for Triple A?”

Dalton looked across at the Lancer, jammed up against the pines, tilting crazily, both doors wide open.

“Can you see if the car will start? I’ll police up the shells, dump the bodies in the truck, drive it back to that side road.”

She looked down at the spray of blood and brains in the middle of the highway. “And . . . this ghastly stuff?”

Dalton looked down at it, gave her a haggard smile.

“Roadkill.”

 

 

 

AFTER
some fiddling with the wiring, the Lancer, to Mandy’s delight, started on the third try, coughing to life, something metallic clanging loudly under the hood. She popped the fairing and jerked a piece of plastic grillwork out of the cooling-fan housing. The rounds had chewed up the headlights and the hood, and a large hole had been punched into the windshield-wiper tank. The engine block had a shiny groove carved into its side, but the slug had not come in at a direct enough angle to break through three inches of steel. This was a very lucky Lancer, she decided, putting the car in gear, backing it out into the highway, and heading back down to the side road after Dalton.

She found him standing by the driver’s side of the car, his hands full of papers, some of them bloodstained. He looked up, his expression grim, as she pulled the Lancer into the cut.

He came over to get in on the passenger side and was still riffling through the papers as Mandy backed the Lancer out, turned east again, heading for Staryi Krim. The front suspension was unsteady, one of the headlight housings was clattering in the wind, and there was a large, crab-shaped bullet-star crack in the middle of the windshield, but the car was still working. And they were still alive. Mandy looked at the dashboard clock and was surprised to discover that the whole encounter had lasted about fifteen minutes.

“What have you got there?” she asked, keeping an eye out for the Kamov, half expecting it to pop up above the tree line.

Dalton looked up from the papers in his hands, smiled across at Mandy. Mandy thought he looked ill, sick at heart,

“They were kids. Back there. Poor, bloody kids. Look at this one,” he said, holding out a black cardboard ID case with a color photo of a bony-faced, big-eared boy with a broad, snaggletoothed smile.

“His name was Giorgy Medic. If I can make out the language, he was seventeen. Makes you feel like a shit, killing kids. The one at the side of the truck, he was still alive when I got to him, but he’d been hit in the belly with a forty-four. A miserable death, unless he got medevaced out.”

Mandy did not have to ask what Dalton had done. She would have done the same, or she hoped she would have. They drove on a while in silence, a mile later passing a faded sign:

Dalton was still looking at the kid’s ID.

“Interesting,” he said, holding the card out. “He’s from Sid. That’s a little town near Belgrade. Sid is where most of the Skorpions came from. The Medic family had a lot of people in the Skorpions. Slobodan Medic was the one who ordered the massacre at Trnovo, in Srebrenica, in 1995. The Skorpions even made a video. Walked these Muslims into a little wooded clearing, shot them in the back with their AKs. Talking and smoking and laughing as if it were some kind of office picnic. See this?”

He touched the image in the upper right corner of the ID card, a black flag with red lettering in an arc above a bright green scorpion.

“That’s the banner the Skorpions fought under in 1995. They were still using it at Podujevo in 1999. And they’re
still
around.”

“What does the other little flag mean?”

She tapped a small rectangle in the upper left-hand corner of the card. “Looks like some sort of symbol. Maybe a clenched fist?”