Paul Vidich - The Mercenary

Mueller looked for movement through the shifting fog. The candy-striped barrier had been raised, and a silver Mercedes S-Class made its way toward the Czech side. Mueller saw the car enter the sorrowful darkness of the frontier, but when he looked through his binoculars he saw only the driver.

Where is Alek? He looked at his watch. It’s time . The window was open for the light breeze, and it was open too for the rifle held by the black-ops Agency sniper who stood beside Mueller. The man observed the top of the watchtower through his German binoculars. His heavy-barrel .270 bolt-action Mauser rifle with laminated walnut stock and telescopic sight hung on his shoulder with a leather harness sling. The rifle was fitted with a Canjar trigger.

The man was tall, like Mueller, but heavyset, and the large rifle looked small and toy-like on his chest. He wore a black utility vest and tan fatigues without identifying markings. He dropped the binoculars onto his chest and raised his rifle, sighting the cross hairs on the Soviet sniper who stood atop the watchtower.

The Soviet marksman wore a black wool cap over thick hair that fell over his ears, and a kaffiyeh wrapped his neck, the ends tucked into his field jacket. His rifle hung around his neck, the barrel pointing down. He wore desert camouflage fatigues and an Afghan tour of duty service patch.

The Agency sniper had his Russian target in the scope’s cross hairs. He knew the exact drop of his bullet in five-meter increments, and he calculated the distance it would have to travel. A clear shot across a short distance. It was the worsening visibility that was uncertain. Clouds were rolling in, coming intermittently, sometimes obscuring the target, and then unpredictably the air cleared, giving him a clean shot.

“Stand down,” Mueller said. “It’s not them. There are no passengers.”

Mueller glanced at the line of cars parked at the Soviet checkpoint, looking for a black Mercedes with Czech license plates, but the end of the line disappeared into fog.

Rositske stood behind Mueller, and beside him Ronnie Moffat, who wore a wool car coat and an anxious expression. Rositske handed Mueller another cup of coffee.

“Why don’t you take a break?” Rositske said. “I’ll take over for a few minutes. You haven’t slept since Washington. You’re no good like this.”

Mueller ignored the offered coffee. “They’ll be here,” he said. “The train arrived in Uzhgorod.”

“If they were on it.”

“They were.” Mueller turned. “He’s good at what he does. He’ll get GAMBIT across. He’ll come.”

“When?”

“When it’s safe. There’s no deadline. He’s not running to catch an airplane. He’ll wait until it feels right.”

“He might have been blown by the smuggler.”

“He doesn’t get paid until he delivers. He won’t risk his life, but I trust his greed.”

“What about Garin?”

Mueller paused. “I’m talking about Garin.” Mueller nodded at the black-ops sniper at his side. “That’s why he’s here. If there’s a problem.”

A telephone rang. The one-note chime pierced the room’s quiet and startled the four Americans. From another room came the urgent sounds of a man speaking Czech. A uniformed officer appeared in the corner office’s door and nodded briskly at Mueller. Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were Warsaw Pact allies, but the Czech people still remembered the Soviet Army’s brutal repression of the 1968 Prague Spring uprising. The Czech intelligence officer who approached Mueller had lost his only son to a Soviet tank tread.

“There may be a problem,” he said in English.

“What problem?”

“A Soviet transport aircraft landed in Uzhgorod airport an hour ago. The airport closes at midnight, but it was reopened for this airplane. Four passengers, three men and a woman, disembarked and took a waiting government sedan.”

Mueller considered the meaning of what he’d just been told. An hour? “Where did they fly in from?”

“Moscow.”

Mueller rubbed his hands together against the chill and moved back to the open window. There was no backup plan. If the smuggler was stopped, they would be questioned, and Mueller had no idea if the wife’s nerves would hold up under stress or if the child’s cry would betray them. There was always a weak point in an operation—the single point of failure. It didn’t reveal itself until the crisis moment.

Mueller considered the problem. If the car had been stopped, it was possible the waking son gave them away or the wife became nervous, triggering a search of the car. Or they might have seen a problem and abandoned the car, going on the run. They stood no chance against the border’s defenses: two rows of razor wire, machine gun towers every two miles, land mines dotting the strip of land between chain-link fencing, and round-the-clock patrols with dogs. Escaping across the border on foot was a dangerous and often fatal mistake. The muscles on Mueller’s neck contracted, and tension tingled his spine.

“It’s too late if the smuggler has turned them in,” Rositske said.

Mueller ignored his former deputy, but he was aware of Rositske standing at his side. They were both tired, both under stress. Mueller knew he was facing his test—this was his operation, and the full weight of a failure would fall on him. Mueller turned, sensing Rositske’s eyes on him, and the two men stared at each other.

“Did you really believe you could trust him?” Rositske snapped. “A mercenary? He’s no better than the smuggler. If he’s desperate, he’ll do whatever it takes to save himself.”

Old grudges between the two men rose up.

“You think you know him,” Rositske went on, “but you don’t.”

Mueller turned away. They both knew what would follow from a failure. Questions would be asked, a formal inquiry convened, and the careers of the men involved placed on hold until answers were given. He would no longer be in charge of his retirement.

Rositske added, “The whole operation has been wrong from the start. The idea we could use one of their own against them. The game they’re playing has changed. He will become a Soviet hero who turned in GAMBIT. Have you considered that we’ve been played?”

Mueller was ready to accept the mistake. It was possible that the best professional calculations applied to GAMBIT’s exfiltration—the studied gnomic briefings on what little they knew of the inner workings of the KGB and Headquarters’ meticulous effort to come up with a plan—were all in the service of a wildly ingenious enemy manipulation. But that didn’t feel right to Mueller. There was a long silence as both men contemplated the possibility.

“The night isn’t over,” Mueller said. His eyes moved to the open window, and then he suddenly turned back. “He’s not that kind, but if he is… so be it.”

“What kind is he?”

Mueller didn’t get the opportunity to answer. The black-ops Agency sniper had stepped closer to the window, binoculars pressed to his eyes. “It’s him.” He handed Mueller the binoculars. “Look.”

HONKING CAME FROM THE FRONT of the line of cars at the Soviet checkpoint, and the sound was followed by the sharp clap of quickly moving boots on pavement, accompanied by grunted commands.

“Halt!”

Boris had pulled away from the second checkpoint, and he was driving through the empty stretch of frontier when the watchtower’s beam found the Mercedes. The cry went up in a frantic chorus. “Halt! Halt! Halt!”

“Keep driving,” Garin said from the back seat.

“And get shot?” Boris braked. “You want to run? Go ahead. Take your chances.”