Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Victor Oxley appeared on Ryan’s right, falling through the air, putting himself between Ryan and the Russian coming through the door. A burst of automatic fire erupted, and the big Englishman jolted back from multiple impacts, then dropped down toward the floor.

Hugh Castor was unarmed now; as Oxley fell, he brought his own hands up to protect himself, but the Russian shot him through the chest and stomach, sending him tumbling away.

The Russian spun his gun toward the last standing target, and he pressed the trigger, but his hand relaxed and let go of the gun as a single round slammed into his forehead.

Jack had shot the man dead at a range of twelve feet.

Jack Ryan leapt over Ox and ran forward, kicked the gun away from the dead man, and then leaned out into the stairwell. Another Russian was moving up with his gun in front of him.

Ryan opened fire, shooting the man over and over until he fell face-first and slid back down the stairs.

Jack ran back to Oxley. The fifty-nine-year-old had taken three nine-millimeter rounds to the chest. He heaved and his eyes fluttered.

“Fuck!” shouted Ryan. “Hang on, Ox!”

Oxley squeezed Ryan’s arm, and blood smeared across the American’s shirt. Oxley coughed, and blood wet his lips and beard.

Jack pressed down hard on the man’s chest, but the wounds were too severe, the blood flow too heavy. He looked around for something to help him with the pressure. A towel or a coat, or a bedsheet.

There. A comforter was on the end of the bed. He started to reach for it, but Oxley squeezed his arm tighter.

He spoke, but his voice was so soft Jack had to lean into it: “It’s all right, mate. It’s good like this. You watch yourself, now. Watch yourself.”

His grip relaxed, and his eyes fluttered and shut.

Jack did not want to look away, but noise on the staircase forced him to swing his pistol toward the doorway to the landing.

A figure appeared at the top of the stairs.

It was Caruso.

Dom lowered his gun quickly, and Ryan did the same. Dom spoke into his headset: “I’ve got Jack. Upstairs. We’re clear up here.”

Dom rushed to Oxley and dropped to his knees next to Ryan, but he immediately saw that there was nothing that could be done.

Bodies lay all over the grounds, both inside the chalet and out on the property. Sam, Dom, and Ding checked the area quickly to make certain there were no more threats, and in so doing they counted eighteen dead.

The chalet was secluded and in a thick forest, but the men knew the gunfire would have carried over the lake itself, so Ding told everyone they needed to exfiltrate before the police arrived. Driscoll hurried through the wreckage, taking pictures of the faces of the dead Russians to send to Biery to run through facial recognition, while Dom pulled mobile phones and pocket litter.

Soon Chavez had Ryan down in the Russian Zodiac boat. Dom and Sam leapt aboard, and they raced away into the fog, just minutes ahead of the first responders.

They were wheels-up at Zurich sixty minutes later. They had filed a flight plan for Paris, which meant there was no customs departure check to deal with, although they had no real sure plan of where they would go.

Ryan was still in a state of despondency over Oxley. He couldn’t get past the fact that the man had taken bullets meant for him. He knew he had to call his dad and tell him everything he’d learned from Hugh Castor, although what he had been told was not the same as what he could prove. But he couldn’t make himself pull the cabin phone out of the cradle and dial the number. Instead he just lay there with his head down on the table, while the men around him worked, discussed the battle they’d just fought, and occasionally patted him on the back to check on him.

After a phone call to Clark, the decision was made to go to Kiev, although Clark was adamant that Ryan would not even get off the plane. The other men would deplane to head back to the safe house so they could continue the investigation into Gleb the Scar, while Jack would return with the Gulfstream to the United States.

They’d been in the air for less than an hour when Clark called back. Sam flipped on the speakerphone function in the cabin.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got big news, guys. You hit the jackpot.”

Chavez said, “How so?”

“The dead guys you photographed at the scene. Gavin got zip on seven of them, but number eight came up huge.”

“Who is he?”

“We photographed him here in Kiev at the Fairmont meeting with Gleb the Scar last week. At the time Gavin ran his face through all facial-recog sources we had and there was no match. But we ran tonight’s picture, just to be sure. It came up with a match. There is a BOLO out for him with the FBI. They have a pic of him loaded, and it’s a match.”

Ding said, “The dead picture worked better in the software than the live one? That’s weird.”

“No. The last one didn’t work because there was no pic of him uploaded then. The BOLO is brand-spanking-new. He’s wanted in connection with the polonium poisoning of Sergey Golovko.”

The men in the cabin of the G550 exchanged shocked stares. It was quiet for a moment until Chavez said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Gavin spoke up now: “Yep. And there’s more. He was carrying the phone we’d tied to Hugh Castor’s villa in Islington. The one owned by Pavel Lechkov. We’re assuming that’s his name.”

Caruso said, “So Lechkov is Seven Strong Men and an associate of Gleb the Scar, and was in on the Golovko assassination.”

“Right to all of that, Dom,” said Gavin.

Ryan sat up straight now. He said, “And according to Castor, Talanov, the head of the FSB, is also the head of Seven Strong Men. That puts the Golovko murder in the lap of the Kremlin. I’m going to call my dad. At the very least he needs to get a team into Kiev to pick up Nesterov, aka Gleb.”

Clark came on the line now. “Sending a team to the Fairmont, even SEAL Team Six, isn’t going to be easy. Gleb has a shit ton of security in his suite, and the entire hotel is crawling with armed men loyal to the Russians. More important, the Russian Army is forty miles east of the city and advancing.”

Ryan said, “If the U.S. doesn’t take down Nesterov right now, they will miss their chance. Once the Russians come, or once he flees to Russia, he’ll be unreachable.”

Driscoll added, “And now that Lechkov is missing, Nesterov’s got to be sweating bullets wondering if his man has been captured and is singing like a canary.”

Clark’s voice came over the speaker. “You guys hurry back over here. I’ll try to ascertain the situation at the hotel so we have good intel in case the U.S. decides to go ahead with a takedown. I’ll meet the plane at the airport and give you a lift back to the safe house.”

The men of the 75th Ranger Regiment had arrived at Boryspil International early in the afternoon in four Chinook helicopters. As soon as they were off the helos they fanned out into the buildings at a far end of the busy airport, checking the security of the site and making sure the fences, gates, and other facilities were in good condition.

Within an hour, the location was secure and more American helos began landing.

The pilots of the helos landed in a grassy field. It wasn’t optimal; they were on the grounds of a major international airport, after all, so one might imagine there was a piece of tarmac to be had for the Ranger Chinooks and the Air Force pararescue Black Hawks and the JSOC Little Birds and the Army Kiowa Warriors. But the Ukrainian military here at the airport had explained to the U.S. forces that the northern end of the property was the most secure from any potential sappers, so that is where the new American JOC was to be established.