Cliff Ryder - Black Widow

Headlights flared at the corner and a long black limousine coasted down the street. Ajza watched as it stopped almost a hundred yards away, well out of range of the explosives. From the way it sat so heavily on its tires, Ajza guessed it was armored enough to be blastproof.

Taburova nodded to his men and took out his cell phone. He listened for a moment, then closed the phone and walked to one of the nearby warehouses. After he entered a code on the keypad, the door opened and he went inside.

Ajza stood near the door, just close enough to draw Saleh's attention. He barked at her to stay back, but she remained close enough to see Taburova open a crate and take out an assault rifle. In the dim light it took Ajza a moment to recognize it as an American military M4A1.

She'd found the cache of weapons.

Excitement raced through her, then quickly died when she realized she had no way to contact the people who had given her the mission. The weight of the explosive vest scared her.

Taburova took his cell phone out and spoke briefly again. When he finished this time, he walked toward a sedan parked beside the warehouse.

"Saleh, get the vans loaded," Taburova ordered.

Ajza tried to guess what Taburova was going to do with the sedan. He had the weapons. All he had to do was load them. She knew he was the type to supervise something like this. But he was making no effort to do that.

Saleh looked uncomfortable, too, and he looked even worse when Taburova climbed in the car and drove away. The other men looked to Saleh for guidance. At last he shrugged and put them to work.

Looking around at the women wearing the explosive vests, at the Chechen rebels carrying the American weapons, Ajza knew what was going on. It was a setup. Taburova and whoever was in the limousine were the only people who were supposed to walk away from this.

* * *

New York

"Taburova's leaving?" Jake's surprise was audible.

Kate cursed as she opened the communications channel to the team she had standing by in Moscow. It had only just arrived and the members hadn't had the chance yet to deploy properly. They were running sloppy on this one and she hated that.

"Move in," she said. "Move in now and take them all down. See if you can jam those explosives."

"Roger that," the team leader responded.

"Mark them," Kate told the tech-support teams.

Almost instantly, moving figures lit up on the screens to designate the commandos on loan to Room 59 for the operation. They were too bunched up and hadn't effectively saturated the hot zone.

Jake got to his feet, no longer able to sit. His jaw muscles worked fiercely. "Taburova has the detonator."

"I know," Kate said.

"As soon as he gets clear, he's going to set them off, kill his guys so they can't rat him out and then call the FSB down on the area immediately."

"I know." Kate stared at the screen and saw the one lone figure running after the car Taburova had driven off in. But another car was in motion too.

"What do you want us to do?" Viktor asked in his quiet, steady voice.

Kate thought about the women and the explosive vests, but she also thought about Kumarin. She didn't want the general to get away.

Ajza was closing on Taburova's vehicle. Let her catch him. Please let her catch him, Kate thought.

"Stay with Kumarin," Kate said. Then she took a deep breath. It was all out of her hands now.

* * *

Moscow

"Stop Kumarin," Viktor said.

Heart thundering, Sergei pressed the accelerator. The car surged forward. He'd parked just down the alley with the lights off and had escaped notice. Or maybe Kumarin didn't care.

His headlights fell across the women and he saw that they all wore body-concealing chadores. Astonishment flooded him.

"Those women…" he began.

"Are Chechen," Viktor said. "I know. Kumarin was selling the weapons to a Chechen terrorist named Taburova."

Sergei had heard of Taburova. The man was a killer many times over.

"That doesn't make sense." Sergei quickly overtook Kumarin's car.

"Kumarin wanted to frame the United States as being supporters of Taburova and his kind of terrorists in Chechnya. It's not so hard to imagine when you think of the big picture." Viktor tapped his glass. "Ram him."

Sergei pulled the wheel hard and slammed into Kumarin's car. After the grating screech of metal against metal, the other car managed to pull away a few feet.

Without a word Viktor took out his pistol and fired through his window at the driver's side of the other car. Glass shattered and fell away as blood painted the inside of the vehicle.

"Armor-piercing rounds," Viktor said. "I always come prepared."

Driverless, the car slammed against an alley wall and stalled. Sergei blocked it in with his vehicle, then he and Viktor clambered out.

Kumarin stumbled from the back of the other car holding his pistol. He fired and Sergei felt something hot and heavy slam into his left forearm. But he kept his pistol on target and methodically squeezed off rounds. His bullets drove Kumarin back, then one of Viktor's bullets almost decapitated him.

Turning around, Sergei was shocked to see the battle that had erupted behind him. Several men in black counter-terrorist uniforms attacked the Chechen rebels without mercy.

"Who are they?" Sergei asked.

"Our backup," Viktor replied. "You'll learn, my friend, that the people we work for never go anywhere unprepared."

Sergei pointed at the woman chasing the car. "Then why is she chasing that car?"

Viktor shrugged. "That was something unforeseen."

* * *

Ajza ran, stretching her stride out as much as she could. Taburova was distracted, reaching into his pocket for something. By the time she caught up with him, he had the remote detonator in his hand.

The arrival of the shock troops had caught Ajza off guard, but she knew that even if they defeated Taburova's men, the exploding Black Widows would kill them.

And Ilyas's baby. All that she had left of her brother.

With a cry of rage, her lungs burning and aching, Ajza lunged at the back of the car, landing on the trunk.

Taburova turned and saw her over his shoulder. He dropped the detonator and picked up his pistol. He aimed at pointblank range as Ajza threw herself onto the roof of the car. The initial barrage of bullets blew out the car's back window. Then Taburova finished off his magazine firing through the rooftop.

But by then Ajza had slid back down to the car's trunk. She stood precariously and stomped the broken glass from the car's window. She crawled through the hole and reached for Taburova, locking her forearm around his neck.

Taburova fought her with one hand. She applied more pressure, cutting off his air and closing down his carotid arteries. He released the wheel entirely and grabbed her forearm with both hands.

Screaming with inarticulate rage, knowing that if Taburova succeeded in throwing her from the vehicle he would set off the explosives, Ajza held on. The car careened out of control and struck a wall. She flew over the seat and her head shattered the front windshield. Even then she held on.

The car stopped moving, one bumper against the wall. Taburova fought only a moment longer, then unconsciousness claimed him at last.

Ajza wasted no time. She found and removed the batteries from the detonator, then crawled out of the wrecked car. Two men drove up in another car.

"FSB," one of them said, holding up identification. He held a pistol in his other hand. He peered in through the window. "Is he still alive?"

"Yes," Ajza replied. "But he doesn't deserve to be."

Even when she'd been thinking of Ilyas and how Taburova had been responsible for her brother's death, she hadn't been able to kill him.