Don Pendleton - Road Of Bones

Make that had been, since his fatal shooting at the Yakutsk Airport several hours earlier.

Dollezhal’s partner and accomplice in rattling the powers that be was Sergeant Tatyana Anuchin, nine years on the job and partnered with Dollezhal for the past six. Brognola had no details on the cases they had worked, nor was it relevant. Somewhere along the line, they had grown disaffected against the corrupt shenanigans they’d witnessed on a daily basis and had reached out cautiously to Interpol.

Dramatic works of fiction commonly portrayed Interpol—the International Criminal Police Organization—as a gung-ho group of global crime fighters. In fact, from its inception back in 1923, the group has served a single purpose: to facilitate communication and cooperation between law-enforcement agencies of different nations. Its agents didn’t make arrests, nor did they prosecute suspected felons. They had no police powers at all.

But they liaised, and so it was that Interpol put Dollezhal in touch with someone from the CIA, who shared his information with the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE. A deal was struck, including terms of sanctuary in exchange for information leading to indictments and eventual testimony at trial.

It was a risky bargain overall, considering the countless possibilities of weak links in the chain. As recently as June 2010, a former president of Interpol had been convicted in South Africa on charges of accepting six-figure bribes from drug traffickers. That case wasn’t unique, and there was also leak potential with the CIA, the FBI and ICE.

But Dollezhal and Anuchin had taken the chance. For thirteen months they’d smuggled evidence and information out of Russia—files and photographs, transcripts of conversations, various financial records—all their handlers needed for indictments, though it likely wouldn’t stand in court without corroborating testimony from the two agents themselves.

Which brought them to the final phase: escape.

And it had failed.

Somehow, somewhere, they’d been exposed. A hit team had surprised them, literally at their exit flight’s departure gate with minutes left till takeoff. Dollezhal had gone down fighting in the terminal men’s room; his partner had been carried off to who knew where.

Well, someone knew.

The screws were tightened, bribes were likely offered and the information was secured. An address in Yakutsk, if it wasn’t too late by now.

But who would intervene?

The FBI and ICE were too far out of bounds, would never get cooperation from Russian authorities if those authorities had been responsible for murder and kidnapping. That left Langley, but the Company still had to work with leaders of the FSB, at least in theory, so its chief had passed the buck.

To Stony Man.

Which put Bolan on the red-eye out of Kobe, winging toward Siberia. At least it wasn’t winter, but that wouldn’t matter if he failed.

Regardless of geography, all graves were cold.

Yakutsk

YAKUTSK WAS LOCATED 280 miles south of the Arctic Circle. It had some 212,000 inhabitants, but Bolan was only looking for one as he stepped off the plane from Kobe.

Brognola’s file had named his contact as Yuri Fedchenko, age twenty-seven, a CIA contract employee presumably unknown to the authorities. He would be waiting with a car for Bolan, rented legally in Matthew Cooper’s name, together with some tools that might be useful in extracting Tatyana Anuchin from her life-or-death predicament.

And this was where the plan could fail, before Bolan had walked a dozen yards on Russian soil. There could be shooters waiting, either licensed by the state or hired to do a bit of wet work on the side, and that would be the end of it.

The end of him.

But Bolan didn’t step into an ambush when he left the plane. The only person waiting for him was his contact, not quite smiling as he reached for the soldier’s hand and pumped it once. Fedchenko’s English took some getting used to, but he managed to communicate.

There was a warehouse on the river. He supplied the address and a map of Yakutsk with the shortest route marked with a crimson felt-tipped pen. The car he’d brought for Bolan was a GAZ-31105 Volga four-door with a full tank of gas. In its trunk, examined once the Japanese pilots had made their way into the terminal, the Executioner found hardware waiting for the next phase of his task.

Bolan checked the gear, confirmed as best he could that all of it was functional, the magazines fully loaded. He couldn’t test the flash-bangs without wasting them and raising hell outside the airport terminal, but that was life.

Or death, if any of the hardware let him down.

“How many men are guarding her?” he asked Fedchenko.

“Four were seen at the airport. Whether they have more at the warehouse, I can’t say.”

“What are they? Do you know?”

The Russian looked confused. “Sorry, please?” he said.

“The crew,” Bolan said. “Are they FSB? FSO? Mafiya?”

Fedchenko shrugged and said, “It could be anyone.”

“Where can I drop you?” Bolan asked as they climbed into the sedan, Bolan behind the steering wheel.

Fedchenko named an all-night coffee shop along the route marked on his map, and Bolan reached it seven minutes later, thanked the man and then continued on his way alone.

The next potential ambush site would be the warehouse. Bolan hadn’t smelled a setup yet, but caution kept him breathing. He had known Yuri Fedchenko less than half an hour, hadn’t met the men behind him who had dealt with Brognola, and trust could only stretch so far.

There’d been a time when Bolan and Brognola both had faith in Langley, but a brutal act of treachery had changed all that. Today, the big Fed kept the Company at arm’s length when he could and triple-checked their information prior to putting agents in the field, if time allowed.

This night, there was no time to spare. No room for judgment by committee. It was either take the job and run with it, or leave a brave agent to die.

Some people Bolan knew would probably have let her go without a second thought. Why help a Russian agent, even if her information might jail felons in the States and drag some of her homeland’s dirty laundry into daylight? Russia and the U.S. had been rivals for the best part of a century, with only slight improvement under glasnost, perestroika and the rest of it. One less Russki was good, no matter how you sliced it.

Bolan disagreed.

He honored courage, sacrifice and good intentions—though it was a fact they often paved the road to hell. If he could save Tatyana Anuchin’s life and put her on a witness stand back home to land some spies and mobsters in a prison cell, Bolan felt bound to try.

But recognizing sacrifice didn’t mean that he planned to offer up himself as one. Bolan had never been a kamikaze warrior prone to suicide. He weighed the odds on every move he made, once battle had been joined, and if some of those moves seemed suicidal to the uninitiated, that was an illusion. He was thinking all the time, six moves ahead.

He did his best, anticipating what an enemy might do in any given situation, but he couldn’t know exactly what would happen. Not until he pulled a trigger and sent death streaking downrange. At that point, Bolan knew that flesh and blood had to yield to firepower.

His own included, sure.

And if he failed, that was the end of it. There’d be no time for Brognola to find another operative, get him in the air to Yakutsk before Anuchin broke or simply died under interrogation. It was now or never, all or nothing.

He drove along the waterfront, the Lena River on his right and flowing northward toward the Arctic Ocean. On its far side lay the Lena Highway, accessed during spring and summer via ferry, or across the frozen river’s ice in winter.