Don Pendleton - Death Gamble

She pushed the grousing from her mind and instead focused on the job at hand. She’d come to Africa looking for the man—the monster—who’d decimated her entire life.

Nikolai Kursk.

The very thought of his name stoked a fiery rage within that scorched her heart and soul and seemed her only companion. The bastard had robbed her of everything—killed the two men who’d meant the most two her, her husband and her father. Normally, Kursk barely would remember either one. However, during the past several months, Rytova had taken steps to insure he’d never forget them.

God knew she wouldn’t.

Her friends in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service—the small number of men and women willing to stand up to the Russian Mafia’s murder machine—had said Kursk was in Africa, but didn’t know exactly where. To get that information, she needed to talk to someone on the inside of Kursk’s organization, specifically his African operations. Talisman, who ran guns and diamonds for the butcher she sought, filled the bill perfectly.

She’d expected to find Talisman and his gunners lounging, drunk or stoned out of their minds, easy pickings. Instead she found them engaged in a full-fledged firefight with a stranger. The hell of it was, the stranger seemed to be winning.

She watched as he wheeled, fired on a pair of gunners who burst from the surrounding brush and unloaded weapons in his direction. Both died in a hail of gunfire as the man fanned a sound-suppressed submachine gun in their direction. The weapon seemed an extension of the man, an appendage wielded with deadly efficiency,

The powerful man dressed in black reminded Rytova of Dmitri, strong and confident in battle. But—and it felt a form of sacrilege to think this—the stranger was even more so; he was like a human cyclone, ripping through his opponents with an ease that seemed almost impossible.

Still, he was outnumbered. And no single person could survive against those odds.

Staying in a crouch, she tunneled through the heavy jungle foliage surrounding the killing field and closed in on the compound. Tracing the muzzle-flashes emanating from within the jungle, she pinpointed at least two of the gunners. One was positioned fifty yards northeast of her; a second was closer, about twenty yards straight north. She moved in that direction.

Rytova had brought a pair of night-vision goggles with her, but had decided against using them. Outdoor halogen spotlights powered by an unseen generator illuminated Talisman’s stronghold, and accidental exposure to intense light while wearing the goggles could have left her temporarily blind.

As it was, the lights threw off enough glare to make trudging through the jungle manageable. And, under the circumstances, manageable was about the best she could hope for.

She wasn’t sure if the man tearing up the compound was a law-enforcement officer or a military operative. Perhaps Talisman had run afoul of his handler and Kursk had ordered him hit. She dismissed that thought outright. Odds were the man wasn’t carrying out a hit at Kursk’s behest—he’d send in an army, not a single man, even someone with this man’s fighting prowess.

Subtlety wasn’t Kursk’s style. She’d learned that painful lesson months ago.

Anger again burned through her body and a coppery taste filled her mouth. She swallowed hard and gripped her Uzi tighter. Let the mystery fighter try his head-on assault. She’d rely on stealth.

She came in behind one of the gunners. He shouldered an assault rifle and stared through a scope, apparently trying to catch the black-suited stranger in the weapon’s crosshairs.

She drew down on him with the Uzi, hesitated. She’d killed before, but always in head-on attacks. Could she shoot a man from behind?

Her quarry suddenly stiffened and turned, swiveling at the waist as he sought her out with his rifle muzzle. She hadn’t made a sound, so how did he know she was closing in? Was it instinct or had someone warned him of her approach via his headset communicator? Sloppy, she was so blasted sloppy. She was thinking like an intelligence analyst again, ignoring her paramilitary training.

Dmitri never would have been taken this way.

But he also wasn’t here which was, after all, the whole point.

She stroked the Uzi’s trigger, and the weapon coughed out a short burst that tunneled through the man’s face, pulverizing his head and knocking him backward, as though an invisible rug had been pulled from under his feet. His gun hand flew up, and in a final reflexive move he triggered his weapon. A brief flurry of bullets stabbed skyward before the weapon fell silent and dropped to the ground. A fresh fusillade burned the air around Rytova, slugs tearing their way through the foliage and buzzing around her like a swarm of angry bees.

She threw herself headlong to the ground and landed next to the dead gunner. Bullets smacked into the corpse’s chest, which was sheathed in a Kevlar vest, causing it to jerk around under the impact.

The indiscriminate pattern of fire told Rytova these men weren’t a legitimate security force. Fingers working gingerly as bullets flew overhead, Rytova unhooked the man’s portable radio and headset, and slipped them on.

Someone was calling, “Lynch? Lynch?” When no one answered, she assumed Lynch was the fallen man next to her. She rolled away, putting precious distance between herself and the fire zone. The voice on the radio continued. “Cole, if we keep firing in there, Lynch is sure to get hit in the cross fire. He might be injured or unconscious.”

Another voice. “I don’t give a shit. Guy should have been watching his back instead of leaving it for us to do. If he gets killed, I eliminate two problems at once.”

“You’re a cold son of a bitch, Cole.” The speaker sounded angry.

“That’s what Nikki pays me for. You remember that. The Russian doesn’t like turncoats. Neither do I.”

Rytova had heard all she needed to. She triggered the Uzi, laid down a heavy barrage into a patch of muzzle-flashes and then moved again. A groan of pain and surprise sounded in her headset, telling her that at least one of her shots had hit home.

A voice erupted in the headset. She recognized it as that of the man named Cole. “Wells. Wells. What the hell, man? You hit?”

Dead silence was the only reply.

Autofire pounded Rytova’s former position and moved in a horizontal swath until she found herself again hugging the moist ground, gritting her teeth as bullets burned the air overhead. Plant stalks, leaf fragments and wood splinters showered her as she waited out the onslaught. The odors of gunsmoke and rotting vegetation fouled the air.

As quickly as it began, the shooting stopped and Rytova guessed the man was reloading. A grenade launcher sounded from somewhere, and a cold torrent of fear washed over her. The fired object arced overhead and crashed to earth more than two dozen yards west of her. Boiling orange flame spilled over from the blast site, and razor wire tore through trees and plants. Heat and shock waves hammered Rytova and her surroundings, and she stayed still as the tempest wrenched the jungle.

Pulling herself to her feet, Rytova bolted and closed in on the edge of the surrounding jungle. Autofire resumed and rent the air around her. As bullets whittled away at her cover, she squeezed off short bursts from the Uzi and furiously sought a better position. The nearest and sturdiest barrier—a pile of stones about the size of a car—lay ten yards to her left.

To get there, she’d need to cross open land and expose herself as she sprinted. Under fire that heavy it might as well be two hundred yards.

Hurtling from the underbrush, the Uzi stammering out a thunderous cacophony of death, Rytova crossed the broad expanse of rich, red earth and closed in on safety. Another explosion—this one closer to Talisman’s home—sounded in the distance.