Firepower, John Cutter [best summer reads .txt] 📗

the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki. There will be just time for a cold collation in the kitchen. Sliced beef, bread, and cheese, with coffee. Please prepare yourself.”

With that he blew a plume of smoke into the room and turned away, leaving Gustafson staring after him, open-mouthed.

*

Vincent Bellator strode along, under the cloud-wracked night sky, the asphalt of Greenville Road. He wore the service belt with its holstered Desert Eagle, the sheathed knife, the SWIR night-seeing goggles, a frag grenade, and two flashbangs.

It was about 8:00 p.m. He had been walking for two miles, heading west from Wersted, West Virginia. Dutch had taken him all the way to Wersted and he’d offered to drive him out to the Ostrovsky house, but Vince didn’t want to put him in danger.

Vince had few friends still living, and he didn’t want to lose another.

Greenville Road was gradually curving up a slope through a forest of spruce intermixed with hemlock in the foothills of the Adirondacks. Vince had seen not one vehicle on the road. Bats had flitted from the woods on either side, and an owl had called out, and he thought he’d seen the eyes of a bobcat glowing golden-green from a tree limb. But so far, except for a 747 droning high overhead, no sign of humanity.

But after another quarter mile he saw lights glimmering through the trees up ahead. One of them seemed to be headlights.

Vince stepped off the road, walked along the gravel siding close to the trees, ready to slip under cover.

He hurried now, jogging up the hill, one hand plucking the goggles up, putting them on. He kept the lenses flipped up for now. There was some light from the full moon and the occasional spangle of stars showing through the clouds.

Soon the road curved sharply to the north, dead-ending about a hundred feet in a short steel barrier. Vince stopped just before a gravel driveway, which headed west between a big overhanging oak and a group of beeches. It circled up beside a hulking gray-stone house. Looking through a tangle of shrubs and lowering tree branches, he could see the arching front entrance of the house, and a group of men, two of them loading luggage into the back of a black Humvee, probably the one that he’d seen driving away from Wolf Base.

There was a light fixture shining over the doorway, but he couldn’t see the men clearly from here, mostly just their silhouettes. He could see the profiles of assault rifles on straps over the shoulders of three of the men.

There was another car there too, long and low, closer to the road — it was a limousine and its headlights were on. A tall, thin man, accompanied by a woman, hurried to the limo. No one opened the door for them. The tall man opened the back door, let the woman get in, then he slid in after her. The moment the door shut, the limousine started moving. The passenger side window was open and as Vince stepped into the shadowy brush, watching the limo drive by, he saw the tall man’s face as the window was closing. Something about the shape of the eyes and the cheekbones made him think Russian.

A slight extra bulkiness to the limo’s body prompted Vince to suspect it was armored. He hoped Gustafson wasn’t in it. If he was, he could take the Humvee, if he lived to do that, and pursue the limo. Maybe force it off the road.

But there —as he turned back toward the house — wasn’t that the distinct shape of Raoul “the General” Gustafson emerging?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Vince flipped on the night-seeing goggles.

Through the unnatural green view of the goggles, the porch light’s glare blocked out some of the scene, but he could make out Gustafson putting a small bag in the back of the Humvee. The General wore an overcoat. Definitely leaving. Another handful of seconds and Gustafson would have escaped.

He still might get away. Vince recognized three of the men with Gustafson from Wolf Base. They’d come in the day before Vince had departed — men from outlying Brethren units. All of them wore Brethren paramilitary uniforms. One of them, a lean man with a long face and a prow of a nose, was a former British paratrooper, Charles Prosser; liked to call himself Chaz. The broad-shouldered stocky guy with the buzzcut was Henry… something. Vincent hadn’t heard his last name. Story was, he was ex-Navy Seal, investigated for murdering Taliban prisoners, and expelled from the service. Dusty Folkson, the tall one with the apish long arms, prognathous jaw, and blond hair tied behind his head, was formerly a Blackwater operative. Investigated for murdering Iraqi civilians. Said to be a Grand Wizard of the Mississippi KKK.

They were all experienced, dangerous men. And there were three more armed Brethren — one was Gunny Hansen. Vince didn’t know the other two. This could be a tough nut to crack.

May as well cut to the chase, Vince thought. He took a grenade and a flashbang from his belt.

Stationing himself close against the oak, he pulled the pin on the flashbang, looked around the trunk of the tree — and tossed the flashbang through a gap in the foliage.

He’d put enough force in the throw to get it to the group of men at the door. He heard the crack-whuff of the pyrotechnic going off and caught the strobe of sudden intense white light from the corner of his eye. The men yelled, Gustafson loudest, as Vince pulled the pin on the fragmentation grenade, stepped out from the tree trunk, and threw it at the men stumbling around, cursing and clutching their eyes. He noticed Gustafson running clumsily back to the open front door. The three professionals — Chaz, Dusty and Henry — had enough experience to rush after Gustafson. The frag grenade exploded and