Blood Play. Don Pendleton
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together. What did it all mean? What had he gotten himself into?
Moments later, Colt heard the front door open. A cold draft swept its way toward him, carrying the pungent stench of javelinas. Franklin’s stomach clenched and he retched, bringing up little more than saliva mixed with more blood from his cracked lip. Out in the living room, the front door slammed shut and there was renewed arguing among his captors. Soon a fourth man strode into Colt’s view, wearing a knee-length black leather trench coat over his well-tailored suit. He was bald, thick-chested and carried himself with an air of authority.
If there had been any doubt that his abduction was linked to what was going on at the reservation, those doubts quickly vanished, for Colt found himself staring at the Roaming Bison Casino’s Director of Operations, Freddy McHale. When McHale glanced his way and the two men shared a look of mutual recognition, Colt realized as well that there was no way he would be allowed to live now that he knew who was behind his abduction.
CHAPTER NINE
The Roaming Bison Casino was not Frederik “the Butcher” Mikhaylov’s first foray into the wagering industry.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, gambling establishments had sprung up in nearly every major city throughout Russia, and, as was the case in many of America’s early casino ventures, organized crime had been quick to latch on to the phenomenon and turn it into one of its primary cash cows. Mikhaylov had been a thirty-year-old low-level goon for freelance mobsters in the suburb of Dolgoprudniy when the first casinos opened down the road in Moscow. His reputation as a brutal enforcer for loan sharks made him a natural choice when several small, competing mobs merged into the dreaded Dolgoprudnenskaya and muscled its way into the capital city’s more upscale gaming halls. Over the next dozen years, Mikhaylov specialized in “negotiating” the payment of gambling debts incurred by high rollers, and in those rare cases when physical assault and torture failed to produce desired results, the one-time slaughterhouse employee had no qualms about putting his butchering skills to good use, killing debtors in ways gruesome enough to earn press coverage that helped serve as a deterrent to anyone thinking they could welsh on monies owed the mob without dire consequence. By his own count, during his years as an enforcer, the Butcher settled over sixty million dollars’ worth of gambling debts and executed at least fifty individuals who were either unable or unwilling to honor their markers.
There came a point, however, at which Mikhaylov tired of what, for him, had become mere drudgery. He yearned for advancement within the ranks and a chance to set foot in the casinos for reasons other than targeting his next victim. He liked the idea of wearing a well-tailored suit and consorting with Moscow’s upper crust at the tables instead of in dark, back alleys, and in 2000 he carried out the vicious execution of a rival gang lord in exchange for an opportunity to become pit boss at Dolgoprudnenskaya’s crown jewel, the Regal Splendor Casino, located only a few blocks from the Kremlin. He flourished in the position, quickly becoming fluent in five languages and developing a personalized sense of savoir faire that combined a newfound cosmopolitan sensibility with the rakish charm that drew on his lower-middle-class upbringing. On the side, Mikhaylov ran a high-price escort service that allowed him to freely indulge in the sexual favors of some of Moscow’s most comely women. As his stature rose, the Russian forsook his modest apartment in Dolgoprudniy for a lavish penthouse suite at the Regal and began to dine regularly at the casino’s five-star restaurant, Nostrovia, where he would often use a private booth to entertain valued guests and conduct the sort of business negotiations that couldn’t be discussed out on the gambling floor. With a personal tailor at his disposal and no less than five customized luxury vehicles stored at a private garage adjacent to the casino, Mikhaylov, on the whole, had enjoyed an extravagant, privileged lifestyle that he couldn’t have even imagined in his youth.
Of course, part of Mikhaylov’s job at the tables required that he continue to deal with gamblers prone to wagering beyond their means, but the Russian had an uncanny knack for judging people and, unlike his predecessors, he routinely made a point not to extend credit in cases where he felt it would become necessary to execute the debtor and write off his or her debt. Yes, there had still been the frequent need for back alley “persuasion,” but Mikhaylov was now in a position to delegate the dirty work to others. He trained his own crew of goons, including Petenka Tramelik and Viktor Cherkow, and he trained them well. Over the next eight years, there were barely a dozen instances in which torture or blackmail failed and his men were forced to commit murder.
All seemed right with Mikhaylov’s world when, in 2008, the Russian president decried the proliferation of gambling in Russia and pushed through legislation banning casinos from urban centers throughout the country. Over the next two years, the Regal Splendor, as well as its illustrious counterparts in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities were closed down, leaving the Russian populace with the daunting proposition of traveling to Siberia or some other godforsaken hinterland to indulge in any form of wagering other than the national lottery. Some crime syndicates rolled with the punch and reluctantly set up shop in these remote wastelands, but Mikhaylov was among those who decided to leave Russia in pursuit of greener pastures. With Tramelik and Cherkow in tow, the Butcher pulled stakes and moved to Bolivia, where Dolgoprudnenskaya, through a shadow company, had poured nearly three hundred million dollars into the Andean Splendor, a gambling mecca modeled after the Moscow casino where Mikhaylov had reinvented himself. The resort was slow to catch on, however, and felt too much like a step down in the world to leave him satisfied. He continued to go through the motions as a duteous pit boss, but all the while kept his eye open for other, better opportunities.
He didn’t have long to wait.
Fourteen months into his Bolivian tenure, by which time he’d been promoted to Chief Officer of Gaming Operations, Mikhaylov was approached by seventy-year-old Evgenii Danilov, whose global renown as an eccentric billionaire was little more than a well-orchestrated front for his allegiance to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, which in 1991 had replaced the notorious KGB. Danilov, with SVR’s blessing, had bought a stake in the Bolivian casino to help keep it afloat but he’d also chosen what he considered to be a more promising—and lucrative—gambling frontier to infiltrate: reservation casinos in the United States. Danilov’s various American enterprises were all affiliates of Global Holdings Corporation, which the elderly financier had painstakingly created as an Antwerp-based entity supposedly made up solely of investors from the European Union. GHC had recently won a bid to take over operations of the Roaming Bison as well as the nuclear waste facility located at Rosqui Pueblo. Mikhaylov was presented with an offer to come to America and help oversee the casino’s table action. It was, for Mikhaylov, the proverbial offer he couldn’t refuse. That offer was gilded even further when Danilov arranged for The Butcher, Tramelik and Cherkow to be sworn in as agents for SVR’s special operations force, Vympel.
Following several months of training and SVR debriefing at GHC’s Belgian headquarters, Mikhaylov and Tramelik were given forged identity papers along with extensively fabricated personal backstories and put on an international flight bound for the U.S., where, as Freddy McHale and Pete Trammell, both men spent the next two years slowly establishing themselves as an influential presence at both Roaming Bison and the nuclear waste facility. As much as the casino was a perennial moneymaker, for Danilov and SVR a stake in tribal gambling profits wasn’t an end in and of itself, but rather a means to help finance clandestine activity at the waste plant. The activity there served a long-standing agenda dating back more than fifty years to the height of the cold war, when Russia had squared off with the United States as the one country most capable of thwarting its aspirations for world domination. Part of that covert agenda was dependent upon securing access to a ready source of uranium beyond that contained in the nuclear fuel rods stored at the waste facility, hence Mikhaylov’s fervent lobbying with Taos Pueblo’s tribal leader Walter Upshaw and the decision to put Upshaw under increased surveillance when he balked at partnering with GHC. It was a bugged phone call carried out as part of that surveillance that had pinpointed Franklin Colt as the informant who’d aroused Upshaw’s suspicions about GHC’s ulterior motives for wanting to place the Taos reservation under its umbrella. Given what was at stake, the Butcher had made a point to be flown to Glorieta so that he could personally ensure that Colt would divulge the information he’d only alluded to