Road Of Bones. Don Pendleton
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endless war in Chechnya propelled the ex-FSB chief to the presidency in 2000—but what had really changed?
Only the names of those in charge, as far as Bolan could tell. The president ran with the oligarchs as the previous one had, while using his office and their widespread power to muffle dissent. The watchdog agency Human Rights Watch branded the man a “brutal” and “repressive” leader on par with the dictators in Pakistan and Zimbabwe. Rumor linked his backers to the assassinations of several investigative journalists, while Scotland Yard suspected Russian intelligence agents of murdering an ex-FSB whistle-blower in London.
Now, if Brognola’s information was correct, another Russian agent’s life was on the line for trying to expose corruption at the top. Bolan wasn’t sure what he could do to help, but he would try—without expecting any radical reform of a society that had been steeped in mayhem, graft and privilege since Grand Duchy of Moscow was established in the fifteenth century.
And do his best, damn right.
The Yamaguchi-gumi would be waiting when he finished up in Russia. If he finished. If he lived.
And after that?
Another pipeline would take up the slack, of course. No victory was ever final in the hellgrounds. Only those who fell were out of action. Their intent and motivation would survive.
Raw greed and malice never died.
As long as Bolan lived, there would be more work for the Executioner.
But at the moment, here and now, he had a plane to catch.
* * *
BY THE TIME Bolan arrived at Kobe Airport with a small suitcase and laptop in a carry-on, the Learjet 60 was already fueled and waiting. Its two pilots were wrapping up their preflight checklist, while a young receptionist—bright-eyed and fresh-looking despite the hour—signed Bolan in and ran his credit card.
It was a limitless Visa, embossed with the name of “Matthew Cooper,” which matched Bolan’s passport of the moment, and his California driver’s license. In fact, the alias aside, his credit card was perfectly legitimate. Whatever bills he managed to accumulate from month to month were paid in full from Stony Man Farm, in Virginia.
When all the paperwork was done, the receptionist thanked Mr. Cooper for his business and directed him outside to board his flight. Bolan hadn’t booked a return flight, since he’d have to judge the situation on the ground once he arrived. Returning to Japan might not be feasible. Indeed, he wasn’t sure that any airport service would be open to him once he’d managed to collect his package from the kidnappers who presently had custody. There were too many ifs for him to plan that far ahead.
If he was met, as planned, at Yakutsk Airport.
If the contact he had never met before provided proper gear and workable directions to his target.
If he found the agent he was on his way to save still breathing, fit to travel.
If he managed to extract the subject without getting either of them killed.
Then he could think about the quickest, safest way to put Yakutsk behind them and get out of Russia with their skins intact. And in the meantime, if Brognola’s fears proved accurate, they’d be running from a dragnet that included both official hunters and whatever private thugs the FSB was able to enlist through its connections to the Russian underworld.
A cakewalk, right.
As if.
They were northbound over the Sea of Japan when Bolan reopened Brognola’s file on his laptop. According to what he’d received, there’d been two FSB whistle-blowers. Lieutenant Sergey Dollezhal had fourteen years in harness, starting with the Federal Counterintelligence Service, or FSK, which had become the FSB in 1995. He was a legacy, in fact, the son of a former KGB colonel.
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