It cost ten thousand dollars, and that was after much haggling. Give it to Stronski, he drove a hard bargain and finally got his price. Swagger was driven in the back of a delivery truck to a Bank of America ATM in downtown Moscow-he was too tense to ponder the ironies-and took out the money after having arranged it via satellite phone call with his banker in Boise. The miracle of modern satellite communications: he, in the back of a bicycle shop in Moscow, calls a man in Boise who calls Atlanta so that a computer transaction is verified back in Moscow, and the next day, with the PIN, Swagger walks away with the cash, gets in the delivery van, and heads back to the bicycle shop.
Then it was wait, wait, wait, more days fled by, days of nothingness and boredom that did nothing to alleviate the crush of anxiety. Too bad he no longer smoked or drank-either crutch might have provided some mercy-but it was a thing of staring at the ceiling as the plaster crumbled away while time decayed slowly. He cultivated an interest in a soccer team, wondered when the NFL would get to Moscow, tried not to think of his daughters and his son and the fine lives they were building, missed his wife, mourned his dead (always), thought about certain flavors, colors, and smells, and more or less concentrated on existence. His only companion was the pistol, brilliantly engineered by the Instrument Design Bureau, flawlessly manufactured by oligarch Ixovich’s IxGroup. He stripped it, examined it, dry-fired it, drew it, grew proficient and familiar with it, learned it in all the ways a man can learn a gun without firing it, which happen to be considerable.
His nighttime visitor, Lee Harvey Oswald, stubbornly stayed away. No ideas, no insights, nothing. Swagger tried to nudge the work along by sitting at the desk of one hole where he stayed and writing LEE HARVEY OSWALD three or four times in the margin of a Russian magazine about health food. The pen wouldn’t work, the paper was too glossy, and nothing came of it.
Or maybe something did.
That night, as before, he swam from unconsciousness in the dark and felt the presence of the other man. Lee, you fucking little monkey, what are you up to now?
The chilly punk bastard was silent and smug, as always, and Swagger scoffed as if to play hard to get and sailed back into sleep, but then it started.
He saw the creep in his sniper’s nest, hair a mess, limbs a-tingle, full of hunger for glory and immortality, on his sleazy, tiny rifle.
What the fuck are you up to, you little bastard?
The first question that came to mind was: why did he wait until the limousine had turned the corner off Houston onto Elm and was obscured in the few trees in the area to take (and miss) his first shot? What a moron!
This one had stuck in Swagger’s craw since he’d stood in the sniper’s nest. It spilled over him again. What the fuck? What’s going on here? Any shooter looking at the situation would know that he was assured one clear, unhurried shot before any kind of reaction took place. He would not choose a shot through the cover of trees at a moving target. Rather, as Swagger had chewed on a million times or so, the best shot was when the limousine had slowed almost to a standstill as it was rotating around the left turn directly below Oswald. At that point, the president was at his closest to Lee Harvey, around seventy-five feet. His chest and head were plainly exposed. The angle was roughly seventy-five degrees, so the trajectory ran well over the windshield of the limousine and the windscreen that cut off the driver’s compartment from the passenger compartment. It was the literal fish-in-a-barrel shot, and it was so close that difficulties with the scope alignment or even the three-hundred-meter battle zero of the iron sights wouldn’t move the bullet placement outside of the lethal zone. That had to be the shot Oswald planned to take.
That was in fact the shot he tried to take. Consider that when he arrived on the sixth floor that morning, he had his choice of windows. There were six. Why did he chose the left-hand corner? Because it gave him direct access to the turning automobile immediately beneath him. It was the right choice. If planning a shot farther down Elm Street, he surely would have chosen the right-hand window: it was the building’s width closer and, in terms of the curve in Elm Street, gave him less deflection to the target. It seemed that even Oswald, fired up on a wave of egomania and sense of destiny as he was, doubted his ability to make a deflection shot at close to three hundred feet, which was what his choice of the left-hand window ultimately committed him to doing. It was difficult to believe he could hit that shot if he didn’t think it was within his powers and had planned to avoid it.
Knock knock.
Hello, who’s there?
An insight.
Swagger realized the little creep in the nest had tried to take the closer, easier shot, and his failure to bring it off-consistent with his goof-up’s personality and his tendency to fall apart at big moments-was what determined the outcome of the next eight to ten seconds. Oswald prepped for that shot, put his scope squarely on the president’s chest, and at the moment of minimum movement and maximum proximity, pulled the trigger to discover that the rifle would not fire.
Had he put the safety on his loaded weapon and, in the heat of the moment, forgotten to remove it? The safety on a Mannlicher-Carcano is a devilishly small thing, poorly designed and not for battle usage. It’s a button located under the bolt plunger at the rear of the receiver. To manipulate it, you’ve got to break your hold, look at the fucking thing, and carefully guide it out of one condition and into the other. The idiot whom the other boys called Ozzie Rabbit snapped dry, panicked, went through the process, then went back into the shooting position, aware that he was already behind the action curve. His first shot may have been premature, as he was hunting for a target through the trees and stacking the trigger for the final pull, and the M-C trigger, unlike most of the age, is surprisingly light.
The rifle fires. He knows it’s a clear miss and now the clock is ticking on his effort and his old friend failure is nipping at his heels again. He rushes through cocking the weapon, reacquires the position, and is amazed to see the car emerge from the trees into plain view with almost no reaction from occupants, security, or crowd. He throws the crosshairs onto the president-this is his most likely shot to hit the brain, as the president is much less than two hundred feet away; the angle is beneficial to Oswald, producing little lateral movement and only slight diminishment, probably not even noticeable through the cheap glass of the inferior optical device; and he’s on much firmer ground regarding the trigger pull, knowing exactly how much slack to take out to get the trigger to stack up at the point of firing and when to exert that last ounce of pressure to fire.
And he misses again.
Of course, that’s the famous magic bullet, and not only does he not miss, he puts a bullet through two men. It’s not God’s point of view that matters, however, but Oswald’s point of view. The president does not react spastically to the bullet strike; rather, he makes a little jerk, which, being lost in the blur of the recoiling scope, Oswald may not see. By the time he gets the rifle cocked and is back to the target, he sees-nothing. That is, the president doesn’t collapse, tip, tilt, implode, pitch forward, splay his arms. Instead, he begins a slow, subtle forward lean, and his hands go toward his throat, but not with any wounded-animal instinct or speed. Oswald cannot see any indication of a hit and must think, You idiot! Another fuckup! And he must think, What the hell is wrong with this scope? I was right on, and I missed. Is it all fucked up? Where do I hold to make the shot?
Given that psychological reality, Swagger found it mind-blowing that Oswald recovered enough to reacquire the target after running the rough action a second time, and though the target was smaller, his psychological condition possibly more scattered, his doubts about his system more intense, his fear of failure even more concentrated, he managed the perfect brain shot.
What the fuck? How did this schmuck go from two strikes to a home run? How did he recover so fast and pull it off? You can look for years at his record for any hint of such a moment and be bewildered. There is nothing but utter failure; random mediocrity is his best accomplishment.
Swagger sat back, astounded that he was sweating and that he’d been transported to a faraway place and time. Now he was back in a sordid room smelling of piss and puke, sleeping on a dirty mattress, man on the run all the way.
Yet the dreamscape of Lee Harvey Oswald killing a president would not abandon his head. In another second, it took over his brain and Swagger was back among the boxes, smelling the burnt powder, standing next to the little prick who brought such shame on all of us who call ourselves shooters. The question, eternal and lingering: what the fuck?
Was it simple sniper’s luck that he hit that last shot? It could have been. The wild shot can hit as accidentally as it misses. The bullet doesn’t know where it’s going, what’s on the other end. It just goes where the physics tell it to go, and that can be into a brain or a curb, whatever.
Swagger understood that this idea sucked: nobody wants the key moment of the late twentieth century turning on nothing more than a nobody loser’s one stroke of luck. But maybe that was what happened.
Luck or whatever, Oswald has just shot the president in the head. Freeze the moment, which is the most interesting moment in the entire event. He has just seen his bullet detonate the president’s head into a geyser of brain matter and blood. Even if he lost specifics of the image in the recoil, when he comes back on target out of the recoil stroke, he sees chaos, panic, and hysteria in the back of the car. And what does he do?
He cocks the rifle again.
Excuse me, but what the fuck?
Why?
Does he mean to shoot again? Is it pure reflex? It wasn’t learned in the Marine Corps, where his M-1 automatically reloaded itself. What is his motive? Most good hunters have trained themselves to cock again for a fast follow-up, but by no means is this ass-clown an experienced hunter, and there’s no indication that he’s hunted in five years. Or does he need a motive at the time? Maybe it can’t be explained; it just is, it happened because it happened, and to look for motive is to see him as rational when he was an irrational man at an irrational moment.
Still, it seemed to Swagger, aware of the sniper’s instincts after the kill, in that situation, his task done, Oswald now knows that his chances at escape can be measured in mere seconds. It seems far more likely that instead of cocking the rifle, he abandons it, exits the nest, and beelines toward the only stairway, which is over ninety feet away diagonally across the empty space of the sixth floor.
He doesn’t do this.
Instead, he carries the rifle with him, loaded and unlocked, across the floor those ninety-odd feet. Suppose he meets a colleague? Suppose someone sees him from a building across the street, the Dal-Tex Building or the Dallas County Records building, both of which have floors and windows that look directly onto his area? At that point he is acting more like a marine on combat patrol, fearing ambush, than he is a fleeing assassin.
He reaches the stairway directly in the floor at the other corner of the building, and realizing he can’t reenter the world with rifle in hand, he shoves it between two boxes there at the stairs, where it will be found, fully loaded, shell in chamber, an hour or so later.
Why does he cock the rifle after killing the president? Why does he carry it with him as he proceeds across the floor? These issues seemed to bother nobody. They bothered Swagger.
Finally, enough time passed so that Stronksi felt safe enough to set a night; he met Swagger again, this time in the back of a van, to arrange the debrief and pass over the money.
“You swear,” said Stronski, “that after I have this thing for you, we will proceed directly to embassy, I will watch you enter, and can then finally relax, knowing I served you as you required and lived up to all promises.”
“Absolutely.”
“Now tell me where to meet.”
“No.”
“Swagger, you are such a bastard. Such a stubborn son of bitch. You don’t trust me?”
“What choice have I got? But let’s take elementary precautions. Though troublesome in the long run, they will cut down on the yips, and we can concentrate on our work.”
“You talk like general. All the time soothing, reasonable, and probably right. Goddamn you, man, you are a hard friend to have.”
“I’m just a country boy scared of city slickers, that’s all.”
“I don’t know what ‘slicker’ is, but I get the meaning. So when we settle on place?”
“I will call you on a cell that morning after you are out of the Lubyanka. I will give you a street. You will drive down it. At a set time, I will call you with a turn to make. I will guide you by me in this way and make sure nobody follows. I may do that two or three times. When I am certain you are alone, I will give you the destination, my choice, and you will be dropped. We will chat, then head by another cab to the embassy. Is that acceptable?”
“You have a cunning Russian mind. No rush to do anything.”
“It’s how I earned a glorious retirement in the basement of a bicycle shop where I watch the plaster slowly fall from the ceiling.”
“It is not very interesting, I am sure, but still, I am sure it is more interesting than death.”
“It is.”
Swagger gave him the envelope: ten thousand dollars in rubles.
“I hope what I get for you is worth that. There are no refunds,” said Stronski.
“I understand. I take the risk cheerfully.”
“I wonder: why do you do this, Swagger? The money it costs, the danger you run, after all you’ve been through. It’s so insane. I can make no sense of such a thing. Vengeance. You took the death of this president fifty years ago so seriously, the pain is so deep?”
Swagger laughed. “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t give a shit about JFK.”
Three days later, Stronski called at precisely 7 a.m.
“I have it,” said Stronski. “It was fine. Walked in, found the Second Directorate volumes, found the right year, found the report, broke the rules by writing it down, he never asked or wondered, got out easily, now I am with driver.”
“Anyone following?”
“Hard to tell. It’s crowded. All Porsches look the same. But no, I think not.”
“Take a few more turns around the town. I’ll call back shortly and give you a boulevard.”
Shortly, Swagger called. “Go to Bruskaya, then go north on Bruskaya.”
“That’s seven miles.”
“I will call in half an hour.”
Then it was “Bruskaya to Simonovich, left on Simonovich.”
Swagger waited forty minutes. “Simonovich to Chekhov. Right on Chekhov.”
He himself stood in an alley on Chekhov and watched as Stronski’s black Cherokee roared by. He watched the busy Moscow traffic flow that followed, looking for cars with intent pairs of middle-aged men, their eyes hammered to the vehicle they were following. He saw nothing like that, mainly commuters as glum as those on any freeway in America, truckies cursing the schedule, buses driven by women, a few cars of youngsters too full of booze and vitality to notice how early it was.
He moved a block, rerouted Stronski around another street, brought him by, and again noted no professional followers; this time he looked for repeats from the first batch of vehicles he’d monitored. He found none.
“Okay,” he said, “you’ve heard of the Park of Fallen Heroes, near the Tretyakov Gallery?”
“I know it well.”
“I will meet you there in an hour. I will take the Underground to the Okty-er, Okty-”
“-abrskaya station. Yes, it’s a few blocks.”
“See you at”-looked at watch-“nine-thirty or so.”
“Sit in front of Comrade Dzerzhinsky. He will appreciate the company,” said Stronski.
Possibly Comrade Dzerzhinsky did enjoy the company. He had no one else there. He stood on his pillar twenty feet above the ground, wrapped in a swirling greatcoat, his strong face ascowl with contempt for the world he looked upon. The man had ruled from the same altitude in the center of the square named after him, where he had commanded the ceremonial space before the Lubyanka, whose apparatuses he had invented as founder of Cheka in the early days after the revolution. He was the first of the Communist intelligence geniuses, if Polish by birth, and had helped Lenin cement his hold and built the machine that helped Stalin sustain his. He ruled from that spot in stone certitude for years, radiating the red terror from each eye.
Now, covered in graffiti and bird shit, he commanded nothing. Look ye mighty and despair, was that the message? Something like that. After the fall, he had been removed to this far place, a glade behind the Tretyakov art gallery. He had become a perch for the avian citizens of the state, and he looked out on a small patch of grass and bush in which other dead gods had been dumped, including about twenty-five Stalins, some big, some small, all broad with the muscular mustache and the wide Georgian cheekbones but all turned somehow comic by their extreme proximity to the earth. It was as if the Russians were afraid to throw out the icon that was the Boss, but at the same time they couldn’t honor him with a dictator’s height from which to command fear and obedience. So, low to the ground, sometimes swaddled in weeds, sometimes noseless or otherwise defaced from street action at various colorful times, he looked, in his rows on rows, like a mysterious ancient statue, unknowable, mysterious, vaguely menacing but easy to ignore, and he was ignored, for of the many beautiful Moscow parks, this was the least beautiful and maybe the least visited. It was unkempt and overgrown, unlike the formal perfection that was within the Kremlin walls. It was strictly an afterthought.
Swagger sat in almost perfect aloneness with the stone men. Sparsely visited in normal time, the park was even more desolate this early. He felt secure from his hunters: he had not been followed on the Underground, he had not been followed on his walk over. He checked constantly and knew himself to be unmonitored. It was a matter of minutes before Stronski arrived, and then he could go home and get on with it. He yearned for a shower, American food, a good, deep sleep, and a fresh start. Maybe all this shit would begin to swing into focus after he got away from it for a while. He knew he had to persist in his nighttime journeys with the creep Oswald. Who? What? How? Why? Nah, fuck why. Why wouldn’t make any sense. Only how mattered.
Oswald went away, and Swagger returned to man-on-the-run guy. He looked up and down the sidewalk; from the direction of the Tretyakov, a museum whose modern fortresslike walls could be seen through the trees, he saw Stronski approaching. He had read Stronski’s file, which Nick had obtained through CIA sources; he knew that Stronski had his finger in a hundred dirty pies, but everyone in Russia did. Some didn’t have so many pies. He also knew Stronski was known as a reputable assassin. He always delivered, he never betrayed. His stock in trade was efficiency combined with trustworthiness; he worked with equanimity for whichever bratva needed a job done, never tarnishing himself with their affairs, never playing their games.
So Swagger trusted him as well as he trusted anyone in this game.
“This is Petrel Five at Tretyakov, do you read?”
Static crackled over the handheld radio set, but the young man on the roof of the Tretyakov waited patiently until it cleared.
“-have you loud and clear, Petrel Five, go ahead.”
“Ah, I think I see Stronski.”
“What’s your distance?”
“About four hundred meters. I’m on the roof. He’s got Stronski’s hair, his build, muscular, he looks to be about the age.”
“Where is he going?”
“He’s in the park, just like you said. No rush. No worry. No indication he realizes he’s under observation.”
“Okay, drop out of sight, let the situation settle. Come back up in three minutes and tell us what you have.”
“Got it.”
The young observer did as he was told, sliding into repose below the edge of the wall at the roof’s precipice. He was by profession a construction worker in one of the companies that the Izmaylovskaya mob owned, but he and many others had been pulled out for observation duties on sites known to be favored by Stronski. This was quite exciting for him, for like many young men, he dreamed of gangster glory, of running with the feared Izzies on their violent adventures in Moscow. The chicks, the blow, the bling! It was the same for gangsters everywhere.
He rose, looked through his heavy binoculars, had a moment of panic, and then made contact.
“Petrel Five.”
“Go ahead.”
“He is sitting on a park bench with someone. Yes, now I see, a taller man, at least his legs are longer. Thin, not so big as Stronski. Workingman, probably, not a Westerner. Doesn’t look like an American.”
“Can you see his face? His eyes?”
“Let me move a bit.” The young man slid down the wall of the flat roof, coming to the corner. This would give him the best angle.
“I can now see they are sitting before the statue of Dzerzhinsky.”
“The eyes.”
He dialed the focus carefully, hoping to squeeze a bit more resolution out of it.
“The eyes,” he said. “Very wary. Hunter’s eyes.”
“Good work, Petrel Five. Now stay undercover.”
“First the good news,” said Stronski. “The good news is that there is no bad news.”
Swagger nodded. He waited for it.
“In those days, KGB started a program where a Second Directorate technical team was in constant rotation, station to station, the world over. That’s all they did. They stayed a few days, a week, they did a complete sweep, using every electronic countermeasure and tracking device at their disposal, and they issued a report to center with copies to the KGB resident in place. A Comrade Bukhov seemed to be in charge. Very thorough man, very patient, very wise in the ways of concealed microphones, wires, long-distance amplified eavesdropping, the power of batteries.”
Swagger nodded, listening hard.
“Soviet embassy, Mexico City, 1964 inspection, twenty-three listening devices found, eighteen of them removed, the point of leaving five, I suppose, to feed bad information to your eavesdroppers.”
“So in 1963-”
“Your people had it all. Everything in that building, your people heard it.”
Swagger nodded. “Of course,” he finally said, “that was a lot of info, most of it routine, I’m sure almost all of it routine. I wonder how carefully the work product was examined, who made the initial discrimination; probably someone low on the totem pole, and then what they winnowed out got passed upward to senior officers.”
“Very good questions, my friend, but answers will be found in Langley, not in Lubyanka.”
“Was there a ’62 report?”
“No, the program started in 1962, and Mexico City being not exactly a big priority, the team didn’t get to it the first time until ’64.”
Again Swagger considered.
“I saved best for last,” said Stronski, so pleased with his success. “Comrade Bukhov, very professional, very thorough, as I said, includes offices that he had found penetrated, and chief among them was that belonging to Yatskov, senior KGB and supervisor of Kostikov and Nechiporenko in Mexico City and first interrogators of Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Swagger let out an involuntary sigh. “That means that CIA had access to whatever Oswald said the last day, when he was so distraught and pulled the gun. He was in Yatskov’s office.”
“I suppose that is conclusion you could draw. I only tell you what the records say about wire operation at the embassy at the time.”
“What it proves,” Swagger said, “is that someone in the Agency could have known about Oswald’s hit on General Walker. It is not proved, but it cannot be ruled out.”
“You’re the genius. You’re the-” He went still.
Swagger picked it up immediately.
“Two,” said Stronski in the same even tone, “coming from around the bushes behind us, heavy coats, I cannot see hands. You have that pistol?”
“I do,” said Swagger, his mind gone instantly tactical. Was this a setup? Had Stronski betrayed him? If so, Stronski could have pulled a pistol and finished the job in one second. He wouldn’t have placed himself in the kill zone. In an odd way, a clarification had been issued. On the point of bad action, Swagger felt a wave of inappropriate enthusiasm. He could not help but smile.
“You laugh. Swagger, you are crazier than even I.”
“This is the only shit I was ever any good at,” said Bob, still smiling. He scanned for threat, immediately seeing two men, also in heavy coats with obscure hands, coming at them from the same direction that Stronski had come, from the Tretyakov, maybe moving with a little too much energy for so early on a sunny Moscow morning in such an out-of-the-way place.
“Two,” he said, “my twelve o’clock.”
“And two more make six, heading in from other entrance, just passing by Dzerzhinsky’s statue on the right. Are you hot?”
“I’m hot, but no reload.”
Neither body posture had altered, neither man had swiveled his head or signaled sudden anxiety through tensed body. In fact, Stronski laughed, and as he did, he reached over and shook Swagger’s arm in mirth, and Swagger felt something heavy slide into his jacket pocket and knew it to be an eighteen-round magazine for his GSh pistol.
“No cover here,” said Stronski, laughing, “and they’ve got baby Kalish, I’m sure. On three, draw and fire, then break around the bench, run straight back to cover.”
Swagger knew what was back there sixty feet or so: Stalinland. Row on row of stone Joe, wisdom in his eyes, sagacity on his face, mustache flowing like the Don, hair thick as the wheat fields of Ukraine.
“I lay down fire, you move. Get into the Stalins. Good cover, you can move, will stop their rounds, you can get shots. We’ll see if they have guts to come against our guns when we are on the sights and shooting calmly.”
“Let’s kill some bad-asses,” said Swagger.
“On my one, three, two, one-”
It happened so fast after such a long wait. The Izmaylovskaya kill team had sat in a Mercedes limo behind the Tretyakov, a glossy black beast of a car with three ranks of leather seats, smelling of new car and also of perfume, as if someone had a woman there recently. But not now. Two men in the front, two in the middle, two in the rear. Very tough, very good men, had done wet work all their lives, first in Spetsnaz, then for the mobs, and now as dedicated Izzy hard guys. It was a great life, and they had everything that the kid code-named Petrel Five dreamed about, blow, chicks, and bling. They had bleak faces and small dark eyes and wide Slavic cheekbones and frosts of gray hair, and each weighed over two hundred pounds. Each could bench his weight and was expert at Systema Combat Sambo, an advanced Russian and deadly martial art. All had scars, mended limbs, jagged knuckles, memories of death in cold or faraway places or, more recently, in back streets or nightclubs. To see them was to fear them, and the exquisitely tailored dark suits they wore over dark shirts-some black, some chocolate, some dark blue-warned the world to step aside.
Each carried what is commonly but incorrectly called a Krinkov, or “Krink” in the vernacular, the preferred weapon of choice of the late Osama bin Laden and perhaps the instrument he was reaching for when SEAL Team 6 popped his balloon. (These men had done a lot of that sort of work themselves.) It was a short-barreled AK-74 variant with a large, almost bulbous flash hider, a folding stock now cranked tight along the left side of the receiver, and a wicked, curving plum-colored mag of thirty 5.45-mm high-velocity steel-cored cartridges. It was secured by shoulder sling under the heavy Armani overcoats they wore, and in each voluminous pocket were a few more mags.
The news came to the team leader when he answered his cell in perfunctory language, without drama or excitement; they were professionals at this, none of it was new.
“Oleg, we’ve got a confirm. They’re on the bench at the Dzerzhinsky statue. You set to roll?”
“On our way, Papa Bear,” said Oleg, tapping the driver hard.
Behind him, he heard the sound he loved best in the world, which was the klack of bolts being racked as they were slid back to turn the gun hot and ready. He himself made that wonderful adjustment, feeling the slight vibration as the bolt slid back, permitted a cartridge to pop into place, then rammed it home to the chamber, the firing pin held tense by the trigger. His fingers inspected while he called out the commands to his team, as he had done in the mountains so regularly: “Bolts back, safeties off, full auto engaged.”
“All positive,” came the ragged response.
The heavy car gunned to life but did not jump into the traffic. As in all action, smooth is fast, and the Izmaylovskaya driver was an equally experienced pro. He slid arrogantly into the traffic, accelerated, made the proper turns while obeying all laws, and in a few minutes pulled up to the margins of the park.
Oleg spoke into his phone. “Papa Bear, we’re set. Still a go?”
He heard Papa Bear speak into another phone and then come back with “Yeah, he’s still got them sitting there like birds perched on Felix’s cold nose. Go rock their world.”
“Showtime,” he said to his boys.
The car slid to the side of the road, and two men slipped out. They’d hold a few seconds, the other two two-man subteams would get out at two other spots around the perimeter of the Park of Fallen Heroes, they’d coordinate the walk-in, and then they’d converge on the bench. All would go to guns, the shooting would be over in seconds, and in the stunned silence, they’d return to the patiently waiting limo, which they knew would go unseen by any of the hundreds of witnesses in the roadway, including Moscow police or militia.
The car deposited the second team, turned a corner, and drove fifty yards to deposit the third. The driver began the heavy labor of a U-turn meant to move him back and place him at the exit to the park closest to the bench, out of which, if all went well, the six shooters would soon emerge.
All did not go well.
Pistol up, two hands, front sight, front sight, front sight and press, the jerk of the recoil snapping the pistol up a bit, its slide in super-time hard back, a spent shell a blur as it spun away, and then Swagger found the front sight again and followed up with another to the midsection, cranked right a degree or so, and hammered two more nines into the partner, who was unlimbering his Krink, and watched that one blur spastically while his nervous system announced he’d taken hits and he staggered, the Krink dropping but not falling as the strap held it.
Swagger heard the reports behind him of Stronski, his own GSh-18 rapping as he fired a suppressive spray, having more targets and not being able to aim after the first.
Swagger’s old legs drove him off the bench and behind it, and he was stunned to see that though he’d hit and slowed them, the two on his side had not pitched to the earth. He fired again even as one of them, in a lurching move, jerked on the Krink’s trigger and chopped up a cloud of dust and debris at his own feet.
“Go, go, goddammit,” yelled Stronski over his own new dialogue of shots; Swagger was too excited to feel his age and ran like hell, low, with first a zig and then a zag and then a zig and was in seconds, it seemed, absorbed by the formation of Joes in Stalinland. He fell behind the nearest, went prone, and shooting with the earth as his sandbag, fired at the smears of men to the left moving and shooting, scattering as they looked for cover, their chopped-for-handling assault weapons jerking arcs of unaimed fire into the air to cascade wherever. Stronski ran, and Swagger held on the head of a man who’d wisely dropped to kneeling to steady his front sight for an aimed shot, but Swagger fired first, careful on the press, and saw a splat of gas-inflated shirtfront to mark a hit high in the chest; the man staggered to his knees, dropped his weapon, and seized it again. Swagger fired, and the man went sluggishly, reluctantly to earth. He seemed so disappointed.
Swagger looked back. One of the first two he’d hit was down, finished, but the other-though his black shirt, now wet and heavy, clung tightly to his chest-staggered ahead, weaving the Krink with one hand, bull-crazed by his job and meaning to finish before he bled out. Holding carefully, Swagger managed to press one off that blew a jet of mist from the man’s broad forehead. He fell like a toppled statue.
A strange ripping sound went stereophonic on Swagger as a spray of stone or marble frags lacerated his cheeks and hands. He turned and saw that two of the original four to the left had taken positions behind the bench and were laying out fire into the fleet of Stalins, ripping through nose and mustache and wavy Georgian hair, blowing out all-seeing eyes, ripping the comfy pudge of sanctimony that in some variations bunched the Boss’s cheeks. One Joe split radically in two, its lesser half dropping to Earth; another, of porous material, simply evaporated into a fog of dust as, hit centrally, it shattered.
“Go back, go back,” screamed Stronski from an adjacent Joe head, and Swagger, usually the yeller of orders in such situations, obeyed, crab-walking back a rank to find another stout stone Joe behind which to crouch even as he heard full-metal jackets hum through the air and was aware that, around and behind him, the whole world was dancing and crumbling to the jig of velocity. Situated and alive, he rose, and though he could see only flashes and that thin scrim of burned chemistry that accompanies multiple smokeless powder discharges screening the bench, fired the last five shots of his mag at the bench, hearing the protest of punctured wood as his bullets bore into the bench slats.
Stronski, under that distraction, scuttled backward, hooked behind a Joe, and slammed a new mag into his GSh. Swagger’s, similarly hors de combat, received the same treatment, and dropping the slide on a fresh eighteen, he hoisted it before him to hunt for targets. He heard Stronski yell in Russian.
“I call them fucking gutless Izzy dogs, tell them to come visit me in the Joes and I will kill the rest of them and fuck their asses when they are dead, hah!” he translated in the next lull.
A new fusillade ruptured the blasphemy, and more stone fragments sang as they pranced from the various Joes that the high-velocity bullets pockmarked.
“He’s coming around,” yelled Swagger, seeing that the two on the bench were covering for a brave guy, cutting right and hoping to ease among the Stalins from that flanking point of entry. Swagger rose, guessing the gun smoke, floating debris, and floating slivers of grass and brush would give him a little concealment, and set to intercept. He dropped back a row of Joes, cut right, ran low, paused as he waited for the shadow of the gunman, then stepped out on the diagonal and fired twice into the approaching killer’s heavy chest, then fired a finisher into center forehead. It was not pretty, but it was final. The gunner went down hard, headfirst, feet flying up with such force that a Gucci loafer popped off one. Swagger scurried, leaned forward, and retrieved the Krink, deftly unlinking the sling catch.
Swagger rose and, as steadily as possible, emptied the mag, about fifteen remaining rounds, into the bench where the last two bad boys hid, this time rendering it further useless under splinters and dust. One of them rose to run, and Stronski leaned into a sight picture to take him. He fired once and his pistol jammed, its slide stuck halfway back.
Swagger swung to take the runner down with the Krink, not remembering it was empty, and pulled on nothing. He dropped it, shifted the pistol to his right hand, and suddenly felt a horse kick in his hip as a pelting spray of frags and superheated dust flew upon him.
He rolled left into the fetal, locked his elbows between his knees, and found the man who stood over the defenseless Stronski and pressed just as that guy got another mag into his Krink and was about to massacre the sniper. Swagger hit him in the eye, blowing it out, and the man twisted like a dancer and corkscrewed earthward.
Swagger turned back on peripheral motion and settled in for a shot on the surviving gangster now fleeing, saw civilians across the street behind him, possible friendly-fire casualties, and opted not to shoot. The big guy, all athlete and amazingly fast, made it out an exit and dove into the open door of a sleek black limo, which burned rubber on the acceleration.
“Dump guns, get out of here,” commanded Stronski.
“You’ve been hit.”
It was true. The left side of Stronski’s white silk shirt bloomed the dark spread of blotted blood.
“It’s nothing, you go, get out of here. Do it now! I am fine. I cannot run much.”
Swagger dropped the pistol, pulled his watch cap low, and started to walk forcefully away, crossing a street, finding an alley, cutting down it, finding a broad boulevard. Police cars roared along it, looking for a turn to the park, which, as it developed, was not accessible from that thoroughfare. Two passed within feet of Swagger, but in them, youngish men seemed alarmed and unaggressive, unwilling to get any closer until they were sure the shooting had stopped.
Finding a small restaurant, Swagger tried to look cool. He said, “Koka,” and waited as the drink was brought, hoping no one noticed that he was hit too.