“I’m trying!” came a Russian-accented reply.
Azarov stuffed his weapon into his waistband and stepped slowly into the doorway with his hands open in front of him. As expected, he found himself staring down the barrel of Mitch Rapp’s gun. The CIA man was sitting in front of a bank of communications equipment that was likely the facility’s only connection to the outside world. He lowered his weapon as Azarov took a position that would allow him to see anyone approaching.
“There!” Eduard Fedkin said, typing frantically into a keyboard. “You should have her back.”
“Irene!” Rapp said into the microphone in front of him. “Can you hear me?”
“Is it done?” came Kennedy’s distorted voice.
“Yeah.”
“Is there any chance it could be played as natural causes?”
“That’d be a stretch.”
“Understood. What’s your situation?”
“Not good. The doc knows the facility and he says there’s no back way out.”
Rapp indicated to Azarov, who just shrugged and shook his head.
“Yeah. We’re fucked. The men Krupin has outside won’t use any serious explosives because they’ll think they might injure him but they’ll get in here sooner or later.”
“You being captured and identified isn’t going to go well for relations between the United States and Russia.”
“It’s not going to go well for me, either, Irene.”
There was a brief pause. “I have someone who may be in a position to help you, but it’s going to take time. How long can you hold out?”
“Depends on—”
Everything went dark for a moment before the emergency lighting came on.
“Get her back!” Rapp yelled.
“How?” Fedkin said. “There’s no power. I’m not an engineer, I—”
“Shut up,” Rapp said, moving to the door. “Grisha. You got anything?”
Azarov shook his head.
“Then maybe this is going to go our way.”
“How so?”
“They cut the power from outside. They’re already seeing this as a hostage crisis and they’ll use the power as a bargaining chip. We can play for time.”
“I admire your optimism, Mitch. But I have to admit that I don’t share it.”
CHAPTER 53
RAPP continued sifting through the pile of weapons, picking up an AN-94 assault rifle and checking the magazine. Only a few rounds left. A 9A-91 was in a little better shape, with about half a mag remaining. The people watching him from behind makeshift barricades were all wearing the same expectant expressions and blood-splattered hospital gowns. According to Azarov, those stains were about all that was left of Andrei Sokolov.
Most had never experienced combat before that day, but all were handling it with the fatalism that Russians were famous for. They were no longer strapped to beds being experimented on and had managed to serve themselves up a heaping plateful of revenge. Overall, not a bad day for a group of people who figured they’d soon be dead one way or another. At least now they had an opportunity to go down swinging.
He finished his inventory and walked to where Azarov was watching a shower of sparks penetrate the wall. The steel there was flimsier than it was on the door, but still formidable. Whoever was outside had gotten their hands on some kind of cutting tool and was using it to inch his way through.
“How much longer?” Rapp said.
“I’d guess four hours. How much ammunition.”
“Enough to make some noise, but that’s about it. Have you thought up a list of bullshit demands that’ll tie up Krupin’s men?”
Azarov was going to identify himself as a Chechen terrorist and offer up a time consuming list of demands in return for Krupin’s release. As plans went, it was shit, but it’d buy some time. How much was impossible to know.
“I’m still working on it. But I’ll be ready when they get through.”
Rapp glanced back and motioned to Eduard Fedkin. Unlike the patients, he and his medical team looked scared. Until they’d been kidnapped and imprisoned there, all had been planning long, prosperous lives. Outside these walls, they had families, friends, and careers that they weren’t done with yet.
“What do you have that we can use as a weapon, Doc?”
“Weapon? What do you mean?”
“Be creative. Could we pump anesthesia through that gash in the wall and knock the people on the other side out?”
The physician wiped at the sweat building on his forehead. “No. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Then what do you have that’s poisonous? Or that’ll blow up?”
“We have medications that given in the right doses would be deadly. You’ve already proved that. But blow up? I don’t know. Medical equipment is designed not to blow up.”
“There must be something.”
“Our job is to save people. Not kill them.”
Rapp dismissed him with a wave of the hand and started passing out the guns they’d collected. “Don’t fire unless I give the order. Understand?”
Yuri Lebedev translated as he accepted an AS Val assault rifle with a nearly full magazine.
“What happened to Krupin?” he asked.
“Dead.”
The former soldier smiled cruelly. “I wish I had been the one to pull the trigger.”
“Me too,” Rapp responded sincerely.
Unfortunately, Kennedy was right. He couldn’t be captured here. Even if he managed to hold out in the interrogation, it wouldn’t take Russian intelligence long to ID him. On the other hand, if they all died in that place, there was a solid chance America could get away with this. The Russians would likely assume he was just some mercenary that Azarov had hired and be anxious to bury him along with all the other evidence.
The collapse of Russia’s government in the middle of a war with NATO would create enough chaos on its own without leaked stories about medical experiments and brain tumors. Krupin’s death would be blamed on a heart attack or unnamed foreign agents or whatever it took to keep the country from blowing itself apart at the loss of their strong man.
The one thing that could change that was finding the CIA’s top operative locked in a building with Krupin’s corpse. The Russian hardliners would trot Rapp out as proof of everything they’d been telling their people about the West. Krupin would be portrayed as a selfless leader who had given his life to keep his country from being encircled by Western forces. Russia’s citizens, wary of the war effort until now, would get fully behind it. Fighting would spread to the other Baltic states and Ukraine. Assuming the nukes were kept in their silos, there would be hundreds of thousands of casualties. If they flew, then that number would climb into the millions.
Checkmate. After two decades in the business, it looked like he may have finally run out of road.
? ? ?
The wall was nearly cut through, but it had taken more than double Azarov’s four-hour estimate. One of the patients was a former construction worker and had come up with a credible theory for the delay—the angle grinder being used was battery powered and constantly in need of recharging.
With only a few minutes left, the wind was starting to push at the loose steel flap, creating a rhythmic clanging. Behind Rapp, the people who didn’t have guns had gathered up anything they could find that could be used as a weapon. The medical personnel still looked hesitant, but everyone else seemed ready—maybe even anxious—to face the men who had helped imprison them there.
The sparks reached the ground and, a moment later, the section of wall fell inward. Everyone tensed, but to their credit, no one fired. Rapp made his way to the hole and peered out, scrutinizing the visual chaos of the munitions dump. No evidence at all of the force he assumed had surrounded them, though there was now a personnel transport vehicle parked about twenty-five yards away.
Azarov moved alongside and scanned the scene with similar intensity, but after a few seconds, just shrugged.
“Open a dialogue,” Rapp said and Azarov shouted out a few of their bullshit demands in Russian. Hopefully, a few steaks and a case of beer.
No answer.