The Kill Switch

Tucker started walking, with Kane trotting alongside him.

9:54 A.M.

By midmorning, Tucker had located six of the eight workers he suspected of being Vladikavkazists. The remaining two had called in sick that morning, something neither had done before.

Standing in a warehouse doorway, he studied the docks. The port was fully alive now, with forklifts moving here and there, cranes swinging containers onto outbound ships, all accompanied by a cacophony of hammering, grinding, and shouted orders.

Tucker pulled out his phone and scrolled through his list of PDF dossiers and found the two men who had called in sick. Both were former soldiers, petty officers in the Russian Naval Infantry. Worse still, they were both trained snipers.

Two and two equals a credible threat.

He set the men’s faces in his memory.

His first instinct was to call Yuri, the head of Fedoseev’s protective detail, but it would do no good. I do not run, Fedoseev had proclaimed loudly and frequently. But most damning of all, Tucker was an interloper, the American none of the other security detail wanted here.

Tucker’s mind shifted again, visualizing Fedoseev’s route through the docks. He judged the exposure windows, the angles of fire. He surveyed for any likely sniper perches. There were a half-dozen spots that would work.

He glanced at the sky. The sun was up now, a dull white disk above the horizon. The wind had also died, and the sleet had turned to big fat snowflakes.

Not good. Much easier to make a long-range shot now.

Tucker looked down at Kane, knowing they couldn’t sit back and wait.

“Let’s go find some bad guys.”

10:07 A.M.

The six potential sniper nests were spread across the dockyard, some twenty acres of warehouses, catwalks, narrow alleys, and crane towers. Tucker and Kane covered the ground as quickly as possible without appearing hurried, using shortcuts wherever possible, never staring too long at any one spot.

As the pair passed a warehouse front, Kane let out a low growl. Tucker turned in a half crouch, going tense. Kane had stopped in his tracks and was staring down an alleyway between a pair of stacked containers.

Tucker caught the barest glimpse of a figure slipping out of view. Such a sighting would be easy to dismiss, but he knew his dog. Something in the stranger’s body language or scent must have piqued Kane’s interest: tension, posture, furtive movements. Kane’s instincts were razor honed after several dangerous years in Afghanistan.

Tucker recalled his mental map of the dockyard, thought for a moment, then flipped Kane’s collar cam into its upright position.

“GO SCOUT,” he ordered tersely.

Kane had a vocabulary of a thousand words and understanding of a hundred hand gestures, making him an extension of Tucker’s own body.

He pointed forward and motioned for Kane to circle around the bulk of containers to the far side.

Without hesitation, his partner trotted off.

Tucker watched him disappear into the gloom, then turned and jogged directly into the nest of giant container boxes where his target had vanished.

Reaching the first intersection, he stopped short and glanced around the corner of the container.

Another alley.

Empty.

He sprinted along it and arrived at the next intersection, this one branching left and right. It was a damned maze back here among the giant containers.

Easy to get lost, he thought, and even easier to lose my target.

He pictured Kane somewhere on the far side, hunkered down, watching this pile of containers. He needed his partner’s eyes out there, while he hunted within this maze.

Tucker punched up Kane’s video feed on his modified satellite phone. A flickering, digital image appeared on the tiny screen, live from Kane’s camera.

A figure suddenly sprinted out of the line of containers, heading east.

Good enough.

Tucker ran in that direction. He caught a glimpse on the screen of Kane doing the same, tracking the man, still scouting as ordered.

Both were on the hunt now—which is what army rangers did. Aside from rare exceptions, rangers didn’t patrol or provide humanitarian relief. They were single-minded in purpose: find and destroy the enemy.

Tucker had enjoyed the simplicity of that.

Brutal, true enough, but pure in a strange way.

He emerged from the container maze in time to draw even with Kane. He motioned the shepherd to him. Kane came trotting up and sat down beside him, awaiting his next command, his tongue lolling, his eyes bright.

They were now near the eastern edge of the dockyard. Directly ahead, across a gravel lot, lay a set of train tracks, lined with abandoned and rusted freight cars. Their quarry had vanished among them.

Beyond the train yard, a perimeter barbed-wire fence rose high—and beyond that, a dense pine forest.

Aside from the muffled dock sounds in the distance, all was quiet.

Suddenly Kane’s head snapped to the left. A section of the barbed-wire fence shook violently for a few moments, then went still. In his mind’s eye, Tucker envisioned a second target wriggling through a gap in the fencing to enter the dockyards from that direction, using the cover of the forest.

Why?

Searching farther to their left, he spotted a tall crane tower, once used to load the freight cars. The tower was one of the six potential sniper perches he had marked in his head.

Tucker checked his watch. Fedoseev would arrive in six minutes. Hurrying, he pulled out a pair of small binoculars from his jacket’s pocket and focused on the top of the crane. At first he saw nothing but indistinct scaffolding in the swirling snow. Then a shadowy figure appeared, slowly scaling the ladder toward the high platform.

That’s who came through the fence just now—but where’s the guy I was following?

He considered calling Yuri with the abort code, but even if his message got past that gatekeeper, his boss’s careless bravado would win out. Fedoseev would not back down from a threat. Bullets would have to be flying before the industrialist would consider a retreat.

It was the Russian way.

Tucker dropped to his belly and sca

He reached back and drew the Makarov PMM pistol from the paddle holster attached to his waistband. A decent weapon, but not his preference.

But when in Rome . . .

He looked over to Kane, who was crouched on his belly beside him. His partner’s eyes had already locked on to the target jogging down the rail line, heading away from the man climbing the crane.

Tucker gave a one-word command, knowing it would be enough. He pointed to the target moving on the ground.

“TRACK.”

Kane took off, silently sprinting after the man on foot.

Tucker angled toward the left, toward the crane tower.

Hunched over, he swept across the gravel lot, reached the train yard, and belly-crawled beneath a freight car and down the sloped ballast into a drainage ditch beyond. From the meager cover, he spotted the gap in the perimeter fencing; the cut was clean, recent.

To his left, a hundred yards away, rose the crane tower. Rolling to his side, he zoomed his binoculars and pa

Tucker quickly considered taking a shot at him but immediately decided against it. With a rifle, perhaps, but not with the Makarov. The distance and the scaffolding made a successful hit improbable. Plus the snow fell heavier now, slowly obscuring the view.