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  On his belt he’d strapped the controls for the retractors and the hooks, a cell phone–sized panel consisting of four small three-position levers.

  Also adorning his utility belt was a multi-tool in a pouch and two black-bladed combat knives in quick-access sheaths.

  He wore a small backpack stuffed with clothing and a medical kit, and on his black, low-profile chest rig, magazines for his nine-millimeter were fastened in Velcro pouches, as well as a 26.5-millimeter single-shot flare gun that looked like a snub-nosed revolver with a fat barrel. It was loaded with a smoke grenade, and several more ballistic smokes adorned his chest rig, held in place with Velcro straps.

  On his right ankle Court wore a Glock 26, a subcompact nine-millimeter pistol. He was hoping he wouldn’t have to go for the 26 since it was not suppressed, but Court had been around long enough to know to be prepared.

  Back when he was with the CIA, his principal trainer’s name was Maurice, and Maurice used to preach preparedness versus luck with a mantra, often shouted into Gentry’s ear when he’d left something to chance. “Hope in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first!”

  That visual never left Court when hoping for the best, or when preparing for the worst.

  Court shivered in the cold; he missed that blanket already, but he ignored the discomfort, checked his altitude, and pushed the control bar forward again for more lift.

  With a jaw fixed in determination he looked to his target in the distance, reached to his center console, and added full power to the engine.

  At Townsend House in D.C., the fourteen men and women in the signal room watched an infrared black-hot heat signature float over a hazy white forest on the other side of the world. After a command from a surveillance technician over the commo link to the drone pilot, a laser reached out from the UAV. It touched the moving craft like an invisible finger and then reported the speed and altitude back to the sensor operator.

  A disembodied male voice spoke through the headsets. “He’s in the climb and accelerating.”

  Babbitt was still trying to get his head around the event unfolding in front of him. “How does he expect to make it to the target area without the Russians hearing that thing?” he asked.

  A young man answered from his desk near the front of the room. “We assume he will cut power for stealth. The wind is inland from the water, at his back. Even with the weight of the engine and the cockpit, that microlight’s glide ratio is good. If he climbs to a thousand feet or so, he can sail a good two or three klicks while totally silent.”

  “And then what? He just lands on the lawn?” That seemed, to Babbitt, like a terrible idea. Even though the first rays of morning light would not appear over northwestern Russia for another four hours, everyone in the basement signal room knew Sidorenko’s property was crawling with gunmen.

  A female voice said, “We think he will try to land on the north side of the property—crash-land is probably the better term. There is less security there, but still, he’s going to have to pull a few tricks out of his sleeve to make this happen.”

  Babbitt did not avert his eyes from the screen. He said, “He’s thought this through. He knows what he’s doing. If he’s got a way in, he’s got a way out.” The prospect of losing this opportunity to get his man was almost too much to contemplate. “The UAV team on site. How close are they?”

  Jeff Parks was still at his boss’s side. “They are in Rochino. Two klicks from the X.”

  Lee called out to the room in a voice unnecessarily loud, considering he was wearing a head mic. “Who’s in contact with the UAV team in Rochino?”

  “I am, sir,” said a middle-aged African American woman. She stood at her workstation to Babbitt’s right, the coiled wire of her headset hanging from the side of her head down to her commo box.

  “I want their second drone in the air and loitering on station. Bring the other ScanEagle down and refuel it. We can’t lose him when this is over.”

  “On it, sir.”

  Parks said, “Lee, there are fifty armed men around that dacha. We have to allow for the possibility that this will end, tonight, right inside those walls.”

  Babbitt chuffed. “If Sid’s boys kill him, we don’t get paid. Tonight I’m rooting for Court Gentry.”

  Court looked at the moving map on his thigh one last time, then pulled the tablet off his leg and tossed it over the side of the microlight. He then reached down between his knees to the tiny console and flipped a switch, killing power to the engine behind him. The propeller slowed, then stopped; all engine noise ceased and, other than a soft flapping of the wind over the fabric of the delta wing, Gentry was enveloped by the silence and stillness and darkness of the night.

  The sensation was startling. He soared quietly through the air, riding a powerful and comforting tailwind eight hundred fifty feet above the treetops, his target dead ahead at twelve o’clock. He flipped down his NOD’s and the green haze from his image-intensifying equipment, diffused by the wet lens, added to this surreal experience.

  He descended slowly, sailing silently toward his objective waypoint, a spot just above the tiled roof of the massive dacha in the center of the target location.

  He’d be involved in furious activity in moments, but for now there was little to do but hold the control bar steady and clear his mind to prepare himself for the unknowns of the impending op.

  And, Court admitted to himself, there were a hell of a lot of unknowns.

  He was not here by choice, although he was under contract. The man in the dacha at his target location, Gregor Sidorenko, was the head of a large and dangerous Bratva, or brotherhood of Russian mafia, and Sidorenko had spent the past year chasing Court, quite literally, to the ends of the earth, sparing no expense in the hunt.

  Sid operated in a state of rage and fear and obsessive compulsion. Sid knew that if he did not kill Gentry, then surely Gentry would kill him. Gentry realized this; he knew Sid would never stop throwing men and money at the task, so Court knew he could not keep running.

  He had to attack into this threat.

  To this end Court made contact with a competitor of Sidorenko, the leader of a Moscow-based Bratva, and the two men negotiated a contract price. The Muscovite mobster used his extensive organization to help Gentry with equipment and intelligence, and this, along with training Gentry underwent near Moscow, had all coalesced into this evening’s operation.

  Court didn’t like partnering with the Muscovite and his shitty gang any more than he liked taking on Sidorenko and his shitty gang, but he knew he had no choice.

  Court had to take out Sid, and in so doing reduce the incredible number of threats against him by a grand total of one.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  Court flipped the NOD’s back up for a moment and made a slight course correction. He reached down and unfastened his seat belt, then grabbed the metal hook at the end of a bungee cord attached to the fiberglass cockpit of the vehicle. This he hooked into a hole drilled into the right side of the control bar. He pulled a slightly less taut cord on the left side of the cockpit, and this he hooked on the left side of the bar. A third bungee connected the center of the bar and the front of the cockpit.

  He let go of the control bar, and the microlight continued to fly, steady in its descent, its fluttering wings held in place with the bungee cables. Each end of the control bar had a long cord tied around it and stored in a bag, and Court removed the cords and tossed one over each side of the cockpit.

  Stowed under his knees on the floor of the cockpit was a small vinyl gym bag. He retrieved it, opened it up, and pulled out a banded string of fireworks, sixty in all. There were several different sizes, shapes, and functions. Glowing rockets; super loud, flashless boomers; and multistage aerial shells. Like Christmas lights, each of the fireworks was attached with a wick to a long fuse, and the fuse terminated in a small black metal box, inside which was housed a wireless igniter. Court quickly pulled the band from the collec
tion, then let the fourteen-foot-long snake of small explosives drop over the side of the craft, whipping through the darkness to the forest below.

  Quickly now Court unhooked a rope ladder attached to the left side of the aircraft, then gingerly turned, kicked his legs out and over, and found the first rung of the ladder with his foot.

  The wings did not like the jarring movement; the craft banked left, then back to the right when Court leaned back over the cockpit to right the turn. Gentry worried he’d given up more altitude in the past few seconds than he had to lose, but the tailwind kept him steady enough, and he knew there was little he could do now but hope for the best.

  With one last glance to check the stability of the control bar, he disappeared over the side, descending into the darkness over the treetops, sailing forward at just over twenty-five miles an hour. As he descended he reached out and found the control bar cords, giving him basic ability to steer the delta wing while under the cockpit.

  Lee Babbitt watched the ten-foot plasma display while he barked instructions into his headset. “I want that UAV down closer. No thermal, no infrared. We need visual confirmation of the target. He isn’t Sid’s only enemy. If this turns out to be some other asshole who—”

  Babbitt stopped talking as the black-hot figure moved off the side of the small vehicle but did not fall; instead he hung there, below the cockpit, and then he lowered into thin air.

  Fourteen men and women gasped into their live mics.

  This was clearly not some other asshole.

  “Never mind,” Lee Babbitt said. “That’s Gentry.”

  Babbitt felt the hair stand on the back of his neck. It had been a long wait, tens of thousands of man-hours of prep and hold, but there was money in the budget for the hunt, and there were incentive bonuses and cost-plus billing and hazard pay bumps that kept his employees on task and his drones in the air.

  And a wide-open spigot of black fund dollars from the CIA made this all possible.

  The ScanEagle’s sensor operator switched from the thermal camera to the night vision camera, and he zoomed in on the man below the cockpit, revealing a rope ladder some seventy-five feet long.

  Gentry descended, hand over hand, quickly and adroitly climbing down the ladder.

  “Who the hell is flying the microlight?” someone asked.

  “No one,” said Parks. “He’s stabilized the wings, trimmed them to maintain a straight descent, probably by tying the control bar in position. He’s trusting that it will stay on its glide path till he lands.”

  “Bet he’s going for the roof,” someone said into his mic. And then he added, softly, “Jee-sus, this guy is brazen.”

  Lee Babbitt pulled off his headset and grabbed Parks by the arm, drawing him closer. With his eyes still on the screen, Babbitt spoke quickly, “Deploy the assets. Trestle to the target location. Alert Jumper Actual in Berlin and tell him to get his team on standby, ready to react to intel from the UAV. I want everyone on the move and prepared to tail Court off the X to his safe house, or wherever the hell he’s going, before the last shell casing hits the floor at Sid’s place.”

  “Roger that.” Parks then asked, “What about the singleton?”

  Babbitt turned away from the screen for the first time since entering the signal room. He blew out a long sigh. “He called it, didn’t he? Gentry is doing just exactly what the singleton said he’d do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Babbitt thought for a moment. With a quick nod he said, “Okay. Establish comms with Dead Eye. Have him drop his current op. I want him wheels up within the hour.”

  Parks left his boss’s side and headed to a glass-enclosed office off the signal room’s main floor.

  Babbitt stayed where he was; he watched the image of the man below the microlight again. Gentry was now less than eighty feet above the ground, just a few moments from crossing over the outer wall of Sid’s dacha.

  Babbitt reached behind him and, without taking his eyes from the screen, pulled a rolling chair away from a desk.

  He sat down. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing left for us to do but to sit back and observe a master at work. It’s not every day you get to watch the Gray Man kill in real time.”

  THREE

  Court hung halfway between the cockpit of the microlight, thirty-five feet above, and the bottom rung of the rope ladder, thirty-five feet below. A few weeks earlier, in a manner he tried to pass off as idle conversation, he’d asked his Russian glider instructor if someone could hang suspended from a microlight in flight, and the young man had looked at the American like he was insane. He explained that it could be done, in theory, if the wings were stabilized and the center of gravity of the suspended person was directly below the vehicle, but a craft the size Gentry was using could not handle the weight of two people and, needless to say, no one would be foolish enough to try such a stunt below the microlight with no one at the controls. Court laughed off his stupid question, nodded politely, and then went back to his room to fashion the hooks and straps to act as his copilot, and a rope ladder carriage that could pull from both sides of the cockpit equally.

  Several times when flying alone over snow-covered fields south of Moscow, Gentry had sat in the microlight with his hands in his lap, the hooks and straps doing the flying. He’d also practiced power-off landings, piloting the craft back to earth without using the engine, usually placing his wheels within a few yards of his target touchdown point, although a few times he tumbled into the snow after coming down too fast and hitting too hard.

  Now Gentry flew through the night above the southern wall of the compound, more or less on course, though he was coming in a little lower than he’d planned. He looked down at the property below and saw several outbuildings south of the main house, and near them two fire pits, around which several men sat, still awake at four A.M. Simple tents were erected here and there, and on the muddy drive and snow-covered lawn, snowmobiles sat parked haphazardly, some with their headlights on and illuminating the southern portion of the compound. Trucks were parked near a tin-roofed barn, and two men with flashlights walked between them.

  And Court Gentry sailed above them all. He knew he was silent, and there was no way anyone below would see him without night vision optics and a reason to be looking up in the sky, but he could not help but wish he had a free hand with which to draw his pistol.

  There were a lot of guys down there in the open air, which meant there would probably be even more guys inside the warm buildings.

  But Court knew this going in. Gregor Sidorenko was no typical mobster. While he himself was urbane and mega rich, his personal security needs were handled by a rough crew of young Russian skinheads, all well armed, if not particularly well trained. Sid was their patron, and in return for his patronage they lived on and around his various properties, committed low-skill crime on his behalf, and kept gangsters and competing Bratvas off his territory.

  Court’s intelligence reports suggested there would be more than forty goons on the property tonight, since most every Saturday they all came to the compound to drink and to party and to engage in their favorite pastime—bare-knuckled brawling, beating one another to a bloody pulp and then falling over piss-drunk.

  Though Court would much rather pit himself against the normal guard force of twenty or so, he knew that many of those on the premises tonight would be shitfaced or passed out completely, and the large number of armed warm bodies would lead to a groupthink around the compound that no one in their right mind would come after Sid this evening.

  As Court hung on, flying through the sky toward the roof, he allowed for the possibility that anyone who thought this might well be correct.

  He was not in his right mind.

  But now all his attention was focused on his immediate objective. The roof was steeply angled and just darker than the snow-covered forest beyond, and in the center of the mansion, a round clear dome bulged out like a blister. Court had seen the dome on overhead photos; it was an odd arc
hitectural feature for a forest dacha in Russia, even one as monstrous as this.

  Court scanned the length of the roof as he neared, looking for stationary guards or lookouts positioned there, but he saw no one.

  When he was less than fifty yards from contact, he realized he was veering to the left and dropping too low. He knew that by descending the ladder he would lower the center of gravity under the wings and cause the craft to lose altitude, and he’d allotted for this, but it seemed now he’d underestimated just how much effect hanging below the cockpit had on his flight path. As he watched the building rush up closer, he realized he now ran the risk of passing wide to the left, missing the roof altogether and tumbling to a landing on the lawn surrounded by drunk and armed goons or—and this could conceivably be worse—slamming into the flat wall of the mansion below the roof. If that happened, he knew the Russians would wake up in the morning to find a battered and frozen dead man on the ground next to the wall, surrounded by bloodred snow. He would be ID’d as Sid’s nemesis, the microlight would be discovered, and everyone would have a good laugh about the world’s greatest assassin dying while executing the world’s most asinine plan.

  But Court wasn’t going to let that happen. He race-climbed the ladder, putting himself back in line with the lower portion of the ceramic-tiled roof. At the same time he pulled on the right toggle cord of the delta wing, wrenching the microlight back to the correct flight path.

  He made it just in time. Eight feet from impact he let go of the ladder and made a controlled collision with the snow-covered ceramic tiles on the southwest corner of the building. He ran up the pitched roof several feet to slow himself, hands and feet scampering up to bleed off energy, and then he dropped down, his gloved hands and his soft padded kneepads absorbing most of the shock and the noise, and he found purchase with the rubber soles of his shoes.

  The rope ladder dragged across the snow on the roof, but silently, sliding behind the empty microlight, which missed the apex of the building by no more than twenty feet. Court steadied himself as he looked up and saw the rear of the vehicle in his NOD’s as it disappeared over the dome, sailing on toward the dense forest on the other side of the compound’s northern wall.