Net Force - Tom Clancy [3]
In the backseat of the Volvo station wagon, Mikhayl Ruzhyo looked into the cargo compartment behind him at the body of Nicholas Papirosa. The body lay on its side, covered with a blanket, and the smell of death seeped into the air despite the covering. Ruzhyo sighed, shook his head. Poor Nicholas. It had been hoped there would be no casualties-it was always hoped to be so-but the fat American had not been as old and slow as expected. They had underestimated him-an error. Of course, it had been Nicholas who had been responsible for the intelligence about the FBI Commander, so perhaps it was fitting that he was the only casualty. Still, Ruzhyo would miss him. They went back a long way, to the days in the Foreign Intelligence Service, the SRV. Fifteen years. A lifetime in this business.
Tomorrow would have been Nicholass birthday; he would have been forty-two.
In the front seat, Winters, the American, drove, and Grigory Zmeya rode in the passenger seat, mumbling to himself in Russian.
Their last names-even Winters-were not those bestowed upon them by their fathers. They were jokes. Ruzhyo meant rifle. Nicholas had named himself cigarette. Grigory called himself after the Russian word for snake.
Ruzhyo sighed again. Done was done. Nicholas was dead, but so was the target. The loss was therefore acceptable.
You doin okay back there, hoss? the American said.
I am fine.
Just checkin.
The American had said he was from Texas, and either he was or his accent was a passable fake.
Ruzhyo looked down at the pistol on the seat next to him, the one with which he had killed the man who had killed Nicholas. It was a Beretta 9mm, an Italian weapon. It was a fine piece of machinery, well made, but it was also big, heavy, with too much recoil, too much noise, too much bullet for Ruzhyos taste. When he had been Spetznaz and involved in mokrie dela-wet affairs-he had carried a little PSM, a 5.45mm pistol. The round it fired had been perhaps half as large as those in the Italian gun, and the weapon itself was much smaller than this piece. True, hed had the armorer tune it for him; but still, it had always been sufficient to do the job. It had never let him down. He would have preferred that weapon to this one, but of course, that would not do. This had to look as if the killing was by someone inside this country, and a Russian assassins-weapon would ring enough alarms to raise the dead man. The Americans were not altogether stupid in these matters.
He frowned at the Beretta. The Americans had this obsession with size; to them, bigger was always better. Their policemen would sometimes empty handguns containing eighteen or twenty high-powered and large-caliber rounds at their criminals, missing each time, what they called spray-and-pray. They did not seem to understand that a single shot from a small-caliber weapon in the hands of an expert was much more effective than a magazine full of elephant-killing bullets in the hands of an untrained idiot-as many of the American policemen seemed to be. The Jews knew this. The Israeli Mossad still routinely carried.22s, weapons that fired the smallest commercially available rounds. And everybody knew Mossad was not to be taken lightly.
But at least the FBI man had died well. He had taken one of them with him and that had been unexpected. He had hit Nicholas three times in the head. Once might have been an accident; thrice, certainly by intent. He had seen the body armor, known what it was, shot for the head. Had he been a bit faster, he might have gotten clear of the initial attack.
In the front seat, the Snake muttered something, loud enough for Ruzhyo to hear. He gritted his teeth. Ruzhyo did not like Grigory the Snake. The man had been in the army in 1995, one of the units that had stomped into Ruzhyos homeland of Chechnya to kill and rape. Yes, yes, Grigory had been a soldier, just following his orders, and yes, this mission was more important in the long run than any grudges Ruzhyo might have against the Snake, so he would