The convoy was now ninety yards away. One of the Russian vehicles sped alongside it, reached the end, turned and stopped so that it was blocking the road. The other did the same at the head of the convoy, which was now trapped between the two vehicles.
As Adam brought the car to a halt twenty yards away from the nearest Russian vehicle, the Russians leapt out of their cars and began opening fire with machine guns at the convoy. Immediately, men inside the vehicles returned fire.
Will jumped out of the car, took aim, and fired a grenade. One of the convoy vehicles exploded. As he reloaded the grenade launcher, he shouted in Russian, “Here to help! Here to help!”
The two Russians nearest to him were using their SUV as a shield, taking turns to break cover and fire rounds toward the convoy’s fuel tanks. Those at the other end of the convoy were doing the same. Hundreds of rounds were striking their cars; the men in the convoy were firing through windows.
Will fired again, and a second vehicle exploded. Roger ran past him, his body low, heading straight toward the nearest Russians while shouting, “Friend. Friend.” Adam, Mark, and Laith were either side of the road, firing controlled bursts into windshields.
Will saw movement. “Roger! Down! Grenade!”
As the CIA officer threw himself to the ground, the Russians’ car lifted off the ground before crashing back down. Shards of metal tore through the two Russians, killing them instantly.
Roger crawled toward the Russians’ destroyed vehicle and dived for cover as more rounds struck it. He shouted in English, “Hit them from their flanks,” and repeated the instruction in Russian. He stood, exposing his upper body to the hostiles, and fired a sustained burst of rounds into the vehicles.
One of the Russian men at the end of the convoy broke cover and was shot in the head and chest.
Laith and Adam sprinted down one side of the convoy, Mark down the other. The last remaining member of the Russian team ran out from behind the car while firing his submachine gun. Bullets from the convoy smashed a large hole into his chest.
Will sprinted, jumped onto the hood of the first ruined vehicle, then leapt onto the roof of the second vehicle and began firing through the roofs, while the rest of Will’s team attacked the line of cars from the sides. Will leapt to the next SUV, continued firing down into the vehicles’ roofs, and moved onward, repeating the drill until he was standing on the last car in the convoy. After firing controlled bursts into the driver and passenger areas and the trunk, Will shouted, “Cease firing.”
He jumped down and began searching each SUV with his colleagues.
Everyone in the convoy was dead.
Police sirens.
Will felt sick with frustration and failure as he called out, “We need to leave right now!”
Mikhail used his binoculars to watch Will and his team run to their vehicles and leave the scene. He waited a few seconds, then gunned his car and drove fast to the destroyed convoy. Exiting the vehicle, he ran along the convoy, glancing inside each SUV, ignoring the distant sound of police sirens. After he checked the last vehicle, he kicked it hard and shouted, “Bastard!”
Schreiber was not in any of the vehicles.
He’d tricked Mikhail by sending out a dummy convoy.
And that could only mean he was now loose, traveling toward the Black Forest. But Mikhail had no idea where in the vast region Schreiber was headed.
He ran back to his car, pressed hard on the accelerator, and chased after Will’s team. Following the big MI6 officer was his last remaining hope. But he’d have no hesitation in killing the operative if he got in his way.
Twenty-Five
An icy early-morning wind buffeted Simon Rubner as he knelt down and used a trowel to dig through the Black Forest mountaintop’s soil. Momentarily, he wondered if he was in the right place, whether the code’s numbers had been altered when in the SVR or CIA vaults. His tool struck metal, he wiped away soil, and he sighed with relief.
The metal box was in the hole.
He stared at it.
Many people had gone to enormous lengths to get him to this place, but none of them had sacrificed as much and worked as hard as he had to ascertain the location of the DLB. It had started six months before. He’d been toying with leaving Mossad to earn a more lucrative salary in the private sector and had made some discreet enquiries with prospective employers. He later learned that one of them was a cover company owned by Mr. Schreiber. Over the course of three weeks, he was interviewed by twelve men and women. They’d told him nothing about their backgrounds, but he could tell they were all former intelligence officers because they asked him precisely worded questions that were designed to not only define whether his responses were consistent but also to subtly elicit a portrait of his character. He could see what they were doing and they knew it. So he’d played it straight and told them that money was his prime motivator and that legalities had never been particularly interesting to him in his line of work. At the end of his twelfth interview, the female interviewer told him that she was recommending that he be advanced to the final interview and that if he was successful he would be hired. Two days later, on a Sunday morning, an elderly, diminutive gentleman knocked on the door to his home in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. He introduced himself as Colonel Kurt Schreiber and said that he was there to conduct the final interview.
Simon was totally unprepared for the interview and had to ask his wife and teenage daughter to go out for a few hours to give them privacy. He sat with Mr. Schreiber in the living room until midafternoon. At the end of the session, he was mentally exhausted. The German had barely spoken, instead had sat motionless, his eyes flickering behind his rimless glasses, with a slight smile on his face and an expression and demeanor that suggested immense intellect, focus, perception, and cruelty.
Simon had guided him to the front door, at which point Mr. Schreiber turned to him and said that he would pay him one million dollars per year with performance bonus on top and that he was to resign the next day. Simon had instantly accepted. The other jobs he was considering had salaries less than a fifth of what the German was offering.
After he’d given his notice with Mossad, he’d taken his wife and daughter to New York. Upon landing at JFK, he’d told the immigration officer that he was a private investor looking to set up a business in the States. The officer grilled him for fifteen minutes before telling him that he and his family needed to wait in a room until a decision had been made as to whether he could enter the country. Two hours later, another man entered the room and asked more questions before obtaining all of Simon’s contact details and letting him go.
Of course, the delay of entry had allowed Immigration to contact other U.S. agencies and ultimately the CIA, who would have given U.S. Immigration assurances that they and the FBI would keep their eyes on the known Mossad officer and would use him for their own benefit.
He put his family in a Manhattan apartment and took possession of one of Mr. Schreiber’s dormant but legal companies.
Four men from the CIA approached him ten days later, saying they were from a Belgium consultancy called Gerlache and were seeking to establish a partnership with a company that could provide information to U.S. companies seeking to set up operations in the Middle East. He’d accepted, and at first their requirements from him were unremarkable. He took their money, telling them that he needed the cash to support a wife and daughter who drove him crazy with their shopping sprees and that the daughter wanted them to stay in the States so that she could attend one of the fancy and expensive East Coast universities.
It was exactly what they wanted to hear.