The Midnight Caller (Jack Widow Book 6) Page 5

  Widow booted Map Face right in the nuts. A hard, devastating attack. The blow hit home like a missile that rocketed straight out of a silo and hit a target seconds later. To Map Face, it felt somewhere between falling ten stories only to land on his groin and a shotgun blast to the crotch of his slacks.

  Even though he was temporarily immobilized, Widow wanted to use the opportunity to take him out in a longer-term sense.

  Map Face’s street cap was dislodged and had slid to the side on his head. Which was a bit of a surprise to Widow. Any other, lesser tough guy and it would’ve flown off completely.

  The guy could take a punch.

  Widow scrambled forward to Map Face, still holding his groin, but still awkwardly standing.

  Widow grabbed the street cap and mashed it down over Map Face’s eyes with his left hand. He fisted up his right hand and swung in for an uppercut to the guy’s chin.

  The blow probably wasn’t harder or more powerful than Map Face’s had been. But it certainly had been better executed and far more precise.

  Down from the toes, Widow felt the energy surge up his body and his fist cracked into Map Face’s chin, rocked him, and knocked him straight onto his back.

  And like that, his ticket was all but punched.

  Widow knew that because Map Face let go of his groin and fell back, limp. His mouth was open. His tongue hung out.

  And Widow’s fist hurt like he had just punched a brick wall, like an oncoming car that sped at top speed with the intention of running him over.

  His forward brain kicked back on and registered the pain. For a second, he was worried that he had broken the bones in his hand.

  No time to speculate, he thought. And his back brain took over again and he was back on his feet.

  Geoffrey was also on his, but still struggling to see what was what. That was obvious because he started to reach out to Vinnie, who stood off to his right, completely dumbfounded and half terrified by what he was seeing.

  Widow registered another thought in his forward brain. He was grateful that Vinnie was a complete idiot. Any other half-competent mobster type would have gone for the gun.

  Widow turned and saw that John, whose voice box was nearly crushed, was back on his feet, facing the other direction, but he wasn’t going for the Glock either.

  In fact, he was doing the only smart thing. He was running away, down into the dark end of the alley.

  The girl, Irene, was a different story.

  Turned out that she had been the threat that Widow should’ve kept his eye on because she wasn’t just standing near the gun now. She was holding it, fifteen feet away, and pointing it straight at Widow.

  CHAPTER 8

  “FREEZE, ASSHOLE!” Irene shouted. Her voice cracked and whined. The New Yorker in her came out in her accent, only it was deeply nasal due to the swollen face and plastic surgery that she had undergone on her nose.

  The whole combination made her sound kind of like some actress in a movie who picked up the gun and had zero knowledge of how to use it.

  Widow stayed quiet.

  Vinnie shouted, also in a nasal voice from his broken nose, “Shoot him, Irene!”

  She didn’t respond, but Widow could see her irritated with Vinnie bossing her around.

  He stood up, straight, and looked her in the eyes. He held his hand out, palm facing Irene. It was in the gesture for the universal traffic symbol for stop.

  He said, “Irene, you don’t have to listen to them.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Don’t you get tired of these guys pushing you around?”

  “I’ll shoot you!” she said.

  She wasn’t going to shoot, Widow realized. Probably not.

  He said, “Irene, you can come with me. I’ll get you away from these guys.”

  “I’m serious!”

  Widow saw Vinnie and Geoffrey moving toward her. Which wasn’t good.

  He couldn’t let them get to her because they would get the Glock. That was no good for him.

  What else could he say? he wondered.

  Just then, he got lucky.

  The noise and the commotion had obviously been heard from inside the pub because a metal lock racked back and the alley door swung open. A big Irishman with a hardy voice and an unlit cigarette tucked behind his right ear stepped out into the cone of light.

  He said, “What the hell is all the noise back here?”

  Sounds of pots and pans and dirty dishes clanking and racking into a sink somewhere echoed out from the open door.

  Hot steam streamed out behind the Irishman as well as bright light.

  Widow didn’t wait. He took advantage of the surprise and lunged forward, in a half crouch, with the bright light from the kitchen over his shoulder. He ran at Irene. He darted to the right the second that he knew she had seen him.

  She fired the Glock.

  The gunshot rang out, loud and booming between the alley walls.

  Widow didn’t stop to check what the bullet hit, but he was sure it wasn’t the Irishman because the sound that Widow heard behind him was like a bullet hitting a brick wall.

  He caught Irene completely off guard and knocked her back with a pop from his left hand straight to her solar plexus. Not a hard hit. Not a game over, knock-out strike. He didn’t want to kill her or even hurt her. It was just enough force to drop her and pop the Glock from her hand.

  Irene fell back on her butt and Widow scooped up the Glock from the cracked pavement.

  In a fast three-step movement, he backed away from her, swung back to the left and pointed the Glock at Geoffrey and Vinnie and even the Irishman.

  He saw the Irishman was simply a kitchen guy. He was decked out in an all-white, stained and used uniform like a second-rate chef.

  Widow wasn’t worried about him, but remained cautious anyway.

  He said, “Listen up! You move, you get shot!”

  Silence. They all stood still. The Irishman raised his hands up in the air, followed by Vinnie.

  “You too! Hands up!” Widow said to Geoffrey, who paused at first, reluctant, unwilling to give up, unwilling to admit defeat.

  Like Vinnie, Geoffrey also reverted to a position of primal submission. He hung his shoulders because he was beat and he knew it. But he didn’t raise his hands.

  Widow was impressed that his sense of pride outweighed the pain of his bleeding brow. But in the end, he submitted and raised his hands.

  “All of you. Get on your knees.”

  They did. Including Irene.

  Geoffrey was last to follow. Probably because he was afraid of what was coming next. Yet, he had no other choice. Widow had the only gun and he had the distance. Geoffrey knew it wasn’t a bluff.

  “What are you going to do?” Vinnie asked, still nasally.

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  They all stayed on their knees and watched him. All of them trembled out of fear, except Geoffrey.

  Widow corrected that.

  He pointed the Glock at Geoffrey, made sure that he could see the muzzle pointed at him. He veered it to the right, just a hair and squeezed the trigger.

  Another loud gunshot echoed in the alley.

  The bullet shot out and hit the brick wall directly behind Geoffrey. Shards of brick exploded and a cloud of pebbles and dust hit him in the back of the head.

  He flinched and hunched forward.

  “Wait! Wait!” he shouted.

  “Wait for what?”

  “Don’t kill us!”

  “Why not?”

  Geoffrey said nothing.

  Irene said, “What are you going to do?”

  Good question, Widow thought. He wasn’t going to kill them. He knew that much.

  He said, “Close your eyes. All of you.”

  They closed their eyes.

  “Count to five hundred. Out loud. Keep your eyes shut!”

  He heard their voices start at one. They weren’t in sync, but close enough.

  “When you reach f
ive hundred, make sure to get John to a hospital.”

  Widow started to back away, slowly, out of the edge of the light. He backed into the darkness. He continued to watch and listen.

  He waited for them to get to sixty, one minute, and he turned and walked away. He kept the Glock until he was out of the alley. There was a two-way street with a corner and a turn that headed east. He took the turn, kept checking over his shoulder to make sure that the John who had run away wasn’t on his tail.

  There was no one.

  He found a dumpster, peeking out behind a green shutter, wrapped around a thin chain-link fence. He took out the Glock, ejected the magazine, and racked the slide. The chambered bullet ejected out. He pocketed the bullets and wiped the gun with the inside of his shirt.

  Never letting his fingers touch it again, he reached over the shutter and lifted the lid of the dumpster. He tossed the gun in. Dropped the lid.

  He walked on and kept the bullets and the magazine for another two streets until he found a sewer drain to drop them in.

  He thought about New York City, remembered that its actual title is City of New York.

  Widow moved on into the night. Still had a headache from being punched twice, but his memory worked again. And he wondered what time it was.

  CHAPTER 9

  FIVE TIME ZONES AHEAD of the City of New York, and more than twenty-four hours earlier, north of Greenwich, England, Captain Elon Karpov looked down at the tan line on the ring finger of his right hand, where his naval captain’s ring normally was. It was a two-hundred-year-old, silver ring, passed down from his great grandfather to his grandfather and to his father until it belonged to him.

  By this time, he imagined the ring to be in his daughter’s possession, in America.

  Karpov rubbed the stubble on his head. It had been days since he shaved it, like he normally did.

  Karpov had been an admired sailor in the Russian Navy. Not a legend or a famous hero or anything like that, but far from being looked down upon. He had had a good career. His military records showed him as an above average officer.

  He was respected, but much more than that, he had been trusted. While being the captain of a nuclear submarine meant that he had top security clearance and faith, it also meant that he had a background with the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces or better known in English as the GRU or the Main Directorate Intelligence. The Russian version of military intelligence.

  Karpov looked away from his ring finger and over at his hat. It rested on a metal panel near one of his crewmen. He felt more than ready to turn over Russia’s top-secret billion-dollar submarine technology to the Americans. Like in that American movie he saw, The Hunt for Red October. Which made him wonder if the Kremlin had considered someone taking that idea from the movie, once it was obtainable to the public.

  It seemed that they hadn’t taken it too seriously, as he only had to follow the same basic steps as Sean Connery’s character had.

  He wondered how bent out of shape his superiors had gotten when they learned how accurate the book was when portraying Russian sailors. The Russians still used a political officer as a way of keeping a close eye on their submarine captains, just as they did in the movie.

  Karpov had such a political officer onboard. Like most of the crew, he was still asleep. But Karpov had an idea of how to deal with him. When the time came, he’d take a page out of Tom Clancy’s book and just kill him.

  He didn’t figure that it would come to that. Most likely, the Americans would return him to the Russian government, like they would the rest of the crewmembers, who weren’t aware of his plans.

  Karpov remembered the first time he saw that movie. It was nineteen ninety. The Berlin Wall had just come down the year before. The Iron Curtain, as the West called it, was crumbling beneath their feet. Former countries of Eastern Europe were becoming countries of Europe again.

  The communist states were falling over like dominoes. The Soviet Union was on its deathbed.

  Back then, Captain Karpov wasn’t a captain at all. Back then, he was a young man, in a Russian state-sponsored university in Moscow. He remembered seeing American movies slowly making their way into his world.

  But it was many years before the theatrical release of The Hunt for Red October would be available to the Russian population on VHS.

  When the wall first fell, the copy that was available to people was edited to make Sean Connery look like the hero, but the defector stuff was all cut out. To most of the Russian viewing public, it appeared to be a story about a Russian captain who had saved the world from nuclear annihilation in the face of US intervention.

  Karpov had thought how funny it was that people believed it.

  He had seen the movie and realized that it was twisted into state propaganda. He knew that because his father had given him a copy of Tom Clancy’s book in English. Luckily, his father had also insisted that he learn English as a boy.

  Karpov read Clancy’s novel and then watched the fake version of the movie and then sought out the original. Which he found and traded a pair of baseball cards for with another Russian officer who fancied the sport and had traded something else with a German who had the movie. It came as is. No subtitles.

  Karpov watched it.

  It was pretty good. Not as good as the book, he had thought.

  It was a lot less technical then the book, a trend that he had noticed a lot in American movies. Often, they dumbed down the technical aspects of military movies.

  He remembered thinking that Sean Connery played a brave sailor, not unlike himself. But he wasn’t brave by fighting for the communist government. He was brave for escaping it.

  Like Sean Connery, Karpov dreamed of the American landscape. He dreamed of freedom. He dreamed of escape from the Russian oligarch corruption.

  Even though the Iron Curtain had fallen, and Russia was a democracy, he knew better. Russia had only been a democracy for about ten years, until the only Russian president to ever exist in Democratic Russia had turned over power to a young KGB officer and political administrator, Vladimir Putin.

  That was when things started to change for the country.

  Karpov was a submariner by then.

  He grew up in a military family. All seafarers. All proud. His father had been a famous Soviet admiral before he had died of pancreatic cancer.

  Karpov remembered his father wanting to go to America when Karpov was a kid. An idea that Karpov’s father had planted down deep in his mind.

  Now, nearly three decades later, Karpov was at the helm of a top-secret fourth-generation Dolgorukiy-class nuclear submarine, known to NATO as Borei-class nuclear submarine.

  This submarine was special. It wasn’t just the nuclear payload that was special. There was something else onboard. Something more valuable, in certain eyes. That’s why the American CIA accepted Karpov’s deal. That’s why they were going to grant him and his command crew asylum in the US.

  In The Hunt for Red October, one of the officers dreamed of living on a Montana ranch. That sounded great to Karpov. He dreamed of owning a ranch and living the American life, far away from the ocean, far away from Putin’s Russia.

  But most of all, he wanted to achieve the dreams of his father.

  “Captain, I see them,” his first officer said. He looked through the periscope.

  “Mr. Travkin, slow the approach. Ascend. Stay low. Stay quiet.”

  Travkin nodded and began relaying orders to the bridge crew.

  Karpov gazed at his father’s wristwatch and noted the time in his head, an occupational hazard more than necessity. He wasn’t going to document this meeting, not to his commanders. It wasn’t a legal mission.

  Sean Connery was a rugged, Scotsman with a white beard and full head of hair in that movie. But Karpov looked more like Connery in real life. He was completely bald. The last time that he had seen hair on his head was probably nineteen eighty-nine. But he did have the same white beard, with tinges of blac
k in it.

  Karpov looked at the skeleton bridge crew. The time had been late night for them. Most of his crewmembers were in their quarters, fast asleep. The faces on the bridge were the men he trusted. And even some of them didn’t know what his plans were. They trusted him anyway. He knew it.

  Like Sean Connery, he had handpicked them.

  The submarine hummed and the engines whined, briefly, and then slowed.

  Karpov said, “I’m going up.”

  Travkin nodded. He knew that it was one of Karpov’s favorite things about being a submariner. He loved to ascend and stick his head out and watch the boat breach the waves.

  Karpov waited to ascend the tower.

  The nuclear pack teemed and propeller slowed. The water rushed around the boat until the bow ripped upward and breached through the waters of the Arctic Ocean.

  Karpov went up the tower and opened the hatch. He climbed past the cables connecting to the radio antenna and stepped up onto the tower.

  He watched the waves spill over the bow and felt the icy night on his face.

  Far off in the distance, blue and white lights lit up the night sky, outlining a vessel, made to look like a deep-sea fishing boat.

  Karpov smiled, pulled his collar up on his peacoat. He saw the lights of the fishing vessel and then pulled a small flashlight out of his coat pocket. He flicked the switch and a bright, sharp beam came out.

  He pointed the light at the fishing boat and pressed his hand over the beam, shuttered it three times, like the CIA had told him to do. He waited a long minute and then got the response, which was four blinks of a light back at him. He responded again with two more of his own. They responded again with three.

  It was the CIA team that was supposed to take him and his crew from the submarine.

  Travkin appeared behind him.

  “Is that them, Elon?”

  “It is.”

  “We’re really going to do this?”

  “There’s no turning back now.”

  “I mean. We could.”

  Karpov said, “You want to?”

  “Of course not! I’m with you all the way. I’m just saying that if you’ve changed your mind, the Americans will understand. I doubt the CIA will start anything.”