Читать книгу Road Of Bones - Don Pendleton - Страница 14

CHAPTER SIX

With space for packing at a premium, Bolan and Anuchin shopped wisely in Nizhny Bestyakh. They started with new outfits for the road, judging that it was better to perspire a bit by day than freeze at night. Their choices—thermal underwear and socks, insulated gloves, flannel shirts under sweaters, with hunting pants and jackets over all—were chosen with respect for what Anuchin knew about the Road of Bones.

As for the rest, they bought two compact sleeping bags; a two-person tent that folded into a twenty-inch square and weighed under seven pounds; a case of bottled water, half the bottles emptied and refilled with gasoline; and enough MREs—as in “meals, ready to eat”—for a week on the road, if they ate twice a day. Bolan passed on the idea of buying a camp stove, preferring to leave space in the BMW’s panniers for extra ammo magazines. Last-minute accessories included a first-aid kit, a small tactical flashlight, an NV-01 survival knife from the Kalashnikov factory and an entrenching tool useful for digging or chopping.

For weapons, they each carried pistols—the MR-444 for Bolan, an MP-443 for Anuchin—but most of the hardware captured when Bolan had rescued Anuchin was left in a garbage bin without firing pins. The soldier kept his short AKS-74U, while Anuchin chose a little PP-2000 SMG.

Thus prepared, they rolled out of Nizhny Bestyakh on a two-lane blacktop, eastbound. The bike ran smoothly on asphalt, was easy to handle, but Bolan knew they’d have some rough riding ahead of them, between rural villages. How well the motorcycle would handle rough country in practice was anyone’s guess.

Likewise, Bolan could only guess how much free time they had before Anuchin’s trackers picked up their trail and returned to the chase. In another life, he had eluded and defeated mafiosi by the hundreds, in urban jungles spanning the world from Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City to London, Paris and Rome. Always outnumbered and outgunned, he’d learned to play the odds, turn them around and use the overconfidence of his opponents to destroy them.

But a hunt in wide-open country, where the quarry had to move and couldn’t go to ground, was an entirely different game. In this case, Bolan’s enemies held all the high cards—numbers and weapons, familiarity with the killing ground and the ability to plug both ends of a restricted pipeline. Bolan couldn’t veer off-course, reverse directions or duck down a rabbit hole into Wonderland.

Still, he and Anuchin had surprised their adversaries twice, with her escape from custody and—Bolan hoped—with their passage from Yakutsk through Nizhny Bestyakh. They had a lead, however slim it might turn out to be, and the Executioner had worked with less.

The men who’d underestimated him were legion. Those who had survived that grave mistake were few and far between, remnants of an endangered species driven to the point of near-extinction.

In the bad old days, the men who’d hunted Bolan knew who they were looking for, what he had done, what he could do. They came for him despite all that, driven by greed or rage, a hunger for revenge or fear of their employers’ wrath, a few propelled by simple arrogance.

The hunters who would follow him along the Road of Bones were at a disadvantage, then, in that respect. They’d only caught a glimpse of Bolan’s style, with five men down. It could have been dumb luck. The home team would be confident.

And they would pay for it in blood.

But whether he’d be able to complete the job remained an open question. Bolan wouldn’t know until they got as far as Magadan and found out what was waiting for them there.

How many enemies?

What kind of help from Hal?

One thing was certain, though: it would be one hell of a road trip.

Nizhny Bestyakh: 11:03 a.m.

IT WAS GOOD to be off the damned ferry at last. Nikolay Milescu had begun to get seasick—or would it be river-sick?—riding the old tub back and forth across the Lena, scanning faces as they boarded, knowing the return trips to Yakutsk were a mind-numbing waste of his time.

At last they had a lead. His team was back together, five men strong, and closing on the target Stephan Levshin had identified. Milescu hadn’t asked the FSB man where he got his information. He didn’t care as long as it was accurate and placed them closer to their targets.

They were still running behind, Milescu understood, but if they managed to acquire fresh information here, the traitor and her bodyguard would be on borrowed time.

The target was a motorcycle shop, not much to look at, with no customers in view as they arrived. The five men had packed into a Lada Samara sedan, with Naum Izvolsky at the wheel. Milescu had him park in front of the shop, blocking off pedestrian access, and told the driver to stay with the car while he led the others inside.

Levshin had given them an address, but no names. A long-haired grease monkey approached them at the shop’s open threshold, half smiling, and asked how he could help them.

“You sold a motorcycle this morning,” Milescu informed him, not asking.

“I sell them all day, every day,” the man replied.

“Only one interests me,” Milescu said. “A man and a woman came shopping. This woman,” he added, producing the photo. “You recognize her.”

“This is just a face,” the shop’s proprietor complained. “With women, you know, it can be distracting. I look more at other things.”

Milescu laughed at that, the others joining him, then asked, “What is your name?”

“Ilya,” the older man replied. “Ilya Vitruk.”

“Ilya,” Milescu said, “I don’t care if this one walked in naked and you spent the whole time staring at her tits, understand me? You saw money, too. You sold a motorcycle to this woman and a man.”