She was brave. Reece felt choked up as he remembered her black-and-blue face, blood trickling from her nose, neck wrapped in explosives, looking up at him with pure terror in her eyes.
“Katie, I knew that det cord wouldn’t blow.”
Katie’s blue eyes connected with his of piercing brown. “I know.”
They kissed one another breathlessly, each of their hands caressing, exploring. Katie rose without another word. Taking Reece by the hand, she pulled him to his feet and led him to the bedroom.
CHAPTER 29
Saint Petersburg, Russia
GREY WAS LIVING IN his office, monitoring events in Montana as best he could without making direct contact with the team on the ground. Tanya, the female asset sent in from New York, was making her daily social media posts. These seemingly innocuous ramblings and photographs, mere cells in the entire biosphere of web traffic, were a direct signal to Grey that the ground team was on track. Since Reece’s movements were never exact, especially given the holiday weekend, the team had moved into position and would remain in place until he appeared. As soon as the secondary team received word that Reece was down, they would move in on Raife Hastings and finish the job.
Accounting for Daylight Savings Time, there was a nine-hour time difference between local time in Russia and Montana. Eight a.m. local at the target was 5:00 p.m. for Grey, which meant that late nights were part of the program. It was approaching 10:00 p.m. now, and he had been in the office for more than fourteen hours. His freshly laundered dress shirt was wrinkled, his tie was loose, and his jacket was hanging in its usual spot on his office door. For Grey, the monotonous hours of waiting for a subject to move was nothing new, but, given his personal connection to this target, that experience didn’t make this wait easier. He grabbed a pint of good local vodka from his desk drawer and took a long pull before pouring a splash into the tea that Svetlana had delivered to him before she left for the evening.
The target vehicle had moved on Thursday, making a stop at the airport in Kalispell, no doubt picking someone up for the weekend. The reporter? Maybe that explained why he hadn’t left his cabin this morning, despite the late hour? Sooner or later he would have to go to town and, when he did, the hit team would be waiting.
CHAPTER 30
Flathead Valley, Montana
VITYA STARED AT THE screen of the tablet, trying to will the blinking light that represented the target vehicle to move, but there it sat, in front of the lakefront cabin. He and his team had hiked to the high ground above the ambush site the previous afternoon, setting up camp three hundred yards from the road in the dense forest. The GPS tracker would give him at least thirty minutes’ notice that the target was on its way, which was plenty of time for them to set the trap. For now they rested in shifts, fiddled with their weapons, ate salty dehydrated meals out of plastic bags, and drank enough coffee to give them all atrial fibrillations.
Vitya’s team was tasked with killing James Reece. He was the primary target and would be eliminated first. Then the second team would kill Raife Hastings.
He walked down to the ambush position for the twentieth time and surveyed the scene. The IED was positioned at just the right angle to rake the road with its 700 3.2mm steel ball bearings, which would shred everything in their path at 1,200 meters per second. The convex mine was concealed under a bed of pine straw at the base of a tree. Its wire was buried along the path. Vitya carried a green plastic firing device in his jacket pocket. He’d used the M40 test set included with the mine to confirm that it was working properly and would send the electric pulse necessary to power the blasting cap and fire the mine’s plastic explosive. He couldn’t risk a premature explosion so he would only connect the detonator when he had confirmation that the target was on his way. It would be a shame if the bait was caught in the powerful blast; he hadn’t even had a chance to sample the goods, but that couldn’t be helped; every battle had collateral damage.
He looked down at the AKM slung at his side. It was spray-painted in a green and