so by the time they neared their rally point, they knew they’d infiltrated the United Kingdom undetected.
They were all Russian, with hard faces and tattoos and body armor on their chests and backs, poorly concealed under oversized raincoats. There were rifles hidden in their oversized packs, Kalashnikovs mostly, though some other weapons were represented.
These men worked for David Mars now, but they bore little resemblance to the other armed men Mars had utilized here in the UK. No, those had been mafia shooters and hired security, dangerous and skilled enough, but they weren’t cut from the same cloth as the formidable new arrivals at all.
At the rally point they climbed into a pair of sixteen-passenger vans with all but the driver’s seat removed and sat in back on their gear for the two-hour drive to their destination. They left the highway for a road, left the road for a gravel track, and left the track for a muddy field with a few other tread marks directing the way. Here they ascended a hill and parked at the stone fence around a cemetery in front of a formidable-looking stone church.
A high-end executive helicopter caught the men’s eyes in a nearby field, but there were, at first, no signs of life around.
* * *
• • •
David Mars himself stood in the doorway to the old gothic church on the far side of the cemetery. He’d only just arrived from Edinburgh via helo, and he watched the men as they climbed out of the vehicles, moving silently through the gray, wet afternoon, hefting impossibly large rucks, and then heading up in his direction.
All thirty entered the sanctuary and began placing equipment in the few old pews lying around the shuttered house of worship, taking off their coats and adjusting the equipment on their bodies.
Mars just looked on while a Bratva foot soldier, part of his protection detail, stepped up to one of the men as he unslung his rifle and propped it against the wall.
The Bratva man said, “Nice rifle. Who are you guys with?”
The big gunman in the body armor did not look his way. “Fuck off.”
The mafia gunman sniffed and turned away. Mars heard him mumbling. “Fucking Spetsnaz. Think they’re such hot shit.”
* * *
• • •
The thirty men who arrived at the dilapidated church were not, in fact, Spetsnaz, Russian special forces. But they all had been. These were former GRU, military Spetsnaz, as opposed to foreign or domestic intelligence special forces. They worked for the same organization that General Feodor Zakharov once ran, but they had no clue they were working for him now.
Mars surveyed many of the former special forces men as they assembled, but soon they dispersed. Some moved to the higher church windows or out in the terrain around the castle, performing 360-degree security for the others while they readied equipment and prepared their living space.
Mars had definite reservations about using former Russian military in his attack, but his reverence for the skills of these men outweighed his misgivings.
This event could not, in any way, lead back to the Kremlin. But the UK was full of Russians, and more specifically Russian mafia, so Mars had decided that infiltrating non-mafia mercenaries with advanced training would be an acceptable risk, especially if he ensured that the hiring of these troops was done carefully.
First, even though they were mercenaries, Mars knew these men would not leave a fallen comrade behind. There would be no evidence of Russian “Little Green Men” operating in Scotland on the day of the attack.
And second, he’d had Terry Cassidy set up a shell corporation, and one of Belyakov’s bankers in Cyprus set up a numbered account that was attached to the firm. The lawyer, following Mars’s instructions, left a few misleading bread crumbs in the paperwork of the shell corporation, should it ever fall under scrutiny. A company that had been sanctioned for doing business in the past in North Korea was tangentially linked to the shell via joint holdings in the shipping industry, and this allowed Mars to breathe a little easier.
His highly skilled mercs weren’t just here to bolster his attack on the conference, an attack that was initially designed as a feint while the real danger fell from above. They were here to bolster the false-flag operation that would keep Zakharov’s precious Rodina safe from retribution when American and British spies started dropping dead from lung conditions all around the world at the same time.