Remembering Helena, Fahad shuddered.
Fahad al-Qadi stood by his bed in his Moscow safe house. His three-man team—Alexei Konstantin, Oleg Kuznetsov and Leonid Sokolov—were waiting for him. They were dressed in all black—suits, ties, even black shirts. Not that they were trying to make fashion statements—quite the opposite. After the op, while still in the car, they would strip off their clothes and throw them in a Dumpster. Their getaway attire was underneath—light T-shirts and thin cotton pants. They would then make their escape in the two vehicles they’d parked near the waste bin early that afternoon.
If the Russian police were searching for four black-suited hit men in a dark SUV, they’d be sorely disappointed. With any luck at all, they’d evade detection.
Fahad’s men each had their standard-issue AK-47s packed in square metal suitcases, which they’d already stowed in the trunks of their SUV. Their Tokarev 7.62mm pistols were shoved inside their belts under their coats. Fahad’s weapons and ammunition, however, were specially made, and he wanted to inspect them one last time. They were spread out on the bed in front of him, and he’d just finished testing the guns’ firing mechanisms. He was now checking everything they needed on his equipment list.
The weapon on the bed nearest Fahad was a Saiga—a Taktika model 040. A semi-automatic military shotgun, it had a seventeen-inch barrel. Picking it up by the breech, he hefted it. It weighed just under eight pounds.
From its AK-74M folded-out pistol-grip polymer buttstock to the barrel’s ventilated tip, it was less than two and a half feet long. Its box magazine held eight 12-gauge magnum shells. Every shell contained thirty-two small steel ball bearings, and its open iron sights came with a high post and a notched tangent at its rear.
So little weight, Fahad thought idly, so much death.
On the bed directly above the Saiga was Fahad’s Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. It had a black folding polymer stock and a detachable cheek rest. Forty-four inches in length with the stock extended, its barrel was fitted with a slotted flash suppressor, a handcrafted silencer that Fahad had designed and built himself, and a PSO-1M2 scope effective for ranges well over 1,000 meters. Chambered for 7.62×54mmR rounds, it had a curved, removable magazine. The cartridges were double stacked in a zigzag pattern, and while it had a ten-shell capacity, Fahad never kept more than eight in one. He thought the spring was too weak for ten.
He loaded the Saiga and the Dragunov into their dark rectangular traveling cases. The bottoms came with custom-fitted slots designed to hold and lock the weapons and their accessories into place so that nothing would rattle around loose.
Fahad turned from the bed, entered the bedroom’s walk-in closet, located a hidden lever and pulled back the false rear wall. He was facing a four-foot-tall Assa Abloy drill-proof, fire-resistant gun safe. After punching in the safe’s lock codes, he swung open the door. He placed the encased Dragunov in the safe, standing it up on its end, buttstock toward the floor.
He’d be back for it later.
Locking the safe, he exited the closet and caught a glimpse of himself in the bedroom wall mirror. Women were always telling him he looked like that Egyptian actor who starred in the American movie Doctor Zhivago. An old girlfriend of his, Helena Katayev—a freelance flight attendant from St. Petersburg, whom he’d eventually recruited and still used from time to time for particularly horrifying assignments—had been especially adamant about it.
Remembering Helena, Fahad shuddered reflexively.
Jesus, she was one scary bitch.
Still he’d seen the actor once on the big screen, and he had to admit there was more than a fleeting resemblance. He just couldn’t remember the guy’s name.
Picking the Saiga’s case up off the bed, he nodded silently to the team. They followed him out of the bedroom and toward the safe house’s back door.