Mihail said, trying to alleviate the tension.
“I never saw a bike path before coming to Germany,” Dragunov admitted. “Who the fuck has time to ride a bike?”
Chapter 11
10:14 AM
Chejlava National Nature Reserve
Two Miles east of Zhur, Czech Republic
Vadim Dragunov squeezed out of the two-story barn and took in a deep breath, savoring the rich mixture of forest scents. The sharp fragrance of the occasional spruce or fir tree faintly stabbed through the overwhelming smell of new foliage from the ever-present towering beech trees beyond the clearing. The fresh smell of spring competed with the musty aroma of moist, decaying leaves from last fall’s seasonal shedding. He missed spending time in the countryside. He glanced toward the dirt path leading from the forest into the tight clearing and nodded at an SVR agent leaning against a thick tree alongside the road.
Movement inside the barn drew his attention, and he turned to see two agents carrying a bloodied body into the light cast through the half-opened barn door. He pushed the heavy, reinforced steel door along its well-lubricated track, giving the team a larger opening. Dragunov stood aside and paid his respects as the men struggled with the corpse. Whoever this man had been, he was by far the most skilled and resilient operative Dragunov had come across in a long time. A worthy adversary on every level.
They had arrived at the safe house during the early evening hours and wasted no time commencing Konrad Hubner’s interrogation. The interrogation had yielded scant details. Hubner had expertly twisted and turned them in multiple false directions throughout the night, wasting precious time and exhausting them as the dawn approached. Just when they thought they had achieved a breakthrough, they found themselves thirty minutes into another dead end, with Hubner smirking. Even without lips, which agent Osin had removed at an early point in the night, the man still managed to smirk.
Around nine in the morning, they took a short break to eat some breakfast and formulate a new game plan. Unendurable pain and agony would continue to be the centerpiece of their strategy. There was only so much a human could withstand, and they still had some evil-looking tools in the kit they had unearthed from the barn, along with a vial of acid. They had re-entered the barn, expecting a long morning, but Hubner had other plans. Without warning, he managed to impale his neck on Osin’s knife, severing the carotid artery. In less than a minute, he bled out onto the concrete floor of the small cinderblock room, taking the rest of his knowledge down the metal drain under his chair.
The two agents carrying Hubner’s body had been given specific instructions regarding the preferred disposal method for this site. The stand-alone barn structure did not contain a proper “bath house,” so bodies had to be buried at least two hundred meters into the forest, in a westerly direction. A poorly maintained, lightly used trail had been discovered several hundred meters to the southeast, tracking north, so they avoided any unnatural activity east of the site.
The property itself enjoyed a high degree of privacy, buried deep within the national preserve. Only accessible by foot, they had parked their new van in a cleverly constructed hide site a few hundred meters south of the clearing, slugging their way along a relatively unfriendly, twisting path until they reached the barn. Motion detectors hidden along the barn’s roofline had confirmed the location’s privacy, recording mainly twilight activity commonly associated with deer. This was Dragunov’s second visit to Site 93, and Mihail Osin’s team’s first. He’d uploaded coordinates to an encrypted GPS device to locate both the vehicle hide-site and the barn. Site 93 hadn’t seen much activity since the end of the Cold War, which was why Dragunov had chosen it. He liked isolation for jobs like these.
Mihail Osin trailed the
“I never saw a bike path before coming to Germany,” Dragunov admitted. “Who the fuck has time to ride a bike?”
Chapter 11
10:14 AM
Chejlava National Nature Reserve
Two Miles east of Zhur, Czech Republic
Vadim Dragunov squeezed out of the two-story barn and took in a deep breath, savoring the rich mixture of forest scents. The sharp fragrance of the occasional spruce or fir tree faintly stabbed through the overwhelming smell of new foliage from the ever-present towering beech trees beyond the clearing. The fresh smell of spring competed with the musty aroma of moist, decaying leaves from last fall’s seasonal shedding. He missed spending time in the countryside. He glanced toward the dirt path leading from the forest into the tight clearing and nodded at an SVR agent leaning against a thick tree alongside the road.
Movement inside the barn drew his attention, and he turned to see two agents carrying a bloodied body into the light cast through the half-opened barn door. He pushed the heavy, reinforced steel door along its well-lubricated track, giving the team a larger opening. Dragunov stood aside and paid his respects as the men struggled with the corpse. Whoever this man had been, he was by far the most skilled and resilient operative Dragunov had come across in a long time. A worthy adversary on every level.
They had arrived at the safe house during the early evening hours and wasted no time commencing Konrad Hubner’s interrogation. The interrogation had yielded scant details. Hubner had expertly twisted and turned them in multiple false directions throughout the night, wasting precious time and exhausting them as the dawn approached. Just when they thought they had achieved a breakthrough, they found themselves thirty minutes into another dead end, with Hubner smirking. Even without lips, which agent Osin had removed at an early point in the night, the man still managed to smirk.
Around nine in the morning, they took a short break to eat some breakfast and formulate a new game plan. Unendurable pain and agony would continue to be the centerpiece of their strategy. There was only so much a human could withstand, and they still had some evil-looking tools in the kit they had unearthed from the barn, along with a vial of acid. They had re-entered the barn, expecting a long morning, but Hubner had other plans. Without warning, he managed to impale his neck on Osin’s knife, severing the carotid artery. In less than a minute, he bled out onto the concrete floor of the small cinderblock room, taking the rest of his knowledge down the metal drain under his chair.
The two agents carrying Hubner’s body had been given specific instructions regarding the preferred disposal method for this site. The stand-alone barn structure did not contain a proper “bath house,” so bodies had to be buried at least two hundred meters into the forest, in a westerly direction. A poorly maintained, lightly used trail had been discovered several hundred meters to the southeast, tracking north, so they avoided any unnatural activity east of the site.
The property itself enjoyed a high degree of privacy, buried deep within the national preserve. Only accessible by foot, they had parked their new van in a cleverly constructed hide site a few hundred meters south of the clearing, slugging their way along a relatively unfriendly, twisting path until they reached the barn. Motion detectors hidden along the barn’s roofline had confirmed the location’s privacy, recording mainly twilight activity commonly associated with deer. This was Dragunov’s second visit to Site 93, and Mihail Osin’s team’s first. He’d uploaded coordinates to an encrypted GPS device to locate both the vehicle hide-site and the barn. Site 93 hadn’t seen much activity since the end of the Cold War, which was why Dragunov had chosen it. He liked isolation for jobs like these.
Mihail Osin trailed the
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