On Target by Mark Greaney Read Free Book Online Page A

ship had been tracked all the way to Iraq and the cargo monitored by satellite. The Marines who found it had been told where to find it, and the embarrassment for Russia nudged them a bit in their support of the U.S. mission there. Not much, really, but a little.
    It was politics, and politics wasn’t the Goon Squad’s stated mission. Court didn’t like it, but as his boss, Zack, had said at the time, he wasn’t paid to like it, he was paid to do it.
    From Sidorenko’s airplane Court was shepherded across a hundred meters of frozen tarmac to a black stretch limousine. His minders led him to the front passenger seat. One man said, “You get in front. The back is for VIPs.” He smiled, enough metal around his neck and in his teeth to pick up local AM stations. “You are just a P .” He laughed aloud, then translated his joke to his colleagues, and they laughed, too.
    Court shrugged and climbed into the front seat. The minders, hardly VIPs themselves, got into the plush back. An absurd security violation: Court sat up front with only a late-middle-aged driver, but Sidorenko’s security men did not appear to be the smartest henchmen around.
    As they drove west towards Saint Pete, Court did his best to retain information about the trip, in case he needed to find his own way back to the airport. He planned on making this a very short journey. Thirty seconds to tell Sid he didn’t appreciate being dragged up here, a violation of his and Sid’s agreement, another thirty seconds to tell him he didn’t appreciate being deceived about the hit he’d just performed, and a final ten or so seconds to tell his Russian handler that he quit, and if Sidorenko’s gold-chained, skinhead mouth breathers tried to stop him from leaving, then there would soon be more vacancies to fill in Sidorenko’s organization.
    But, in the end, it did not work out quite the way Gentry had envisioned.

SIX
    After an hour on the road, Court was taken to a massive home on the northern outskirts of Saint Petersburg. He had never been in this suburb and admitted to himself that he could not even find this place on a map. The streets were wide and tree-lined, the properties were large and landscaped, the homes were old and stately.
    The limousine turned up a drive, and Gentry immediately focused on the home ahead. It was breath-taking from a distance. Architecturally speaking, it was magnificent.
    But as they got closer it appeared to Court as if Sid’s crew of dumb-ass henchmen also moonlighted as his landscapers and housekeepers, tasks for which they were even less suited than security. There were tents erected on the grounds, like a small military encampment, with smoking fires and young men standing around, apparently doing little or nothing. Several four-wheel-drive vehicles, mud-covered and poorly maintained, were parked on the shredded lawn on both sides of the driveway.
    The facade of the mansion was covered in flaking paint, and the gravel roundabout parking space was covered with bottles, cigarette butts, and other trash. Gentry climbed out of the limo and was led through a kitchen that looked like something from a frat house whose house mother had run away after a nervous breakdown: dishes upon dishes in the sink, plastic carry-out trays covering every flat space, and vodka bottles rimming the floors like some sort of shabby chic glass trim work.
    Court was no neatnik, but he could not help but wonder about the prospects for wildlife in this kitchen during the summer, and he felt thankful for the frigid air that made its way through the thin kitchen window to keep bug life from flourishing, and the three or four fat cats he’d noticed strolling around both the interior and the exterior of the mansion to keep furry vermin at bay.
    Next it was two flights up on a wide, circular staircase. Men sat on the steps, played handheld video games, chatted on mobile phones, read newspapers, and smoked, each man with a submachine gun on his lap or a