Days of Rage: A Pike Logan Thriller - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

BRAD TAYLOR is the author of the New York Times bestselling Pike Logan series. He served for more than twenty years in the U.S. Army, including eight years in 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, commonly known as Delta Force. He retired as a Special Forces lieutenant colonel and now lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2014 Brad Taylor

3

Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Present day


Confused by all of the Cyrillic street signs, Aaron Bergmann folded his map and sighed. Why was it that a town predicated on attracting tourists did nothing to help them navigate? The damn place was a maze. And he thought Jerusalem was bad. This town was worse.

He grinned, knowing that wasn’t really true.

He continued in the same direction, following the crowds walking down the large promenade. He hoped to see something that would trigger in his mind from the research he’d conducted before he left Tel Aviv. An historic house, church, mosque, or other landmark he would recognize. He saw a circular hole in the ground, about a hundred feet across, and walked toward it. Getting closer, he sighed with relief, recognizing the remains of an old Roman stadium. Only a small piece had been excavated, with the rest running a hundred meters under the pavement of the modern streets, but it was a landmark he could anchor against.

He got his bearings and took a left on Saborna Street, entering the cloistered cobblestone of the old city. He picked up his pace, seeing he’d burned his entire time cushion wandering around trying to find his location. He passed other tourists out sightseeing, but didn’t ask for any help. Very few spoke English, and none spoke Hebrew, but he was fairly sure he could find the remains of the old fortress on the tip of the hill. From there, he’d locate the beer garden with the man he was paying to meet.

They’d had some success penetrating Hezbollah and the Syrian opposition forces, but no stone would be left unturned. The Mossad looked everywhere and anywhere for intelligence, and when an oligarch from Russia had made contact, claiming he not only had information on Russian geopolitical history and future goals, but on the Syrian government’s intentions with WMD, he’d been launched to investigate. The oligarch—code-named Boris—had picked the place and Israel had brought the money. There was little risk if he ended up being a bust, but the potential for payoff was great.

Aaron wound his way through the cobblestones, knowing as long as he was headed uphill, he was going in the right direction. He passed a youth hostel, seeing a tent and a clothesline in the courtyard behind an open door, wondering how they washed their clothes before hanging them up. Did they have automated washers, or do it by hand? For that matter, did they have a shower in the compound, or did they simply pay for the security of a lock on the gate?

He would have liked to experience the world as they did, freely tramping about, no worries and no greater ambition than to explore, but that had been taken from him in the first Intifada when a suicide blast on a Tel Aviv bus had shredded his parents.

He had been fourteen, and his childhood had disappeared. He had worked to contain his hatred at the same time he had worked to find an outlet. He’d shown a fierce drive and an uncommon intelligence during his mandatory military service, striving for and being accepted to an elite Special Forces unit known as Sayeret Shimshon—or Samson—tasked with clandestine penetration of the Gaza Strip, the hardest counterterrorist missions in the IDF.

He’d learned to blend in as a Palestinian Arab. Learned to harness his fear while walking in the belly of the beast, to succeed against all odds, locating and eliminating terrorists in their own backyard. He’d lived through many missions that he would have considered suicidal before, and had had the art of the impossible hammered into him.

In 1994, right about the time he’d begun to grow comfortable with the mission, the Gaza Strip had been given back to the Palestinians, and because of it, his unit had been disbanded. For about a day.

Before Aaron could even wonder what he would do next, the Mossad had called, wanting Samson’s skills and promising future missions.

Now the commander of the unit, he’d made a deal with the devil and found his team doing more Mossad tasks than manhunting. A necessary evil to keep the support. He, as the Samson commander, was not immune, which was why he was in Bulgaria attempting to glean intelligence on Syrian intentions.

Aaron turned a narrow corner and saw the cobblestone run up to the ruins at the top of the hill. To the right was a smattering of picnic tables perched on an overlook two hundred meters above the town.

Must be the place.

He went down the steps, purchased a bottle of Kamenitza beer, then casually surveyed the deck. Full of students and backpackers, he focused on singletons and found his contact fairly quickly. A large, overweight man of about sixty-five or seventy, he was sitting at the very edge of the overlook, next to a small trail leading precipitously down. He had a porkpie hat on the table to his front, and a tourist map laid out. The map was the identifying bona fide, and the hat was the safe signal. Had he been wearing it, Aaron would have taken his beer elsewhere and simply reported back, letting his higher command in Mossad reinitiate contact and determine what had gone wrong.

Aaron took one more look around the deck, checking for anything out of the ordinary, once again searching for singletons who didn’t fit in. He found none, but that didn’t mean there was no threat. Just that if there was a threat, it was well trained.

He approached the man known as Boris and said, “Sure is pretty up here.”

The man said, “It is, but I prefer Moscow. Have you been there?”

Aaron sat down opposite of him and said, “No, but I’ve always
wanted to go.”

The correct words exchanged, with both men satisfied they were talking to the correct person, Boris wasted no more time.

“Did you bring the money?”

“Yes. Well, I brought a card and a PIN. You can draw the money from any ATM or bank, but the card won’t be activated until I get what I came for.”

“How do I know you aren’t tricking me?”

Aaron smiled and said, “How do I know you have any information that’s worth a shit?”

Boris said, “The Americans thought it was good. They have paid me handsomely.”

“You’ve already sold this to the CIA?”

“Yes. Perhaps you’d like to wait on them to pass it to you.” Boris smiled again.

“What am I buying?”

“Have you heard about Edward Snowden?”

“The American traitor? The one who gave all the secrets to you people? Is that what this is about?”

“No, no, I just mean are you aware of the large cache of documents he stole from the American National Security Agency? I am like him. I have a treasure trove of documents, from the KGB’s help of terrorists against your state in the 1970s to what they’re planning to do today. Russia is worse now than it was under the USSR, and the KGB is alive and well in the FSB.”

Aaron knew that Boris was prior KGB himself, and understood that he—like many, many KGB agents—had made a fortune plying his skills for less-than-savory individuals before returning to the new federal security apparatus—the FSB. He was no saint. No white knight out to expose Russian corruption. No, he’d been turned out into the cold for some transgression, and now he was looking for a final golden parachute. An augmentation of his retirement fund to be earned by selling the souls of the people he’d worked with for decades. It made the Israeli sick to his stomach.

Aaron said, “Let’s just...