The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

It was a very brief cockpit tour, just long enough for the Tu-934A pilots to show Torine and Castillo the engine start procedures and to tell them the best rotation speed during takeoff.

General Sirinov, still moaning with pain, was carried aboard and attached with plastic handcuffs to the strapping holding the blue plastic barrels in place.

Torine stayed in the cockpit while Castillo led the pilots and Sweaty off the airplane. He saw that Berezovsky and Koussevitzky were in a far corner of the hangar. He and Sweaty walked to them.

“I have offered to take Stefan with us,” Berezovsky said. “Understandably, he is concerned with what Putin would do to the family of a traitor. There are six unmarried Spetsnaz who should come with us. Stefan suggests we make it appear they are coming involuntarily.”

“Major,” Castillo asked, “what makes you think Putin won’t—”

“It would help if Podpolkovnik Alekseeva found it necessary to shoot me,” Koussevitzky said.

“Well, I suppose ...” Castillo said.

There was the pop of her toy pistol and Koussevitzky fell to the ground, bleeding from a wound to his right upper leg.

“We’ll try to get you and your family out, Stefan,” Sweaty said. “Really try.”

“May God protect you and yours, Svetlana,” Koussevitzky said.

“And yours,” Sweaty said.

Berezovsky knelt beside him and put him in plastic handcuffs.

“How do we get the hangar doors open?” Castillo asked.

“You have to push,” Koussevitzky furnished. “They’re like curtains.”

“What happens if we start engines in here?”

“You’d burn the hangar down.”

“Good idea. Get everybody out of here,” Berezovsky ordered. “And then get the Spetsnaz we’re taking with us firmly tied up and ready to get on the UH-60.”

“Get aboard, Sweaty,” Castillo ordered.

“I’ll get aboard when you do,” she replied.

There was no time to argue with her.

Castillo went outside the hangar, and made hand signals toward the sky to order the Night Stalker Black Hawk code-named Kidnapper Two to land.

“Push the hangar doors open,” Podpolkovnik Alekseeva ordered in a Russian command voice that would have passed muster at Fort Bragg. “And then help Polkovnik Berezovsky clear the hangar.”

As soon as the doors had been pushed aside, Castillo heard the whine of a Tu-934A engine being started. And he saw Kidnapper Two, cargo doors slid open, coming down the runway almost on the ground. It touched down.

Two of Berezovsky’s ex-Spetsnaz carried Major Koussevitzky out of the hangar and lowered him to the ground twenty meters from it. Then they ran back into the hangar as he heard the whine of the second Tu-934A engine being started.

/> The ex-Spetsnaz came back out of the hangar, leading the Tu-934A’s pilots, their hands in plastic handcuffs. They deposited them next to Major Koussevitzky. One of them then ran back into the hangar. The other ran across the tarmac to where a half-dozen Spetsnaz in handcuffs were sitting.

Roscoe J. Danton appeared, furiously capturing everything for posterity—after of course it was published in The Washington Times-Post—on his camera.

Two of the ex-Spetsnaz pulled one of the handcuffed Spetsnaz to his feet and loaded him--not very gently: “threw him aboard” would be a more accurate description—onto the Policía Federal Preventiva UH-60, and then threw two more of the Spetsnaz aboard.

Roscoe J. Danton captured this, too, with his camera.

One of the ex-Spetsnaz looked at Castillo and Svetlana.

“He wants to know if he should load the others aboard,” Sweaty said.