Vanessa was dragged to her feet by the guards, still sobbing hysterically, and pulled out of the office. The doors clicked shut, restoring the pristine silence of the room.
I walked back to the desk, picked up the finalized acquisition file, and handed it to Viktor, who had been standing silently in the shadows of the corner the entire time.
“File this,” I ordered. “The Peterson era is officially erased.”
“Yes, Pakhan,” Viktor nodded, taking the file. “And regarding our other problem?”
“Dmitri Sokolov.” I walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the sprawling grid of the city. Down below, millions of people were going about their lives, completely unaware of the invisible wars being fought above them. “Has our intelligence located his stronghold?”
“Yes,” Viktor stepped up beside me. “After the failed ambush at the clinic, Dmitri panicked. He pulled his remaining loyalists back to a fortified compound in the industrial district of Newark. Heavily guarded. Concrete walls, reinforced steel doors, at least forty armed men inside. He is expecting retaliation, but he thinks we will try to negotiate a truce to avoid a bloodbath.”
“He doesn’t understand who he is dealing with,” I murmured, my reflection staring back at me in the glass. “My father was a pragmatist. He would have negotiated a truce to save resources. But Dmitri crossed a line when he involved my husband and tried to orchestrate a hit in broad daylight with my daughter present.”
I turned to Viktor, my eyes alight with a cold, strategic fire.
“We don’t negotiate with dead men, Viktor. We don’t siege the compound. We erase it.”
The assault on the Sokolov compound was not a gangland shootout. It was a synchronized, paramilitary operation that I orchestrated with ruthless precision from the command center beneath the Hudson Valley estate.
It was 3:00 AM on a moonless Thursday. The industrial district of Newark was a wasteland of abandoned warehouses and rusted shipping containers, bathed in the sickly orange glow of sodium streetlights.
In the command center, a massive digital map illuminated the room. Red dots represented Sokolov forces; blue dots were ours. I stood at the center table, wearing a headset, watching the drone feeds broadcast in high definition on the primary monitors. Alexei was on the ground, leading the strike team of thirty elite Volkov operatives, all heavily armed, wearing tactical night-vision gear and encrypted comms.
“Bravo team is in position at the northern perimeter,” Alexei’s voice crackled in my ear, calm and steady. “Alpha team is stacked at the southern loading dock. Awaiting your command, Pakhan.”
I watched the drone feed. Dmitri Sokolov’s men were patrolling the roof of the warehouse, pacing nervously. They thought they were safe behind their concrete walls.
“Execute Phase One. Cut the power and jam all cellular frequencies in a two-mile radius,” I ordered.
On the monitors, the entire industrial block went pitch black. The red dots on the perimeter stopped moving, confusion setting in.
“Frequencies jammed. They are blind and deaf,” the cyber-op sitting to my left confirmed.
“Phase Two,” I said, my voice devoid of emotion. “Breach.”
The silence of the night was shattered by simultaneous, synchronized C4 detonations at both the northern and southern entrances. The reinforced steel doors of the Sokolov warehouse were blown off their hinges, pancaking into the interior.
Before the smoke could even clear, Alexei and the Volkov strike teams flooded into the building like shadows. The tactical feeds from their helmet cameras filled the screens in the command center. It was a slaughter. The Sokolov men, blinded by the darkness and disoriented by the concussive blasts, were systematically neutralized by our operatives, who moved through the warehouse with the precision of a scalpel cutting through diseased tissue.
Suppressed gunfire flashed through the dark corridors. I watched, detached and focused, as the blue dots advanced rapidly, absorbing and eliminating the red dots.
“They are routing toward the central office,” Alexei reported over the sound of heavy gunfire. “Dmitri is heavily fortified in the back.”
“Don’t lose men trying to breach a reinforced choke point, Alexei,” I instructed, my eyes scanning the blueprints we had acquired of the facility. “Look at the schematics. The central office is situated directly below the primary HVAC intake on the roof. Charlie team, move to the roof.”
“Copy that,” came the response.
I watched as four of our men scaled the exterior of the building, reaching the roof and locating the massive ventilation shaft.
“Deploy the tear gas,” I ordered. “Flood the room.”
On the thermal cameras, I watched the gas canisters drop down the shaft. A moment later, the thermal signatures inside the central office began to panic. The door to the office violently swung open as Dmitri’s remaining men poured out, choking and blinded by the gas, straight into the crossfire of Alexei’s waiting Alpha team.
“Room is clear,” Alexei announced moments later. “We have Dmitri.”
“Bring him out.”
The feed shifted. The camera focused on a man being dragged out of the gas-filled room, coughing violently, his hands zip-tied behind his back. Dmitri Sokolov, the man who had plagued my father for a decade, who had tried to use my broken marriage as a weapon, looked small, pathetic, and beaten.
“Bring him to the extraction point,” I commanded. “I want to look him in the eye.”
An hour later, I stood on the tarmac of a private airfield we owned in New Jersey. The cold wind whipped at my coat. A black helicopter descended from the sky, its rotors kicking up a storm of dust and debris.
The side door slid open, and Alexei dragged Dmitri Sokolov out, throwing him onto the hard asphalt at my feet.
Dmitri groaned, struggling to his knees. He looked up, coughing, blood running from a laceration above his eye. When he saw me, his eyes widened in shock.
“Mila Volkov,” he spat, his chest heaving. “You… you coordinated this.”
Popular Posts
→- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
Recently Viewed
Stories you read recently will appear here.
