His name wasn't Peter Strelok, just as Mikhail Ruzhyo wasn't born with his name. The name fit well enough, however. Strelok and Ruzhyo ran the hit with Grigory Zmeya, though they kept the snake's role simply less vital.

Ruzhyo had expressed his distrust and dislike of Grigory earlier with Strelok, and arranged for a forth man, Job Geroj, Ethnic Armenian, to back up the snake.

Geroj, he had not chosen that appellation. Strelok and Ruzhyo had given it to him because he had a tendency to join teams as an afterthought, a plug added to keep a detail from unthreading. Such role-play could be invaluable to them inside Al Mamlakah al Arabiyah as Suudiyah.

Crown Prince and First Deputy Prime Minister Abdallah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud is in charge of the country. The people aren't as rich as casual western observers seem to think. The per capita GDP is merely $11,800, unemployment is 25, and most telling of all, no one has ever developed their proven natural gas reserves.

The kingdom is a dangerous place. And it will only become more dangerous, especially in the foreign and diplomatic quarters.

Al Mabaheth, the kingdom's antiterrorist police, will react to any attacks, if they're fast enough, that is.

Hezbollah, the same organization the mortars Israeli towns, killed 19 American airmen in the Khobar Towers bombing on June 25, 1996. The bomb damage looked eerily like Oklahoma City one year before. That attack was in turn, of course, only two years after the WTC bombing. In those attacks, Ramzi Yusef and Timothy McVeigh were captured, but in Khobar, the White House didn't make any "demands for justice," even though the Saudis detained a litter of likely suspects.1


They had one last meal at a Saudi McDonalds. Grigory had a super sized Mac, and the others ate more sensibly. Strelok and Ruzhyo avoided carbonated beverages, and Geroj abandoned his Dr Pepper after thinking it over. Grigory super sized a Sprite, and cursed the clerk for not stocking alcohol.

Ruzhyo had tried reminding the Snake that a McDonalds wouldn't even serve alcohol in Ireland, but no use.

After eating, the four of them broke apart, taking their own routes to their posts. Ruzhyo walked freely with his air taser, a modal with a twenty-foot reach. Attired in loose fitting black, he jogged alongside a Mercedes convoy to one foreign compound gate. The three cars waved the banner of the united Germany.

The assassin stopped for a patrol detail, a foot patrol attached to the compound.

"Good morning. Do you speak English?"

They didn't seem so threatening. Both wore windbreakers with side arms and batons, but besides those articles, they were just flunkies with radios and pointless badges.

"Da, enough, sirs."

A Russian, not a typical threat in the Kingdom. Russians have a high energy demand, too.

"Good, sir. We need to search you, just a routine pat-down."

He let them, and one second under his jacket, they found the taser.

"Are you registered to carry this in the kingdom, sir?"

He carefully, slowly, reached his back pocket, flipped open the wallet containing his permit.

"Yes sir."

Everything looked in order, but they resumed the frisk just in case.

"Okay, just show your ID at the gate, and the gatekeeper will square things up real quickly."

The two guards walked to the curb, and seated in a motorbike. These guys run a regular patrol, as the Russians had learned when casing the area. It will be a few minutes, for sure, although to their credit, they have a varied routine.

Ruzhyo hedged a glance in the distance, saw a light flash in a minaret. Strelok is in position. Grigory is at the appointed bus stop, so two are seen in position, and Geroj must be at the appointed position between them. Swivel, and continue the walk toward the gate.

He hears the percussive play of children, a rubber ball, and the wall, before reaching the gate. The guard asked to see his pass via a small closed circuit TV camera. Like using an ATM, he extracted a thin card with a magnetic strip, and inserted it, then punched the pin sequence.

"Have a nice day, mister Leary."

The card's magnetic strip had been skimmed from a nice Scot they'd mugged after following him on their last casing. The binary information and a memory of the four digits tapped on the back were all they needed.

"You have a good one."

He's in, and the gate slides toward its latch. Ruzhyo allows his left hand to linger in the left pocket, even as his right fingers enfold over the taser.

Strelok should be aimed at the guard's chest. Just a few seconds.

Sheathed around the guardhouse is the miracle Ge Lexan Polycarbonate Resin, a formidable bullet stopper. Current specs are high enough to stop the best Barrett sniper rifles, but the heavy gauged RAMO 650, chambered for 14.5x115 Russian anti material ammunition, can do it, firing a 63.4 gram shell at 1,000 meters per second.

Peter Strelok's internal magazine allowed him the luxury of repeating his semi-jacketed feat six more times. This he did as fast as he could pull the bolt and depress the five-pound trigger.

Ruzhyo side-stepped wide of the discharged gun, but in clear view of the guard's still functioning personal computer. The steel darts of a taser are propelled by compressed nitrogen and conduct 50,000 volts of electricity into whatever it comes in contact too.

The wet works agent illuminated a garnet dot on the monitor, in the middle, just over an archeologist's shoulder.

The archeologist on screen aimed her .45 Colt pistol skyward, as if blaming an Egyptian deity for the incoming shock. The dart punctured the glass, carried a current to the cathode ray tube, overloaded it, and spread poor Lara Croft around like a download from Napster.

The compound's copper-wired Ethernet cables offered transport to the 50,000 volts, so Lara didn't go to pc heaven alone. The whole base faced overloads. Cameras died, communications faulted, automatic sentry guns shorted, and no advantages of the integrated defense remained.

Some twenty meters away, a berserk armored zealot lined an MP5 up from behind the rear Mercedes. Strelok is gone now, and wouldn't have an angle up if he did.

The Chechen shot first, using a Bulgarian .32 key chain the frisk missed-- Ruzhyo didn't-- one thumb clicking the firing button in his left hand. Left foot forward, and matching shoulder pointing at the target, he discharged a .32.

The armories neglected the neck. The shot dipped under the chin, and shocked the jugular.

Fall back.


The Mabaheth react too slowly. Their first responders catch a spike strip, shredding rubber down to the rims. Steel catches concrete at high speed, grating badly. One agent radios in the predicament, then dismounts with a Kalashnikov. He pulled the charging handle, and looked down range as a heavy Japanese van storms at the gate.

He removed the muzzle nut in advance, and attached a grenade. Can this stop the murder?

Out of his peripheral senses, flak slips in, a deluge of bullets. Duck, look. Two men, one behind a palm, the other under a bench, both with machine pistols. You're punctured, bleeding, lying under the curb. Only a small gap exists between them, so the grenade is beautiful!


Ruzhyo ran like it was nobody's business. He returned the key chain, still harnessing a full barrel, to one front pocket, and snapped another shot onto the taser.

Strelok should have keys in the ignition by now. Ruzhyo may ride with him, but if he doesn't show, a car awaits at the McDonalds.

He doesn't wince as the bomb explodes. Don't look back at Gomorra. That was the van, demolishing the structure and people beyond the gate he'd opened.

He heard Zmeya and Geroj shooting, then a more disturbing punctuation- then more Micro Uzi action. That's welcome. Geroj deserves survival.


1.I'm not making any of this up: just ask Director Freeh, if you can contact him.