Breakneck, p.1
Breakneck, page 1
Also by Marc Cameron
The Arliss Cutter Series
BREAKNECK
COLD SNAP
BONE RATTLE
STONE CROSS
OPEN CARRY
The Jericho Quinn Series
ACTIVE MEASURES
THE TRIPLE FRONTIER
DEAD DROP
FIELD OF FIRE
BRUTE FORCE
DAY ZERO
TIME OF ATTACK
STATE OF EMERGENCY
ACT OF TERROR
NATIONAL SECURITY
The Jack Ryan Series
TOM CLANCY: RED WINTER
TOM CLANCY: CHAIN OF COMMAND
TOM CLANCY: SHADOW OF A DRAGON
TOM CLANCY: CODE OF HONOR
TOM CLANCY: OATH OF OFFICE
TOM CLANCY: POWER AND EMPIRE
BREAKNECK
MARC CAMERON
www.kensingtonbooks.com
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
Grumpy’s Dessert Beans
Ritz Cracker Fried Halibut
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2023 by Marc Cameron
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 2022950827
The K with book logo Reg. US Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3761-8
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: May 2023
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3762-5 (e-book)
For
Odis—
my Grumpy
“O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
PROLOGUE
Alaska
Gladys Tomaganak’s husband, Pete, was the one who decided they should all go upriver to catch ducks—and she would never forgive him for it.
It was June, Kaugun in Gladys’s native Yupik, when fish would soon be so plentiful you could hit them with a stick. The ice had gone off the main Yukon just the week before with much destruction and shrieking.
Gladys made almost as much noise when she spied the new hickey on her fifteen-year-old son’s neck. That damned downriver girl, Agnes Polty, was the culprit. Gladys called her utngucegnaq—one who looks like a wart.
Pete assured her Emmett was just going through a phase. Boys would be boys. When Gladys pointed out that those same boys were already cozying up to their twelve-year-old Winnie, Pete started getting the boat ready for duck camp.
Emmett took care of the shotguns and the .270 Winchester rifle—Gladys’s camp gun. There were bound to be bears about. Winnie helped pack their basic supplies—flour, oil, salt, sugar, coffee, and a gallon baggie full of smoked salmon strips—the last of the previous year’s harvest. Two dark blue boxes of Sailor Boy Pilot Bread went on top of everything. More of a hard cracker than bread, each piece was the diameter of a hockey puck—and good with everything, from peanut butter to seal oil. It was a staple in bush Alaska.
All chubby cheeks and smiles, baby Martha enjoyed the ride up and down the riverbank swaddled in soft cotton in the back of Gladys’s summer kuspuk.
Moose camp, berry camp, fish camp, or duck camp, the Tomaganaks were pros, and they had the boat loaded in no time. Gladys’s worries began to melt away from the first growl of the propellor biting the turbid brown waters of the mighty Yukon. The river was wide here, swollen by spring floods to almost a mile across. Sandbars had popped up in new places since last summer and rafts of ice floated by like killer torpedoes.
The mouth of the main Andreafsky was less than two miles upriver, just around the corner. St. Mary’s, a couple of miles north of that. A series of crescent sloughs and side channels, the East Fork of the Andreafsky snaked between the main river and the Chuil-nak, meandering south and east before turning northward through the low Nulato Hills. It was called Qukaqlik in Yupik—the Middle One.
Pete pulled the tiller toward him, avoiding a sandbar as he cut up the channel. A grayling leaped on the sun-dazzled surface, biting at some unseen insect or bit of fluff. The sight of it filled Gladys with hope for a good supper.
The normally clear waters churned and frothed, swollen and cloudy with silt. Jagged rafts of old ice grew more plentiful as the little boat motored upstream. Pete wove his way carefully, keeping well clear of the bergy bits. His dad had died falling through rotten ice and he harbored a healthy respect for it.
Two hours after the Tomaganaks departed Pitka’s Point, their little boat nosed around the protected bend they all knew so well. Gladys marveled at how much of the bank had simply vanished. Thick cottonwoods that she’d known for decades were gone, sheared off during breakup and taken downriver. What had once been a gentle slope had been gouged into a steep muddy cliff, five feet high.
Emmett gave his sister a stiff elbow and called dibs on any fossilized mammoth teeth or ivory they might find in the newly exposed earth. Gladys clapped her hands, elated when she saw the plywood shelter was still intact. Pete reversed the prop for a short burst and then lifted the motor out of the water. Momentum carried them in.
Skunk cabbage and purple sedge sprouted on the wet bank amid patches of ice and snow. Twenty feet upriver, an otter zipped down a mud chute and slipped beneath the surface with a squeak.
Emmett and Winnie crowded into the bow, their bulky life jackets fighting for the best spot. Winnie grabbed the bow rope, the sleeves of her purple hoodie pushed up on her little forearms, ready for work, and scrambled over the side the minute they scraped gravel. She sloshed up the bank to take a loop around a cottonwood that had survived the ice dams. Emmett gripped the bow with both hands and threw his weight backward, tugging the boat closer to the bank so his mother wouldn’t get her feet wet.
The grunt of winging ducks drew everyone’s attention upward. If there was a more beautiful duck than the strikingly black-and-white eider, Gladys had never seen it. Pete stood at the sight, teetering the aluminum hull against the gravel. Never much of a talker, he turned his head to follow the winging birds.
Gladys smiled, happy her husband was such a good hunter. “You boys catch us dinner,” she said. “Me and Winnie will unload the boat.”
Pete raised both eyebrows. In other parts of the world the expression might convey amusement or surprise, but to Gladys’s people, who might have to sit silently for hours waiting to catch their food, it was a quiet way to say “good idea.”
Baby in the back of her kuspuk, Gladys trudged up the hill to the little cabin. It was a shack, really, with a blue tarp roof, weathered plywood walls, and one long window Pete had salvaged from the rear of an old Ford pickup truck. The door was unlocked—a thief would just break it down—and someone caught in a blizzard might need shelter.
Winnie crowded around her mother and surveyed the sixteen-by-sixteen interior. There was plenty of light thanks to Pete’s pickup-cab window.
“Did they take stuff?”
Gladys scrunched her nose. No.
The furnishings were sparse—four metal folding chairs, a set of bunk beds built from two-by-fours, a similar crib, and a double bed with a rusted metal frame. A plywood shelf ran along the wall beneath the truck window. Spattered grease stains marked the spot where she would put her two-burner camp stove. The Coleman lantern was still hanging from a wire on the center two-by-four rafter—right where they’d left it.
Gladys took the lid off a blue metal bear barrel in the corner and peeked inside.
“They mighta took some tea . . .” she said, the hushed clucks of a mother hen. “Probably hunters who’d needed to warm up. That’s okay . . .”
A half hour later, the beds were laid out, a fire snapped in the woodstove, and the baby snored softly in her crib.
Winnie reached into her daypack for a paperback copy of The Hunger Games she’d gotten from the Trooper book-boat.
Gladys held out a five-gallon bucket.
“Fill this up. Then you can read.”
Winnie went out the door, book in one hand, bucket in her other.
It took fifteen minutes before Gladys started to worry. She opened the door and called out, cupping her hand so as not to wake the baby. No answer but wind and water.
She was probably lost in her book.
Gladys called again.
Nothing.
Exasperated, she scooped up the startled baby and stomped down the hill, .270 rifle in hand.
Only minutes before, the river had brought her so much joy; now it took on a sinister gulping sound—as if it were hungry.
Heart in her throat, Gladys searched up and down the bank, bending willows, parting grass, looking for any sign or track.
Then a cake of dirty ice, the size of a car door, slammed into the mud exactly where Winnie would have been getting water. Seconds later, a huge log came around the bend. It caught the same eddy and gouged a furrow in the bank before spinning back into the current.
All the blood drained from Gladys’s face. If Winnie had been reading and shown the river her back . . .
Beyond panicked, Gladys set the baby on a patch of grass and fired three shots into the air. She worked the bolt quickly, screaming all the while for her missing child. The baby flinched at the gunfire, and began to wail along with her mother.
It seemed like forever before Pete and Emmett crashed through the willows. Emmett carried not only his shotgun, but a yellow five-gallon bucket.
“I found this floating downriver,” he said. “Mom? What’s—”
“Winnie’s missing . . .” Gladys pointed at the churning brown water. Her knees buckled and she had to grab her husband to keep her feet.
Emmett scuffed at the bank with his boot. He looked up at his father.
“Here’s one of her tracks.”
Gladys clutched the baby to her chest.
“Look at this, Dad,” the boy said. “She’s facing away from the water, leaving. We shoulda passed her when we came up.”
Pete wheeled. “Come on. She might be hung up in a sweeper, or some willows.” He stopped abruptly, turning back to Gladys, his bronze face twisted with the worry of a man who’d lost his father to the river. “How long’s she been gone?”
Gladys told him.
“Come, come.” Pete flicked his hand at Emmett.
“Hold on, Dad,” the boy said. “This track . . . It’s different.”
Pete glanced at the mud. “Probably when we were unloading the boat. Now come!”
“I don’t think so,” Emmett said. “Different heel—”
Pete cuffed his son on the shoulder. “I told you, let’s go! Dirt’s too tore up to see anything for sure.” He crashed into the thick brush with Emmett on his heels, both shouting Winnie’s name.
Gladys waded knee-deep into the water beside their skiff, screaming for her little girl until her voice cracked.
In her haste she missed the fresh boot track in the mud.
Russia
Fifteen hundred miles to the east of Alaska, a man with feral eyes and a hatchet face held court from a tufted leather booth in the back of Ogon’ i Led—which meant Fire and Ice—his back-alley nightclub off Primorskaya Street in the Russian city of Petropavlovsk. A hint of rotting seaweed from nearby Avacha Bay muddled with the pungent body odor and eye-watering perfumes of the three women crammed into the booth with the man. Low, moaning music throbbed in time with pulsing lights, illuminating three cages and, more important, the nubile dancers inside them. Two dozen men sat at low tables around the stage, all entranced, swaying, drinking the hatchet-faced man’s booze, and throwing wads of cash at his women.
When Maxim Volkov was a boy, his friends had called him “Toporok,” (in English, it would have been “Little Axe”)—and not only for the severe angles of his face. He was a fighter, prone to fits of rage. The tail of a black-dolphin tattoo the size of his thumb peeked above the rat’s nest of gunmetal chest hair spilling from the open collar of his silk shirt. The ink was a memento of another time when the air smelled, not like the sea, but of misery and urine and fear. In Penal Colony Number 6 he’d earned another nickname: Kostolom (Bone Breaker).
Volkov’s lieutenant, a handsome silver-haired man, with a pencil-thin mustache, stood at the end of the booth, with a phone pressed to his ear. He pulled the device away and gave a slow shake of his head.
“No answer, boss,” he said. The music made lipreading a necessity.
At forty-six, five years Volkov’s junior, Ilia Lipin had earned tattoos in the Black Dolphin Prison as well. All had been applied with a jury-rigged electric razor motor, plastic from a melted toothbrush, and a straightened staple from a fat book in the prison library. Ink was made of boot polish and piss, preferably from the person getting the tat. Volkov had decided early in their acquaintance that Lipin’s handsome face and prematurely silver hair made him perfect for politics or the cinema. Even in prison he advised the man to keep the tattoos concealed under his clothes, mindful of a time when they might wish to blend with the world.
“No answer?” Volkov muttered, as if the notion was inconceivable.
Lipin shook his head, his mouth pinched in a frown, demonstrating to his boss that he was disappointed at the current situation too.
The tendons in Volkov’s neck thrummed as if carrying high voltage. People, he could bend to his will. Phone lines, satellites, undersea cables—those did not care that he was a feared leader of the bratva, known as the Russian mafia or mob in the West.
One of Volkov’s many mistresses, a raven-haired waif named Kira, cuddled up beside him. Even she was not sure how old she was, but Volkov put her at around sixteen, if he happened to think about her age at all.
He gave a nod to Lipin to try the call again and then turned his attention to the pudgy naval officer standing before his table. The man kept his head up, shoulders back, but rubbed his sweating hands at his waist like a housefly—at once, nervous and defiant.
“It is Bukin, correct?”
“Yes,” the man said. “Gennady Arkadyevich Bukin.”
Volkov toyed with an empty vodka glass, turning it back and forth as if grinding something against the table. “Captain of the third rank,” he noted. “Stationed across the bay at Rybachiy Naval Base aboard special mission submarine BS-64 Podmoskovye—”
“This . . . This is sensitive information,” the captain stammered. “How did you come by—”
Volkov cut him off. “You owe me money, Gennady.”
“And I will pay,” the captain said. “I only need—”
“You have money to spend at my competitor down the street.”
“That was an error in judgment,” the man said. “It will not—“
Volkov pushed the glass away and sat back on the soft leather between his women. “I am curious,” he said. “The Russian Navy is very strong . . .”
