Page 80 of Dead Fall

“Exactly,” Harvath replied.

“You think the dead Russians were also art thieves?” asked Biscuit.

“I think they were theoriginalthieves—experts and muscle sent from Moscow. Who knows how they crossed paths with the Ravens. Maybe it was just dumb luck or maybe the Ravens had gotten wind of what they were up to and had been following them. It doesn’t matter. Eventually, it happened. And because they were fellow Russians, the Ravens were able to get in close enough to take them out, which is what they did.”

“Leaving them free to take over their art racket,” stated Hookah. “The Ravens went AWOL from the Wagner Group and have been under their own management ever since.”

Harvath nodded. “A bunch of criminals alert to criminal opportunities. In a war zone no less. Go figure.”

“How do we catch them?” asked Jacks. “You’ve got more targets on your list than we can possibly cover.”

“We know where they’ve been, so the key for us is to uncover any type of pattern.”

Hookah walked over to his chest rig, pulled out his land nav kit, and, removing the protractor, returned to the table.

Borrowing Harvath’s grease pencil, he began marking off distances and making notes on the border of the map.

“Look at you go, Grandpa,” said Biscuit. “Old-school. How many cubits?”

“Just one,” Hookah replied without looking up as he gave the young Canadian the finger.

The rest of the team chuckled.

Harvath watched as the man continued to work. Soon enough, he set the pencil down, visibly frustrated.

“What is it?”

“Stolen anything,” said Hookah, “is a very specific kind of game.”

“Meaning?”

“Until you’re ready to get rid of it, you’ve got to have a safe place to keep it. Ditto for a hostage.”

Harvath nodded. “Keep going.”

“The Ravens, it’s safe to assume, are also oneverybody’sshit list. You want them. The Ukrainians want them. The Wagner Group wants them. And if they haven’t already, once the Russians figure out what they’ve done, they’re going to want them as well.”

“Which means what?”

“I’m guessing that there’s a limit to how far away from… let’s call it their safe house that they’re willing to conduct operations,” Hookah said. “Easy out, easy back. That’d be the smart play.”

Harvath looked at the map, specifically all the locations the Ravens had already hit. “Then the key is to figure out what that distance is and try to determine their base of operations.”

The man nodded. “The front lines have moved back and forth. If these guys leaned more toward greed than they did smarts, I think they’d be hitting some of the locations farther out—at least while there wasn’t any fighting there. But they’re not doing that. They’re avoiding getting too close to the front, which tells me they’re disciplined.”

“Or scared,” stated Harvath. “Having gone AWOL from Wagner, they’ve cut themselves off from any battlefield intel. They’re blind, which makes them vulnerable across the board.”

“Agreed. They no longer have a full view of what’s happening. Evenbetter, with everyone looking to kill them, there’s no cavalry coming to rescue them if they get in trouble. That bodes very well for us.Ifwe can find them.”

Draining the last drop of moonshine from his small glass, Harvath dried the inside with his napkin, turned it upside down on the map, and motioned for Hookah to hand him the pencil.

“Based on the scale of the map, what’s the diameter of my glass?”

Hookah laid his protractor across it. “Twenty-two klicks.”

Centering the glass over each of the spots the Ravens had hit, Harvath traced a circle around it and then moved on to the next.

Once he was finished, he removed the glass and looked. The map was a mess. The circles were all over the place. Too few of them intersected in any way that might have provided useful information.

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