by Peter Nealen
“A…shell…shell company,” Codreanu coughed. “Don’t…don’t know who they…really were.”
“A name,” Brannigan ground out relentlessly.
“Bur…Burkholder…Limited,” Codreanu whispered. “That was…what they…” his breathing seemed to catch, and then it let out in a long, phlegm-rattling sigh. His body relaxed, and the faint smell of his releasing bowels reached Brannigan’s nostrils. He was gone.
Burkholder Limited. It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start.
They were out of time. Movement was clearly visible through the trees to their north and south now. They had to go.
“Out to the west,” he hissed. He didn’t get an acknowledgement, but Flanagan immediately turned and led out, heading for the fields. They’d be in the open, but if they got out of the closing encirclement, they might still have a chance.
***
The Transnistrians led their entry with wild bursts of fire through the door, followed by more into each corner of the room as they came through. Flint struggled not to flinch, as bits of plaster were blasted off the walls above him, and the bedstead rocked with more hits. Somehow, none of the bullets hit him; he was too low, and the angle they were shooting at wasn’t quite right. He still felt the old man’s cooling corpse shudder as the soldiers shot the bodies.
Russian CQB doctrine was not exactly concerned with the fates of noncombatants. Or even their own people, for that matter. And the Transnistrians had learned everything they knew from the Russians.
The shooting stopped, and voices started talking in Russian. They didn’t waste words, though what little Flint knew about the Russian language suggested that the language itself didn’t tend to waste words much, either. But these guys sounded somewhat professional. He started to wonder if these weren’t actually Russians, rather than Transnistrians.
A radio crackled with another voice speaking Russian. One of the men inside answered. Boots started to shuffle on the packed-dirt floor, and Flint started to relax. They’d missed him. They must have been focused on Redrum and Lezàrd.
I hope they killed those fuckers. I hope they shot them in the guts. He’d momentarily forgotten his own promise to torture Redrum to death for leaving him behind. Right at the moment, he was just hoping that the men standing just a few feet from him were going to go looking for the others and give him an opportunity to escape.
Before he could let out his breath, though, the old man’s body was abruptly hauled away from the edge of the bed, and a bright light blazed in his eyes. He squinted, all too aware of the 5.45mm muzzles pointed at his face, and carefully moved his hands away from his M21.
A voice barked a command in Russian. He couldn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear enough. “Okay, okay, I’m coming out,” he said. “Don’t shoot me, okay?”
The answering words were in accented but understandable English. “Keep hands where I can see. Move slow.”
Flint complied, crawling out of his claustrophobic hiding place, over the bodies of the farmer and his wife. There were still four men in the room, one with the flashlight that was still almost blinding him. But he wasn’t so dazzled that he couldn’t see that these men weren’t dressed like the Transnistrians. And they weren’t carrying old, worn-out AK-47s, either. Those were some kind of high-end AK variant, with optics, even. And the plain green fatigues told him more than even the weapons. These weren’t Transnistrians. These were Russians.
That gave him an idea, though he’d have to play his cards carefully over the next few hours. He kept his hands high, interlacing his fingers on top of his head, as he got out onto the floor, staying on his knees. His first priority was to stay alive, and that meant giving these Little Green Men no reason to shoot him. He could develop the situation later.
Flint was nothing if not a survivor.
***
Curtis was driving one vehicle, Hart the other. It had taken a long time to get back to the vans, and the landscape around them was visibly brightening as they turned the vehicles around and headed back toward the trees. Javakhishvili had Childress laid out on the floor of Curtis’ van, and was double-checking the tourniquet and bandages. Childress was hanging in there, despite the rigors of the long hike back to the vans, though he was in a bad way.
He still said he couldn’t feel his legs, either.
The radio crackled next to Curtis. “Gambler, this is Kodiak,” Brannigan’s hoarse voice called.
Curtis snatched up the radio, keeping one hand on the wheel. “Go for Gambler.”
“Movie’s over,” Brannigan said. “We’re going to the water park. Traffic’s bad, though.”
Curtis bit back a curse. “Movie’s over” meant that the mission had been accomplished, somehow. “Traffic’s bad,” however, meant that they were either being closely pursued, or were cut off.
“I think I can find a bypass for you,” Curtis said. “Give me about five minutes.” He dropped the radio and floored the accelerator.
“Copy all,” Bianco said over the radio from the white van. It was a little more military-sounding than they’d hoped, but it got the point across, and they were all wet, cold, tired, and stressed to the breaking point.
“We can’t take Childress into the middle of a firefight,” Javakhishvili snapped, grabbing a handhold to keep himself from being pitched into the side of the van as Curtis hit a bump in the frozen ground.
“We don’t have much of a choice, Herc,” Curtis replied. “I’ve got one of the RPDs, and Vinnie’s got the other. Besides, if we work this right, it’s going to be more of a drive-by than a firefight.”
“Even if you’re right, the stress might still kill him,” Javakhishvili said quietly, as he climbed into the passenger seat and grabbed his Vz.58. “He’s hanging on by a thread.”
“And if we don’t do this, then the rest of the team might well get cut off and slaughtered,” Curtis retorted. “Sam wouldn’t want that.”
He was trying hard not to let his fear take over. Curtis was a man quick with a quip, easy with the ladies, but if he was being honest with himself, he didn’t have all that many real friends. Most of them were back there in the snow, just about surrounded by Russians and Transnistrians. He wasn’t always on the best of terms with them; he knew that Flanagan was still pissed at him about the knife incident. But Joe was his brother, closer by far than any blood relative he still had around, and Kevin Curtis would be damned if he let Joe Flanagan go down without doing everything in his power to stop it.
He’d do it for me, crazy chicks and bar fights notwithstanding.
The truth was, and he didn’t even want to admit this to himself, he was hoping that if he saved his friend’s life, then Joe might forgive him for the close encounter with Leticia. His glib mask was too practiced to let it show, but Flanagan’s anger about that had cut him deeply, and he had been nursing the guilt the entire time since.
He kept driving southwest, away from where they’d been hearing most of the gunfire. It was going to take a little bit of extra time, but he didn’t want to drive right into the middle of that, not in thin-skinned vans. And the “five minutes” had been code, too. It really meant more like ten to fifteen.
He took a turn hard, almost tipping the van up on two wheels and starting it fishtailing on the snowy, unimproved road. Time was slipping away, but he had to force himself to slow down, just a little. It wouldn’t do the rest of the Blackhearts any good if he wrecked on the way to try to support them.
Tearing through the narrow cart tracks that passed for roads within the little ville of tiny farms gathered along the M4 Highway south of Hrustovaya, he finally saw the highway ahead and gunned the engine, surging up onto the icy hardball.
And found that they were a bare fifty meters from a line of trucks and UAZ utility vehicles. Vehicles that had a handful of men in green fatigues with rifles standing guard.
“Oh, shit,” Javakhishvili moaned, even as he cracked the door and stuck his Vz.58 out through the “V.”
Curtis gulped as he stomped on the brake and the clutch, the van skidding forward on the ice and snow and starting to turn sideways, presenting the driver’s side to the Russians who were turning to stare, their rifles starting to come up. He’d left the headlights off, but the UAZ 452 wasn’t exactly quiet, so they had to have known something was coming.
Keeping both pedals pinned, he threw his own door open as he hauled the RPD up from beside his seat. He might not have been terribly practiced with the Warsaw Pact machinegun, but he knew machineguns in general, and he found the safety lever quickly enough. Flipping it off, he laid the barrel in the V of the door, clamped his off hand on top of the oddly-shaped wooden forearm, and held down the trigger.
The RPD spat fire with a stuttering, ripping roar, 7.62x39mm rounds folding the closest man in half before the recoil sent the stream of copper-jacketed lead high, smacking bullets into the nearest truck frame with loud bangs that were drowned out in Curtis’ ears by the thunder of the gun.
More fire was coming from behind and to his right, where Hart had pulled up the other van to the side of the road, apparently having noticed that Curtis had driven right into a shit-show. Bianco was laying into the men in green with his own RPD, playing his cone of fire up and down the line of vehicles.
The machinegun locked open, empty, the metal belt slithering into Curtis’ lap, and he hauled it back inside, slamming the door and reaching for the wheel and the gearshift. Javakhishvili had just rocked a fresh magazine into his Vz.58 and stuck it out the window, dumping a dozen rounds out in a long, clattering burst, just to keep their heads down. Curtis was already slewing the van around, so there wasn’t much chance that Herc was going to hit anything.
Then the south road was open in front of him, and Curtis threw the van into gear, fishtailing as he tried to accelerate. The four-wheel-drive did the trick, but it was still a struggle. Fortunately, they seemed to have caught the men in green by surprise, at least a little, since there weren’t more than a few sporadic shots coming after them, the harsh snaps of the passing bullets almost lost in the roar of the UAZ’s engine.
He raced south as fast as he dared, looking for a turn off to the west, hoping and praying that it wasn’t going to be a dead end. “Grab that radio and tell Brannigan that we’re on the way,” he told Javakhishvili. “We’ll meet up by one of the hedgerows out to the west.”
***
Brannigan heard the shooting clearly. Despite all the commotion, it was still early in the morning, and sound carried. He hoped that was Curtis, almost as much as he hoped that their exuberant playboy managed to get clear afterward.
The diversionary attack did the trick, however. He heard a voice on a radio, only a few dozen yards from where he and Flanagan crouched, speaking in Russian. It sounded urgent. The answer was equally tense, followed by yelled commands in the same language, and the unmistakable sounds of men moving, stomping through the woods.
And they were heading away, toward the south. Curtis had managed to rattle their cage enough that their commander seemed to be calling them back in to regroup.
He didn’t have to say anything. This was their opening. Flanagan waited, still flat to the snowy ground, a tree between him and the enemy, his Uzi leveled, watching and listening. The need to get some distance was tempered by the fact that if they were detected, they’d be shot to ribbons before they could get far at all.
Flanagan stayed perfectly still until he was sure that the militia and whoever the shooters were—a closer look had shown him that they weren’t Transnistrian Army regulars, but better-equipped men in sterile green fatigues—had moved away. Then he slowly got to his feet and started moving away, making eye contact with Brannigan as he did so, just to make sure he wasn’t heading out by himself.
As quickly as they dared, the Blackhearts forged up the hill, through the woods, away from the Russians and the militia. Behind them, Codreanu’s body was steadily cooling, the blood on the ground already frozen.
Chapter 23
Flint had been flex-cuffed and dragged to a UAZ 469, where he was unceremoniously shoved into the back and told—in Russian, though he got the gist—to shut up and stay still. The two men watching him were wearing black balaclavas, sterile green uniforms, and carrying what looked to him a lot like AEK-971s, though he hadn’t thought that those had ever really been fielded.
He stayed quiet, his eyes half-closed, but Flint’s mind was racing. He was fairly sure he could get out of the flex-cuffs—it wouldn’t be the first time—but those two Russians were watching him like hawks, and he had little doubt that they’d shoot him full of holes as soon as they thought he was trying something. He might get one, but the other one would kill him. Even his own supreme self-confidence wasn’t dishonest enough to make him think he had a chance.
In fact, he’d probably get shot as soon as he started trying to get loose.
He had a backup, but he knew that it was a last resort. The Board did not look kindly on any sort of exposure, and calling in that favor was going to have consequences.
Better those consequences than a shallow grave or a long stint in a Russian prison. He knew that a rogue shooter captured under these circumstances that went into Lefortovo probably wasn’t coming out except feet-first.
“Hey,” he said. “I need to talk to your commander.”
The two Russians just stared at him.
“Kommandant,” he insisted, not sure if that was the right Russian word.
One of them looked at the other and said something in Russian. They both got a chuckle out of it, though there wasn’t really any humor in the sound. The one who hadn’t spoken looked at Flint and just said, “Zatknis.”
He didn’t know the word, but he got the context. “Shut up.”
Well, they hadn’t shot him yet, so he supposed he could be patient. Sooner or later, somebody with some authority would show up to question him.
He just hoped that the contact he would give them would do their job, instead of just writing him off. Well, that’s why I’ve been collecting information all this time. They only know half of what I know about them, and that’s enough to convince them that I can do a lot of damage before I go down.
***
It was getting light, and as Brannigan glanced back, he could see their prints in the snow, plain as day, pointing back toward the trees. Their camouflage would help them stay partially out of sight for a little while, but that trail was going to lead the Transnistrians right to them.
And even as he watched, he started to see movement against the treeline, just starting to come into view over the hill. They had to keep moving, or this was going to turn into a running firefight that could only end one way.
They were almost across the field, though Gomez and Flanagan were keeping to the lower ground, a narrow draw running down the hillside. There wasn’t a lot of ground cover, but the terrain would mask their movement for a while.
Gogol was turning into a problem. Wade was visibly getting angrier; the gangster was clearly all-in, stumbling and shivering. It didn’t appear that Gogol was much of an outdoorsman, particularly in the winter, and he simply didn’t have the kind of endurance that the mercenaries did. Add in the fact that babysitting him had meant that Wade hadn’t been in a position to get any shots on the terrorists, and the big man must have been on the verge of going nuclear.
But Gogol was a problem in Brannigan’s mind for other reasons. He was still reluctant to just murder the man in cold blood; it might have been the pragmatic course of action, and certainly wouldn’t be entirely unjustified under the circumstances; Gogol had already tried to sell them out once. They couldn’t afford to just turn him loose, either. He’d have the Russians and Transnistrians down around their ears in a heartbeat.
Nor could they afford to drag him all the way across the country. They’d already done that with Dmitri, and it had worked on the way in, but trying to make extract, disguised as simple tourists, was going to be another matter.
&nb
sp; Of course, with Childress as badly wounded as he was, that was already going to make extract dicey, to say the least.
They didn’t dare pause. He dragged his radio out of his vest and lifted it to his lips. His face was stiff enough with cold that he sounded like he was mumbling, even to himself. He could feel the frost on his mustache. “Gambler, Kodiak.”
“This is Gambler,” Curtis replied. Brannigan had the radio turned down far enough that the words were faint, but still audible, even over the rasp of his own breathing and the crunch of his boots in the snow. “We can pick you up in a couple minutes.”
Their code had kind of gone out the window, but Brannigan wasn’t going to object at that point. They were already being pursued; comm security was of only limited usefulness. Once they had broken contact, they could change that again, but he hoped that they’d be heading out of the country by then.
However they were going to pull that off. Just get across the river, first. We can worry about the rest later. Maybe they could convince the Moldovans that they’d run afoul of Transnistrian cops trying to rob them.
He looked back again and ducked down. There were men in green camouflage now clearly visible behind them. One of them shouted and raised his rifle.
Santelli was in the rear, but was down in something of a low spot. Brannigan saw him look over his shoulder, but he was masked from the oncoming soldiers.
Hancock was not. He turned, dropped to his belly in the snow, and opened fire.
The AKM rattled and roared, the muzzle blast kicking up clouds of snow in front of him, even as Brannigan lifted his own rifle, flipped the selector lever down to “auto,” and fired a long burst. The muzzle bounced and rose, sending the last few rounds high, but it had the desired effect. The oncoming figures dove for the ground, though a couple of them fired back wildly.
Hancock got back to his feet and surged into a run, Santelli not far behind. The former Sergeant Major’s legs were shorter, but he could run surprisingly quickly for the length of his stride, and he had no quit in him.