by Cap Daniels
I obeyed, as the moment I’d been waiting for had finally arrived. When she lived her life on both sides of the Iron Curtain, her loyalties remained firmly on the cold side, but all of that changed when she abandoned her home to be with me.
Learning that Dr. Richter was her father only served to solidify her newfound alliance. Sooner or later she’d come clean about everything I needed to know to catch and kill Suslik. She was about to spill her guts, and I hoped I had the courage and intellect to keep up.
“Chase, there were things I could not tell you before now. I need for you to know I did not like keeping information from you, but I did not have choice. Please tell me you understand at least little bit.” Anya tried with great effort to look into my eyes.
I knew she needed me to understand. I took her hands in mine. “Anya, I understand more than you can know. Of course you had to keep things from me, but that’s no longer necessary. You can tell me anything. Nothing you can tell me will change how I feel about you.”
She pulled her hands away from me, obviously needing physical and psychological separation while she said what was on her mind. “This is not easy for me, and will not be everything, but is start. I will tell you what you need to know now, and I will always in future tell you everything.”
“I understand. Please go on.”
She looked toward my cabin and blew out a long breath. “Chase, the things I do with you in there are things I was taught to make men tell me everything they know. You must understand that you are first man I have done those things with because I wanted to please him, and not because I wanted him to talk. You are first sincere man I have known. That is why I am here. I am not here because I hate my country. I do not. I am not here because I was doing wrong. I do not believe I did wrong. I am here with you because I feel with you some things I have never before felt. I turned from everything I know because you are something I have never known. I choose you, Chase, because being your person feels better than anything I have ever been. That is only reason. Do you understand?”
“No, of course I don’t understand, but I believe you, Anya. I learned from my father that belief is far more important than understanding.”
“Okay,” she said. “That is all about that, okay?”
“Yes.”
She said, “Now, I will tell you about Suslik. There were three of him. He was triplets—identichnyye brat’ya. You killed one in Cuba. I killed one in Gibraltar. I will tell you about that later. One is left, and he is trying now to kill both of us. He is, uh, I think English word is rogue. He is out of control and very dangerous. It was not safe for me to tell you this when Grace could hear.” Anya stared coldly at the locker containing the corpse.
“Are you certain there are only three?” I asked.
“Yes, I am certain.”
“Does he have a support network?” I tried to avoid sounding like I was interrogating her, but I needed to know some things for which she was my only source.
She seemed to understand my plight. She seemed to understand so many things that I did not.
“He did have very strong network, but no more. He has gone mad. He is like angry bear now. He is not thinking. He is acting in passion and anger. He is now unpredictable and more dangerous than you can know.” She sighed. “I promise I will tell you everything you want to know when there is time, but now, you know what you must know to finish and stay alive.” She placed her hands on my cheeks. “I love you, my Chasechka.”
Before I could respond, she stood, pulled her pistol from a small bag on the chart table, and slid it into her waistband. Then she went into my cabin and returned with her sniper rifle that seemed to fit perfectly in her hands. I followed her through the companionway and into the cockpit where we both froze in place at the horrifying sight in front of us.
Dr. Richter was lying across the seat, desperately holding his right shoulder as blood poured through his fingers. Anya struck me hard with her hand, pushing me back through the companionway and down into the galley. She grabbed her father under the armpits and dragged him into the cabin where she quickly went to work inspecting his wound.
I saw the fear in her eyes as she applied a pressure dressing and tried to get the bleeding under control. The next few moments of our lives would feel like hours, and it would be a long time before we could get Dr. Richter to the medical care he desperately needed.
“Father . . .” she spoke reassuringly. “Is not bad. Stay down. You will be okay.”
Anya curled her lips and growled. “He tried to kill my father. Now I will send him to Hell.”
38
Comrade Colonel
Any thought we had of being the predator in this deadly game had vanished. We had become the prey. Dr. Richter’s gunshot wound was a chilling omen of the danger that lay across the waves. The determination on Anya’s face told me she was devising a plan to drag Suslik into his own private Hell.
“Chase, you must start engine. I do not know what boat Anatoly is using, but I know is not sailing boat. I know we cannot go faster than him, so we must think faster.”
I grabbed a pair of binoculars from a locker and shoved them into Anya’s hands. “I’m going outside to get us under power and get the sails down. I’ll turn us through a full circle. You find him!”
My words sounded more like an order and less like a plan, but Anya offered no objection as she pressed the binoculars to her eyes and took her place at a starboard porthole.
I slithered through the companionway and onto the deck of the cockpit. I pressed the starter switch and heard the diesel purr to life. We’d been sailing on a beam reach with the sails flying over the port side, so I turned the wheel to the right. As the bow passed through the wind, the sails luffed and howled their protest at being blown in line with the centerline of the boat and losing their ability to produce lift. I opened the halyard clutches, allowing both the main and jib to fall to the deck. I continued pulling Aegis through the turn, determined to give Anya a complete three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the water around us. It was my hope that she would spot Suslik before he could get off another shot at us. I certainly didn’t need rifle rounds bouncing around my boat.
I couldn’t resist quick-peeking over the coaming as we continued our slow, lumbering turn. Anya was much safer down below with ample concealment, but her vision was limited by the combination of binoculars and the small porthole. During one of my peeks over the coaming, I caught a glimpse of a black silhouette that appeared to be powering directly for us.
Just then, I heard Anya start issuing orders through the companionway. “Stop turning, now!”
I quickly rotated the wheel, bringing the rudder amidships, and stopping our turn. We rolled out on a steady course broadside to the wind, waves, and the oncoming vessel. It was not only the worst possible position to place a sailboat for stability, but it also presented a massive target for our aggressor. Anya obviously had a plan, and I had to trust her.
I couldn’t resist poking my head over the coaming just once more to see how bad our situation had become. As my eyes rose clear of the fiberglass, I heard the cracking report of Anya’s rifle from the cabin down below. Anya had opened fire on the oncoming boat, so I locked the wheel and dived headfirst through the companionway, landing at Anya’s feet. I rolled onto my back and looked up at her, but she was not looking back at me.
Her feet were planted like stones on the cabin sole, and her eyes were focused ahead. Her right eye glared through the scope, and her left scanned across the top of her rifle through the open porthole. She cycled the bolt, and the spent .308 caliber shell casing bounced across the cabin deck, smoking and rolling as Aegis wallowed on the waves.
“Tell me what you’re doing!”
Without changing her position, she replied, “I want him to turn so I can shoot engine.”
The rifle roared again, and the recoil drove Anya’s body several inches backward, but she was unfazed by the jolt. As the barrel rose and fell powerfully in the porthole,
she cycled the bolt with practiced precision. Just as the rifle came to rest, she squeezed the trigger and again absorbed the pounding recoil. This time, she didn’t cycle the bolt, and instead kept her eye focused through the scope.
Without celebration, she said, “I did it. You must quickly turn toward him so we can be smaller target. His boat is dead. Now Anatoly will fight.”
I ran up through the companionway and quickly freed the wheel lock. I turned hard over to bring us bow-on toward Suslik’s crippled boat, and Anya scampered out of the cabin and crawled forward, burying herself in the head sail that was piled on the foredeck. She took up a perfect firing position inside the concealment of the sail, but she had no cover. The sail wouldn’t stop any bullet Suslik would inevitably fire at us.
I tried to keep my head as low as possible and keep us pointed directly at Suslik. The instant I turned slightly to see the bobbing vessel, I heard something whistle past my head. I turned to watch the flying object land in the water in my wake.
The list of things the missile could’ve been was extremely short, so it didn’t take me long to settle on the terrifying fact that it was a fired grenade. Before I could come up with a plan to react to the next incomer, I heard Anya yell, “Granatomyot!”
In any language, “grenade launcher” sounds ominous.
Grenadiers use a technique not unlike the tactics of larger artillery gunners. They carefully observe the first fired round and adjust the following rounds to correct the first miss. Gunners referred to this technique as walking in.
I watched the second grenade splash harmlessly abeam our starboard side less than ten feet away. The next round would be anything but harmless.
In a desperate attempt to disrupt his walking in, I pulled the power back on the diesel and forced the transmission into reverse. I opened the throttle and felt my heavy boat begin to bleed off forward momentum. Suslik would calculate his next shot based on our previous speed, so if I could get Aegis stopped, or even better, moving backward, his next round would fall short of our bow. That would give Anya another few seconds to put some more lead into Suslik’s lap. She was firing relentlessly and still yelling at me between the bellows of the rifle.
I couldn’t understand most of what she was yelling, but I did hear what I thought was the best possible idea. She yelled, “Put raft in water!”
I left the wheel and dived for the davits where the dinghy was hanging. I grabbed the painter and quickly secured it to a stern cleat.
Anya yelled, “YA udaril yego!”
Did she say she hit him?
Unsure if I’d heard her correctly, I freed the lines securing the dinghy to the davits and heard the small boat splash into the water at Aegis’s stern. I didn’t watch the dinghy fall, and I lunged back to the wheel to continue my clumsy, lumbering maneuvers to avoid the next grenade. Instead of hearing another incoming grenade, I saw Anya walking backward toward me with her rifle still trained on the bobbing boat in front of us. I had heard her correctly. She hit him, but she was clearly concerned that the fight may not be over.
She stepped down into the cockpit and handed me the rifle. “Watch him closely. I am going to check on Father.”
I shouldered the rifle and took cover behind the main mast. The optics of Anya’s scope were much better than my binoculars. I saw Suslik’s body sprawled awkwardly across the gunwale of the powerboat. If he wasn’t dead, he was doing a very good impersonation of a very dead bad guy. I watched for his chest to rise and fall, but he lay there motionless. I stomped my foot on the deck and Anya stuck her head through a hatch.
I glanced down at her. “You hit him all right. He’s definitely dead, you little sniper.”
She pulled herself upwards through the hatch, exposing her head and shoulders, and peered across the bow toward Suslik’s boat. “I told you I could shoot.”
She went back through the hatch and quickly reappeared in the cockpit with her father close behind. His eyes were bloodshot, and his face was deathly pale, but he was walking and appeared to be in good spirits.
“He needs doctor,” she said, pointing toward the badly wounded shoulder.
Dr. Richter protested, “There’s no time for doctors right now. We have work to do. We have to do something that should’ve been done a long time ago.”
We were going after Dmitri Barkov.
“I have plan, but you will not like.” Anya surveyed Aegis. “I have plan to bring Barkov to me, to us, but you must give up your home, Chase.”
No matter what her plan, I was onboard, despite the cost.
“Bring guns, knives, ropes, and blankets, and get in raft.” She was going to call the dinghy a raft no matter how much I opposed.
I followed her direction and climbed into the dinghy with her and Dr. Richter. He started the engine and began piloting one-handed toward Suslik’s boat. As we approached, Anya lay over the bow with her pistol pointed cautiously toward the gopher’s dead body.
She finally accepted that he was dead, lowered her pistol, and knelt on the gunwale as we came alongside the much larger powerboat. She tied the dinghy to a cleat, and the three of us leapt aboard Suslik’s stolen powerboat with marine patrol markings emblazoned along each side of the hull.
She wasted no time grabbing Suslik by his hair and lifting his head from the deck. His dead eyes were still open. He looked identical to the man I killed in Havana, and no doubt, exactly like the man Anya killed in Gibraltar.
Anya pressed her pistol to the right shoulder of Suslik’s corpse. In terrifyingly cold Russian, she whispered, “You shot my father in his shoulder, and now you will spend your death wearing the same wound.”
She pulled the trigger twice, and watched flesh, bone, and blood fill the air as the dead man’s body rolled slowly into the dinghy. She untied the painter and let the dinghy drift away. Dr. Richter and I were helpless to do anything besides play our roles—whatever they were—in Anya’s plan.
She took a seat on the deck and motioned for us to join her as low as possible.
“Anastasia, you must tell us what you’re doing,” Dr. Richter said.
“We are waiting, Father. We must wait for Barkov. He will come when he sees fire.”
She lifted Suslik’s grenade launcher from the deck and loaded an incendiary grenade into the tube. She frowned painfully and looked at me. “I am sorry, Chase. There is no other way.” She pulled the trigger, and the grenade left the tube with the tell-tale thump. I watched its arcing trail through the air and felt my stomach turn as the grenade pierced the deck of my boat. The incendiary grenade ignited a fire that consumed my home in orange flames, and I watched as smoke billowed from Aegis.
Dr. Richter watched what had been Ace’s beloved boat, and my home, become reduced to black smoke that must’ve been visible for a hundred miles.
“I am so sorry, Chase, but there is no other way,” Anya said again. “Now we must set trap.”
Her plan was becoming clear, and it was going to work if she was correct about Barkov being close enough to see the smoke.
“You must sit here, Father.” She helped place him in the seat behind the wheel, then leaned him forward across the console with the grenade launcher perched precariously in his arms. “Your body is same shape and size as Anatoly. You must make Barkov believe you are Suslik.” Anya stepped back and looked at her father. “Yes, will work. Now we must hide.”
She and I lay beneath a pile of canvas and fenders near the bow of the boat and pulled a blanket across us. We didn’t have to wait long.
Dr. Richter whispered, “There’s a boat coming. A big boat. And it’s definitely not the coast guard.”
I snuck a peek across the gunwale, and what I saw made me shake my head in amazement at Anya’s ability to predict Barkov’s moves. Coming toward us with impressive speed was a luxury yacht nearly identical to the one I’d assaulted in Havana. It could be none other than Dmitri Barkov.
The yacht came alongside, and Dr. Richter began his charade. He moaned and lifted his
head just as a wounded Suslik would’ve done.
At that moment, the unmistakable voice of Dmitri Barkov filled the air. “Anatoliy, ty v poryadke?”
Dr. Richter stood up, faced Barkov, and leveled his pistol at the Russian’s barrel chest. “Surprise, Dmitri. I’m not Anatoly, and Anatoly is definitely not all right. In fact, he’s burning in Hell right now, and you’ll soon be joining him.”
Barkov froze as Anya and I sprang from our concealment with pistols drawn. We leapt aboard the yacht, and Anya wasted no time going to work. She locked her heel behind Barkov’s knee and drove him into a deck chair with astonishing speed. I helped her tie him in place as he bellowed for help. Anya drove her elbow sharply into his face, crushing his lips against his teeth. Blood gushed from his mouth, and his yelling ceased.
Dr. Richter climbed aboard with his bandaged shoulder still oozing blood. “You two go secure the rest of the boat. I’ll keep my old friend company until you get back.”
As Anya and I left the stern deck of the yacht, I heard Barkov say, “Comrade Colonel Richter, so you are still alive.”
We cleared the remainder of the yacht, finding only a skeleton crew and staff. We ushered each of them overboard and into the crippled powerboat. Certain that no one was left aboard other than Dr. Richter and Barkov, Anya and I returned to the stern.
In angry Russian, Barkov barked, “What have you done, Anya? Why have you brought this to me? I gave you everything. I made you what you are. Without me, you would be a peasant, an orphan.”
Anya stared stoically into Barkov’s eyes. In Russian, she said, “No, you made me an orphan when you cut out my mother’s heart. You killed my mother, Katerina Burinkova, so she could not give her heart to my father—to this man. You turned me into this thing that I am—this thing that until now has only known killing and following orders. Your orders. You made me what I am, and now I will show you how deadly your creation has become.”