by Jack Hardin
In a warehouse on the other side of the city were over fifteen hundred assault rifles, crated and ready for transport to his buyer, the magnetic leader of a Sudanese mercenary army. The weapons had to be on the train to Omsk within the next hour or they would have to wait for the next opportunity to get them out of the country. That would be three weeks from now, and by then, Pavel’s buyer would have found another arms merchant to fulfill his needs.
Pavel drew back his hands and crossed his arms over his burly chest. He took a step back from the radiant heat and then turned and looked at his son, who was still sitting at the table, examining his nails and picking at them. The sight produced a hot revulsion inside his father. But the feeling quickly dimmed, overshadowed as always by the lingering sense of disappointment he felt over the boy, something he could do nothing about.
It wasn’t laziness. Laziness Pavel could fix with a hard smack across the face or by making him chop wood outside in the snow with no shirt on. No, what Peter had was something entirely different, something that his father couldn’t work out of him with a thousand cords of wood.
Peter was soft.
He lacked the rugged hardness inherent in nearly every Russian man. He lacked tenacity and grit and fierceness needed to be respected in a growing and well-respected black market arms business. And the worst part about it was that the boy didn’t even know. Peter was quick to respond to orders, and he carried them out as reliably as anyone else on Pavel’s crew. He never complained, he didn’t lag behind, and not once had he ever stepped out of line or failed to follow orders to the letter. But somehow Peter’s bones were missing the hardened steel required to succeed at this job.
Pavel, not for the first time, began to wish he had never taken the boy. He should have allowed him to go back to America. But he didn’t do that in part because he wanted to stick it to the boy’s mother. She needed to know who was still in control.
It had been six years already since Pavel had come to live with him. Peter’s mother, after Pavel’s repeated and indignant threats, put eleven-year-old Peter on a plane to Moscow to visit his father for two weeks. She and Pavel had met years earlier at the top end of her year in Russia on a research grant. Mutual friends introduced them at a ryumochnaya—a vodka bar—one evening. They dated for months, and just before her return date arrived, Pavel proposed to her. She stayed, they married, and she quickly became pregnant with Peter. Things were fine for three years until Pavel decided to leave his legitimate employment at an oil refinery for easier money on the black market. It started with drugs, moved into prostitution, and finally international arms dealing. She left when he was still slinging drugs on the street. After months of arguing and fighting, he arrived back home one night to an empty house and a letter explaining that she was taking Peter back to America and that their lawyer could finalize the divorce through the mail.
So she returned to America with the boy, and for many years Pavel cared nothing for either of them. His business continued to thrive, and by the time he started acquiring weapons by the truckload and selling them to rebels and revolutionaries in other countries, Pavel began to wonder what it would be like to have an heir, as it were. Someone to raise up into the business—the family business—and work the ropes and call the shots as father and son. After all, he was the king of black market arms in this part of the world. And didn’t every king need a prince?
So six years ago, when Peter’s two-week stay was over, Pavel would not allow him to return home. He lived in constant hiding, due to the nature of his job. His ex could get the American embassy involved, but she wasn’t getting her boy back; she wouldn't be able to find him. He told her as much, told her not to even try to locate them, and hung up after rolling off a hearty gale of laughter into the phone’s receiver.
But now it seemed that the joke was on him. Peter was lacking, and eventually, Pavel knew, he would only be in the way. Business was as strong as it ever was. They were selling small arms to over a dozen clients on three continents. Peter was a good footsoldier, but he was not a leader, and there was no future for him here.
Pavel blamed his ex for it. She had raised Peter by herself for the better part of his first decade of life. She had sent Pavel a son that was timid and soft. He had hoped that those qualities might eventually be replaced with aggression and strength and greed and expected as much once Peter hit puberty. But it didn’t happen. Peter’s body grew, but his tenacity did not.
His ex had left him with a slabovol'nyy chelove—a weakling—and Pavel was not sure that he wanted to continue bearing the shame of his son’s incompetence.
He gritted his teeth and checked his watch. Turgenev was out of time. He needed to make a call.
The air was stiff and malicious, maintaining a temperature of nearly ten degrees below freezing. Ellie O’Conner—known only as Pascal to her fellow five TEAM 99 operatives—shivered inside her parka and clutched her assault rifle with gloved fingers that the cold had begun to render slightly less dexterous.
She peered around the corner at the long row of ancient Russian townhomes, annexed to each other in one consolidated structure that stretched over fifty meters down the street. The two-story building was old and dilapidated, and smoke rose from tired fireplaces as the residents used them as their only defense against the penetrating cold. Ellie’s focus, as well as that of her entire team, was on the southernmost townhouse, the one with a loose cluster of cameras mounted on the eaves and into the brick.
A car’s headlights appeared at the other end of the street. The car rode slowly over the icy asphalt as it made its way through the neighborhood, rolling by Ellie’s hidden position and continuing a path away from the city. It was nearing dusk, which meant another fifteen-degree drop in temperature over the next hour. Virgil’s voice whispered through her earpiece:
“Can we get this show on the road? My brain is starting to freeze.”
“What brain?” Cicero quipped.
“Six,” Voltaire said. “How are those cameras?”
Darwin was in a surveillance van two streets over, sitting in front of a bank of monitors and several laptops. “Almost got it. I’ve locked the interior cameras. Waiting for the upload on the exterior ones. Hang tight.” The next minute of radio silence was broken by Darwin sighing happily across the frequency. “The heater in this van is amaaaazing. It’s like my grandmother’s kitchen in here.” That got a string of threats from the rest of his team outside, all of them wearing winter gear that made them look more like polar bears than the elite, battle-hardened warriors that they were.
“Cut the chatter,” Voltaire ordered.
Everyone obeyed, waiting patiently in the cold for their technical operator to finish looping the camera feed from Pavel Petronovich’s cameras.
Pavel hung up the phone, incensed. Turgenev had gone black. He wasn’t answering his phone, and no one had seen or heard from him since yesterday. Now the shipment would not go out. Merchandise worth over three million dollars would continue to sit idly in the warehouse. Pavel began to pace with his hands clasped behind his back, trying to think of a way they could still get the shipment to the Black Sea in time.
Across the room, Anatoly tensed and placed two fingers over his earpiece. “Sir,” he said. “We have—”
A muffled crash sounded from the other side of the building—the side door breaking open. Anatoly, his hand still on his ear, said, “We can’t see them. Mikhail says they must have looped the video feed. There is no one there.” Pavel grabbed his gun off the table, and Anatoly took three long strides across the floor and grabbed his boss by his bicep, led him to the end of the room. “Peter,” Pavel called over his shoulder, “let’s go.”
Anatoly pushed back the sideboard from the wall and leaned down, wedging a thick finger into a small gap between the wall and the floorboard. He pulled up and brought back a hidden door in the floor. Gunfire crackled loudly on the other side of the wall. “Hurry,” Anatoly said. He assisted an anxious Peter down into the hole
while Pavel stepped to the sideboard, opened a drawer, and retrieved two small packages wrapped in black cellophane. Pavel stuffed them into the pockets of his parka and handed Anatoly his cell phone. Then he removed two flashlights from the drawer and shut it.
They could hear orders being barked out on the other side of the house. Pavel did not recognize the voices. He looked to his number one, who, in spite of the sudden chaos, remained calm and unshaken.
Unlike Peter.
“Follow the plan we put in place,” Pavel said, “and I will meet you in three days. Make sure you’re not followed.” Anatoly answered with a quick nod and helped his boss down the wooden ladder leading down to the tunnel. Once the older man was down and the flashlight blinked on, Anatoly swung the door shut and slid the sideboard back against the wall. Mikhail’s voice screamed through his earpiece. “Anatoly! Go—now! You need to—”
Mikhail was silenced by a short burst of semi-automatic gunfire. Anatoly hurried to the fireplace and slid a loose brick away from the others. There was a chromed switch behind it. He flipped it and heard a weak clatter above him just before a consistent humming permeated the room. He carefully replaced the brick and took a step back, waiting for the ladder to descend before stepping onto it and climbing quickly up its iron rails. He was up in ten seconds and shifted his weight from the ladder to the base of an exposed rafter. He crawled across it to where a small door had opened up in the wall, went through it, and crawled into the attic of the adjoining townhouse. He squinted to see but soon found the switch. He pressed it, and the humming commenced again as the ladder retreated back into the ceiling and the hidden door Anatoly had just come through flapped shut.
Ellie heard the man cry out in Russian: “Anatoly! Go—now! You need to—” just before she cut him down with a flurry of bullets from her carbine. She glanced past his body and saw a door swing out in the hallway. Ellie saw the handgun before its user appeared from around the door. She waited and a moment later saw the angry and scared expression of a man who was clearly intent on defending himself at all costs.
He saw Ellie too late. She fired, sending a hail of bullets into his torso and chest. He fell backward into the hallway, its walls now painted with his blood. Ellie stepped around his body and quickly worked her way through the three remaining rooms. “Clear,” she called out. Moments later, Virgil yelled, “Clear!” from the top of the stairs. Voltaire appeared at the front end of the hall and let the team know that the townhouse was secure. His team quickly gathered up near the front door. They had five bodies, a half-smoked joint in the living room, and a pot of boiling pasta on the stovetop. But no Pavel Petronovich. No Peter, either, or Pavel’s lieutenant, Anatoly. Faraday, the other female agent on the team, was still outside, keeping watch on the perimeter.
Voltaire addressed her. “Four, any action out there?”
“Negative,” she replied.
Everyone inside looked at each other with a mixture of caution and perplexity. Ellie had heard the man she gunned down warning Anatoly to get out. But there was no one here.
Ellie performed another quick sweep of the first floor, taking the hallways down the center and then coming around through the kitchen, the living room, and passing through the empty sitting room before rejoining her team. She shook her head. “This isn't right.”
“What’s not?” Voltaire asked.
“The interior. It’s too small.” She looked toward the staircase and the wall beside it. Her stomach dropped. “Look,” she said, jutting her chin out. “That’s not original. And look at the smudges of plaster along the baseboard.”
“Smudges?” Virgil muttered, and then behind him, Voltaire cursed.
“She’s right,” he said.
Ellie moved to the foot of the stairs and set her ear against the plastered wall. She thought she heard a faint hum but couldn’t be sure.
“Don’t knock,” Voltaire warned quietly. “If someone’s on the other side of that wall, they’ll make swiss cheese of your face.”
She took a tentative step back. Voltaire looked at Cicero and used his head to point at the wall. He and the rest of the team moved into the adjacent living room while Cicero unshouldered his pack and removed a blasting charge. He unrolled what looked like a thick strip of doughy duct tape and pressed it along the bottom edge of the wall. He took another one, stood up, placed it at head level, then reached down and grabbed his pack. “Hot in three!” he called out, moving into the living room.
The explosion was immense. The entire townhouse shook with a concussive wave that blew wood and plaster clear out of the wall. Voltaire waited for some of the dust to settle and then led his team through the newly formed doorway into the adjoining room. Their red laser sights cut across the dust clouds still billowing up toward the ceiling. The room was some ten meters long and several meters wide. There was no second floor, only rafters high above like the building was showing its skeleton. A wooden table was positioned in the center of the floor and a sideboard along the far wall. There were several glasses on the table, a book, and a bottle of vodka. A bottle lay shattered at the foot of the far wall, an explosion of glass encircling it. There were no windows. A fire was still roaring in the fireplace.
Virgil finally voiced the question on everyone’s mind. “Where are they?”
Over one hundred meters to the south, two figures surfaced from a manhole in the center of a narrow street and moved quickly down an alley where, at the end, a rusted metal door was set into a brick wall. Pavel produced a key from a pocket, inserted it into the lock, and opened the door. He waited for Peter to enter before following suit and throwing the deadbolt from the inside.
It was pitch black inside the warehouse. Pavel led the way across the concrete floor with help from his flashlight. Their shoes echoed across the walls, and dirt, accumulated from their short time in the tunnel, began to drift off their shoulders. Pavel reached the far wall, where an interior window and another door were set into a bare sheetrocked wall, a small office. He opened the door, and they both squinted against the harsh lights once Pavel had located the switch and turned them on. A tumbledown desk was positioned in the center of the room, cluttered with paperwork and shipping labels. The elder Petronovich stepped behind the desk, leaned down, and opened a drawer. After rummaging around in the back, he stood back up and shut the drawer with his foot. In his hand was a black leather fanny pack. “Let’s go,” he said. They exited the room without bothering to shut the lights off.
They cut another path across the sprawling floor, passing up high rows of pallet racks loaded down with boxes and manufactured assemblies for farm equipment. Reaching the opposite side of the building from which they had entered, Pavel pushed through another door and stepped back outside. They were on the dark corner of an empty street. In the distance, a train whistle floated over the air. Dirty snowdrifts lined the sidewalks, gathered along the base of the warehouse like a mismatched skirt. He turned to his son.
“What do we do now?” Peter asked. His eyes were scared and shifty, roving up and down the street looking for any sign of their pursuers.
Pavel reached into the pocket of his parka and withdrew the bundle he’d taken from the sideboard at the townhouse. It was wrapped in cellophane; the size of a small paperback book.
Peter took it. “What is this?”
“You are going back to America.”
“Me?” Peter searched his father’s face. “What about you? You’re coming too?”
“I will not be going with you. I have other things I must see to. For now, you return to America.”
“What? No—Father. I’m staying with you. I’m not going to—”
“You will do what I say!” the older man snapped. His breath puffed from his lips in ragged clouds of steam. “You are going to finish school. You will get a job. When I am ready for you to return, I will send for you.” He motioned toward the package. “In there is a passport with a new name, a social security card, and other credentials you will need. There ar
e also instructions on what to do and where to go once you arrive. You must be cautious. They will be looking for you.”
Peter swallowed hard. He wanted to ask his father why; why couldn't he just stay with him? But he didn’t ask it out loud. It would only serve to anger his father further. And Peter did not want his father thinking he was weak. That was when, for the first time, a repellant thought suddenly entered his mind: perhaps his father already did think that.
“When will I see you again?” he asked pleadingly.
Pavel was clutching a cellophane-wrapped bundle of his own. “I do not know. Do well in your studies. Perhaps a year or two.” They drew closer into the shadow of the building as a car slowly passed and then continued down the street. Pavel handed the fanny pack to his son. “That is full of cash. Be wise with how you spend it.” He looked down the street. “I must go. Stay out of sight and get to Gregory’s shop. He’ll be waiting for you there and will arrange everything to get you to America.” Pavel set a hand on his son’s face. He made as if to say something else but then closed his mouth and patted the boy’s cheek without looking at him. Then he turned and hurried down the street, his boots punching into icy drifts of snow as he crossed the street and disappeared around the corner.
Peter Petronovich did not wipe his tears away. They quickly froze to his skin as he turned out of the shadows and crossed the street, walking in the opposite direction from his father.
He traced the route to Gregory’s shop, wondering what he had done so wrong and why his father had chosen to leave him behind.
The Americans exchanged confused glances as Voltaire spoke into his mic and addressed his technical operative. “Six. King, queen, and jack are not accounted for.”
“Not possible,” Darwin exclaimed from the van. “I watched them go in, clear as day. I’m looking at multiple cameras. They didn’t go back out.”