by Greg Rucka
“Who was that?” I asked.
“We can walk from here,” Zviadi said. He began heading in the direction of the harbor, where the big ships were loading cargo in the sodium lights, not bothering to look back.
I followed him, thinking it was probably a very good thing I'd brought a gun with me to Batumi.
It was creeping past eleven by the time we reached our destination. We could probably have covered the distance quicker, but Zviadi's anatomy made that unlikely. Spindly loading cranes moved containers of cargo overhead, and the sound of the cranes, forklifts, lorries, and men at work was constant and loud. Perhaps a kilometer to the south was a rail yard, and every now and again I could hear the whistle from an engine, pulling out or pulling in, another part of the never-ending supply convoy feeding goods south into Turkey and Armenia.
We pushed further into the docks, passing a line of four giant fuel tanks to the east. The harbor here had been built like an inverted C, opening to the west, with a breakwater formed along the northern side, then mirrored to the east in a similar, though less trafficked, setup. We passed several outbuildings, port offices, more storage, more containers. Sweat shone on Zviadi's face, glistening orange in the lights, and as we moved further away from the main business of the port, as the noise dropped away, I could make out his breathing, labored from the walk.
Our destination was the third of three blue-roofed, Soviet-era structures, what looked to be warehouses from the outside, all of them windowless. The last of the lighting had dropped away some hundred meters back, and most of the illumination now came from the canopy thrown up over the main harbor, magnified by the water vapor constantly in the air. To the north, barely silhouetted against the eastern edge, I could make out the hulks of abandoned ships, beached and corroded. I could taste sea salt and rust.
Zviadi stopped, looking at the buildings, and I watched his tongue creep out over his lips, wetting them as he tried to catch his breath. Then he thrust out his hand to me, palm up. “The rest of the money,” he said.
“You think they won't let you have my wallet after they're done with me?”
He blinked. “What? I—”
He was to my left, so I used that leg, brought my foot up and swept his right knee. He tumbled forward, managed to barely get his hands out in time to keep from planting himself face-first into the broken concrete beneath our feet. I used my right to kick him in the side once, and then to flip him onto his back.
Then I put the heel of my boot on his sternum and pressed down, to make certain he understood.
He got the message quickly, and didn't make a sound.
“What am I walking into?” I asked him, and when he didn't answer, I gave him some of my weight. He grunted, more in fear than in pain, I thought. “Who's in there?”
“Nobody!” It came out choked. “Nobody!”
“You're supposed to signal them, is that it? How?”
He stared up at me, then nodded. “I was going to text them.”
“Who are they?”
“Some guys. They just want to talk to you, that's all they want.”
“Why do they want to talk to me, Zviadi?”
“I don't know.”
I moved my right foot from his sternum to his groin and applied pressure. He brought his hands down to try and push my leg away, but he had no leverage, and he wasn't strong enough, and when he did it, I pushed down harder. His inhale was sharp and accompanied by a whimper. I put a finger to my lips to indicate that he wanted to keep it down.
“I called around!” He sounded like he was choking, either on his pain or his fear, both of which would've been fine by me. “For your girl, the one you were looking for! And they asked who wanted to know, and I told them, I told them this foreigner was asking! They said bring you here!”
“Why?”
He shook his head, wincing, cheeks inflating. I wondered how many of his dumplings were threatening to come up the direction they'd entered.
“Why?”
“I don't know! They just said bring you here!”
I looked up from him, at the building. No idea what was inside. Alena would've shat a brick if she knew I was considering walking in there alone.
“How many of them?” I asked Zviadi. “How many are coming?”
“Two, three, I don't know.”
So double that, and the high estimate became six. There was no way I was going to take six guys, certainly not if they were who I thought they might be. Low estimate would be four, and even that was too many. Taking four by myself would require a minor miracle.
Nothing in what I had been taught, in what I had learned, either in my first career or my present one, told me that meeting these guys head-on was a good idea. Everything I knew told me that I should walk away, walk away now, and not look back.
Except there was a chance that whoever they were, they knew where Tiasa Lagidze was.
I drew my weapon and Zviadi flinched, hands flying to his face. I let his nuts go free from my boot.
“Get up,” I told him. “You're coming with me.”
CHAPTER
Six
I wasn't a total idiot. I searched Zviadi first, took his cell phone and the knife he was carrying, a lean-looking Russian Army talon. Then I scouted the building, walking around its perimeter with Zviadi in front of me, my gun pointed at his back. He tried appealing to me twice. The first time I told him to shut up. The second time I hit him, and had to pull him to his feet again before we could resume.
He stopped protesting after that.
The building was, on the outside, everything I had feared it would be. Three portals total, covering the north and south sides, facing the water and the port, respectively. The south had the addition of a garage door. No windows, no ladders, no fire escapes. Some ten, maybe twelve meters tall, and damaged enough that I figured I could find the handholds if I had it in mind to try and scale it, which I didn't.
When we came around again to the south side, I told Zviadi to open the door. Both he and the door did as ordered without hesitating. I didn't take much reassurance from either.
I had to keep Zviadi close once we went inside, because it was dark and I didn't want him trying to escape. The fact that I didn't like him or his business made manhandling him easier. The fact that it was his own damn fault he was here with me in the first place only added to that. It took a few seconds of him fumbling in the darkness with the pressure of my pistol at his back before he found the light.
The bunker, it turned out, was a garage, or had been before port operations had moved further west and south. Now all that remained were the pieces that couldn't be relocated or the things that no one had wanted responsibility for. There was a hydraulic lift, left at three-quarters raise, the pit for work beneath. A dozen or so rusted-out fifty-gallon oil drums, pieces of metal, shavings, and rat feces.
I gave Zviadi back his phone, put my gun to his neck, and said, “Text them. Show me first.”
He tapped out a simple message, the word NOW, and with a nod from me, sent it out. I took the phone back.
“Now what were you supposed to do?”
“I was supposed to leave.” Either stupidity or gall made him put hope in his voice.
“Yeah,” I said, imagining him running as fast as his mismatched legs could carry him, far enough to reach a phone or intercept his friends. “Yeah, Zviadi. That's not going to happen.”
I dragged him over to the oil drums. Used motor oil filled most of them to the brim, fetid and thickened. One was mostly empty, and merely disgusting and rank. I told him to climb in.
He hesitated.
“You want to live through this,” I told him, “you'll get in the fucking barrel. Otherwise, I've got no problem shooting you, and then putting you in the fucking barrel.”
He didn't like it, and he was almost too fat to fit, but he got in the barrel. When I moved to place the lid back on it, he found his voice.
“Please,” he said. “Don't.”
; I shook my head, tucked my pistol away long enough to take the top with both hands. “Don't move. Don't speak. You'll know when it's over.”
I put the lid on his barrel, leaving enough room for air to leak in. He could push it off with no effort, but it was either that or kill him, and despite everything, I didn't want to do that. It's one thing to put down the shooter trying to light you up; that's survival, and when it comes down to survival, anything goes. But it's something else entirely to put a round in a man who's been rendered defenseless, who poses only a potential threat. Yes, Zviadi could make things difficult for me when his mates came through the door, but he could be smart and stay quiet, too. I had to give him the benefit of the doubt, no matter how vile I found him, no matter how dangerous it might be.
I had a good idea what Alena would've said about that, too.
Lid on, I made another quick survey of the space, looking for anything I'd missed, anything I could use. There was a rusted fuse box on the west wall, near the broken mounts where some heavy machine or another had once been secured, and I followed the conduits running off it with my eyes, tracking them. The trunk line dropped into the foundation, as was to be expected, but the two others running from the box ran up to the ceiling, then separated at a junction, sending out power to the rest of the building. The lights were high-hanging fluorescents, set in naked fixtures, half of them dead.
I checked the doors, first the southern one, from which we'd entered. It opened inward. I paused at it, listened, and then resolved myself to the fact that I wouldn't be hearing anything anyway through the concrete and steel. I cracked the door, looked out, and as I did so saw a set of headlights approaching, maybe fifty meters out, and if headlights could look familiar, these certainly did.
I shut the door and sprinted across the space, to the northern access. They'd arrived faster than I'd thought, probably waiting on Zviadi's call. Hell, we could've easily walked past them on the way here and I'd never have noticed, because I hadn't been certain at all what I was looking for. I checked the north door, and this one opened inward, too. I scanned the floor, found a rusted length of pipe that I thought would serve, stepped outside far enough to prop it quietly against the wall. I heard car doors slamming, the echo amplified by the concrete all around. The water's edge was only twenty, maybe twenty-five meters away, but it was all open ground between here and there, with no place to hide. I closed the door quietly, counted my steps back to the hydraulic lift, had almost reached it when the door to the south opened and they entered.
There were four of them, which was better than six, but not nearly as good as one, and they all had the swagger that comes from being predators feasting in an ocean of prey. Each was Caucasian, the same Central-to-Eastern European stamp on his face. Maybe Russian, or Ukrainian, or Georgian, or Albanian, or Romanian—I couldn't tell and doubted they'd answer if I asked. The weak fluorescent light grayed each of them out, made their pale skin paler, their dark hair darker.
The first one through the door was the biggest of the crew, and not in the way Zviadi was big. His hands, surprisingly, were empty, and when he saw me, he saw the pistol I was holding parallel with my thigh, barrel down. His expression didn't even flicker. I was a threat that didn't rate.
Which made sense, because the second and third guys through the door were carrying their pistols in hand, much the way I was, and the last of their party had brought a shotgun with him. The door swung closed after him, heavy metal meeting concrete, and the echo rang off the floors and walls.
“Tiasa Lagidze.” I kept my voice even. “Where is she?”
The one to the left spoke softly in Russian, and the leader canted his head slightly, to listen. None of their eyes left me. Shotgun and the second pistol began to spread out slowly, trying to keep from bunching up.
“That's the guy,” the one on the left was saying. “That's the guy who dropped Gorda.”
The leader righted his head, then nodded, barely. His whole expression was as dead as when he'd entered, his stare empty, with nothing for me to read in it.
Then he turned away, saying, “Kill him.”
At least I'm pretty sure that's what he said, but I could be wrong. Everything after the word “kill” was lost when I started laying down fire.
I put my first two at the shotgun, and the double-tap hit him before he could bring his gun to bear. By then I was already moving back and left, counting my steps as I shifted my aim right. Second pistol got a shot off as I lined him up, but he rushed and it went high, and I was still counting steps when I drilled him with another two, then swung the pistol back left.
The leader had moves, already behind the nearest hard cover he could find, the two oil drums closest to the south door. I didn't linger on him. I was firing 45-caliber jacketed hollow-point, and there was no way it would penetrate both walls of the barrel to hit him. I continued bringing my weapon around to find first pistol, the one who'd spoken, who'd identified me. He was going for a set of oil drums himself, the same cluster of them that held Zviadi, and he was firing blind as he went, and his shots were hitting the floor and the walls and not me.
I shifted aim past him, and hammered the fuse box with five of the six rounds I had left, dumping them off as fast as the trigger would let me. Somewhere around bullet three I broke through, and the lights went, and without windows, the building dropped into an absolute darkness. I finished my count, and the heel of my left foot hit the door behind me.
I went outside, yanking the door closed behind me to give them the noise, checking my corners. No one was waiting to spring on me. With one hand, I grabbed the pipe I'd placed and slid it through the handle, leaving six inches of overlap on the wall, effectively barring the door from the outside. Then I sprinted for the eastern side, coming around and making for the southern door as fast as I could. I'd brought two mags with me, and I switched them out as I ran, slowed at the corner, then rounded strong, my weapon in high-ready. I saw the car, the same damn Land Cruiser, parked fifteen meters off to the side.
The door burst open. I'd thought it would be the leader who came out first, because he'd been the one closest to it, but instead it was the first pistol who emerged, raising his gun, and I realized too late that I was too close. I got a forearm up and under his weapon as he came in, forcing his gun away from me, and he fired anyway, for all the good it did him. Even as he did that he was barreling into me, and we went down together, each of us trying to get our weapons to bear, twisting like kids in a playground fight.
The fall trapped my weapon beneath him, denied me any useful shot. He didn't have the same problem. He fired again despite my grip on his arm, this time dangerously close to my left ear, and the report hurt like a motherfuck. I sacrificed the gun, went for the knife I'd taken off Zviadi, and doing it cost me my leverage, and we tumbled. He ended up on top of me, fighting viciously against my grip to bring the barrel of his gun in line with my head.
He was still fighting to do it when I punched him twice in the side with the knife. He made a soft and awful sound of surprise, then cut it short when I quickly drove the blade into him a third time. Then I pulled it free and stabbed again, fast, this time coming down into the side of his neck, where it met his shoulder. He turned to dead weight.
Then something heavy and hard skittered on the pavement my way, and a fucking hand grenade bounced out of the darkness of the doorway straight toward me.
The last time I'd dealt seriously with hand grenades had been in the Army, and that had been a lifetime ago, and all the training options that flashed through my mind came back as no-go. There was no way I could get into a pencil position in time, and even if I could free myself from the body, the nearest hard cover was ten meters behind me.
But I had soft cover.
I heaved myself and the dead weight off the ground and onto the grenade. Then I lunged back, losing the knife but heading for my gun, twisting to hit the deck on my belly, trying to get into the pencil position anyway. I managed to get my feet together a
nd my mouth open and my hands up to my ears when the explosive detonated.
The dead man's body absorbed most of the blast, but overpressure still slapped at me, first from the explosion, then from the vacuum as air rushed to return to the detonation zone. Opening my mouth had helped, and my eyes didn't feel like they bulged too much, or at least, they stayed in my skull. Even with my hands over my ears, the concussion shot pain through my head, further traumatizing my left ear. I lost my body long enough to realize it, had to force myself back into play.
I reached for my gun, rolling clumsily back to my feet and staggering to the side. The leader had used the grenade to clear his exit, but he'd had to wait until after it had detonated to leave for fear of eating his own blast. I just hoped he didn't have a second grenade. Or a third.
Then he made his move, coming out with his gun at high-ready, pure Russian-military-style. Maybe he thought the body on the ground was mine, but it drew his attention and his aim first, and it gave me the half-second to pick my shot. I needed a live one, and he was the only one left.
The round punched him just inside the hip, shattering his pelvic girdle, and he dropped hard with his legs suddenly unable to support him. When he fell, he fell forward, and I closed on him as fast as I could manage. He was cursing in Russian, trying to bring his pistol around, but my boot found his hand, knocked the weapon free and sent it bouncing a couple of meters.
I holstered my gun, then dropped a knee onto the base of his spine and began to search him. It wasn't direct pressure on the pelvis, but it was close enough, and the pain kept him occupied. He had a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a wad of bills, a knife of his own, a set of keys for the Land Cruiser, and a phone. He also had a wallet, and the wallet had an ID card, and the ID card had his picture and a name, Vladek Karataev. I put the money, the keys, the wallet, and the mobile in a pocket, then flipped out the blade on his knife.
He was hissing out deep breaths, hands clenching and unclenching, trying to control the pain. I came off his back, rolling him. His breath caught when I moved him, the shattered bones in his hip grinding and shifting. I waited until his eyes focused on me again, then showed him the knife.