by Alex Shaw
‘Perhaps.’ Snow noticed something ahead. ‘Bugger.’
‘Bugger.’ Racine rolled her eyes; it had been one of the first British swearwords she’d been taught.
‘Up ahead, ten o’clock. That’s the man you stole our ride from.’
‘I see him … and the Russian troops he’s with.’
‘Hang on, they haven’t made us yet.’ Snow slewed the Mitsubishi to the right, shot down a side street, and turned left behind an apartment block.
‘This means we’ll have to ditch our ride sooner rather than later.’
‘Agreed,’ Snow said.
Snow continued to drive along the smaller road that ran parallel to the one watched by the Russians.
Racine noticed people standing at a bus stop. ‘Have you seen any cars?’
Snow scanned the street. ‘No.’
‘Exactly. They seem a bit thin on the ground here, and the Russians are watching the road.’
‘So?’
‘What’s that over there?’
‘A bus stop.’
‘We hide in plain sight … we get on a bus. Stop the car.’
‘That’s … crazy.’ Snow slowed the Shogun and parked next to a playground. ‘We’ll have to leave the longs.’
‘Longs?’
‘AKs.’
Racine reluctantly agreed; even with their collapsible stocks, there was no way to conceal the assault rifles under their jackets.
Racine got out of the car and Snow casually followed suit. She took his hand; it wasn’t as rough as she expected. They walked side by side up the street for a while, until they found a row of bus stops. The absurdity of studying a bus timetable in a de facto war zone was not lost on her, but nevertheless she looked for one that went in the direction they wanted. Eventually they found the correct stop. Racine checked the old timetable secured behind a cloudy, plastic panel. Before the conflict a bus route had gone into the city centre and near the Circus, and she hoped it still did.
Around her, residents were attempting to get on with their daily routines. She had to admire the spirit of the Donetsk locals and their refusal to allow the conflict to dictate their everyday lives. She’d started off ambivalent to the crisis – it was just another foreign conflict to her – but now she’d started to despise the Kremlin for the chaos and carnage it had caused. The people of the East deserved better. If taking out Vasilev also helped the Ukrainian people, it was an added benefit.
Racine linked arms with Snow and pushed these thoughts aside; they were just another couple waiting for a bus. Snow was quiet, watchful, but to the untrained he gave off an air of brooding indifference. He was taller than Baptiste, his muscles thicker. She imagined briefly what he’d look like with his shirt off. She whispered in Russian in Snow’s ear. ‘Do you think any of The Shadows made it out?’
Snow nodded as though she had passed on a pearl of wisdom to him. His reply too, was soft. ‘The Russians were firing those shells blind; that drone didn’t give them much accuracy.’
Two women ahead of them started to complain in vexed tones about the bus service. Racine counted eleven of them in total waiting for the bus into central Donetsk. In any disputed territory there were always those who sided with the occupying forces, and the DNR must have maintained some essential services to keep the little local support they had. How many of those awaiting the bus’s arrival believed in the DNR, she didn’t know, but guessed they’d be in the minority.
The dirty, yellow bus came to a halt and the passengers surged towards the open door. The first, a heavy woman wearing an equally heavy woollen coat, moaned at the driver that he was late. The driver, in return, relayed a story about a road closed due to a stray shell. As they climbed aboard, Racine noticed a single bullet hole marked the bus’s front panel and its indicator light was missing. She handed the driver the fare and asked about the route.
Outside, the street was quiet save for a solitary old man, arms laden with heavy shopping bags, gingerly navigating the broken pavement. They took seats halfway up the bus.
Snow asked quietly, ‘How far?’
‘It’s a way yet. We have to go right into the centre and out the other side a bit.’
‘And get past our Russian friends.’
They didn’t talk for a while as even though both of them could pass for Russian, their conversation would be listened to intently by the other passengers and then probably, she imagined, dissected later at numerous dinner tables by the ‘babushka network’.
The bus slowed as it turned away from the residential street and onto the larger through road. The traffic was heavier than earlier in the day but nothing like it must have been pre-crisis. Half an hour later, as the bus drove further into the city centre, the visual signs of war damage lessened to be replaced once more by the surreal tableau of life interrupted. More people were on the streets, a ‘Press’ kiosk sold Russian printed newspapers, and some shops were open. The only sign of change was the juxtaposing of a tank, with Russian markings crudely obscured by dull, green paint, standing watch on a street corner next to a bakery. A line of shoppers snaked past it onto the pavement, ever hopeful of getting a loaf of freshly baked bread.
‘If we grabbed that tank,’ Racine said softly into Snow’s ear, ‘we could steam in, snatch our targets, and steam out.’
‘You can drive a tank?’ he whispered back.
‘Of course, can’t you?’
Before Snow could reply, the bus abruptly stopped. Without warning, an armoured personnel carrier roared across the intersection. The driver cursed.
‘There it is,’ Racine stated.
The address was on Leninskyi Avenue, a wide road where both trams and trolleybuses had run alongside four lanes of traffic – although now, only the buses continued to work. The target building was four storeys tall. Unremarkable except for the fact that it was across from the large ‘Kosmos Circus’ building which before the conflict had kept its Soviet-style entertainment shows going nightly. A group of battered German saloon cars were parked haphazardly outside the target address, half blocking the pavement. It was standard parking procedure for Ukrainian Mafiosi who presumed themselves to be above the law – even more so now that they wore uniforms and carried assault rifles.
The specific address was on the third floor, on the end nearest the Circus. A small road separated the building from another, smaller block, which housed a grocer’s shop and café on its ground floor. An Italian-style dry cleaners took up the ground floor of the building to the other side. On the side of the building a crude ladder of iron rungs led to the roof. As the bus sluggishly moved past, a group of four uniformed men left the café and entered the address. At that distance, Racine couldn’t tell if they were Russian military, or DNR.
‘If we’d been earlier, the place would have been empty,’ Snow noted.
Racine was more philosophical. ‘We now know there are probably a minimum of six guns inside.’
The bus continued on to the next stop not much farther up the road. Racine and Snow followed an elderly couple off the bus; they all waited for a break in the traffic and then crossed the street. The pensioners headed for a large pharmacy while the intelligence operatives turned left and leisurely walked back towards the target address. Two minutes later, they had passed the target and were sitting at a table at the back of the café, discreetly watching the communal front door. Snow sat with his back against the wall. Racine excused herself, on the pretext of finding the bathroom, and returned a short while later.
To keep up the appearance of being a couple, she placed her arms around Snow’s neck and whispered into his ear. ‘There’s an exit at the back that leads to the road behind and there’s a playground surrounded by more apartments and trees.’ Snow smiled. Racine sat next to him, also not wanting to have her back to the door. She held his hand. ‘Have you ordered?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. What?’
‘I got you a black coffee. You don’t look like a milk girl.’
> ‘Girl? What am I, twelve?’
‘On a scale of one to ten.’
Racine shook her head slowly. ‘Your hands are cold.’
They said nothing more until their order arrived. The other customers too were quiet. Racine spooned three sugars into her black coffee – it would taste awful, but she needed the fuel and didn’t want to chance the unappealing-looking food. Snow bit into a jam tartlet. In silence they continued to watch the building, knowing they couldn’t stay static for long. Their command of Russian and their accents were good enough to mark them out as being from Russia, but this still made them strangers in a town whose population had significantly decreased since the creation of the DNR. The longer they remained in the café the more they would stand out.
Their fellow customers looked to be immune to the upheaval; however, Racine knew appearances were often very misleading. The couple had 9mm handguns concealed in inside pockets – Racine had a Makarov and the knife whilst Snow carried his Glock. Racine was envious – she missed her silenced Glock. She reached for her coffee and her hand froze mid-air as she saw movement from the target address. A soldier in full battle dress stepped out onto the third-floor balcony, took a cursory glance at the road below, and disappeared inside.
‘That changes things,’ she announced as she snuggled into Snow’s large shoulder.
She was still trying to reassess their approach when four men – the same ones they had seen enter the building ten minutes earlier – exited and climbed into two separate dark-blue BMWs. She noted they were DNR. ‘That’s some of them gone.’
‘We need a new plan.’
‘We need intel.’ Racine stood.
Snow pointed at the remaining pastry. She shook her head. In her peripheral vision, Racine noticed the café owner was watching them. She put her hand on Snow’s cheek, drew his head down and kissed him on the lips. She felt his lips resist ever so slightly before he put his hand on the back of her head and started kissing her back. The kiss lasted longer than she had anticipated, but she reasoned it was good for their cover. It wasn’t the worst kiss she had ever had.
The pair left the café.
Immediately to their left and outside the Circus building there was a string of closed kiosks. While Snow watched the target, Racine walked farther on to where several pensioners had set up impromptu stalls. At the nearest an elderly man sat on a wooden chair alongside a board pinned with a variety of cigarettes. Partially hidden from the target building by the kiosks, he wore several layers of clothes and a fur hat; he would have looked at home in the Arctic Circle. At the next stall sat an equally ancient woman with a trolley of assorted women’s clothes.
The man was already staring at her, so she asked him, ‘What’s happening across the road?’
‘What do you mean?’ He looked up, with watery eyes.
‘That building on the end; I saw a Russian soldier on the balcony.’
The elderly man peered at the building before he answered. ‘It’s been taken over by the Russians; well, two of the apartments have. The owners moved away when the DNR appeared. The rest of us stayed.’
‘You live there?’
‘On the third floor; the Russians are now my neighbours. They aren’t bad; some of them are Buryats, from Siberia. They look like Mongolians. They’ve shared their food with me, we’ve had a few drinks, and I told them about my time in the Red Army. The DNR are nothing but the old bandits wearing new clothes.’
‘I see.’
The elderly man carried on, clearly glad of someone new to complain to. ‘Since all this started, I’ve had hardly any money or food. The Kyiv government has stopped paying my pension. The DNR claim they are looking into paying me. But so far? I get a bit of bread if I’m lucky.’ He looked up at her hopefully and then continued. ‘I have old colleagues who live in Crimea, and they now receive triple my pension. Why Russia doesn’t take the Donbas, I do not know.’
Racine focused on the intel she needed, ignoring the politics. ‘Are the DNR and the Russians inside there now?’
‘Yes.’ He frowned. ‘They brought someone in earlier. They keep prisoners there. Can you imagine? My building turned into a makeshift military prison.’
Racine started to shake and then put her hand to her eyes and pretended to cry.
The pensioner squinted and bluntly addressed Snow, who had appeared by Racine’s side, putting his hand on her shoulder. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
Snow took his cue, ‘They have her husband, my brother-in-law. He’s not from here. We’ve been trying to find where he is but the DNR keep moving him about. If only we could speak to the Russians about him, they may let him go. He’s a medical student, and he’s done nothing wrong.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘His family is from Pakistan,’ Racine whimpered, through her fake tears.
‘The man they took inside had dark skin, even darker than the Buryats. I wish I could help you more, but I have to stay here, and sell my stock; otherwise I won’t be able to eat.’
Racine removed several one-hundred-dollar bills from her pocket. ‘These are yours if you can get us inside the building. Then we can talk to them.’
The old man’s eyes were suddenly wide. ‘How much money is that?’
‘Three hundred American dollars.’
‘Put your money away, before someone steals it! That is more than two months’ pension!’
‘Please help us.’ Racine slowly put the notes back in her pocket.
‘If this is some kind of a trick, it’s a wicked one.’
‘No trick,’ Snow said. ‘Please help us.’
The old man licked his lips. ‘What would I need to do?’
*
Iqbal tried moving his arms again and found just how tight they were tied behind his back. His shoulders ached from the stress position. He had been left alone for what seemed like hours. Where was his watch? And his trainers? Had they been left at the last place? No one seemed to care.
Iqbal looked at his feet; they were a mess. His blue socks, which he’d been wearing for over a month, had turned black and clung to his feet in bloody tatters. He doubted he’d be able to walk and hoped his cuts weren’t infected. The most annoying part of all was he absolutely stank. As a medical student and a Muslim, he’d been used to washing several times a day and changing his clothes almost as often – even if it meant washing his clothes in the bathtub of his outdated Donetsk apartment. It was the indignity of the situation that angered him; there was no need for it. At least this place was furnished. The realisation that the attack on the last place he was held at was probably a rescue attempt had filled him with hope and a new energy, but that had been ripped away when he’d been taken away by Strelkov.
Now, although his surroundings looked better, his outlook was bleak. It seemed to him he was now more of a hostage than a prisoner and they wanted to turn him into a performing monkey. That wasn’t just it though. He was being used as bait to lure in those sent to save him. Iqbal felt helpless, and there was nothing he could do to change it. He remembered seeing a documentary on the British Tornado pilots shot down and captured by Iraqi forces during the first Gulf War. He’d watched it with his parents years after the events and could still hear his mother’s words. ‘Poor boys! What must their mothers feel, seeing them bruised and held like that?’ He was determined he wasn’t going to put his parents – his mother most of all – through that type of pain.
Iqbal hoped Strelkov was right – that the SAS or someone had been sent in to rescue him. But why would anyone take such a risk for a Muslim student from Birmingham, regardless of who his real father was? He was just some dumb kid who’d ignored everyone’s advice to leave Donetsk because he loved a local girl. He felt confused and very alone. In the silence, Vasilev’s questions about his relationship with Tanya repeated in his head. Did he love Tanya? Had he ever? Did she love him? Had she ever? Did they have her too? Was she safe? Was she dead? His chest started to pound. He felt as though a
black hole was swallowing him up.
He shook his head. He had to try to remain positive; otherwise, these bastards would win. That was it … if he was forced to make a video, he would appear on it with a wide smile and act as happily as he could. Who cared about propaganda? He cared about his parents and his family – that was all.
Empowered by his revelation, he decided he wanted to be untied. ‘Hello!’ he called. He waited … There was no answer, so he called again. When there was again no answer, Iqbal tried shouting. ‘Hello!’
The door opened forcefully and a DNR militant entered. ‘What is it you want?’ he demanded in Russian.
‘Toilet, please, toilet.’
‘Shit yourself.’ The man shut the door.
*
The pensioner was called Yuri and had, in a previous life, after his compulsory military service, worked on the Soviet railways, travelling far and wide. ‘Even to Tallinn,’ he happily told them both. Racine and Snow helped him pack up his makeshift stall and together the three of them crossed the road near the Circus. They drew level with the apartment building and without any issues, Yuri walked up the steps to the open front door. Racine and Snow followed. Racine noticed huge cracks in the building’s walls and the balconies looked rusty. As Yuri reached the top of the steps, the door of a ground-floor apartment opened, and a Russian soldier greeted him in the hallway. He had a smooth, round, flat face and coal-black hair spilling out from his cap. ‘You finished early for the day?’
‘That’s right. I have guests; my sister’s son and his girlfriend.’
The young soldier eyed Snow with suspicion; his expression changed when he saw Racine smiling at him, and he started to blush.
‘I need to see some identification documents.’
‘Come on, you know me,’ Yuri said. ‘You know me so well I even let you beat me at cards.’
‘You let me?’ The soldier blinked before he smiled. ‘No, old man, I am the better player!’
‘Come by tonight. I’ll have something for us to drink and then we can really see who the better player is.’