Trial by Fire

by Trial by Fire (retail) (epub)

  ‘I can look after myself.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question, Frost.’

  Her throat was tightening as her natural inclination to respond in kind grew stronger. She wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, to save his grizzled warrior routine for someone who gave a shit.

  Only Franklin’s earlier warning was enough to hold it back.

  ‘No, Drake. I haven’t killed anyone.’

  Drake spread his hands. ‘That’s the first reason you’re not going in with the assault team. Because you don’t have the first fucking clue about what we do here, and there’s no way I’m trusting my life or the lives of my team to someone who’s never fired a weapon in anger.’

  ‘And the second?’

  ‘I don’t like you,’ Drake said without hesitation. ‘I’ve read your file, from the army and from Agency selection. Both of them tell me you’re bad news. If it were up to me you’d never have seen the inside of this briefing room, so consider this fair warning that you’re not in my good graces. You fuck up once, you give me any reason to suspect you can’t do your job, and you’re out. I assume that’s clear enough for you.’

  Frost was stunned into silence by his withering putdown, and the vehemence behind it. It was as if he genuinely hated her.

  ‘Will there be anything else?’

  Actually there was. ‘Why did you even let me on this team?’

  ‘Because there was nobody else,’ Drake admitted coldly. ‘Now if you don’t mind, we’ve got a planning session to finish.’

  Chapter 3

  Keira lay on her bed, staring up at the ceiling with her headphones blasting heavy metal music, loud enough to help take her mind off the fight earlier that day. Loud enough to dissipate some of the rage she still felt. Loud enough to drown out the sound of her mom arguing with her boyfriend in the living room.

  They were yelling about her – she knew that much. Her mom was bad enough, always pissed off or worried about something or other, always looking for someone to blame for her own crappy lot in life. Someone she could pin all those bad decisions against. And that person was usually Keira.

  Those things she could deal with. It was her mom’s boyfriend Shane that was the real problem. A strutting, macho asshole who’d shown up about six months ago, he was the latest in a string of short-lived relationships that had come after Keira’s real dad got sick of her mom and took off. The woman seemed to treat finding potential partners like throwing shit at a wall, hoping something would eventually stick.

  Well, now it had. Shane had breezed in like he owned the place, and soon set about making his mark on the household. He’d even seen it as his personal responsibility to bring Keira into line, and discipline her wayward behaviour. Her mom, desperate for someone else to fix the problems she'd created, hadn't even tried to stand in his way.

  ‘Kids her age need a firm hand,’ she’d overheard him say once. ‘You’ve got to show them the right way, otherwise they go off the rails.’

  A firm hand. Yeah, that probably explained the painful welts and bruises she’d come away with on more than one occasion, after he’d swapped a firm hand for an even firmer belt buckle.

  Shane was a real man’s man, beating up on a 13-year-old girl.

  None of it had worked, of course. In fact, his verbal and physical assaults had precisely the opposite effect. The more he set himself against her, the more determined she became to resist him. She knew her stubborn defiance was pissing him off, and took a certain perverse delight in his frustration.

  She rolled over, reached for the snow globe of New York city resting on her bedside table and shook it, watching as the little fake snowflakes drifted down around the plastic skyscrapers of Manhattan. It was a dumb, tawdry-looking thing that her real dad had bought for her years earlier, returning from a business trip to the Big Apple. There was a little key on the back that used to play music if you wound it up, but one of the springs inside had busted and it no longer worked; it just turned loosely, doing nothing. Yet she'd held on to the gaudy trinket all this time, perhaps to remind herself of him. Or perhaps to remind her mom and Shane of him.

  The shouting had reached such a volume that it penetrated even the wall of noise she’d erected between herself and them. Turning the volume on her Walkman down, she was just in time to hear the front door slam shut. Maybe Shane had thrown a tantrum and gone off to get wasted with his buddies. He’d be back some time after midnight, belligerent and stinking of beer.

  At least she wouldn’t have to listen to his crap this evening.

  She was just about to turn up the volume when her door swung open. Turning away from the snow globe, she rolled over to see a tall, burly figure standing in the doorway.

  That was when she realised the truth. Shane hadn’t lost his temper and stormed out – her mom had.

  * * *

  The CIA was nothing if not generous when it came to providing its employees with recreation space. Its headquarters’ campus was set within acres of carefully manicured gardens and parkland, providing havens of green space and relative calm away from the world of high-pressure conference rooms, busy offices, ringing phones and whirring printers.

  Frost’s mind was anything but peaceful however as she stared into the murky depths of a koi pond, catching the occasional glimmer of golden scales beneath the surface. It was a bright but chilly morning in November, so there were few people around, which suited her just fine.

  She was seething at Drake’s scathing rebuke of her, and the casual disdain shown by his colleagues Mason and Keegan for anything she had to say. But more than that, she had begun to question herself. As much as she hated to acknowledge it, part of her had started to see his criticism as something more than narrow-minded distrust and prejudice.

  He hadn’t just questioned her ability; he had questioned Frost’s character itself.

  If he was wrong about her, then she’d been lumbered with a sexist, confrontational, arrogant asshole as a team leader. But what if he was right? What if his distrust was born of legitimate concern for his own team?

  She couldn’t rightly say which conclusion was worse, but either way she’d been left feeling angry, resentful and isolated since the meeting. Most of all, her confidence in herself had taken a hit.

  The planning session had dragged on for another hour or so as Drake and the others pored over minor operational details, fine-tuning their deployment plan and testing it for possible weaknesses. Frost, stung by Drake’s harsh words and reluctant to risk further provocation, had contributed almost nothing during this time, volunteering no opinions and giving only the most perfunctory answers when questioned. She felt cowed and browbeaten.

  She’d been relieved when the charged, difficult meeting finally broke up, allowing the team to go their own way before boarding their transport out of the country. It couldn’t come fast enough for Frost. She needed time to compose herself, gather her thoughts and prepare her mind for another onslaught.

  Was it always going to be like this, she wondered? Were Drake and his team an unlucky exception, or would every assignment see her allocated to people who didn’t want her? Would every prospective leader see nothing but her murky background and unflattering service reports?

  ‘Fuck them,’ she said, flicking a stone into the pond.

  Shane couldn’t break her when she was still a girl, and this asshole Drake certainly wasn’t going to finish the job now she was an adult. In much the same way that Shane’s efforts to dominate her had inspired stubborn resistance, so Drake’s attempt to undermine her confidence had only hardened her resolve to see this through.

  She would get this done, and give that bastard no reason to fault her.

  Chapter 4

  For a few seconds they remained frozen like that: Keira lying on the bed looking over at the door, and Shane standing there blocking the exit, watching her. Then he took a step forward, his heavy work boots thumping solidly on the floorboards.

  ‘What the hell have you gotten yoursel
f into now, kid?’ he said. He always called her that, always trying to be friendly and companionable. Made it easier when he decided she needed to be punished, like it was some kind of reluctant duty on his part. But she knew how much he really enjoyed it, how much satisfaction it gave him to use that belt buckle against her soft flesh - her legs, her buttocks, her back. Sometimes taking it easy, sometimes going at it so hard she could barely sit down for days afterwards. Never the face though, where people would see and question the marks and bruises.

  Shane was smarter than that.

  Keira glared back at him. ‘Go away, Shane. I’m not your kid.’

  She expected to see his anger flare up the way it so often did, and inwardly she was readying herself for another ass-kicking. Shane wasn’t like the immature boy at school who so unwisely picked a fight with her today. His was a grown man's strength that no amount of aggression could overwhelm, and he knew all too well how to use it.

  ‘No,’ he said, looking at her differently now. ‘No, I guess you’re not.’

  Having dumped her jacket on the floor when she got home, Keira was wearing only jeans and a black t-shirt. Her breasts weren’t really big enough to need a bra and she found them uncomfortable anyway, so she didn't bother wearing one. But she was suddenly very conscious of his eyes travelling over her body, and had to fight the urge to try to cover herself.

  Shane took another step forward, gently closing the door behind him.

  ‘Guess you’re all grown up now, huh?’ he said, approaching the bed. ‘Bet the guys are starting to notice you.’

  Keira sat up then, backing away slightly. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Come on, you know what I’m talking about,’ he carried on, towering over her. Up close, he looked even bigger somehow, as if the threat and menace he represented had amplified his stature. ‘You think I don’t know what you’re up to, laying there on the bed like that when I walked in? Showing me all your shit? You think I can’t see what you want?’

  Keira didn’t say anything. She’d always disliked Shane, and that enmity had slowly matured into real hatred through months of abuse, but this was the first time she’d felt truly afraid of him.

  She went for it, trying to make a run for the door, but Shane was in her way. He’d once been quarterback in the high school football team as he so often boasted, like that made him some kind of fucking hero twenty years later. He was older and fatter now, but some of that athletic agility was still with him. And he had more than enough strength to make up for it.

  In a single terrifying movement he’d grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her roughly back onto the bed. He was on top of her before she could recover. She could smell the sour taste of beer on his breath, feel the roughness of his factory worker hands as they pinned her arms down. It was like being crushed beneath a car; there was no way to escape him.

  ‘Don’t struggle,’ he warned her, his voice low and dangerous now as he leaned in and kissed her neck. ‘Don’t struggle, and I’ll make you feel real good.’

  Within moments his hands were on her, one reaching beneath her T-shirt, squeezing her breast so hard it hurt, the other yanking at the belt of her jeans. But by doing so, he’d released his grip on her arms. He no longer seemed to care as primal lust and long-suppressed desire took over, because one skinny, frightened girl was no threat to him.

  He’d given her an opening. A small one, but enough.

  Her hand groped wildly at her bedside table, scattering the miscellaneous crap that cluttered its surface, until it closed around something smooth and round, cool to the touch and reassuringly heavy. Something she'd kept with her long after its time, never really knowing why. Until now.

  She swung the snow globe at him, catching him squarely across the side of his head. There was a loud pop, a satisfying crunch as the globe shattered in her hands, and a sudden gush of water that splashed across her face and chest.

  Shane let out an almost animalistic growl and twisted away, momentarily stunned by the impact and clutching at his bleeding face where broken glass had sliced his skin.

  She lashed out with her feet, catching him in the groin and overbalancing him so that he fell backward off the bed with a fleshy thump.

  Keira was moving in an instant, even as he stumbled to rise, still growling and shouting out curses at her. Snatching her jacket up from the floor, she tore downstairs with water from the globe dripping off her, almost losing her footing in her panic-stricken haste.

  ‘Keira! Keira, get back here!’ he bellowed after her.

  Only in the hallway did she pause to snatch up Shane’s wallet. He always kept beer money in there, and she knew she’d be needing it more than him now. No way was she coming back here again.

  The big man, swearing and bleeding from several deep cuts, stumbled down the stairs after her a few seconds later, but it was a few seconds too late. The front door was already hanging open.

  Keira Frost would never walk through it again.

  * * *

  Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine – 3rd November 2005

  Frost clenched her teeth and the old van bumped through another deep hole in what was still tenuously considered a road, the impact jarring its way up her spine, something that had become a tediously familiar pattern. Shock absorbers had apparently never been heard of by this vehicle’s manufacturer, and neither had padded seats. The cold metal floor of the van’s cargo compartment offered no respite from the relentless impacts, and she was left with the distinct impression that their driver was aiming for the deepest holes to maximise her discomfort.

  Still, she knew that any complaints would be unproductive, either falling on deaf ears or stirring up Drake’s ire, which seemed to have intensified since their arrival in Ukraine several hours earlier.

  The commercial flight out from Dulles International to Kiev had been largely uneventful, and Frost had been pleased to learn that the team were travelling separately to avoid raising the suspicions of the Ukrainian authorities. At least it had bought her a few hours respite from her teammates, and a chance to learn what she could about the city they were approaching, and the disaster that had led to its abandonment.

  * * *

  By 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had grown to become one of the largest in the Soviet Union, operating a fleet of four separate reactors, with two more under construction. The nearby city of Pripyat, founded to house plant-workers from the massive facility, had likewise grown in size and prestige over the years. With shops, high-quality apartments, extensive sports and recreation facilities and modern, well-equipped hospitals, it had been considered a model Soviet city and a desirable place to live. Fifty thousand people had called it their home.

  All of that was to change in the early hours of 26 April 1986, when a combination of flawed reactor design, inexperienced personnel, characteristic Soviet negligence and sheer bad luck had seen a routine safety test of Reactor four spiral into an uncontrolled nuclear meltdown. The resulting explosion had been powerful enough to blow the 1000-tonne core lid 30 metres into the air, right through the ceiling of its facility, as well as scattering chunks of burning reactor fuel and core materials hundreds of yards in all directions.

  The panicked operators in their nearby control room could scarcely have imagined the nightmare they had unleashed as they desperately scrambled to discover the extent of the damage. Most would be dead from radiation poisoning within weeks, as would the local fire crews sent in to battle the blazes raging outside.

  Residents in the nearby city of Pripyat initially carried on with their lives as normal, having been told only that a minor fire had occurred at the plant and the situation was safely under control. Only when people began falling sick did the true extent of the catastrophe become apparent, and a temporary evacuation was at last ordered. Twenty-four hours later, the last bus laden with civilians departed Pripyat forever.

  Over the following days, the evacuation zone would be continually expanded until everyone w
ithin 30 kilometres of the still-burning nuclear plant had been forcibly relocated. Trees and plants in the vicinity of the reactor building withered and died under the onslaught of lethal radiation, wild animals perished in uncountable numbers, and radiation alarms as far away as Sweden were triggered by the fallout that drifted across Europe. The Soviet government was at last forced to admit the truth, even as hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, known as Liquidators, were mobilised in a desperate effort to contain the disaster.

  With many records lost after the fall of the Soviet Union, the final death toll from the accident would never be fully known, but its insidious legacy lived on in the cases of cancer and birth defects that still plagued the survivors and their descendants.

  Though the most harmful radiation had died down in the intervening years, the Exclusion Zone remained very much in force two decades later. It was into this radioactive wilderness that Frost and her fellow Shepherd operatives were about to venture.

  * * *

  Frost was under no illusions that their task tonight was going to be an easy one, and her relegation to a distant support role still rankled, but she had resigned herself to it and was determined to do as much as her limited participation allowed. If things went south tonight, it wouldn’t be because of her.

  Out of habit she glanced at the device strapped to her left forearm, pulling back the protective cover to check the screen beneath. It was one of the portable gamma radiation counters, designed to monitor their total exposed doses in rads, issued to them by their Agency contact in Kiev. She, along with the others, had listened carefully during his terse briefing on the dangers of radiation exposure.

  Less than 50 rads over several hours was considered relatively safe. Beyond that, exposure to 200 rads or more was enough to induce radiation sickness and immune system damage, while a dose of over a 1000 was invariably fatal. Given the pain and suffering involved in such a miserable death, his recommendation had been simple and blunt – take your gun, put it in your mouth and pull the trigger.