With this hellish landscape behind then, the little convoy rolled out the open village gate and into the cool Russian early morning.
As they rumbled down the road they passed vehicles speeding toward the enclave, and she contacted the other section. Their results were a bit worse; they had captured no cyborgs at all, and had had to blow five of their targets sky-high. It appeared they had received some slight warning, or perhaps had simply been more alert. However, in the end it did not matter. When they rejoined each other on the road, the commandos indulged themselves in a cheer that could be heard over the rushing wind of their passage.
Alkina’s one fear now was that the headless Frankenstein’s monster of the Russian government would react as it was designed too, following procedures to block roads and stop traffic in the event of any disturbance. Countering this concern was her hope that, between the American’s two operations and the generally angry mood of the citizenry, they would be slow to react.
Additionally, right now the twenty-four hour media and the internet should be full of information, misinformation and disinformation about what was happening, so that the bureaucratic nerves and muscles would be twitching in confusion. And as much as they needed to be, her people were ready to fight their way through to their extraction vehicle.
Only one checkpoint slowed them, but bursts of AK fire from their local escort took care of the half-ready army conscripts and they sped on past. Within an hour they pulled onto the runway where their enormous airplane waited, engines running.
Like a smooth-running clock, her people loaded their wounded and their dead, and then processed the three captured cyborgs. First, they ran them through a heavy industrial fluoroscope, obtained by the locals for just this purpose. The scan revealed small beads of explosives wired into the cyborgs’ cerebral cortexes, presumably their version of kill switches in case their masters wished to terminate them, but none of the large self-destruct charges that were Alkina’s primary fear. Loading explosive-filled golems onto aircraft would have been the height of folly.
Thus ensured, the three crates were wrapped in reinforcing cladding and hooked up to oxygen feeds. If the explosive collars, the foam and the heavy steel plates failed to contain them on the long journey back, as a last resort they could always be ejected out the rear ramp, to enjoy a fall from seven miles up.
Spooky planned this mission well, Ann told herself admiringly, and I love him all the more for it.
As the locals dispersed, their aircraft engines lifted them on roaring jets into the steely Russian skies of another red dawn.
***
Olsen stared into the hunting cabin’s fireplace and enjoyed another Aquavit. Three more days to go, he thought. Then I can leave, one way or another.
The lake had been busy with patrol craft since the Salmi base had been hit. Despite the countercoup in Moscow, the juggernaut that was the Russian military shuddered onward, fulfilling its standing operating procedure, trying to catch the culprits despite the fact that no one really wanted to.
Perhaps that was why it really did not surprise him when he heard footsteps on the porch, peculiarly light though the creaks were heavy, as if massive stone statues tried to tiptoe. He’d known the two operatives had been military, not Agency, just from looking at them, and when the big man had gotten into the truck those days ago, he couldn’t hide the way the vehicle settled on its springs.
Cybernetic augmentation. It was an open secret in clandestine circles, the coming thing, especially after the nano program had so many problems. He still wondered what he would say if such enhancements were offered him.
Olsen went to open the door, hunting rifle in hand. It was always possible that someone else awaited him. Occasionally poachers poached from each other, though normally only in particularly hard times.
He was glad to see the tired and drawn faces of his contacts. “Welcome back. You look like hell.”
“Thanks,” the woman with the bandaged hand said. “Got anything to eat?”
“In the cold cupboard.” He meant the propane-powered refrigerator, which contained such rude sustenance as could be expected in a hunting cabin. Olsen was far too good an operative to allow anything that would give him away to be found by an inquisitive visitor.
“Bread, jerky, vodka?”
“There are some cooked potatoes and butter in the bin below, and sour cabbage in the crock. Welcome to Russia,” he replied with a shrug.
The woman pulled out all the food and set it on the rough-topped table in front of the big man they called Stein. “I’m not complaining, mind you, but I would rather hear ‘welcome to Finland’.”
Olsen raised his tumbler of the Caraway-flavored liquor in salute. “You and me both, sister. Now eat. We’ll go whenever you’re ready.” The two just grunted as they stuffed their faces with the abundant rustic cuisine.
Once they had eaten all of his ready food, the woman said, “We’ll go in the morning, or tomorrow evening if you’d rather go at night. We need to rest and heal.” She flicked her eyes at her partner, and Olsen suddenly realized that the big man was almost out on his feet.
“Sure,” he said. “You guys take the bedrooms. I’ll sleep on the sofa.” He quickly cleared his few belongings out of one bedroom and watched as his charges went their separate ways to crash. “Sweet dreams,” he murmured, then hummed idly as he started making stew with the rest of the supplies, and set it to simmer on the propane burner for a while before he went to sleep.
In the morning he got up and turned the flame back on to warm the pot, expecting the two to eat heartily again. tasting it, he threw some more salt in it and was about to stir it when he heard an angry moan from the bedroom.
Seizing his rifle, he pushed to bedroom door open to see the woman shaking the man and yelling. “Get up, you stupid bastard, you can’t die on me now!”
“What’s wrong,” were the first, painfully trite words on his lips, then he put the rifle down and moved to the bedside to put two fingers on the man’s neck. “No pulse.”
“No shit!” The woman quickly cleared the man’s airway, and then ripped “Stein’s” shirt open and began CPR.
Olsen pulled out a folding knife and cut away the shirt and the sleeves, exposing the man’s arms. After a minute or two of careful examination he finally said, “You’re too late.”
“What?” the woman asked between compressions. “How do you know?” Her face was wild, frantic, and unaccountably she frightened him. “Tell me!” she said, grabbing his collar with her right hand in a grip of steel.
Olsen swallowed. “Livor mortis,” he replied. “He’s been dead for five or six hours.”
His words thudded to the floor like bags of wet cement, and the woman suddenly collapsed next to them as a puppet might with her strings cut. A moment later she began to sob.
“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling completely inadequate. “Something…” he refrained from stating the painfully obvious: something unexpected must have happened.
“What kills Edens, though?” she husked, rocking back and forth. Then she whispered. “It must have been the nano.”
“The nano? Like the combat nanites I’ve heard about?”
She glared at him, then relented. “Yes. I guess you’re cleared and now you’ve got need to know. If they get in the brain of an Eden, they try to repair any damage…and he got concussed on the mission. Badly.” She put a palm against her face. “I should have thought of it.” Tears leaked between her fingers.
“Listen, Miss Johnston,” he began.
“Jill. Call me Jill.”
“Okay, Jill, I’m Gus.” He sank down next to her and put his arm around her. She turned into his shoulder and began to sob. “It wouldn’t have mattered. Even if we had gone straight in to Finland, the only people who could have possibly helped him are an ocean away.”
“He was alive! He was talking to us last night.”
“I know.” He couldn’t figure out much more to say except, “I’m sorry.�
��
“No, I’m the sorry one. I’m alive. People near me die. I’m jinxed.”
They sat there for some time, until Jill was sobbed out. Eventually she pushed away from Gus. “Thanks, I’m okay now.” She went into the tiny bathroom to splash water on her face, avoiding looking at Roger Muzik’s corpse.
“Ah…what are we going to do?” Gus asked.
“Bury him?” Jill suggested.
“Too many bears. They can smell a corpse and dig him up easily. Graveyards in this area have to be defended by night watchmen with rifles.”
Jill pressed her lips together. “Then we sink him in the lake. He won’t float. Maybe someday we can recover him.”
“He won’t float?”
“Metal bones.” Jill peeled enough of the wrapping off her left hand to show him her metal pinky finger, stripped of all flesh.
“Oh, jeez, that’s…”
“Hideous, I know. And it’s highly classified, so keep your mouth shut, all right?”
Gus nodded. “Yah, you betcha.”
“Okay,” Jill sighed. “Let’s get him into the lake.”
-18-
The Stalinesque clang of sliding doors echoed down the halls of Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison, causing a sweat to break out again on the face of Winthrop Jenkins, for a few months the absolute ruler of Russia. He’d been in custody for almost forty-eight hours, and in that time no one had come to speak with him. He’d been fed twice, a metal tray shoved through the slot in the bottom of his door, and occasionally he saw the flicker of movement that told him an eye pressed to the spy-hole.
He knew how long it had been because no one bothered stealing his expensive watch. That in itself frightened him deeply, because when the usually corrupt Russian bureaucracy turned righteous, it meant death waited in the wings, and he should expect no better than a bullet in the back of the head, the traditional mercy for the purged. It meant he could not buy his way out. Someone would undoubtedly take the bauble from his corpse, but for now, its smooth functioning gave him cold comfort, merely ticking off the seconds to his inevitable end.
A quick check of that watch told him it was three in the morning as the tramp of goose-stepping feet proceeded down the corridor toward his door. This is it, he thought. Composing himself, he put on the resolute face he had always shown to the world, determined he would go out with dignity.
That resolve cracked slightly as he saw Sharion Prandra already handcuffed and waiting in the passageway, two muscular female wardens at her elbows. She nodded to him, but kept silent as the prison guards snapped shackles on his wrists and ankles, and marched them both to a surprisingly benign-looking interrogation room.
That such was its function was obvious by the plate of one-way glass on one wall. Even so, he saw no bloodstains or instruments of torture, and there was none of that faint smell of corruption that signified an abattoir no matter how deeply it was cleaned. The guards marched the two prisoners to separate chairs on the same side of the table, and then left them there alone for a moment.
“Winthrop,” Prandra hissed.
“Shut up,” the other responded. “They are watching. Just wait and see what they want.”
A moment later an unfamiliar man entered, smoking a foreign cigarette, a mark of prosperity in this dysfunctional nation. He set down an ashtray he carried and then sat down across from them. With narrowed eyes he sucked in a lungful of smoke, then blew it out into the space between them, causing them both to blink.
“So,” the man began in fluent English. “What is the State to do with you? I am not sure we even have names for some of your crimes.”
“And you are?” Winthrop asked.
“Trosikian. FSB.”
“Might as well call it by its right name: KGB,” Winthrop retorted.
Trosikian reached across to casually press the burning ember of his cigarette against the back of Winthrop’s manacled hand. The motion was so smooth that it took him a moment to really notice he was being burned, and then he yelped and jerked back. “Bastard!”
“You really do not understand your position, Mister Jenkins. I am here because I am the highest ranking member of my agency not addicted to this.” He fished in his pocket and took out a very familiar item: a nanocrack injector. “Oh, look. I just happen to have another.” He placed one more alongside it, so that they stood like two salt shakers in the center of the heavy steel table between them.
“What’s your game?” Winthrop blustered.
“No game. I just wanted to experience this moment for my own satisfaction. Do you know I watched from surveillance devices as you briefed the Cabinet with a bowl of these prominently displayed in front of them? As you ground the proud leaders of the Russian State under your filthy American feet?” Trosikian raised a hand, and four guards trooped in.
Two held heavy leather uniform belts, and two others carried Makarov automatics in their gloved hands. Without warning, the belt-wielders looped the leather around the prisoners’ necks from behind and drew them tight, leaving them just enough slack to breathe. Each of the other two placed the muzzle of his pistol against the base of each captive’s neck.
“As I am a fair and reasonable man, I will give you much the same choice you gave our leaders. Take an injector and use it…or take a bullet. You have ten seconds to decide.”
Before two had passed, Prandra reached for the metal cylinder in front of her and pressed it convulsively to her neck. A moment later it dropped from her nerveless fingers to clatter onto the floor, and she relaxed in her seat, head lolling, only kept upright by the pressure of the belt around her neck.
Winthrop thought about it for five or six seconds before fixing his eyes on the secret policeman and deliberately picking up the injector. Instead of aiming it at his neck, he sneered and poked its tip directly into the cigarette burn on his hand, then placed it upright back on the table before he could feel the effects. Closing his eyes, he smiled faintly, looking for all the world as if he had won instead of lost.
Trosikian ground out his cigarette and frowned faintly, then jerked his head peremptorily. “Take them back to their cells. The new Cabinet will decide what to do with them.” Somehow he felt as if the American had cheated him of his satisfaction, but then he brightened as another thought crossed his mind.
Perhaps there was some consolation to be had. The other one, the South Asian woman, was not bad looking, and for the next hour or so was unlikely to complain if he paid her a friendly visit in her cell.
A very, very friendly visit.
***
For the first time in the collective political memory, the Russian delegation to the Neutral States Assembly seemed cowed and cooperative. Obviously this had everything to do with the events of the past two days. They all knew that what had really happened was ten times worse than what got into the media or past the firewalls and censors, and it had been made plain to them – by the Free Communities delegation if not explicitly by the Neutral States – that all of their wiggle room was gone.
In short, the word was: cooperate or be crushed. Or more politely: clean up your own mess, or we’ll clean it up for you.
Even the normally slow moving Europeans had agreed to the meeting and general strategy, led by a rare British-French accord. No longer would Russia be allowed to lumber along like some bullish Frankenstein’s Monster, helping and harming the world defense effort in equal measure. The only choice they had now was who would oversee the transition: the Neutral States or the Free Communities.
A triangular table big enough to seat five on a side had been assembled from the fine Swedish furniture of the Assembly Council’s halls and facilities in Geneva. However, despite the attempt to create a meeting of equals, it felt like what it really was: two powerful blocs facing one weak one.
Or perhaps it resembled a job interview with two employers who held all the cards.
Plus one. A Chinese observer. That nation had found out about the negotiations and requested a representative
to be present. While not strictly required, the two other alliances had thought it wise to grant the request.
Minister-Representative Horton of the British delegation cleared his throat in that pompous fashion only an Englishman ever really manages. He glanced left and right at his French, German, Polish and Bulgarian counterparts, and then across at the Free Communities delegation. “I suppose we can begin, now.”
“I concur.” Special Envoy Travis Tyler led the Free Communities’ team, a not-so-subtle reminder that the United States was rapidly regaining a place of eminence, if not preeminence, in world affairs. His co-consuls represented South Africa, Australia, Argentina and Brazil, arguably the four most influential members of that power bloc.
“I would like –” the Russian lead began tentatively.
“Shut the hell up,” Tyler cut him off. The others in the room stared at him in shock as he plowed on in a voice of steel. “With all due respect to our hosts, the Free Communities are not here to listen to the usual blather. Every day, every hour, every minute is precious. I am here to deliver a message to Russia, and our esteemed allies in the Neutral States, in the name of and with the full support of the FC Council.”
“And that is?” Horton asked, his stiff upper lip frozen beneath his voluminous mustache.
“Simply this: by midnight, Russia will announce that it has joined either the FC, or the Neutral States. If not, the FC will consider that nation a rogue and will do everything in its power short of nuclear war to dismantle it. And that decision will not be rescinded by future capitulation, short of an unconditional surrender of sovereignty. One chance, and one only.”
“China concurs, in this case,” a voice from the rear spoke up. All eyes turned to the urbane young man with the perfect suit and haircut who sat idly looking at his nails. He flicked his eyes upward for a moment, then looked back down as if he did not care much, despite the bombshell of his simple declaration.
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