The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  Nothing moved.

  I kept the pistol up and slowly, with my left hand, felt in the pocket of my fatigues for the LED torch. I aimed it along the barrel and clicked it on, ready to fire.

  Caught in the beam were the frightened eyes of the girl I’d found under the cotton tree, or rather the girl who’d found me. I dipped the beam of bright blue light to the ground and holstered the SIG.

  My hunch had paid off.

  “Hello again,” I said, and crouched down, leaning my back against the wall of the cave. I was filthy, caked in blood and mud and sweat. She didn’t blink, wide eyes taking it all in.

  There was nothing to say. Nothing I could say.

  Outside, aboveground, the shots and shouts grew fainter—muffled by the trees and the bends in the tunnel and, hopefully, greater and greater distance. I relaxed, and felt immediately overcome with pain and nausea.

  I closed my eyes and saw my father fall, cut down by my bullet; the look of surprise in his eyes; his thin frame contorted by the shock of the shot. The tears came then, scoring hot, wet streaks into my bloodstained cheeks. And I cried long and hard. My shoulders juddered; my nose ran; saliva fell from my mouth and pooled on the ground between my feet. I felt the girl’s hand press lightly on my arm. I rocked onto my haunches and then down on my knees and rested my head on the cushion of dead leaves on the ground and wept silently in the torchlight with her crouched beside me.

  Twenty-six years, and I had never wept for him once. And then I thought the tears would never stop. Engulfed by a flood of memories I barely knew I had, I balled up on my side like a lost child and cried myself to sleep.

  23

  I woke with a start and swept the passage with the torch beam. Alone. The cave was empty. I looked at my watch. Fourteen hundred. I’d been out for over four hours. Lying on the ground by my head was a ripe mango and a hunk of bread. And next to them stood a little wooden stick man—twigs tied together with twine and a scrap of red cotton wrapped around its head. I sat up and picked it up and turned it over in my hands. The legs were sharpened so it would stand upright. The hands were stumps. On one there was a splinter protruding, like a knife or a wand; on the other, a wisp of black hair—hers, I supposed. It was crude and childlike but an unmistakable effigy of the red-masked man.

  Drawn with a finger into the dirt on the cave floor between where its legs had stood was an arrow, pointing deeper into the cave. I put the figure down and ate the mango, peeling it with my teeth. The bread was fresh—a dense, heavy rye. Soldier’s bread. Russian bread. I took the day bag off my back. It had been opened, but nothing important had been taken. She was a curious girl, but not a thief—even though she had every right to be. I drank some water and ate a bar of chocolate.

  My senses seeped back to me. I felt ashamed and relieved. Ashamed because I had cried neither for my father nor for my mother but for myself; relieved because I knew my shot had landed in exactly the right place. No unnecessary pain or suffering. Quick and clean.

  But it wasn’t finished yet.

  I took off my shirt and opened the medical kit. First, I bandaged my ribs, strapping them as tightly as I could. Second, I disinfected the wound on my throat, packed it with gauze and taped it up as best I could. Then I swallowed a thousand milligrams of penicillin—who knew what I might have contracted from Super Rebel? Finally I rubbed a fentanyl lozenge around my gums. Instant pain relief. God bless the Medical Corps. Before I put the shirt back on, I used it to clean the SIG, which I fieldstripped, wiped the dirt out of and reloaded.

  The stick man I left where the girl had put it. I wanted to repay her for the bread and mango, but, except for a spare torch, I had little of any use to offer. I put it next to the effigy and then unpicked the lucky lion charm from my wrist and wrapped it around the wooden man. I hoped that might at least make her smile.

  Then I taped the LED securely underneath the silencer and rechecked the breech.

  Good to go.

  The cave was natural: no sign of human habitation, hammer marks or blasting by miners in the granite walls. There were no bats, either, or guano—though I wondered if the colony I saw come in to roost the night before found sanctuary in the hills as well as on them. The air was cool, the temperature stable. I managed to walk at a crouch. Heavy going on the thighs, but I covered ground quickly. After a hundred meters the tunnel seemed to bend off to the left, but it was hard to be sure. What was certain was that I was heading deeper underground, and steeply so. As I descended, the scent of the chamber became noticeable. Growing stronger the farther I went, a heavy, musty smell filled the passageway. Then the slime-covered walls began to glint, and tiny drops of water hung from the ceiling, which was crested with miniature, milky white stalactites. I was standing under the Mong River. The floor was wet. I trod cautiously, but there were no pits in the rock floor. A thin fissure above, a fault in the granite, funneled a steady drip from the bed of the dark green watercourse above. I swept the floor with the torch beam. Tiny human footprints skirted each side of the mud, this way and that, and vanished on the dry ground that continued on either side.

  I pressed on.

  The floor became steeper still. The pressure in my ears shifted. I shortened my steps to control my progress. I swept the floor with the torch beam, looking for more footprints, any sign of habitation, but found none. Every few meters I stopped and listened in darkness. The chatter of monkeys and the buzz of flies had abated completely. There was nothing to hear but my own breathing coming back to me in the echo chamber of the tunnel.

  After a hundred meters or so, the passage divided. To the right, the floor seemed to climb a little. To the left, the descent continued. I ran the beam of light over the walls. Still nothing. No sign of animals, or insects; no markings at all—just unremarkable rock. I stood and listened, the barrel of the SIG pointing downward. Then in the dirt and mulch of the cave floor, a glint of color. I bent down and picked up a bright blue M&M.

  Not a thief. A guide.

  The sweet was a couple of feet along the left-hand passage. I cut a waypoint in the slime and dirt covering the cave wall, ate the chocolate peanut and pressed on.

  I kept on keeping on for five kilometers. The descent leveled out a little, but continued deeper into the bedrock. It took two hours and a small handful of M&M’s before the passage ended abruptly. Perched on a rock up against the wall sat the last sweet, red and incongruous in the black catacomb. There was no arrow. No other sign. I spun around, half expecting to have been followed, but there was no one there.

  “You idiot, Max,” I said under my breath, “it’s not a trap. Or a map. It’s a bloody game. A child’s game.”

  All this, to end up being caught out by an eight-year-old. There was no plan. And there never had been. I picked up the Judas sweet and crushed it between my back teeth. When you start running, you stop thinking. My whole life had been consumed with tactics, empty of strategy. No thought. Just twenty-six years of flight. And the killing. The endless, bloody killing.

  “Don’t forget the dead, Max,” I said out loud, “in case they forget you.”

  I swallowed the sweet and sat down heavily on the stone it had rested on. My head spun; the earth turned. The torch beam flashed wildly as I lurched to one side. My feet went from under me. I tumbled through the space of the tunnel and landed heavily, banging my head on the rock wall as I went. I turned round and brought the torch beam to bear on the spot where I’d been sitting, but I didn’t need it. The passage was now lit by a shaft of electric light. I’d fallen all of a foot onto the floor and ended up on my arse. Shifted by my weight, the stone had rolled aside to reveal a crack in the cave. That’s how the light got in.

  A roughly hewn corridor stretched out under the burning-hot hillside above. The complex was buried deep, the walls and ceiling of the cave patched with concrete reinforced with steel rods and wire mesh. The drone-pulse of an unseen generator filled the v
oid of the dank stone walkway. Cool air hissed from stainless-steel pipes that wound their way above. At twelve-meter intervals security doors with magnetic-swipe entry panels stood shut against the bright white light.

  I holstered the SIG, slipped the day bag off my shoulders and fed it back through the hole I’d just dropped down from, out of sight. I checked the dressings on my neck and my chest and walked on, singing “Bayu Bayushki Bayu” to myself under my breath. Generations of Russian mothers have sung it to their babies, mine included, warning them not to sleep too close to the edge in case the gray wolf snatches them away to the woods.

  “Bayu-bayushki-bayu, nye lozhisya na krayu . . .” Rock-a-bye baby, don’t lie on the edge . . .

  Each entry panel glowed red, locked. In each door a security window looked onto a square concrete cell. Through the glass, darkly, the silhouettes of men standing in rows revealed themselves. Listless, naked, heads bowed, bare feet rooted to the spot. Black men and white men, heads shaved, rocking back and forth, back and forth. From above, a fine mist dropped onto their shoulders—a gray-green fog pumped from long vents in the ceiling that condensed on the floor and ran in rivulets to a drain in the far corner. No faces were visible, just the muscle-bound backs of ten swaying somnambulists.

  “Pridyot serenkiy volchok I ukhvatit za bochok . . .” Or the little gray wolf will bite your side . . .

  I walked past all five doors. The same scene played out in each. Fifty men clothed in fog and silence, waiting in suspended animation. At the end of the corridor, a plastic sign was bolted to the wall. In Russian and English it read:

  Инкубатор, Уровень 4. Только уполномоченный персонал Incubator, Level 4. Authorized Personnel Only

  Beneath it, a site map depicted Levels One to Five. The layout of the level I was on was replicated immediately above me. That meant there was the capacity for at least a hundred men in the cells alone. There was no indication of what the other upper two levels were for—the armory, quartermaster stores, a canteen . . . they must all be located somewhere, I thought to myself. What looked like two exits to ground level rose in the middle of Level One—most likely coming out into the two huts my father had emerged from, and moved between. One hut was fed by a lift shaft, the other by a flight of stairs.

  My father . . . I checked myself. What’s done is done.

  Inside the cave complex each floor was furnished with stairs at one end and a lift at the other. I’d dropped down into a recess behind the lift that most likely housed the power-relay unit for that floor. But what I was looking for was on the lowest level. A bold red cross marked the spot. With any luck the hospital would still be inundated with wounded.

  “I potashchit vo lesok . . .” And drag you off into the woods . . .

  I checked the corridor again. No guards. No sound of footsteps. No obvious cameras. Scores, possibly hundreds, of people above and below me, and the only sound was the rhythmic hum of generators and the fizzing of the fluorescent lights overhead. I reholstered the SIG, leaving the silencer and torch attached, and took the stairs, quickly but carefully, heading down to Level Five.

  A stinking, bloody mess, I looked perfect for the part. My fatigues were ripped. I’d obviously not long ago been in a firefight. And I spoke fluent Russian. Despite the fact that I was missing half an ear and had been decorated with another man’s brains, things were working out well: there was nothing to distinguish me from the people who were trying to kill me. Feeling overly pleased with myself, I ran straight into an immaculately turned out officer at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Goddamn you! Watch where you’re going, will you?” he barked in Russian. Then he recovered himself and looked at me properly. My right hand twitched, but the SIG remained holstered. The fire door he’d emerged from swung shut behind him.

  “Sorry . . .” I looked at his uniform for rank insignia. One star. Major. I saluted. “Sir. I mean, sorry, sir.”

  “Name?”

  “Ivanov.” Small lies. Always tell small lies to power. We stood a foot apart. Five-ten, wiry, mean as fuck.

  “Pass.”

  “Sir, I lost it, sir, in the firefight. That motherfucker fucking fucked us. I got separated from my unit. I was told to report to Level Five to get patched up.”

  “Huh. OK. Next time take the lift. This is restricted access.” He sized me up. I must have been one of the oldest soldiers in the barracks. I hoped the blood on my face concealed my years. He saluted back. I started to move past him, but he caught my arm.

  “Sir?”

  “When you’re done, see Petrov, the praporshchik in Two-A, and get your pass sorted before some rear-echelon prick really fucks you.”

  I smiled and saluted again. “Sir, yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  He dismissed me with a “Carry on,” and we pivoted past each other. I headed through the fire doors and emerged into the hubbub of a cavernous dressing station.

  “Shto?” The head of a uniformed ward sister popped up from behind a high metal desk set to one side of the reception ward. Behind her stretched rows of makeshift curtained cubicles, a bank of gurneys and a dozen medical staff coming and going from doors on either side. Each exit was marked with the name of the service or facility it led to: SURGERY, RADIOGRAPHY, DIAGNOSTICS, LABORATORIES ONE and TWO and EMERGENCY RESUSCITATION. At the far end, one red door, emblazoned with a biohazard sign, was titled in Russian and English: QUARANTINE: LEVEL ONE INFECTION. DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED. The air was scented with antiseptic and sang with the beeping of vital-signs monitors and the muted urgent conversation that follows an emergency. I turned my attention back to the sister.

  “Ivanov.” I pointed to my ear, then my ribs, and winced. “Major Ivanov.” I didn’t fancy my chances of getting away with being a squaddie if anyone looked at me closely enough.

  “Unit?” Her accent wasn’t Russian. Ukrainian, most likely. She was angular. Matter-of-fact.

  Unit? I suspected Forty-fifth Spetsnaz wasn’t the answer she was looking for. I started to cough hard and retched. The force of it made me cough naturally, but thanks to the fentanyl, I felt no pain in my ribs. I doubled over, dribbling saliva.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” I spluttered, and recovered myself. “My unit is . . .” I exploded into another coughing fit. I looked up. She’d walked around the desk and stood next to me. A Makarov pistol bounced at her hip. She looked exasperated.

  “This is most . . .” And then shouting into the ward, “Nurse Kuznetsova!” I looked down the row of triage beds. A young nurse stuck her head out. “Yes, you, Kuznetsova,” she bawled. “Major Ivanov to Triage One. I’ll put Radiography on notice.”

  “Thank you.” I coughed again for good measure.

  “Can you walk?” The young nurse Kuznetsova touched my arm. I said I could, and she guided me through the center of the ward to one of the improvised cubicles. We passed Russians and Africans laid out on gurneys and cots and wrapped with bloody bandages. They were attended to by Russian army medics. Weapons and kit were piled up neatly beside them.

  “What happened?” I asked. “I was knocked out cold chasing after that bastard. Mortar, I think. One of ours, must have been. Complete clusterfuck.” She took quick, short steps and locked her knees. Her hips swayed. Her bottom swished under her fatigues. I waited for her to reply and I wondered what it would take to kill the natural impulse to imagine what she looked like naked under that drab green cotton. My grandfather had been so badly wounded in Stalingrad that he’d been laid out in a morgue before being evacuated across the Volga. Six days later he woke up in the battalion field hospital bed and proposed to his nurse. They were married as soon as he was able to walk.

  We entered the cubicle at the very end, nearest the door marked QUARANTINE.

  “More friendly fire,” she answered me quietly, unwrapping a tray of sterile equipment. She was wearing a Makarov as well. Everyone, includin
g the wounded, was armed. “Two units got in front of the other, yours included, by the look of it.” She turned to face me and smoothed the front of her fatigues. She nodded at me. “You were lucky.”

  “Da,” I agreed. “Very. I could have lost more than my ear.”

  “Nyet,” she countered. “I mean you were lucky you weren’t taking parade, sir. Now please undress. You can sit on the bed.” She turned her back on me and began filling out a sheet of notes. The little pistol was in a closed holster.

  “Undress?”

  She turned back to me.

  “Ah, sorry—your ribs.” She put down the clipboard and picked up a pair of safety scissors and stepped toward me. I let her begin to cut away at my shirt, from the right wrist up the arm. She was strong, her actions purposeful. Her red lips and pretty, pale face belied the determination of a trained, professional soldier. Her head came up to my chest. Strands of blond hair escaped from her surgical cap. She exposed the arm and brought the scissors down and began cutting away at the torso of the shirt, bottom up.

  “Why’s that?” I said. “About the parade, I mean.” She looked at me askance.

  “The sniper, sir. Can you believe he knocked out a whole unit, and the professor? Poor boys.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Horrific injuries, most of them.” She paused while she unsnagged the scissors. “Not that I give a damn about those apes, mind you.” It wasn’t immediately clear if she was referring to the wildmen who’d charged me or to the African soldiers I’d cut down between the huts. The Russian army was at best prejudiced, and at worst virulently racist.