Red Scare (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 3)

by Mike Leon

  He makes it down the hall and turns a corner to meet Todd face to face.

  “Don’t shoot!” the cowardly bodyguard shouts, flinching and shutting his eyes as though he might be able to clench his eyelids tightly enough to stop a rifle round.

  “You Todd?” Sid says, staring through the iron sights at Todd’s nose for the nod of compliance that comes without hesitation. “Where is he?”

  “Back that way, in the bedroom, behind the steel door.” Todd sways his raised hands slowly toward a long hallway behind him. Sid pushes him aside and moves along.

  At the end of the hall, a man leaps around the corner with a Thompson submachine gun pressed against his hip ready to unload the entire 100 round drum magazine. Sid shoots him in both eyes before he squeezes off a single shot. He hits the mag release and reloads the 553, then uses the entire magazine to chop through drywall while he presses forward down the hall. He drops the carbine and pulls the FNX. He fires off two shots at the end of the hall and then he’s standing with the smoking gun in a bedroom littered with bodies. It looks like five of them were waiting in the corners for him, waiting to draw him into an ambush. He killed them all through the walls. Amateurs.

  INT. GROW HOUSE - NIGHT

  “It is not porn!” insists Piotr Bogdonovich.

  “It is videos of sexy women with big, eh, sis’ki,” says Yuri, shaking his head next to the Koschei, as they both look down on Piotr with condescending derision. “What else could it be?” Val and Vlad stay on the sidelines of the conversation.

  “ASMR is not about sex. Is relaxation exercise only. There is tingling sensation that comes from whispering. Very relaxing.”

  “But you jack off to it, yes?” says Koschei.

  Dmitry’s cell phone rings and he delights in answering it just to escape this discomforting small talk. The chatter on his phone turns out to be even more disconcerting.

  “Help! He’s killing everybody!” squeaks Grigoriy Kuznetsov from Dmitry’s tiny phone speaker.

  “You believe me now?” Dmitry says.

  “Yes! Just do something! Anything!”

  Dmitry ends the call and immediately begins barking commands at the others.

  “He’s at Volchenko’s! Let’s go!”

  The Koschei’s ears perk up, and the hitman rises to attention before any of the others seem to have fully grasped the call to action. Even as they all run for the door, the Koschei dashes ahead. His sleek black Maserati growls down the driveway from the grow house before the others have finished climbing into Yuri Moldovich’s sport utility vehicle.

  INT. VOLCHENKO ESTATE - NIGHT

  Todd wasn’t kidding about the panic room. The steel door in the master bedroom feels like a boulder to the touch. It must be a solid foot of rolled homogeneous armor equivalent. It has no window, though a surveillance camera mounted above the door seems to indicate the occupant can see everything that is happening outside. Sid knocks on a sterile looking metal intercom panel next to the door. He grunts like a gorilla. “I know you’re in there, Igor,” he says. “This door won’t keep me out forever.” This is a lie. Sid doesn’t have anything with him that will ever punch through that door. He would need a heat lance, or high explosives at a minimum, and both of those options would kill Igor. To extract the syndicate boss without also killing him would probably require the precise application of a large quantity of thermite. He knows how to mix that up, but he doubts he will find a hundred pounds of iron oxide and aluminum powder just lying around Volchenko’s house. He can’t leave or the dumb Russian bastard will jet and Sid will never find him.

  “I’ve hit the alarm!” Volchenko crackles through the intercom speaker. “The police are on their way!”

  “Do you really think they can stop me?” Sid considers more options. He could cut the power, but that isn’t likely to do anything. Nobody would be dumb enough to design a blast door that opens when the power goes out. He could try going through a wall first. Those might only be brick or concrete.

  Sid knocks on the painted drywall next to the door. It feels and sounds solid. He pries the tommy gun from the cold dead hand of the man at the bedroom door. He presses the muzzle to the wall and holds down the trigger to blast away at the drywall. All he does is expose the glint of bare metal beneath powdery broken gypsum.

  “These walls are half meter of forged steel,” Volchenko says. “You have no chance of breaking through. You are a fool!”

  Footsteps. Outside the door. Sid spins and drops the tommy gun, whips out the FNX and points it at the incoming body with lightning quickness. He is surprised by what he sees. The interloper is not another armed guard, not a syndicate goon waving an automatic weapon. It’s a girl, dirty blond, with speckled skin and gaunt features. She wears a blue dress and carries no weapons. He expects her to scream at the sight of his gun, his mask, and just him, but that is not what she does.

  “What the fuck is all this noise down here?!” the girl yells, angrily shaking her finger like she’s scolding a child. “I’m trying to do my outfit of the day video upstairs, but all your noisy stupid guns keep interrupting me!”

  Sid lowers the FNX with a mixture of confusion and amusement. “Huh?” is all he can say. The girl must have stepped over at least three dead bodies to get to this room.

  “Is it you making all the noise? Cause my daddy will own you! He’ll have your job in two seconds, you fucking peasant!”

  “Babochka!” shouts Volchenko from the intercom behind him. “No, Katya! Run!”

  Sid glances back at the intercom, then again at the blond harpy still screeching at him while surrounded by bleeding corpses. He puts the pieces together in a flash. That is Volchenko’s daughter. There could not have possibly been a more fortuitous development at this moment.

  “And I better not have got blood on my shoes coming down here,” she says. “These are Louboutins, and they cost more than you make in a year!”

  Sid moves behind her like a silent shadow. He snatches her neck and whips her body into an osoto-gari throw that rattles the floorboards and leaves the girl stunned and incognizant. He presses his boot down into her chest and turns up to glare at the cold glass eye of the surveillance camera. “What now, Volchenko?” he says.

  “You let her go!” the intercom crackles. “She’s not a part of this!”

  “Come on out then!” Sid says. “Come out or things are going to get nasty out here.” He yanks Katya up from the carpet and slams her against the side of Volchenko’s king sized bed. She jolts to awareness again as Sid presses his crotch to her nose, making sure they are in full view of the camera.

  EXT. LOS ANGELES FREEWAY - NIGHT

  Dmitry shrieks like a schoolgirl from the passenger seat of Yuri’s SUV as Piotr Bogdonovich tears past a group of motorcycles at nearly a hundred miles per hour. The SUV’s engine sounds like a jet plane and the tachometer’s needle bounces on the edge of the red line. Bogdonovich acted as a getaway driver for many years back in Moscow, where the punishment for bank robbery is to have one’s legs frozen solid in the Siberian cold, and then shattered with a claw hammer. Russian getaway drivers must be very good at what they do.

  And still, Bogdonovich cannot keep up with the Koschei.

  “He’s losing us! We need to keep up!” Dmitry shouts. The Koschei’s sleek black Maserati looks like a Matchbox car in the distance as it weaves through traffic ahead of them, passing an eighteen wheeler on the left at a speed that is simply astonishing.

  “What do you expect?” Bogdonovich yells back. “That is half million dollar car! This is Lincoln Navigator!”

  “What’s wrong with Lincoln?” Yuri chimes in from the back seat. “I like Lincoln.”

  “Because you are a hundred. Lincoln is grandpa car.”

  While the others are bickering, Dmitry notices something instantly discouraging up ahead. “The cops!” he shouts. The state highway patrol car on the brim flashes past like a white blur before Dmitry is done yelling. Seconds later he sees the bright red and blue s
trobe blink to life behind them.

  “Pull over and ask for just a warning,” recommends Yuri from the back seat.

  “You’re holding a machine gun, you moron!” Dmitry hollers back. Yuri glances down at the Pecheneg machine gun stretched across his lap, and Vlad’s, and Tony’s. He frowns with the realization that it is there, as though he had completely forgotten. Possession of a gun like that carries a Federal prison sentence of up to ten years and a $10,000 fine. Dmitry will evade all of that with his badge, but his cover will be blown, and his case against Volchenko will be doomed.

  “Do not worry,” Piotr says, pressing down even harder on the accelerator. “I escape police many times! They will not catch us tonight!”

  INT. VOLCHENKO ESTATE - NIGHT

  “I kill you!” Igor Volchenko screams over the intercom speaker in his bedroom. “I will buy army to ki—” His voice cracks slightly. “—to kill you if I have to! But I kill you!”

  “Here’s what I think of that, Igor,” Sid Hansen says. And then he slaps Katya Volchenko across her stupefied face—with his dick.

  “You stop it!” Volchenko screams.

  “Or what? You’ll call more of these dipshits?” Sid leans back for a better angle on the bedroom door as an armed bodyguard attempts to get the jump on him. The report of Sid’s FNX jolts Katya back to consciousness as the guard falls dead in the doorway, on the corpses of the two who died there before him. “What are they gonna do? Bleed on me?”

  When he turns his attention back to Katya, he sees that she is recording him with a bejewelled iPhone. “I’m recording this!” she says. “Everything you do is going on Snapchat right now! I’m being assaulted! This man is assaulting me!”

  Sid swipes the phone from her hand and forces it into her mouth. He yanks her to her feet and pulls her toward him, pressing the iPhone down her throat with his latex werewolf snout. She gags violently and strings of spittle rappel down her chin. He growls like a wolf.

  “I will hatefuck you until your tears fill a bathtub,” Sid says. “Then I will drown you in that bathtub.” Sid leans back and the slimy phone jets from Katya’s open gullet. He catches it and stuffs it into her bra. He might have a use for it later.

  That breaks Katya Volchenko. “Neeeeeeyyyaaaaahhhhhh!” she begins to scream, seemingly incapable of forming words. Her body goes slack like a catatonic and she slides down Sid’s legs as he buckles his pants.

  “Last chance, Iggy!” Sid shouts up at the camera.

  “I will kill you!” Igor says again. He isn’t very creative.

  “Okay then. Guess I’m taking this with me.” Sid drags Katya’s rubbery, still screaming, body across the carpet and over the corpses in the doorway.

  “Babochka! Babochka!” Volchenko shouts.

  EXT. VOLCHENKO ESTATE - NIGHT

  It is dark as the Koschei travels up the drive to the Volchenko mansion in his curvaceous black Maserati GranTurismo S Mansory with its cool blue ground lighting, temperature controlled leather interior, heads up display, mirror windows, 255/30 R 20 front tires and 305/30 R 21 rear with 20” forged wheels, custom sport suspension, 450 horsepower V8, performance enhancing dual double tailpipe exhaust, and 1280-watt 15 speaker sound system. Ahead of him, the mansion is in chaos.

  He slows the car as he nears the great stone front entryway, allowing it to coast closer before coming to a complete stop. He steps from the driver door after pulling the trunk tab. The Koschei stands before the projected Maserati logo on the ground and looks up at the building as he sniffs the night air. There is a full moon tonight, a hunter’s moon, and he is the hunter.

  The trunk is spotlessly clean like the rest of the car. He had it detailed this week. The company he uses is quite thorough, but even they always miss the compartment underneath which stores the Koschei’s weapons. He presses the trunk button on his car’s key fob three times, then the unlock button, then the trunk button again. This is the special sequence which opens his armory.

  The floor of the trunk cracks open, separating into two panels which lift and slide apart electronically as the trunk fills with eerie blue light from the bulbs inside the hidden compartment. His arsenal is impressive: grenades, a submachine gun, a dozen different pistols, shining serrated blades in every configuration imaginable. At the center of it all, the crown jewel of his collection sits encased behind protective glass.

  The Koschei turns the key to release his signature weapons and the case opens mechanically. A blinking green light signifies that his prized pistols have been released from their hiding place. The left is a platinum stamped custom crafted CZ 75 chambered in .40 S&W with a matching platinum 17 round extended box magazine, 50x magnification scope, matching platinum suppressor, finger grooves along the grip which were molded to his fingers, an ultra-lightweight hair trigger, and a laser aiming module. Engraving along the side of the pistol slide reads PHOBOS. The right hand pistol is a CZ 75, also custom constructed and featuring matching extended magazine, grooves molded to the fingers of his right hand, a 50x magnification scope, a sound suppressor, laser aiming module, and hair trigger. The notable difference is that the right hand pistol is entirely gold plated, along with the applicable accessories. The engraving on the slide reads DEIMOS. The Koschei rolls up the sleeves of his alligator skin jacket to uncover the matching tattoos on the backs of his forearms. PHOBOS and DEIMOS. Fear and Terror. He picks up his pistols, brandishing them in preparation for battle.

  Now he stands next to his supercar, waiting for his enemy to come to him. Tonight, the angel of death will meet his prey in glorious combat. There will be chaos. There will be destruction. There will be blood. There will be a firefight.

  EXT. VOLCHENKO ESTATE - NIGHT

  Sid exits through the front doors of the Volchenko mansion dragging Katya behind him. The girl still squawks as she thumps down the stone stairs toward the floor. Ahead of them is a peculiar obstacle.

  A man wearing a tuxedo and sunglasses stands next to a black car equipped with decorative colored lights which serve no utility Sid can imagine. In his hands are two shiny and gaudy looking CZ75 pistols equipped with more attachments and modifications than could ever be practical. The damn things are nearly two feet long. He might as well just carry submachine guns. The man stares down at the ground as still as a stone statue, until his head snaps up to focus on Sid.

  “Let girl go,” says the hitman. A flock of white doves scatters from behind his car, flapping their way skyward.

  Sid’s hands are full, so he throws Katya’s iPhone directly at the hitman’s face. The gold plated status symbol smashes into his target’s nose with a crack that sends the man reeling. It only takes Sid another fraction of a second to draw the FNX and shoot him through the neck a few times.

  As he approaches the body, he notices that the iPhone still works, so he picks it up and puts it in his pocket. The open trunk of the car contains a cache of firearms which far outclasses anything he saw at that Los Angeles gun shop, all illuminated under an obnoxious green light. Sid takes an HK UMP, several CZP09 pistols, extra mags, and five grenades. He smacks the Volchenko girl’s head into the bumper a few times to keep her compliant while he stuffs all of this into an ill-fitting backpack. Then he drags her away by her hair and tosses one of the grenades into the trunk.

  The car goes up like a tinder box. It was a stupid car.

  EXT. VOLCHENKO ESTATE - NIGHT

  Piotr Bogdonovich did exactly what he promised. The hell ride he took them on through the streets of Los Angeles was a white knuckle tour de force that had Dmitry on the edge of his seat and gasping for air with no idea what would come next. Piotr scraped the side of the Lincoln along three parallel parked cars, destroyed a side view mirror, and assuredly damaged the suspension to some unknown extent when he used that roll-back truck to jump some construction equipment, but he lost the police.

  A burning pyre illuminates the sprawling front lawn from the distant house as they travel up the long driveway. Dmitry leans forward and squints to try a
nd identify the source of the flames.

  “Is that, uh…” Tony says. “Is that a car on fire?”

  It is. They find the Koschei’s Maserati still blazing like a tire fire at the bottom of Volchenko’s front steps. The legendary hitman’s charred cadaver sizzles like a roast pig on the blacktop of the turnaround.

  Dmitry tells Piotr and Val to stay with the Navigator, and the others pile out near the flaming wreckage. Yuri Moldovich hauls the heavy Pecheneg machine gun from the SUV and yanks back the gun’s bolt. “Let’s kill this bitch!” he says, before charging up the stairs into the mansion with no apparent concern for safety or tactical superiority.

  “How did he live this long?” Tony wonders aloud. The others follow Yuri into the house more cautiously.

  In the atrium, there are bodies everywhere. Bodies on the floor, bodies on couches, bodies slumped against the walls, bodies cut up in broken glass. The original flooring is hardly visible anywhere among the gore. Dmitry’s eyes are drawn to the eerie sight of a 9mm projectile slowly skating on a crimson puddle like a leaf floating downstream, propelled by the vibrations of their footfalls or perhaps the imperceptible flow of the blood.

  They find Gafur Kumarin trying with little success just to lift his arm toward some unknown or incorporeal thing. His shirt is shredded from several shotgun blasts and his insides are mostly outside.

  “Who did this?” Tony asks Gafur, jostling his shoulder for the man’s attention. Dmitry already knows the endeavour is useless, but Tony continues to hold out hope.

  “Bodark…” Gafur rasps. “Bodark…” And then the hitter breathes his last.