by Drew Avera
She spoke of the man as if she despised his weakness. Bob wondered how much of that was her true feelings and how much was protective coloration, meant to keep up her armor and avoid being seen as weak.
“But then he died and his wife decided we were a bad use of what was now her money, and we were out on the street again.” The sneer straightened into something more personal, more honest. Something hurt and frightened and vulnerable. “I was ten. She tried to protect me, at first, to do whatever she had to do to keep us both safe and fed. But eventually, the men she sold herself to got her hooked on heroin. The drugs became her life and I became an afterthought. She sold me for a few grams of heroin and a week’s worth of food.”
“And yet you lived through it,” he said, impressed despite the fact he already knew the bare bones of the story.
“You learn quickly to make yourself indispensable. As I have with you.” She stared out at the ruins of the city. “I was traded from one man to another until I came upon one who liked to hit me. I put up with this for as long as I could, and then I stabbed him through the eye with a pen. I was fourteen.” She smiled thinly and he wondered if the memory of killing the man was what she found so pleasurable. “He was an FSB agent, and I was arrested and taken before his immediate superior. He gave me a choice, which was more than I’d ever been given before. I could go to prison and never see the light of day again, or he could put a bullet in my head and save me the suffering…or I could go to work for him and get to kill more people, more bad men.”
She pulled a cigarette case from her purse and lit one up, making herself a hypocrite for her earlier warning to him. Though perhaps she’s not worried about death either, though for different reasons.
“So,” she went on, adding pale white to the cloud of darker smoke from his cigar, “I have no love for the Motherland. It offered me nothing and took what little I had.”
“Did you ever find your mother?” he asked, genuinely curious. It was the one thing he’d never been able to discover in all his research into her.
She glanced at him sharply, her jaw clenching against what he thought might have been a harsh retort she’d reconsidered as inadvisable.
“I did.” The words were flat and emotionless. “She died less than a year after she sold me. She was buried in a pauper’s field.”
“If you’d found her alive, what would you have done?” he wondered. “Would you have tried to help her?”
Svetlana didn’t reply for a moment. Perhaps she was debating whether she should tell him the truth, or perhaps she didn’t even know. When she finally did answer, Bob thought it was the most honest thing she’d ever said to him.
“I would have killed her myself.”
Bob nodded, resting an elbow against the arm of the wheelchair and puffing silently on his cigar. He had nothing to add except his approval, and Svetlana neither wanted nor needed that, he was certain.
“The idiot downstairs,” Svetlana said when she’d burned through most of the cigarette and the sun was touching the horizon. “How long are we planning on keeping him there? I believe he has gone…” She trailed off, eyebrows knitting in thought. “What is the old American term I’ve heard you use? Oh, yes. Stir crazy. He’s gone stir crazy being in that cell in the dark for so long.” Her nose wrinkled in distaste. “Also, he very badly needs a bath.”
“I’m adjusting his mental state,” Bob explained. “He’s almost there. There’s no use pulling him out and cleaning him up until the equipment has arrived, anyway.”
“What equipment…” she began, but trailed off when she heard it.
She had exceptionally good hearing. He’d known it was coming and he hadn’t picked it up yet.
“Is that an engine?” she asked, standing, tossing away her cigarette and pulling a compact handgun out of her purse.
“A truck engine, to be precise.”
He pushed himself up out of the wheelchair, the cigar still clamped in his teeth, scanning down the road through the broken gates and out into the street. There it was, coming around the corner. It was antique but serviceable, painted an incongruous desert tan with the US Army white star on the side.
“I believe that is what used to be called a Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, HEMTT, known colloquially as a ‘Hemmet.’ They haven’t been made in decades but they hold up quite well, don’t you think?”
“Why does it have US military markings?” she asked, her tone suspicious, the gun still in her hand.
“Because what it’s carrying came a long way,” he said, “and payments had to be made to certain parties for it to pass through the lines. Relax, Svetlana,” he assured her, hand gently grasping her wrist just above the Makarov she held at low ready. “Very soon, the star on the side of that truck will have as little meaning as the house where we’re standing. It, too, will be simply a grave marker for an old world.”
And the beginning, he hoped, of a much better one.
Chapter Three
Anton Varlamov wiped his knife blade clean on the expensive, silk shirt, watching the life fade from the bearded man’s eyes. People always seemed so surprise at death, as if they thought they could avoid it, as if they would be the one man who lived forever.
No one lives forever, tovarisch, he thought silently at the man. Especially not people who think being a sentry just means standing around with a gun in your holster.
He pulled the CZ from the man’s shoulder holster, careful not to get blood on his sleeve. His black fatigue top wasn’t exactly designer silk, but blood was difficult to get out in the wash and they wouldn’t be shipping replacements over from Russia anytime soon. The CZ was well made, mostly polymer though, which was unfortunate. Anton appreciated the weight and feel of a quality metal firearm. Polymer lacked permanence, lacked gravity. He tucked it into his belt anyway.
Straightening from the well-dressed corpse, he signaled the all-clear and six other black-clad figures emerged from the shadows of what had once been a laundromat in a world long dead. They moved in fluid silence, not a scrape of boot sole against pavement, suppressed sub machineguns tucked into shoulders, the optical sights held just below eye level.
I should let someone else take care of sentry removal. It’s not a task for a Major.
He knew Vasyli would lecture him for it when they returned to base, tell him he wasn’t a young Spetsnaz Captain anymore to be leading from the front. But he still felt young even if middle age was beginning to creep up on him. He’d lose a step soon as forty drew ever closer. No use letting any of his prime go to waste.
Though I hope I don’t celebrate my fortieth birthday in this place. Norfolk was, as the Americans liked to say, a shithole, and if his own country had played a part in making it so, it still irked him. How many Russian cities had been razed, burned, torn down brick by brick over the centuries only to be rebuilt, repopulated, repurposed? If the Americans had balls, had pride, they would have moved back into the east coast cities and scraped away the ash and dirt and filth and made them home again. Instead, the government had abandoned them to the squatters, to the criminals…to the predators.
Ah well. If the Americans lacked the will to kill the predators, he and his people would do it for them, as they had killed the wolves stalking in from the wild when Stalingrad and Moscow had been crushed under the heel of the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War.
These wolves had steel-framed doors to shut out the hunters, but Mischa had the cure in his rucksack. They would have to use the plastique sparingly—there’d be no replacing it once it was gone, not until and unless another freighter made it through the drone submarine fleet and across the North Atlantic to drop another load of supplies. But this was why they had the stuff and half a kilogram planted at the hinges would be more than enough.
They stacked on the door and Mischa passed Anton the detonator before taking his own spot to the left of the heavy, reinforced steel portal. The dead sentry watched them, a witness from beyond as they prepared to demonstrate to
him how fully he’d disappointed his comrades.
Anton counted down on raised fingers for the benefit of the others, three down to one and then he popped the safety out of the way and jammed his thumb on the detonator. The crump was gut-deep, a kettle drum banging inside his head, echoing through his sinuses, but the door was gone, smoke and dust pouring out from the gap where it had been. The screams and surprised shouts would come moments later, after the shock had subsided, but that would be far too late.
His people rolled inside, the stutter of their suppressed 9mm’s reserved and polite after the violence of the explosion. It almost seemed pointless, but they were special operations and they carried silenced weapons as if it were a badge of honor.
God knows we need some sort of honor. There’s precious little to be found in this war after so many years.
Through the entrance hall, there was what might have once been a storage room but was now lined with cots, some bare, some covered with sleeping bags…some covered with dead bodies, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds, weapons near their outstretched hands.
“We need prisoners!” he yelled, knowing it was useless, that they were too far ahead. Either they’d remember the op order and their training or they’d let the heat in their blood get the better of them.
Sgt. Namestnikov brought up the rear, determined to be his bodyguard despite Anton’s repeated assertions he neither wanted nor needed any such thing, walking backwards behind them, weapon at high port. None of the corpses in the entrance hall or the makeshift bunkroom were faking it, however, and by the time they made it to the offices, the NCO had turned to cover the front.
Commotion rattled furniture in the private office down the hallway, the grunts and crashes of a fight filtering down from it, shouts from the two Spetsnaz operators standing guard outside the open door.
“Kick his ass, Giorgi!” one of them encouraged, pumping his fist as if to show exactly how Giorgi Lermontov should kick said ass.
Anton pushed through them and into the room just in time to see Sgt. Giorgi Lermontov and Corporal Yusupov bringing a man beneath them to the floor, twisting his arms behind his back and holding him down with a knee between his shoulder blades. The man was big and long-limbed, well-dressed, his dark beard neatly trimmed but his face a wreck of acne scars and damage from one too many fights.
Anton turned back to the two men outside the door, waving them away down the hall.
“Go!” he urged them. “Help them finish securing the building.”
They left with curt nods, though Namestnikov stayed, taking up a position outside the door to watch for threats.
The bearded, rough-visaged man was still struggling, cursing them in eloquent Russian, English and Spanish, promising what he was going to do to them once he got free, describing it in great detail. Anton decided immediately that physical persuasion would avail him little with this man and he wished the team could have captured someone softer, less accustomed to pain.
It is what it is, as the Americans say.
He pulled the small medical kit out of his thigh pocket and withdrew the pre-loaded syringe. Yanking the safety cap off the needle, he estimated the correct dosage for the man’s weight by guess and by God, spraying the extra out into the air, the droplets catching the light of the desk reading light, still glowing even though it had been knocked to the floor in the struggle.
“Hold him still,” he instructed the two NCOs.
The bearded man cursed even louder, screaming desperately as Lermontov grabbed him by the hair and pushed his head into the carpeting. Books had spilled out of the nearby shelves and Anton scanned the titles with a casual curiosity as he plunged the needle into the big man’s neck and injected the chemical cocktail they loosely and rather inaccurately called a truth drug.
The big man clenched his teeth and then relaxed unwillingly, muscles going slack as the sedative hit his central nervous system.
Crime and Punishment, Anton read aloud in his head. 1984. The Art of War. And then… Oh, sweet Jesus, sparkling vampires?
“Tell me these were not his books,” he pled with the bearded man, grabbing him beneath the chin and tilting his head back.
“He found them here,” the man said, laughing a bit hysterically, as if he’d lost control of his impulses. Which he had. “He always said you could tell so much about someone by the books they read. He found the selection amusing, but he never explained why.”
Good. It’s working.
“What’s your name?” he asked the man, gesturing at the others to let some of their weight off of him and make it easier for him to breathe.
“Alexie.” The answer came easy, something he had no trouble talking about. That was how you started them.
“How long have you worked for Robert Franklin, Alexie?”
“I am FSB,” the bearded man insisted, face scrunching up as if he resented the question, was offended by it. “I have worked for the Russian government for twenty years now.”
“You were FSB, Alexie,” Anton corrected him. “Before Franklin coopted you, and Svetlana, and the rest of them. Now how long has it been? When did you stop working for us and start working for him?”
This one was harder for him. He fought it, shaking his head, sweat beading on his high forehead, veins popping out at his temples.
“I work for the FSB,” he said with mulish stubbornness.
“Come, Alexie, would we be here if that were true?” Anton’s voice was gentle, soothing, trying to lead the other man in directions he wanted to go. “Would our older brothers in Moscow have sent us in after you if you were still loyal sons of Russia? Be honest with me, tovarisch. It’s what your family back in Tbilisi would want. What your kindly old mother, Anna would want, is it not?”
Alexie’s eyes had been drifting all over the room as the man made an attempt to avoid thinking about the question, but at the mention of his mother, they snapped around and tried to focus on Anton, though they couldn’t quite lock it down.
“You would do this?” he asked, horrified disbelief in his voice, his face. “You would threaten my mother?”
“I will do whatever I am ordered to do, Alexie,” Anton reminded him. “Just the way you used to. Now tell me, how long have you been working for Robert Franklin?”
“Eighteen months.” The answer was sullen, reluctant, but truthful. Anton knew the truth when he heard it. “He pays better, and he swore I would never have to go back.”
Good.
“What was in the shipment, Alexie?”
That stubborn frown again. He slapped the man’s face, not hard. It wasn’t for the pain, it was for the shock.
“Use your head. Do you think we won’t find out if you don’t talk? Do you think there aren’t other ways to get the information? You’re buying your life and your mother’s with the time you’re saving us. How much is your mother’s life worth to you?” He smacked the man again, in the forehead this time, with the heel of his hand. “Think, Alexie! What was in the shipment?”
“Duplication.” The word came in an outrush of breath. “Duplication equipment. Lots of it.”
“Good,” Anton chanted soothingly, caressing the man’s beard with his palm. “Very good. Where? Where was it being shipped?”
“The White House. The old American White House in Washington. It’s where Franklin has set up his headquarters.”
Anton laughed aloud, long and low, and Giorgi stared at him as if he’d gone crazy.
“It’s Franklin,” he explained. “Whatever else, the man has style, you have to give him that.” He slapped Alexie lightly in the cheek again. “What else? Did he share the plan with you? Did he tell you the why of it all?”
“Not me,” Alexie insisted. “None of us, only Svetlana.” A hint of a scowl. “She is the only one of us he took with him.”
“That is indeed a shame.” Anton sighed and sat back, slipping the CZ he’d taken off the guard out of his belt and putting the muzzle up against the man’s temple.
&n
bsp; “No!” Alexie yelled, trying to shake his head but coming up against Giorgi’s unyielding hand on his neck. “I told you the truth!”
“I believe you. But that means you are of no more use to us.”
“But my mother! Will you at least spare my mother?”
“Of course,” Anton assured him, sounding aggrieved. “We are not monsters, my friend.”
Alexie seemed to relax, as if this was what he had expected. Anton raised a hand to shield his face, then put a bullet through the man’s head.
“Will you?” Giorgi asked him as they let the body slump to the floor, wiping blood from their hands and forearms on the man’s shirt. “Will you spare his mother?”
Anton snorted in dark amusement.
“His mother died ten years ago of typhus. The drugs made him forget.”
“You’re a cold man, Anton.”
“I am,” Anton declared, “whatever Russia needs me to be. Gather the others. We have to move.”
Chapter Four
“Roach, Mule, get back in your mechs and head back to base.”
Roach couldn’t see Nate’s face in the video recording from Patty’s mech, but she remembered it, remembered the cold harshness of his eyes. He’d had them locked on Patty, wouldn’t look at them as if he was afraid that she would see what was in his heart. The image looked flat and washed out in the old monitor, a scratch running down the middle of it. It seemed less real, and maybe that was okay. Maybe that was why she’d hooked the monitor up to her tablet instead of just watching from the smaller tablet screen.
“What?” the Ramirez on the screen blurted, and she thought she saw the current version of the man flinch at his own words beside her. “Why?”
“Because I fucking said so.”
“Nate, you don’t have to do this alone.” Roach watched herself take a halting step toward Nate, reaching out a hand. She almost reached out toward the screen in an involuntary sympathetic reflex but stopped herself.