Mikail and his guards were congregated in the center of the gym as Vladimir approached and began to share his report. Mikail and his people, who were discussing where next to search for Vasily, paused as Vladimir brought them up to speed on his failed hunt.
The group of men stood and talked around a table laden with a rudimentary mockup of Warwick, tracing with their fingers several possible alternatives. There was a quiet, scientific exactitude to their conversation, and just as they were beginning to argue about whether two crossing streets had been properly searched, and just as Vladimir was trying to assure them that they had, the doors to the gym burst open and events accelerated.
Thinking that he had more than half of his twenty-four hours left, and planning to use all of them before surrendering, Mikail was quite surprised when the Spetznaz leadership, along with the coalition spokesman, rushed into the gym and arrested everyone among the revolutionary leadership on the spot. “Gentlemen, surrender your arms,” said Yuri Belov, newly elected spokesman for the townspeople. In Russian, the words sounded like an overly harsh insult.
Mikail and Vladimir looked at the array of Special Forces, their guns pointed down toward the ground but their muscles tensed, ready to respond if coercion was needed. Mikail realized that it would be hopeless to resist. He glanced at Vladimir, fearful for a moment that, knowing no other language than power, he might attempt to fight his way out. He raised his hands to waive off this possibility and spread them calmly, as if in supplication. A Spetznaz solider approached and placed handcuffs around his upturned wrists.
The dismantling of Mikail’s team proceeded quickly, in a manner common throughout history to that of all failed revolutionary movements. Those few at the top were held accountable for the actions of the many beneath. Low-level gunmen and soldiers of the Youth Revolutionary Forces were only arrested if they were guilty of some particularly heinous crime. For the most part, the foot soldiers just switched sides. Most of them, in fact, were re-tasked as gophers and servants to the Spetznaz teams and their new coalition overlords.
If it seemed from this ceremonial display that the Spetznaz were now in the control of the people, a quick inspection of the entire gym would have put that notion to rest. At that very moment, the Russian officers in the basement kept up their work interrogating the oldlings, working with battery-powered lights that had been protected from the EMP. They worked their interrogations as if no change in regime had taken place at all, because for them, it had not. They cared not who was nominally in charge, since the interrogation of the old spies, the collection of intelligence, had been the only reason for all of this anyway. Front-men come and go… presidents, prime-ministers, magistrates, even revolutionaries, and they are deceived if they think that their power is anything other than illusory. The Russian agents were preparing their case, laying the predicate for what would eventually come. The broader war could not commence until the Russians knew the names and whereabouts of every Warwickian in Russia. In the Russian homeland, a thorough search through houses, a turning over of stones, and the intensive location of traitors who would be held accountable for their actions would take place one day based on their findings.
Recriminations.
Occasionally, or maybe intermittently, like the pause between swipes of a wiper blade across a windshield in a rainstorm, a body would be hauled up from the locker rooms. It looked like that moment of clarity between the blades, if only one could see it between the drops of rain that otherwise pummeled one’s vision and spread out on the protective glass leaving only an impression of reality. Two soldiers were walking upward on the stairs, struggling, lifting a body bag which they would then carry to the doors of the gymnasium, swaying from side to the side with the dead weight of a new corpse, hauling the contents to be buried in the field behind the gymnasium.
Meanwhile, administrations changed, and new leaders carried on with their elaborate charade.
****
Mikail, Vladimir, Sergei, and the rest of the revolutionary leadership were marched at gunpoint back up the hill to the prison they’d escaped less than a week earlier. It was a long and humiliating walk for Mikail, but he was not distraught. He was surprisingly reflective and focused.
He’d been angry before, and he still held on to the hatred he now felt for the people who had taken his love, Irinna. He’d also grown angry at Vladimir’s recklessness. He fumed at being played by that idiot Vasily.
Mistakes. Catalogued. Never to be made again.
His anger now gave him purpose and a larger view of what had happened and what was now occurring around him. He looked at the Spetznaz soldier walking in front of him, gun pointed toward the ground, and he thought how only a few hours ago he might have successfully ordered that soldier to fire into the crowd that was now lining the street.
The crowd. Boos and hisses could be heard coming from the mass of Warwickians gathered for the procession.
Mikail felt the red scar on his forehead throb, and he reached up with his handcuffed hands and brushed the hair on the back of his arm across the slope of his brow. He felt his temples pound, and glanced up into the sun. It was hard to imagine that only a week had passed since the Hurricane had ripped through the area. He’d gotten an education in that week. He readily admitted that.
Tuesday morning, a week ago, he’d been a prisoner trying to win over converts in his cell to help his cause. He’d used the time during the storm to convince even Todd, the guard of his cell block, to play along with his plans. The nor’easter had gone through just a few days later, and then there was the breakout and the coup. Now the EMP had been released right on schedule and everything should have fallen into place perfectly. However, rather than be on top and running this part of the operation for the new Russian government, he’d been abandoned by the troops sent to guarantee his authority and position.
Mikail thought about that for a moment as he walked, whether there was anything that could have been done to avoid this. He wondered whether he’d been too bold, too delicate, too reasonable, too extreme. Then he pushed these thoughts from his mind, and was about to turn them toward what came next, when a woman stepped from the crowd and placed herself squarely in his path. He barely had time to notice her and to look up into her eyes when she spat in his face. The crowd roared their approval as a soldier gently guided the woman back into line with the crowd.
In a way, Mikail’s rapid removal from power had been the fourth storm to hit Warwick, once the natural and human disasters were accounted for. If someone had asked him, he would have said that only one of them—the EMP—had been expected. Each of the others had occurred, in its turn, as an opportunity, and he’d merely taken advantage of the situation, using what seemed to be acts of God to hasten plans he’d been making with his secretive contacts in Russia for several years. Now he realized that this storm had caught up with him, and he began to wonder whether there might be some opportunity to be discovered even here. One thing felt certain: as a student of political movements, and a firm believer in the inevitability of his ultimate cause, he was sure that there’d be a fifth storm. He just didn’t know when or where it would strike. He determined within himself to be ready when it did.
The glint of gunmetal contrasted against the white of the snow, and Mikail’s brown boots made an indentation in the slushy, worn path just beginning to melt in the heat of the sun as he trudged up the hill. He noticed the heavier footprint of Vladimir, who was being marched along a few paces in front of him, and wondered what was going through his comrade’s mind, before he returned again to his own thoughts.
The coalition was going to seek his execution, this he knew. And if he was right about them and their need for blood in exchange for blood, the recriminations would start soon. Still, he had no fear. The newfound clarity in his thinking gave him a sort of certainty that his position and purpose in this world had not passed. Failure and humiliation can be crippling to most people, but Mikail wouldn’t trade what he’d gained from this expe
rience for anything in the world. He was actually thankful that his efforts had failed, because success would have only left him naïve and foolish and weak. He knew now that when the time came someday for him to take power again – because even in that moment, he was determined that such a day would come – he would have valuable insight and experience that would suit him to the task. He rolled his shoulders in their sockets, feeling a hump form along his back, and he stretched and looked toward the ground and the melting snow and thought of the coming spring.
****
As they passed through the fences and slid back up the icy walks towards the prison, Mikail sought to put together all of the different and disparate pieces of information he’d gathered while he was in charge.
There was a way out, and it looked like Vasily, of all people, had been the one to find that way out. But Vasily would not have been working alone. Someone was helping that stupid boy. It simply had to be. But who could it be?
As the prisoners were escorted into the facility, the wide double doors swung outward into the courtyard, casting a shadow on the open snow, like two giant jaws opening to devour a prey. The prisoners stepped shamefacedly into the same corridor that they had emerged from only days before in cocky self-assurance. Mikail, Vladimir, and Sergei walked into the darkened corridor and focused their eyes to the compact blackness. They were led down the maze of hallways toward the pod of cells that would be their new home, the locks tumbling and the pins clicking with each successive door they stepped through, until they were pushed into their chamber. The thick prison doors swung open and closed with the expected thuds and clanks. All of these familiar sounds served to focus Mikail’s attention on the problem at hand.
He was thinking through the situation more linearly now, and walking into the prison had a way of clearing his mind. Thoughts he should have had, and memories forgotten in the clash and fog of war, were now occurring to him in crystalline clarity. As they were left alone in their prison cell, he turned to regard his larger comrades and noticed for the first time that his friends were white with agitation.
“Vladimir Nikitich, did you check through the family ties as you searched the village?” Mikail asked his aide, as the three shuffled into the corners of the cell.
“Vasily had no family, Mikail Mikailivitch.”
The young men stood in the dark of the cell. It was the same cell that had once housed the stranger named Clay, and old Lev Volkhov. The surroundings and the ghosts of the place caused Mikail’s mind to clarify even further. As the lock snapped on a door down the hall, he turned to Sergei and smiled, and then turned to Vladimir again with the smile still spread out on his face. “Not Vasily. Remember, there were two men housed in this cell. Vasily left here with two things, one from each of his cellmates.”
Mikail moved very close to Vladimir, so he could see the large man’s reaction, and as he spoke again he moved even closer. The cell was in almost complete darkness, and only a faint light came in through the glass window, criss-crossed with chicken wire. His voice was very low, and it was tinged with a certainty that it had not had for a few days. “Our little friend had a backpack that he received from the traveler named Clay.”
“This we know, Mikail,” Vladimir answered, “but we were unable to find Vasily or the backpack.” There was a slight tremor of fear in Vladimir’s voice as he said this, and that almost indiscernible hitch spoke loudly and clearly to Mikail. Mikail knew that it was his proximity, and his certainty, that was frightening his friend, a man who previously had shown no fear at all. He paused, to let that fear take its full effect.
“The other thing he had, comrade Vladimir Nikitich,” Mikail said, as he slid another half step toward Vladimir, “the other thing he carried with him when he left this very cell, was a plan. You see, old man Volkhov had a nephew. I’d not thought of it until just now, and perhaps it is too late, but I think that it is not. Volkhov’s nephew lives in a very peculiar house, in a very peculiar spot in the town.”
“How is that, Mikail?” Again, the tremor in the voice. Vladimir shuffled his foot on the floor, as if looking for someplace to go, but there was nowhere else to go.
“His nephew is Pyotr Bolkonsky,” Mikail said softly, “and Pyotr Bolkonsky lives on the very edge of town. In fact, his house is probably closer to the perimeter fence than just about any other house in Warwick.”
“I know that house, Mikail. It is the one with all of the raised gardens and strange landscaping. But we searched it and found nothing.”
Mikail’s right fist caught Vladimir in an uppercut to the solar plexus that doubled the larger man over just as Mikail’s knee came up and hit Vladimir directly in the face, breaking his nose. Vladimir fell to the ground and Mikail stomped him brutally until he was unconscious and bleeding.
The violence happened so fast, and was so unexpected, that Sergei shrunk silently into the darkness until his back hit the far wall of the cell. He saw only shadows, and heard only the grunts that came from Vladimir until he saw that the bigger man was out cold on the ground. Even after what he had seen in the last few days, Sergei was shocked at the brutality of the beating.
When it was over, Mikail stood over Vladimir like a bulldog over a bone and spoke to the unconscious man in flat, low tones. “You are correct, Vladimir. You found nothing. And no one. I had not wondered, until just now, where all the dirt came for those peculiar gardens and all of that strange landscaping. But now I have wondered, and I think I might know how our comrades, Vasily and Pyotr Bolkonsky, have escaped Warwick.”
****
“I left my glasses in the tunnel,” Cole told Peter privately. “I don’t know how I did it, but I did. I took them off before we left, perhaps when I was using the privy. I didn’t even think about them with all the excitement of leaving the tunnel. It was dark. I couldn’t see anyway. What can I say, Peter? I’m sorry.”
“Well, you cannot go back for them, Cole.”
“I must. I’m not heading out into this broken world as a blind man.”
“Are we to risk everyone’s lives, even your own sister’s life, because you forgot your glasses? Don’t be a fool!”
“Well, I feel somewhat like Gloucester without them.” He looked at Peter, to see if the older man understood his reference. Sometimes a man makes references to prove to others how clever he is, and other times he makes them because they give his life meaning. For Cole, it was almost always the latter. Before he could decide whether Peter’s frown indicated understanding or not, he continued, as a way of explaining. “I’ll be helpless without them, and every one of you will be at risk if I cannot see, so don’t sit there like a king, leering at me.” Nothing. Maybe a half-smile. “I have to go back. And besides, we need to know what’s going on back there, anyway,” Cole said.
Peter shook his head. “It’s too big of a risk. I can’t let you go.”
“Listen, Peter, if Lang had not come back through town in his heroic attempt to save people, I wouldn’t be here anyway. And you wouldn’t be worrying about me, would you? I’m not going back into town, friend. I’m just going to the tunnel. I can be back in a few hours’ time.”
Peter wanted to argue with him, but the older man knew that Cole had made up his mind. He tried to recruit Natasha and Lang to help him dissuade Cole from the trip back to the tunnel, but they’d both, surprisingly, been on the younger man’s side.
“He’ll need his vision if he’s going to survive long out there, Peter,” Natasha said. “Who knows when, or if, such glasses will ever be available again in our lifetimes? We will need every tool we can muster if we’re to make it to safety.”
Cole looked at Peter and saw the seriousness in his face. “Please, Peter.”
Peter sighed in resignation. “Ok,” he said. “But if one person is going back, then we all go back.”
Cole protested. “No. I’ll go alone. It is my responsibility and I will manage it.” He was respectful, but he persisted. “I can see fine during the bright daylight, and it w
ould be silly and foolish for all of us to put our lives in danger just because I was stupid enough to forget my glasses. It was my mistake, and I need to fix it.”
“But if we all go, Cole, then we can protect each other and cover for one another if something happens.”
“If something happens, Peter, then that means that things have gone horribly wrong, and we will have the whole group at risk.” Cole knew enough to appeal to Peter’s leadership feelings and his responsibilities. “I know you would admit that, in a worst case scenario, you would rather lose one unimportant member rather than the whole group. Be reasonable. You have Natasha and Lang to think about. I need to go alone.”
Lang chimed in with his agreement. He also believed that it was a bad plan to travel back as a group. They were more likely to be seen with four of them trying to make it back into the tunnel, he suggested. Peter considered the case and saw the reasonableness of this conclusion.
“I see your logic, Cole, but please do not say that you are unimportant. I don’t think that you are unimportant to your sister, and you are certainly not unimportant to me or Lang. I’ll allow it, but you should at least wait until tomorrow. It’s late in the day now, and it’ll be getting dark soon.”
“Ok, Peter,” Cole said, smiling.
“And if you don’t make it back, I’ll be very upset with you—and with myself for giving in to you.”
“You’ll see me again, Peter. Never you worry. In the end, you’ll see that this is much ado about nothing.”
“Yes, well, let’s hope. So far it seems more like a comedy of errors, with very little to laugh about.”
Cole smiled at this, and gave his friend a thankful squeeze on the shoulder. He looked at him and suddenly felt overwhelmed with the warmth of emotion.
In short order, it was arranged, and on mid-morning the next day, Cole started off on his retreat back to the tunnel.
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