Bear

by Matt Rogers

  Not artificial climate control.

  They’d opened the doors in anticipation of herding the passengers off the train, and Slater glanced out the frosted window. A cluster of armed policemen milled about on the platform, slowly creating formations to funnel the civilians through to the station’s main building.

  The building itself was enormous, a great slab of straw-coloured stone with two connecting facades attached to each side of the main structure. All the foot traffic arriving along the Trans-Siberian Railway were funnelled through the colossal building on their way out into downtown Vladivostok, but Slater guessed the delay had been caused by emptying out the station for the logistical nightmare that would soon follow.

  But they weren’t ready just yet.

  Cordons were still being created. Policemen were congesting in groups across the platform, muttering to each other as the sleet battered their all-weather uniforms.

  Slater sensed the last opening he would get to instigate chaos.

  And he seemed to have a particular knack for that.

  Fuck it.

  Now.

  He wrenched the Desert Eagle out from under his jacket as soon as he realised the three plainclothes officers were clustered down the other end of the carriage.

  ‘Run!’ he roared at the top of his lungs, a word so common in pop culture that it would be understood by ninety-five percent of the people on the train whether they spoke English or not. ‘Run!’

  Then he pumped the trigger over and over again, emptying the rest of the Desert Eagle’s magazine into the roof of the carriage.

  15

  Those generally unaccustomed to unsuppressed gunfire would liken a shot from a Desert Eagle to a nuclear bomb going off in their ears.

  The seven consecutive blasts roared like thunder in the enclosed space, tearing giant holes in the flimsy metal roof of the carriage, exposing the interior to the snow and the elements.

  But no-one noticed the wind howling in through the cluster of holes in the roof, because by that point everyone in the carriage had let out guttural screams. They were fearing for their lives, and when people feared for their lives all order and reason was hurled out the window.

  Slater hadn’t known whether the Desert Eagle was chambered with .357 Magnum rounds, .44 Magnum rounds or .50 Action Express rounds. As the gunshots ruined his hearing and the high-pitched whine of tinnitus filtered into his eardrums, he realised it was the latter.

  0.50 caliber rounds were the largest caliber legally allowed in a handgun in America, mostly because they caused enough noise to deafen all the occupants of a regular suburban street. In a confined train carriage, it sounded like the world was ending.

  Moving faster than almost anyone on board the carriage, Slater dropped the empty pistol, wrapped a hand around the collars of both men opposite him and hauled them out into the aisle.

  ‘Exit,’ he demanded, even though he couldn’t hear himself speak — and he doubted either of them could hear his words either. ‘The exit! Move!’

  There was no chance of the plainclothes officers getting a beat on who had fired the gunshots. They were in the midst of a panicked crush of terrified passengers, all throwing their personal safety aside to get off the train as quickly as possible. With everyone in the vicinity seized by mortal fear, Slater used it to his own advantage.

  As possibly the only person aboard who didn’t think they were about to die, he shoved and pushed and hurried Viktor and Iosif through the throng of terrified civilians.

  They burst out onto the platform at the same time as all the passengers running along the entire length of the train.

  Pandemonium broke out.

  Slater seized the nearest officer, who looked as if he’d been caught in the middle of a war zone, and pointed a shaking finger back at the train. With eyes wide, he screamed, ‘Murderer! Help! Gun!’

  The guy seemed to understand, and although he didn’t burst off the mark to throw himself into the line of fire his attention turned imperceptibly to the body of the train itself.

  Slater followed the dozens of passengers sprinting for the train station’s giant exit building. They’d reached the apex of chaos — the policemen had lost their one opportunity to form a rudimentary barricade around the fleeing passengers, and instead several streams of sprinting civilians opened up, hurrying straight past the officials who were focused on the train itself.

  No-one knew who was in charge.

  No-one knew how to react in the heat of the moment.

  And no-one knew exactly where the threat was coming from.

  That suited Slater perfectly.

  He put all his strength into keeping as tight a grip on Iosif’s collar as he could — that was the most volatile aspect of the entire ordeal. At any point the guy could break away and disappear into the streets of Vladivostok, and then Slater’s best avenue of enquiry would be lost.

  He paid less attention to Viktor — the man had already pledged his allegiance to Slater before things had gone awry, and Slater imagined the man would continue to stick with him.

  The three-man unit, joined by Slater’s vice-like grip, hurried straight into the giant train terminal. The building’s domed ceiling stretched far overhead, an impressive sight in any other circumstance, but Slater wasn’t interested in the architecture. He barely paid the giant stone walls and colossal interior any attention, instead focusing on every shadowy corner for signs of law enforcement.

  It seemed the policemen’s actions had ended up being their biggest hindrance. The terminal was completely empty. Staff had been evacuated, passengers told to disperse. Slater couldn’t see a single soul standing in their way. Even if there had been, there were dozens of other people all around Slater, sprinting for the road outside Vladivostok’s downtown train station with the verve that only materialised when they thought they were at risk of being shot.

  Slater forced Viktor and Iosif across the shiny floor of the terminal and smashed open a pair of giant wooden entrance doors. The building opened out onto a wide road covered in a thin layer of snow, almost entirely devoid of vehicles at this time of day. It was mid-morning, and the streets seemed quieter than usual — the early morning’s commuter rush had subsided.

  Slater took a moment to catch his breath — even though he’d been the one to cause the carnage, the adrenalin spike had materialised all the same. A giant cloud of fog steamed out from between his lips as he exhaled, keeping Viktor and Iosif in a tight grip. A sweeping set of concrete stairs fanned outward from the entrance to the station, leading onto a wide footpath.

  Across the street, a row of residential apartment complexes hovered ominously.

  ‘Where to?’ Viktor panted.

  Slater saw terror in the man’s eyes. Viktor didn’t want to be in Vladivostok. He wanted to be hundreds of miles away, in relative safety, but he had been called back to face his fate. Stepping out of the relative comfort of the train station had been a significant checkpoint, a realisation that he was here, in the place he had fled from just days earlier, a place that could only spell trouble.

  ‘Relax, Viktor,’ Slater said, still panting. ‘We’ll sort this out.’

  The hint of a reassured smile began to creep across Viktor’s lips, and he took a pause to gather his senses. Passengers from the train were fleeing into the streets all around them.

  ‘We’ll sort this out,’ Viktor repeated.

  He seemed to enjoy how the words sounded.

  Then a warm burst of liquid hit Slater in the face, and a half-second later he felt a horrendous tugging sensation against his fingers clutching Viktor’s collar, and a half-second after that the deafening crack of a long-distance gunshot resonated across the road.

  It took Slater far longer than it should have to understand that Viktor’s head had exploded.

  16

  Now, he wasn’t causing chaos.

  He was right in its midst.

  Reeling, thrown to the wolves, his mind raced as he instinctively ducked a
t the knees, minimising his target area. The burst of weight against his fingers had been him taking Viktor’s entire deadweight in his grip — the man had become a corpse in the blink of an eye as the top half of his skull disintegrated, showering Slater in a fine mist of gore. He let go of the dead man, recognising a lost cause when he saw it, and started piecing together what the hell had happened.

  Sniper rifle, or a long-range assault rifle, fired from across the street.

  He thought he’d caught the slightest hint of a muzzle flare out of the corner of his eye before Viktor had died. That left him completely exposed to a follow-up shot, and he scrabbled across the freezing concrete in an attempt to throw off the gunman.

  Which meant he lost Iosif in the carnage.

  If he’d thought the civilians all around him had been panicking before, he was entirely unprepared for what came next.

  Rabid screaming broke out everywhere at once — at least a dozen people had seen Viktor die. A body slammed into him from the side — a heavyset man running full-pelt toward the stairs — and he lost purchase on the slick stairwell. He slid out, crunching into one of the steps and taking another civilian off their feet in the process. Bodies trampled him, and he squinted in a feeble attempt to get his bearings.

  He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t think.

  Pain tore across his body, but he’d been through the ringer before. It was all superficial — no bones were broken, which meant he could ignore the sensations entirely. He pulled himself upright halfway down the stairs and searched the screaming crowd for any sign of Iosif.

  Nothing.

  The guy had disappeared.

  Fuck.

  It was all he could think. He repeated the curse over and over again under his breath as he covered the last few steps and leapt down onto the pavement underfoot. Another couple of bodies crashed into him, sending him spiralling in different directions. He caught his breath and finally shoved a sprinting man aside, sending the guy sprawling across the icy asphalt on the road — otherwise, the guy would have barrelled straight into Slater and taken him off his feet for the second time in the space of five seconds.

  Composing himself, he took a moment to pause in the middle of the pavement, ignoring the pressing urge to duck below the line of sight in case the gunman deemed it necessary to take out anyone attached to Viktor.

  He searched desperately for Iosif, still finding nothing.

  Then the man himself hurried straight past Slater, materialising out of nowhere, his gaze fixed on something in the distance. Slater wheeled, snatching out a hand to grab at the bottom of Iosif’s jacket, but he missed by inches. He considered pulling out the Grach in his waistband and firing a shot into one of the man’s limbs, but that wouldn’t guarantee survival in any capacity. Any direct impact had the chance to sever an artery, and Iosif would almost certainly die from massive blood loss unless an ambulance arrived in minutes.

  Slater didn’t think the man deserved to die just yet.

  He didn’t even know who he was.

  So he watched miserably, helplessly, for the three seconds it took for Iosif to reach a jet-black van with windows tinted to the highest degree that had screeched to a stop in the midst of the procession of terrified train passengers.

  Slater grimaced as a woman running full-pelt across the road didn’t stop in time. She bounced off the hood of the van and sprawled across the asphalt, tearing off skin in the process. The occupants of the van barely noticed. A man in heavy tactical gear with a balaclava covering his features leapt out of the passenger seat and grabbed hold of Iosif as soon as he surged into range. The side door slid open on its tracks, and the guy in the combat gear hauled Iosif into the dark space. A second later the door slammed closed and the passenger dove straight back in the van. Its tyres spun, accompanied by the sound of screaming rubber, and the van shot off the mark. It veered around a cluster of civilians, clipping one man who couldn’t get out of the way in time, spinning him off to the side where he collapsed in a heap.

  Then it screeched around a corner and disappeared from sight.

  Slater stood motionless in the midst of the crowd, the only one not panicking. He searched the windows across the street for any sign of a gun barrel, but found nothing.

  The gunman was gone.

  Iosif was gone.

  Viktor was dead.

  Slater stood alone in a desolate stretch of Vladivostok and wondered how he’d managed to lose a grasp on the situation so completely, all in the space of a fleeting moment.

  17

  He didn’t know what to do.

  Slater walked dejectedly through the streets of downtown Vladivostok, one road blurring into the next, everything clouded in a hazy fog of grey sleet.

  Including his own mind.

  He couldn’t believe how quickly things had changed. He had been willing to let Iosif escape if worse came to worse, given the fact that it would have been hard to control the actions of a man who wanted nothing to do with him. But he’d been relying on Viktor as a back-up plan — he could have wormed out more information as soon as they found a safe place to bunker down.

  But the man had not been lying.

  He’d come to Vladivostok to die.

  And the people organising his departure hadn’t wasted any time in doing so.

  They must have known exactly what train he’d been on. They’d had a man in position to take him out as soon as he filtered into the streets — they hadn’t known that Slater had intervened and caused a critical incident on board the train, but in the end that hadn’t mattered. Whether he was fleeing for his life or not, Viktor had ultimately walked straight through those doors all the same, effectively signing his own death warrant.

  Misery washed over Slater. He lowered his head and cursed — it was a two-pronged assault on his senses. On one hand he was furious at himself for allowing Viktor to succumb to his enemies so quickly and Iosif to escape into the hands of his friends, but on the other hand he couldn’t believe how little information he’d been able to gather.

  One man would carry his secrets to his grave, and the other was gone forever, vanished into the dark underbelly of Vladivostok, never to rear his head again at risk of Slater finding him. Iosif had seemed genuinely scared of Slater.

  Slater doubted he would ever see the man again.

  No-one would be that foolish.

  Which left him in an odd kind of limbo, where he had almost nothing to investigate other than a loose connection to the Medved Shipbuilding Plant.

  Wherever the hell that was.

  Even when he managed to locate the plant, what on earth was he supposed to do? Run around kidnapping construction workers until he managed to get someone to spill their secrets?

  If there was some kind of illegal operation unfolding within the plant’s limits, then nothing Slater could do would uncover it. As soon as one member of the guilty party sniffed trouble the entire entity would pack up shop and move on. Perhaps that was already taking place, as Iosif revealed that a strange American man had seemingly come all the way to Russia to investigate their dealings.

  You can’t do anything, a voice told him.

  He decided on sniffing around Medved Shipbuilding Plant at the earliest available opportunity, just for the hell of it. There was a ninety-nine percent chance he would turn up with nothing, but he had come this far, and he wasn’t going to book a trip back toward Moscow for at least a few days.

  The same voice in his head told him it was over, but he reminded himself of his past.

  It never ends up being over.

  Learn from history, Will.

  So he would investigate.

  Because that seemed to be the only way his life unfolded.

  But not now.

  He had just watched a man’s head explode from less than a foot away.

  Now, he needed a drink.

  He tightened the thick overcoat around his torso to mask the droplets of blood staining his undergarments. He’d taken c
are of the blood on his face and neck by melting snow in his hand and rinsing it off.

  He stepped into the first bar he found. It was an old-school traditional Russian tavern, complete with exposed wooden ceiling beams and a hearty fire on the far wall. The tables were populated with locals, all of whom turned to the entrance with raised eyebrows as a black man stepped into their local drinking hole for what Slater imagined was the first time in years.

  Most of the patrons looked to be well over two hundred pounds — Russians sure enjoyed their drink.

  Slater found himself consumed by the thirst for alcohol — he had used all manner of substances to dull his senses for the better part of a decade now. It probably wasn’t the healthiest use of his downtime, but he didn’t care. He preferred it over therapy.

  This way, he didn’t have to talk to anyone.

  He could stuff all his emotions up into a tight ball and shove them down deep inside himself and suppress them with a steady stream of drink.

  It had worked so far.

  He wasn’t about to unpack his mind. He simply moved through life at a blistering pace and dwelled on nothing. Maybe he figured he’d die before slowing down, and then he could take his twisted mentality to his grave, never having to deal with it if he departed from the land of the living.

  Quite a sinister worldview, all things considered.

  Once again, he didn’t care.

  He liked the taste of a drink, and all else be damned he would allow himself that reprieve. The rest of his life consisted of throwing his broken body into the line of fire for anyone he could help.

  He wondered what Jason King would think of all this…

  He wondered how King dealt with his demons.

  He zigzagged his way around the wooden tables spread across the floor of the tavern and drew up a stool at the bar, ordering three fingers of vodka in a tall glass. The bartender was a stout man with thick white hair and a creased, weather-beaten face. He seemed to be in his early sixties.

  ‘English?’ Slater said, more to fill the silence than out of genuine interest. He couldn’t care less whether this man spoke English.