Bear

by Matt Rogers

  ‘Not here,’ he muttered. ‘Come with me.’

  But he should have paid closer attention to the mental fragility of the two men in front of him. They evidently knew Viktor well, and his sudden disappearance had torn them apart. Now they had a glimpse of what might have happened to their friend, and this strange foreign man was hiding information from them, preventing them from reaching the truth.

  Slater realised all of that as the first guy lunged for him, his eyes manic and sleep-deprived.

  Slater caught him by the lapels and hurled him into the brick wall of the adjacent building. The impact drove the breath from the man’s lungs, but for good measure Slater kept hold of his collar. He wrenched him away from the wall and slammed him into the surface for the second consecutive time, adding insult to injury.

  Then he let go, and hissed, ‘I will help you as much as I can. But not here. I’m on your side.’

  The unharmed man stared at Slater, wide-eyed, in disbelief at the outburst of violence. These men were physical labourers, but that didn’t mean they were accustomed to the type of force Slater could unleash in the blink of an eye. They had spent their whole lives toiling away on construction sites, and he had spent his life toiling away in combat gymnasiums.

  Big difference.

  Overpowered into submission, the first guy nodded sheepishly, sucking air into his lungs in giant gasps, and beckoned into the nearest alleyway. ‘Is this good enough?’

  ‘It’ll do,’ Slater said. ‘I can’t hang around for long.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to put the pair of you in danger.’

  With that, he led them into the grimy stink of the alleyway, a narrow strip of land between two towering brick buildings. Overhanging awnings and lattices and balconies cast great shadows across the muddy ground.

  And someone followed.

  28

  Slater didn’t recognise the hostile presence until it was far too late.

  He ushered the two men into the lip of the alley, and then sensed rapid footsteps directly behind him.

  Close.

  Too close.

  He spun on his heel and threw a massive right hook without assessing the threat, figuring he didn’t have time.

  He was right.

  The giant mercenary surged into range in unison with Slater’s wild swinging, looping punch. He connected on the jaw and felt the vibration of the direct impact resonate up through the bones in his forearm, into his upper arm.

  His shoulder socket rattled. A good, clean punch.

  Lights out.

  Or, maybe not.

  The big Russian thug stumbled like a newborn giraffe and went down in a half-squat, almost losing his balance entirely. But he kept his legs underneath him and burst back to his feet, disorientated and thrown off by the attack but still composed enough to return the favour.

  The guy was at least six foot three, standing a few inches over Slater, and built like a concrete slab. Slater didn’t want to consider the arsenal of designer drugs the man was on. The real question was whether he could fight or not.

  He could.

  Inhibited by taking all five of Slater’s knuckles directly to the jaw, he still had his wits about him enough to burst into motion. With his own survival on the line, the guy came in swinging with a serrated switchblade. The knife had been clutched between his fingers the entire time — he’d stormed into the alleyway ready to stab a series of holes through Slater’s mid-section.

  Knife fights were ugly, dirty, messy beasts. And Slater wasn’t armed.

  So he lurched away from the blade, opting to tumble back into the alley as if he were the semi-conscious one. The first swing of the blade narrowly missed his chest, slicing through the empty space a few inches in front of him. Slater’s pulse redlined, beating fast enough to trigger a heart attack if he wasn’t careful. The presence of the switchblade changed the dynamic entirely — now he found himself terrified for his life, fearing the death blow to slice an artery at any moment.

  And that turned him into the one thing he’d wanted to put in the past.

  A monster.

  The next attack came in lazier than the first — recognising that Slater was unarmed, the attacker relaxed ever so slightly. Nothing perceptible to the common civilian, but even a millisecond’s hesitation in this game spelled the difference between life and death. A combination of his compromised mental alertness, still rattled from the punch, and his supposed confidence in wielding a massive advantage over his assailant, led to a half-hearted swing of the blade.

  And all that added up to a shocking reverse in momentum.

  Slater reached out both hands at lightning speed and seized hold of the guy’s wrist, so fast he could barely comprehend his own actions. But as soon as he had hold of the appendage he felt the white hot burning sensation of opportunity. He knew he would never get the chance to reverse fortunes again, and his body seemed to comprehend that.

  Because he burst off the mark with inhuman strength.

  Even though the guy had an advantage of close to thirty pounds in bodyweight, Slater wrenched him forward by the arm with all the bone-jarring torque he could muster. The man stumbled off-balance, his arm nearly ripped out of his socket, and Slater brought the guy’s delicate wrist down to his knee with the strength of ten men. Possessed by fight or flight strength, he snapped the guy’s forearm clean in two, rendering the limb entirely useless.

  The knife spilled from the man’s grip as shock set in and he lost all feeling in his right hand.

  Slater let go of the guy’s mangled wrist, reached out, and caught the knife by the hilt.

  In one unbroken movement, he wrenched the blade up and shoved it into the guy’s throat, tearing through flesh and soft tissue, destroying his trachea, brutalising his neck, severing all the important arteries.

  He worked the blade left and right in two jerking motions, then let go of the hilt and lowered the bleeding, dying body to the alleyway floor.

  Adrenalin and shock hit him in the chest, and the ease with which he’d murdered the man sunk in. Panting for breath, he dragged the corpse behind a collection of broken, disused furniture. Allowing the thug to pour his lifeblood all over the snow, he wiped his hands on his jacket and stumbled back out into open view, eyes wide and heart rate thudding incessantly.

  The two workmen had no idea how to react. They stood in the middle of the alleyway, mouths agape, shocked at how ruthlessly it had all unfolded. Slater understood the sheer shock of the whole experience.

  Violence up close and personal was something horrific, and it had taken him years to acclimatise to the brutality of killing another human being. He’d just done it in one of the most grotesque ways imaginable, and these men had probably never seen a dead body before, let alone watched the lifeblood drain out of a giant thug in a cold alley in a Russian port city.

  Slater placed a hand on each of their backs, turning them away from the violent scene. ‘Let’s go.’

  Neither of them budged an inch.

  He shoved them hard, sending them stumbling deeper into the alleyway. Slater followed, charged with purpose. He couldn’t linger around this place any longer than necessary. Already he sensed eyes on him, whether due to paranoid insecurities or a real presence. He hadn’t spotted the man approaching, and that said everything that needed to be said about who he was up against.

  He folded the switchblade up, still slick with arterial blood, and tucked it into his inside jacket pocket.

  The fact that he wasn’t armed had never been more apparent.

  The two workers got moving and Slater stayed hot on their heels. They took a left at the end of the alleyway and entered a complicated grid of side streets, all cutting between residential apartment complexes and retail outlets. The narrow laneways collected trash and disused furniture. Finally Slater found an open doorway leading into an abandoned building and ushered the two workers through. They stepped into a low dark space, illuminated only by the
bleak natural light filtering in through the grimy windows. Years ago it must have acted as a reception area for a storefront, but the building had been decommissioned and surrounded by other structures, cordoned off from the populated streets, left to fall into disrepair.

  Slater gestured for the two men to crouch down against the far wall, and he spent far longer than necessary staring out through a crack in the doorway, watching the laneway outside for any sign of trouble. He kept one hand poised tentatively against his chest, feeling the reassuring weight of the switchblade in his pocket. He knew exactly how to use it, and if the future had to get messy, he knew what to do.

  But nothing materialised. There were no reinforcements, nor were there screams from the neighbouring alleyway as someone discovered the body. Slater sensed there were parts of Vladivostok that lay dormant for months on end, hidden away from prying eyes. Common civilians didn’t venture into these alleyways. They were dark and decrepit and filled with the potential for suffering.

  They belonged to the underworld.

  Thankfully, the underworld was quiet today.

  Slater shut the door behind him, took a deep breath, and set to work trying to decipher the bloody labyrinth he’d been dropped into.

  He just hoped the two workers could keep up.

  29

  ‘Bogdan,’ the first guy said, introducing himself.

  ‘Pasha,’ the second said after only a brief pause.

  Slater studied them.

  Bogdan was the larger man, rotund around the mid-section, barely squeezing into his high-visibility workers’ vest. Despite his height and weight, he had the aura of a harmless giant. He waved his fat, meaty hands around every time he spoke, gesticulating wildly to compensate for the fear coursing through him. He spoke limited English, but he made up for it by conveying emotion with every sentence. Slater had no trouble understanding him.

  Pasha was a different story. Short, thin, slightly more reserved. But still scared shitless. He had a better grasp of the English language, so Slater did most of the communicating through him.

  Every now and then, Bogdan interjected with a passionate statement.

  Slater found the man endearing.

  ‘So,’ Slater said, ‘we’re in quite a sticky situation, aren’t we?’

  ‘Where do we begin?’ Pasha said. ‘We want to help you. You just saved our lives.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ Slater said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t think that guy was interested in you at all. Everyone in this city seems to be trying to kill me. Or people I get close with. I think you two are safe.’

  ‘No!’ Bogdan exclaimed, pointing a fat finger at Slater. ‘You are wrong. He was following us. Before you came.’

  Slater glanced at Pasha. ‘Is that true?’

  The man nodded, icy fear in his pale blue eyes. ‘We thought he was annoyed at us disrupting the neighbourhood. You know, going around and asking everyone in sight about Viktor. We thought he might come up to us at some point and start a fight. Try and push us around, tell us to shut up, take our problems elsewhere. That type of thing. We didn’t know he had a knife…’

  ‘It’s all connected,’ Slater mumbled.

  ‘What?’ Bogdan said.

  ‘Sorry. Thinking out loud. But there’s some serious shit happening in Vladivostok. Important enough to kill people without a moment’s hesitation. You two work at the shipyard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you do there?’

  ‘We are building an icebreaker. Actually, we just finished.’

  Slater paused. ‘This is news.’

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘It might be. Viktor was working on it, too?’

  ‘Yes. He was. Do you know what happened to him?’

  ‘I do. But you’re not going to like it.’

  Both men went pale, anticipating what might come next, but it hit them hard all the same when Slater told them.

  ‘At the train station?’ Pasha said, disbelief in his tone.

  ‘Yes. It happened yesterday. I’m surprised the authorities have managed to cover it up so well.’

  ‘Do you think that’s what’s happening?’

  ‘There’s been no mention of it. If there was an ongoing investigation, the police would at least release some kind of prepared statement. They’d be vague about it, but they’d let everyone know there’d been an incident. They wouldn’t completely blanket it like this.’

  ‘But all the witnesses? You said there was a train full of—’

  Slater held up a hand. ‘You’d be surprised how effectively an entire train load of people could be silenced if they have control of the media. So what if people run around talking about it? If no-one reports on it, it never happened.’

  ‘That kind of thing doesn’t happen in today’s—’

  ‘Yes it does.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You see what you’re told to see. You hear what you’re told to hear.’

  ‘But why Viktor?’

  ‘I think you need to tell me more about this icebreaker you’re working on.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Viktor ran from the Medved Shipbuilding Plant when he stumbled onto something. He made it all the way to Moscow, and then they called him and threatened his family and ordered him back. He came back here to die. And he knew that. I thought I could stop it, but I was wrong.’

  ‘So that’s why he disappeared,’ Pasha muttered.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘He no show to work one day,’ Bogdan said, complete with hand gestures. ‘We think he sick, but no-one hear from him. And the days go on. And we get scared. Because many bad rumours about him. His family very worried.’

  ‘Are his family safe?’

  ‘Yes. We are checking in on them.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘We check this morning. They safe.’

  ‘So they haven’t stooped to that level yet. That’s something, at least.’

  ‘Who is they?’ Pasha said.

  ‘I don’t know. The people behind this. I assumed it was your employers.’

  ‘They don’t know where he is either.’

  ‘Tell me about the icebreaker.’

  ‘You have not heard about it? It’s all anyone is talking about.’

  ‘Big ship!’ Bogdan said.

  ‘Big ship,’ Slater muttered.

  ‘I can understand why Viktor saw something he shouldn’t have,’ Pasha said.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘It will be the largest nuclear powered icebreaker in the world when it’s completed. We’ve been working on it for years. Good money. A stable contract.’

  ‘Good money for tradesmen,’ Slater said. ‘I don’t know if a stable income is worth killing people over.’

  ‘No,’ Pasha said. ‘Not because of that. Because of the opportunity.’

  ‘What opportunity?’

  ‘The ship is finished. We are unveiling it later this week. A large ceremony. But no-one knows what for.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The Russian government has a plan for its maiden voyage. But they aren’t telling anyone what it is. It’s all being kept quiet. They’re very secretive about it.’

  ‘Lots of tension,’ Bogdan said. ‘In government. Because of what happened last year. You know about that?’

  Slater knew all too well.

  Because he’d been the one to cause it.

  30

  He elected to keep that information away from Bogdan and Pasha.

  What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  But the whirlwind of destruction he’d carved across the globe before his official retirement had created long-lasting consequences on the global political spectrum. It was why he didn’t carry a phone, or check the news. Any day he expected to receive word of the breakout of nuclear war, but over the last few months the tension seemed to have dissipated.

  It was half
the reason he’d come to Vladivostok.

  To tie up loose ends.

  Because his last visit to the Russian Far East had left far too many unresolved problems to be comfortable with.

  And therein lay the truth.

  He’d always expected confrontation. Like Natasha said, he was a magnet for it. He knew when he’d rescued Jason King from an abandoned gold mine on the Kamchatka Peninsula the war wouldn’t end there. They’d aggravated too many people in the upper echelon of Russia, the corrupt and powerful oligarchs and titans of industry. These faceless men and women had paid an arsenal of mercenaries to host a bloody tournament-style fight to the death in the bowels of the gold mine, run by an ex-KGB killer named Vadim Mikhailov.

  Mikhailov had met his demise at the hands of King, but he wasn’t the ringleader.

  He was the puppet, dangling from strings wielded by billionaires and politicians at the very top.

  So Slater figured if he strode back into the hell he’d left behind, it wouldn’t take long for his past to catch up to him.

  Then he could confront it, put it to rest, and move on with his life.

  But it seemed he’d become entangled in something else entirely. And right now, barely treading water in the murky cesspool of Vladivostok’s underbelly, he realised he was in way over his head. He couldn’t keep running, playing defence, trying to piece the puzzle together before it caught up to him.

  No.

  He had to accept he didn’t know anything, and move forward, directly meeting the resistance.

  It was how he would get Natasha back. It was how he would avenge Viktor. It was how he would track down Iosif.

  He couldn’t achieve any of it unless he took a deep breath and leapt into motion.

  The very thing he’d spent his entire journey trying to avoid.

  You can’t avoid the inevitable.

  ‘Pasha,’ he said. ‘How much do you really know about the icebreaker?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve been building it. I’m sure there’s a crew of dozens working on it.’