by Ted Bell
A small army of peasants and their flyblown mules were struggling to pull his tracked command vehicle out of a deep fucking ditch full of mud, hacking through the layer of permafrost. First they’d had to clear all the rotten and broken timbers of the bridge that had given way under the weight of his command vehicle. The bridge his Russian recon map boys had assured him was crossable.
Now the convoy was going around the ravine, bumping and grinding over open ground. Two hours lost, at least, he figured.
If he wasn’t so damn pissed off, he’d be laughing at the whole thing. The peasants and soldiers were whipping their mules and screaming at them to pull his behemoth out of the ditch. “Heave! Heave!” they shouted. The Russian foot soldiers were whipping the peasants and screaming at them, “Heave! Heave!” Screw it. The chances of either team having any success extracting his ride were slim to none.
This whole mission was beginning to look like a classic goatfuck, that is, if it wasn’t one already. When your command and control goes into a ditch, it can ruin your day. The new vehicle was jam-packed with radar and tracking technology and he’d have a near impossible time completing the mission without it.
And his destination? The shining city on a hill waiting at the end of his magical wanderings in the vast Siberian wilderness? Well, it wasn’t exactly Disney World, now, was it? No. It was the Chinese-Russian border, an imaginary line that ran through thousands of acres of heavy forest. Apparently there were vast shantytowns built in the depths of the forests. Home to countless thousands of Chinese who’d crossed illegally into Russia and homesteaded, all in order to harvest stolen timber and schlep it back to the Chinese lumber mills south of the border.
The situation was far too remote for the Kremlin to care about it. But the Russian peasants who’d depended on the lumber for their survival? They were forming armed militias of local peasants and attacking the Chinese settlements at night, slaughtering them in their beds with swords. The Russian fighters had all flocked to a giant of a man they called Ivan the Terrible. Guy wore two short swords at his waist and had two bandoliers of ammunition across his chest. A Heckler & Koch machine pistol in each hand. Good guy. If the colonel ran across him, he aimed to hire him.
Because, if Beauregard didn’t have enough crap to worry about, this operation he was mounting would take place in a guerrilla war zone. Think Custer and the Lakota Sioux at Little Bighorn.
Christ!
Endless days trekking beneath a brutal and unforgiving sun, wind, and rain took its toll on man and machine. Heat prostration. Overheated diesel engines. And then the torrential rains. And then the torrential mudslides that took out what passed for roads around here. He did a mental calculation of what he figured Siberian real estate would go for on the open market these days. Didn’t have oil, didn’t have water, didn’t have grass, didn’t have shit. Negative value. Except for the huge forests on the border to the south, and the valuable lumber Chinese peasants were stealing on the Russian side of the border. Any rate, you’d have to pay some poor rube a fortune to grubstake this territory.
Oh, and you haven’t lived until you’ve had to spend a whole goddamn day going door-to-door to recruit local farmers and their mules to pull a half-million-dollar tracked vehicle out of the Siberian permafrost-impacted mud—and then sit around with your thumb up your butt until—
Beauregard hadn’t even seen the old crone approaching him. She shuffled along, looking like some kind of evil Snow White character, dressed in tattered, filthy rags, long greasy grey tresses hanging down to her waist, and a huge beauty spot on the tip of her pointy nose. She was hobbling toward him, a rough carved staff in her right hand for support. She was clicking right along, kicking stones out of her path, making a beeline straight for him.
By the set of her craggy jaw and the look in her hooded black eyes, she was definitely a woman on some kind of a mission. Russians. The colonel thought, Where do they come up with these kinds of people, for crissakes? Centuries of some very backward inbreeding shit was the only answer he could come up with. Too much cousin humping, like they had down in Appalachia, he figured. What was that movie with the pig-oinking scene in it? Deliverance, that was what you had around here all right.
When the hag got to within two feet of his personal perimeter and he could smell the stench pouring off her, Beauregard raised his hand and shoved it within an inch of her face. “Stop,” he said.
Apparently this was considered impolite in her social circles because she started screaming her bloody lungs out, her thin little mouth stretched wide revealing her teeth, or rather the rotted black stumps that were all that was left. He leaned back, sucked on his cancer stick, and smiled at her, waiting for her tirade to subside. When she paused to catch her breath, the colonel smiled and said, “Could you please repeat that, ma’am?”
And she did. Word for word at an even higher decibel level.
Motioning to one of the young Russians assigned to protect him, he said, “Come here, soldier.” The boy raced over, snapped to attention, and saluted. He had strong eyes and enormous black bushy eyebrows.
“Yes, sir!” he said in good English.
“What’s your name, partner?”
“Tolstoy, sir, Corporal Grigory Tolstoy.”
“Any relation?”
“Yes, sir!”
“What’s this old bitch going off about, son? I speak pretty decent Russian, and I haven’t heard a word I know yet.”
“Is ancient Tatar dialect, from the old Cossack days, sir. She says this is her land and that we’re destroying her ditch like we destroyed her bridge. We have no right to be here. Her many sons have rifles and horses. If we don’t leave now, she’s going to get them to come shoot us.”
“How do you destroy a ditch?” he said. But the kid just shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, that’s a problem ain’t it? What I’d like you to do, in the most polite way possible, is to inform her ladyship that your commanding officer, me, would like her to hightail her ugly ass out of my face and go back over that hill to whatever hole she crawled out of. You got that?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“In the nicest possible way, of course.”
“Of course, my colonel!”
The young boy leaned in close to the old woman so she could hear him and began speaking very quietly in her ear. Then he listened to her hoarse reply and turned to face the colonel.
“She says ‘Fuck you.’ And she put a curse on you. A hex that will bring your days to a quick end.”
“Is that right? Well, how about that?”
A second later, with surprising strength, the hag shouted out an oath and shoved the young soldier away. Then she swung on the kid with her stout wooden staff. The kid tried to duck, but the blow was unexpected and she caught him squarely above his right ear, opening a large bloody gash. The unconscious kid went sprawling in a muddy puddle, and she began kicking him viciously in the face with her hobnailed boots.
She clearly intended to kill him.
The colonel thought about it for a couple of seconds, then pulled out his sidearm and put a neat black hole in the center of the witch’s forehead. She didn’t even twitch much. He looked down at her thinking the old wretch gave a whole new meaning to the phrase putting somebody out of their misery.
He stepped over her corpse and knelt to attend the young soldier, using his handkerchief to stanch the kid’s blood. “I’ll get a medic to clean that out and stitch it up for you,” he told the wounded soldier whose eyes now fluttered open.
“Thank you, sir,” he managed to say.
“You all right?”
“Just dizzy, I guess.”
“Son, tell me, do you feel well enough to drive that jeep there?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“Good. You work for me now. Get on your feet and go fetch me some troops to offload my personal gear and supplies. Take them from the command vehicle and stow them in the back of this jeep. You and I are leaving this scenic parad
ise forthwith and driving this jeep to the Chinese borderlands. I hear they have trees there. If I don’t see a tree within the next twenty-four hours, I’m liable to shoot myself after I shoot you. Tell your captain, what’s his name, Koczak, what I said. Tell him we’ll be waiting for him at the exact time and coordinates we’ve agreed to. If he wants me, use the radio. You got all that?”
“Yes, sir. No problem finding trees in that region of Siberia.”
“Good to hear. Tell Captain Koczak if he’s a minute late to our rendezvous on the Chinese borderlands, his ass is mine, understood? We got ourselves a date with destiny and we can’t be late.”
“Understood. Sir.”
“Then get your skinny ass moving, cowboy. Time to saddle up.”
“Yes, sir! Will do, sir!”
The smiling young Russian soldier turned to run in search of the captain.
“Hold on a sec, Corporal Tolstoy. If they ever do manage to get my command vehicle out of that ditch? Tell them to throw that raggedy-ass old carcass there in the hole before they fill it back up. Oh, and stick some kind of cross in the ground to mark her grave. She may have been mean and ugly as sin, but I’m sure in her prime she was a fine Christian woman. Hard life out here. For anybody.”
The colonel watched the still woozy corporal march away, thinking what a fool he was for not coming up with this plan hours ago. Just thinking about pitching a tent and getting a little campfire going in the deep woods cheered him right up. Let Koczak worry about getting the damn vehicle out of the ditch and getting the troops and the whole support convoy to the site on time. You want to succeed in this world, you got one option and one option only: if you’re not the lead dog, you spend your whole life looking at the wrong end of the dog ahead of you.
Delegate your ass off.
The colonel allowed himself a brief smile. His capacity for resilience in the face of adversity was legendary.
“Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere,” he said to a young Russian sergeant standing idly beside him. “And sometimes in the middle of nowhere you find yourself. Remember that, son.”
The young soldier looked up at the American with reverent admiration and a total lack of understanding.
CHAPTER 45
At sea, off Havana
First thing Stoke and his black-clad Raiders did aboard the Viktor Leonev, CCB-175, they assembled all the ship’s Russian Navy officers up on the bridge and Stoke laid down the laws. How the boarding and search would be conducted. What they could expect and not expect. How the law demanded they behave during a lawful boarding. How he, Stokely Jones Jr., demanded they behave, law or no law.
The message behind his message?
Don’t fuck with me. Don’t fuck with my crew.
Expecting the Russian crew to be hostile, Stoke was prepared for anything. Got some dark looks and some evil eyes, but everyone kept their damn mouth shut and called him “sir” when they spoke to him through Gator, the team’s translator. The Russian captain behaved himself too, doing as Stokely ordered: going on the PA system to inform the entire crew that they were to cooperate with the commandos now aboard and commencing a search of the vessel without hesitation.
Harry Brock and Stoke were up on the bridge along with a SEAL warrior, a Florida cracker name of “Gator” Luttier. Had an HK automatic weapon slung over his shoulder. Gator was sheer badass material, and he was just itching for some Russian dipshit to give him some shit.
He’d gone to the University of Florida on a football scholarship, majored in Chinese and Russian as an undergraduate, graduated from Florida law school, tried being a divorce lawyer in West Palm for a while before going to SEAL school out at Coronado, ending up as a UDT explosives specialist.
Gator had eventually tired of wading into rich people’s shit, their messed-up marriages, listening to either side of their sad little stories until he just couldn’t freaking take it anymore, no matter how lucrative his family law practice was becoming.
“Lieutenant White, gimme feedback,” Stoke said to the Coast Guard leader in his lip mike.
“Cleared forward and amidships and heading aft. Collecting arms. No resistance,” Ryan White replied. White, a former U.S. Coast Guard skipper, had driven USCG frigates before being wooed away by Hawke Industries’ Marine Division to helm Blackhawke whenever the captain was away from the bridge. He was also a headbanger who liked to shoot bullets.
“Say your location.”
“Port side, amidships, sir, on the rail.”
“Thirty seconds,” Stoke said, looking at Brock and Gator. “Gator, Brock, and I are coming down to finish this Easter egg hunt. You cool, Lieutenant?”
“Born cool, Skipper,” White replied.
“I know that, son. Those Russkie boys start misbehaving? Just give the Stoke a shout-out.”
“Aye-aye, sir!”
“Can I borrow one of your guys?”
“Aye-aye, sir!”
Stoke smiled. This new generation of hard-ass navy men showed the ones who’d gone before some respect. They knew the old Stoke had done three SEAL combat tours and honored guys who’d served in the shit and—Never mind about all that; time was a’wastin’. There was bad crap aboard this Russian rust bucket—Stoke knew it in his gut. He nodded in the direction of the two former navy guys covering the officers with their MP5s.
“Okay, you fellas got the conn. Gator, Mr. Brock, and I are taking over what’s left of this search. Anybody makes a move on you, you shoot first and apologize later. Law of the sea, understand?”
“Yes, sir!” they shouted in unison.
STOKE, BROCK, GATOR, AND A lanky kid they borrowed from White named, oddly enough, Fat Jesse Saunders, a skinny blond-haired boy from Waycross, Georgia, descended the steep flight of aluminum steps down into the bowels of the ship. Saunders was packing a double-slung submachine gun with a pistol grip he could get at in a big hurry if need be. Fat had the kind of loose-limbed confidence of someone who could make good use of any kind of weapon at all, including his hands and feet.
When they got to lowest deck and moved aft, they came to something they hadn’t encountered aboard this vessel before. Stoke had borrowed a SCAR H-CQC machine gun with the short thirteen-inch barrel. “What have we here, gentlemen?” Stoke said, eyeing the two gorillas standing in front of a thick steel door.
A locked door, most likely. A locked door with two armed Russian military policemen positioned squarely in front of it, automatic weapons at port arms. Some stenciled Russian gibberish was written in red on the right-hand door, Stoke noticed. Heavy, steel doors. And the two guys were wearing Russian Army uniforms.
Army? On a naval vessel?
Gator turned to Saunders and said, “Fat?” But Saunders’s gun was already up and trained on the two Russkies.
“What’s the sign say, Gator? Ask them that,” said Stokely. Gator asked the question in slow but sure Russian. The two guys looked at each other before one of them answered the question.
“He says this is KGB HQ aboard the vessel, sir. Their military intel unit. No admittance.”
“Seriously, Gator? No admittance? Is that what he said? Well, hell. Do what you gotta do, Fat,” Stoke said.
In the blink of an instant, Saunders made a blindingly fast move forward. In one fluid motion, he leaned into the two guards, his two hands out like twin pistons, seizing both weapons and whipping them away from the Russians.
Stoke said, “Thank you kindly, Fat. Now, Gator, tell those two boys to stand aside before I perform rifle-butt dentistry on their asses.”
“Yes, sir,” Gator said, shouting an order. The two angry young men stood reluctantly aside.
“You see that palm plate access doohickey on the wall there, Gator? Tell one of them to put his hand on it. We’re going in there.”
Gator told them. They both glared back, shaking their heads in the negative.
“Tell them if they refuse again I’ll cut one of their fucking hands off and do it that way.”
&nb
sp; To make his point, Stoke pulled out the assault knife sheathed on his right leg. “Tell them to open that goddamn door!”
Like magic, it was open sesame time in the KGB kingdom. Fat Saunders soon had the two military cops facedown on the deck, cuffing their wrists behind their backs.
“Gator, stay out here and keep these two boys facedown on the deck, got that?”
“Bet yo’ ass.”
“I don’t bet. Fat, you’re coming in with us.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for nuthin’, Skipper.”
Stoke stepped through the opening first. It wasn’t KGB; it was storage. The ship’s hold was cavernous. Lit only by a smoky blue light that swirled around like ground fog on a moonlit night. Nobody home. No personnel, no desks, no communications, nothing. He signaled his guys to follow and moved deeper into the mist.
“Shit!” Stoke cried out in the swirling mist. He felt like he was walking into a void. And then he slammed into something solid, and it startled the living bejeezus out of him.
CHAPTER 46
Brock was by Stokely’s side in an instant, his weapon up, peering into the gloom.
“What the hell?” Brock said, waving his free hand to clear away the swirling wisps of bluish fog.
“What is it?” Stoke said, looking around.
“It’s like a damn pool hall in here,” Fat announced.
“Pool hall?” Brock said, incredulous. “Did he say it’s a pool hall?”
“Damn straight,” Fat said. “Pool tables, or something similar, stretching out as far as you can see in the dark. Only there’s something on top of them.”
“Like what? If you say billiard balls, I’m shooting you first,” Brock said. “This is not a pool hall.”