“Good. Very good.” Akula did some more tapping on his tablet. “I’ve e-mailed you the name and address of the man to see in Minsk. Yevheniy is a good man; he’ll take care of you.”
“Thank you.”
“Anything for my old friend,” Akula said. He was feeling something, but Christine couldn’t quite figure it out. Satisfaction, maybe. “Is there anything else I can do?”
“Could you call us a taxi to take us to our hotel?”
“I can do better than that. I’ll have one of my men drive you anywhere you wish to.”
Father Aleksander nodded his thanks.
* * *
The hotel wasn’t great; it clearly catered to the budget-conscious traveler, but Father Aleksander had chosen it because it was off the beaten path and did not get as much attention as the more high-rent places. As soon as they had been shown to their rooms, Mark made a ‘keep talking’ gesture and started playing with his wrist-comp.
“Lovely weather,” Christine said sarcastically. “It’s almost as warm as Alaska.”
“It might warm up by mid-April,” Father Alex replied. “Although May is more likely. June at the latest.”
“Okay, I just found and neutralized two bugs,” Mark said. “If the gadget Condor put in my wrist-comp is working as advertised, that is it. Looks like your pal planted them on you when he was hugging you, Father.”
“Call me Mykhailo, or Michael,” he replied. “I am here in a secular capacity, after all.”
“Okay, Fa… Michael.”
“Fedir is curious about our intentions,” Father Alex said. “I feared he might be. He does a lot of business with the Dominion, and he clearly does not wish to jeopardize it on my behalf.” He was sad and disappointed, but did his best not to show it.
“You think he’s going to drop a dime on us?”
“No, I don’t believe he will. His contacts with the Ukraine are unofficial – fellow criminals, smugglers, and dealers in drugs and weapons. He will instruct his people to watch us carefully, and if we do something that might hurt his business with the Dominion, then he will not hesitate to betray us. But we are not doing anything like that, are we?”
“Nope,” Mark said. “Just going somewhere in the middle of fuck all to meet with somebody nobody knows about, and hopefully get the hell back out as quickly as possible. No harm, no foul.”
“Are you sure we can trust Shark-Boy?” Christine asked, feeling very much out of her element. She didn’t even like spy movies, and this was feeling a lot like the boring parts of a James Bond movie, except with less sex and gambling. “I couldn’t get a good empathy read off him.”
“Yes, Fedir has always been hard to read,” Father Aleksander admitted. “He does not feel emotions the same way a normal human does. But he wouldn’t want to attract any attention from the Dominion’s authorities; denouncing us would reveal parts of his operation he’d rather keep hidden. When we were released from the Iron Guard, we were warned against having any dealings with our former Fatherland. Both of us have done so regardless of the warnings and the explicit threats. In his case, the Dominion tolerates him to a point because his services are useful. The Ukraine conducts a lot of unofficial business.” He smiled grimly. “In my case, breaking my parole won’t be disregarded so easily.”
“So you didn’t escape from the Iron Guard?” Christine asked. “You were let go?”
“Fedir, myself and a man named Yakiv. It was a reward for deeds in the service of the Fatherland. We were asked what we wanted as our prize, and we all asked to be released from the service.” There clearly was a story in there, and he clearly didn’t want to tell it. “In return, we all swore we wouldn’t return unless we did so to rejoin the Guard.”
“Okay, Mike. You can come with us to Minsk, but there’s no way you’re walking into the Dominion if you’re a wanted man there,” Mark said.
“And how are you going to speak with your guide, if he happens to have no English? How are you going to search the marshes and forests on you own?”
Mark closed his eyes; his borrowed face looked older than it had been moments before. Christine put a hand on his shoulder and he put his hand over hers. “This is not a good idea.”
“Do we even need a native guide?” Christine said. “I mean, I could just fly us there. We have GPS on our wrist-thingies. Forget dealing with literal loan sharks. We could go look for the guy, just you and me, Mark. I don’t have a good idea of where he is, but I figure when I get close enough he’ll send me a vision or smoke signals or whatever. It’ll probably be quicker that way.”
Mark shook his head. “Too risky. You can’t be detected psychically, but flying humans have a pretty big radar signature. The Dominion has a damn good air defense system. They’ll pick you up and hit us with everything they’ve got.”
“Oh.”
Mark turned to Father Aleksander. “Okay, you’re right. We need you. But if this caper goes tits up, you’re going to end up dead.”
“We all die, my friend. If my time comes while we are back in my country, the place where I sinned so greatly…” He trailed off for a second. “Let’s just say it would be a fitting end.”
Christine could sense his sorrow and shame without trying.
The priest looked at them with a resigned expression. “It happened in 1975,” he started.
The Judge
Karlivka Village, Dominion of the Ukraine, July 25, 1975
The day started with an oddity and ended with a massacre.
The Judge looked with interest at the man who was not afraid. Fear was so pervasive among everyone he encountered that its absence was almost shocking. Over the last six years, he had learned to distinguish all the nuances of the emotion, from the apprehension most people felt when in the presence of a member of the Iron Guard to the uncontrolled panic of those who knew death was at hand. There were exceptions, certainly. The Shark didn’t feel fear, or any other emotion, not the way humans did. The Witch wasn’t immune to his gifts, but she’d never expressed fear. And, of course, there was the Tsar himself.
This unafraid man was not a Guard, however. He did not possess superhuman powers or the status that might give him the delusion he was above the law. He wore an ill-fitting suit and gold-rimmed glasses, which made him stand out among the largely peasant crowd that had gathered on the square for a chance to see the ruler of their world. A schoolteacher, perhaps. He might have been one of the village’s notables, but those were gathered behind the podium where the Hetman of the Guard would soon introduce the Tsar himself.
The people of Karlivka did not love the Tsar. Most of its two thousand souls were ethnic Russians who still referred to their home town by its Russian name Karlovka. Their affection was irrelevant, however: they feared the Tsar, and dared not be anything less than obsequious and reverent.
Except for the man in the gold-rimmed glasses. He wasn’t afraid. He was actually feeling exultant, triumphant. No one in the village should be feeling that way.
Akula walked up to the Judge. The gigantic, inhuman-looking Guard towered over his colleague, but he addressed him with friendly respect. “You look thoughtful, Mykhailo,” he said. “If something is bothering you, spit it out. His Highness will arrive to this shithole in twenty minutes, give his usual speech, and be on his way. We’d better make sure nothing disturbs his routine, or he will get cranky, and when the gets cranky, blood starts flowing like water. You know that.”
Mykhailo shrugged. “The man in the glasses,” he said without pointing out the suspect, lest he realized he’d been singled out. “Something about him feels off.”
“Very well. I’ll have the men bring him to us.” Akula nodded to the other Guardsman in the group, Yakiv, better known as the Knight. He was clad in a suit of mail like one of Alexander Nevsky’s warriors, although his armor could shed heavy-caliber bullets like so many raindrops. “Be on watch, Sir Knight. We might have a troublemaker at hand.” He explained the situation to his colleague.
Yaki
v nodded and walked around the crowd, a hand resting lightly on his curved horseman’s sword. When the man with the glasses noticed the soldiers moving among the villagers, he took off running, knocking people aside in his rush to escape. It was futile, of course. Akula himself caught up to him in a few strides and knocked him down with a casual blow that left the man whimpering on the ground. The gathered villagers recoiled from the Guardsman and his prey. A few tried to run back to their homes, dragging their children along, but at a barked order from the Knight the soldiers forced everyone back and surrounded the crowd, preventing its dispersal. If things were as Mykhailo suspected, those poor peasants would find no safety anywhere on this earth.
He walked over to the prisoner, who was no longer triumphant or unafraid. The man on the ground started to reach for something in his pocket, but Akula was too fast for him. The Shark broke the man’s wrist, dug into the pocket and pulled out a small black device. A walkie-talkie. “His name is Boris Zhernakov,” Akula said, rifling through the man’s papers after relieving him of the radio. “The local schoolteacher.”
“Do you have anything to say, Boris?”
“Fuck you, that’s what I say,” the man replied; his voice broke in mid-sentence, but he remained defiant despite his growing terror. “Long live the Rodina!”
“I’m not liking this, Mykhailo,” Akula said.
“He has accomplices,” the Judge replied, gesturing at the portable radio. “We must make him talk, and quickly.”
“Yes.”
Mykhailo asked the questions. It took a few minutes. Akula was a professional. None of the injuries he inflicted were immediately fatal. The hapless schoolteacher lived long enough to talk, and a few minutes after that.
Storming the nearby barn the dying schoolteacher directed them to was almost anticlimactic. The conspirators were all human, utterly helpless before the Iron Guards. They all died or were subdued before they knew they had been discovered, and had no time to activate the device they had hidden in the building. When Mykhailo saw what the dead men had brought to the village, he knew what had to happen next. It would be best if he was the one dispensing justice, rather than the Hetman or, God forbid, the Tsar himself. Every villager there, and their relatives beyond, might pay for this affront with their lives.
The Judge could provide a small measure of mercy.
“Decimate them.”
“Everyone?”
Mykhailo almost ordered them to kill only one tenth of the men, but too much mercy might get his orders countermanded by his superiors. “Spare the children under the age of twelve. Of the rest, pick one in ten, and have them shot.”
That was mercy.
Moscow, Republic of Russia, March 20, 2013
“It was a nuclear device, you see,” Mykhailo explained to his friends. Mark Martinez regarded him with an impassive expression on his borrowed face, but his emotions were in turmoil. Christine Dark looked as horrified as she felt; tears were running down her face. “A small one as such things go, around twenty kilotons in yield. A rogue group of former Soviet soldiers and scientists had managed to build it; they used a design from a long-dismantled nuclear program of the nineteen-forties. It was the last great act of defiance from the Communists, from old men who remembered the glories of the USSR and wished to bring them back, and young fools like that schoolteacher who followed them.
“How they managed to build the bomb, and smuggle it into the Dominion… The facts we eventually unearthed would have filled volumes. They could have inspired a heroic saga, except for the fact that nobody composes sagas for the anonymous losers of a secret war. Their plot failed, thanks to me, and thanks to the foolish pride of a schoolteacher who wanted to see the Tsar die with his own eyes. I helped save the Tsar’s life, and that gave me the privilege to decide how many villagers must die for failing to warn the authorities, even though none of them had any inkling of what was going on. Thanks to my mercy, only one hundred and fifty-two souls lost their lives that day. Through those actions, I earned my discharge from the Guard, along with my two companions.”
He stared bleakly at one of the walls. He couldn’t bear to look at their faces any longer. The feelings he sensed were bad enough. “So now you know what kind of man I was. Now you know why death holds no horrors for me.”
Chapter Eighteen
Face-Off
Moscow, Republic of Russia, March 20, 2013
“Mark, you sleeping?” Christine whispered in the dark.
“Not even a little bit.”
I felt her shift around in the bed. “Me either.” She turned on the nightstand light.
I turned around to face her. I’d been lying down for almost an hour, unable to sleep but trying not to disturb Christine. It’s always hard when two people start sleeping together – different habits, different sleep patterns: if you’re not careful, neither one will get much sleep. Although in this case my sleeplessness had nothing to do with her.
Christine ran a hand down the side of my featureless face. “Father Alex,” she said.
I nodded. “Role models just ain’t what they used to be, I guess.” Condor was a closet sicko. Father Alex had left behind a trail of bodies longer than mine. If Cassandra turned out to have a basement full of dead transients somewhere, I’d never get over it.
“He is a good man,” Christine said.
“Tell that to all the widows and orphans. Tell that to the dead.” The Judge, the Shark and the Knight, champions of the Iron Guard. I’d actually read a few comic books featuring them, come to think of it, usually as villains that fought the likes of the Legion, although the Guard had mostly avoided that kind of conflict in real life. They hadn’t had pictures of the actual Guards, so the comics’ versions of the Shark hadn’t been accurate at all, and the Judge was portrayed as some tall blonde guy that looked more like a Nazi than a Ukrainian, and he’d been a powerful telepath that nobody could lie to. There’s no truth in advertising. Turns out the Judge was just a big guy with some empathic abilities, and he was now alive and well in New York City. What would his parishioners think if they knew that they were hearing Mass from one of the bogeymen from the old country?
Christine leaned forward until her forehead touched mine. “He’s trying to atone for what he did. Has been ever since he left the Ukraine.”
I ran my hand through her hair, and its silky feel on my fingers helped make me feel a little better. “All the times he talked to me about how killing tainted your soul, poisoned you, I always wanted to yell at him he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. But something always held me back. I always had a feeling that maybe he did know what the fuck he was talking about. I didn’t know the half of it.”
“I’m not going to excuse what he did. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.” I’d seen tears form in Christine eyes while Father Aleksander told his tale. He hadn’t noticed. His steady, emotionless tone hadn’t wavered throughout the story, as if he’d gone into a hypnotic trance.
“My friend. My fellow monster. Makes sense.”
“If you’d been there, if I’d been there, would we have done any better?”
I thought about it. The answer that first came to me was simple and easy. Yes. I’d have made them kill me before I hurt those people. But then those people would have died anyway, and more besides them. Father Alex had chosen the lesser evil.
I still didn’t know if I could forgive him. And if I couldn’t, I didn’t know if I could ever forgive myself, either.
“Hey, it’s okay, Mark,” Christine said softly. “It’s okay.” She sounded like someone trying to console a crying friend.
I wasn’t crying. Can’t cry without a face.
She turned the light off and we held each other in the dark.
At some point we slept.
Pripet Marshes, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 23, 2013
Our guide to the marshes was a wiry man with weathered skin, sparse beard and small, squinting eyes. He looked as tough as old leather, with an
expression that said he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and that he wasn’t glad to be suffering our company. He also didn’t speak three words of English. The two words he did know were ‘Shit’ and ‘Bitch.’ While he talked to Father Aleksander, I was able to read between the lines and figure out his nickname for me was ‘that American Shit.’ It didn’t take a giant leap of logic to determine what Christine’s nickname was.
The guy was wearing a fur coat and hat, thick padded pants and sturdy boots. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder. I was enough of a gun nut to recognize it: a German Mauser, probably a Model 98 or 98K of World War Two vintage, or maybe even World War One. It looked pretty well-maintained, and something about the guy told me he’d used it for more than hunting bear or wolf. He didn’t look quite old enough to have served in the Great Patriotic War, but the Russian-Ukrainian conflict had gone on long after all the wars were officially over, and there’d been plenty of dust-ups in the intervening years; the guide looked like he’d been in a few of them. I could tell. The guy was a killer, a hard case. Takes one to know one.
Father Aleksander made the introductions. “This is Vasyl.” Vasyl didn’t bother shaking hands. He looked us up and down, made it clear he wasn’t much impressed by what he saw, and took a swig of something in a flask by his belt. I was fairly sure it wasn’t lemonade. He didn’t offer to share.
This looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 33