Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  “I’m talking about those lines you know are supposed to be there, like gut shooting someone just to watch them die instead of killing them clean. Like beating up some old man who was acting too proud. Like looting valuables because ‘they don’t need it anymore.’ It wasn’t murdering someone’s grandma or raping some ten-year-old, it wasn’t so over the line we couldn’t ignore it, but it was still over the line. They didn’t pull themselves back, and the rest of us let them.

  “By the time we pulled out of Vietnam, they were already gone. They couldn’t ever come home, not really. Even if they were back in their hometown around people who loved them, they couldn’t see those around them as real people or be able to work in the real world. That guy at the end of Deer Hunter, playing Russian roulette—I know that guy. All of us old operators know that guy. Whether it was a needle, a gun to their own head, or something else shooting at them, it was about the same.”

  The fire crackled. Drinkwater finished his beer and flicked the stub into the fire. “Commanders, by the end of the week I want a one-block hour of instruction on the Law of Warfare given to your teams. You will give the legal portion of the class and your command guidance. First Sergeants, you will participate by amplifying and supporting your team commanders by giving war stories of the do’s and don’ts. You will make sure not only that your soldiers have the law fresh in their minds, but that it is not just something buried in the back with the rest of the schoolhouse crap. That they understand your no-shit guidance. I suggest you distribute copies of the Geneva Conventions to everyone prior to the class and make it required reading. Once we have the rules of engagement, we’ll tune our operations to whatever the JAG says are the hoops we have to clear, but I want everyone to know what right looks like regardless of the ROE. Some rules need to be followed and some need to be nodded at, and you need to make sure you and your troops understand which is what.

  “Make no mistake…”

  He paused, turning to look at the assembled soldiers, some of the best-trained lethal professionals in the world, under his personal care and responsibility.

  “Make no mistake, if I come across any one of you so far outside the lines that you are gone, I will personally shoot you in the head, right then and there.”

  He let that sink in. Then more softly, looking into the fire, “Because that is what I wish I had done for a few guys I once called ‘my friend.’ Because that is what my younger self would have wanted if I went that far.”

  Looking back up to Terry, he said, “We look out for each other. We pull each other back. If one fails, it is because we all failed, and I am responsible for each of you just as we are responsible for each other. That is serving with honor. That is knowing where the line is. I’m not worried about crossing the line, I’m worried about how far. I’m worried about whether you pulled yourself back, others pulled you back, or you just kept going until you got caught.

  “At the end of the day, I want us all to come home, whether it’s in a box or on our feet. We all deserve to come home.”

  He paused, and then added: “And bring your souls with you.”

  * * *

  We are across the line. Terry knew that. Was it too far? Some of the guys used to say that as long as you were asking yourself that question, you weren’t too far. Terry never bought that. You could swim too far from shore and know you couldn’t make it back. The question becomes: do you try to turn around or do you keep going?

  He tried to say it didn’t matter. He didn’t have a home. His marriages to Pam and Angie had both smashed into the proverbial wall, so like the other troop divorces he didn’t even feel the right to think the pain was that special. Mom had died so long ago he barely remembered her face. Dad had died when he was nineteen, shriveled by the Big C until he looked more like the Crypt Keeper than the immortal soldier who had carried Terry on his back from base to base around the world.

  He had no home but the army, and he was losing that.

  The Pirates are my family, and this is what we have decided to do together. It is right for us. This isn’t about civilian law. Colonel O’Shay did wrong by us. When he didn’t get his star something just twisted in his head, and the shit rolled downhill. We’re just making it right by paying him back. Just one time, do this one thing, and we go back across the line as good citizens. We can take care of our own, settle down, and make it right that way.

  That’s what Father Geek has said, over and over. I’ve seen rat bastards live fat on foreign aid and covert payoffs. It’s only fair we clear the books with O’Shay and come out ahead, just this once. Then we’ll pull ourselves back across the line.

  Just this once.

  Right.

  CHAPTER 9

  MOSCOW, WEST BIRYULYOVO WAREHOUSE DISTRICT

  December brought what Fiodor Nabokov’s grandfather Piotr had called ushaka weather, the kind of cold suffered during the Great Patriotic War, when they had surrounded and slaughtered the Nazis at Stalingrad. Fiodor had never been able to decide which tales of that horrid, frozen, glorious time were truth and which militaristic fantasy, knew only that whatever had happened in those days had mutated his grandfather from a human being into an emotionless glacier, one who had done his best to transform his son Mikhael into an identically implacable force.

  Mikhael had not been quite the golem Fiodor considered his grandfather, but he was still a man with a commitment to survival at all costs. A man who no longer believed in country, but had discovered nationalism to be a superlative foundation for power. First, Fiodor, Grandfather had said, never enter battle alone. Always have a tribe to fight beside you. And secondly, never pass an opportunity to enrich yourself. For all the chaos and slaughter, fortunes were always made as well as lost in wartime, and those with military connections were among the most deeply enriched.

  So with his father’s blessings Fiodor had joined the People’s Army, and through various combinations of capacity and intrigue had swiftly risen to the rank of colonel. But one of the most important parts of that process was learning who could be counted upon to steal, or assist theft, and thereafter evade detection. Or at least capture.

  Or if not that, to die with lips sealed.

  Fiodor might not believe in anything in the world other than Fiodor Nabokov, and that was fine with him. The three men behind him in the windowless, unheated, concrete-floored warehouse also believed in Fiodor, so long as he paid them, and that was fine as well. They understood each other. There was no love lost between Fiodor Nabokov and his bodyguards. But rubles had been exchanged, as well as dire warnings about the cost of betrayal. As Machiavelli had said, fear was a far more reliable bond than love.

  The only illumination shone from three overhead incandescents casting overlapping pools of sterile light. His eyes adjusted to the darkness quickly, as they always had, a gift of survival from his grandfather. The warehouse within was stacked high with wooden boxes and canvas-wrapped bundles, few of them directly related to the business at hand. The objects of the current negotiations were nestled in wooden crates stacked in a cleared area the size of a boxing ring, squarely in the middle of the warehouse. Soviet SA-7s, the handheld Russian equivalent of American Stingers, heavier and less reliable, but more powerful and accurate under a wider range of weather conditions.

  His men were waiting for him, as he had known they would be. The SA-7s were just a teaser, of course, representing a fraction of the weapons liberated before an unfortunate fire had destroyed the Minsk arms depot.

  Pity.

  “Ah!” he said, exhaling a stream of condensation into the frigid air. “Hammad. It is good to see you.”

  “And you, Fiodor,” Hammad said, each word visible as a puff of steam. Hammad looked a little like the film star Omar Sharif, if the actor had groomed himself daily by striking his face with a hammer. One would have thought they were old comrades, and perhaps in a sense they were. “I was not certain that you would be here.”

  “I would not miss it. Such negotiations are be
st conducted between friends.” “Friend” meaning someone who would not profit by shooting him in the face, and from whom he could expect a measure of extra-legal professionalism. Regardless of trust or friendship or professionalism, it would not do for Hammad to know that this was Fiodor’s final deal.

  He was closing down the pipeline. The Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del or MVD, the Russian security forces, had been nibbling around his finances for some time, and this latest affair, he knew, had focused their attention on his small but lucrative operation. Numerous times over the course of his career Fiodor had very carefully deflected guilt from himself onto less precious, or at least less perspicacious necks, but inevitably the day would come when those precautions would not suffice, and the truth would out. And instinct said that that day had arrived.

  He had secreted a half-billion rubles in various paper and metal assets in a dozen different banks under a dozen different names, distributed so that no single deposit was large enough to draw unpleasant attention. But … there were limits.

  And that damned blog post had brought him perilously close to one such limit. It was easy to deflect some of it as simply Internet rantings, but he knew that Nabokov family alliances cultivated since the last czar now teetered at the edge of disaster. He had been warned, sternly but indirectly by allies in high places, to conclude his extracurricular activities.

  The next warning would be a knock in the night.

  But if Hammad knew that Fiodor was leaving the business, he might value the Russian less highly. Which could lead to him deciding to default on the current payment, or perhaps even put a bullet behind Fiodor’s ear. Which would lead swiftly to his own demise, of course. But Hammad might be egotistical enough to believe he could survive the retaliation. Which he wouldn’t. But people had miscalculated before. Millions of them, in fact, and Fiodor was in no hurry to join the long, marching line of the dead ones.

  None of these thoughts showed on his face. His smile was welcoming. “So. I understand that we have a gap of some twelve million rubles in the deal.”

  “My people will go to ninety, and no higher.”

  “Our price is reasonable. Such things cannot be purchased on the Amazon.”

  “The price is too high, my friend. Seven million euros is the extent of…”

  Fiodor missed the last words. A flash of light crashed through his head, and the world went white. His calves bunched with sudden violence. Their twitching had nagged him for the last few minutes and he’d hoped to shake it off, finish his business and get to his masseuse. But this was no twitch. It was more like a bite from an angry rottweiler.

  “Excuse me. Is something the matter?” Hammad’s flat, battered face was solicitous, but between jolts of pain Fiodor detected a bit of the younger man’s contempt for age.

  “I am fine,” Fiodor said. But … suddenly, he wasn’t fine at all. He felt something like a thousand knives flaying his skin and splitting muscle to expose the anguished nerves. A brief thought: I am betrayed! A microwave device, triggering an epileptic fit. He had heard rumors of such things. The MVD had found him out … No! Hammad had somehow poisoned him. Fear and hate and surprise all rose up at the same time, and he screamed, “It’s a trap! Kill them—” before his teeth clamped down, severing his tongue and filling his mouth with blood.

  The bodyguards on either side hesitated long enough to draw two breaths, and then bullets ripped through the warehouse walls, sending splintered wood and feathers whirring into the air.

  “Stop! Stop!” someone screamed, and by some miracle, they did.

  Hammad was down, and so was Fiodor. There remained no one to pay them. But there was a difference: Hammad had been shot just above the right ear. Fiodor Nabokov was curled onto his side, twitching, staring. He grunted and drooled blood, arms and torso knotted horribly, like a yogi attempting to commit suicide by contortion.

  Incongruously, one of Hammad’s bodyguards crossed himself. One of Nabokov’s bodyguards put a bullet between his boss’s eyes.

  “I don’t know what happened here,” he said. “But it seems we have lost our employers.”

  “I only kill for money,” the other team leader said. They eyed each other warily.

  The second man nodded. “Professional courtesy,” he said. And the two teams backed out of the warehouse, eyes upon each other, weapons tilted at the ground, the corpses of their former employers sprawled upon the floor.

  * * *

  The bodies were discovered ninety minutes later, after neighbors reported gunfire in the warehouse. Within five hours the news reached ITAR-TASS, the Russian news agency, and had passed to CNS’s stringer three hours later. Someone connected the name with that Indonesian blog, leading to the first documented usage of the phrase “the Dead List.” Up until this discovery the list had been an uneasy joke, but reporters began combing the world for news of deaths under similar circumstances. None could be found, but the assumption remained that somewhere, another victim was curled onto his side in some dark place, bleeding from mouth and anus, every bone in his body broken.

  And the first headline appeared on the Huffington Post, and three other blogs: “Death List Terrifies World Leaders.”

  “United Nations Crisis Summit.”

  And inevitably …

  “End of the World?”

  CHAPTER 10

  DECEMBER 17

  GÖTALAND, SWEDEN

  The house had been built in 1874, a six-bedroom castle on the estate of a more imposing structure damaged in some forgotten battle. The larger building no longer existed, but the smaller had been converted and refashioned with modern materials, so that by 2014 it was the most expensive dwelling for a hundred kilometers, a hybrid of stone and glass and concrete. It was the property of Thor Swenson, publicly an industrialist with many interests, and privately the largest arms dealer in Sweden.

  At the moment, Swenson was finishing an excellent open-faced smörgås sandwich with cucumber and nötkött. Their cook’s special blend of muesli was excellent as always, a delicate combination of flakes, grains, dried fruits, and filmjölk soured yogurt, a treat to his palate since childhood.

  His beautiful wife, Frieda, and his daughter, Inga, watching him, Thor dabbed his napkin against his lips, kissed Frieda’s pink mouth and his daughter’s cool forehead, and plucked his briefcase from the chair as he headed out of the house.

  He paused on the front steps. His castle perched on the edge of Rivö Fjord, spectacular in the depths of its blue waters glittering in the morning mist. The legendary warrior Beowulf was said to have made his home here, and Swenson could understand why. This was a place for heroes.

  “I’ll have to work late tonight,” he said.

  If he had looked carefully, or at all, he might have seen a thin sheen of ice in Frieda’s eyes, swiftly thawed. “I know, Thor. But try to make it to the recital. Inga sees the empty chair.”

  “I will do my best.”

  Little Inga’s warm blue eyes gazed up at him. “You’ll try, Papa?” The recital, yes, and after, her bedtime reading of The Return of the King. A favorite.

  “Of course.” He ruffled her hair fondly, and picked his way down the steps, the ridged gum soles of his Hasbeens loafers stabilizing him upon the morning ice.

  The car waiting for him was not ostentatious. A Volvo S60 Polestar, although he could easily have afforded any production automobile in the world. But a Lamborghini Veneno Roadster or Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse would have violated his desire to maintain a low public profile. Something that damned blog listing had violated.

  His executive assistant, Greta Olson, moved over into the passenger seat as she always did. She was more spectacular than the car itself, a sun-haired, perfectly coiffed, and aerobicized Valkyrie in a Caracina suit.

  He was somewhat surprised to see her. Usually an office chauffeur was assigned to pick him up. “Greta?” he asked. “You are here in person, so I assume there is something important.”

  She nodded. “Too important
for even a scrambled line, yes. I received by courier the acceptance of terms. Even as we speak, our Russian friend is completing the negotiations.”

  “This is good,” Swenson said.

  “Thor … have we made the usual arrangements?”

  Even alone in the car, Greta tended to speak obliquely. “The usual arrangements” generally involved an exchange of keys or codes, a slip of paper detailing the location of a warehouse, and a message to intermediaries to finalize delivery.

  “No. I knew that they would come to terms. The weapons have already arrived. All I need do is tell them where they can be retrieved.”

  Greta’s perfectly symmetrical face glowed. “Thor … that is brilliant. There are so very many reasons we work well together.” Her hand glided up his thigh.

  Swenson felt himself respond, then remembered the slippery roads. He had traveled them since childhood but in driving, as in running a multinational concern, there was no substitute for a strong and mindful hand upon the wheel. “I must keep my eyes on the road.”

  “Please do,” she murmured.

  She slid her head down into his lap and unzipped his pants. At first he was nervous, then gave himself over to the sensation as her hands, and then her lips, embraced him. “Greta. I … oh, God…” He kept his eyes on the road, but his fingers tousled her hair.

  Her only reply was a deeply felt “Mmm.”

  Swenson groaned, fingers tightening upon the wheel, his eyes fighting not to roll up into his pleasure place. Then … his hands convulsed so tightly he felt his knuckles crack. The contraction eased. Something was terribly wrong, but …

  “Mmm.”

  “Something is wrong, Greta. Please…” He managed to get that out, but pain shot up his neck. His spine. His chest felt as if one of Tolkien’s oliphaunts was squatting upon it.

  Perhaps understandably, Greta mistook his fear and pain for rising passion, responding with an eager “Mmm.”