37 Hours

by J. F. Kirwan

  She heard the scuffing of a man being brought down, dragged along the cobbles. Grunts. The sounds of fists pummelling flesh. Another of the tramps began searching in her pockets, and she saw her phone held up to the sky in triumph. Then her other pockets were emptied. She was beginning to feel again. The tranquiliser was wearing off. One of them groped her between her legs, another fondled her breasts. The tranq was fading fast. Come on! She heard the colonel telling his soldiers to stand back, so he’d have a clear shot.

  Her right arm was numb, like a dull club, but she swung it in an arc, thumping the fondler’s carotid, throwing him off her. The others drew back. Then one kicked her in the ribs. Good. It would trigger adrenaline and make the tranq fade even faster.

  The colonel was giving her father a lecture, no doubt one rehearsed a hundred times, about a boy watching his own father being buried alive.

  Another kick in the ribs – thankfully not her head – and her legs woke up. She rolled onto her stomach, pushed up on all fours just as another foot headed inwards. She grabbed it, twisted hard and brought down her entire weight on the man’s calf, dislocating his knee. He screamed. Which was what she wanted, to distract the colonel, to make him blink.

  The tramps scattered, some running up the slope into the trees, others back into the shadows. She got to her feet and glanced towards the colonel, his group in a semicircle around a man on the ground, panting, in a foetal position, in agony, blood pooling beneath his face.

  The colonel turned to her. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘History loves echoes. You get to watch your father being executed.’

  She walked unsteadily towards them. Her father lay on the ground, elbows up as if protecting his face from any further punches or kicks. She hated to see him like this. He’d always been so strong, even that day he’d been dragged away from her. The colonel, hood down around his shoulders, eyes blazing, aimed his pistol at the shivering figure with a steady arm.

  Maybe it was better this way. A quick death rather than a lengthy period being tortured in prison, followed by an unfortunate accident.

  ‘Shoot,’ she heard herself say.

  The colonel glanced at her, his eyes narrowing, probably unsure if she was sincere, or trying to use reverse psychology, or just pissing on his parade.

  Her father dropped his elbows, and she saw his face. Her father’s face. But that was wrong. He’d had plastic surgery. When he’d loomed above her and she’d seen this face, she’d presumed it was a trick of the mind. But now… The colonel turned back to his prey, his prize, his nemesis.

  ‘As you wish, Nadia.’ He levelled the gun.

  Something was wrong. The eyes. Not quite… ‘Wait. Make him speak.’

  ‘Why, so he can beg for his life? His time is up.’

  She walked closer. The body. Close, but not quite right. A bit flabby at the midriff, the shoulders and chest less pronounced. The colonel took aim.

  ‘It’s not him,’ she said.

  The man’s eyes – she was now sure it wasn’t her father – flicked between her and the colonel. He spoke. ‘Nadia, what are you saying?’

  Not his voice. She walked closer still.

  ‘Get out of the way or I’ll shoot you both,’ the colonel said.

  She ignored him and squatted next to the man. ‘No need to die for him,’ she said softly. She reached out and touched his cheek. Cool. Waxy. Plastic. A mask. A very good one. The grey eyes almost certainly contacts.

  ‘Take it off,’ she said.

  He looked up at her, then she helped him sit up, and dug her fingernails into his neck, and slowly peeled off the latex mask.

  ‘Then where –’ the colonel began, lowering his weapon.

  ‘Long gone,’ she said. Smart. Her father was very smart. Already on his way to find Katya and kill Salamander.

  The colonel walked over to the man, and pushed the muzzle of the pistol against his forehead. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  The man barely finished shaking his head before the colonel pulled the trigger. Blood, bones and brains erupted from his skull, splattering Nadia, including her face where one of the tramps had touched her so gently earlier. Of course, her father.

  The colonel stomped away. ‘Clean this all up.’

  ‘What about her?’ one of the group said, a female.

  ‘Take her back to Bransk.’ He turned back briefly to Nadia. ‘See you in Chernobyl,’ he said.

  She stared at the bloody mess next to her. She had no idea how her father had persuaded someone to take on this role, to die for him. Was that good or bad? She wasn’t sure, but it spoke volumes about him. Did she even really know him that well? Not really. Not enough. Earlier she’d thought he really cared for her. Perhaps he did. But he’d once said that a father could either bestow love or survival skills on his children, but not both. He was still teaching her.

  She stood up, accepted a cloth and wiped blood and grey slime from her cheek, but some entered her mouth, and she threw up.

  As they led her away, Nadia put her hand in her pocket, expecting it to be empty, and found a smooth metallic object there. A phone. Her father had planted it there while the other tramps had emptied her pockets.

  ‘I’ll take you to Bransk,’ the female said.

  ‘First I need a shower,’ Nadia replied. ‘And a change of clothes.’

  The woman nodded. ‘What the hell, you’re my sister’s size, and she has more clothes than she knows what to do with. Come with me.’

  Only when in the bathroom of the woman’s apartment did Nadia take out the phone and switch it on. It required a six-digit code. A date. Not her birthday, or even his or Katya’s, as anyone could find out those easily. She typed in the date of her father’s arrest. It didn’t open. Two more tries. A hint appeared. A single word: cause. She stared at it. Cause? As in cause and effect? Something personal, not just for him, but also for her. What was the effect? He had stayed out of most of her life. Why? He had killed. But there were too many kills, and she didn’t know the dates. Why had he killed? The mine collapse where her grandfather had died. That had been the event that had sent her father on a violent path. She knew the date. They’d held a vigil at the mine every year, even when she was a girl.

  She typed in the numbers. A little egg-timer icon told her she’d been successful. An envelope appeared, with a ‘2’ underneath. She tapped on the first message.

  Still digging on Bransk. He is not what he seems.

  She’d already figured that out. She knew she couldn’t trust him. She tapped on the second message.

  Now they know I’m alive, my days are seriously numbered. You and Katya must live. If it comes to it, make the right choice.

  There were no further messages. There were no numbers in the phone. She put it back in her pocket, undressed, and climbed into the shower, turned it to cold. She recalled the hunts with her father, in the woods by the banks of the Volga, often in the cold rain. Katya would never go. But this time, all three of them would be together, maybe for the last time, on a kind of hunt. Or maybe they were the hunted. It didn’t matter. Right now, one thing was important to her above all else.

  Family.

  ***

  The borrowed clothes weren’t a great fit, but Nadia needed to get going. A car arrived. Not just any car. A sapphire Marussia sports model. Very sleek, all curves. Bransk stood next to it in a black leather coat that stretched down to his ankles. She wondered if he could actually fit in the low-slung vehicle, and recalled that Marussia had gone bankrupt some years ago. Everything about Bransk made a statement; she just wasn’t sure what they all added up to. Still, Katya must have had a great time riding around in it.

  She walked up to him. ‘Remind me. What’s your job title again?’

  He didn’t answer her, and handed her an envelope. Inside were fresh papiren. Hers had been stolen by one of the tramps. God knows how Bransk had gotten them processed so fast. There was also a bundle of high denomination notes in roubles.


  She climbed into the sumptuous cream leather seats and relaxed while he drove. The passing of the yellow streetlights was hypnotic, and she drifted off. When she awoke, it was pitch black outside except for two halogen beams lighting up tarmac and trees. No other cars. Where was he taking her? They should have been at the train station long ago.

  ‘Going to shoot me and bury me in the woods?’

  His dark eyes and black eyebrows locked on to hers. If he’d been an actor, he could have played Rasputin.

  ‘We want the same thing, Nadia.’

  ‘I doubt that.’ She decided to cut to the chase. ‘Who do you really work for? And what exactly is your relation to the military?’

  His eyes sharpened. He focused on the road again. ‘I work for myself. And the military…owe me some favours. But I’m not here to kill you.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. You have a gun. I don’t.’

  He leaned forward without taking his eyes off the road, clicked open the glove compartment, and there lay a Beretta Cougar, her weapon of choice. How did he know? Was he teasing her?

  She took it, released the magazine. A full complement of nine-millimetre Parabellums. She reinserted the mag, pulled back the breech and the top one snapped into the barrel. She could shoot him. Bransk is not what he seems. He can’t be trusted. She should shoot him right here, right now, while she had the chance. She took a breath.

  ‘We’re here,’ he announced.

  The headlights picked up a white sign on a razor-wire fence as he slowed and then swung sharply off-road through an open gate. An old airfield. Up ahead, light seeped from cracks in the doors of a corrugated hangar. Bransk sounded the horn in three short bursts. The hangar doors opened, and Nadia’s breath stalled as she saw what was inside. A two-tone grey Russian Sukhoi fighter jet. An all-weather, supersonic interceptor, with variable wings. Known in NATO as the Fencer. One of her uncles had worked in maintenance for the air force, so she knew her planes. But she’d never actually seen one.

  Sweet.

  Bransk slewed the car in a tight arc, as if it was on rails, switched off the engine and got out of the car without looking back. Curiosity got the better of her, so she followed him into the hangar. Several men in overalls were prepping the plane, two working inside the cockpit.

  Bransk conversed with them for a few minutes then headed to a small room at the back.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

  He walked up close to her, leaned down because she was much shorter, and spoke through his thick beard. ‘We are going to Salamander’s lair. We need the element of surprise. We will arrive early. Before the colonel. And before your father.’

  She couldn’t fault his strategy. But if she well remembered, this was a two-seater aircraft. ‘So, who’s the pilot?’

  He pulled out a flight suit, sized her up, pulled out a smaller one and tossed it to her. Without warning he began to strip until he was down to his underwear, and donned the suit, stuffing his clothes into a flight bag. She did the same. He then left, and yet again she had to follow on his heels. One of the men in overalls handed him a clunky-looking white helmet, and then gave her a smaller one.

  ‘Wait a minute. Seriously? You can fly one of these?’

  He went straight to the ladder and climbed into the vacated cockpit, as two other men removed the wheel chocks and pennants hanging from the Fencer’s arsenal muscling its wings and undercarriage.

  She got in, the fighter jet having an unusual side-by-side seating arrangement. It was spacious for her, whereas Bransk looked as though he’d been vacuum-packed into the cockpit, his shoulders hunched, his knees up high. It didn’t seem to bother him. The canopy slid forward and sealed them in. Her intercom switched on with a hiss of static.

  Bransk flicked switches, and the engines began to whine. She asked him the question that mattered. ‘What exactly is it that we both want?’

  He waved a hand signal to a man with large headphones, who was walking backwards out of the hangar. The Fencer began to roll.

  ‘To kill Salamander,’ he said.

  ‘Why do you want him dead?’

  He was busy, but she heard his breathing deepen. He was deciding whether to tell her or not.

  As they taxied down to the far end of the narrow runway, he touched a control and the intercom sounded different, as if Bransk was closer. She guessed no one else could hear them now.

  Bransk’s voice lost its normal smooth yet fervent tone. ‘He killed my entire family. My father worked for him. He did something wrong, and that was the price Salamander exacted.’

  Her own father had told her how Salamander demanded complete loyalty. ‘But then why are you still alive?’

  ‘I was an orphan, taken in by them at the age of four. They wanted more children but couldn’t have them after a particularly difficult birth. I was twelve, at summer camp in Sochi when it happened.’ He turned to face her, the high-tech helmet and long squared-off beard oddly incongruous. ‘But to me they were family. It’s the one thing the colonel and I have in common – our families were murdered – which is why we can work together. I inherited the family fortune.’ He turned back, flicked the radio switch, and began conversing with an air traffic controller.

  The engines rose in pitch, then began to roar, the plane vibrating as he stepped on the brakes. The Fencer was like a greyhound, eager to escape its leash, to sprint forward and upward.

  ‘Clear for take-off,’ she heard on the intercom. Bransk released the brakes. She was thrust back in her seat as the Fencer powered forward. The acceleration was like nothing she’d ever experienced. Her stomach felt like it was being left behind, and she had to concentrate in order to breathe. Suddenly they lurched upwards into the night sky, within seconds almost vertical, and Nadia felt as if she was being flattened into the seat, her forehead pressed backwards by the helmet, her mouth stretched wide by the sheer acceleration.

  She clutched the sides of the chair and fought to gulp in air. They tore into the low cloud layer, and suddenly they were above the clouds, stars everywhere, a bright half-moon illuminating the ruffled bed of white beneath them.

  Bransk busied himself with checks, flicking controls here and there, and replied to comms from the base. It gave her time to catch her breath.

  After a while they stopped ascending and he eased off the engines, and again clicked the intercom control so it was just the two of them.

  ‘We must agree on operating rules,’ he said.

  ‘Such as?’ she croaked, then cleared her throat.

  ‘The important thing is that he does not walk out of this alive. No matter who else gets killed, Salamander must die.’

  She looked at him warily. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘If I get the chance to kill him, and you or your father – or even Katya – will die in the process, I will still kill him.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘And if you get the chance, but I or Sergei, for example, will die in the process, you must still proceed. I do not expect the same of you if it is Katya or your father. Family is family.’

  She thought of her father’s second message. He’d also considered how it might play out, and had let her know that his life could be forfeit in favour of hers and Katya’s.

  ‘Agreed,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, flick that switch.’ He pointed to a small grey lever marked A/B.

  She took a deep breath this time before flicking it upwards, and once more was shoved backwards into her cushioned seat as the engines roared louder, and despite everything she began to laugh. A/B. After-burner. As they speared forward and the double booms told her they’d gone supersonic, she recalled her father’s first message.

  Bransk is not what he seems.

  No kidding.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As they descended, the first stirrings of sunrise cast a scarlet glow on the sea of clouds beneath them. But then it was impenetrable fog, buffeting the air
craft in all directions, until suddenly Kiev’s Boryspil airport rushed upwards to meet them.

  A ditty from long ago played into her mind, a song Katya had adored as a teenager – Provence, something like that – and Nadia recalled the video, half expecting to see the Ukrainian singer Yolka waiting for them at the end of runway 22, gyrating in a tight stewardess uniform. Nadia clenched every muscle known to her as they landed hard, thumping onto the tarmac and braking brutally before veering off towards a floodlit hangar. Bransk slewed the jet to a stop, flung back the canopy and leapt out. Nadia had to wait a while until the nausea had passed.

  They were ushered over to an area where two Ryadovoy, the equivalent of army privates, waited with piles of neatly folded green-and-brown camouflaged uniforms and underwear. She took hers and glanced around the empty hangar with several soldiers wandering around, two keeping guard with Kalashnikovs, safeties off. Nowhere to change. Bransk stripped so she followed suit, as fast as she could, not only on account of the cold. The new uniform was heavy but flexible, as if she was donning chain mail. He caught her looking at her forearms.

  ‘A special brand of Tyvek, Kevlar and lead lining,’ he said, pulling on a long black leather coat. ‘Radiation protection. Pretty much bulletproof, though that’s not what you should worry about.’

  Of course. They were going to enter a hot zone.

  On a table lay an array of weapons, the smell of machine oils lingering in the draughty air. Bransk picked up a Makarov pistol, a Stechkin semi-auto with a wooden rifle butt extension, and a KS-23 shotgun with rounded pistol handle. He stashed all of them in his coat, along with numerous magazines. All she had was her pistol with nine rounds of ammo. Didn’t seem fair.

  ‘No grenades?’ she said.

  ‘Last thing we want to do is kick up a plume of radioactive soil, or bring down a ceiling laced with strontium.’

  Fair enough. Chernobyl, after all. Given radioactive half-lives, it’d be perfectly safe in about twenty thousand years.

  Bransk strode towards a rear door, and on the off chance he wasn’t simply going to take a piss, she followed him. Actually he was, and did, but waiting for them was a khaki GAZ-Tiger, the closest the Russian military got to a Hummer. First she needed to go, too, and so found a bush to squat behind. It took a while with her heavy uniform.