37 Hours

by J. F. Kirwan

  ‘You are not allowed this close,’ Bransk shouted. ‘You must pull back to the four-hundred-metre marker.’

  Several of the pack – there were eight plus the driver, still in his seat – turned towards Bransk, as if bemused, or confused. Just dumb tourists. Except that all of them had tensed, ready. She could see it in their postures, heads slightly bent forward, listening, knees bent a fraction, ready to move. The two girls looked first at Bransk, then spotted her, prone on the ground. They didn’t look away. Their sunny smiles shrank to thin lines of concentration, probably judging distance, angle, wind speed. The one with a video camera – probably an Uzi – raised it, as if to take a video of Nadia.

  Not going to happen. In her current position, Nadia’s head was the first thing a bullet would find. Uzis weren’t accurate at that distance, but if the girl knew what she was doing, she’d spray up and down, and at least one bullet would ricochet off the ground straight into Nadia’s face. But just as Nadia was about to get up, Bransk walked a few steps sideways, placing himself between her and the two girls.

  One of the men swaggered towards Bransk, hands in his belt. He spoke in English with an American twang, though there was that whiff of Russian lurking underneath.

  ‘What’s the problem, pal? You’re here, after all.’

  Nadia did a quick sweep of the area to check there was no one else. No snipers, as far as she could see, no reinforcements creeping around to flank her and Bransk. Only this gang. She wondered if they were there to kill them or take them alive. But now all nine were facing them. The charade was about to be dropped. It was going to be a kill zone. She tensed her muscles, and drew back into a crouch. She could see three to the right of Bransk, two to the left, and the driver through too much glass to make it worth wasting bullets.

  Bransk pulled out his shotgun. ‘Leave,’ he said, in Russian.

  The guy continued walking towards Bransk, talking as if this had all been a misunderstanding, while his hands left his belt, and the two girls walked a few paces to the side, just enough to draw a bead on Nadia. This pack were good, gaining advantage, counting on the fact that most people wouldn’t fire first, because there would always be some uncertainty. Perhaps, after all, they were just dumb tourists.

  But Nadia wasn’t most people.

  And neither was Bransk.

  He raised the shotgun and fired, and blew the man’s head clean off his shoulders. Nadia kicked off high into the air, aiming with both hands as she pulled the trigger and kept it there, squeezing off a spray of four rounds towards the girls, before she had to brace and roll. The girl without the Uzi went down.

  The air crackled with rapid gunfire, bullets fizzing past her, high-pitched twangs as lead met concrete and machinery, small puffs of dust spitting upwards. Two more shotgun booms were followed by a constant stream of Uzi and small arms fire aimed at Bransk.

  Nadia rolled and came up standing, then took aim at the girl with the Uzi. Their eyes met. First one to kill, won. Nadia needed to aim properly. In a game of spray bullets the Uzi would always win. Two shots slammed into the Kevlar protecting Nadia’s thighs, and she fell forward, onto her knees. She took aim again. Not quite there. Another bullet punched into Nadia’s left shoulder, making her let go with her left hand. The girl’s smile had returned. She thought she’d won. Another second and she’d be right. Nadia aimed one-armed, competition-style, locked target, breathed out a fraction and fired.

  The girl dropped.

  Nadia got to her feet. The suit was protecting her. Bransk was no longer stationary, and had pulled out his Stechkin. He zigzagged towards the group as they fired. He was taking bullets too, but none hit his face.

  Nadia fired spray-style again at those aiming at Bransk, knowing she’d not hit any of them while she was running, but she wanted to take their aim off him for a couple of seconds. She spotted the magazine and dived for it, jettisoning the empty mag in mid-air, and as she rolled back up she rammed the new one into place, breeched the weapon and landed kneeling, finger on the trigger.

  She got knocked over twice more, but Bransk had them on the run. The driver tore away as three of them, a third girl and two men, tried to board the moving vehicle. She aimed carefully and picked off the girl, while Bransk blew a hole in one guy’s back. But they were getting away.

  Bransk dropped the shotgun and pulled out the wooden shoulder rest for his Stechkin, and took aim. No way he could hit the driver. Not at that distance. Not with all that glass and metal on the move.

  But he wasn’t aiming at the driver.

  He fired at the gas tank. There was an initial burst of flames from the petrol cap side, then its entire tank exploded, engulfing the minibus as it rolled sideways, fire and black smoke billowing from the windows. A man clambered out, a human torch, waving his arms, screaming. Bransk lowered his pistol, presumably figuring the guy was dead in seconds anyway, so it wasn’t worth wasting a bullet. Nadia cursed and lined up the shot, and hit the man square in the chest. He went down. No one else emerged.

  She got up, surveyed the scene, counted the bodies, including the one cremated inside the minibus. All accounted for. She stared at the reactor building. Katya was bleeding. But there was something bugging her. Before rushing in, she needed to work it out.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she said.

  Bransk joined her while he reloaded the Stechkin. ‘Which part?’

  She thought about the phone call. ‘He wants my father, to trade with Katya. But they were trying to kill me.’

  She gazed at the carnage all around her. If I’m dead… How would that work? Make her father so mad he’d rush in to be killed? Something was off about this deal. Salamander was making them think it was personal, about his revenge. And partly it might be, where she and her father were concerned. But something else was going on. Salamander needed something. Not from her evidently, nor her father, nor Bransk.

  ‘If they’d succeeded – and they sure as hell tried – what would be the next move? Not ours, but the colonel’s?’

  He pulled at his beard, then began reloading. ‘He will storm the building.’

  ‘Then that must be what Salamander wants.’

  Bransk stared around, then muttered, ‘Ko.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Salamander was a master at the Chinese Go board game. Much more complex than chess. Ko fighting is a Go strategy. You make your opponent respond – rush in, as you say – by raising the stakes, when what is really at stake is minimal, sacrificial. Meanwhile, you gain advantage elsewhere on the board.’ Bransk lifted his emptied shotgun and then rammed it barrel-first into the ground. He hammered it with his fist until it stood erect.

  ‘What’s that for?’ Nadia asked.

  ‘A message,’ he said.

  ‘For the colonel?’

  ‘I doubt he will know it. Some of his men might. Your father will.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘The gun symbolises an ostrich, its head stuck in the sand. It means we are not seeing something.’

  She discarded her empty mag as he passed her a fresh one. ‘Make it last,’ he said.

  Above the breeze, she heard the faint but unmistakeable sound of rotors. ‘We should go in before they arrive, in case they decide a sweep-and-clean.’ And kill anything on two legs still breathing.

  He passed her a head torch, like night-runners use, with three LEDs and a head-strap. She fixed it in place. Then he handed her an elastic bracelet with a white disc the same size as a watch face.

  ‘Dosimeter. Radiation counter. If you see grey dots, you’re getting a dose. When they start to appear, time is your enemy. The longer you stay, the higher the dose. Seconds matter. In very high rad areas, thirty seconds means vomiting blood later; forty-five seconds means organ disintegration. Where Katya and Sergei are being held, the radiation is low. He’s installed some kind of shielding. But the rest of the building… There are still places so radioactive that nobody goes there.’ He
slipped the strap around her wrist. ‘Black dots are worse. If the disc turns all grey, you’re going to be pretty sick for a while, maybe cancer later. All grey with black dots, cancer sooner. All black, do yourself a favour: eat a bullet.’

  He put on his, and set off.

  She stared at her bracelet.

  Coming, Katya.

  ***

  It was rough going once they’d gotten through the heavy iron door. Dark, rubble everywhere once they’d left the well-used corridors, rusted pipes running along the ceilings, many broken and on the floor, the walls a mouldy grey where the paint had flaked off, leaving crumbling cement and plaster, and shallow puddles of oily water scattered everywhere. She glanced at her dosimeter disc once a minute, dipping her head to shine the LED’s stark white light on it. A tiny grey smudge. So far, so good.

  Bransk had a Geiger counter, the sound turned down low, sounding like a sleepy cricket. Once or twice the clicking sped up and Bransk moved faster, his Stechkin leading the way.

  She heard heavy footsteps up ahead, men in boots running. Welcoming committee, no doubt. Probably with night-vision goggles. And she and Bransk had a target painted on their foreheads thanks to the torches.

  Bransk slowed as they approached a corner. The Geiger counter kicked up a notch. He stopped, turned to her. ‘Switch your light to strobe. Stay behind me.’

  She did as instructed, finding a small metal protrusion, which she pressed, and the corridor lit up in bright flashes. He did the same, and the effect became disorienting, their flashes out of sync. It was like too many vodkas in a cheap nightclub. She tried to adjust her eyes and her balance to the shifting scene.

  Bransk advanced and the clicking became a constant purr. Not good. She resisted glancing at the disc, not that she’d be able to process it properly in the flickering light. The boots around the corner stopped. The bastards had the advantage. Maybe where they were, the rad level was low. As Bransk had said, seconds count. But a bullet in the head was still the main threat.

  She had an idea. Tapping Bransk on the shoulder, she picked up a short piece of broken piping, and took off her head torch, wrapping the elastic around it.

  He nodded. They swapped places. It was quiet around the bend, the men waiting, presumably aiming at the corner. The clicking continued. The men might be smirking, knowing their enemy was being slowly cooked.

  ‘Turn it off,’ she said. Psychology was a weapon too.

  Silence, just the flashing. Bransk’s hand appeared in front of her face.

  Three fingers.

  Two.

  One.

  She thrust the pipe around the corner, at what would have been head height, just as Bransk launched himself horizontally at ground level, sliding in the puddles, and fired, his weapon on auto, a stream of bullets, the shots pounding her ears long after they’d been fired, reverberating up and down the corridors.

  The gunfire stopped, and the echoes died down.

  ‘Run,’ Bransk said, scrambling to his feet, and she hurried around the bend, leapt over three corpses, until she reached a junction. He switched on the counter, and this time it was a sleepy cicada. She retrieved her head torch, but put it in a pocket. There was light up ahead. She looked at her left wrist, peeled back the sleeve to see the disc. It was speckled grey. Not too dense. But one dot was darker than the others. Who was she kidding? It was black.

  Bransk reloaded and headed off. The clicking stopped as they reached a room she recognised from the drone. Three exits. But they already knew which one to go through. She thought there might be further resistance, more men, but no. There in front of them was the chamber with Sergei and Katya chained to the wall, crucifix-style. Katya was whiter than white, the knife removed, the blood staunched by a wad of cloth and a crude bandage wrapped around her middle. She looked up towards Nadia, her lips the colour of chalk. Sergei was unconscious.

  Between them stood the man, a hunched bear, pitiless black eyes peering out from deep sockets. Salamander. He didn’t speak, but then he didn’t have to. In front of him was a contraption roughly a foot on each side, with wires, polished metal and no moving parts. Not the warhead, but it might as well have been a black bowling ball with the word Bomb painted on its side.

  Salamander held a trigger device in his right hand. His thumb had depressed the trigger. A dead-man’s switch. If they killed him right now, the bomb would go off and they would all die. She suddenly remembered what Bransk had said, about killing Salamander no matter what.

  Bransk raised his weapon. Nadia gauged the angle. It was pointed at Salamander’s thick neck.

  ‘We need to know where the warhead is,’ she said, her fingers gripping her Beretta, ready. Could she kill Bransk in order to stop him? If not, his shot would end them all. A part of her knew he was right. But not the voting majority.

  ‘He will only lie,’ Bransk said. ‘He speaks poison.’ His arm firmed.

  Salamander stared at him. ‘Do I know you?’ His voice was bass, guttural. His mouth barely moved. The words were choppy, as if he had broken glass in his mouth, and each syllable cost him blood.

  Bransk didn’t answer.

  Katya spoke, her words slurred. She’d been drugged. ‘Bransk, you came. I…knew you would. I…I love you, Bransk.’

  Nadia watched his gun arm. It didn’t waver. She realised she hadn’t breeched her weapon. The barrel was empty. If she tried to kill Bransk his bullet would pierce Salamander’s neck first.

  Salamander spoke again. ‘Ah. The orphan. The boy who got away.’

  ‘Let me unchain them,’ Nadia said. ‘Get them out of here.’ She breeched her weapon.

  ‘Finest German steel,’ Salamander said.

  She glanced at the chains. Thick, too. Maybe Bransk’s shotgun could have broken them, but not her pistol. She was running low on options.

  Katya’s head swivelled between Salamander and Bransk, then she locked on to Nadia. ‘Hello, sestra. Don’t think I’m getting out of this one. You should leave.’ She shook her head, as if trying to shake off an insect. ‘Not afraid to die.’

  Nadia wanted to kill Salamander herself for doing this to her sister. But Bransk hadn’t fired. She honestly didn’t know why. His eyes glared hatred, but his trigger finger didn’t move.

  ‘I spared you,’ Salamander said. ‘Your father gave up your sisters, his real flesh and blood, to protect you. That was the deal.’

  Bransk’s eyes widened. Clearly he hadn’t known. How could he? But what was Salamander doing? Egging him on to pull the trigger? It didn’t make sense.

  ‘You have to kill him, my love,’ Katya said. ‘He’s…a monster. Must kill monsters. You taught me that.’

  Nadia had no idea what that meant – obviously something between the two of them. But Bransk’s lower lip quivered, just for a split second. So, he did care for Katya. But he pushed his forearm out just a little further, and Nadia could almost sense the signal from the brain travelling to the nape of his neck, along the underside of his arm, through his wrist, into his forefinger, giving it the command to bend…

  She whipped up her pistol and fired at the Stechkin. Sparks flew as his hand was swatted aside. The gun fired but missed Salamander, ricocheting off the wall behind. Bransk pulled out a knife with his left hand.

  ‘Enough!’ The colonel burst into the room, his own pistol aimed at Bransk. Six men quickly fanned around the room, a semicircle facing Salamander and the two hostages. The colonel’s aide entered last, also decked out in the same rad-protection combat fatigues Nadia wore.

  ‘We need him alive,’ the colonel barked. ‘Once we have the location of the warhead, I’ll let you interrogate him further.’

  The way he said it, it was as if everything was suddenly under control. But it wasn’t. Salamander had not moved an inch since their arrival. The colonel’s men fidgeted with their rifles and sub-machine guns, but did not advance. Bransk stowed the knife inside his jacket. He didn’t look at Nadia. Only Salamander. No
one seemed to know what the next play was going to be.

  And then three things happened.

  First, Sergei came to, his head rising, then dipping, as he uttered a groan, and then jerked awake.

  Second, Salamander’s eyes looked over the assortment of men with the colonel. Nadia followed his gaze, and then stopped on one of them. Her father, in amongst the squad of commandos. Her father’s eyes were neutral for Salamander, but when he glanced at his daughter, Katya, whom he’d not seen in years and who believed him dead, Nadia could read his pain. At least Salamander still didn’t know what her father looked like. Then she remembered the businessman on the plane. Had he been able to take a photo somehow? In any case, Salamander didn’t react.

  But then the third thing happened. The one that most spooked her, turning her spine into one of those marching band vertical xylophones, as someone raked a scalpel down it.

  Salamander smiled.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Nadia decided someone should take charge. She turned to two of the soldiers, one of whom was her father.

  ‘Cut them free,’ she said.

  They glanced across to the colonel. His aide whispered something in his ear. He eyed Nadia, then Salamander, then waved a hand, dismissively. ‘Do it,’ he said.

  Keeping well away from Salamander, her father and the other soldier grabbed the set of bolt-cutters another soldier had brought, and guillotined through the chains holding Sergei first, then Katya. Nadia watched as her father caught Katya’s weak frame, and helped her sit down against a wall. He produced a flask, and Katya gulped water greedily, spilling it down her front.

  Don’t say anything, father. Don’t give yourself away. She knew how he must be tempted. And how Katya might react, especially as she seemed drugged. Nadia stared at the sister she’d saved two years ago. And here they were again. But their father was with them this time. That must make a difference: he was ex-Spetsnaz after all. He would have a plan. And Salamander didn’t know it was her father. At least she prayed he didn’t.