Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  At the base of the tank closest to me, I saw the dark boxes of shaped charges stuck to the side. Black tumors marring pristine skin. Glued in place with instant epoxy, maybe.

  Pipelines cris-crossed the farm. The small pipes were a foot in diameter and low to the ground, the largest one a yard wide and up on supports. I stayed low and close to it for cover as I ran. The farm smelled cloyingly of gasoline fumes, thick enough that the freezing rain couldn’t completely push them aside. Even the air was flammable here.

  I didn’t know where Kasym was, among the acres of tanks. If they were blowing holes in all of the bigger containers, he would push the incendiary bomb on its trolley near to the center of the farm, for maximum effect.

  He’d have a gun. I had a claw hammer. It would be a surprise attack, or nothing.

  I ran for a hundred yards, like a rodent scuttling alongside the big pipe. The sleet coated my hair and my back.

  Then I saw it. The Mark 77, on its trolley, halfway between two gigantic tanks. No Kasym. And no packet bomb visible on the long blue-white tube of the Mark 77, either. Good. Better than good. Kasym must still be off setting the last of the shaped charges.

  I found a guardhouse, a glassed five-foot-square shack for the petro farm security to stay out of the weather. It was empty. The phone lines had been torn away from the wall and the receiver.

  As I turned back toward the pipeline, I felt the whip of a bullet passing the bridge of my nose. It splintered the glass behind me.

  I ran.

  On the second shot I heard the little crack of a suppressor, like a clap heard from far away. Handgun. Sixty or seventy feet off. Kasym was taking the time to aim. I rolled under the pipeline. A third round dinged a metal support strut only a foot from my knee.

  Taking cover would be pointless. He knew I wasn’t armed. He would just walk up and blow me away. I needed distance. The ground was becoming slick with rain and ice granules. I heard Kasym’s footsteps, running after. My legs pumped as I sprinted hard for the shadows between the tanks.

  No more shots whipped past. He was concentrating on catching me, or at least keeping me in sight. A lethal game of tag. I rounded one tank, then another, skidding on the wet pavement. I glanced back and saw him, dressed for the exercise in his tracksuit but hampered by the pack on his back, which still looked half full. I was winning, stretching the yards between us.

  But Kasym didn’t need to catch me. Just attach the packet bomb to the incendiary, get clear of the blast zone, and set off the charges. How many minutes did we have, until the firestorm?

  He wasn’t following anymore, I realized. A muffled thump came from back near the big pipe, a hundred feet away. Was he moving away from me? Or circling around, to put one between my eyes?

  I had stopped next to a set of narrow stairs that wound up and around the side of the nearest tank. Being on top would give me a better vantage. Staying down would give me room to run.

  I went up. Slush wept from the thin steel grate of the steps. I took big, low strides while holding on to the railing, three stairs at a time.

  On my tenth step, maybe thirty feet up from the pavement, I saw Kasym. And froze.

  He was making his way very quietly around the curve of the next tank over, his automatic leveled in two hands. Maybe he didn’t have the big bomb ready and didn’t want to risk any interruptions. Or maybe he just really wanted to kill me.

  I couldn’t move. Any sound, and he’d look up and have four shots in my center mass before I could complete a step. The sleet spun through the air in tiny cyclones, in and out of the light, lending everything around us a diamond sparkle.

  Kasym kept advancing. Halfway around the curve now and almost directly in front of me. I played rabbit, waiting until the fox padded away into the tall grass.

  He passed. And felt my presence, high above. I knew it an instant before he did, and even as he started to turn and raise the gun I was following through on a fastball throw of the hammer. It whirled and glanced off his head. I heard the gun clatter on the ground as I bounded down the stairs.

  The hammer had dazed him, but he was not down. He reeled after the fallen gun. I tackled him. We rolled through shallow puddles of ice water. He clocked me hard across the cheek with his elbow. I kneed him in the stomach. On my second kick he got a forearm under my chin and shoved until I gagged. He was very strong. I heaved and yanked and got him off me. His other hand dipped toward his waist as we stood and I hit him one hard straight right before jumping back. The blade of his knife sizzled the air in front of me.

  He lunged. If he hadn’t been stunned he might have put the knife hilt deep in my heart. But he overextended, and I grabbed him by the wrist and chopped my hand down on his elbow. The knife fell from his numb fingers. I tried to twist his wrist behind him, around the backpack. Rip his arm off at the shoulder. He drove me into the side of the steel tank. My arm holding his was trapped between us. He hit me with his big fist under the ribs. Pain. My whole body shook with the force of it. I spun away from the next punch but he had me now where I couldn’t dodge. And his head was clearing.

  Instead of trying to push away, I clinched with him. I couldn’t take another paralyzing hook to my kidney. Kasym pushed harder, trying to mash me right into the paint of the tank. He stank of old sweat and grease. My hand clawed at him, trying to get a hold. The fabric top of his rucksack was open. He drove the bone of his shoulder under my chin. Pressed into my windpipe. Over his back, I saw the little red packet bomb with its timer. I couldn’t breathe. My fingers closed almost robotically on the dial. Red numerals appeared, bright in the shadows both real and in my brain. 01:00. And then 00:59. The timer beeped as its numbers counted down.

  Kasym heard it. Knew what it meant. His eyes went wide in panic. He shoved at me, but now I was the one holding tight. He thrashed like a shark, trying to head-butt, to claw, anything. I hung on. The timer beeped, almost happily.

  It wouldn’t be bad to go out like this. With an enemy. With purpose.

  I’d miss Luce.

  And there was still Reuben.

  Kasym stepped back and shoved frantically again, and this time I let him go. The weight of the rucksack stumbled him backward. I punched one-two-three one-two-three, all head hunting, not caring if I broke my hands on his skull. He fell to a knee and I kicked him so hard in the ear that he flew sideways to the ground.

  Then I was running, a lurching monster’s gait. How far away did I need to be? Twenty yards. Thirty. I fell more than dived behind the curve of the next tank and looked back.

  Kasym was still, incredibly, conscious. He was up on his knees. He’d gotten the rucksack unbuckled around his chest and was removing the strap from his shoulder when the bomb went off.

  I have seen it before. I wish that I could say I was still amazed by the effect of high explosives in very tight proximity to the human body. But suicide bombers are as much a fact of modern warfare as mustard gas was a century ago. And there is not much variance, not with a bomb that close. The middle of the body vaporizes. The extremities often remain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  HALF-BLINDED, EARS RINGING, I staggered my way through the gore to retrieve Kasym’s gun. An FNP-45 with a chunky rectangular suppressor. Ten rounds left in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Enough. I also snatched up the claw hammer, which was slick with blood. Black smoke swirled and danced, thrown this way and that by the whirling sleet.

  Some part of me realized that I was running on very efficient autopilot. Fury and training combining to shut out any pain, any distraction from the objective. The objective being Reuben K. The rage said Go. The preparation said This Way.

  By the front guardhouse was a flatbed diesel Ford, empty of any load. I climbed up and smashed the window with the hammer, and used it again to crack the steering column so I could reach its ignition wires.

  Even in first gear, the moving truck snapped the padlock and chain on the gate of the petroleum farm like they were licorice ropes. I swung the truck onto
the road, tires skidding on the wet asphalt, and let all eight pistons eat as much fuel as they could handle. It was a little over a mile to the BerPac yard on the opposite corner of the island. I had the flatbed in fifth gear before I had to brake and turn wide to the right. I wanted as much of a running start as possible.

  The gate at BerPac was a lot tougher than a chain-link on hinges. The flatbed truck weighed about five tons. Its speedometer was cresting forty miles per hour when I hit the gate.

  It wasn’t even a contest. The gate crumpled like tin foil and exploded backward, flying wildly through the air to chop like a giant’s cleaver into the BerPac building. The truck bucked and slowed but didn’t stall.

  I saw the scene through the cracked windshield in tableau. The loading dock’s crane in motion, with a huge steel shipping container suspended in midair on fragile-looking lines. One thug behind it. The second man to the side by a waiting semi-trailer, gawking at the oncoming flatbed. I pointed the wheels at the big target of the container box, letting the truck coast as I jumped from the cab and rolled twice on the pavement.

  Two seconds later the flatbed walloped the container and the massive box spun madly, rainwater spraying off it. Cables snapped with high-pitched bangs. I was up and running. A scream sounded somewhere under the crash. Then came an almighty kettledrum boom as the corner of the steel container, loaded with seventy million in precious metal, fell to the dock.

  One of the thugs had ducked beneath the semi-trailer. He saw me advancing, the gun in my hand, and he took three big running steps and jumped off the dock into the Sound.

  Reuben ran out of the BerPac building, holding a cell phone. Maybe he had been trying to reach Kasym to figure out why they’d only heard one pop, when they’d been expecting a whole fireworks show.

  He gaped. The sight of me had to be a hell of a shock, even without my looking like I’d been tenderized and broiled. He dropped the phone to fumble at the small of his back. I smacked him in the forehead with Kasym’s pistol. He flailed and I hit him again. I grabbed my Glock from his belt and tossed it aside.

  Reuben was still standing, that big head surprisingly tough, but too disoriented to do more than keep his balance. Blood was starting to run down his face. One of his hands moved thoughtlessly to touch it. I frisked him, found his car keys in the pocket of his leather jacket and took away a knife and his wallet. He was starting to fight back again when I wrenched his arm and frog-marched him over to his electric-blue BMW. I bounced his face off the bumper twice before stuffing him into the trunk.

  Tires screeched behind me, where the gate had once been. I wheeled around to see Addy Proctor’s old Saab clattering its way across the yard. Leo was driving. As he came to a stop, I saw that his face was a mask of dried blood, from a deep cut on his forehead.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, stepping up to the car. “Reuben said you were dead. I was about to go hunting for your body.”

  “I’m a little surprised, too,” he said. He opened the door and shakily lowered one leg to the ground. The Mossberg shotgun was resting in his lap.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I got antsy waiting in the car. We’d been parked there all day long, you know? Risky. So I went to ground in the bushes nearby. Two of those assholes”—he nodded at the BerPac building—“came sneaking up in the dark, making so much noise I could have heard them if I’d been playing drums. Idiots.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “They wish.” He lifted the Mossberg. “Your granddaddy’s rubber shells. I figure I broke a few of their bones, shooting that close. I tied them up and gagged them with some of your neighbor’s yarn from the backseat and left them in the sticker bushes.”

  Addy’s knitting securing two Bratva killers. That was a mental picture.

  From high up on the bridge, I heard sirens. And many more coming, somewhere in the distance.

  “What about your face?” The flesh around his forehead cut had swelled. A last few drops of falling sleet did what they could to wash the blood from his cheek.

  Leo looked sheepish. “I slipped. Smacked my head on the concrete.” He closed his eyes and winced.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” I said. “We’ll get you to a hospital.”

  “Yeah. That might be a smart idea. I got to the car and drove off to find you, but I passed out somewhere off the road. Lucky I didn’t drive right into the water.”

  I couldn’t see the emergency vehicles coming down the long overpass onto the island, but I could see a river of lights, flashing off the low, dark clouds and making prisms of the rain.

  “We both had some good fortune today,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here while it lasts.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  A FEW HOURS LATER, I was sitting in a gravel lot two miles off the North Satellite terminal of Sea-Tac airport. The lot was empty, waiting for a construction project that might never come. Reuben’s BMW was about the only thing in a hundred yards, any direction. The BMW, and me, and Reuben, still in the trunk.

  He had made a lot of noise for the first half hour after I’d stopped. Threats and promises and pleas like a playlist on repeat. I heard him continually trying the interior trunk release, which I had broken before closing him in. When his raving stopped amusing me, I told him that if he said another word I would run a hose from the exhaust pipe into the trunk and let the carbon monoxide calm him down. He held his tongue for another hour, when he’d asked for water. My answer was to start the engine and rev it once. There was no more chatter after that.

  I had not minded the wait. I spent most of the time in the driver’s seat, slipping in and out of sleep. The pain of my burned wrists, and too many contusions to count, kicked rapid eye movement in the ass every time it got near. Finally I was rested enough to get out and walk around the parking lot. The cold felt good. A few laps and my steps were a lot more reliable than when I started.

  Around six in the morning my phone rang. I told an unfamiliar male voice at the other end where I was. He hung up without another word.

  Twenty minutes after, two black limousines pulled into the lot. I stood beside the open BMW. My Glock was visible in the front of my waistband. The dead Kasym’s FNP was at the small of my back.

  The limousines stopped abreast of each other, twenty feet in front of the BMW. Two large men in rumpled dark suits and white shirts with no ties got out of the front of the left limo. Another similarly dressed man got out of the driver’s seat of the second car. They all left their doors open.

  The men looked around the lot. Looked at me.

  “Throw the gun away,” said the one who had been driving the second car. He had a heavy Eastern Bloc accent.

  I smiled and shook my head.

  Couldn’t really blame them for being cautious. Besides the hardware, I was filthy and scarred and looked like a rabid dog who would enjoy passing along the sickness.

  I heard the whir of a window rolling down. The man who’d spoken to me leaned in to hold a conversation in very quiet Russian. The other two men and I watched one another.

  Finally the driver opened the back door of the limousine, and Lev Kuznetsov stepped out.

  There was no question he was Reuben’s father. Same height, stretched much thinner and slightly stooped on Lev, and the same big forehead. Where Reuben was balding, Lev was completely hairless. His eyebrows were so pale as to be invisible. Lev was older than I’d imagined. He must have been near fifty when Reuben had been born. He wore a black double-breasted suit with wide lapels and a tie the color of late-summer corn. His black knee-length coat might have been sable. If so, it had cost more than his son’s Beemer.

  Most of all, Lev looked immaculate, despite the long flights. Maybe that was the secret to power. Kings stayed elegant while soldiers got dirty.

  If my gun caused him any concern, he didn’t deign to show it. He walked up to stand ten feet from me.

  “You are Shaw,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Willard has said
that my son has caused you troubles.” Lev’s accent was very thick and he spoke crisply, as if testing the proper pronunciation.

  “Not just me.” And I was sure that by now, it wasn’t only Willard who had fed Lev information about what had happened in Seattle. The old king may know more about Reuben’s schemes than I did.

  “I am here,” Lev said. Meaning, Hand him over.

  I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  “Yes. The deal. Willard said of your concerns, your—” He made a please-fill-in-the-blank gesture.

  “Conditions.”

  Lev nodded shortly. “I would like to hear these from you. Your words.”

  His voice was spiced with anger. I knew I was following a new map through a minefield. You trust that the path is safe. But not one hundred percent. Lev Kuznetsov had avoided a very bad situation, by luck rather than by his own intrigues. He might feel indebted, and pissed off about that unfamiliar emotion. He might be offended that I had laid a hand on his son, no matter what the cause. Ego was unpredictable.

  “I’ll give you Reuben, relatively intact,” I said. “You get to stop a coup. Reuben will know all the Bratva captains who were ready to back him. In return, your Brotherhood forgets about me and my people. And I get your promise that Reuben won’t ever be a threat.”

  “That condition, I can give the promise. Your people?”

  “Reuben tried to kill my woman, and my friend.”

  Lev made a small hum of acknowledgment. “And you have him alive.”

  “Because he’s worth something.”

  “Not money?”

  “Not money.”

  Lev nodded. “You are not fearing, meeting me—us—like this?” He dipped his head toward the empty lot.

  “Willard respects you,” I said.

  Lev made that same little hum. He looked over the hillside that bordered the lot, still grassy and lush even in winter. A moment passed as he thought about whatever he was thinking about. I didn’t have to think. My options were very limited, if this went sour. But I was willing to bet large.