The Distant Chase

by Cap Daniels

  Snake chimed in. “You’ve heard of the navy’s shellback ceremony for when a sailor crosses the equator for the first time, right?”

  I had heard of the ridiculous antics in the age-old maritime tradition, but I couldn’t imagine what that had to do with this.

  “Well, it’s kinda the same the first time you illegally cross the Russian border. You’re supposed to do it with your pants around your ankles.”

  Uncomfortable laughter rolled across the group, ending in awkward silence, which Clark broke up. “Okay, enough. Let’s get across. We’ve got too much to do to be playing silly games.”

  We found a shallow spot in the narrow waterway and wasted no time making the crossing. The DPVs were incredibly capable and fast. Snake, Mongo, and I were in the first vehicle across, and we made it without getting wet. We watched the second impressive vehicle bounce across the rocky, shallow stream, and it made it look like a Sunday drive, but Singer had his hands pressed over his eyes, and his face was as red as a fire engine. I had to know what was happening in the back seat of that buggy. We pulled alongside to see Norikova struggling to pull her pants back up.

  She locked eyes with me. “I am Russian, and tradition is important to Russian people.”

  I wanted so badly to hate her, but it was becoming more difficult every day.

  The operators—everyone except Singer—found her performance hilarious.

  “Okay, now that we’re here,” I said, “I need to make a phone call.” I climbed from the DPV for a little privacy and dialed Skipper.

  “Hey, it looks like you made it back to the Mother Land,” she said.

  “Yeah, we’re on the ground. We’re six plus one, and the one is pretty sick. She’s got a nasty fever.”

  Skipper showed no sympathy. “Yeah, I’ll bet Anya’s pretty miserable in that prison, too.”

  Way to point out the obvious and get my mind straight.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what’s happening. Just like you predicted, they bought your ploy, and they’re not willing to risk getting her snatched out of the Black Dolphin. They’ve added extra security around the prison, and they’ll be moving Anya tomorrow morning for the ten o’clock train out of Sol-Iletsk. I can’t be sure where they’re taking her, but that train runs west toward Moscow. Our best guess is that they’ll be taking her to another prison where she’ll be interrogated about the plan to break her out of the Dolphin.”

  “I’m sure that’s their plan, but it won’t be Anya they’re interrogating. Did you get us a truck?”

  “I did. Well, Ginger did. I had no idea how to procure a truck in a Russian town I’ve never heard of, but I know how to do it now.”

  “Excellent. Where, and what is it?”

  “It’s a two-ton millwright truck with dual rear wheels and four-wheel-drive. It weighs about fifteen thousand pounds. Is that heavy enough?”

  “It sounds perfect. Where will I find it?”

  “There’s a sheep farm one mile east of the town on the south side of the P239. You’ll see two large white barns, and you’ll find your trucks in the southernmost one. That’s also where you’ll spend the night.”

  “You said trucks…plural. There’s more than one?”

  “Yeah, there’s another one in the barn that’s yours if you need it, but it’s a light truck. I can’t remember what it’s called.”

  “Whatever did I do to deserve you, Skipper?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry. You’ll be getting my bill as soon as you get home.”

  “And you’ll be getting a big tip if this all plays out like we planned. I’ll call you from the barn.”

  I briefed the team, and we headed northeast, determined to avoid being seen. We couldn’t afford a run-in with anyone—especially not the military or local police.

  The sheep farm was where Skipper said it was, and the barn was unlocked. The DPVs fit nicely, and there was even a wood stove and several cots. Mongo checked out the truck and declared it to be “close to perfect.”

  The second truck was a LuAZ 969 M, commonly referred to as the Russian Land Rover. It wasn’t pretty, but it certainly looked rugged. I knew what to do with the LuAZ.

  We split up into three teams. Clark took Singer in the LuAZ to scout for an overwatch position while I took the rest of the team, minus Mongo, to find the perfect place to hit the prison convoy on its way to the train station. Mongo would stay behind with Norikova. I didn’t need that beast of a man stumbling around downtown and sticking out like Goliath at a kiddie park.

  Clark found a nice little nest for Singer, high atop an abandoned industrial building with a beautiful view of both the Black Dolphin Prison and the park where we’d hit the transport. Five blocks north of the prison, the Ulitsa Sovetskaya met the Orskaya Ulitsa in a blind intersection with abandoned buildings on all four corners. The northwest corner was open just enough to allow for the scuffle I needed to pull off my little shell game.

  An hour later, we were back in the barn, warming by the wood stove and putting the finishing touches on the plan for the next morning. Singer prayed before we ate and asked God for all sorts of things I never would’ve been brave enough to ask for out loud, and for some reason, having him on the team made me feel better. I think my father would have liked him. I envied his faith, and I quietly asked God to take care of my team. As much as I wanted to believe we had the skill to pull it off, the coming morning would be the perfect time for a little Divine intervention.

  Chapter 27

  Tent Revival

  Dawn broke with the sun at our backs and everyone in position. Singer was nestled on the rooftop one block northeast of the prison and four blocks south of me. Smoke, who everyone agreed was the best driver on the team, was behind the wheel of the millwright truck one block east of the intersection that would soon be center stage for the wildest show that little town had ever seen. He had the engine running and a folded, inflatable air mattress between his chest and the steering wheel. Staged nearby was the LuAZ, poised to play the most crucial role in the entire mission.

  Norikova, who had taken half a dozen Tylenol and antibiotics through the night, was shivering in the corner behind Mongo. She was handcuffed to a pipe that even Mongo couldn’t pull from the wall, so I was confident she wouldn’t make a break for it. The enormous man knelt with his M4 rifle perched across his thigh, making the weapon look like a child’s toy. I was a dozen feet in front of him, nestled behind a stack of empty store shelves, with a clear line of sight down Ulitsa Sovetskaya and to the gates of the Black Dolphin Prison. Snake and Clark were across the street inside an abandoned, one-story building that had, apparently, once been a feed store. There were old bags of rotten livestock feed and fertilizer still scattered about the space.

  I anticipated the transport carrying Anya would be no more than two vehicles: one van with heavy steel caging, and possibly an armored escort vehicle with a mounted, large-caliber machine gun. Singer would take care of the machine gunner if it became necessary, but I hoped we could complete the mission without sending bullets through any brains.

  The morning was eerily quiet; so much so, that I could hear my own heart beating. That may have been more a function of my energy than of the lack of outside sounds, but either way, I would’ve much preferred hearing Singer belt out a stanza or two of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

  In the midst of the silence, while trying to ignore the cadence of my heartbeat, I thought I heard Norikova say my name. I wasn’t sure if I’d actually heard her voice or if I was replaying our previous conversation. But she said it again, and this time she wasn’t as quiet.

  I glanced over my shoulder to see her staring at me. I took another long look down the street and then shuffled my way to her, trying to stay low enough to avoid being seen through the windows of the storefront.

  “What is it?” I asked quietly.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you risking your life, and why are these m
en willing to risk theirs to take my sister to freedom? She is only simple Russian woman.”

  I didn’t have to think about her question. The answer came to me as if it had been imprinted on my brain. “A man who I loved like a father, and who loved me like his son, once loved your mother more deeply than you or I could ever understand. Your sister is the result of that love. That man devoted his life to the pursuit of one single thing: freedom. He couldn’t give that gift to your mother, Katerina Burinkova, but I can give it to his daughter on his behalf. I owe that to him, and to Anya, because she was once willing to give her life to save mine.”

  She cast her eyes to the cold concrete floor and whispered, “I hope to know such love before I die.”

  My earpiece crackled, and Singer’s voice filled my head. “They’re out of the sally port. It’s a single-vehicle. One hardened van. I see two armed guards plus the driver. He has a sidearm, but no rifle. The prisoner is . . .”—he paused long enough for me to believe my earpiece had failed—“My God! She’s identical to Norikova.”

  I keyed my mic. “Roger. Call the intersections. Verify you copy, Smoke.”

  “Smoke copies.”

  “Roger. Call the crossings,” Singer said.

  Clark’s voice filled my ear. “Two is ready.”

  In slow, steady succession, Singer called out the cross streets as the van passed each.

  “Ural’skaya.”

  Fifteen seconds . . .

  “Tsvillinga.”

  Thirteen seconds . . .

  “Volodarskogo.”

  Fifteen seconds . . .

  “Ordzhohnikidze.”

  Eleven seconds . . .

  “Kraznoarmeyskaya.”

  I keyed my mic and ordered, “Roll, Smoke!”

  The world slowed as I watched the van carrying Anastasia Burinkova drive away from the most infamous prison on Earth, and toward me. The heavy truck accelerated from the east with Smoke at the wheel, and the two vehicles closed on each other as if drawn together by some invisible alien force. The timing was perfect.

  The truck roared by the window in front of me at the same instant the van entered the intersection, and the resulting collision was explosive and chaotic. The rear of the truck left the ground and climbed upward until gravity declared its hold and forced the bed back down. The van spun wildly through two hundred and seventy degrees, rolling onto its side, and becoming twisted and warped almost beyond recognition.

  Clark and Snake stormed from the northwest corner with M4 rifles held across their chests and ready to engage any resistance with blinding speed. Smoke leapt from the truck, having been protected by his field-expedient airbag, and thundered toward the van.

  “Let’s go, Mongo!” I yelled as I thrust the door open in front of me. I’d taken only four strides when Mongo’s enormous frame passed me as if I were standing still. The speed of the big man was remarkable.

  Snake had a sledgehammer bouncing off the windshield as the driver lay motionless with blood pouring from his skull. Clark rounded the van and approached from the back with his rifle tucked tightly against his shoulder and both eyes recording everything that moved in the intersection. He grabbed the door handle and pulled with all his weight, but it wouldn’t surrender.

  Clark yelled into his mic. “Blow the door, Singer!”

  Half a second later, a fifty-caliber round impacted dead center of the locking mechanism, and the door buckled from the shock of the projectile.

  Mongo grabbed what remained of the door and threw it into the street as I leapt into the overturned van. One guard was pinned forward, his head and neck twisted at an impossible angle. The second guard was still alive, but badly injured and completely disoriented. He pointed his radio at me as if it were a pistol, and yelled something I couldn’t understand. I landed the heel of my boot beneath his chin and ended his delirious rambling.

  And there she was—the woman I’d once loved. Her face, although gaunt from hunger and neglect, was still beautiful and impossible to forget. Long blonde hair fell in tangles against the steel bars of the window, and her hands were cuffed to a steel ring once welded to the floor but now hanging loosely at the end of her chain. Unlike the strong woman I had known a year before, her body was thin, and her skin was drawn and pale, but the beauty she inherited from her mother was still there, still undeniable, and still irresistible.

  I threw myself to the twisted pile of metal and felt for her pulse. Her skin was dry and warm, but the blood coursing through my hand, driven so brutally by my pounding heart, made it impossible to distinguish her pulse from mine. I held her face in my hands and placed my ear to her lips, hoping…praying…to hear her breathing. I tried to calm my breathing enough to hear hers, and finally, as if from the lips of an angel, I heard, “My Chasechka. You have come for me.”

  I forced my arms beneath her body and tried to stand, but she was bound. Her feet were trapped beneath a tangled web of iron that had folded and encased her lower legs in what was nothing less than a bear trap.

  I pulled at the railing, grunting and kicking to find purchase on the metal walls of the van. “Mongo!”

  The big man climbed over me and buried his hands in the twisted steel. His thick chest filled with a long breath, and the veins in his neck bulged as he cried out like an Olympic weightlifter deadlifting for the world record. The iron creaked and groaned under the strain of his force until I saw daylight between Anya’s feet and the bars.

  I pulled her legs free and lifted her body into my arms. It may have been the adrenaline that made her body feel so light in my arms, or perhaps she’d been starved to near death in the hell she’d endured behind the walls of that prison, but carrying her seemed to consume none of my strength. I leapt from the van and ran back for the building, where Norikova lay cuffed to the pipe.

  I dropped Anya by her sister’s side and began pulling her black-and-white prison-issued clothing from her frail body. Terror and shock filled her deep eyes as she stared into the face of the sister she’d never seen and never knew existed. Norikova returned the look of disbelief, even though she had read her sister’s file, examined hundreds of photographs, and spent hours trying to perfect her sister’s mannerisms. The shock of seeing Anya for the first time shone on her face as if she’d seen a ghost.

  Clark came through the door and slid to a stop beside me. “We’ve got thirty seconds. No more!”

  He unlocked the handcuffs from Anya’s wrists, and I freed Norikova. The weak and fevered Russian spy began tearing off her clothes and threw them to the ground beside her sister. She took the black-and-white uniform I’d removed from Anya and slid it onto her body. Anya watched with a look of awe and utter disbelief on her face, as her sister, Captain Ekaterina Norikova, held out her hands, awaiting the cuffs that had bound Anya’s wrists only seconds before.

  I slid the cuffs in place and squeezed them against her skin. She made no effort to resist or run. Instead, she knelt by her sister and stroked her hair with the back of her cuffed hand. “Freedom is yours, my sister. Our mother would have wanted nothing more for you.” Norikova leaned toward Anya and kissed her on both cheeks.

  She turned to me, and I expected to hear words I would never forget. I thought she would charge me with protecting her sister, or threaten to find and kill me, but the words never came. She bowed her head and began the slow march of the condemned toward the door. Clark caught Norikova’s arm and hurried her to the van, and I helped Anya into her sister’s clothes.

  “It’s not over yet,” I said. “They’ll be coming, but I have a way out. Can you walk?”

  She nodded and took my hand. I led her through the back of the building and into the park where the LuAZ idled beneath a statue of Mikhail Gorbachev. I glanced back down the street where Captain Ekaterina Gregorovna Norikova lay inside the mangled remains of the prison transport van. Anya watched as if she were trying to understand the last few minutes of her life—a thousand questions churning through her mind.

  “Get in the car
!” I said, holding the door for her. She obeyed and slid inside the LuAZ, and I climbed behind the wheel. “Stay down.”

  I drove one block north to our rendezvous point and then slowed as Snake, Smoke, Clark, and finally, Mongo squeezed into the back of the car. I headed one block east and then turned south where a smiling Singer was running toward me with his rifle slung over his back. As he continued past the car and tried to wedge his way into the back, I heard him singing “When the Roll Is Called up Yonder.” In some kind of unavoidable, post-mission euphoria, as if we were at an old-time tent revival, we all sang along. Anya sat in silence, gazing into the first sunrise she’d seen in months, and making no effort to hide the tears falling from her eyes.

  * * *

  Back at the sheep farm, the elation continued, and Singer examined Anya. He believed that other than malnutrition, some bruises, maybe a broken rib from the crash, and of course the absence of the little toe on her right foot, she was going to be just fine.

  I sat with Anya. With a Pelican case at my feet, I handed her a small, tattered, cardboard box.

  “These are letters from my mother to my father, yes?”

  One by one she pulled the envelopes from the box, holding each of them to her nose, just as she’d done in Dr. Richter’s hangar the day that seemed so distant in our past—the day he’d seen his daughter for the first time, and the day she obviously wanted so desperately to relive.

  “Your father is dead, Anya. He died of heart failure. But he knew the truth. You are, without question, his daughter, and he is forever your father. Those letters are the story of the love your parents shared, and you are all that remains of that love. You are now free to live the life they both would have died to give you.”

  She squeezed her lips together in a tight, thin line, and let the tears come. She placed her head on my shoulder, and I wrapped my arms around her. Her golden hair fell across my face, and her trembling hands grasped at my sides.

  She finally lifted her head and met my eyes. “I have nothing, my Chasechka. What am I to do?”