by Andy Farman
Whatever operation had been compromised had to have been an important one but there was nothing to indicate Svetlana was guilty of any collusion. Clearly, an opportunist thief had taken the car.
He had another asset in the British National Crime Intelligence Service, NCIS, working to identify the thief. Another, a specialist in surreptitious hacking was endeavouring to utilise the cars built in ‘Tracker’ anti-theft system without alerting the authorities. Constantine’s job description involved skulduggery but he thought himself a decent man. The pair who had turned up with Moscow Centrals authority had not waited for the initial investigation findings, they had immediately taken it upon themselves that the girl was guilty and the truth would be extracted. He had received information about the pair that caused him to shudder in distaste. Glancing once more at the results before him he opened a safe in the floor, extracting a 9mm Glock pistol.
Locking his office he hurried for his car. Time was no doubt short, if in fact it had not already run out for the girl.
He would of course need to first clear himself of any British or American surveillance.
The level of acid was now only about one inch from reaching the nearest digit of Svetlana’s left hand. She was in fact being pulled in four different directs by the rubber bindings on her wrists and ankles, as close to immobile as any struggling person could be. Her screams were unnoticed by any person outside of the derelict industrial unit. She could not see any of her tormentors but could feel their presence.
Raised, angry voices filtered through to her brain. The one she thought of as ‘Oxford accent’ stood and shouted in an angry torrent until the sound of an automatic pistol being cocked made him pause.
“Cut her loose and then stand with your friends, where I can see you” A man’s voice ordered in accented English, obviously for the benefit of the Irishman and Co.
She heard the words and felt hope emerge. There was a pause followed by the soft click of a safety catch being thumbed off.
“DO IT!” A shuffle of feet followed the shouted instruction in its very threatening tone, and she felt the bindings on her ankles tugged as fingers sought to untie them.
Major Bedonavich crouched into a gun fighters stance, the pistol aimed and his finger taking up the first pressure on the trigger. “Wrists first, if you please!” he hissed in warning.
Her ankle bindings were let go and Svetlana realised that had her ankles been freed first she would have been catapulted face first into the acid by the wrist’s rubber straps.
With a snort of frustration Oxford accent released her wrists and then her ankles and Svetlana scrabbled backwards frantically until clear of the acid vat, still sobbing and attempting to cover her nakedness with her hands.
On the far side of the vat stood three men in their twenties wearing jeans. A woman of about thirty with striking Slavic features, and a tall man in his late thirties. The pin stripe suit and a British Regimental tie looked out of place worn under the rubber apron, boots and heavy rubber gauntlet’s he also wore.
All had their hands ostentatiously in plain view and were looking at some point behind her. She turned as the controller she had never seen before was transferring a handgun to his left hand in order to finish the removal of his suit jacket. The gun was still carefully pointed in the direction of her tormentors as he held out the jacket to the side of his body. She still had wits enough left to avoid coming between the man and the group, going around behind him she took the jacket, draping it over her shoulders. Her body was still trembling. At his feet lay an AKM-74 assault rifle, from its extra pistol grip below the stock she knew it to be of a Rumanian pattern.
“We are leaving now” he addressed the group as a whole. “You two…” he directed at the woman and the svelte male. “Be at the house in two hours’”.
Anger was replacing the fear and humiliation Svetlana had felt, “Wait, please” she asked Constantine in a weak voice. She looked very docile as she padded barefoot around the vat towards the group. Lessons never previously put into practice were now about to be.
Constantine gestured at the younger men with the Glock to move away, and bumping into one of several large blue containers bearing Hazchem warnings, they duly did as instructed.
Svetlana was looking at the ground as she approached the man and woman; the jacket held closed in front. ‘Distract and Disarm’ was the phrase in her mind but to the man with the cultured accent her humble demeanour made him guess at whether she was now in his thrall, thoroughly dominated.
Svetlana stopped just in front of him; she released the jacket which tumbled to the factory floor with her still meekly looking down. Her right hand moved up and across to cup her left breast, finger and thumb squeezed the nipple. The man’s eyes started to widen in gloating satisfaction when the hand released the breast and lashed, backhand, upwards and out. He had a split second to jerk back his head but his face was not the target. The full blow failed to connect but the end joint of her middle finger struck against his Adams apple and his throat immediately began to constrict as he staggered backwards fighting for air, hands going to the injured area. His back peddling feet struck a protruding metal machinery bracket and he fell, gasping and turning blue.
Distracted and taken unawares the woman turned, mouth opening, to follow her partners’ stricken passage when Svetlana spun and in a fluid movement grabbed her by the shoulders and drove her right knee into her groin. Women also have delicate equipment in that region, and it hurt like hell, leaving the woman doubled up on the floor with hands between her legs.
Retrieving the jacket, Svetlana folded it over one arm and strode away naked without a backward glance.
Constantine picked up the assault rifle in his free hand and backed up until he judged he was beyond effective range of the group before turning to follow the girl.
At the large hangar-like doors at the end of the building another jean-clad male was just sitting up from where he had been sprawled, blood pouring from a broken nose and a scalp wound. He was just groping about for the AKM 74 he had been holding at the time he had encountered the angry Russian major. It had been this man who had shoulder charged Svetlana in her hallway. Through the veil of pain he gaped as he saw Svetlana, a naked goddess with waist length auburn tresses but otherwise devoid of body hair from the neck down, striding purposefully toward him. He blinked to clear his eyes.
Her foot lashed out at his face, the heel connected and he was again unconscious.
Twenty paces behind the girl Constantine witnessed her final expression of anger and chuckled as he put away the handgun and unloaded the AKM which he dropped on the man’s still form.
He thought his day a lot more pleasant than it had started out.
Fort Hood, Texas: 1830hrs, same day
A fairly nondescript patch of scrub and stunted trees was home to some fairly nondescript wildlife but for one snake whose brief appearance centre stage had been the highlight of the late afternoon for twenty odd infantrymen and a dozen tankers whose homeland boasted nothing more deadly than Adders.
Four British Mk2E Challenger main battle tanks, four British Warrior armoured personnel carriers of RTR, 1st Royal Tank Regiment, 3 RGJ, 3rd Battalion Royal Green Jackets, and four Americans from Fort Hood’s training centre with their ‘Humvee’had taken up temporary residency.
The armoured fighting vehicles, AFVs and support troops of the British 1st Armoured Brigades tiny contribution to the US Army’s ‘Commanche Lance’ training exercise were now laagered up for the night. The tanks were spaced out at tactical bounds in the centre with the Infantry providing protection for them against other infantry who may be bent on causing them mischief. The days when the foot soldier was helpless against these behemoths had been and gone, it had gone full circle in fact.
In the First World War Germany produced its own tanks to counter Britain’s invention, against which the German infantry had no choice but to get out of the way. This is not to say that the first tanks were lords of the b
attlefield, far from it. The crews were more likely to become ineffective from the sweltering heat and exhaust gases their inefficient engines produced in abundance, and mechanical failure than a lucky enemy shell.
Tanks do not live long unaccompanied amongst enemy infantry since those days; they need their own ‘Grunts’ to keep away the nasty men with hand held anti-tank weapons.
With the American logistics train the Brits also had a small detachment of REME, Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, or ‘Rough Engineering Made Easy’, to grateful customers. The RTR and RGJs Challengers and Warriors 1500hp and 550hp Perkins diesel engines were hardly compatible with anything in the Americans spares inventory.
Lt Tony McMarn, RGJ, was the platoon commander of the Green Jackets, Captain Hector Sinclair Obediah Wantage-Ferdoux, RTR, or ‘Obi Wan’ to the troops, commanded the four Challenger 2Es. On the Brits left were the two platoons and company HQ, company headquarters, of their 52nd Infantry hosts with their ‘Bradley’ APCs, attached mortar and anti-tank sections. This was the infantry-heavy balance in their composite mechanised company.
Both men were studying maps on the engine deck of Hectors tank accompanied by Captain Daniel King, US Army of the Black Horse Cavalry, their liaison and mentor on all things American. Also, he had said with a smile
“To ensure you guys drive on the right and don’t go near the Whitehouse with matches again”.
When, a fortnight earlier, initial introductions had been made Hector had enthusiastically pumped Daniel’s hand as if trying to drag off his black skin, with a cheery,
“Call me ‘Heck’, damn glad to meet you Tone’. Daniel had been slightly taken aback.
“Tone?” was that a slur on his race or had he missed something?
Tony McMarn had seen the wary look in the cavalryman’s eyes. “Once upon a time a young Queen Victoria had enquired of a Lancer at a Ball. ‘And what exactly is the role of the Cavalry on the modern battlefield?’ The Lancer replied ‘Why Ma’am, it is simply to add tone to what would otherwise be … a vulgar brawl!’ All cavalrymen are ‘Tones’ to us, sir”. With that out of the way they had got on like a house on fire.
The other Americans of the liaison detachment, tagging along, as the Brits put it, where Master Sergeant Bart Kopak, PFC Angie Evans, driver, and Specialist Stu Jameson, the radio op.
It was the third day of the exercise and at present the Brits, and their US allies were supposed to be assisting a friendly country ward off the advances of that evil empire known so well to British servicemen, Fantasia. The American scenario had described the opposing forces as ‘Blue’ and ‘Green’ but this did not have the appropriate martial ring to the British squaddies,
“Sounds like chuffing Oxford and Cambridge boat crews having a ruck with the militant wing of the Tree Huggers” as one disgruntled Rifleman had put it. Heck proposed a name change at a local level for his ‘Toms’. Daniel objected,
“It’s our game and we will call them what we want”.
Heck had responded
“Unless you want a bunch of pissed off Toms retaking New York in the name of King George, I would humour them Tone”. So the enemy became ’Fantasian’s’ and the Toms were all smiles.
The term Toms had also been a puzzle to the Americans until Tony’s platoon sergeant had loaned a dog-eared copy of Rudyard Kipling's complete works to young Angie Evans. ‘Tommy Atkins’, the name he gave the common British soldier as a breed, had solved the puzzle.
The allied forces were at this point in the game dispersed along the ‘border’ with a tank heavy brigade in reserve until the Fantasian intentions became clear.
Both sides’ were probing with recce's, or recons as the Americans preferred to call them.
The Brits patch was a rather bare arsed region of real estate. Restrictions on ‘digging in’ had seemed an alien concept to the Brits, however at the initial exercise briefing the Riflemen had taken that piece of news with smiles. Every time a British infantryman stops in the field for longer than the time it takes for ‘a brew’, the squaddies term for tea, the picks and shovels come out and shallow ‘fire scrapes’ are started. If it should become a prolonged stop then these fire scrapes are extended to become two man trenches and then ‘shelter bays’ are added for protection from artillery and a dry place to sleep.
Digging-in is a way of life, but that does not mean it’s a popular activity.
With the entrenching tools being taboo items, good field craft had become the only solution. Heck deployed his pair of snipers to set up OPs, observation posts, on particularly bare arse features, and the Riflemen to those more conducive to invisibility.
Heck had returned from an ‘O Group’ at company headquarters with his American boss, a stocky mid-western captain with a drawl Heck ripped the piss out of at every opportunity.
“Y’all ok?” Captain Dave Gilham would enquire, “Well it was when I left it tied up by the boathouse. I can always ring Mrs Heck and check?”
He was now giving Tony a warning order for the nights patrolling when Heck’s radio op stuck his head out of the tanks turret with a headset in hand
“Boss, its India Three Three Delta…contact, grid 277,872 near as they can tell, bearing eleven zero zero mag, two Bradleys, lots of dust ‘n shit a few miles behind ‘em!” 33D were his snipers. If anyone were going to see enemy movement first it would be them with their powerful spotting telescope. Heck passed on the contact report to Company HQ and told Tony to hang-fire on the patrols before shouting out to everyone in the location.
“Stand To!”
It was welcomed with muttered “Ah, bollocks!” by those in various stages of feeding themselves as they ‘binned’ their ‘scoff’, and hurriedly got ready to have a serious word with the interlopers who’d ruined supper.
The fight was on.
St John’s Wood, London: 2100hrs GMT, same day
Constantine parked his car in a plush residential street not far from the barracks that were home to the Kings Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. He looked across at Svetlana, her face was in shadow, unreadable and she stared straight ahead.
After a shower at her flat and a horrendous age drying her long hair she had stood unashamedly naked while he had examined her. With her hair held in her hands, bunched atop her head he had applied cream to the burns between her shoulder blades and the bruises in other areas. She had been completely unabashed, which is more than could be have been said for him. He had been divorced for over a year and had been acutely aware of Svetlana’s naked state. His taste in women was not for the big boned, broad faced, childbearing-hipped variety, so many of his countrymen sought. His wife had been a ballerina, slim and lovely, elfin-like beside him.
The poor, irregular pay had irked her. Their small state provided flat with second and third hand furniture was not the future she had envisaged at marriage. He had hoped that bringing her with him to London would have satisfied her. Better accommodation, more and regular pay, less drab surroundings. It seemed that it fuelled her dreams of a better life rather than solved their problems. She had embarked on an affair with a wealthy Russian entrepreneur with offices in London. They parted and six months ago she had become Mrs wealthy entrepreneur. He wished her well but missed her keenly.
Svetlana was stunning, slim waisted, drum tight flat stomach, full firm breasts and her skin two-toned by the tiny pale strips against her otherwise tanned skin. He had never seen a woman completely shaved down there before, and he had certainly never seen a pierced clitoris before either. In answer to his thick tongued queries, at least it sounded that way to him, and she replied that the piercing enhanced her already higher than average libido, ensuring multiple orgasms, and finally that she endured laser hair removal as pubic hair was not conducive to the underwear she wore, nodding toward a clothes stand of drying panties. A deeply blushing Constantine had looked across at the items on display and remarked that they weren’t underpants; they were pirate’s eye patches….with gussets! Svetlana’s laughter had pe
eled throughout the flat.
Bodywork touched up; she had slipped into one of the aforementioned articles, which only served to worsen his heart rate. Constantine had escaped into the kitchen to make coffee and food for them both whilst she finished dressing. Her apparent recovery was remarkable after the experiences of earlier in the day. He could understand why the sparrow school had recruited her. ‘Sparrows’ were the young women used to bait the honey traps. There was a well-known term; ‘A hard-on knows no conscience’. In his opinion the Pope would have tossed his holy bible over his shoulder with a “Sod it, who believes this stuff anyway” and begun tearing off his robes 30 seconds after being confronted by even a fully clothed Svetlana. He could not understand though, why that department had let her go?
After exploring the cupboards and some industrious beating he had knocked up a pretty hefty Ham, onion and fresh tomato omelette by the time she appeared. She had looked about, inhaled the aroma of fresh coffee and said
“God, are you spoken for, sir?” he had turned to answer but her back was to him as she collected king sized Italian pottery plates from another cupboard.
“I was” he replied, “How about you?” making the table she’d replied that as he had access to her file he should know. He mentally rebuked himself, of course he knew. A windsurfing instructor on holiday in Crete, a ski instructor and her husband on another holiday, and the not infrequent one and two nighters picked up in singles bars, but nothing that could in any way be termed as a serious or lasting relationship.
“It doesn’t go with my real job, besides I intimidate all but the vain ones who only want a trophy fuck” her matter of fact way of speaking and use of that word in such a casual way had made him turn. She had her back turned again, sorting out napkins