Free Stories 2016

by Baen Books

  I was still tempted to move the safe house, since Kunaev knew where it was. So far, with the enormous amounts of cash our employers were willing to throw around to cover our operations and support, he'd left us alone. But a crook is a crook, and they all get greedy after a while. I should know; I'd spent most of the last decade working with crooks, rebels, terrorists, mercenaries, and all sorts of other unsavory types across Eurasia.

  Dropping our gear in the entryway, J.D. and I set about checking the perimeter, making sure that none of either Kunaev's guys or the Kazakh NSC thugs had been poking around. By the time we were both satisfied that it was secure—it should have been, as the IED wired to our comms room door hadn't gone off—Ivan and Carlos were pulling up to the front door, Ivan's huge frame somehow squeezed behind the wheel of a creaking, rusty '79 Lada.

  Ivan parked the car, levered himself out of the driver's seat, slammed the door hard enough to almost break the glass, snatched his gear out of the back seat before slamming that door almost as hard, and stalked inside. J.D. and I looked after him, then turned to Carlos, who had gotten out of the passenger seat rather more sedately. Carlos just shrugged.

  “I don't know,” he said. “He's in one of his moods again.”

  “Ivan is always in a mood,” J.D. said. “I think it's part of his Russian genes or something.”

  “You could always try taking him on one of your hooker safaris,” I suggested. “Might mellow him out a little.”

  J.D. gave me a look that suggested I was a complete idiot. “First of all,” he said, “I don't use hookers.” He waved to indicate himself. “You really think that I have to pay for it? No. Just, no.”

  “What about that Maserati?” I asked, following Carlos inside.

  “That's for the American chicks, I told you,” he replied. “It's a shortcut, not a payment. And second,” he continued, undeterred, “there is no way I'm taking that misanthropic gorilla out to the clubs with me. I'm pretty sure he'd look at a girl, go into lock, drink three bottles of vodka and start a fight.”

  Considering that I'd first run into Ivan in the middle of one of the nastiest bar brawls I'd ever seen in Pavlodar, that was not outside the realm of possibility.

  Carlos was just shaking his head. Ivan was in his room in the back of the house, doing brooding Russian things. The guy was the ultimate case study in disillusionment meeting clinical depression. He was damned good at his job, though.

  I had more pressing matters to worry about than Ivan's mental state at the moment, though, namely getting paid. I knew Ivan would snap out of it eventually, whatever it was.

  After carefully disarming the IED, I stepped into the windowless interior room that housed our comm setup, flipping on the light as I went. The single, bare light bulb hanging by its wiring from the ceiling illuminated one of the most high-tech comm setups Eastern Kazakhstan had ever not seen. The funny part was, if anybody outside of the team ever did set eyes on it, they'd think we were working for the CIA.

  It didn't take long to get the VTC setup linked back to the office. For us, the “office” was a nondescript back room in an industrial park in Philadelphia. Most of the time. When we really needed to talk to the Office, well, that was different.

  Ginger was staring at me through the screen, chewing her inevitable bubble gum. She had a real tendency to dress and act like a stereotypical early-'60s secretary, even though she was usually alone in the windowless closet she called her workspace. I knew for a fact that she was a lot smarter than the gum-chewing bubblehead she presented to the world, but the one time I'd said as much she'd just winked and shushed me. Given what we'd been up to the night before, I'd just smiled and nodded.

  She wasn't wearing the airhead act this time, though. She stared out of the screen at me with a dead serious, one hundred percent professional look on her face. That didn't bode well.

  “Frank,” she said, “the Office called. They want to talk to you, five minutes ago.”

  I frowned. “Why? I didn't think Komrade Kommissar was that important.”

  “They didn't say,” she replied, “but it sounded like a pop-up. It sounded serious, too.”

  I shook my head. “They should know better than to hit us with 'serious' without some sort of big number attached to it,” I said. “But fine,” I continued, when a worried look crossed her face. “I'll call 'em.”

  A look of relief crossed her face before she signed off. That was kind of worrisome. Generally speaking, our employers had been pretty good about keeping their distance. They got us the jobs, we executed them, we got paid. We tried not to ask too many questions. Knowing too much of the big picture tended to result in people, even contractors like us, mysteriously disappearing.

  I knew that Ginger was worried that, just through sheer time on the job, we were getting too close to the threshold where they decided to make us vanish. They hadn't been as effective as they had been for seventy years by taking chances with leaks, that huge internet file dump on Operation Heartbreaker in Zubara notwithstanding. If anything, that had made our position that much more precarious.

  I typed in the link to the Office. I didn't know where it was physically located, and I had no desire to know. We didn't keep the link anywhere on anything, and on the rare occasions that we had to use it, we were careful to wipe as much trace of it off the computer as possible. If it came to the possibility of the laptop falling into unfriendly hands—which pretty much meant anybody outside of the four of us—we'd destroy it first, making sure we got the hard drive. And we'd make sure we had proof of destruction if our employers asked for it.

  The VTC link connected immediately, suggesting that somebody was just sitting there waiting for me to call in. Considering it was pretty early in the morning Stateside, that suggested that Ginger was right, and they were taking whatever it was really seriously.

  I didn't recognize the face that appeared on the screen, which was surprising. Our employers liked to keep the stable of people who knew about the contract side of their operations small. This man had a shaved head and small goatee. He was lean, though there was a softness to him that suggested that he had spent the majority of his career at a desk. His next words suggested that my assessment was wildly erroneous, though.

  “Mr. Dragic,” he said, his voice dry, with a hint of a Midwestern accent, “my name is Forsyth.”

  That was chilling. I'd never met Forsyth, but the stories floating around among those in the know were not terribly pleasant. He had once been one of the top HVT hunters out there. In more recent years, as he got older, he tended to handle more . . . internal affairs. If Forsyth came after you, you were boned. If Forsyth took any interest in you at all, it probably meant you were boned.

  “We have a mission for you,” the man continued, even as I pulled out another Black Russian and lit it, trying not to let my fingers shake as I did so. I usually tried not to smoke in there; there wasn't really any ventilation aside from the door that was shut behind me. But I was talking to one of our employers' scariest errand boys. I needed the nicotine.

  “Whoa there,” I said, trying to maintain my tough-guy image and not let him see how much that name had rattled me. I was slightly relieved by the fact that they didn't want me to come in, but anything Forsyth touched was something I wanted to stay away from if possible. “That's not how this works. I work contract, and I pick the jobs you offer. I'm not one of your Dead Unit dupes. You ask, I say yes or no, you pay my price.”

  The cold-eyed man on the screen didn't change his expression one iota. “Yes, I'm aware of your rather unique arrangement,” he said. That was bullshit; there was nothing unique about my little team of hitters. I'd been kicking around doing dirty deeds for these people for the better part of ten years. I'd linked up with other teams half a dozen times. And that wasn't even mentioning the Project Heartbreaker files. The Office had dozens of us running around the world, knocking people off to nudge events here or there. The Dead Units were the big offensives; we were the skirmishers. “An
d that arrangement depends on you maintaining your usefulness.” That wasn't a subtle threat at all.

  “There is a time-sensitive target that just popped up. It is considered of serious enough import that all available assets are being called in, even those that might be at some distance.” A faint smile crossed his lips, that didn't extend to his dead, shark's eyes.

  While I really didn't like the sound of that, I also realized that I'd probably blustered all I dared to. I looked at him through an eye-watering cloud of harsh cigarette smoke. “Who's the target?”

  “Mr. Anders,” he said.

  That made me sit up and take notice. As bizarre as it might be to hear that Anders, one of the Office's chief killers, was now an HVT, quite frankly it was like hearing that Christmas had come early to me.

  He'd come out to Xinjiang with a few more of his high-speed, low-drag meatheads five years before. I'd had a five-man team at the time, and had been instructed to liaison with Anders. I'd done what they'd told me, even though a gigantic, blond mountain of muscle who looked like he belonged on a Wehrmacht recruiting poster didn't exactly blend in with the locals.

  One of my guys, Imad, had been a Uighur and a Muslim. He was the best terp I'd ever worked with, and one of the best liaisons with the various Islamic groups that we interacted with in Xinjiang there had ever been. He knew every tribe, every clan, and he knew just whose ego to stroke to further work against the PLA. He was also what I called a jack Muslim. He drank, swore, and was one of the biggest porn hounds I'd ever seen. We were the only family he had; he knew that if AQ got their paws on him, he was just as dead as if he wound up in PLA hands.

  Anders hadn't liked him. He made no secret of the fact that he didn't trust the “towel-head slope” and told me to kick him to the curb. I told Anders to pound sand; Imad was one of mine, and Anders didn't call the shots where my team was concerned.

  Two days later we got ambushed. We never saw who it was; they shot at us and ran. They might have been one of the many AQ offshoots that had gained traction in Xinjiang the harder the PLA cracked down on the Uighurs. In the course of the ambush, Imad went down. He'd been shot in the back of the head.

  I couldn't out-and-out prove it was Anders or one of his meatheads. There was no real court or chain of command to prove it to anyway. Anders all but dared me to do something about it. I swore then and there that one day I'd see him dead.

  Maybe this was my chance. If it was legit.

  “When did Anders wind up on the Office's target deck?” I asked, unsure that this wasn't some kind of elaborate loyalty test. It sounded too good to be true, and if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

  “Some time ago,” he replied coldly. “You do not need to worry about the details. All you need to know is that he is a target, you are being hired to capture or kill him, and you need to get moving quickly.” It wasn't an unfamiliar mission statement, except for the ID of the target.

  “I take it you have some intel about his whereabouts?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Forsyth replied. “We have actionable intelligence that he is presently in Stepanakert.” When I stared at him blankly, he supplied, “That's in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan. At least it's still Azerbaijan officially. There's something of an ongoing ethnic war between the Azeris and the Armenians, and Stepanakert is right in the middle of it. Which is, we presume, why he's there. War zones are notoriously good places to do business with the underworld, something with which, I am sure, you are quite familiar.”

  I was, but that didn't make this better. Azerbaijan was not our usual AO. It was most of a damned continent away. We had no contacts, no resources there. I said as much.

  “Doesn't matter,” Forsyth replied. “This is high priority, and we're calling in all hands. All hands. So that means that you pack your shit and get on the next thing smoking for Azerbaijan.”

  “How reliable is this report?” I asked, stalling for time. I really didn't like this. Whatever was going on—and I had no illusions that Forsyth was telling me the whole story—going half-cocked into a country I'd never worked in to pull a “Capture or Kill” mission was not my idea of a good time, or a good idea.

  “Very,” the man replied. “He's apparently now working as muscle for the Montalban Exchange, which means he hasn't just gone rogue, he's actively gone over to the Opposition.”

  I knew vaguely that the Montalban Exchange was involved in all sorts of underworld operations that our employers were always looking to counter, but the mysterious “Opposition” was something I'd never looked into that thoroughly. It all sounded like some kind of conspiracy theorist bullshit to me, anyway, cooked up to justify half of our dirty deeds in distant places. Sort of like the people who called our employers “Majestic.” There were plenty of webs of criminals, terrorists, and rich people hiding the fact that they were criminals without some kind of big-time shadow-clash of massive conspiracies going on.

  “How long has he been there?” I asked, stubbing out my cigarette and lighting up another one. The smoke was raw on my throat, but I'd been smoking Russian cigs for so long that American ones just seemed tasteless now.

  “We don't know for sure,” he replied. “Nor do we know how long they can be expected to stay there. We're not sure what the Montalbans are up to, but you should move quickly. I'm sending you a file with the locations where he may have been sighted, along with any other information we have on Anders and his movements.”

  I held up a hand. “Hold on,” I said. “I'm sure you are already well aware of my past with Anders.” He just nodded impassively. I'm sure they had an entire file on the incident. “There's still the matter of our fee.”

  He held up a piece of paper with a number on it. There were a lot of zeros after it. “Enough?” he asked.

  I just nodded, taking another deep drag off the Black Russian. It was a good payday, almost enough to justify going halfway across the Eurasian continent to kill a very dangerous man. It was also enough to make me nervous about our future even if we did succeed. Our employers paid well, yes, but there were limits, and this was pushing it. Especially after what had apparently happened to Dead Six in Zubara, an offer that big had me looking over my shoulder.

  “I'll need to discuss it with the team,” I said, but he shook his head.

  “Let's dispense with the free market bullshit,” he said coldly. “This is a high value, time sensitive target. You do the job, you get paid, and the wheels keep turning. You turn the job down, or you hem and haw and make it clear to me that you don't have any actual intent to follow through with it, and your stock with the Organization fucking vanishes. And given your experience, Mister Dragic, that means that I will start to take a very personal interest in enforcing our non-compete agreement.”

  There comes a point where the bluster and the facade of being your own man has to give way to reality. We'd just passed that point. The truth of the matter was, as much as I had a bad feeling about attempting to pull a snatch and grab—or just an assassination, which would be fine with me—on unfamiliar territory, I really did want Anders dead, even more than I didn't want this cold-blooded bastard turning his baleful eye toward me and my team. So, as much as it galled me to be their dutiful yes-man, I just nodded. “Understood,” I said, in as close to a tone of absolute professionalism that I could summon up anymore. “Send us any intel you've got, and we'll get it done.”

  He gave me the same thin, vaguely sinister smile. “The packet is already in your inbox,” he said. “As is the contact to reach when the job is done.” He started to reach up as if moving to cut the connection, then paused. “Mister Dragic?” he said. “Just so we're clear. Taking Anders alive would be preferable. There is information in his possession that the Organization is very interested in extracting. However, given that it is Anders . . . dead is almost as good.”

  “Roger that,” I replied flatly. If they thought I was going to try to take that mutant alive, they were out of their damn minds. He nodded with a sly, knowing loo
k on his face, and cut the connection.

  My cigarette had burned down to my fingers. I crushed it out and immediately lit up another one before going out into the main room, rummaging through a cupboard until I found the fullest bottle of Stolichnaya in the house. Without a word, I popped the top and took a long, burning swig.

  J.D. and Carlos watched me as I slugged back the vodka, exchanging a glance. Ivan was off being Ivan somewhere else in the house, but he'd be along as soon as I called him; moody he might be, but he was still a professional.

  “That bad?” J.D. asked. “I was sure we whacked the right guy.”

  “We did,” I replied, after coming up for air. “No, this is because of the new mission we just got handed to us. Along with a not-so-subtle hint that if we didn't do it, we'd be the next ones on the chopping block.”

  Eyebrows climbed. “That's a little unusual,” J.D. said. Carlos just looked concerned. Usually the pay was considered enough. “What's the job?”

  “Anders,” was all I needed to say. Expressions hardened, and a dangerous, brittle edge entered the atmosphere in the little safehouse. The name even brought Ivan out of the back room, where he loomed in the doorway, his expression thunderous.

  “He's apparently pissed off our employers,” I continued, before any of the muttered cursing could gain any real volume. “Whatever he did, he's now on the target deck, and apparently there's a full-court press offensive to capture or kill him. And when I say 'full-court press,' I mean that we've been brought in to help. Whether we like it or not.”

  There was a note of enthusiasm and slight confusion in J.D.'s voice. “We get a chance to kill Anders? What's not to like?”

  “Oh, I don't know,” I retorted. “Maybe the fact that he's in fucking Azerbaijan, where none of us have worked in years, if at all. Not only that, but I don't like being railroaded. We've done everything these motherfuckers have asked for years, and demanded nothing but our paychecks. And now they want to threaten to put us on the target deck if we don't take this job.”