by Baen Books
Getting back to the safe house, we were presented with a problem. The car was burned, no doubt about that. Parking it in front of the safe house would only burn the house as well, and we didn't have a backup. But walking too far with the gear, even stuffed in the big backpacks we had in the back, might raise some eyebrows as well. We weren't locals, and this part of Stepanakert, hell, any part of Stepanakert, was a little sensitive to out-of-towners. These people had effectively lived under siege for decades. Strangers were noted. That was why we'd exposed ourselves as little as possible.
But the car was going to be a bigger target indicator, so we parked it five houses down, stuffed our Suchkas and chest rigs in our packs, and walked the rest of the way. J.D. was at the door, his AK-74 held just out of sight.
“Where's the car?” he asked, as we walked in.
“Down the street,” I answered. “We got spotted.” I dropped the pack on the floor and picked up my AKM. I'd be keeping it close for the moment.
“Um,” was all J.D. said. I turned and frowned at him. Usually, he'd have a lot more to say, especially about a compromise. But he wasn't looking at me. He actually looked a little guilty, which was a new expression for our resident hedonist and serial womanizer.
“What the fuck did you do?” I asked, concern about The Russian eyeballing us suddenly eclipsed by J.D.'s demeanor.
He was saved the necessity of answering immediately by the call signal from the laptop in our makeshift comms room, which was just a former bathroom, the toilet having been ripped out to leave nothing but a noxious-smelling hole in the floor. With a glare that promised a continuation to the conversation, I went inside to answer it.
I was expecting Forsyth. But the face that came up on the screen wasn't Forsyth. I'd never seen this guy before.
Forsyth had a dangerous rep, but he looked like an office geek who got to the gym regularly. Whoever this was, he was older, decades older, but even with thinning white hair and wrinkles, he looked like one dangerous, scary old bastard. His neck was almost as thick as The Russian's, and his eyes were probably the coldest I'd ever seen, and I've looked into the eyes of some very nasty people.
“You Dragic?” he asked. His voice was low and gravelly. It fit him.
“I am,” I said. There probably wasn't any point in trying to beat around the bush with this guy. He didn't look like the type to play games. “Who are you?”
“My name's Underhill,” he replied. “I'm told you've made contact with Michael Valentine.”
I felt a sudden cold rage at his words. So that was why J.D. had looked like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He'd talked about Valentine. Fucker.
But somehow I got the impression that showing this man anything but the utmost professionalism was not a good idea. “That depends on how you define 'contact,'” I answered. “We've tentatively ID'ed him, based on a couple of chance encounters in the course of our own operations. We're pretty sure he's here after Anders, just like we are. If it is him.”
Underhill's expression didn't change a whit. Nor did he apparently give a damn for my qualifications. “Your mission profile has changed,” he said bluntly. “You are to get eyes on Constantine Michael Valentine, and maintain surveillance until I get there. Do not try to engage him or his companions.”
“Dammit,” I snarled, momentarily not caring about how scary this oldster appeared. An old guy working for the Organization was usually not one to trifle with. He'd probably been around a long time, and done some things that would give most normal people nightmares. But after ten years of working for these people, we were being used as expendable pawns, and it pissed me off more than this guy scared me. “We're already in over our heads with looking for Anders. I'm ninety-five percent certain that he's hunting us as much as we're hunting him. And as near as I can tell, we're the only assets you've got here looking for him. And you want us to add another target to the list?”
“No,” he said, with the grinding patience of a glacier. “You're shifting targets. There are plenty of other teams out doing the same 'confirm or deny' game that you've been playing with the three dozen or so mostly spurious Anders sightings that have been cropping up. This is a higher priority.”
I saw red. We were out in the cold, with Carlos dead already, for a target that probably had never been there, and the Organization had known that? “And how many of those teams have been ambushed?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Several,” he replied, with about as much feeling as a man talking about how his stocks were doing. Less, actually. A man talking about his stocks would have some actual stake in their success. Underhill didn't care. At all. “That was always to be expected. Enough of that. Stick to the matter at hand.”
It was a tribute to just how menacing this emotionless, gravel-voiced oldster was that I quit bitching and went ahead and played along.
“Why Valentine?” I asked. “What did he do that makes him more valuable a target than Anders?”
“He's not,” Underhill said. “You're being re-tasked because we're now fairly certain that Anders isn't in Azerbaijan, while you've got a pretty solid lead on Valentine. As for what he did; that's need-to-know, and you don't need to know. Just don't underestimate him.”
“He looks like a kid,” I said.
“That kid was a Vanguard merc before he became an Exodus terrorist,” Underhill said. “He's seen plenty of combat, and he's a survivor. If he was just any schlub with a gun, they wouldn't have hauled me out of retirement a year ago to find him.
“You've got your instructions,” he said, his voice low, hard, and brooking no dissent. “Get eyes on Valentine and don't lose him until I get there and can take him in. He's my target; you're now spotting for me. Don't screw this up.” The screen went blank. He'd ended the call.
To my credit, I didn't yell, I didn't scream, I didn't even curse under my breath. I just sat there for a minute, staring at the laptop. Then I got up, went out into the main room, without looking at either J.D. or Ivan, and lit a cigarette. I smoked the entire thing down to the filter, then crushed it out on the filthy floor before turning to stare at J.D.. He didn't look at me, not at first.
“I specifically said we were going to leave well enough alone,” I said. “We are undermanned, all but unsupported, and in unfamiliar territory. Let's stick to the job at hand until we can either bag the target or otherwise get back to our own AO, where we know the terrain and the people, I said. So tell me, J.D., since I'm pretty sure it was you, why did you decide to throw that decision completely out the fucking window and tell fucking Forsyth that we'd seen fucking Valentine here?”
He lifted his head and looked me in the face. Suddenly his guilty look was gone, replaced with a flash of anger. “Because somebody had to,” he snarled. “We've been through two ambushes and several days of recon, with no sign of Anders. Forsyth was getting impatient. If we wanted to have a chance in hell of getting out of here in one piece, I had to give them something, some reason not to just write us off and make us disappear. They wouldn't even have to take us, you know that. A word here, a file deleted there, and we're international fugitives. Fuck that.”
He stepped closer to me, lowering his voice. “This isn't about your pride anymore, Frank. It isn't about your idea of somehow being above it all, a gun for hire, totally uninvested, doing the job well enough to keep below the level of a threat and above being a pawn. Guess what, Frank? We're fucking pawns. We're no better off than the Dead Six guys that you pitied so much, all the while telling yourself that you had it figured out, that we could walk the tightrope and come out fine.” He stepped back and shook his head. “We're not fine, Frank. This isn't our game, and we can't play it the way we want to. I had to give them something, and it bought us time. So you can get off your damn high-horse and accept that if I hadn't told them about this Valentine character, we'd be dead in a week.”
I just glared at him, but at the same time, I knew that he was right. We'd been playing a game of brinksmanship for
years, banking on our usefulness to keep us from being too expendable. But to the Organization, everybody's ultimately expendable, particularly contractors. We weren't special. We'd just bucked the odds for longer than most. Now we were out of options. I had no doubt that Underhill would make it his business to hunt us down and finish us off if we screwed this up. Forsyth might have a nasty reputation, but even without knowing anything about Underhill, something about that old man just scared me.
But that didn't make the fact that J.D. had gone behind my back to the Organization any easier to swallow. I'd trusted this man with my life for years. And he'd just betrayed that trust as surely as if he'd slid a knife into my back.
Part of that tightrope act we'd pretended was going to end in anything but a fiery crash and burn had been the understanding that we could never entirely trust the Organization. We had to trust each other instead. Yet J.D. had gone to the Organization in spite of Ivan and me. I didn't know if I could ever trust him all the way again.
I'd always known that J.D. had an amoral streak. He was a hired killer and a serial womanizer, and not much else. But this . . . it was all I could do not to just shoot him in the face. He was the same guy, but I'd be watching him like a hawk from here on out. Because I couldn't know when he'd decide to sell us out the rest of the way.
Ivan hadn't said a word, but the expression on his flat Russian face was thunderous as he looked at J.D.. Loyalty was a big thing with Ivan; he'd followed me without hesitation—though occasionally with some rather pointed questions—ever since I'd pulled him out of Pavlodar just ahead of the friends of the brodyaga he'd nearly killed in the bar. He wouldn't like this. And when Ivan really didn't like something . . . well, things could get a little physical.
“You should not have done this, J.D.,” he said, his voice sounding a little deeper, his accent a little thicker, than usual. “Not without consulting us.”
“Both of you would have just doubled down on your walk-the-line bullshit,” J.D. answered harshly. “You wouldn't have done it. So I did it for you.” He turned away, toward his room. “You can thank me later.”
Ivan and I watched him leave the room, neither one of us saying anything. Ivan didn't look pissed anymore. His expression was blank, dead. Ivan with the dead face was way worse than Ivan pissed off. It meant he was seriously contemplating killing J.D. in the next few minutes.
He turned to look at me, and I shook my head. “We still need him,” I said, reading the unasked question. I sighed bitterly. “We'll figure out what to do after this is all over.”
“He knows all fallback plans,” Ivan pointed out quietly.
“He won't tell anybody,” I said, starting to get over the anger. I could see why J.D. had done it, even if it still pissed me off. He hadn't suddenly turned into an Organization drone. He was scared that we were going to fail and pay the ultimate price for it, and had acted out of that fear.
Still, I could tell that the team's days were numbered. If we survived this nightmare of an assignment, we wouldn't be working together anymore. More than likely, we'd activate our fallback plans, and disappear into the shadowy corners of the world, to live out the rest of our lives under assumed identities, hoping the Organization overlooked us.
But that was dependent on that big, ugly if. If we survived. We needed to get to work on that part, and worry about what came after if there was an “after.”
“Come on,” I said. “We'll start planning to track down this Valentine character. J.D. can come join us when he's done sulking.”
#
In the end, we didn't have a chance to find anybody. They found us.
The fact of the matter was, we had no idea where Valentine and his Exodus pals might have been. We'd only ever seen them in passing, while hunting for Anders—or, rather, hunting The Bulldog, since Anders didn't seem to actually be on the ground in Nagorno-Karabakh. The only lead we had was that the Russians had apparently been following Valentine when we'd had our little dust-up in Kerkicahan. So we decided to go looking for Russians.
J.D. had come out of his room after Ivan and I had only been planning for a few minutes. We kitted up and got ready to move without much conversation. There wasn't much to say. At least, until Ivan looked out the front window to see if the coast was clear.
“We have company,” he said. I joined him at the window, trying to peer out without exposing myself too much to the outside. We hadn't drawn too much attention from the neighbors, but it was probably bound to happen. It was just a really bad time for it.
It wasn't the neighbors. Valentine had ditched the Lada for a UAZ. They were trying to be casual, but I could see enough through the rolled-up windows to tell that it was the same big black dude in the passenger seat. The thought that they should probably have left that guy at home went through my head. It's hard to be inconspicuous in the Caucasus when you're damn near seven feet tall and black as the Ace of Spades.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered. Ivan had a stream of Russian profanity going under his breath. We didn't have to look for our target, but one of the keys to successful surveillance is that the target doesn't know you're there. And apparently, Valentine had come looking for us.
“We don't know that he knows we are here,” Ivan said. “He could only be looking. Maybe he is not even looking for us.”
“We haven't seen any of The Russian's people in this neighborhood,” I pointed out. “Either he's way off, or he's not looking for them. And right now, I'm not trusting in coincidence.”
“So what do we do?” J.D. asked.
I blew a deep breath out past my nose. “We've got to take him.”
Ivan's eyebrows climbed toward his hairline as he turned to look at me. I kept watching Valentine's vehicle through the window.
“Take him?” he asked. “In middle of street, during middle of day? And how will we avoid Russians and NKDA while getting him out of town, while dismantling safe house, and making contact with Underhill to tell him change in plans?”
“I don't fucking know, all right?” I snapped. “This is 'desperate times, desperate measures' time here. I'm spitballing.” The truth was, I had a sinking feeling in my gut that said we were fucked, no matter what happened over the next five minutes. “The only other option is to try to run out the back, try to lose 'em, set up somewhere else, and try to find 'em again. What are the odds we can pull that off, given how the rest of this job is unraveling around us?”
“Is not good plan,” Ivan said.
“It's no fucking plan at all,” I replied, throwing on my chest rig and grabbing my AKM. “It's nothing but a desperate roll of the dice. We're probably dead either way. May as well go down shooting, if that's what it comes to.”
Ivan shrugged, though he didn't even look at J.D. as he grabbed his own gear and weapon. J.D. didn't say another word, but he kitted up as if he was fully on board.
“J.D., you stay here, cover us from the window,” I said. “Ivan and I will go out the back.” He nodded, staying back from the window, but shouldering his AK-74 and bringing it to the low ready. Ivan and I beat feet out the back door.
The back was mostly overgrown, with trees overhanging the yard between the safe house and the house behind it, one of the few on Shahinyan Street. The yard was overgrown, but not overgrown enough to conceal the four men in Russian digital camouflage and black chest rigs moving toward the safe house, their black AK-107s held ready.
I don't know who was more surprised to see the other; we had been a little focused on Valentine out front, and they thought they were sneaking up on us. Everybody reacted about the same way and at about the same time, though.
I barely aimed as I ripped a burst at the first green and black silhouette that rose in front of my muzzle, even as I ran for the corner of the house and some kind of cover. Ivan was going the other way, and the Russians were diving for the ground, all of them shooting at the same time. Bullets snapped past, hitting the side of the house with loud cracks, spraying concrete fragments and plaster dust int
o the air with each impact.
Diving onto my belly behind the corner, I found that it really didn't provide that much cover; it cut off one of the Russian shooters, but I was still pretty exposed to the other three. Worse, I could hear more fire coming from out front, both rifle fire and the booms of Valentine's hand cannon.
Caught in the open, the Russians charged the house, firing as they came. I was in the prone, though, and shrank back against the wall, aiming in on the closest, and fired three fast shots. They tracked up his chest, and he staggered, but didn't go down. He had to be wearing a vest. So I raised the rifle a bit and shot him three times in the throat and face. Red splashed and he stopped dead, kind of went up on his tiptoes, and fell flat on his face.
The others slowed, and the covering fire started to get uncomfortably close. I shrank back further against the wall, trying to make myself as small as possible, but I had to finish this fast. The shooting from the street was intensifying, and I felt really exposed. There wasn't much between my ass and the street, after all.
Flipping the AKM back up to auto, hoping that there were still enough rounds in the mag, I rolled out from the wall and dumped the rest of the magazine at the charging attackers.
The AKM bucked with the recoil, the muzzle rising as I tracked it across the two men I could see. One doubled over as a round took him right beneath the plate, and stumbled to his knees. The other one tried to duck, and took a round to the top of the head. He wasn't wearing a helmet, either. A bloody chunk of skull went flying, and he fell on his face. Then the rifle clicked. Empty. It was a bit of a frantic scramble to get the next mag out of my chest rig, which I was lying on, strip the empty, and rock the new mag in. That guy I'd gut-shot, while he was rolling around on the ground and screaming, wasn't dead yet, and I never trust a bad guy until he's dead.