by Baen Books
We came to a deserted street. We crouched in the bushes and scanned the area before crossing the danger area that the open road presented. Where houses had apparently once stood, there were only crumbling foundations on overgrown lots. “What happened here?” This looked worse than the usual crumbling infrastructure you see in post-Soviet Central Asia.
“Ethnic Armenians, backed by the Russians, have been fighting with the Azeri for this part of the country for years. They shelled the fuck out of this part of the city, and engaged in some serious ethnic cleansing later. This was back in the Nineties. There was a cease-fire, but both sides have violated it over and over.”
The helicopter sounded like it was getting closer, though I still couldn’t see it through all the trees. “We need a vehicle. If they’ve got air support, it’s going to be that much harder to get out of here on foot.”
“Do you see any vehicles around here?” Dragic asked, obviously frustrated. “This isn’t the rich part of town, okay? Most of the people that live here don’t have much.”
“Actually . . . ” I trailed off, peeking my head out of the shrubbery just a little. A smallish van, light blue with a white roof, was headed in our direction. Its rounded contours and utilitarian aesthetic gave it a distinctly eastern European look.
“Un-fucking-believable,” Dragic said. “Okay, here’s what we do. I’ll . . . hey!”
I stood up and stepped out of the bushes before Dragic could finish his plan. We needed a ride right-goddamn-now, and we didn’t have time for this guy to come up with an elaborate scheme. I walked out into the middle of the street, rifle in hand, and stood facing the oncoming van. Antoine followed, pointing his rifle at the vehicle from the side. Dragic reluctantly stepped out a few seconds after that.
The driver was a middle-aged local man, wearing blue jeans and a polo shirt. He slowly raised his hands off the steering wheel. I didn’t point my rifle at him, but Antoine had him covered. Even though I didn’t speak his language, carjacking transcends most language barriers. I jerked my thumb to the side, indicating for the driver to get out. He did so, slowly, flushed white with fear.
I actually felt bad. This guy probably had a hard enough time of things without three foreign assholes stealing his van, too, but this was a life-or-death emergency. As he stepped away from the van, Dragic strode past me. “I’m driving,” he growled, and grabbed the old man by the shirt. He said something to him in a language I didn’t understand. The old man looked terrified, and with shaking hands produced a small cell phone. Dragic grabbed it and smashed it on the ground before shoving the old man away. “Well? Get in!”
Antoine and I jogged over to the van. The big African opened a side door to the rear cargo compartment, which was presently empty, and climbed in. I jumped into the passenger’s seat next to Dragic and closed the door. I handed my rifle back to my teammate while Dragic laid his on the floor between the seats. Getting a good look at it, I realized it was an AK-1-0-whatever, one of those rifles with the counterweight that’s supposed to negate recoil.
“You know,” I said absentmindedly, as he put the van in gear, “I did this exact same thing once in Zubara. It was a French car, if I remember right, driven by a British guy, not a . . . ” I looked around the cabin of the van. “Whatever this is.”
“It’s a Yeraz,” he said tersely, lighting up a cigarette. “That’s what the locals call them. Armenian produced for about thirty years.”
“Yeraz,” I repeated. “Cool. Okay, what’s the best way out of the city?”
“Reach in my bag, the outside pouch. There’s a map of the city. I’ve got a couple of egress routes highlighted, but that wasn’t accounting for the entire NKDA looking for me. Fuck. They’ll have checkpoints everywhere.”
“That’s why I wanted to get us a vehicle.” I pulled the map out of Dragic’s bag, waving the coarse smoke out of my face. “They might have God-knows-how-many dudes scouring the city for us by the time it gets dark. We need to get out of Dodge before they can get their shit together.”
The grizzled mercenary puffed his cigarette and looked at me sideways. “That’s surprisingly solid thinking.”
“Surprisingly?” Asshole.
“To be honest, I’m kind of surprised you’ve lived as long as you have, after seeing how you operate. You just barge in and start shooting. You showed up and fucked everything up for us.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what I do. Besides, if you know anything about Project Heartbreaker, then you should realize I might know a thing or two about sowing chaos and escaping in the confusion. I helped bring down a nation, once.” I rolled down my window a bit, to clear out the acrid smoke from his cigarette. “And I got away alive.”
"Yeah. Cute. My team's dead and my life's barely worth the cost of a bullet, all because you barged into the middle of my op. I’m glad you think this is funny."
The tone of my voice changed. My left hand habitually dropped to the butt of my revolver. “Fuck you. Don’t act like you don’t know who you were working for. How did you think it was going to end, Dragic? You thought you were going to retire from this someday and die of old age? I risked my life to tell the world about Project Heartbreaker, tell them how we were betrayed and left to die. Even after that, you still kept working for them.”
He looked over, giving me an icy glare. “Now you listen to me, kid—”
I didn’t let him finish. “No, you listen to me, you son of a bitch. Your employers didn’t just leave us to die when we were inconvenient. They sold us out, had us liquidated. I watched the woman I loved die in the mud. After they caught me, they didn’t just interrogate me. Hell, they didn’t just torture me, they turned me into a science project. So don’t you fucking dare get on your high horse with me, dude. If I had known you didn’t know where Anders was, I’d have shot you dead or left you for the Russians.”
Dragic didn’t say anything. He puffed his cigarette angrily. He was gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. Every muscle in his body was tense. He was seething with anger. I think that had Antoine not been just behind us, gun in his hand, Dragic would’ve tried to murder me right there.
Too fucking bad. Sooner or later, we all have to face what we’ve done. You can only lie to yourself for so long. When the truth can no longer be denied, it’s a terrible shock. The realization of what you’ve wrought, the consequences of the choices you’ve made, it all weighs on you.
“Anyway . . . .I’m sorry about your teammates. I’ve been there, more times than I like to think about. It was a bad op. You got used, and when you weren’t useful anymore, they threw you away. It’s not right.”
He relaxed his grip a bit and exhaled, heavily, filling the cabin with foul-smelling smoke. “Once you get in, there’s no getting out.”
“That’s not true. I got out. You’re getting out right now. As long as people like me and Anders are still on the loose, I doubt they’ll commit any resources to tracking down a runaway door-kicker.”
“Yeah, well, we gotta survive the day, first. Now check that map and find us a good route out of here.”
# # #
“Hey, kid.”
I kept my eyes on the map of the city. “Yeah?”
“What’s with the revolver?”
“Huh?”
Dragic pointed at the .44 hanging from my hip. “The Dirty Harry magnum. Why do you carry that thing?”
“I like it,” I said. “And I shoot revolvers better.”
“Yeah, but it’s huge, and has to weigh a ton. You could carry two Glock 19s for that weight, and have more than twice as much ammo.”
I thought about it. “Yeah, probably.” I looked back down at the map.
“No, seriously. Nobody carries a revolver anymore. They went out of style in the Eighties. A modern gun is smaller, lighter, easier to conceal, has less recoil, can be suppressed, and is quicker to reload.”
“You’re right about that.”
“And for someone in your position, car
rying a weird gun like that is fucking stupid. That’s how we ID-ed you, you know. We saw that revolver.”
Hmm, I thought. Maybe a little more discretion wouldn’t hurt.
“So why do you insist on carrying it?”
“Like I said, I shoot revolvers better. And this gun? It’s always kept me alive.”
“That sounds like a bunch of sentimental bullshit to me,” Dragic said. “I once knew . . . shit.”
Dragic’s, snarled expletive and change in tone was enough to get my attention. I looked up from the map and down the road. We’d been driving for almost an hour, having had to change our route and double back more than once. The Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army had mobilized in a rapid fashion. They were setting up expedient checkpoints along every road out of the city. I’d hoped that this road, at least, would get us out of town without being spotted.
So much for that. We came to a stop. Up ahead, an old UAZ 4x4 was parked in the road, blocking one lane. Four bored-looking, but armed soldiers stood around it. One had one of those flashlights with a red cone on it, and was motioning for us to come forward. Antoine ducked further into the back of the van, his rifle in his hands.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“This piece of shit can’t outrun them. If we turn around, they’ll get suspicious. If we go forward, they’ll either capture or kill us. There’s no way I’m going to be able to bluff my way through without getting the van searched. If it was just me, maybe, but with you two?”
“Well, this sucks,” I said. The soldier with the flashlight-cone was getting impatient, waving the glowing implement faster. “We can’t just sit here, either.”
“I can try to gun it,” Dragic suggested. “Run a couple of them over. Maybe we’ll get around that bend before they shoot us up.”
The bend in the road he was talking about was a long ways off. I shook my head. “They’ll start shooting before we even get to them.”
“I know, goddamn it! We have to do something!”
“Pull forward,” I said. “Be ready. If you have earplugs you might want to put them in,” I said, putting in a pair of my own. I drew my .44 Magnum and put it in my lap. “It’s about to get loud.”
Dragic looked at me incredulously, shaking his head. He lit another cigarette, probably the fifth one he’d had since we’d been driving, and put the van in gear. “Fuck me, we’re gonna die.” He wasn’t losing his cool; he was frustrated, but still level headed. It was more resignation than anything else.
I took a deep breath, feeling my heart slow down as we approached the checkpoint. Everything else seemed to slow with it. My senses were heightened, my thoughts clear. I was scared, and I was amped up, but that all got pushed into the periphery. With the adrenaline came the Calm. “Trust me. I’ve done this before.”
Of course the last time I’d done this it had cost Wheeler his life. There was no other way, though. I looked back at Antoine. “Don’t shoot until I shoot.”
We slowly rolled toward the checkpoint. It was late in the day, and we were headed in an easterly direction; the sun was at our back, which worked in our favor. As we drew near, I got a good look at the four NKDA soldiers. All of them wore camouflage. To our left was a young, skinny man with a unibrow. His helmet was too big for him and the chinstrap dangled from the side of his face. He had an AK-74 slung over his right shoulder, muzzle-up. I saw that the safety was on.
In front of us, standing next to the parked UAZ, was an officer. He wore a soft cap with a shiny badge on it. A green pistol belt was fastened around his ample waist. A pistol in a flap holster hung from his right hip. He was fiddling with a radio and wasn’t really paying attention.
On the right side of the road was a more seasoned-looking soldier with a big mustache. He looked squared-away, and held an AKS-74 at the low-ready. He was also wearing a plate carrier—the biggest threat. Next to him, with the flashlight-cone, was another young man, this one with glasses. He had an AK-74 slung across his back.
Everything seemed to slow down as Dragic brought the van to a stop. When Calm, I perceive things like you do when you’re in a traffic accident, when everything seems to move in slow motion. It’s more than that, though. I tend to notice every detail, and I remember everything I see later. It’s an overwhelmingly intense focus that I wish I had better control over, but as is it’s rarely let me down.
Unibrow-guy stepped to the driver’s side window. At the same time, flashlight-cone-guy stepped to the passenger’s side. Both of their eyes went wide as I brought my gun up in both hands, pushing it out over the dashboard. The big, stainless-steel Smith & Wesson roared. Glass fractured as .44 Magnum slugs punched right through the windshield. I fired once, twice, three times, aiming at the veteran NKDA soldier with his weapon in hand. The first round went way low, impacting on his front armor plate. Bullets do funny things when they go through glass. The second shot I pulled to the left, and it clipped his shoulder. The third hit him in the face and blew his brains out the back of his head.
At the same time, Dragic reached out the widow and grabbed unibrow-guy’s uniform collar. He jerked the skinny soldier to the window with his left hand. His right hand came up with a knife and plunged the blade up into his head, under the jawbone. He twisted and yanked the knife out in a spray of blood.
As unibrow-guy and the veteran were both falling to the ground, I shifted my gun to flashlight-cone-guy. He had dropped his light and was backing away from the passenger’s side window, struggling to bring his rifle to bear. He wasn’t nearly fast enough, and he wasn’t wearing body armor. The .44 bucked in my hand as I put a round through his heart.
The fat officer looked up, an expression of shock on his face. He dropped his radio and went for his pistol, but Dragic stomped on the gas. Antoine’s rifle barked from the back of the van. I felt the muzzle blast as the bullet zipped between Dragic and me, punched through the windshield, and struck the NKDA officer in the stomach. He doubled over and started to fall. THUMP! The bumper of the van clipped him before he hit the ground, launching him into the grill of the parked UAZ as we sped past.
Just like that, it was over. Time sped up to its normal rate. I noticed that my ears were ringing despite the earplugs. My hands started to shake. “Is . . . is anybody hit? Everybody good?”
“I’m fine,” Antoine assured me. “Are you injured?”
“No! No.” I was just spun up. My heart was racing now. “Dragic, you okay?”
He looked over at me with an intense expression on his face. He’d been splashed with blood and looked primal. “I’m good,” he said haltingly. “I’m good. Holy fucking shit.”
I exhaled heavily. I couldn’t believe that had actually worked, either.
“You weren’t kidding about being good with that revolver, were you?”
# # #
We drove for probably another hour, putting distance between us and the city. The road was narrow and winding, so it was slow-going. As darkness fell, we learned that the NKDA officer’s fat body had busted our left headlight. Antoine was on the radio with Ling, updating her on our location. We weren’t actually going toward the safe house. We were going to find a secluded spot, ditch the van, and have her come pick us up.
We pulled off the lonely highway, turning north, and followed a dirt road for a couple miles as it plunged into the forest. Finding a good spot, we came to a stop, and climbed out. “Here,” I said, handing Dragic my GPS. “Figure out where we are, exactly, and find a good spot for my team to meet us. They have a four-wheel drive, so they can go off-road if they have to. Antoine and I will push the van into the trees.”
“Good,” the mercenary said, taking the GPS from me. The glow from the screen made his haggard face look even more unsettling. “We should move under tree cover in case the Organization still has a UAV overhead.”
Nodding, I turned my attention to the van. Antoine had already disengaged the parking brake. We both sidled up to the back of the van, put a shoulder into it, and pushed. I was glad to have
Antoine with me; he’s big and made of muscle. We were able to get it over the hump at the edge of the road, and from there the van started rolling on its own. I stood back and watched as it rolled a short way down a hill, coming to a stop only when it crunched into a tree. The hill was steep enough that anyone driving by wouldn’t see the van from the road, and the trees were so dense that it wouldn’t likely be spotted from the air.
I wiped my brow on my sleeve and turned to Dragic. “Okay, where do we . . . Dragic?”
He was nowhere to be seen. I immediately knew what happened. Son of a bitch.
“It seems this is where we part ways,” Antoine said quietly.
The asshole had stolen my GPS. “Probably a waste of time trying to go after him. He could get the drop on us too easily if he decides he doesn’t want to be followed.” More than that it was dark, it was getting cold, I was tired, and I’d had enough fun for one day. I looked up at Antoine. “I probably should’ve shot him when I had the chance.”
The big African shook his head. “I don’t think so, Mr. Valentine. I think you stayed your hand for a reason. I doubt he’ll try to return to his former employer.”
I doubted it, too. As near as I’d been able to tell, Frank Dragic hadn’t been a Majestic insider. He was kind of like I had been on Dead Six, hired help, only told what he needed to know and not privy to anything too sensitive. Deniable and expendable. “Underhill will be on the ground here soon enough.”
Antoine actually put one of his huge hands on my shoulder. “Believe me when I say that I know what it’s like to desire vengeance for someone you love. Please, also believe me when I say that going down that road will only get you killed. You may get your shot at this Underhill person yet, but now is not the time. We should regroup with the others and return to Azerbaijan while we still have the chance. We’ve pushed our luck enough.”