Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

  “You need any help in here?” Ramirez asked her.

  Something about the tone of his voice made him realize she’d been staring out at the pickup for too long and she shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut at the afterimages from the sun’s glare.

  “If you can find any meaning or sanity in this fucking desk,” she responded with more bitterness than she’d intended, “you can be my guest. Or any idea why Nate took off,” she added. “Why the hell would he abandon us?” The words came out as something near to a sob and she felt a jolt of shock that she was letting it affect her so much. “Was it Patty? Did Patty betraying us make him leave?”

  She sounded like a kid, like more of a kid than Ramirez. She thought she saw embarrassment for her in his eyes and she hated him and herself for it. She gripped the edge of the desk tightly and forced herself back to reason.

  “I don’t know,” Ramirez admitted. “I know Dix getting killed hit Nate pretty hard. I can’t believe he’d just leave us in a lurch like this. I mean…” He shrugged helplessly. “Without him, we can’t keep Broken Arrow going, right? Not with just the two of us. Where the hell are we going to go?”

  “Did you get the data recorder from Patty’s Hellfire downloaded to the system?” she asked, her tone steadier now, more professional.

  The question seemed to shock Ramirez out of his self-pity and he nodded, pulling a flash drive from his chest pocket, passing it over to her. She weighed it in her hand, considering the weight of the memories held in an ounce of plastic and metal.

  “There was a video file in there,” Ramirez told her. “Big. Don’t know when it ended, maybe when we depowered the mech to ship it here, maybe earlier.” He gestured toward it. “If we want to find out where Nate went, maybe we should watch it. It might be the only clue we have.”

  She rubbed a hand over her eyes, suddenly feeling very tired.

  “It might,” she admitted. “But I’m not sure I want to see what’s on it, Hector. It was bad enough finding Patty’s body the day after.”

  She tried to keep the image out of her mind, of Patty’s face pale and lifeless and covered in blood. He’d been shot right through the forehead, a pistol round, like the 9mm Glock Nate had been carrying. She hadn’t found the cartridge casing on the ground, but then, she hadn’t really been looking for it. She wasn’t a cop and wasn’t interested in investigating the death. She knew what had happened to him. Nate had done exactly what she’d expected him to do. Patty had been a traitor and he’d deserved a bullet to the head. She didn’t blame Nate for doing it, but she had never thought he would actually go through with it.

  For all that Nate was a soldier who’d killed over a dozen Russians in battle just in the time she’d been with Broken Arrow Mercenary Force, she’d never thought he had it in him to execute a man in cold blood. It made her wonder if she’d ever really known him at all.

  “If we want to find him,” Ramirez argued, “we gotta have a place to start. His phone is dead, his tracker is deactivated. That footage is all we got.” He held out a hand. “If you want, I could go watch it by myself and tell you if I see anything important.”

  She debated it for a few seconds, but she’d always wanted to be a leader. Leaders didn’t push tasks on their subordinates just because they were afraid to do it themselves.

  “No,” she decided. “We’ll watch it together.” She pushed up from the chair and headed for the door, but paused midway there and gestured back towards the desk. “Bring the whiskey.”

  She didn’t know what she’d see on the video, but she was fairly certain she’d need a drink.

  The Lincoln Bedroom had seen better days. Robert Franklin remembered the first time he’d seen it, during a private tour of the White House…Was that fifty years ago now? More?

  It had looked so grand, so ornate, so full of uninterrupted history. Now…now, they’d had to run a few squatters out at gunpoint and it had taken weeks for the crew to scrub away the smells of shit and piss. But he’d insisted. The White House made sense as a place to set up their base for this operation. It was structurally reinforced enough to keep them safe from most air strikes, and defensible from 360 degrees. And he’d always wanted to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.

  Well, some version of me always wanted to sleep here. God alone knows whether that’s still me or not.

  He pulled a cigar out of the nightstand. He’d brought it along with him from Cuba. Nothing stored here had lasted long once the capital had been abandoned. The Russians had occupied it briefly, mostly as a boast of their “great victory” driving out the American forces, but the fact was, no one really wanted it. Washington DC was a swamp, quite literally. Without constant maintenance, it was trying very hard to go back to being a swamp. The mosquitoes were horrid at night.

  Not even any politicians left here and it’s still full of blood-sucking parasites. Amazing.

  He thought about lighting up right there, but as much as he enjoyed a good cigar, he hated the idea of stinking the room up with smoke so soon after getting it livable again. Instead, he walked outside to the nearest balcony. There was a chair there, waiting for him. An old wheelchair one of his men had brought up from storage somewhere. The poor bastard had insisted it was FDR’s wheelchair, but Bob could tell it was no older than the 1980s or 90s. He hadn’t said anything. There was no use disillusioning the man.

  He made sure the wheels were locked and sat down, looking out at what was left of the Washington Monument, cracked and broken in the red light of dusk, just like the country it had represented once. The Reflecting Pool was overgrown with weeds now, the water long drained, and the lower third of the monument was defaced by graffiti in four different languages. Including Russian, of course. The troops who’d rolled in here so briefly had made sure to leave their mark. There was more of it on the face of the White House, on any surface left standing, as if all of the capital was a giant canvas for disaffected youth to proclaim their despair and rage.

  He realized he’d been sitting with the unlit cigar in his mouth for several minutes and shook himself free of his thoughts long enough to pull out a lighter. He puffed the cigar to life and held the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds, feeling the slight light-headed dizziness he got from real Cubans. The exhalation was a white cloud, hazing over this nightmare version of America.

  “Those things will kill you,” Svetlana told him.

  He hadn’t heard her approach, but then, she was a spy.

  “You know enough to know why I’m not worried about it.” He took another puff, not inhaling as deeply this time. More than one long hit on the Cuban would make him nauseous. You had to know when to say when.

  “We have the power back on. You might actually set off a smoke detector with that cloud of burning Cuban agriculture.” She snorted cynical amusement. “And you’d definitely offend the puritanical ghosts who haunt this damned mausoleum for the Nanny State you used to love so much.”

  “Our countries weren’t so different, once upon a time,” he argued, mostly out of reflex. He didn’t actually disagree with her.

  “Says the man who never lived in Russia,” she reminded him. She talked back more now that he’d let her into his confidence, and he liked it. It was refreshing. He’d grown tired of having nothing but toadies and yes-men around these last few years. “You hired me, you must have known my background.”

  “I know of your work in the FSB. Your record is exemplary.” It was a half-truth. He knew everything about her, but he wanted to see how much of it she’d share voluntarily.

  “My mother,” Svetlana Grigoryeva related, leaning carefully against the porch railing, “lived on the streets of St. Petersburg, supporting herself by selling drugs, selling guns, selling her body when she had to.” Her perfect lips curled in a sneer. “Which was how I came to be. She found a shelter to take us in, at first, sponsored by a businessman who felt guilty for his success and tried to assuage his conscience by helping the downtrodden.”

  She spoke of the m
an as if she despised his weakness. Bob wondered how much of that was her true feelings and how much was protective coloration, meant to keep up her armor and avoid being seen as weak.

  “But then he died and his wife decided we were a bad use of what was now her money, and we were out on the street again.” The sneer straightened into something more personal, more honest. Something hurt and frightened and vulnerable. “I was ten. She tried to protect me, at first, to do whatever she had to do to keep us both safe and fed. But eventually, the men she sold herself to got her hooked on heroin. The drugs became her life and I became an afterthought. She sold me for a few grams of heroin and a week’s worth of food.”

  “And yet you lived through it,” he said, impressed despite the fact he already knew the bare bones of the story.

  “You learn quickly to make yourself indispensable. As I have with you.” She stared out at the ruins of the city. “I was traded from one man to another until I came upon one who liked to hit me. I put up with this for as long as I could, and then I stabbed him through the eye with a pen. I was fourteen.” She smiled thinly and he wondered if the memory of killing the man was what she found so pleasurable. “He was an FSB agent, and I was arrested and taken before his immediate superior. He gave me a choice, which was more than I’d ever been given before. I could go to prison and never see the light of day again, or he could put a bullet in my head and save me the suffering…or I could go to work for him and get to kill more people, more bad men.”

  She pulled a cigarette case from her purse and lit one up, making herself a hypocrite for her earlier warning to him. Though perhaps she’s not worried about death either, though for different reasons.

  “So,” she went on, adding pale white to the cloud of darker smoke from his cigar, “I have no love for the Motherland. It offered me nothing and took what little I had.”

  “Did you ever find your mother?” he asked, genuinely curious. It was the one thing he’d never been able to discover in all his research into her.

  She glanced at him sharply, her jaw clenching against what he thought might have been a harsh retort she’d reconsidered as inadvisable.

  “I did.” The words were flat and emotionless. “She died less than a year after she sold me. She was buried in a pauper’s field.”

  “If you’d found her alive, what would you have done?” he wondered. “Would you have tried to help her?”

  Svetlana didn’t reply for a moment. Perhaps she was debating whether she should tell him the truth, or perhaps she didn’t even know. When she finally did answer, Bob thought it was the most honest thing she’d ever said to him.

  “I would have killed her myself.”

  Bob nodded, resting an elbow against the arm of the wheelchair and puffing silently on his cigar. He had nothing to add except his approval, and Svetlana neither wanted nor needed that, he was certain.

  “The idiot downstairs,” Svetlana said when she’d burned through most of the cigarette and the sun was touching the horizon. “How long are we planning on keeping him there? I believe he has gone…” She trailed off, eyebrows knitting in thought. “What is the old American term I’ve heard you use? Oh, yes. Stir crazy. He’s gone stir crazy being in that cell in the dark for so long.” Her nose wrinkled in distaste. “Also, he very badly needs a bath.”

  “I’m adjusting his mental state,” Bob explained. “He’s almost there. There’s no use pulling him out and cleaning him up until the equipment has arrived, anyway.”

  “What equipment…” she began, but trailed off when she heard it.

  She had exceptionally good hearing. He’d known it was coming and he hadn’t picked it up yet.

  “Is that an engine?” she asked, standing, tossing away her cigarette and pulling a compact handgun out of her purse.

  “A truck engine, to be precise.”

  He pushed himself up out of the wheelchair, the cigar still clamped in his teeth, scanning down the road through the broken gates and out into the street. There it was, coming around the corner. It was antique but serviceable, painted an incongruous desert tan with the US Army white star on the side.

  “I believe that is what used to be called a Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, HEMTT, known colloquially as a ‘Hemmet.’ They haven’t been made in decades but they hold up quite well, don’t you think?”

  “Why does it have US military markings?” she asked, her tone suspicious, the gun still in her hand.

  “Because what it’s carrying came a long way,” he said, “and payments had to be made to certain parties for it to pass through the lines. Relax, Svetlana,” he assured her, hand gently grasping her wrist just above the Makarov she held at low ready. “Very soon, the star on the side of that truck will have as little meaning as the house where we’re standing. It, too, will be simply a grave marker for an old world.”

  And the beginning, he hoped, of a much better one.

  3

  Anton Varlamov wiped his knife blade clean on the expensive, silk shirt, watching the life fade from the bearded man’s eyes. People always seemed so surprise at death, as if they thought they could avoid it, as if they would be the one man who lived forever.

  No one lives forever, tovarisch, he thought silently at the man. Especially not people who think being a sentry just means standing around with a gun in your holster.

  He pulled the CZ from the man’s shoulder holster, careful not to get blood on his sleeve. His black fatigue top wasn’t exactly designer silk, but blood was difficult to get out in the wash and they wouldn’t be shipping replacements over from Russia anytime soon. The CZ was well made, mostly polymer though, which was unfortunate. Anton appreciated the weight and feel of a quality metal firearm. Polymer lacked permanence, lacked gravity. He tucked it into his belt anyway.

  Straightening from the well-dressed corpse, he signaled the all-clear and six other black-clad figures emerged from the shadows of what had once been a laundromat in a world long dead. They moved in fluid silence, not a scrape of boot sole against pavement, suppressed sub machineguns tucked into shoulders, the optical sights held just below eye level.

  I should let someone else take care of sentry removal. It’s not a task for a Major.

  He knew Vasyli would lecture him for it when they returned to base, tell him he wasn’t a young Spetsnaz Captain anymore to be leading from the front. But he still felt young even if middle age was beginning to creep up on him. He’d lose a step soon as forty drew ever closer. No use letting any of his prime go to waste.

  Though I hope I don’t celebrate my fortieth birthday in this place. Norfolk was, as the Americans liked to say, a shithole, and if his own country had played a part in making it so, it still irked him. How many Russian cities had been razed, burned, torn down brick by brick over the centuries only to be rebuilt, repopulated, repurposed? If the Americans had balls, had pride, they would have moved back into the east coast cities and scraped away the ash and dirt and filth and made them home again. Instead, the government had abandoned them to the squatters, to the criminals…to the predators.

  Ah well. If the Americans lacked the will to kill the predators, he and his people would do it for them, as they had killed the wolves stalking in from the wild when Stalingrad and Moscow had been crushed under the heel of the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War.

  These wolves had steel-framed doors to shut out the hunters, but Mischa had the cure in his rucksack. They would have to use the plastique sparingly—there’d be no replacing it once it was gone, not until and unless another freighter made it through the drone submarine fleet and across the North Atlantic to drop another load of supplies. But this was why they had the stuff and half a kilogram planted at the hinges would be more than enough.

  They stacked on the door and Mischa passed Anton the detonator before taking his own spot to the left of the heavy, reinforced steel portal. The dead sentry watched them, a witness from beyond as they prepared to demonstrate to him how fully he’d disappointed his comrades. />
  Anton counted down on raised fingers for the benefit of the others, three down to one and then he popped the safety out of the way and jammed his thumb on the detonator. The crump was gut-deep, a kettle drum banging inside his head, echoing through his sinuses, but the door was gone, smoke and dust pouring out from the gap where it had been. The screams and surprised shouts would come moments later, after the shock had subsided, but that would be far too late.

  His people rolled inside, the stutter of their suppressed 9mm’s reserved and polite after the violence of the explosion. It almost seemed pointless, but they were special operations and they carried silenced weapons as if it were a badge of honor.

  God knows we need some sort of honor. There’s precious little to be found in this war after so many years.

  Through the entrance hall, there was what might have once been a storage room but was now lined with cots, some bare, some covered with sleeping bags…some covered with dead bodies, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds, weapons near their outstretched hands.

  “We need prisoners!” he yelled, knowing it was useless, that they were too far ahead. Either they’d remember the op order and their training or they’d let the heat in their blood get the better of them.

  Sgt. Namestnikov brought up the rear, determined to be his bodyguard despite Anton’s repeated assertions he neither wanted nor needed any such thing, walking backwards behind them, weapon at high port. None of the corpses in the entrance hall or the makeshift bunkroom were faking it, however, and by the time they made it to the offices, the NCO had turned to cover the front.

  Commotion rattled furniture in the private office down the hallway, the grunts and crashes of a fight filtering down from it, shouts from the two Spetsnaz operators standing guard outside the open door.