Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

  It was, Anton Varlamov decided, depressing. He was glad it was too dark to see the full ugliness of what remained. America was the enemy, had been the enemy for longer than he’d been alive, but there had been respect for her traditions, her former greatness. Annapolis was, if not ancient, at least venerable. Over two centuries old, its style was classical and elegant for a military institution, and what was left reminded him of the ruins of ancient Rome.

  He’d seen Rome, once, a decade ago. The ruins were still there, joined now by more recent ones, one civilization following another into the abyss. Russia was too much like that, now. Everything was falling apart.

  No, not falling apart. Ripping itself to pieces, clawing out its own guts like a desperate animal.

  “Mischa reports all clear from the west side,” Sgt. Namestnikov told him. “Do you want them to enter?”

  Anton didn’t answer him, instead touching the control for his own throat mic.

  “Go,” he ordered.

  The entry team was only thirty meters away, but nearly invisible even through his night vision glasses. The moon was lost behind a morose blanket of clouds, as if even God Himself didn’t wish to gaze down upon the sins of His creation.

  Even the Devil has abandoned this place. Only we remain, rats in the walls.

  “Clear,” the report came in his ear. “Nothing here, not even squatters.”

  “We’re coming,” he warned. “If anyone shoots at me, they’re fired.”

  “You sound like an old woman,” Giorgi Lermontov scoffed. “Come on ahead, fearless leader, we will have the tea ready.”

  Anton’s lip curled. Giorgi was becoming a bit too familiar, possibly. It was almost inevitable out here, so far away from the Motherland and any real military structure, but he worried it would erode team discipline. Now was not the time to address it. Perhaps if he waited a few days, neither of them would be alive to worry about it.

  He switched off his night vision goggles when he reached the stairs, instead triggering the weapon’s light attached to the underside of his carbine. There was no need to be remain tactical in here. Nothing was left alive in this place to see them except rats, and the occasional cat to prey on them. And cockroaches. They lived through everything. They scurried away from the beam of the light, heading back through holes in the walls.

  He tried to remember what the chapel had looked like before the east coast had fallen. He was too young to have seen it live, but he’d been shown videos and pictures while he was in training and he recalled rows of wooden pews, stained glass windows and the massive brass cylinders of pipe organs. All gone now, stripped away by looters, the pews probably burned during the winters, the metal sold for scrap by the human version of the cockroaches who’d run away from his flashlight. Bare floors and bare walls greeted the glowing arcs of the weapons’ lights of his team, a pool of stagnant water in the center of reflecting the glare back at them.

  Mosquitoes floated in clouds over the room, hatched in the water deposited year after year, season after season in tiny drips through gaps in the roof. They swarmed the lights and Anton fought an urge to swat at them. There was no need. His fatigues repelled them, as did the balaclava covering his face.

  “The stairs are over here,” Giorgi called from off to his right, not over the radio, his booming voice echoing off the walls like an opera singer warming up.

  Anton winced at the volume despite their isolation. It was the principle of the thing, but again, he tamped it down and pushed on with the mission. If there was time, he might have to give Giorgi what he’d one heard his American counterparts refer to as “wall-to-wall counselling,” which meant slapping the man around from one wall of the barracks to the other. He hadn’t had to take that approach since he’d been a young lieutenant with his first team, but it might be necessary in this wild land.

  Less had been taken from the lower level of the chapel, perhaps because of the difficulty of getting anything up the stairs and through the narrow hallways of the obvious entrances. Here there was vandalism for the sake of destruction, spray-painted graffiti left out of spite. And yet the tomb of John Paul Jones remained, as if protected by some jealous nautical deity. The crypt still rested on tiles faded and cracked, black marble columns still guarding each approach.

  A chill crept up his spine at the sight, a feeling this place was haunted somehow, as if they were violating it. But it wasn’t the first haunted place he’d braved nor the holiest tomb he’d desecrated these last twenty years. He wasn’t the first. One of the walls had been knocked out and replaced, long after the looting and the vandalism and the final abandonment by even the scavengers.

  A Russian engineering team had performed the task with shaped charges, ever so carefully lest they bring the roof down on top of them, then cleared out the rubble from the other side. What they had erected in its place was plain white plaster, out of place if anyone had been brave and foolish enough to intrude here. Foolish because what they’d left behind the fake wall was guarded by something more tangible than ghosts or gods of the sea. The contact mines were ingenious little devices, ubiquitous here and all throughout the world wherever Russian forces fought. They could be left behind for years, their radioisotope batteries scanning for any unauthorized tampering, ready to reward the miscreant with death or dismemberment. Unless you had a Russian military RFID chip implanted in your hand, in which case it was as harmless as a kitten.

  Anton carefully yanked the last of the mines off the wall, their adhesive still stubborn after all these years, taking a layer of plaster with it. He was tempted to just toss it on the floor to demonstrate his bravado to the others, since he knew his chip had rendered it inert. But this was Russian engineering they were dealing with, so instead, he gently placed each one on the floor on the other side of the crypt.

  “All right,” he nodded to Giorgi once he’d deposited the last one as far away from them as he could. “Bring it down.”

  The NCO nodded, waving to the junior members of the team to come forward. They’d brought sledgehammers with them, looted from a hardware store twenty years ago and resold a dozen times in street markets since. One still bore the remains of a price sticker, which Anton found inexplicably amusing. Giorgi took a hammer proffered to him by one of the corporals and the three of them went at the thin, fragile plaster wall. The impacts echoed hollow and tinny in the enclosed chamber, the sounds growing deeper as the wall came down. The space behind the façade was utter blackness, impenetrable shadows behind clouds of plaster dust that diffused the glow of the flashlights.

  It was long seconds after the wall was down before the dust began to settle and the light began to make its way through to what lay beneath. Humanoid shapes, ten meters tall, nearly scraping the ceiling despite the fact parts of it had been pulled down to make room for them. The Tagans were painted in brown and green camouflage, bristling with weapons and weighted down with a ton of armor, their isotope power plants still burning hot even after what had to have been three years concealed here beneath the chapel. There were six of them, which would have to be enough.

  Anton stepped up to the closest of them, running a hand down the barrel of the chain gun hanging down from its right arm. They didn’t often use mechs. The supply train back to mother Russia was far too long to depend on the machines for anything more than special missions or raids, unless they happened to be near a supply depot set up far in advance. But he surely appreciated the firepower and mobility the mechs offered, and just having them available seemed to give him a feeling of invulnerability.

  Have to watch that. You can die just as easily in one of these things as out of it.

  Beyond the half-dozen mechs were a few cases of spare ammo, which he would have loaded into the truck just to be thorough, but didn’t expect to have the chance to use. Once they made their incursion and accomplished the mission, the Tagans would be left behind. Beyond the ammo was another wall, this one blocking the way to an exterior entrance and much sturdier than the plas
ter barrier they’d broken through to get in.

  Anton turned to Namestnikov, nodding.

  “Tell Mischa to set the charges on his side,” he instructed. “Then begin setting ours. Everyone get into your mech. You’ll be safer there in case of roof collapse.” Not safe, of course, but still safer.

  “We’re really going to fly these all the way to DC?” Giorgi wondered, tossing his sledgehammer to the floor. He probably thought they’d be leaving the sledgehammers behind, but Anton planned to toss them into the truck along with the ammo. Waste not, want not.

  “Fly and walk,” Anton replied, most of his attention on Namestnikov as he pulled C4 charges out of his backpack. Placing them correctly to bring down the wall but not the ceiling was going to be tricky. “Unless you have an uncle in the shipping business you haven’t told us about.”

  “Won’t that take hours?” The hint of a whine in Giorgi’s voice grated at Anton’s nerves and he clenched his teeth to keep from biting the man’s head off.

  “The better part of a day,” he corrected. “Which is why we shouldn’t waste time talking about it. Help Sgt. Namestnikov while the rest of us prepare the mechs.” He shot Giorgi a tight grin, wondering if the man could even see it in the uneven glare of their flashlights. “If the thought of the journey disturbs you, perhaps you’ll feel more comfortable riding in the truck and missing the battle.”

  “No, sir!” Giorgi begged, eyes going wide, the whites bright enough to see even in the gloom. “Please, Major, I want to be in on the raid!”

  Anton regarded him evenly, trying not to let his momentary anger sway his judgement. He debated for just a moment whether he’d be better off leaving the man behind where he wouldn’t have to worry about him screwing up, or bringing him along where he’d have a better chance of getting himself killed. In the end, waste-not, want-not won again.

  “Very well, Giorgi. If you want to fight that badly, get those charges set and then get inside one of the Tagans. But I don’t expect to hear any complaining from you during the trip. If these machines are good enough to take us into battle, they are worth the trouble to transport.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir. I promise, no complaints.”

  Anton snorted his skepticism but said nothing. A soldier who didn’t complain was harder to find than an honest politician.

  Nate flexed his leg experimentally, wondering at the simple pleasure of being able to move it again without pain. The medics had come in, along with their armed guards, and changed the bandage, replacing the high-tech healing stimulator with a simple gauze and tape model now that the electronic work was done and his wound had mostly closed. He wished they’d let him put his pants back on. Hospital gowns were universally embarrassing and unnecessary, sort of like politicians, and all the decades all the versions of Nate Stout had seen and still remembered, nothing had changed that.

  He also wished he’d been able to bring his own books. Svetlana had brought him a tablet, not connected to any external networks, with a collection of e-books, but her taste in literature—or, to be fair, the tastes of whoever had filled the tablet’s library—were far different from his. There was nothing but old-school science fiction and fantasy in the list, stuff from a hundred years ago by writers he’d never even heard of: Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury. Something about the name Bradbury nagged at the edges of his memory, something his Prime might have read but hadn’t been passed down, but the other names were cyphers to him.

  He sighed and settled into reading a book called Something Wicked This Way Comes, but the whole setup of the society in it made no sense to him. It was an America that hadn’t existed for a century, if it ever had, and he couldn’t relate to the kids wanting to be older. He couldn’t remember much about Nate Stout’s childhood, but he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be older, wanting less life.

  He set the book down and closed his eyes, frustration welling up in his gut. Now that the pain was mostly gone, he was getting some serious cabin fever. The room’s walls had gotten smaller and he kept having to remind himself it was better than the dank, underground cell he’d been stuck in for the first few days.

  He looked up at the door latch turning and felt a strange catch in his breath when Svetlana Grigoryeva stepped through. She seemed to be wearing different clothes every time she came in the room. Not just fresh clothes, which would come as no surprise, but a different style, as if she were a different person with each visit. This time, she wore a dress, which was a look he hadn’t seen from her before. It was old-fashioned, something his Prime would have seen back when this building had housed presidents instead of crime bosses. Well, not that there was much difference if I’m being honest.

  It was yellow and knee-length, sleeveless, cut low just above her breasts. Her hair was loose and clean, freshly-washed, and he thought he smelled a hint of perfume. Something stirred inside him he hadn’t felt in quite a while. If he was being honest, it was something he hadn’t felt since the Prime. He and the various other incarnations of Nate Stout had occasionally frequented the working girls in the Fry or the equivalent thereof in the rest of the ruins of the eastern seaboard, but those had been the scratching of an itch, nothing more.

  “Good morning, Nathan,” she said, pushing the door shut and punching in a lock code. It was interesting, he thought, that there was a lock plate on both sides of the door.

  “Is it morning?” he wondered. “It’s kind of hard to keep track.” He waved around the windowless room. “The old cell had a few cracks, but this one is pretty airtight.”

  “Sorry,” she said, stepping over to him, a hand resting on his arm. “If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be kept in here, but Robert has his own priorities.” She shrugged. “He is not a cruel man, and one might even say he is noble. But he is burdened with purpose, and sometimes he forgets the suffering of those who swept along in his wake.”

  She hesitated, licking her lips with an uncertainty he hadn’t seen before in her face. She pulled a small electronic key card from a pocket he hadn’t noticed.

  “If I take off your handcuff,” she said, nodding at his left hand, still restrained to the side bar of the bed, “do I have your word you won’t try to escape?” The corner of her mouth quirked up. “You will have to take my word that you would not be able to overpower me, particularly since you’ve been spending the last few days lying in bed.”

  “In that case,” Nate said with a rueful chuckle, “you have my word.” The truth was, he didn’t doubt she could take him. She was beautiful, but also undeniably deadly, a leopard at rest.

  She seemed to read his thoughts and her grin widened. She touched the card to the center of the handcuffs and both loops parted with a soft click. He pulled his hand free and rubbed at the raw, red line on his wrist for a moment before he pulled his arm across his chest, popping his shoulder joint and relieving a constant pressure he’d felt for most of the last few days.

  “Thank you.”

  She leaned over him to retrieve the handcuffs and her hair teased at his face, her breasts just barely brushing against his chest. He held his breath, not wanting to give her the impression he was trying to cop a feel. She took the cuffs and tossed them into a chair across the room, the same chair she’d sat in as they’d talked these last few days, safely away, separate. Not today.

  “You had a shower last night,” she said, then made a show of sniffing the air. “I can tell.”

  “I did,” he acknowledged, sitting up in bed, making sure the sheet was covering the lower half of the robe, because it didn’t conceal much. “Though it was as short as the showers we were allowed in Officer’s Candidate School.”

  “You never went to OCS,” she reminded him, drawing closer still. He felt the warmth of her skin radiating between the centimeters between them and his eyes locked in on hers so he wouldn’t get caught staring at the flesh visible above her dress. “You were never married. You’ve never been in love.” She cocked her head to the side. “Have
you?”

  “No.” The admission was easy, but the words wrestled their way out of his chest. “I suppose I haven’t had the time.” He worked moisture into his mouth. “What about you?”

  “My job has made it difficult for me to trust anyone enough to let them close. I am required to lie, and if you lie so much…” She trailed off and for once since he’d met her, she seemed unsure of herself. “If you lie so much, you begin to forget what it’s like to be honest with yourself.”

  “And are you being honest now?”

  By way of answer, she leaned in and kissed him. He hadn’t exactly been expecting it, but it didn’t shock him. Her lips were warm and tasted of strawberries and cigarettes and her body was taut and toned and yet somehow soft as well. His heart was pounding its way out of his chest and he felt as light-headed as a teenager about to lose his virginity…until he realized he’d never been a teenager. Her fingers pulled away the sheet, pulled away his hospital gown, and the chill of the room seemed a welcome relief from the intense heat of her skin against his.

  Her legs were impossibly smooth, like silk beneath his palms as he slid the dress up over her head. She wore nothing beneath it and blood surged away from his brain at the thought she had come here intending to do this.

  This is a mistake. It’s some sort of mind game. She just told you she lies for a living.

  And yet he couldn’t think of a single good reason why he shouldn’t do it. The old saying was life was too short, and it was truer for him than it had ever been for anyone else who’d ever uttered the words. He gave in to the desire, coupling with her urgently, not caring about the why, only feeling a paranoid certainty they’d be interrupted, that he’d be punished by the guards or by Franklin, or perhaps, by God. God seemed to have been punishing him and all the other versions of him for the whole of their stutter-step existence, punishing the Prime for his hubris in having tried to live life one second longer than fate had dealt him.