Loe raamatut: «Road Of Bones»

CHAPTER ONE

Yakutsk, seven hours later

Yakutsk owed its existence to the tide of war and tyranny. Constructed as a fort by Cossack warlord Pyotr Beketov in 1632, within seven years it had become the seat of power for an independent military fiefdom whose commander sent troops ranging to the south and east. Discovery of gold and diamonds in the late nineteenth century turned Yakutsk into a mining boomtown. The Sakha Republic still supplied twenty percent of the world’s rough diamonds, but Yakutsk owed its final growth surge to Russia’s Man of Steel.

Joseph Stalin was one of those people who chose his own name and made grim history—like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac killer, but on a grand scale. Born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, he didn’t like the sound of it, and so renamed himself Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin—Russian for “steel”—after joining the early Bolshevik movement and being convicted of bank robbery. Exile to Siberia couldn’t tame him, but it gave him ideas.

Climbing the revolutionary food chain with ruthless cunning, Stalin was Vladimir Lenin’s strong right hand in 1917 and beyond. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin rushed to fill the power vacuum in Moscow, exiling or executing his rivals and consolidating power in a dictatorship that scuttled any dreams of a Communist Utopia on Earth.

And he remembered Siberia. Over the next three decades, an estimated twenty-two million passed through Stalin’s Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, better known as gulags for short. Based on figures released after communism’s collapse in 1991, some 1.6 million internees died in Stalin’s camps between 1929 and his own death in 1953.

But killing hadn’t ended with the cold war in the Russian Federation. Life and death went on as usual. Mack Bolan was in Yakutsk to prevent one death—and likely to inflict more in the process.

Business as usual for the Executioner.

It was a rush job, with time being of the essence. Bolan drove his GAZ-31105 Volga sedan along the Lena River’s waterfront with barges and an island to his right, warehouses on his left, looking for the address where he could—hopefully—collect his package from some people who weren’t expecting him.

And there it was.

He drove past, boxed the block and rolled back toward the water with the makings of a plan in mind. He’d keep it simple: hit and git, if that was possible.

If not…well, Bolan played the cards that he was dealt.

And on occasion, he’d been known to throw away the deck.

He parked within a half block of his target, killed the Volga’s engine and turned to his tools. First up was an AKS-74U submachine gun, nineteen inches long with its wire stock folded, weighing five and a half pounds unloaded. Size aside, it had the same firepower as its parent weapon, the venerable AK-74 assault rifle in 5.45 mm, with a cyclic rate of 650 rounds per minute. On paper, the little gun’s effective range was listed as 350 yards, but with an eight-inch barrel it was used primarily for work up close and personal.

For backup, Bolan wore an MR-444 Baghira semiauto pistol in a fast-draw shoulder rig. The Russian-made sidearm was chambered for 9 mm Parabellum rounds, carrying fifteen in a double-column box magazine.

His less-lethal option consisted of four GSZ-33 stun grenades, a flash-bang model equivalent to the U.S.-made M-84 that generated one million candela to blind a target on detonation, while shocking him deaf and nearly unconscious with 180 decibels of concussive sound inside a five-foot radius. When they were clipped to Bolan’s belt and the pockets of his long coat filled with extra magazines, he left the sedan and locked it, moving toward the warehouse with the address offered by his contact.

Despite the vote of confidence from Langley, filtered back to Bolan through his friends at Stony Man, there was a chance that his informant could turn out to be a rat. In which case, it was fifty-fifty that Bolan would never have a chance for payback.

Not in this life, anyway.

But there was one thing you could say about the odds on any battlefield.

They shifted when the Executioner arrived.

* * *

WHEN THE INTERROGATOR took a break, Valentin Grushin braced him, getting in his face to ask him, “Are you making any progress?”

The pale man regarded Grushin as he might a laboratory specimen, perhaps a frog or piglet offered for dissection. Grushin thought, again, how much the creepy bastard looked like Dracula. Not old Lugosi, long before his time, but Christopher Lee in the great Hammer films from the sixties and seventies.

“She’s tough,” the pale man said. “I give her that.”

His name was Ivan Shukov, but inevitably he was known within the dark world he inhabited as Ivan the Terrible. No surprise there, from what Grushin had heard—and now seen—of his work.

“I would have said you’re getting nowhere,” Grushin said, emboldened by his guns and three companions. “All this time, and nothing.”

All that screaming, and the generator humming, Shukov murmuring his questions as he placed the alligator clips for maximum effect. How many volts? Enough to singe the flesh without inflicting death or permanent disfigurement.

So far.

Grushin wasn’t unsettled by the screaming. He had made some women scream himself—a few from pleasure, others not so much. Insensitivity to suffering was part of what equipped him for his work, a subset of his general indifference to the fate of other human beings.

No. What made his skin crawl in the presence of a man like Ivan Shukov—and there seemed to be a surfeit of them in the world these days—was the disturbing sense that he, Grushin, might fall into the hands of such a man someday.

And then what would become of him?

It would be easy to transgress and fall from grace. A simple comment in the wrong place, at the wrong time, might betray him. Passed along maliciously, amended and redacted, any casual remark could turn into a death sentence. And while he didn’t relish death, Grushin had long since come to terms with personal mortality, accepting that the chances of a long and happy life were slim indeed.

It wasn’t dying that he feared, so much as screaming out his final breath while everything that made him human was extracted, sliced and diced or seared with flame, by someone like Ivan the Terrible.

Had he already gone too far in goading the interrogator? Would his criticism get back to the man in charge, be filed away for future reference and used against him somewhere down the line? Perhaps, but now it was too late to take it back.

“I’m thinking of a new approach,” Shukov said.

“Oh?” Grushin strived for a noncommittal tone.

“Selective applications, heat and cold,” Shukov explained. “You have dry ice?”

“Dry ice? No,” Grushin replied.

“But you can find some, yes?”

Grushin considered it. Where would he locate dry ice?

As if reading his mind, Shukov said, “I suggest the ice plant. Kulakovsky Street. You know it?”

“I can find it,” Grushin said, determined not to ask Shukov for the address.

“A pound or so should be sufficient,” Shukov said. “I have a pair of gloves. And tongs.”

Of course he would.

“I’ll send Mikhail,” Grushin said, wishing he could go himself and get away from Shukov for a while. Ivan the Terrible depressed him, set his teeth on edge and made him feel the need to shower under scalding water.

Too late, Grushin thought. He was already soiled beyond redemption, not that he placed any faith in superstition or the church. Forgiveness, if it mattered, always called for a confession and repentance, whereas Grushin had been raised to keep his mouth shut in the presence of authority.

And truth be told, he wasn’t sorry for the things that he had done. Well, maybe one or two of them, but just a little.

Dry ice coming up, he thought, and bustled off to find Mikhail.

* * *

BOLAN COULDN’T READ the sign, in Cyrillic, outside the warehouse, but he didn’t need to. The address was painted in Arabic numerals, and the numbers didn’t lie.

Unless his contact had.

No way to second-guess it now as he approached in darkness. Seven hours had passed since the package had been lifted, and he understood the kind of damage that could be inflicted in that span of time.

A gunshot to the head took, what, a fraction of a second? But the men he had to deal with would be after information, likely skilled in methods of extracting it. How long that took depended on their subject’s pain threshold and powers of endurance.

No one was immune to torture. Everybody broke, sooner or later, if they didn’t die from shock or blood loss. But would a subject give up what his or her tormentors required, or misdirect them? Would the innocent confess to heinous crimes, while the guilty targeted a fictional accomplice?

Bolan reckoned he had seen the worst of it on more than one occasion. If he’d come too late this time, at least he could avenge the victim and make sure that her interrogators felt a measure of the pain they had dispensed. Or maybe they’d be lucky, and he’d simply kill them where they stood.

But first, he had to get inside.

The large doors on the warehouse loading dock were padlocked, and their rumbling would have been too noisy even if they weren’t secured. He sought another way inside and found it at the southeast corner of the big, old building. An employees’ entrance, he supposed, although its faded sign was gibberish.

He tried the knob and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. No sign of an alarm from where he stood, fishing inside a pocket for a set of picks. Bolan spent sixty seconds on the lock—no dead bolt on the door to make it complicated—and he pocketed the picks again before he crossed the threshold.

The soldier was cautious now, letting the stubby muzzle of his submachine gun lead him through a corridor with concrete underfoot and metal walls on either side. The hallway ran for twenty feet and then turned left at a dead-end partition, granting Bolan access to the warehouse proper.

The building was dark, except at the far end, where two banks of overhead lights blazed his trail. Between Bolan and what he took to be his destination, ranks of agricultural machinery stood silent in the murk. He picked out tractors, cultivators, backhoes, combine harvesters. Moving between them, the soldier homed in on sounds of moaning and a male voice asking questions that he couldn’t translate.

They were still at work, then, but he still might be too late. Beyond a certain point there was no rescue, and the only mercy came with death’s release from hopeless agony. If it came down to that, Bolan was equal to the task.

When he was halfway to the lights, a voice addressed him from a pool of shadows to his left, between a thresher and a skid loader. The lookout spoke in Russian. “Who the hell are you?”

Bolan let his AK answer back, one Russian to another. Three rounds at a range of six or seven feet, two punching through a plastic cooler that the stranger carried, loosing plumes of smoke. His muzzle-flashes lit a startled face before it toppled over backward, out of frame.

So much for stealth.

He dodged between a swather and a mower, reached a different aisle and pounded toward the bright oasis where the action was. Bolan could hear people scrambling, as a voice called out, “Mikhail? Mikhail!”

Presumably the dead guy.

Bolan let the others wonder as he moved in for the kill.

* * *

TATYANA ANUCHIN hoped she was dying. She’d heard the pale interrogator asking for dry ice and tried not to imagine how or where he’d use it. After the electric shocks, it hardly seemed to matter, but she understood that pain was both his passion and profession. Since she had resisted his best efforts to the moment, he could only plan on doing something worse.

She hoped to die before she cracked and told her captors everything. Exactly what she knew and how she had acquired that knowledge, naming sources both unwitting and deliberate. Sergey had been the lucky one, compelling them to kill him outright at the airport terminal. In retrospect, Anuchin wished that she possessed the same presence of mind.

Next time, she thought, and almost found it humorous.

That would confuse them, if she burst out laughing. If nothing else, it would insult the ghoul they’d summoned to abuse her. Anuchin wondered if he was a colleague from the Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii, the FSB, someone whom she might have seen at headquarters and overlooked in passing.

Someone from the Lubyanka’s basement? Or an operator from the private sector, peddling his skills and predilection to the highest bidder in a cutthroat marketplace?

It hardly mattered now, when she was duct-taped naked to a wooden chair, her flesh a crazy quilt of superficial burns and bite marks from the alligator clips. The jolting pain still resonated in her muscles, in her teeth and jaws. A migraine headache pulsed behind her eyes.

Was it a sin to pray for death? If so, she didn’t care.

Could hell be any worse than this?

Against her will, Anuchin began to imagine the next phase of her live dissection. Dry ice, she knew, was the solid form of carbon dioxide. Its normal temperature hovered around -109 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to cause frostbite on contact. Above -70 degrees, it sublimated into frosty-looking gas, the “fog” so often used on movie sets for old-time horror films.

And as a tool of torture, she recognized that it could prove effective. As to whether it was worse than electricity…well, she’d simply have to wait and see.

If she withstood the ghoul’s next round of questions, how would he proceed? With scalpels or a blowtorch? Acid? Could she hope for shock to spare her from the worst of it, or was he skilled enough to revive her with drugs?

Holding her breath accomplished nothing, as she’d quickly learned. Innate survival mechanisms wouldn’t let her suffocate herself. If her hands were free—

The gunshots startled Anuchin from her fantasy of suicide. Her eyes snapped open, saw her captors facing toward the darkness of the cavernous warehouse. The ghoul was shifting nervously from foot to foot, as one of those who’d snatched her from the airport shouted to the long rows of machinery.

“Mikhail? Mikhail!”

No answer from the shadows.

The thought of rescue never entered her mind. Who was there left to help her? No one from the Ministry of Justice that she served. They wished her dead, silenced forever, buried with the secrets she’d uncovered.

As for private parties, Anuchin couldn’t think of one who had the means to find her coupled with an interest in helping her survive. Certainly, she had no friends within the Russian Mafia, denizens of the thieves world that infested every level of Russian society from top to bottom.

With Sergey dead, she had no one.

A quarrel between murderers, then, with Anuchin caught in the middle. Better that than more torture. She could always hope for a stray bullet to release her from her world of pain.

Was that so much to ask?

Helpless and totally exposed, she closed her eyes again and mouthed another silent prayer.

* * *

WHILE ONE OF BOLAN’S targets shouted for Mikhail, others were fanning out to sweep the warehouse, homing in on the echoes of his first gunshots. He saw one man breaking to his left, another to his right, their mouthpiece fading back to crouch behind a bulky gravity wagon.

That left two figures visible beneath the warehouse lights. A naked woman was fastened to a chair with duct tape at her wrists and ankles, plus a loop around her ribs, slumped with her chin on her chest. Beside her, to her left, a tall man in a raincoat stood and goggled at the shadows with protruding eyes. A glint of stainless steel told Bolan that he held a knife.

Completely useless in a gunfight.

From the tall man’s look and his reaction to the shots, Bolan knew he was the inquisitor. Without a second thought, he raised the AKS and stitched the gawker with a rising burst from clavicle to forehead, shattering his face. The guy went down as if someone had cut his strings, and Bolan saw the woman in the chair turn toward him, blink, then look around to find out where the shots had come from.

Wondering if she was next?

The shooter behind the gravity wagon was playing it safe. His cohorts, flanking Bolan, did their best to keep it stealthy, but their style was obviously more attuned to smash-and-grab than creep-and-sneak. They telegraphed their moves with scuffling feet, letting their target track them in the dark.

Bolan fell back from the bright lights and climbed aboard a midsize Caterpillar tractor, crouching with his back against its open cab. He’d let the hunters come to him—the first of them, at least—and see what happened next.

The gunman coming from his left was faster, shuffling toward Bolan from behind a bale wrapper. He didn’t check the high ground, though, intent on peering under things, where shadows pooled. When he had closed the gap to twenty feet, a burst from Bolan’s SMG ripped into him and dropped him, twitching, on his back.

The dead guy’s backup took advantage of the muzzle-flash and banged away at Bolan with a pistol, but the Executioner was already in motion, airborne, dropping to a crouch behind the tractor as incoming rounds cracked through its cab.

The soldier broke to his left, keeping the bulk of the machine and its big engine block between his adversary and himself. When he was near the tractor’s nose, he knelt, then stretched prone and crawled around beneath the radiator grille, careful to keep his weapon’s magazine from scraping concrete as he went.

He caught the second shooter scrambling toward the tractor, pistol out in front of him and ready for a hasty shot if he was challenged. What he wasn’t ready for was half a dozen full-metal-jacket rounds slashing through his thighs and pelvis, spinning him into the line of fire and ending it with head shots.

Which left one.

Bolan emerged to find the last man standing with a pistol pressed against the naked woman’s head, half-crouched to use her as a human shield.

The soldier found a vantage point beyond the ring of light and stopped there, took a second to unfold his submachine gun’s stock and raise it to his shoulder. As stubby as it was, the little room-broom hadn’t been designed for sniping, but at forty feet he thought the shot was doable.

His weapon had a flip-up rear sight with a front cylindrical post. Its eight-inch barrel produced a muzzle velocity of 2400 feet per second, slower than the full-size AK-74, but an insignificant difference at what amounted to point-blank range.

While his target shouted, sounding more agitated by the moment, Bolan found his mark and held it—just above the guy’s left eyebrow, with the SMG’s selector set for semiauto fire. One shot, and if he missed it…

Crack!

A crimson halo wreathed the gunman’s head as he slumped over backward. Bolan thought the naked woman gasped but wasn’t sure. He crossed the open floor to reach her, opening a knife in transit. Keeping his eyes averted as he slit the duct tape at her wrists and ankles, he reached around to cut one side along her rib cage.

Finally, he met her eyes and saw the fear behind them. When she asked him something, Bolan couldn’t understand it.

“Slow down or speak English,” he suggested.