Red Templar (4 page)

Dimitrov turned the old Tokarev on the boy in the coat and waited while he flipped off the safety. Killing the young man would serve only to prolong things. Eventually they’d find him, torture him, and in the end they would kill him anyway. Brother Theodore Dimitrov took the last long seconds to speak to his God, and then the church filled with the screams of the boy and the thunder of his weapon and then there was nothing.

6

“We have—
¿cómo se dice? una cola
—a tail?” Eddie said.

“We’re being followed?” Holliday answered, startled. He looked in the rearview mirror of the stodgy old Moskvich he’d rented in Istanbul. There was no traffic behind them on the narrow coast road running along the rocky cliffs that dropped down to the Black Sea. To the left of the deserted old highway there was nothing but scrub forest and wooded hills.

“Sí.”
Eddie nodded. “I have been watching.” He spoke softly. In the backseat a less flatulent Genrikhovich was asleep again. “Three of them. A red BMW, an old KrAZ truck with a . . . thing on the front, and also there is something that looks like one of those old ZiL limousines El Comandante used to drive around in. Black and very big.” The tall Cuban shrugged. “
No estoy seguro.
Maybe a Chaika.”

“I don’t see anything,” said Holliday, checking the mirror again. The highway was still empty. The very fact that Eddie had seen three vehicles of any kind was reason enough for suspicion.

“They keep back most of the time and they . . .
¿cambiar de posición?
”

“Switch places?”

“
Sí
, that is what they do. Switch places to try to make it seem like they are not together. An old trick of the Seguridad del Estado in my country when they followed dissidents.” He laughed quietly. “Three men, three different hats.
¡Muy estúpido!
”

Holliday looked in the mirror again. This time he saw the BMW. He wasn’t much of a car buff, but it looked like one of the bigger models from the eighties or early nineties.

“Shit,” said Holliday. Eddie checked the side mirror.

“Sí.”
Eddie nodded.
“Una mierda grande.”

Holliday dropped his foot down on the gas pedal. The Moskvich responded with a shudder and a grudging acceleration that took them up just barely past one hundred kilometers per hour. It wasn’t going to be the car chase from
The French Connection
; that was for sure.

The big BMW accelerated until it was fifty yards from their rear bumper. The narrow highway began a sweeping series of easy S curves. On the left the wooded hills closed in, and on the right the ragged cliffs looked steeper. Holliday became acutely aware of the single 3-shaped guardrail bolted to wooden stumps that was the only thing between them and a long swan dive into the surf five hundred feet down.

There was a flicker of movement in the side mirror. The large black car Eddie had spotted was pulling out from behind the BMW and passing. It stayed in the other lane, surging forward, speeding past the Moskvich through the turn, ignoring the risk of oncoming traffic. It was a big, bullying ZiL, just as Eddie had thought. It pulled in front of them and took up a station fifty yards ahead, matching the BMW, which was still behind them. Holliday had seen two men in the car, both hard-faced men wearing black.

“It’s a squeeze,” he muttered, thinking about the third vehicle—the truck.

“¿Qué?”
Eddie asked.

“They’ve got us boxed in,” said Holliday. “The truck will come up and push us off the road and over the goddamn cliff.”

“Goddamn,” said Eddie, looking to his left at the rusty old guardrail.

“Goddamn right,” said Holliday.

Right on cue a giant green truck appeared, rumbling up behind the red BMW on their tail. It was a monster, and the “thing on the front” Eddie had described was a double-bladed snowplow, one blade forward and the second blade angled to one side. The enormous vehicle sounded like a tank, big puffs of sooty exhaust bellowing out of the high stack that jutted over the cab.

“This is not good,” said Holliday, his heart pounding like a trapped animal in his chest.

“Dame la pistola,”
said Eddie quickly, his voice urgent.

Behind them the truck downshifted and there was a bellowing roar as it pulled out into the left lane. “What?!”

“
¡Dame la pistola!
Give me the gun,
mi amigo!
And roll down your window,
por favor!
”

The noise and commotion woke up Genrikhovich in the backseat. He struggled sleepily into a sitting position.
“Shtaw?”
he mumbled, blinking. Holliday dug into his jacket, handed Eddie the gun, then rolled down the window. Eddie rolled down the window on the passenger side. The muscular Cuban put a meaty hand on the Russian’s head and pushed him back down.

“Lazeet salyetch!”
Eddie ordered. Genrikhovich acted predictably, fighting against Eddie, who forced him down again.

“Chto za huy?!”
screamed the Russian, trying to pull himself up again.
“Chyort voz’mi!”

Eddie twisted around in his seat.
“Lazeet salyetch, yob Tvoyu Mat!”
He let go with a left cross that caught Genrikhovich on the point of his chin, dropping him to the floor of the car.
The massive truck pulled up beside the Moskvich. Eddie gave Holliday an evil grin, eyes flashing. “
Yo disparo; lo lleve a
. I shoot; you drive.” Eddie began humming “Auld Lang Syne,” the tune for his Young Pioneers farewell campfire song. He flipped off the safety and pulled back the hammer of the pistol to full cock. The Cuban was definitely pissed.

The high-wheeled truck began to make its move, the giant gleaming side of the plow sliding toward the side of the Moskvich like a massive ax blade as the KrAZ turned in toward them. Ahead of the Moskvich the ZiL slowed, boxing them in tightly, while the BMW moved even closer behind them. At the last second Holliday made his move as well.

“Hang on!” he yelled to Eddie. With the snowplow blade less than a foot away, raised at eye level, Holliday simultaneously jammed his foot down on the brake pedal, twisted the wheel toward the flimsy guardrail and dragged up on the handbrake between the two front seats.

It was a classic bootlegger’s turn, but done on a front-wheel-drive vehicle. The rear wheels locked, the back end slewed out and the front end ricocheted off the guardrail with a tearing clang as the front bumper tore away. Instead of doing a complete one-eighty turn, the Moskvich turned broadside to the BMW, offering Eddie a sight line through the car’s windshield. He raised the heavy little Korovin .25 and pumped half the clip at the car behind them. The windshield shattered and the BMW spun out, then hit the ditch on the far side of the road, flipping over twice, then flipping right-side up again, the roof crumpled between the doorposts.

“¡Aprende a manejar, aweonao!”
Eddie whooped happily.

The snowplow truck, taken by surprise, kept swinging into where the Moskvich had been a second before. Air brakes screaming, the driver tried to stop the sideways motion of the giant vehicle, but inertia had its way with the steel beast, and the side blade of the plow hooked the rear end of the ZiL, slammed into the guardrail and sliced through it like a knife through soft cheese.

The twenty-two-ton behemoth and the four-ton ZiL rocketed out over the cliff, seemed to hang against the bright blue sea and the sky for a split second, and then disappeared. An eternity later there was a muted, thundering crash and the sound of an explosion. The Moskvich screeched to a halt.

There was silence except for the distant pounding of the surf and the soft rustling of wind in the trees. It was almost peaceful. There was a twenty-foot gap in the guardrail and another ten feet on either side of the hole that sagged out over the cliff, the stumps torn out of the ground and the galvanized steel twisted into corkscrews.

“¡Hala!”
Eddie whispered, staring.
“¡Ay, coño!”

Holliday looked back over his shoulder. Genrikhovich was groaning on the floor. “Let’s check on the BMW.” He left the car engine running, pushed open the door and stepped out onto the road. Eddie followed.

Holliday stopped suddenly, swaying for a second, holding on to the open door of the Moskvich as a wave of nausea swept over him. His face was suddenly slippery with flop sweat, his heart was still jumping behind his ribs like a jackrabbit and he could hear his pulse hammering in his ears. He knew it was just the adrenaline rush, but he also knew that thirty seconds ago he’d been staring death in the face and it wasn’t looking good. A herd of buffalo stampeding over his grave. For a moment he thought he was going to puke all over his shoes. He closed his eyes and shook off the nausea.

Eddie came up beside him. He had a worried look on his face, staring at his friend. “
¿Estás bien,
Doc?”

“I’m okay.”

“Is crazy all this, no?”

“Is crazy
mucho, compadre
,” answered Holliday. He let go of the car door, the ground solid beneath his feet again.

He and Eddie crossed the road to the ditch and peered inside the BMW. The two men were both dead. The driver had the jagged end of the steering column through his chest, and the man on the passenger side looked as though his head had gone into the dashboard and then rebounded against the roof. His face had been pulped into gravy, and his skull was crushed like an egg, the whole mess held together by a bag of flesh and sitting at an odd angle on his neck. There was blood and tissue everywhere. If one of Eddie’s shots had found its mark, it was going to take a coroner a bit of time to find it.

“You missed,” said Holliday.

“Mis disculpas, Coronel.”
The Cuban grinned.

Holliday reached in carefully through the shattered window and flipped back the passenger’s jacket. There was an empty shoulder holster on the left. The weapon, a big Stechkin APS, was clutched in his right hand. Holliday leaned in farther and pried it from the man’s fingers, then handed it back to Eddie. He reached back in and slipped his hand into the inner pocket of the man’s jacket and took out the man’s wallet. He eased it back through the window, then flipped it open. There was a red plastic ID case inside. He flipped the case open. Inside was a card with a plastic shield with an eagle and a sword on it, and a picture presumably showing what the dead man had looked like up until a few minutes ago. The cover of the ID case had three Cyrillic letters stamped in gold on the cover:

Holliday handed the case to Eddie. “Those Bulgarian State Security types Dimitrov mentioned?”

“Much worse, I’m afraid, my friend. These men are not Bulgarian at all. The letters are FSB, and they stand for Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii.”

There was a keening, moaning sound from behind them, like one of Scrooge’s terrible, desperate spirits in
A Christmas Carol
. Eddie and Holliday turned. A bleary-looking, ashen-faced Genrikhovich had managed to drag himself out of the Moskvich and stagger across the empty road. He stood just behind them, his lank gray hair plastered sweatily across his cheeks. He looked over Holliday’s shoulder, swaying back and forth, staring goggle-eyed and horrified at the ID case in Eddie’s hand. He began to shake his head wildly back and forth, wailing loudly.

“KGB!” Genrikhovich screamed. “KGB!”

7

In the late afternoon they stopped in a place called Golden Sands, a resort town about fifteen miles outside the city of Varna. Like most off-season summer destinations, there was an empty, abandoned air to the town, the neon signs on the strip bars and the sex stores dark, the soft-ice-cream stands boarded up for the season and almost no traffic, pedestrian or otherwise.

They found a hotel called the Grifid Arabella that was still open for business, booked a suite and put an exhausted Genrikhovich to bed. The Russian had become apoplectic at discovering that they’d been involved with the deaths of the secret police thugs they’d left in the ditch, and it had taken them more than an hour to calm him down with a combination of violent threats from Eddie and reassurances from Holliday.

All three restaurants in the high-rise hotel were closed, but they eventually found a place on the main street of the town called the Happy Bar and Grill that looked like it was part of a chain. The logo showed a smiling man, in a tall white hat and a mustache, who looked remarkably like Chef Boyardee from the spaghetti cans, and the interior decor was a combination maritime/rock-and-roll theme, with neon guitars, real saxophones and ships in bottles.

The Happy menu offered everything from sushi to skewers to something dreadful-looking called “Happy Bits,” which appeared to be crinkle-cut home fries and chicken nuggets covered in a congealed grayish gravy that gleamed in the harsh overhead lighting. They also offered something suspiciously called “Krispy Loins,” which Holliday didn’t even want to think about. Virtually everything on the menu was served with an ice-cream scoop of potato salad and sour cream.

“Genrikhovich would love this place,” commented Holliday. He ordered a “Slavic Salad” and a chicken skewer from the pleasant, English-speaking waiter, whose name was Viktor. Eddie ordered the same thing.

“Let him sleep,” said the Cuban. “I’ve had enough of his
peos
for one day.”

“Agreed.” Holliday nodded. Their food arrived quickly and they began to eat. Slavic Salad turned out to be a mixture of peeled tomatoes, roasted peppers, garlic, black pepper, olives, olive oil, cottage cheese, yogurt and fresh parsley, and it wasn’t half-bad.

“They will have discovered those men by now,” said Eddie, looking suspiciously at the lump of cottage cheese in the middle of his colorful paper plate. He took a small taste on the end of his fork, made a face and nodded.
“Ah, es requesón.”
He speared a piece of tomato on the end of his plastic fork and chewed thoughtfully. “They will be watching the airport, I think.”

“Train station and bus station as well.” Holliday nodded. “Not to mention the fact that neither you nor I have visas for entering Russia.”

“If we stay here they will find us sooner or later. They will check the Turkish border crossing, I think. I am the very handsome man, I am sure, but I am also very black, and I don’t think they would be seeing too many
pasaportes
from Cuba.”

“So what do we do?”

Eddie shrugged. “There must be places where the border is easier to cross.”

“Into Serbia, maybe, but not into Russia.”

Viktor the waiter shimmered up and asked them if they needed anything else . . . fresh-squeezed pomegranate and tangerine juice, perhaps, dessert, coffee, anything . . . Holliday took out his wallet and counted out ten twenty-lev notes and set them on the table. By his calculations two hundred leva was about a hundred and fifty bucks. Viktor didn’t even blink. He swept up the bills, folded them neatly and tucked them into the pocket of his black-and-red vest.

“
Dobar wecher!
What I can do for the
gospoda
today?”

Holliday smiled pleasantly. “My friend and I are looking for a bit of an adventure,” he said. Viktor’s left eyebrow crept up and he glanced toward Eddie, but he remained silent.

“What kind adventure the
gospoda
look for? Small-type adventure, bigging adventure, or very serious adventure?”

“Very serious,” answered Holliday.

Viktor stared at the spot where the money had been. Holliday took out ten more bills. Viktor didn’t look happy. Holliday laid out an additional ten. At that point they disappeared into Viktor’s vest pocket again.

“You look for what adventure, exact?”

“We were thinking there must be an adventurous way to get into Russia.”

“Definite, sure.” Viktor nodded, giving his patented stare down at the table again.

“Two hundred more when you give us directions.”

“Easy,” said Viktor, grinning. “My friends, we do it all the time. Easy-peasy.”

“How?” Holliday asked.

“The ferry.”

“There is no ferry.”

“Not people ferry, ferry for the trains. Hero of Sevastopol. Leave tonight, nine o’clock, thirteen hours after,
pssht!
You have achieved Russia at port of Illichivsk.”

“Where is Illichivsk?”

“Maybe ten mile Odessa. Very nearby. I have girl there. Marinoska. Blondie-type girl. Nice.”

“I’m sure she is, Viktor. How do we get on the ferry?”

“Two hundred leva, I show you, another five hundred, I take you there.”

“To the ferry?”

“No, no.” Viktor grinned. “I take you Illichivsk and then Odessa to meet with Marinoska. Viktor give the best service in Varna, no doubt!”

“Okay,” said Holliday. “When do we leave?”

“Seven thirty o’clock. You have car, of course?”

“Of course.”

“In parking lot of hotel then,” said Viktor. “Seven thirty o’clock we meet. I bring food and some nice beers. You pay me then. We have good time, okay?”

“It’s a deal,” said Holliday.

*  *  *

The ferry terminal at the port of Varna was south of the main port and the naval base. After the fall of the Soviet Union, trade between Bulgaria and the Ukraine had collapsed, but UKR ferries had recently revived the trade in moving railcars back and forth between Varna and Odessa.

There was a crane arrangement where the wider-gauge bogies on the Russian cars were switched to the narrower European gauge, a large multitrack holding facility for waiting railcars, and a dock and hydraulic ramp system capable of handling two ships at a time, usually one just arrived and one just leaving.

Each four-hundred-foot-long ship was capable of taking a total of one hundred and eight freight cars on the main deck and the two decks below. The trick was to know which cars were going on the top deck and which were going below, and to make sure you didn’t try to hop a freight car that had just been unloaded. Empty freight cars were easy to spot, since they weren’t padlocked. Incoming cars were chalked with the capital letter,
for Bulgaria, and outgoing were marked with a
, for Ukraine. Tonight it was Hero of Sevastopol outgoing and Hero of Pleven incoming.

Viktor told them all of this on the twenty-minute drive from the Golden Sands to the outskirts of the ferry terminal, a pool of sickly yellow sodium lights in the dusky October evening. Holliday and Eddie had brought Genrikhovich a taco plate from the Happy Bar and Grill, a late-night dinner they knew might have the same kind of repercussions as the Burger King Quad Stacker, but the old man had to eat something, and an open freight car was much airier than a cramped little Moskvich.

Viktor turned out to be a full-service guide on their “very serious” adventure, turning up at the Grifid Arabella’s parking lot right on time and bringing four sleeping bags and a knapsack full of sandwiches, apples, two pomegranates, eight bottles of Zagorka beer and two rolls of toilet paper.

“Do they patrol the rail yard?” Holliday asked as they abandoned the rental halfway down a gravel side road.

“Sometimes. They have dogs but I have never been caught.”

“I do not like dogs,” said Eddie.

“Shtaw?”
Genrikhovich said nervously.

“Saabaka,”
translated Eddie.
“Awchen Gnevny Saabaka.”

Genrikhovich went pale but he kept his mouth shut.

“What did you say to him?” Holliday asked.

“I told him there were dogs.
Very
big dogs,” said Eddie.

“You sure that was the right thing to do?”

“It will keep him . . .
¿paralizado por el miedo?
”

“Paralyzed with fear?”

“
Sí
, we will be much happier.” Eddie grinned. “Your Cuban is getting
muy bueno
.”

“Muchas gracias, mi compañero,”
answered Holliday, bowing gravely forward.

“¡Ay, coño!”
Eddie laughed. “Soon I take you back to my family in Habana.” He clamped a hand on Genrikhovich’s narrow shoulder as Viktor the waiter led the way down between the railway tracks. Viktor found the appropriate chalk marking on one of the cars and rolled back the door. The Bulgarian boosted himself up, then helped Holliday and Eddie up. Genrikhovich came last.

The interior of the empty boxcar was half-solid and half-slatted. The lingering smell suggested that some kind of root vegetable like rutabagas had been the last cargo. Viktor rumbled the door shut and set up the bedrolls in one corner of the car, and they all settled in. Holliday had one of the bottles of beer Viktor offered and then lay down on his bedroll.

Ten minutes after finishing the beer he was fast asleep. He woke once to the thumping and banging as the boxcar was loaded onto the ferry, and woke briefly again, feeling the odd, almost comforting sensation of being rocked on the sea. He fell asleep again and didn’t wake until the ship docked at the Ukrainian port city of Illichivsk at noon the following day. For the first time in twenty years Lieutenant Colonel John “Doc” Holliday, United States Army Ranger (retired), was back in what had once been enemy territory.