I shifted aim past him, and hammered the fuse box with five of the six rounds I had left, dumping them off as fast as the trigger would let me. Somewhere around bullet three I broke through, and the lights went, and without windows, the building dropped into an absolute darkness. I finished my count, and the heel of my left foot hit the door behind me.
I went outside, yanking the door closed behind me to give them the noise, checking my corners. No one was waiting to spring on me. With one hand, I grabbed the pipe I'd placed and slid it through the handle, leaving six inches of overlap on the wall, effectively barring the door from the outside. Then I sprinted for the eastern side, coming around and making for the southern door as fast as I could. I'd brought two mags with me, and I switched them out as I ran, slowed at the corner, then rounded strong, my weapon in high-ready. I saw the car, the same damn Land Cruiser, parked fifteen meters off to the side.
The door burst open. I'd thought it would be the leader who came out first, because he'd been the one closest to it, but instead it was the first pistol who emerged, raising his gun, and I realized too late that I was too close. I got a forearm up and under his weapon as he came in, forcing his gun away from me, and he fired anyway, for all the good it did him. Even as he did that he was barreling into me, and we went down together, each of us trying to get our weapons to bear, twisting like kids in a playground fight.
The fall trapped my weapon beneath him, denied me any useful shot. He didn't have the same problem. He fired again despite my grip on his arm, this time dangerously close to my
left ear, and the report hurt like a motherfuck. I sacrificed the gun, went for the knife I'd taken off Zviadi, and doing it cost me my leverage, and we tumbled. He ended up on top of me, fighting viciously against my grip to bring the barrel of his gun in line with my head.
He was still fighting to do it when I punched him twice in the side with the knife. He made a soft and awful sound of surprise, then cut it short when I quickly drove the blade into him a third time. Then I pulled it free and stabbed again, fast, this time coming down into the side of his neck, where it met his shoulder. He turned to dead weight.
Then something heavy and hard skittered on the pavement my way, and a fucking hand grenade bounced out of the darkness of the doorway straight toward me.
The last time I'd dealt seriously with hand grenades had been in the Army, and that had been a lifetime ago, and all the training options that flashed through my mind came back as no-go. There was no way I could get into a pencil position in time, and even if I could free myself from the body, the nearest hard cover was ten meters behind me.
But I had soft cover.
I heaved myself and the dead weight off the ground and onto the grenade. Then I lunged back, losing the knife but heading for my gun, twisting to hit the deck on my belly, trying to get into the pencil position anyway. I managed to get my feet together and my mouth open and my hands up to my ears when the explosive detonated.
The dead man's body absorbed most of the blast, but overpressure still slapped at me, first from the explosion, then from the vacuum as air rushed to return to the detonation zone. Opening my mouth had helped, and my eyes didn't feel like they bulged too much, or at least, they stayed in my skull. Even
with my hands over my ears, the concussion shot pain through my head, further traumatizing my left ear. I lost my body long enough to realize it, had to force myself back into play.
I reached for my gun, rolling clumsily back to my feet and staggering to the side. The leader had used the grenade to clear his exit, but he'd had to wait until after it had detonated to leave for fear of eating his own blast. I just hoped he didn't have a second grenade. Or a third.
Then he made his move, coming out with his gun at high-ready, pure Russian-military-style. Maybe he thought the body on the ground was mine, but it drew his attention and his aim first, and it gave me the half-second to pick my shot. I needed a live one, and he was the only one left.
The round punched him just inside the hip, shattering his pelvic girdle, and he dropped hard with his legs suddenly unable to support him. When he fell, he fell forward, and I closed on him as fast as I could manage. He was cursing in Russian, trying to bring his pistol around, but my boot found his hand, knocked the weapon free and sent it bouncing a couple of meters.
I holstered my gun, then dropped a knee onto the base of his spine and began to search him. It wasn't direct pressure on the pelvis, but it was close enough, and the pain kept him occupied. He had a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a wad of bills, a knife of his own, a set of keys for the Land Cruiser, and a phone. He also had a wallet, and the wallet had an ID card, and the ID card had his picture and a name, Vladek Karataev. I put the money, the keys, the wallet, and the mobile in a pocket, then flipped out the blade on his knife.
He was hissing out deep breaths, hands clenching and unclenching, trying to control the pain. I came off his back, rolling him. His breath caught when I moved him, the shattered bones
in his hip grinding and shifting. I waited until his eyes focused on me again, then showed him the knife.
“Tiasa Lagidze,” I said. I used Russian. “Where is she?”
“Go fuck your mother.” The strain of keeping pain out of his voice made it sound very sincere.
Fucking Russians
, I thought.
Always proving how tough they are
.
After a half-second for thought, I stabbed him in the thigh. He yelled, cursed me, tried to grab for my hand and immediately fell back in the agony the movement caused. I yanked the blade out, wiped it on his shirt, then closed and pocketed it. I straightened up, then put my foot on the wound I had just made, pressing down hard. From my pocket, I brought out his phone. It was a BlackBerry, one of the new ones.
“Vladek,” I said. “That's your name?”
“Fucking cunt, fuck you!”
“I just cut your femoral, Vladek,” I told him. “You can't walk. You can barely crawl. Your friends are dead. We're far enough from the port that no one heard a grenade go off, which means we're far enough that no one will hear you no matter how loud you yell. Right now, my foot is the only thing keeping you from bleeding out.”
Then I showed him his phone.
“You want this back, you talk to me.”
It was all across his face how much he hated me and my offer. He was sweating now, and he licked his lips once, twice, and I knew his mouth had gone dry, knew he was going into shock.
“You're running out of time,” I told him.
He swore again, then said, “Tourniquet. Put a tourniquet on it first.”
“No.”
He swore once more, but this time it was quieter, and more at himself and his position than at me.
“She went out yesterday, before dawn,” Vladek Karataev said. “On the boat to Trabzon. She's already in Turkey.”
“Why there? Why'd you send her there?”
“She went with the others.”
“What others?”
His eyes focused. “What's it to you? Who the fuck are you?”
“A friend of Bakhar's,” I said. “What others? Why did you send her to Turkey?”
He began coughing, and it must have hurt like hell to do it with a shattered pelvic girdle, but he didn't stop. After a moment, I realized he was laughing, not coughing, and he was laughing at me. Then pain caught up to the joke, and his noises subsided.
“That shit had it coming,” Vladek told me, and he smiled. “He fucking sold us to the police, Bakhar got what he had coming. Gave it to his daughter, too. We all did.”
I didn't say anything.
“You won't find her.” The smile turned into a grin. One of his incisors was missing, another was gold. “She's pretty and young. She's already been sold. Some fat Arab sheikh already has her wiping his floors and sucking her own shit off his cock.”
My arm felt cold where it was covered in blood, like it had been dunked in a bath of ice. My head pulsed with pain, my left ear still ringing sharply. The backs of my thighs and shoulders throbbed, and for the first time I was aware that what I thought was sweat running down my back probably wasn't sweat at all.
He really loved the reaction he got, the look on my face that I couldn't hide, and didn't bother to try to.
“What the fuck you think this is?” he asked, as if assessing me for brain damage. “You fucking think Bakhar was living in that shithole town because he liked the beach? Coward, fucking
coward was
hiding
from us, he knew what he had done. So we paid him back, we paid him in full.”
I still didn't speak, but this time it was because I didn't think I could.
“He sold them, too, you understand me? He sold more girls than you've ever seen, and then the fucking Americans leaned on Tbilisi, and Tbilisi leaned on us, and he sold us out. Your
friend
. Fuck you! That was your friend!”
He was shouting at the end, furious at Bakhar, at me, at his wounds and the injustice of a world that would punish him like this. I watched his chest heave as he tried to replace his spent breath, glaring at me, the hostility as naked as it had been on Bakhar's body.
I moved my foot off his thigh, watched the blood begin to flood out of the wound I'd made, spreading beneath his leg.
“Give me a name,” I said. “The captain of the boat, the contact in Turkey, something. I want a name.”
The glare stayed as before. He knew the way that I knew that he would never get a tourniquet or the phone. He knew he was done, and he knew that giving me anything more wouldn't change that.
I took out my gun.
“You'll never find her,” Vladek Karataev said.
“You'll never know,” I told him, and shot him twice in the face.
CHAPTER
Seven
Halfway back to Kobuleti, after crossing the Supsa
River, I took the Land Cruiser off-road, heading inland, headlights off. It was closing on two in the morning, the moon beginning to move toward setting, but there was more than enough to see by as long as I drove slow. I followed the river-bank for four kilometers, passing farms and their distant houses, before reaching woodlands. Then I turned the nose of the car to the river and parked. When I moved to get out of the car, I realized that my shirt had stuck to the seatback as well as to me, and when it came free I felt my back start bleeding again.
I opened the doors and the rear, then found a rock big enough to weight the accelerator, put the car in gear, and let it
go into the water. The Land Cruiser did pretty well for itself, got about six meters into the Supsa before stalling out, and it was already turning slowly in the current, beginning to drift, when I turned away and headed for home on foot. I followed E&E procedure as I moved, staying away from the roads and anything that advertised people, going through the woods.
It required concentration, and that was good, because it meant that I didn't think about Bakhar, and who he was, what he had done, what he had been. It meant I didn't think about Tiasa, what had happened to her, what was being done to her right now.
It was dawn when I reached home, and Miata came to meet me, licking my hands and following close to heel when I went indoors. Alena hadn't returned yet, and even though that was expected, it was also profoundly disappointing. I needed her.
I checked the security, rearmed the system, then went to the gun locker and reloaded my gun. I put everything I'd gathered on my trip in Bakhar's go-bag—the money, the two knives, and the BlackBerry, along with its battery, which I'd removed before leaving the road. Then I went into the bathroom and started the shower. I stripped down at the mirror, twisting around in an attempt to catalogue my injuries. There were bruises and scrapes acquired from the fistfight and the desperate motion before and after. Most of my blood was from the grenade, minor shrapnel mixed with pebbles and dirt that had carried enough velocity to penetrate cloth and skin, but none too deep. I picked what I could out of my body, got my legs clean, but there was a spot on my upper back that I just couldn't reach. Fresh blood leaked out of me where I reopened my wounds.
Then I got under the shower and watched as blood, mine and others', spiraled down the drain. After a couple of minutes
I got the shakes, and decided that sitting might be a better idea, so I slumped down in a corner and tried to ride it out. Then I got the dry heaves.
It was to be expected. The only thing that surprised me was that it had taken this long for everything to catch up.
I was asleep when Alena returned home, deep in a bone-tired coma, and she woke me with a touch, saying my name. She was sitting beside me on the bed, a hand on my back, and I had a vague sense that she had been there awhile, but perhaps it was only a dream. The lamp was on, but otherwise, the room was dark.
“Welcome home,” I said.
“I'll get the kit,” Alena told me. “Stay still.”
She rose and left the room, and I decided that staying still didn't mean I couldn't reach for my glasses. I had them on when she came back carrying one of the two homemade first aid kits we had in the house. They were closer to the jump bags you'd find on an ambulance than the kind of thing you could buy in a store, filled with bandages and tape and gauze, even two liters of Ringer's solution. Alena opened the kit and came out with a clamp and a set of forceps, set them aside and went to work dumping Betadine on my back.
“Tell me,” she said.
I told her.
When I had finished, so had she, smoothing the last of the tape down across the bandage. The three fragments of shrapnel she'd dug out of me sat on the open gauze wrapper, black and sharp. She scooped up the paper, crumpling it before setting it aside, then checked my legs, her fingers careful as she examined the rest of my wounds.
