Wanted (5 page)

Valentin saw a flash of white, as his red raw eyes rolled backwards in their unprotected sockets. The blonde woman was on top of him now. She pressed the barrel of the stun-gun to his head. A high-pitched whimper escaped Gregori’s bound mouth. But instead of depressing the weapon’s primitive firing mechanism, she turned back to Valentin.

‘Don’t worry, Granddad, we’re not going to kill him just yet. We’re just going to hurt him.’ She smiled. ‘A lot.’

Without warning, she rammed and twisted the stun-gun hard between Gregori’s legs.

And fired.

A hiss of compressed air. A dull thud.

Gregori’s face froze like a mask, then contorted in agony as he started to writhe.

Animal.

Valentin fought the urge to try to tear himself free from his bonds. Instead of being manacled, like the others, he was still hog-tied. If he tried to tear himself loose, he would fail, he knew. And in so doing he would give away his recovery.

Slowly, he commanded himself. Do not let these
sooki
see, but now slowly test what you can do. So he tried. And, yes, right there, he felt his wrists turning, twisting one against the other, probing at their bindings, trying to break free. Not long now, he told himself. A few more minutes and you’ll be strong enough to fight.

As his wrists continued their hidden dance, his eyes searched desperately for some kind of a blade or sharp surface to speed matters along.

I will not quit. I will not surrender hope.

A shriek of duct tape.

A gargling of blood and air.

‘Anything,’ Gregori screamed. ‘Anything. I will tell you anything you want to know.’

Before Valentin could stop himself, he reacted. He could not help himself. He twisted right round to face Gregori: if the younger man talked, they were all doomed. These people would butcher them like cattle. They’d have no reason to keep them alive.

‘Shut up,’ he shouted.

The blonde moved so fast, he hardly saw her coming. But then she was on him again. On top of him. She bared her teeth. She rammed the stun-gun into his squirming groin, and Valentin wished then that he was still gagged. If he had been gagged, then at least he would not scream.

But it was the girl who screamed first.

She was jerked backwards. But, even then, she refused to let go. Her nails clawed blood from his neck. The hawk-faced man gripped the scruff of her neck. Then he pressed a pistol to her head. Eventually she became still.

‘Not yet,’ he told her, soothingly now. ‘I have a much better use for him first.’

Valentin’s hope almost deserted him. The way the hawk-faced man had spoken . . . The look in his eyes . . . The way even the woman – this bitch – now looked sated by his words . . . He knew then that whatever the hawk-faced man was promising her, it was going to be so much worse than death.

Hunting.

That was what this reminded Danny Shanklin of, the pounding of blood in his veins, the thickening of spit in his mouth. It had got him thinking back to when the Old Man used to take him hunting in the woods.

Danny had been a kid when his father had taught him how to kill, first with slings and bows, then with firearms. Many years later, after Danny’s parents had passed away and he’d finally plucked up the courage to set about clearing out his childhood home, he’d found a faded Polaroid that the Old Man had kept tucked inside his Bible in his bedside drawer.

It had pictured Danny swamped in a camouflage jacket way too big for his skinny body, leaving him looking like a scarecrow, with his scruffy blond hair all messed up like straw, his knees and elbows sticking out. He’d been grinning, proudly holding up a dead wood pigeon. The bird had been shot clean through the head, mid-flight. An inch-perfect kill.

The Old Man had been a soldier, just as Danny would later become. Hunting had been in his blood and he’d wanted his boy raised the same. He’d taught him to trap and shoot small game, then skin, pluck and gut his kills for food. But the first time Danny had ever tracked, stalked and shot something as big as himself, it had been a deer.

Fleetingly, in his mind’s eye, he now saw the young deer again. A stag, skin the colour of raw liver. It had been standing silhouetted against a blood-red sky, gnawing at lichen on the bark of a tree.

Danny hadn’t waited for the Old Man’s permission. He’d crouched and steadied himself. Then he’d done as he’d been taught. He’d locked his entire body as he’d aimed. He’d slowed his breathing and relaxed. As he’d squeezed the trigger, he’d exhaled, imagining the round he’d just fired first impacting and then snatching away its target’s last breath.

Danny had been nine years old that morning. More than four decades had passed since then. Time enough for him to have married and had two kids of his own. And all the horrors that had happened since.

In spite of that, Danny still felt the same now as he had done on the morning he’d gone out after the deer. That same catch-breath of anticipation before the kill, that same deliberate unfurling of a bridge between life and death, and the same first step on it: he felt all that now and knew there could be no turning back.

And for that he was glad. Because, make no mistake, the group he’d tracked here, the same terrorists who’d planned to torture and murder him and Lexie, he no longer thought of them as human. They were nothing but prey.

A voice like river grit being sifted through a coarse steel sieve cut clean through his thoughts.

‘So are we going to do this shit, or what?’ Spartak said.

All six foot seven of Spartak Sidarov was crouched low in the moonlight beside Danny in a thicket of brambles on the rusted railway track, about as subtle and as small as a tank.

Spartak’s grizzled shovel of a face was pressed up to his ear so that he could make himself heard above the rain and the howling wind. So close that Danny could smell the stink of tobacco and salt liquorice on his breath.

Danny lowered the telescopic night-sight he’d been looking through. He gazed down at the Geiger counter strapped to his wrist. The digits were still spiking up into the red, meaning the radiation level remained dangerously high – even for the Zone.

The Zone of Alienation had been established in 1986, following the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor disaster. The entire population from the surrounding area had been evacuated at the time to protect them from the fallout, and most had never come back.

More than 600,000 recovery workers, known as liquidators, had been drafted in to work here between ’86 and ’92. Their job had been to hunt out the worst of the radioactivity and bury any materials particularly affected where they found them. Thousands of liquidators had died in these places, or had later become severely disabled as a result of the radiation poisoning they’d suffered.

The worst hot spots were still potentially lethal today. And the Geiger counter on Danny’s wrist left no doubt in his mind that he and his team were crouched dead centre in the middle of one now: Pripyat, Ukraine. The faster they got this done and got the hell out, the better it would be for them all.

‘Ready?’ he said, turning to Spartak.

Spartak’s crooked teeth glinted ghoulishly in the green neon glow of the GPS locator cupped in his enormous gloved hand. He pushed his tangled mop of thick black hair back from where it had been plastered across his wide brow by the rain.

‘I was born shit fucking ready,’ he said. ‘Ready to rumble and ready to roll.’

Danny smiled wryly. Languages had always come easily to him, and he spoke a half-dozen fluently, including Spartak’s native and learned tongues of Ukrainian and Russian. But the big guy preferred practising his English whenever Danny was around. He had ambitions to move to America one day, marry a Californian girl, with ‘an ass as firm and as smooth as a peach’, and go into politics the way Schwarzenegger had done.

Danny hadn’t yet told him that the only real impediment Spartak needed to overcome for this plan to work was that he’d been raised on pirated American action flicks back in the eighties so he thought that cursing like an extra from
Full Metal Jacket
or
Hamburger Hill
was perfectly fine. He hadn’t told him, not because he wanted his plan to fail but because he enjoyed hearing him talking that way.

Spartak turned to the two other men lying flat and silent in the dirt to his left.
‘Rukhatysya,’
he told them, in Ukrainian, meaning, Time to fucking move and earn your supper.

Like Spartak, the two younger Ukrainians were ex-military turned mercenary. And, like Spartak, their loyalty in the recent political upheavals between Ukraine and Russia was to Russia, the motherland in whose army they had served, and where many of their extended family still lived. But while Spartak was there out of friendship and a shared history with Danny – each of them had saved the other’s life – the others were there for cold cash.

They were dressed, like Spartak, from head to foot in black Gore-Tex assault gear and radioactivity vests. Both carried AK-9s, fitted with silencers. State-of-the-art retinal-targeting night-sight goggles glinted in the shadows of their hooded, visored caps, revealing patches of sallow, surprisingly boyish freckled cheeks and chins. Neither man spoke as they slithered up from the ground into a crouch.

‘Meet Viktor and Vasyl, my cousins from my mother’s side.’ That was how Spartak had introduced the twins to Danny two days before, in the concrete cancer-riddled Ukrainian tower block where Danny had been hiding.

The names were so ridiculous that Danny knew they had to be bullshit. He guessed the family connection was more than likely the same. Neither of these youthful trained killers bore any familial resemblance to Spartak. For one thing, they were nearer Danny’s height at around six foot. And for another, they were lithe, also like Danny, and built like middleweight boxers, not endowed, like Spartak, with all the suppleness and agility of a rhino.

But if Spartak vouched for them, that was good enough for Danny. The big guy had never let him down before. Which was why – along with the fact that he was Ukrainian and originally from around here – Danny had brought him to help with this take-down.

Danny had Spartak to thank for smuggling him across Europe as well. As the British police and intelligence agencies had continued to comb the UK for signs of his presence and monitor all points of exit, Spartak had kitted him out with a fresh Russian ID, an oxygen mask hooked up to a respirator, and a set of green hospital robes. He’d then stuck him on a gurney in the back of a private ambulance that had shipped him across the English Channel, then driven him through Europe.

The driver and attending medic had been introduced to Danny as ‘a friend of a friend of a friend’, and neither had asked him a single question the whole way there. ‘They’re used to moving things,’ was all Spartak had said, when Danny had asked him who they were.
Things:
bodies, stolen art – he hadn’t cared or probed any further. He’d just been grateful at last to have the help of a friend.

‘Now,’
Danny said, in Ukrainian, for the benefit of the twins.

The four picked themselves up out of the dirt and rose as one, then started running forward, fanning out across the open ground.

Gore-Tex scratched against thorns. Boots crunched on earth. Danny’s weapon felt light, felt right in his hands. He ignored the fatigue in his limbs. He knew it was only temporary. Only a matter of seconds now before adrenalin kicked in.

Picking up speed, he snapped his night goggles down over his eyes. Autofocusing, retina-guided and smart-chipped, they fed off light thrown down by the moon and the stars. Danny’s view of the world switched to green and grey, as though he were now under water, a ravenous pike lancing in search of fresh prey.

He upped his speed again as he zigzagged across the deserted shunting yard towards the abandoned town. His peripheral vision and feet were working in tandem, almost entirely independent of his conscious thoughts, instinctively navigating him through the minefield of potholes, rail ruts, torn-down fences and cracked concrete slabs that littered this forgotten, forsaken corner of the world.

As well as allowing him to see what was in front of him, his goggles were also automatically tracking the other members of his team, casting them as three separate green pulses, designated with a number from one to three, against a rolling green grid of pixellated terrain.

Ten years younger than himself and Spartak, the twins – numbered two and three – were moving fastest. He watched the spacing between them rapidly increase as they continued to deploy into the approach pattern he’d ordered.

He forced himself to move faster too, imagining Spartak attempting the same. ‘This growing-old shit, this thought of having our asses kicked and beaten by motherfuckers younger than ourselves . . .’ the big guy had once said ‘. . . a part of me hopes I get killed before that.’

Danny knew the feeling. Once this was over, he was finished. No more. Not for himself and not for anyone else, no matter how good the cause. He was done. He wanted to be a father again. To make up for all of the lost time when he’d not been there for Lexie. He didn’t want to have to prove himself any more. He just wanted to be alive and allowed to grow old.

But first he had to finish
this
. . .

Reaching the crumbling concrete plinth of the decrepit station platform, Danny took the ten steps to its top in four swift strides. He ran on through the desolate, wind-whipped waiting room, with its mosaic of broken tiles, forgotten seats and smashed glass.

He’d been braced for the strangeness of the place, but it still freaked him out. It was just so . . .
gone.
Nothing remained. Not even memories. No one had stayed behind. All gone. Everyone who’d ever lived there. Parents watching that their kids didn’t stray too close to the tracks . . . Workers smoking cigarettes, waiting for the train to take them home . . . All their hopes and dreams, the everyday worries clamouring inside their heads. This wasn’t even a ghost town. It was too dead now even for that.