Death Before Dishonor Page 20

  Now just seven or so more cars were left to check. He looked at his watch: 00:09:26. He was well ahead of schedule.

  ***

  Terry crept through a dark access hallway that led into the main ventricle of the mill that wrapped around the yard and the main facility in the shape of an “L.” He had no clue where his targets were, but the mill, he figured, would be a great place to start since it looked to no longer be in operation and since its ventricle was open and surely dark.

  The mill smelled damp and stale with the lingering sweet smell of rotting wood. Terry scanned the cavernous space. It was littered with antiquated hardware outdated by more than half a century and had the classic Depression-era administrative office at the end nearest him. The light was on too.

  Well, it was worth a look.

  Terry darted from cover to shadow and back to cover again as he approached the office. At one of the workstations, he noticed incongruous stains that were sticky as his feet stepped in them. That drew his attention—more like his intuition—and he hovered his head over the largest stain and sniffed it; its scent was metallic and aggressive. Blood. Dried no less. The aggressive scent, though, was that of flesh necrosis. He lifted his head and followed drips and spatter up the legs of the workstation onto the table, where a large rusted circular saw was suspended in its yoke. Terry could make out the concentric circles that blood had painted onto the rim of the blade. There was more blood spatter about the track. Leathery strips of flesh dangled from the teeth.

  Terry’s mind began flipping through possibilities. Extremists weren’t above torture. Hell, their leader was reputed to have used it during his years as an Eastern Bloc general. That said, the RKO could have used a saw—this saw—as a means of punishment for dissenters or a captive. The thought that the RKO was using this hardware to butcher game popped into his head as a possibility, but he dismissed it. Considering the numbers of personnel that he had already seen around the facility, the amount of game that would be needed to feed the entire group would be quite vast, and the need to hunt would be quite frequent. Terry hadn’t spotted any hunters or foragers outside of the compound, nor had he seen any signs of such. The RKO had to be transporting their food in. Furthermore, Terry had worked with extremist types before—this stank of their modus operandi. He was sure that someone had been run through the machine, most likely the operatives that were killed. He was close to a target.

  He crept to the door of the office and peeked in through the window. The office was empty save for an old desk and a few chairs. On Terry’s left, there was a table with a bloody sheet covering something.

  Keeping low, Terry pulled the door open just enough for his body to fit and crawled in, staying beneath the windows. Once inside, he located the light switch and killed the lights. It wasn’t completely black since the lights from the main ventricle afford some illumination, but it wasn’t much. Terry stood to his feet and drew back the sheet. What he saw caused his moral center to scream.

  There was a human head and torso with stubs for arms, an intact left leg, and three-quarters of the right, barely breathing. The human's face was mangled beyond recognition, missing a nose and an ear. The skin was frayed like useless newspaper and peeled away in some places. Its trunk was battered and bruised but didn’t seem to have any major trauma. The human whimpered and gurgled once it realized Terry was there. It wasn’t by sight, though, that the body had noticed Terry; its eyes had been gouged out. Terry gritted his teeth. He had seen this happen before. An organization he had been employed to work for in the Middle East had used heinous torture tactics and beheadings to intimidate their enemies. It was one of the reasons he and Yuri had left mercenary work behind. It angered him then, and it angered him even more now.

  Terry was practically sure it was the operative, but he needed to confirm it. He scanned its wretched body for markings until he eventually found an identifying tattoo on the man’s last remaining shin that matched the one depicted in the dossier. The first target was found.

  Terry felt terrible. This man had been brutalized and tortured to further the political ends of criminals. They were all without honor and deserved to die, not this man. He was a scrupulous warrior like Terry, only separated by culture. Terry felt as though killing the man only added to the man’s torment, but in reality, killing him, at this point, was the most merciful thing Terry could do. He figured that he’d numb the man’s pain before proceeding, so Terry pulled two field syringes of morphine from his survival pack, unscrewed the caps, and plunged their needles into the meat of the man’s thigh. Then Terry backed away and drew his pistol. Terry whispered a prayer to the ancestor Shinobi to guide the warrior to his resting place. He touched the barrel to the man’s forehead and ended the operative’s suffering with a silenced round. Death brought the operative honor.

  Terry checked his watch: 00:13:42. He was still on schedule. He still had thirty-two minutes to find the other two targets.

  ***

  Yuri cursed with disappointment when he climbed into the eighth car and noticed that it was full of equipment and he had only one charge left. He had been using them sparingly, trying his best to maximize their effectiveness, but even that hadn’t been enough. He’d have to improvise. He searched the boxes and pallets until he found a pallet full of artillery shells. Suddenly, he wasn’t so frustrated anymore! Yuri could rig an IED. The best part was the shells had a much larger explosive yield than C4, so when the shells blew, they would turn this car into the mother of all fragmentation weapons and pulverize everything within a considerable radius. Oh, the mayhem. Yuri liked that idea greatly.

  He didn’t waste any time; he got right to work building the IED. He unscrewed the casings and drew out their wiring, cutting and splicing them to meet his needs, and then connected a detonator to them that linked them to his cell phone signal. He estimated that one shell would easily level the rail car, so all eight would be the right amount of carnage. The RKO was in for a treat, that was for sure. Perhaps mercenary work hadn’t been the most honorable living, but he sure had learned some invaluable skills, like building IEDs for example.

  Yuri touched the light on his watch: 00:51:31.

  Just then, he heard someone approach the door of the car. Yuri cursed under his breath; he hadn’t finished rigging the explosives yet, and he still had to check two more cars. With any luck, the guard wouldn’t force Yuri to make a messy scene.

  Yuri pressed himself into the bulkhead and held his breath. He didn’t want panicked breathing to give him away. He made himself flush with the corner of a stack of pallets, coiling to strike with his matte-black ninjatō. The guard hefted himself into the car, looked around, and then began walking towards the end of the car where Yuri was hiding. Yuri tightened his grip and waited for the guard to come close. When the guard was within arm’s length, Yuri struck with the malice of a cornered viper. He grabbed ahold of the guard’s face with his left hand and, with his right, plunged half of the blade into the guard’s gut just below the sternum. Yuri drove the man bodily against the corner of a pallet and muffled the man’s cries with one hand while pressing the forearm of the other into the guard’s jugular, trying to speed him into unconsciousness. The man tried to exhale forcibly but couldn’t with the blade preventing his diaphragm from moving, and unconsciousness came quickly, followed closely by death.

  The clamor had been louder than Yuri had meant. He hoped that no one else had heard it, but he darted to the opposite side of the car so he could ambush another rover in the event someone came to investigate the noise. Sure enough, another rover did.

  The new guard came to the door, shined his flashlight, and made a query in a language that Yuri didn’t know. Yuri burrowed between two pallets and waited for the guard to make a move: either the rover would get bored and leave or he’d get suspicious and enter the car. In the case of the former, the new rover would live to see the next day if he was lucky enough not to be caught in the blast. In the case of the latter, Yuri would kill him
and leave him with his comrade. It didn’t make a difference to Yuri which outcome was realized; he just needed to stay on the clock.

  He checked his watch: 00:53:02.

  The new rover queried again and then climbed into the car. He swung the flashlight in an arc, the beam missing the top of Yuri’s head by several inches. The light caught the feet of his prostrate comrade, and the rover moved in deeper, trying to get his attention. He drew closer, and the circle of light cast by the flashlight crawled along the dead rover’s legs until a pool of blood became visible. In seconds, confusion became disbelief and then became panic. A sound of alarm began to rumble in his throat, but Yuri was out of cover and on top of him before the sound could leave his mouth. Yuri grabbed him from behind with both hands, locking his fingers underneath his chin and, with a violent jerk, yanked the man’s head back and buried his knee into the rover’s spine. The rover’s vertebrae crumpled audibly, and Yuri tossed him onto the deck next to the first rover, splashing his blood in a semicircle. Yuri stepped over the new rover and ran him through. Then Yuri went back to rigging the IED.

  Yuri checked his watch again. He needed to hurry.

  ***

  Terry crossed the bridge that passed over the main yard and connected the mill’s second-story catwalks to the second story of the main facility. He looked out toward the rail depot, wondering how things were going for his brother. There hadn’t been any gunfire, nor was the body count climbing, which meant that Yuri was keeping quiet—that was promising.

  Terry checked that there was no movement on the other side of the entrance and skulked through. He stalked the halls of the complex, searching for the general and the minister. The security inside the facility was minimal, limited to personnel transiting the spaces. Terry was a ghost hiding inside doors, around corners, and in the shadows. He planted his ear against closed doors to listen for occupants, and if there were none, he’d open them and check for any trace of the minister and the general. For rooms that he determined to be occupied, he would stand to the side of the door and look in with a fiber-optic cable if the room was lit and the hallway was dark. However, if the room was dark and the hallway was backlit, he would hover over the crack of the door to block the light as he looked in so as not to alert someone to the presence of his silhouette.

  Terry left the second story for the main deck, where the observation deck to the engineering space was situated. As he came into the hall that led from the stairwell to the “T” of the claustrophobic main passage, which was scarcely wide enough to fit two people side by side, he saw a portly man in his late fifties pass left to right. That might have been the minister, Terry thought to himself. The man was heavy enough. Terry just needed to get a better look to see if the man’s face matched the picture in the dossier.

  Terry sped up to follow him. When he reached the corner, he checked that both directions were clear and watched the portly man beeline for a door further down the hall to his right. Terry crept into the hallway and gave chase, following the suspect to the same door. From the smell of methane, Terry instantly identified the room as the latrine. Terry gave it a twenty-count and followed.

  The portly man was standing near the sink. He turned when he heard Terry enter through the old, whiny door. They both paused; the man tried to place Terry’s face, and Terry was confirming his. The man’s face was a match; he was definitely the minister. Terry launched a roundhouse that connected hard with the minister’s cheekbone. The minister shuddered and collapsed onto the sink with a grunt, and Terry leaped on him, grabbing a handful of what was left of the minister’s thinning hair. Terry wrenched the minister’s head back, wrapped a garrote wire around his neck, and pulled. The minister bucked wildly, but Terry was able to keep him pressed into the sink with his weight despite the minister’s marked size advantage. The minister’s eyes bulged and shot through with red lightning streaks until they filled with a passive orange and then auburn red. His tongue wagged violently as Terry cinched the wire tighter, cutting through the minister’s skin and closing off his carotid, jugular, and trachea.

  The struggle came to a bloody crescendo as the minister smashed his hands and arms into the ceramic of the sink, the tile of the walls, and the glass of the mirror, causing an infernal racket but to no avail. The minister relinquished control of all of his fluids and gasses before slumping lifeless against the counter. Terry yanked at the garrote one last time to be sure.

  Now he had to hide the body. The best place to put it was in the exact place the minister had intended to go—the toilet. Terry let him fall to the floor, stowed his garrote, and dragged the minister’s opulence to the door of the stall and sat him up. He grabbed beneath the minister’s arms and hoisted him off the ground, cursing beneath the man’s immense girth. Terry drove him back into the stall and dropped him onto the seat, wiping the sweat off of his own brow and checking his watch: 00:42:54. Only thirteen minutes left.

  Terry checked the hall from the door. It was clear, so he made his way down to the door from which the minister had exited. Its position was congruent with the location of the observation room. Perhaps the general and minister were using the room as the command center for the facility while they returned it from mothball. He approached the door and pressed his ear to it. Inside, there were three distinct voices: two nearing the door and one deeper in the room. Someone was leaving. Terry scanned the passage for options. There was no way he’d make it to the bathroom before the person exited the observation room. Perhaps he could make it into an adjacent room in time—if the doors weren’t locked.

  Time was up. Terry had spent too much time deliberating, and the individual was opening the door.

  Terry, giving testament to his athleticism, quickly bounded up the walls and suspended himself directly above the door by pressing against opposite walls with his hands and feet and his back against the ceiling. Two RKO exited the doorway and passed beneath Terry, never noticing him. They turned the corner without so much of a thought about the Shinobi hovering above the floor—claustrophobic hallways had their advantages. Terry waited just to be sure. After a few moments, Terry was confident that they weren’t coming back and released his handholds and footholds, dropping to the floor with the same acrobatic grace he’d used to get up there.

  Terry checked the doorknob—it was unlocked. He turned it and slowly pushed the door open—it groaned loudly. Terry winced, stopping before it was even cracked a half-inch. Then a voice beckoned from the inside, clearly alerted to the door’s opening. Since the cat was out of the bag, he’d just use the direct approach: Terry drew his pistol, swung the door open, and swaggered in.

  The general, a fit man of maybe sixty years with a bald spot on top of his head, stood to his feet when he saw a stranger waltz through the door. He was gripped with suspicion and barked something in a language that Terry wasn’t familiar with. “I don't speak Russian, comrade,” Terry said casually, slamming the door behind himself.

  “You are American?” The general asked disdainfully in English.

  Terry didn’t reply.

  “So, the Westerners believe they can still interfere? How many more of you do I have to kill?”

  Terry slowly flanked the table, behind which the general was standing. “I'm not an agent of any government.”

  “Then you’re a mercenary. Which means no one will miss you when I leave your body to rot in the snow.”

  “Mercenaries aren’t creatures of honor, General. I’m no mercenary.”

  “So, you are just a common assassin. What do you hope to achieve here? You are horribly outnumbered.”

  “Surely your superior numbers have hindered my ability to be in this room with you. Superior numbers also apparently prevented me from choking the life out of the minister.”

  The general’s face became indignant.

  “I am the instrument of the consequence of your dishonor. Superior numbers can’t prevent what you’ve brought on yourself.”

  “Dishonor?” the general laughed
. “You are sorely mistaken, my boy. I am the vanguard of the Georgian Republic. No action for the honor of Georgia is dishonorable.”

  Terry eased around the corner of the table until he was standing in front of the general. “You know nothing of honor, then.”

  The general yanked a wretchedly angled bowie knife from his belt and rasped, “I’ll have the honor of carving out your heart. I have survived many assassins; I will survive you.”

  The general lunged at Terry, bringing the knife down in a lethal arc. Terry reacted swiftly, taking a step back and catching the blade with the receiver of his pistol, grinding metal on metal. He pushed the general back effortlessly and returned the gun to his side. The general set a low center of gravity and circled. Terry seemed uninterested, standing there as if he had all day. The general came at him again with a sweeping motion. Terry slipped to the outside, allowing the blade to whistle past. The general lunged again, and Terry gave ground to remain just beyond range. The general growled in frustration. Then Terry flicked the safety on his pistol and tossed it onto the table.

  “Are you truly stupid enough to discard your weapon when you had the upper hand?”

  Terry shrugged. “I’m stupid, I suppose.”

  The general rushed Terry, swinging and stabbing wildly. Terry bobbed, weaved, and parried to keep the knife from making contact and zigzagged across the observation room, stringing the general with him.

  The general was getting winded; he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He couldn’t let this assassin wear him out. Otherwise, the assassin would make short work of him. He gave into desperation and slung a Hail Mary at Terry, trying to jam the point between Terry’s neck and clavicle. Terry intercepted the general’s knife hand at the wrist and used his momentum to sling the general into the table. The general careened into it, knocking all of its contents to the floor. Terry maintained control of the general’s arm and had it painfully locked behind his back. Terry torqued the general’s arm until he bared his teeth and released the knife. Terry scooped the knife in midair and buried it into the general’s free hand. The general’s body quaked, and he let out a blood-curdling shriek.