Hard Cold Winter (23 page)

T
ERROR WOKE ME. NOT
all the way. Not the way that banishes a nightmare almost instantly. I was very tired. My mouth tasted foul. We rose up and dipped down, and then the
We
suddenly resolved into me and Elana, lying next to each other on the coarse non-skid floor of a boat’s deck. My jacket was gone, and I could feel the spiky surface through my T-shirt. It was still nighttime.

The up-and-down motion was lulling. I didn’t want to fall backward into sleep again. Couldn’t help it.

Then I snapped to, as hands grabbed my shoulders and ankles and I was lifted very rapidly. When they dropped me I was just alert enough to expect it, and tucked my chin to my chest for the big
whump
of impact. My teeth clenched on a wad of cloth in my mouth.

“Awake?” asked Reuben from somewhere. I tried to look. My wrists and elbows were bound tight behind my back. Same with knees and ankles. I could writhe, a little, but not turn.

The hard case in his black tracksuit came into my line of sight, blurred and tilted on the diagonal from my point of view. He stood feet
planted, staring at me. I had a moment of clarity that told me he was about to stomp on my head.

“Kasym,” said Reuben.

The hard case looked up.

“Turn him over so he can see,” Reuben said. Then something in Russian, maybe repeating the order.

Kasym put his boot on my shoulder and kicked so that I rolled to the other side and onto my face. I squirmed to get back upright.

Reuben walked over, leaned down to look at my face from a foot away, like he was peering into a fish tank. His high forehead and snub nose came into startling focus.

“Hey, you look lively,” he said. He grinned at Kasym. “See, you gave the bitch too much. A half dose is just about right.”

I tried to spit the rag out, but couldn’t seem to get my mouth and tongue to coordinate. Reuben tapped my cheek.

“Party time, my friend,” he said. “A little Z blend.”

That explained why I was so out of focus. They’d doped me. The same stuff used for severe insomnia. Or date rape.

Reuben plucked the cloth from my mouth with his long fingers. I coughed through shuddering breaths, as Reuben strode away to sit on a stool by a broad worktable. Kasym joined him. He glared at me for another moment and then picked up a tool and bent over to adjust something on the table.

The drugs they’d given me weren’t so different from Ambien or other sleep meds. Shake it off, Shaw.

Reuben smirked. “Kasym’s pissed because you almost killed him, did you know? He gave you the big zap with the stun gun back there, but fuck if you didn’t get a shot off.” He leaned back on the stool to look at Kasym, who wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Right past your ugly head, eh?”

My vision was clearing. I could see farther away now. Beyond Reuben and Kasym at the worktable there was a large window, and through its panes I could see the shiny white curve of a petroleum tank, looming in the near distance. A roof arched thirty feet over our heads, made of wooden beams and aluminum sheeting. Despite the roof, it felt
and sounded like we were outside. The Cobalt bobbed gently nearby. My mind assembled these facts groggily and came up with the conclusion that we were in a large boathouse next to the petroleum farm.

Where was Elana? I twisted and was half surprised when my body cooperated. Elana and another man lay against the wall of the boathouse. Elana was facing me, bound like I was, with thick plastic zip ties around her arms and legs. A strip of tape across her mouth held in a lump of rag. She moved weakly against her bonds. The man was dressed in paint-stained coveralls. He was not tied and gagged. He might be dead.

“Come here.” Reuben’s voice. “You’ll appreciate this.”

He grabbed the zip tie that was around my elbows like a handle, and dragged me across the floor. He was strong enough to make it a fast journey. The sharp plastic of the zip tie bit into my skin, and the blessed pain whisked away the last of my dizziness.

Reuben propped me up at the corner of the workbench. “Look,” he said, striding over to the boathouse wall. A dozen large black duffel bags were stacked near the door. Reuben lifted one with a grunt of effort and unzipped it as he brought it over to me. “I brought the party.”

There were three steel boxes inside the duffel, each about a foot square and half an inch thick. Each box was open at the top, revealing the inside packed with gluey, cream-colored Tovex depressed into a
V
.

Shaped charges. Closed on all sides to direct all the kinetic force of the detonation into that
V
. The blast wave would slice through just about anything. They used charges like them to demolish buildings.

“We made fifty of these in the last two days,” Reuben said.

The two squat Bratva thugs came into the boathouse. They were wearing blue pants and matching coats.
JURLEE PETRO
was in white across their backs. Kasym barked something at them in Russian, and they each picked up two of the large duffels and shuffled out the door as quickly as they could manage under the weight.

Reuben yanked the stool around, where he could sit in front of me. His eyes looked electric, despite the bags of fatigue underneath. Cranking himself up with coke or meth or maybe both.

“It takes some hours to set all these in place. Like dominoes. But oh, it will be worth the wait.” He winked at me. “You’ll see.”

“What will I see?” I asked, slurring the words.

“The
culmination
,” he said. “I like that word. It’s a new one, for me. You have been one stinging pain in my ass, but now I understand why. It was destiny. Because you were supposed to be here.”

“Where?” There were tools on the worktable. Maybe something that could cut through my zip ties. If I could convince Kasym and Reuben that I was still out of it.

“Don’t play stupid,” Reuben said, as if he’d heard my thoughts. “I know you’ve been watching, you and your
uzko glaziye
friend. He’s the same little shit who was at your house when Kasym threw our message through your front window, yeah?”

A message. The bomb had just about killed all three of us, and it had most definitely killed the house.

Leo. He’d have been watching BerPac. He would have called the cops.

“No, no,” said Reuben, giggling as he read my mind again. “No help from him. We thought you might come poking in, little rat. After he put you on the dock, I called some soldiers of my own. They waited for him to come back to shore. Bye-bye, slant-eye.”

Oh, Christ.

Kasym walked away from the worktable to the boat. He pulled a wheeled trolley over next to the dock’s edge, and then jumped down agilely into the cockpit and disappeared into the cabin.

“I don’t understand,” I said.
I dunn unnerstan.

Reuben sighed. “Maybe we inject a quarter dose, next time. Okay. No point in bringing you here if I don’t explain.”

That’s right. I’m too stoned. Go away and let me see what’s on the table before your killer, Kasym, gets back.

Instead Reuben reached up to the table, took a roll of duct tape, and wound a long strip of it around and around me and the four-by-four workbench leg. Stuck. Very. I tried hard not to let the comprehending fear show in my eyes.

Reuben grabbed a bucket off the floor and marched over to dip it into the water, on the end of a slim rope tied around its handle. He came back and tossed the water into my face. The icy salted jolt across head and chest felt like a baby brother to the Taser. I gasped.

“Good,” said Reuben. “Not much time, and I want you to know everything I’ve done for you. Fucking ingrateful shit.”

He was angry. Happy, too, because Reuben was always the happiest of psychopaths. Anger was new.

“I tried to bring you in,” he said. “I told you the world was changing. That it was my time. Didn’t I?” He pointed at the remaining duffel bags. “That’s my proof, right there. Kasym dials his phone and all the little bangs go off like firecrackers. They destroy the retaining wall at the waterline. They cut holes in those fat tanks, and let the pressure inside spray the jet fuel and diesel for a hundred meters. A tsunami of one million barrels all over that corner of the island and all the water around it. And then—”

He gestured with his thumb at Kasym, who was using the Cobalt’s hoist to lift something large and heavy off of the powerboat, out of the crate I’d seen in its cockpit. It was bluish-white and shaped like a stretched barrel. I’d seen some like it, on airfields in Iraq.

An MK-77 incendiary bomb. Kerosene and white phosphorus and God knew what else. Over seven hundred pounds of Hell.

Reuben gave me a huge smile. “And then we light the match.”

THERE WAS NO POINT
in pretending any longer. I was stuck tight. “You’ll kill thousands,” I said.

“Oh, hundreds only. Maybe less. Not the point, really. I’m not a fucking anarchist.” He said it like I’d offended him.

“Then why?”

“Magic, Van my man.” He was excited now. A kid looking forward to Christmas morning. “The biggest trick in the world, with everyone looking the other direction. Police. Fire. Every-fucking-one of them. Can you imagine?”

I could. I could imagine a fire that was unquenchable, so hot that it burned right through the concrete island itself to the water. Millions of gallons floating and ablaze in the Sound. A bonfire higher than the gantry cranes, devouring the huge freighters. Crossing the eighth of a mile to the Seattle shore, where it would find a new feast in the piers and boats and buildings.

“You’re going to steal the metal shipment. All of it,” I said to Reuben. My voice sounded hollow.

“That’s right! Very good, Van. But the metal is just money. A means to an end.” He spread his arms wide, as if to embrace the world. “Right now there’s more than seventy million dollars at our dock on the other side of the island, just waiting for me. We’ll load it as soon as we hear the first bang, and be gone before the cops shut the island down.”

“Lev will bury you. Even if you are his son.”

“Papa will be dead before anyone unravels what happened.” Reuben said. “Right now he’s in the air, coming in from Irkutsk. By the time his Gulfstream lands here, his money will be my money. Lev will not see Russia again.”

He got off the metal stool, picked it up, and calmly threw it twenty feet across the boathouse. It landed with a crash and I heard Elana cry out in muffled alarm from behind me. Kasym barely paused in loading the incendiary bomb onto the wheeled trolley.

Reuben sat down cross-legged next to me. Two buddies having a heart-to-heart.

“Lev is ancient. He didn’t even question why the BerPac orders had spiked so much. I created fake companies, to buy lots and lots for this shipment. I told you. It’s
my time
. And the seventy million is my war chest. The Brotherhood captains who aren’t already on my side will be gone, just like him. We are
ready
.”

His face distorted. The jollity and even the anger cracking like dry clay, so that the madness showed through. “I wanted you to be my friend, Van. You got the skills, the smarts. When that insect Broch came to me and said you were poking your nose into Kend Haymes, that
you’d busted up his gambling place
and
his men, I laughed. Of course you were too much for him. I told him I’d take care of it.”

There was a tiny bubble of saliva at the corner of Reuben’s mouth. The bomb was tied to the trolley now. Kasym wheeled it slowly toward the doorway.

“And I did. I did right for you. Kasym ended them both, so no more problems from Broch.” He waved a finger at me, chiding. “But you’d keep fishing. I knew you would. Right then was a very risky time for you to get too close. So we gave you a distraction. Sorry about your house, but you know. You shouldn’t be attached to things.”

Things like Luce, and Leo. “You’re fucking bughouse, Reuben.”

His slap came so fast that there was no pain at first, just a snap of my head to the left and a flash of light.

“I did you a
favor
. And you repay me by what? Trying to skull-fuck the best day of my life?” His voice cracked. As he looked at me a new mask slowly formed, this one of sadness. “You could have been rich.”

He stood and began loading the last of the duffels with the shaped charges onto the trolley, next to the incendiary bomb. Kasym stepped onto the boat and shouldered a full rucksack onto his back. He adjusted the straps as he spoke Russian to his chief.

Reuben picked up a red packet made of soft plastic from the table. The packet was about half the size of a shoe box. He and Kasym walked over to the incendiary bomb on the trolley, and began conversing. The red packet had what looked like a digital timer on the side. Wires led from the timer into the packet. As I watched, Reuben twisted the dial on the timer and red numerals appeared.

I didn’t speak Russian, but I got the gist. Firebombs rupture and explode on impact. The red packet was a small bomb, probably crafted from the Tovex. It would provide the kick that would set off the much much bigger and hotter bang of the Mark 77, once there was a lake of refined fuel surrounding it. Reuben slapped Kasym on the shoulder and put the packet bomb into the top of the hard case’s rucksack.

Kasym heaved his weight into moving the laden trolley out the
door, just as the two thugs in their Jurlee Petro costumes came back. The duffels were gone. Most of the shaped charges, excepting the few Kasym had on the trolley, would be in place now.

One of the squat bruisers pointed at Elana and said something to Reuben.

“Yeah,” Reuben agreed. He pointed to me. “Here.”

The thugs walked over and picked up Elana and set her gently down in front of me. Her eyes were wild and she was drenched in sweat. They yanked the strip of tape off her mouth and she spat out the wad of rag.

The three men got into the Cobalt. Reuben started the engines and began backing out of the boathouse. He looked over and gave me a blissful smile.

“You know what the very best part is? Why I decided I needed you both to be here at the end?” he said. “When the cops eventually ID your bodies, they’ll tie her to Kend and the stolen explosives. They might even think that you, hero soldier man, were working with them, building the bombs. Cable news will eat it up. Terrorist plots. Beautiful girl. Rich family.”