Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (29 page)

Mercy glanced in the rearview mirror as the tires struck the road with a jolting thump. Mihkas was hunched up in a ball, arms folded over his head.

“What the hell,” she gasped, “is left for them to guard?”

Suddenly, Mihkas threw himself forward, latching onto the back of the driver’s seat. He grabbed frantically for Mercy’s right arm. “No. Stop! Let me out. Russian cars crap. They will catch us!” he shrieked.

“Not if I can help it,” Mercy shouted above the roar of the Lada’s engine.

Sebastian pried Mihkas off of her and thrust him back into his seat. “Don’t bother the driver.”

She hung a sharp right, punched the gas, veered around the next corner and down yet another deserted side street that ended in an unpaved slope into wild brush.
Just what we need!

Jamming her foot to the floor, she sent the little car crashing into bushes, plummeting down the steep hillside. Sebastian clung to the car’s overhead handhold. Mihkas screamed his lungs out. She landed the car on a lower road and kept her foot on the gas.

“I think that might have done it,” Sebastian said with the same calm detachment she’d seen him show when they’d faced a ruthless gang in the Mexican desert. “Nice job.”

Mihkas moaned from the back seat.

They followed the road for another mile. No vehicles appeared to be following them. The geography changed. Pripyat, the dead city, gave way to an eerie rural landscape of charred pillars that once had been the trunks of towering conifers. Interspersed among the dead trees were new-growth deciduous trees and brilliant orange daylilies.

Mercy kept checking her rearview but saw nothing. She started to breathe again. “Where are we, Mihkas?” she asked his pale reflection.

He poked his head above the door panel and peered apprehensively out the window. “Oh no.”

“Oh no, what?”

“I know where we are,” Sebastian said. “Look to your right.”

Mercy had been concentrating on the road, trying to keep up their speed without driving off the edge or into one of the many potholes large enough to swallow a German Shepherd. Now she looked around and saw
them
rising above the grassy plain: four monoliths of metal and cement.

The Chernobyl reactors.

She swallowed.

“Please, please…please, we go back now?” Mihkas squeaked. “It’s no good here. No good, no good.” He thrust the roentgen meter, out of its case again, between the front seats. “See?”

“Sit back!” Sebastian bellowed.

“My poor father’s spirit. Ah—” Mihkas sobbed.

Mercy jammed her foot on the brake. And Sebastian snapped his head around to see why she’d stopped. Two Jeeps blocked the road ahead of them. “Unless your father’s been reincarnated in the militia,” she said, “I don’t think that’s him.”

She spun the wheel, and the car sheared around in a gritty cloud. But as soon as she accelerated in the opposite direction, the Land Rover appeared over the rise in front of her.

Trapped!

Frantic, her palms slick with sweat on the steering wheel, she glanced off to the side of the road. Overgrown fields led into dense forest. If they ran for it they’d have to fight their way through gorse and brambles. And they were at a disadvantage, being in unfamiliar territory and without weapons. Alone, she might have tried it. But she had Sebastian and Mihkas to consider.

Sebastian looked at her. “Time to negotiate.” He pulled a wad of hundred dollar bills from the money belt strapped beneath his shirt.

Mihkas’ eyes grew huge. “Don’t give them my money! I will take care of this.”

Amazed that the threat of losing the rest of his fee so quickly outweighed his terror, Mercy watched Mihkas scramble out of the Lada’s rear door. He ran toward the advancing Land Rover, holding the roentgen meter up in front of him like a shield. The truck stopped. One of the men got out and spoke with him.

Mercy climbed out of the car, hoping she might be able to hear at least some of their conversation.

Sebastian came around to stand beside her. “What are they saying?”

“Sounds like a Ukrainian dialect. I only know a little Russian, but they share some words. I think Mihkas is telling him we're scientists. And something about a scientific study.”

Sebastian frowned as their guide babbled on, making sweeping gestures with his arms at the forest, the ground, then again toward Mercy and Sebastian. The militia officer scowled at the guide as if he were insane.

Sebastian swore. “He’ll only make things worse by lying.”

“Right. Let’s see if we can set the record straight.” At least, as straight as their forged passports would allow.

Mercy walked slowly toward the Land Rover holding her hands open at her sides, palms forward and away from her body—the universal signal:
I’m unarmed
. Sebastian followed, she assumed doing the same. By now the Jeeps had approached from the opposite direction. Men piled out of all three vehicles. They were a rag-tag bunch, dressed in layers of flannel and canvas, wearing torn jeans or khakis. Each man held a firearm of one sort or another.

Mercy stopped in front of the man Mihkas kept calling, “Comrade-colonel, sir.”

“Excuse me,” she broke in on their guide’s nervous chatter, using what little Russian she remembered. “I’m an American and this is my husband.” She pointed to Sebastian. “We’ve come to visit my mother but are having trouble locating her.”

The tall, fair-haired militia officer looked her up and down, his gaze hard and suspicious. “I speak English.”

“It is taught in all of our schools,” Mihkas explained, his eyes jittery-bright dots. “The colonel understands you.”

“Great,” she said, with forced cheerfulness, adding a smile for effect. Her father had taught her that treating an opponent like a friend, until proven otherwise, was the best strategy for any negotiation. “Colonel, maybe you’ve seen my mother while you were on patrol. She’s petite, a good six inches shorter than I am. Red hair, chin length. Green eyes and fair skin. She would have been carrying a camera bag and—“

“Your mother is Ukrainian?” He studied her through narrowed eyes.

“No, American. A photojournalist. She came here to take pictures of your beautiful country for a magazine spread.”

The man beckoned one of his soldiers forward, conferred with him in words she didn’t understand, and then signaled the others with a nod. They moved in quickly, seizing Mercy and Sebastian by the arms.

“You don’t believe me?” Mercy gasped. “It’s the truth!”

Sebastian produced a hundred dollar bill from his shirt cuff and locked eyes meaningfully with the colonel.

Mercy held her breath, waiting for a reaction.

The man glared with open hostility at Sebastian, his full lips curling in disgust. “You would try to bribe me like a fucking corrupt government official?”

“Great negotiating technique,” Mercy muttered.

“You weren’t doing any better,” Sebastian snapped.

Another man clamped a hand down on Mihkas’ shoulder, and for a moment it looked as if the little guide’s knees would give way under the sheer weight of the soldier’s hand.

“Wait! Please, no,” Mihkas wailed. “I don’t even know these foreigners. They pick me up on side of road. Force me to come with them.”

You little traitor,
she thought.

The colonel ignored him and waved a hand toward the vehicles. Two men grabbed Mihkas by the arms, lifted him off his feet and carried him—worn brown shoes pedaling air is if he were riding a bicycle—to the first Jeep.

“You will come with us for further questioning,” their leader stated.

Mercy exchanged glances with Sebastian. His steel-blue eyes flashed a message:
Stay calm. We’ll get out of this.
Sebastian allowed a guard to guide him toward the other Jeep.

The two shabby, unshaven men who held Mercy smelled like they’d been in the woods for months. They jerked her toward the Land Rover. She dug in her heels and glared at them. They didn’t let go but eased up on their grip and allowed her to walk at her own pace. She climbed into the Rover’s backseat without their assistance. The colonel took the front passenger position. Her two escorts squeezed in on either side of her.

“Where are you taking us?” Mercy asked the colonel, if that was indeed what he was.

“Shut up,” he growled.

“I demand to know what you intend to do with us!”

Without turning around to face her, he barked out an incomprehensible order. The man on her left removed a handkerchief from around his own neck.

“Wait, no!” she cried.

He tied the gag across her mouth and knotted it tightly behind her neck.

She choked on the metallic taste of his sweat permeating the fabric. When she reached up to pull it off, the man on her other side lifted the barrel of his sawed-off shotgun and shoved the muzzle under her chin.

She nodded her compliance, dropping her hands docilely into her lap.

They drove for what felt like less than ten minutes then she was ushered out of the Rover. One of the men had followed them in the Lada and parked it alongside the militia’s vehicles in the forest clearing near a lone cabin. All three prisoners were marched inside. Two men, she noticed, remained outside. As sentries, she supposed.

Mercy shot Sebastian a look of frustration. Apparently he hadn’t tried talking to his captors. He wasn’t gagged. Mihkas wrapped his arms around his chest, looking adrift without his roentgen meter. One of the militia walked behind him, carrying it.

After a nod in her direction from their leader, another of the men removed the revolting gag from over her mouth. Her stomach clutched and churned. Her legs threatened to buckle beneath her. Only through sheer will power did she stay on her feet.

Oh, God, what are they going to do to us?

                                          32

Mercy looked around the interior of the cabin. Its single gloomy room reeked of stale food, body odor, gun oil. One entire end had been turned into an arsenal. Rifles, boxes of ammunition, what looked to her like hand grenades—stacked everywhere. Metal cots and bedrolls lined the other end of the room.

Mercy stared at the bed closest to her. It looked identical to the one in the photograph she’d been given in Mexico—the one with the image of a frail, bruised woman tied to the iron frame. But no one lay there now. Had Talia been here? Mercy’s hands started shaking. She clenched them in front of her.

It took every bit of her remaining self-control to stop herself from bursting into tears. She looked around for more clues.

In the center of the room stood a scarred wooden table and a cast-iron wood stove, its tin chimney rising up to the open-beamed ceiling and out through an opening in the roof. Crates of canned food lined the rear wall. The colonel nodded at the men in charge of each prisoner. Mercy was brought to the arsenal end and seated in a wooden chair. A man pushed Mihkas down onto one of the cots. Sebastian’s guard pointed his gun at a chair in the middle of the room, beside the table.

Mercy wanted to scream,
For God sakes, let us explain!
But she hated the thought of being gagged again.

For the next few minutes she sat absolutely motionless, agonizing over their fate, her entire body prickling with terror. Maybe the most she could hope for was that they wouldn’t rape her before they killed her. Now that was a cheery thought.

She shot Sebastian an apologetic look. If it hadn’t been for her, he wouldn’t be here now. But if he felt her watching him, he didn’t respond. His eyes were down, studying his hands folded in his lap. Planning their escape?

Half an hour later, the three of them were still sitting in their assigned places, and no one had accosted them. In fact, now that they were at what appeared to be the militia’s shambles of a  headquarters, their captors ignored them and went about pre-assigned chores—making a meal, unloading more boxes of ammunition brought in from the vehicles, cleaning their weapons—all the while chattering at each other in a confusing mishmash of Ukrainian and Russian and possibly a few other languages.

Mercy looked at Sebastian again. This time he met her eyes, lifted one dark eyebrow in encouragement. She felt a warm rush of hope.

Suddenly calmer, she turned her mind to possible strategies. There had to be a way to make these men understand that killing them, or doing whatever else they had in mind, wouldn’t be to their benefit.

Nothing about this situation made sense.

Mihkas had said the militia protected the villages. What villages? These abandoned towns? What was there here to protect? And who were these patched-together soldiers preparing to do battle with?

Maybe they were just Eastern European versions of rednecks or whacko survivalists. Maybe they believed a foreign invasion was imminent, or they were leftovers from the militant protestors who had driven Yanukovych out of the presidency.

When the blond-haired colonel passed near her again, she risked a few words of polite explanation. “Sir, we really aren’t here to harm anyone, or to take anything that doesn’t belong to us. We’re trying to save my mother’s life.”