Spider Shepherd 10 - True Colours (43 page)

Monotok was six years old when the Berlin Wall had fallen. He’d watched it happen on television with his mother and father, and his father had told him then that the world – their world – was about to change for ever. Monotok wasn’t called the Hammer back then, of course, he was little Kirill, a sickly child who caught every bug going, with pale skin and spindly arms and legs that never seemed to get any stronger no matter how much food his mother forced down him. ‘Kirill, soon the world will open up to us Russians, and we must be ready to take advantage of it.’ Monotok’s father was the manager of a steel factory some two hundred miles east of Moscow, a huge hellish place of flames and smoke that always filled Monotok with a mixture of dread and awe whenever his father took him to visit.

It seemed to the young boy that the factory was staffed by giants, big men stained with soot and sweat with bulging muscles and rippling chests who communicated with nods and grunts but who smiled whenever they saw how scared he was, hiding from them behind his father’s legs.

Monotok was eight when the Soviet Union fell apart, and again his father had tried to explain the significance of the monumental event. He had chosen his words carefully, because even as the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB were still everywhere and the state came down heavily on dissenters. Monotok remembered little about what his father had said, other than that he was excited about the prospect of being given more responsibility at work and that the government would let him run the factory the way he wanted to. His father had big plans, he wanted to expand the factory, seek out export markets, and increase the wages of his staff. All of it would happen in time, he promised his son, all they had to do was to wait and see.

What Mark Luchenko didn’t know was that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union would result not in a capitalist boost for his factory but in his own death and the death of his wife, Monotok’s mother.

Monotok was orphaned shortly after his ninth birthday. His uncle took him away from the house and they never returned. By the age of ten, Monotok had been ‘adopted’ by a farmer, Sergei Boronin, a widower who bought Monotok from his uncle for fifty roubles, as if he was mere livestock.

Boronin’s farm, little more than a smallholding, was in a remote area, beyond the Ural Mountains, a thousand miles east of Moscow. He proved to be a vodka-sodden, petty tyrant who beat Monotok, kept him out of school and used him as virtual slave labour on his farm. If Monotok complained or didn’t work fast enough, or if Boronin was angry or hung over from one of the vodka-fuelled binges that followed his weekly visits to the small town where he sold his animals and bought his supplies, Monotok would get another brutal beating.

There was worse to come. One night Boronin returned drunk as usual from a trip to town. Monotok was already in bed, and when he heard his bedroom door open, he pretended to be asleep, fearing another beating. There was the shuffling sound of Boronin’s footsteps and then a creak as he sat down on the edge of the bed. He spent some time looking down at the boy and then the blanket was pulled aside and Monotok felt the farmer’s calloused hand on his thigh. He lay motionless, still trying to feign sleep, though his heart was pounding. He heard the rustle of fabric as Boronin fumbled with his trousers and then the farmer’s weight was on him, crushing him and pinning him down, and a moment later the boy felt a burning, agonising pain.

That brutal ritual became such a regular part of his life that he grew to dread the sky darkening into evening because he knew what the night would bring. At first it was just Boronin himself, but after a few weeks, other men began to appear at the isolated cabin in the forest, bringing a bottle of vodka and perhaps a couple of roubles for the farmer. Monotok would hear voices and the clink of glasses, and then his door would open and a figure would be outlined against the glow of light from the kitchen where Boronin still sat, pouring himself another drink.

Monotok ran away twice but both times was found by the police, who ignored his tearful pleas and protests and returned him to his guardian. Each time, after the police had drunk Boronin’s vodka and gone, Boronin would wrap the end of his belt around his fist and beat the boy almost senseless.

In the end Monotok became numbed to everything that happened to him. The beatings and the nightly abuse became just another part of his life, as hard, unvarying and predictable as the work of feeding and mucking out the animals that he had to carry out. But, although now outwardly calm and resigned to his fate, inside he burned with dreams of revenge.

He was patient – he had to be – but every day he schemed, planned and prepared for his opportunity. Although Boronin worked him like a dog, Monotok used what little spare time he had to further build his strength and stamina, taking long runs through the taiga – the forest that spread unbroken across northern Russia, spanning nine time zones – and using logs, buckets of water and large stones as primitive weights.

On the rare occasions when Boronin took Monotok with him to town, he grabbed the chance to toughen himself and hone his fighting skills by picking fights with much bigger boys. Inevitably he took a few beatings at first but kicks and blows were too familiar to him to be a concern, and before long, he was flattening any boy who got in his way, landing his blows with a cold, cruel calculation, his pulse rate barely rising above normal as he beat them into submission and then laid them out with a final brutal punch or kick.

When he was fourteen years old, he felt he was ready. He chose his moment well: a midwinter night so bitterly cold that his footsteps rang like struck metal on the ice-bound ground as he crossed the yard from the barn where the animals were housed. He waited for Boronin to return home from the town that night, stumbling drunk through the snow, clutching yet another bottle of vodka. Monotok watched him struggle out of his coat and make his unsteady way to his seat by the fire, but as Boronin turned his baleful, bloodshot gaze towards him Monotok spat in his face and then rained blows and kicks on him, beating him relentlessly to a bloody pulp.

He left him lying unconscious on the floor in a pool of blood while he went through his pockets. He took all the money and valuables he could find, and when he could not pull the farmer’s gold wedding ring from his swollen finger, he severed it with a knife, giving a cold smile as Boronin jerked back into consciousness with an ear-splitting scream of agony.

Monotok pocketed the ring, straightened up and booted him in the ribs one last time, savouring the crack of splintering bone. Monotok – measured, unhurried – picked up the bottle of vodka that had fallen from Boronin’s fingers as the assault began and poured the alcohol all over Boronin’s clothes. Then he pulled a blazing chunk of wood from the fireplace and set fire to him.

He retreated to the doorway as blue flames snaked over Boronin’s body, then caught the fabric of his frayed clothes. Monotok watched impassively as the blinded farmer stumbled to his feet and blundered around the room, trying in vain to beat out the flames with his hands. The tattered curtains caught fire, adding to the inferno. Boronin fell to the floor and began rolling on the ground in a frantic attempt to extinguish the flames, and howled in torment as his flesh blackened and burned. Eventually he collapsed in a smouldering heap while the flames began to devour his log-built home. It burned down around him, becoming his funeral pyre.

Monotok left the farm for ever that night. He made one other call, on the uncle who had sold him into his slavery. He flattened his uncle as soon as he answered the knock at his door, cut out his tongue so that he could not cry for help, then hamstrung him by severing the tendons behind his ankles so he couldn’t walk. Monotok then slashed him with a knife across his face, torso and arms – enough to weaken him from blood loss but not enough to kill him – and then threw him into the pigsty behind his house. He watched the pigs begin their feast, then moved away through the forest into the night.

Monotok walked through the night, following forest tracks and single-track roads without seeing a single vehicle. He reached a remote station just after dawn, warming himself by the stove in the wooden hut that served as a waiting room and drinking black tea from a samovar watched over by a toothless old babushka, as he waited for the westbound train. He travelled a thousand miles west to Moscow and moved into an abandoned apartment in a dismal Stalinist-era block, where the lifts had not worked in twenty years and the stairs stank of urine and worse. It was one of Moscow’s poorest and most violent districts, but his neighbours, mostly drug addicts, alcoholics and petty criminals, who preyed on each other and on the handful of other inhabitants of the block, too old, too poor or too ill to escape, soon learned to stay out of his way.

For almost two years he lived a semi-feral existence, using his wits and his fists to survive, always in and out of trouble with the law for thefts and assaults. Then he made what could have been a fatal mistake, giving a savage beating to a man who richly deserved it, but who was also the son of a Russian mafia boss. With a price on his head and no other way out, though still aged just sixteen, Monotok lied about his age and enlisted in the army. The minimum age was eighteen but he was tough and powerfully built, and his battered face, marked and scarred in scores of fights, made him look much older than his years.

He joined the Spetsnaz – the Soviet Special Forces, or ‘Special Purposes’ troops, as the Russians themselves described them. Unlike the British SAS, the Spetsnaz were not soldiers first who then became special forces by passing a bruising selection process; raw recruits were inducted straight into the Spetsnaz and did their entire military training with them.

Spetsnaz training was designed to break down recruits and then rebuild them, but they never broke Monotok. He never once failed to do what was asked of him, no matter how gruelling the task. When his instructors ordered him to do a hundred press-ups with a full bergen on his back, he did it. When ordered to run a mile through a forest with a colleague over his shoulders, he gritted his teeth and did it. They made him lie fully clothed in an icy mountain stream for two hours, and he emerged close to death but still smiling. He knew that there was nothing they could do to him that was worse than what he had suffered at the hands of his tormentor.

When fully trained, Monotok and his unit were deployed to a barracks north of Prenzlau, close to the Polish border and a few miles from the Baltic coast. They left there only for training exercises and to go on operations, where Monotok proved himself the fittest, strongest and most ruthlessly effective soldier of his entire unit. He was too much of a loner to be a good team player – none of his comrades liked him or trusted him – but he was a cool and cold-blooded killer, who never showed the slightest trace of emotion, fear or panic, no matter what was thrown at him, and he never failed in the task he was set. His talents were noted by his superiors and he began to be selected for special assignments, assignments that more often than not involved assassinations.

Monotok was a skilled assassin, and he killed without remorse or conscience. He had been trained as a sniper but was as comfortable killing with knives, garrottes and handguns as he was with a rifle. After a dozen kills he was sent with his unit to Chechnya. Russia was tightening its grip on the republic following a terrorist attack on a Moscow cinema by armed Chechen rebels that ended with the death of one hundred and thirty civilians. Monotok was part of an assassination unit tasked with killing a dozen of the rebels who had planned the raid. Within six months of arriving in the republic all were dead. In 2006, Monotok was part of a unit responsible for the targeted bombing of Shamil Basayev, the prime mover in the Chechen Islamic rebel movement, but Basayev was only one of twenty Chechens that he helped kill that year. He had become a relentless killing machine, devoid of all emotion or empathy as he carried out his orders.

It was in 2009 that Monotok saw the picture that took his life down a different path. He was still in Chechnya, but Russia was winding down its anti-terrorist operations there and Monotok was preparing to return to Prenzlau. The picture was in a week-old copy of
Komsomolksaya Pravda
, the biggest-selling newspaper in Russia. It had started life as the official organ of the Communist Union of Youth but following the break-up of the Soviet Union had become a tabloid with more than three million readers. One of Monotok’s colleagues had returned from leave with the paper in his pocket, and during a break between missions Monotok had flicked through it. He had never been a big reader and rarely watched television. He didn’t care about anything that happened in the outside world, his life revolved around the Spetsnaz and his assignments, he cared for little else. Monotok had recognised the man in the photograph immediately, though the name meant nothing to him. Pyotr Grechko.

The story was about Grechko trying, and failing, to buy Liverpool Football Club. Monotok wasn’t interested in football, or any sport, but he read and reread the story more than a dozen times. Peter Grechko was one of the richest men in the world, the story said, a man who had fought his way up from humble beginnings to head a transport empire that literally spanned the world. But Monotok knew the truth about how Grechko had started on the road to unimaginable wealth, and as he stared at the newspaper he decided that the time had come to get his revenge. He left the Spetsnaz in the winter of 2010. His superiors offered him all sorts of incentives to stay – promotion, money, more leave, foreign travel – but Monotok refused them all. The only thing he cared about was the revenge that was rightfully his.

Monotok went freelance, working for a former Spetsnaz colonel who had joined up with a former KGB assassin to set up a murder-for-hire company. Assassinations were a common way of solving political and business disagreements in post-Soviet Russia and Monotok had an average of one job a week. Clients included the Kremlin, the Mafia and even legitimate businesses, eager to use a professional service that guaranteed to keep the killings at arm’s length. Monotok earned good money, ten times what he earned as a soldier, and he learned quickly. For the Spetsnaz he had been a simple killer, following orders, but as a freelance he learned about electronic surveillance, accessing databases, and gained access to fake documentation that allowed him to move freely around the world under a number of aliases. His hired a tutor to teach him English, and as his fluency increased the company sent him farther afield and Monotok killed in Europe and the United States. When he wasn’t working, Monotok dug up as much information as he could on Pyotr Grechko. And it didn’t take him long to track down three more faces from his past. Oleg Zakharov, Yuri Buryakov and Sasha Czernik. All four had become rich and powerful oligarchs, men who had the sort of wealth that others could only dream of, men for whom the world was a giant playground. But Monotok knew the truth about the four men, he knew that it wasn’t hard work or luck that had brought them their wealth. It had been cold-blooded murder, and for that they had to pay. Now Zakharov, Buryakov and Czernik were dead, and soon Grechko would join them. Then maybe the nightmares would finally stay away and he could sleep soundly for the first time since he was nine years old.