The Flood (39 page)

And they were heading right toward Lenin’s tomb.

That’s weird.

Turning his head left and right, Aliyev could see there was still a perimeter of black-clad soldiers, moving along with them, and shooting their silenced bad-ass rifles, keeping the dead off. And they seemed to have sufficient numbers, skill, and ammunition to handle the job. They weren’t even breaking a sweat.

Stretching his neck back and looking forward again, he could see they were now passing through the gate in the low wall that surrounded the tomb. They climbed the handful of stairs, paused at the doors while someone performed some operation to get them open, and then all strolled right inside. When the doors closed behind them, Aliyev couldn’t see a damned thing. But the whole group just moved along in the dark, strong arms holding him on four sides like a prize warthog they had bagged in the bush. A faint glow appeared ahead, another pause – and then they all poured into a very large and clean and high-tech-looking elevator.

The doors pressed shut and they started descending.

The men put him down on the floor – face, chest, and privates all pressed into the cold hard steel. He could hear or sense them shifting or fiddling around him, and when he strained upward to look, he could see some of them flipping their night-vision goggles up on the tops of their heads.

Aliyev let his own head rest on the steel again, cheek-down. It was easier.

Down they went – and then down some more. A lot more. If there were any floor indicator lights, Aliyev couldn’t see them. Finally, they stopped and the doors opened up again. And up he went again, arms and legs, belly sagging, and out they marched, carrying him into…

Some kind of sprawling underground complex. Room after room went by, some of them dramatically large. People sat or stood or occasionally moved around – not tons of them, not a big crowd, but not nobody either. The floor was white tile, and smelled disinfected. And in one room, then the next after it, Aliyev got a certain vibe, so he made the effort to crane his neck again, and…

And it was as he thought. He could see rows of biomedical research equipment, some of it the same stuff he’d had back in his lab at the dacha. Centrifuges, CO2 incubators, nitrogen storage systems. He couldn’t make it all out, and he was mainly seeing the bottoms of things. But he saw enough. He knew.

At least part of this place was a lab complex.

They exited out the far end, traversed a long and dim corridor, and then passed through a very different room, its walls covered with gray lockers and weapons racks, with benches running down the aisles. But they went straight back out the other end, through what looked like some kind of briefing room – a lot of chairs – took a left, and entered a very small room with a table and a couple of chairs.

Only when they turned him over did Aliyev realize most of the group that had taken him had peeled off by this point. There were only three left. Two picked him up and sat him on one of the chairs, then tied him to it. One of them unslung a backpack – Aliyev’s own bug-out bag – and tossed it on the floor. They then nodded and walked out again.

And, with their departure… then there was one.

The one remaining man unclipped his high-tech-looking rifle from its sling and propped it in the corner. Then he pulled off his black gloves – Aliyev could see the raised plastic ridges on the knuckles – and laid them gently down on the table. Finally, he dragged the other chair around to face Aliyev, set himself down in it, removed a handkerchief from a pocket, and dabbed the sweat from his brow.

The man was big and muscular and hard-looking, with a dirty blond buzz cut and similarly colored stubble. He wasn’t young. He had a thick and deeply lined forehead, but his body fat was obviously as low as his muscle mass was high. He looked to Aliyev like maybe an
Expendables 1
-era Dolph Lundgren. But smarter. He had a gleam of intelligence in his eye.

But it was a cruel, cagey intelligence.

He pulled out a lighter and pack of cigarettes, took one out, lit it – and offered it to Aliyev, who shook his head no. So he drew deeply from the cigarette himself, then leaned back. Exhaling slowly, he said: “So. The chimera returns to the roost.”

That’s not good
, Aliyev thought.
Sounds like this Rocky 3 reject knows who I am.
Keeping both his face and his voice neutral, he succumbed to cliché. “Where am I?” he asked in Russian.

“You are in a deep hole,” the Russian soldier rumbled, a smoker’s voice, low and abrasive, menacing – but also smart, literate. “An underground bunker complex. Originally built by that paranoid bastard Putin, so he could survive anything. Natural disaster, nuclear reactor mishap, foreign assassination attempt in force. Or, most likely of course, a coup.”

Aliyev kind of looked around. “So where is Putin now?”

The man made a throat-slitting motion.

Aliyev felt no desire to have him elaborate. “And all that research equipment we passed outside?”

The man nodded as he exhaled thick smoke. “You knew of the technology complex at Skolcovo?”

Aliyev nodded. He did know of it. It had been a major effort to build a high-technology ecosystem for post-Soviet Russia, funded by a Ukrainian-born Russian oligarch and co-chaired by the CEO of Intel. They did bleeding-edge stuff in IT, nuclear, next-gen energy, space and telecoms…

“The biomedical technologies cluster,” the Russian said. “We moved it here.”

Jesus
, Aliyev thought.
That’s pretty impressive – anybody surviving, for starters – but also moving a whole research facility to… to however damned far underground they were right now.
Evidently Aliyev wasn’t the only man in the world with a bunker and a lab. None of this had been here back in the day, when Aliyev was an occasional visitor to Moscow. Or, hell, it probably had been – they sure wouldn’t have told him. Paranoid down to the bottom of their black souls.

“But we have come to the end of your questions,” the man said. “Now mine.” He paused to take another drag, then blew it basically right in Aliyev’s face. He sat up straighter, and pushed up the sleeves of his matched fatigues – which were a solid, matte, dark-charcoal gray, with only a muted tricolor Russian flag on the left shoulder – revealing big tattoos on both forearms.

Aliyev could see that the first tattoo was an elaborate crest. Across the top in an arc was written
АНТИ ТЕРРОР
– “ANTI TERROR”. Below that was a big red
A
over a shield with a dagger through it. Aliyev recognized this coat of arms from somewhere – almost certainly from his friend who had been in Russian special forces, and later the Russian mafia, and who had sold him all his guns. With a wash of terror, he found he knew what the crest represented.

Alfa Group
.

This had been an elite, stand-alone sub-unit of Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces – and one that reported directly to the much-feared FSB (successor to the KGB), under the direct control and sanction of Russia’s top political leadership. They had basically been Putin’s remorseless killers – and the ones who responded to most of the terrorist acts in Russia, usually by Chechen separatists, including the Moscow theatre hostage crisis and the Beslan school massacre. And by “respond to” what was meant was that they stormed in and killed everyone.

Absolutely everyone.

Aliyev’s blood ran cold as he realized whose power he was in. Now the man began his questioning – and it wasn’t long before it took a violent turn.

“You are working with the British and Americans.”

“What?”

The Russian stood up, raised his big and menacing assault boot, and shoved it in Aliyev’s chest, knocking him over backward in his chair. Aliyev hit the floor hard, taking much of the impact on the back of his head. His eyes swam, but he could see the big man flick the remains of the cigarette onto him, then walk over and stand right over his immobilized form, one leg to either side, staring straight down at him.

“You think we are amateurs? That we can’t detect radio transmissions in our own backyard? Or triangulate the end points?”

Aliyev worked his mouth dryly, trying to get the word
Nyet
out.

The very large man squatted down right over Aliyev’s chest – and stuck his hoary finger right in his face, an inch away. Now Aliyev had a second to make out the tattoo on the other arm. It had the words
ВОЛЧЬЯ СТАЯ
(“WOLF PACK”) over a drawing of a gray wolf with an entire severed leg of some hapless dead prey, maybe a caribou of some sort, in its mouth.

The text below read
АКЕЛА
– “AKELA”.

Aliyev swallowed dryly again. He knew the gray wolves of the Russian steppes were not just mean, but also smart – with multiple modes of communication and complex pack-hunting techniques. (He knew these seemingly random facts about wolves because he’d made a careful study of all the dangerous wildlife of the Eurasian steppe – brown bears, wild boars, wolverines – before deciding where to build his dacha.) And he could easily imagine why a unit of Spetsnaz’s Alfa Group would take them as their mascot.

Finger still in Aliyev’s face, this pack leader, evidently known as Akela, now demanded: “What was your involvement in the sinking of the
Admiral Nakhimov
?”

Aliyev’s mouth opened and closed again. He didn’t have to feign bafflement at this, and he certainly didn’t have to feign terror.

Akela put the pad of his finger into Aliyev’s forehead and pressed – hard. He was actually pressing his head into the floor, painfully, with a single finger. “It won’t matter in the end,” he said. “The
Mirovye Lohi
cannot be killed.”

Aliyev didn’t know who
The World Fuckers
were, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want to meet them. The Wolf Pack was more than enough for one day – or one lifetime for that matter.

“No,” Akela said, sticking his face even closer to Aliyev’s. “All the Americans did was bloody their noses – and make them very, very angry. But
Spetsnaza
cannot be deterred or frightened away. Pain, discomfort, death – all of these are nothing to them. They are unbeatable, not to mention undefeated, at every level of combat – from teeth and claws, to knives and sniper rifles, all the way up to ICBMs. And they absolutely will not stop,
ever
… ”

Finally, the hulking and supremely menacing bad-ass Russian commando stood up and looked down at Aliyev with utterly emotionless eyes, his cruel mouth turned up at one corner.

“…until they have Patient Zero.”

Alpha team will return – but so will Spetsnaz Alfa Group – in
ARISEN, BOOK ELEVEN – DEATHMATCH

Come back and live through the beginning of the end of the world in
ARISEN : GENESIS
, the pulse-pounding and bestselling first ARISEN prequel.

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Thanks and Acknowledgements

My deep and sincere thanks to indispensable über-readers Mark George Pitely, Amanda Jo Moore, and ETC Mark D. Wiggins, USCG (ret); the amazing Editrice; and 1SG Don Harper, US Army (ret). Thanks as always to Anna K. Brooksbank, Sara Natalie Fuchs, Richard S. Fuchs, Virginia Ann Sayers-King, Valerie Sayers, Alexander M. Heublein, Matthew David Grabowy, and Michael and Jayne Barnard, for their indispensable support. Also, Bruce, Wanda, Alec, and Brendan Fyfe for their service and sacrifice. Eternal thanks to Glynn James for coming up with
Arisen
.

The line about how if your life depends on your cardio, you will run, even on four packs a day, is from Iraq war veteran, PMC, and general badass (and friend) Paul Trejo.

The comfort of “a dwarfy hope” is from probably the very best and loveliest novel you’ve never read, Tibor Fischer’s
Under the Frog
.

The quip that when a problem goes from difficult to completely impossible, it becomes easy again is from Michael Kinsley.

“Be bold – and mighty forces will come to your aid” is from Basil King.

“Tough. Deal with it. Adapt and overcome” is, as always, from Master Chief Brandon Webb USNAVWARSPECOM (ret). You should go read his memoir
The Red Circle
right now. It’s perhaps the best Navy SEAL memoir – and, yes, I’ve read them all. After that you might want to read his new book
Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice
, which is pretty damned amazing as well, plus important.