Читать книгу Enemy Combatant - David Winner - Страница 6

Suddenly, it was 2:30 in the morning, and they were springing into action. Peter peed. Then furiously brushed his teeth until his cheeks got foamy and his gums hurt. He couldn’t offend American agents nor Muslim prisoners with halitosis.

Next was the pistol.

As Peter took out the retaining pin and got the cylinder, he heard the southern voice of the former marine who gave people tips at the gun range, reminding everyone to keep the trigger half-cocked while loading for safety’s sake. Once Peter had filled it with bullets and placed it back along with the retaining pin, his chest heaved with relief. Sarah was right about gun laws in America, and Peter had no idea what were like in Armenia. Except it didn’t make sense for him and Leonard to accept them when the soldiers at the smelter would abide by nothing at all.

They took the backpack and slipped quietly into the hallway, but rather than exit through the front door, which would lead them past the reception desk, likely to be populated despite the early hour, they found their way out through another exit that took them past the swimming pool around the side of the building into thick shrubbery, gravel and a pile of festering garbage.

The Lada’s noisy ignition jarred the morning silence. But in the middle of the bridge over the river that took them to the road, Leonard suddenly braked as if he were trying to get out of it after all.

He peered dubiously at the road.

“Which way?” he muttered pathetically.

He’d gotten them easily from the smelter back to the hotel but had no idea where to turn in the darkness.

Peter remembered that they had to head in general direction of Tbilisi. Along the way, a sign that neither of them remembered pointed toward the tiny road into the hills that would take them to the highway to Alaverdi.

They took a random right once they’d made it down from the hills, and after only a few minutes more saw a sign that said “Alaverdi 5km.”

Peter felt his apprehension evaporating. He was tossing his hesitation away. Disconcertingly confident, he flexed his muscles, felt for the pistol in his backpack and gazed down upon the town emerging below them.

Dusty and funky-smelling like a damaged old friend.

When Leonard braked the car and pulled it off to the side of the road, Peter bashed his fist on the glove compartment and demanded to know why he had stopped.

Trepidation gleaming on his sweaty face, Leonard stuck his hands in his pants pockets and pulled out a miniature bottle of vodka from the hotel minibar and chugged. Then he found a second one in the same place and handed it to Peter.

Who furiously frisked Leonard’s pockets but found no more.

One little bottle wouldn’t hurt them.

Peter downed it dutifully, and they pulled back onto the road. They drove slowly and stopped frequently. Short bursts of sound might not be as disruptive as long ones.

Their headlights revealed goats and chickens outside of the shacks that lined the road that had longer life expectancies than they did because bullets in the guns of guards outside the smelter didn’t have their names on them.

They passed rusting cars, abandoned and forlorn. Occasionally, they saw a light from a distant tenement Life existed on Planet Alaverdi despite the blight, the environmental catastrophe.

They rumbled to a stop about fifty yards away from the smelter. Leonard reached for his backpack, but Peter got the jump on him, removing the Beretta and roughly concealing it inside his shirt. Which made him look as if he had one malformed breast, the result of some botched surgery like the one that had killed his mother.

Once outside the car, they walked slowly and deliberately into the darkness, tentatively stepping forward, avoiding rocks and roots.

“Safety on?” whispered Leonard. Peter nodded. It was.

But as they crawled forward, clusters of abandoned vehicles came into focus, behind which enemies could be hiding. Thick old trees revealed themselves too, and in the distance, the windows of tenements. He flicked off the safety, so he could immediately fire.

It felt cold against his flesh. If he tripped, he might shoot himself

Once they got closer, they could see that there was just one van parked in front of the smelter, a skeleton staff just as they hoped.

Leonard diligently took a few pictures with his phone. Peter grabbed it from him and stared at the image on it. A vehicle parked in front of a fuzzy looking old structure. It could have been taken anywhere.

They had to actually penetrate the eerie old smelter. Its odor, even from fifty feet away, was musty, rotten, and Peter worried about uncovering older mysteries. It couldn’t have been functional for decades and might have been more recently used as a local dumping ground: stained mattresses, expired bodies.

The black van meant Americans were nearby, but no one seemed to notice himself and Leonard slipping quietly forward. It looked safe from the distance, unguarded, but each step got riskier.

And they kept stepping on things. Leonard’s foot landed on some kind of bottle, the sound of the braking of glass echoing hollowly around them. A few moments later when they were almost at the smelter, Peter’s foot landed painfully in what must have been a tiny animal hole. He bit his hand to keep himself quiet.

But the smelter was now upon them, and they heard no sounds to indicate that anyone had heard them approach.

Peter had expected some kind of barrier. Barbed wire. Or maybe an electrical current set up for intruders.

But lowering their shoulders and their heads, heand Leonard stepped inside the lower level of the smelter unmolested.

Moonlight lit the spindly columns supporting the rickety ceiling, but all that lay in back of them was obscured by shadows.

The dirt floor buckled as they moved across it, as they breathed in damp, leafy-smelling air.

They tramped on rocks, broken bottles and what felt like old metal tools. Insects whirred. Bats whistled.

About a minute later, Peter breathed in fresher air and felt with his feet that the floor had ended. They’d reached the other side. They hadn’t found anything. The smelter space was empty. But they couldn’t just give up and dash back to their car. An armored vehicle was parked outside. They couldn’t pretend that nothing was happening here.

Delicately, Peter raised his arm to see what the ceiling was like. Mud drifted into his hair and face. He had to spit it out of his mouth.

Leonard flipped open his phone and held a beam of light around them. Peter saw the ground below, then the second level of the smelter just above his head. A stepladder hung within easy reach.

Silver-colored, shiny, probably American-made.

Leonard gripped it and pulled himself up. The reappearance of the light from his phone let Peter know that he’d made it. When Peter grabbed the ladder a little too forcefully, it tipped sideways, but Leonard steadied it from above.

A moment later, they caught their breaths, safely up on the second level.

As they walked across it, Peter’s mind slipped away from him.

Fifteen months before, he’d been visiting his mother in Maryland. She had not yet been dying. One morning she brought him breakfast in bed – eggs and toast with too much butter.

Every weekend evening when they were first together, Peter and Sarah had gone to a Polish place on Greenpoint Avenue for pancakes and kielbasa. They still tasted it in the afternoon when they made love, no matter how hard they brushed their teeth. Peter tasted it now, mixed with mud.

What difference would his breath make if he never made it home. Nostalgia was dangerous. He bashed his chest with his fist to affix himself to the moment.

Then he felt something hit him: Leonard had kicked his shin to get his attention. Peter circled his surroundings until he saw it too, through the shadows.

A figure, a faint outline of a man in camouflage, stood a few steps ahead of them, holding a rifle. His hair was thick and dark.

Peter froze while his heart swelled inside his chest. The man would notice them soon if he hadn’t already.

Could he still turn back? Quietly set down the firearm, slip slowly and subtly to the other side of the smelter, tip toe down the stepladder and back out to the car? He couldn’t drive because of its manual transmission. He’d rely on his legs, probably make it back to the hotel by mid-morning. His courage was slipping away. His hands shook just slightly, and his teeth rattled against each other. Audibly. Backing out was what you’d expect from the web designer never even charged with a DUI or marijuana possession, the man on Manhattan Avenue who played with the fat cat at the local bodega, who hardly raised his voice if you got angry with him.

For a moment, then several moments more, Peter and Leonard were paralyzed, listening to an odd tinkling coming from right nearby, distant electric guitars. What sounded like heavy metal was plugged into the man’s ear.

Bopping his head to the music and yawning occasionally from night-shift fatigue, he wasn’t attuned to his surroundings.

Leonard exhaled. Sharply.

The man didn’t see them. They still had the advantage. Peter took the Beretta out from under his shirt, pointed it at the soldier, and jumped into a role tailor-made for the moment, Jack Lord from Hawaii Five-O, his fifth-grade idol.

“Drop it, motherfucker,” screamed Peter in a childish voice he barely recognized as his own, using language not permitted on seventies TV, “drop the fucking gun.”

The shadowy figure jolted, then swiveled towards him, rifle in hand.

The kid wasn’t listening. Maybe he didn’t speak English. Maybe he wasn’t American after all. He wasn’t dropping the gun but aiming it at them.

Then pop-pop-popping sounds reverberated through Peter’s body, nearly knocking him to the ground. The din of gun reports had been almost reassuring at the range. But these explosions pierced his ears, rattled his spine. Lethal firecrackers that could take your legs away, your groin.

But when Peter felt around his chest with his hand, it was dry. He wasn’t actually wounded.

The next sound, muffled and quiet, the soldier’s assault rifle landing on the ground, was followed by another loud report. Static electricity whizzed through Peter’s nerve endings, then faded, as his eyes fogged over with eyebrow sweat and tears.

Then cleared again. He could see Leonard and the soldier still standing, everyone accounted for. Peter tasted vomit. His heart bashed relentlessly against his chest wall, but he’d figured out what had happened. He had fired, not the soldier.

Who was somehow on his feet, neither dead nor mortally wounded. Peter hadn’t actually shot him. He’d shot over his head to scare him.

All the drills and dummy scenarios couldn’t have prepared the kid for an actual confrontation. He may only have worked security guard type jobs back home. He hadn’t thought anyone would penetrate this remote facility. He’d hadn’t expected a live gun to get stuck in his face.

Adrenaline tingled through Peter, sort of like cocaine, like steroids maybe, much better than the gun range. He’d actually subdued someone with his firearm. But once the feeling began to subside, its numbing effect dissipated. His body started shaking again, his insides felt inflamed. And his thoughts flew far away from him again.

“Dr. Wager 4:00 PM,” read the note Sarah left out for him one morning not long before she kicked him out. He should never have scrunched up the psychiatrist appointment reminder and shoved it in his back pocket. If he’d just been medicated properly, he wouldn’t have landed in this whole fucked up situation.

Another piece of food from the hotel restaurant careened up his esophagus onto the ground, just missing his feet.

Then the soldier found his voice.

“Fuck! What the fuck!? You don’t look like Arabs.”

He sounded Southern.

“Toss me your flashlight,” ordered Leonard, sounding calmer and more logical than he had in days. The man had been issued one. He needed to give it up.

When the soldier reached into his flak jacket for his flashlight and tossed it over, Leonard shone it on him. A stocky guy in his mid-twenties with thick black hair and Mayan-looking features that made him right at home in the smelter pyramid.

Then, shrugging his shoulders apologetically like he

knew he was being ludicrous, Leonard took his phone from

his pocket, skillfully worked his way through it one-handed

until he got to the camera mode and flashed it in the direction

of the soldier.

“Okay,” he told Peter, “got it.”

Except Leonard hadn’t talked like himself. He’d spoken in some amorphous foreign accent. Peter had spoken in some hyped-up of version of his usual voice, but Leonard had the right instinct. What sounded ridiculous was actually smart. Faking even a stupid accent could cloud their identity. When the soldier talked to his commanding officer, he might say the two men who’d showed up that evening didn’t sound like Americans.

“Put your hands over your head,” Peter heard himself command, another line from those grand old shows, Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, that he’d watched in reruns in the afternoons after middle school, spoken in his only foreign accent, a version of Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes that he’d faked when stoned in high school.

Leonard shone the flashlight into the soldier’s eyes as the soldier put up his hands. Tears crept down his cheeks. Two assailants with weird accents had come from nowhere. They’d fired bullets right near him and still pointed a gun in his direction.

“Where are you from?” Peter asked in that same accent, the normal question when you met a fellow American abroad.

“Richmond,” stuttered the soldier, “Richmond, Virginia.”

Virginia, Peter thought but did not say, I’m from Virginia.

For a moment, silence, beautiful and serene, filled the smelter. Peter gazed sympathetically at the weepy young kid. He meant no harm. Maybe he didn’t have many opportunities. He’d probably thought he’d been hired overseas as a glorified security guard but with a lot more than usual pay. Only after the endless background checks had been completed and he’d found himself in this terrible place could he have any idea what it entailed.

The silence was suddenly broken. Someone was speaking, the soldier.

“Don’t shoot,” he begged. “Please don’t shoot. I want to see my kids again. I’ve got two babies. You don’t want to kill their daddy.”

Only B-movie villains went around killing people’s daddies. Peter’s own mom and dad may not have done the best job raising him, but they couldn’t have expected this.

“Just do what we tell you,” said Peter, losing and regaining his German accent, “and we won’t hurt you.”

But the minute he’d finished his sentence, he got distracted again. Who was he? Where was he? He wasn’t doing his Klink voice on a Friday night out by Eric’s house.

He was years older, miles away, waving a Beretta some poor kid’s face.

The soldier sniffled, shook, and softly wept. A gust of cooler air breezed through, lowering the temperature a notch before disappearing, leaving it as hot as ever again.

They heard faint vibrations coming from somewhere deep inside the smelter, which might have been the settling of an old structure that did not appreciate the trampling of strangers.

Leonard pierced the silence.

“Ammo,” he demanded.

The soldier wiped his snotty nose with his sleeve and scratched his sweaty head.

“Ammo,” repeated Leonard. And sure enough the soldier reached inside his flak jacket and pulled out a packet of extra ammunition for the assault rifle in Leonard’s hands and gave it over to Leonard.

“And how many you got in there?” Leonard asked him.

The soldier gulped, grimaced. Peter knew what Leonard meant, but did the soldier? How many what?

The solder shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. He was supposed to take a bullet rather than reveal what lay hidden inside the smelter.

Peter pointed the Beretta at him and flicked off the safety. He wasn’t sure he could really pull the trigger. He was hoping the kid was scared enough to cooperate.

The soldier flinched and scratched his head again. Plaintively, he looked around him as if there were someone nearby who might help.

“Just one left,” he finally admitted, “just one at this level.”

Which might explain how they’d managed to penetrate the place. Security could be lax because they were closing it down. Maybe it was too dark and creepy even for them.

“Take us to him,” said Leonard. The soldier’s left eye twitched, the phrase “court martial” probably flashing through his head.

“It’s okay,” said Peter, gesturing with his gun. “We forced you.”

“We could have killed you,” Peter went on.

Which wasn’t true. At least, Peter didn’t think so. If the kid had stood his ground, they wouldn’t have actually shot him.

But they must have both looked so abnormal with their cheap Georgian clothes and dirty faces, the crazed looks inhabiting their bloodshot eyes, the crew cut just beginning to grow out on Leonard’s asymmetrical skull. They were not at all what the soldier expected. Not dark-skinned terrorists but a warped white and an Asian who seemed like serial killers.

Tension filling his face, the soldier pointed towards the darkness below the spindly columns, and Leonard shone the flashlight at the low dirt ceiling surrounded by flimsy beams.

Large sections had rotted away and might crash down upon them.

Their footsteps stirred more dust as they followed the soldier deeper inside the smelter. It got hotter too, steamier.

Tiny insects brushed intimately against Peter’s arms and face. One snuck into his eyelid, and he snuffed it out with his fingers.

After several more steps, the ground dipped sharply into the earth, but another shiny new ladder took them down.

Sinking to his knees, the soldier grabbed it and began to descend.

Dirt from the ceiling sunk into Peter’s head, sweat gushed from his armpits and his teeth chattered foolishly though he was hardly cold. The sweetly acrid Alaverdi air hurt to breathe.

A claustrophobic child back in Virginia, he’d screamed so stupidly inside Luray Caverns that the tour guide had taken him back up to the surface. That shame ambushed him again now, the chagrin on his father’s face.

His next few breaths didn’t yield enough air. Sweat, now from his hair, dropped down his forehead, clouding his vision. Tasting panic in his mouth, he bit his lower lip to force himself to keep it together and kept on biting until it bled.

Leonard handed Peter the assault rifle, so he could follow the soldier down the ladder with his hands free. Its weight and bulk strained Peter’s arms. Letting it rest on the ground, he shone his flashlight on Leonard, as Leonard slipped, step-by-step, into the earth.

Once he’d reached the bottom, Peter lowered the rifle to him along with the light.

Which Leonard shone back up the ladder, so Peter could safely descend.

The three of them wheezed heavily together deep inside the sweltering, sulfur-stinking earth. Then the soldier began to lead them slowly forward.

Taking the light from Leonard, Peter pointed it in front of them, waiting to see what would emerge from the shadows.

The cage was smaller than the one he’d seen in Georgia.

Four-feet by four-feet encased in thick, metal bars.

And a man stood right in the center as upright as the cage would allow staring curiously in their direction. An emaciated man with light brown skin, straight dark hair and a thick, matted beard. Once-chubby cheeks hung limply from his cut-up face. Deep bruises covered his left eye, blinking uncomfortably in the light. A gaping wound on his forehead dribbled blood down his face. His orange jump suit was dank and streaked with dirt.

Sniffling urgently through his broken nose, he made phlegmy attempts at words. Spitting mucus from his mouth, he tried again.

“What the fuck is this?” British, working class. “Who the fuck are you?”