Frozen Conflict (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  The first couple of times, that had required a couple of repetitions. After the second time he’d had to repeat a question, Javakhishvili had reached over and stomped on the man’s wounded foot, hard, eliciting a howl of pain.

  “Herc,” Brannigan had said reprovingly from the front seat. “Settle down.”

  “He’s a scumbag, Colonel,” Javakhishvili had replied, his eyes still fixed on their prisoner, who had been breathing rapidly and shallowly, staring at his wounded foot, his eyes wide. “He’d do worse to us, given the chance.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Brannigan had said. “He already knows that if he crosses us, he’s a dead man. That’s enough.”

  “You afraid I’m enjoying his pain a little too much?” Javakhishvili had asked with a crooked grin.

  “Put plainly, yeah,” Brannigan had said. There had been no humor in his voice, and the smile had faded from Javakhishvili’s face. Brannigan had jerked a thumb at Wade, who had been sitting behind Javakhishvili and the wounded mobster. “Wade’s a borderline sociopath, but I trust him because he’s demonstrated that he’s got the discipline to keep it under control, and he shares the code. He might not always agree with it, but he knows how I do business, and he follows along. You, I don’t know so well. And I don’t know if I can trust you all the way yet.”

  “And if we can’t trust you…” Wade had let the sentence trail off, the implications obvious.

  Javakhishvili had looked from Brannigan to Wade, then around at the others in the van. Flanagan had been driving, and had kept his eyes on the road. Wade and Bianco had just watched him coolly.

  The Georgian medic had been a little bit less quick to hurt their prisoner after that.

  Now, as they entered Rezina, driving past an old Orthodox church flanked by blocky, Soviet-era high-rises, Brannigan turned in his seat to look at the mobster. The man was looking pale and ragged, his face drawn and his eyes bloodshot and surrounded by dark circles. He was pretty sure that Javakhishvili had bound up the wound in the man’s ankle well enough that he wasn’t at risk of bleeding to death, but he’d had a rough night, even after they’d stopped alongside the road in the woods to get a little bit of rest. It had only been a couple of hours’ worth, and none of them had managed to sleep the entire time, due to the necessity of keeping a watch, but it had been something.

  “How strict is the border crossing?” he asked.

  Javakhishvili translated. The prisoner answered quickly; his reluctance to talk had been thoroughly beaten out of him by then.

  “He says that the Moldovans don’t really care,” Javakhishvili translated. “They’ve got security forces on the bridge, but they don’t recognize Transnistria as being independent, so they treat it as if you’re just going from place to place in the same country. The Transnistrians might give us some hassle, though. He says that there’s a checkpoint on the far side of the bridge.”

  “How thorough are the Transnistrian entry guards?” Brannigan asked.

  “He says that as long as the ‘taxes’ get paid, they’re fairly lax,” was the reply.

  “You think he’s telling the truth?” Brannigan asked.

  Javakhishvili watched their prisoner with hooded eyes for a long moment before answering. “I think it’s mostly the truth,” he said. “He’s nervous, though.”

  They were going around a traffic circle. The river was close, the bridge just visible between the naked trees and scattering of snow-blanketed houses in front of them. Brannigan turned around in his seat and stared the prisoner down, himself. At a hulking six feet, four inches, almost all of it muscle, and with hard, gray eyes above his thick, graying handlebar, he knew he could be plenty intimidating. “Tell him that you’re going to have the Tokarev on him the entire time. I know he and his buddies probably have an arrangement with the Transnistrians; there never was a Soviet who didn’t also have gangster sympathies. I don’t care, as long as he gets us through. He tries to burn us, and he’s going to be the first one to die. Make sure he understands that.”

  Javakhishvili spoke softly in Russian, while the prisoner looked Brannigan in the eyes. There was fear there, sure enough. He knew that Brannigan wasn’t bluffing, and that Javakhishvili wouldn’t hesitate to follow through. He nodded jerkily, and Brannigan turned back forward. They were coming up on the bridge quickly. “Everybody else, hide the weapons as best you can,” he said. “We’re just tourists.”

  He knew that that was going to be a hard sell. Most tour groups weren’t made up of exclusively military-age males, particularly not this kind of rough-looking crew. Except for Curtis and Gomez, they blended a lot better than they might have in the Middle East or Asia, but they were still less than “low profile” if somebody was really looking.

  He hoped that the Transnistrian border guards were greedy enough not to look too closely. If they decided to search the vans, they were made. But none of them were willing to just ditch the weapons, not after the last few hours.

  Since Flanagan was driving, Brannigan reached over and grabbed the PP-2000, wrapping it in a spare shirt and shoving it under his seat as best he could. Fortunately, the little 9mm submachinegun was pretty compact, so it fit without too much trouble. He could hear Wade cursing under his breath as he tried to get the Krinkov hidden.

  Javakhishvili, his eyes narrowed, shot a question at their prisoner. The man hesitated, and the doc moved his boot toward the man’s wounded foot again. It was subtle, but the message was there. The gangster spoke quickly. Javakhishvili nodded and patted him on the shoulder.

  “He says there should be a compartment underneath the floor, if you pull up the carpet,” he said. “You might have to unload the weapon, but it should fit.”

  Wade fumbled around in the dimness for a bit, then grunted. “Well, what do you know?” He lifted his head over the seats. “You want to pass me Joe’s subgun, Colonel?” he said. “I think I can fit it in here.”

  Brannigan did so, passing the PP-2000 to Javakhishvili, who passed it with one hand, the other still on the Tokarev that was still pointed at their prisoner. “Certain advantages to using criminally-owned vehicles,” he commented.

  “No kidding,” Wade said, as the PP-2000 disappeared into the hole in the floorboards, and was then covered over. “We should let the guys behind us know.”

  They had two cheap, burner cell phones that they’d bought in Chisinau, and Brannigan pulled his out. There wasn’t a lot of signal, but there should be enough.

  “Roger?” he said when Hancock picked up, “check the floor in the back of the van. This one has a smuggling compartment, and we’re hiding the weapons in there.” When Hancock gave him an affirmative reply, suggesting that they’d already found it, he hung up. They were almost to the bridge.

  The road curved around a white stone statue just before the bridge itself. There was no checkpoint on the Moldovan bank, though there was a police car parked on the side of the road, with two heavily-bundled up policemen inside. They hardly glanced at the two vans as they drove past, absorbed in their conversation and trying to eke as much warmth out of the Lada’s heater as possible. The winter weather was making them turtle, and Brannigan was glad of it, as he spared a short glance at them but avoided staring. Show them the same inattention, and they shouldn’t notice anything amiss.

  Then they were rolling across the bridge, going over the Dniester River and toward the militarized zone.

  The high-rises on the east bank of the river were darker gray shapes in the morning snow. The storm hadn’t lifted, but the snowfall had been coming and going all night. Below, under the bridge, the Dniester was partially frozen, the ice extending several meters out before giving way to the black water.

  The checkpoint on the Transnistrian side of the bridge wasn’t a permanent structure, as Brannigan had halfway been expecting. There weren’t barriers set up, but there was an old BTR-60 sitting on the side of the road, its turret aimed down the bridge, and half a dozen soldiers bundled up in Soviet-era woodland camouflage, flak
jackets, and blue helmets with “MC” in yellow on them were standing near a fire barrel, trying to keep warm.

  As the vans came out of the drifting snowfall, the soldiers straightened, looking toward them. Steam was pouring from the BTR’s exhaust; it was running, which meant the turret was probably manned and the weapon live.

  One of the soldiers, his AKM slung in front of him, stepped out into the road, one gloved hand on his rifle’s firing control, and held out the other to signal them to halt. Flanagan obligingly braked, slowing the off-road van and bringing it to a halt a few meters in front of the soldier.

  The prisoner said something softly in Russian. “He says that they’re a mix of Transnistrian and Russian Federation troops,” Javakhishvili said. “The Russians are supposedly here as ‘peacekeepers’ but they’ve been actively supporting the Transnistrians since ’92.”

  The other van stopped behind them, and the soldiers started to drift toward them, hands on their weapons. The BTR-60’s turret wasn’t pointed directly at them, but it was definitely close enough.

  “Everybody just stay cool,” Brannigan said quietly. “Get your passports out. We’re just tourists.”

  The man who had stopped them stayed where he was, but another man, barrel-chested and red-nosed, came to the driver’s window and knocked impatiently. Flanagan rolled the window down, and a blast of cold air came inside the van at the same time.

  “Ty kuda?” the soldier asked. He sounded bored and suspicious, all at the same time.

  Javakhishvili leaned forward and spoke at some length. Brannigan didn’t speak Russian, but he gathered that the Georgian was explaining that they were tourists, doing a big loop through Eastern Europe. They’d decided to see Transnistria because they’d heard so much about it.

  The soldier wasn’t looking at Javakhishvili as he listened. Instead, he was peering at each of the men in the van, his face blank. Brannigan looked back at him with a bland, harmless expression. At least, he hoped that it looked harmless.

  The soldier said something else in Russian, waving toward a turnoff on the side of the road. Brannigan tensed, and he felt the rest of the men inside do the same. It looked like a search pit. If they got a thorough going-over, was the compartment under the floorboards concealed enough?

  But there was nothing else to do, especially not with that BTR and its 14.5mm KPVT sitting right there. The rounds that gun fired were the size of a man’s thumb, and could easily go through the vans long-ways.

  They pulled up and another soldier knocked on the side door. Javakhishvili obligingly slid it open, even as he shoved the Tokarev down between the seat cushions behind him. This could get hairy. If their prisoner tried to make a grab for it…

  “Passporta,” the soldier grunted. Wade and Bianco handed theirs forward, while Brannigan handed his and Flanagan’s back.

  As he did so, Brannigan glanced at the wounded mobster and his blood turned to ice. The man probably didn’t have one, or else didn’t have it with him. And with him sitting there with a bloody shoe…

  But their prisoner pulled a Ukrainian passport out of his pocket and handed it to Javakhishvili. Herc looked at it a second, shooting the man a warning glance as he did so. If this turned out to be a double-cross, his look promised, he was going to make sure the man paid for it.

  Keeping his face carefully composed, Javakhishvili turned and handed the soldier the stack of passports. All of them, except for the gangster’s, had been stamped in Chisinau.

  They waited, silent and tense, trying to look nonchalant and unworried, while the soldier glanced over their passports, then looked up at Javakhishvili. He said something in Russian, and Javakhishvili turned to Bianco.

  “He says the entry stamps are twenty-five euros each,” he reported. Bianco dug into his backpack without comment. Each of them had a share of the discretionary cash that Brannigan had been sure to get out of Guildenhall before they’d left. In short order, he had the required amount in brightly-colored euro notes, which Javakhishvili handed over.

  The soldier pocketed the money, then took their passports back to a shack nearby, disappearing inside.

  Javakhishvili asked their prisoner something. Brannigan looked over his shoulder at them.

  “He says there’s usually no problem, as long as the payments are right,” Javakhishvili said. “Especially for tour groups.”

  “We don’t exactly look like much of a tour group,” Wade muttered. “More like a Mafiya hit squad.”

  “We’ve got an advantage with Curtis and Gomez, though,” Javakhishvili pointed out. “Blacks and Hispanics aren’t common around here, so they’ll help us look like tourists.”

  They lapsed into silence as they waited. The snow continued to sift down out of the sky, melting against the windshield, though some of it was starting to pile up on the side windows. It wasn’t especially warm inside the van, particularly not with the side door open.

  They seemed to wait a long time. “Does it usually take this long?” Bianco asked. When Javakhishvili translated, their prisoner just shrugged. Wade was staring hard at the back of the man’s head; he clearly didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him.

  Brannigan turned to study the wounded mobster. The man was still clearly in pain, and just as clearly nervous, but he was holding things together, and didn’t seem inclined to start screaming bloody murder. The fact that Javakhishvili’s hand was back out of sight, doubtless on the Tokarev’s grip, probably had something to do with that.

  He glanced out the window again. The soldiers were back around their burn barrel, but they were watching them. The BTR continued to idle, the big KPVT still not quite aimed at them, but not exactly pointed elsewhere, either.

  It could all go very wrong in the next few minutes. All they could do was wait.

  ***

  They’d probably been sitting there for most of an hour when the door to the shack opened again, at the same time a canvas-topped UAZ-469 pulled up and a man who was clearly an officer got out. Dressed in a camouflage field jacket with a fleece collar and elaborate shoulder boards, he was wearing a stereotypical Russian fur hat instead of a helmet. He joined the helmeted soldier and walked toward the vans.

  At the door, he peered inside, studying each man’s face for a moment. He asked a question in Russian. Javakhishvili inclined his head toward their prisoner, who immediately spoke up, prompting a nod from the Transnistrian officer. At least, Brannigan thought he was Transnistrian; he was pretty sure the Russian Federation Ground Forces had gone to the double-eagle branch insignia, rather than the red star surrounded by leaf clusters that this guy had on his hat.

  The officer asked several more questions, watching each of the men in the van as he listened to the answers. Javakhishvili was outwardly calm, though Brannigan could see him suppressing the urge to glare at their prisoner.

  Nodding, the officer continued to study the lot of them. Then he spoke at some length, getting a conciliatory-sounding response from Javakhishvili. Finally, the officer held out a hand to the soldier next to him, who handed him the stack of passports. He handed them in through the door with a final admonishment, then stepped back.

  Javakhishvili took the passports, waved his hand with a cheerful, “Do svidanya!” and slid the side door closed. The officer motioned to the soldiers, who waved them out of the search pit, as Javakhishvili let out a long, shuddering sigh and started handing the passports back.

  “What was that all about?” Wade asked, accepting his.

  “He wanted to know who our guide was,” Javakhishvili explained. “Our new friend here was the only one who could fill that role, and fortunately for him, he played along. But they wanted to know exactly where we were going and when. I think they’re still suspicious. Especially since he warned us to stay out of trouble, and that we’ll be the focus of some attention. It seems there was some trouble here in Ribnitza not long ago, and there have been a lot of Westerners coming in since then.”

  Brannigan frowned, and not only at the
news. He was watching the rear-view mirror, and saw the officer watching them depart, lifting a radio to his lips.

  “Lots of Westerners,” Flanagan mused as he drove. “You think maybe our friends from the GOPLAT are involved?”

  “It’s possible,” Brannigan said, still watching the checkpoint in the mirror. “I’m still not convinced that we did a clean sweep taking out that team.” In fact, he knew that there was no way it was a clean sweep. There were too many resources backing the attacks. The men they’d killed had only been the attack dogs, not the whole group. Whoever was behind it was still out there, which was the whole reason they were in Transnistria in the first place.

  “Well, didn’t Dalca, or Guildenhall, or whoever, say that somebody else was already after this Codreanu guy?” Flanagan asked. “What if they’re trying to shut him up, if he is the one who sold them the sub?”

  “It’s possible,” Brannigan said absently. He dialed Hancock’s burner phone again. Everything on the screen was in Romanian, but he was able to navigate it well enough. When Hancock answered, he spoke loudly enough to make sure that the rest of the men in the van could hear. “That officer was on the radio as we left, and he was talking about more Westerners and some shooting trouble,” he said. “Keep your eyes open; I expect that we’re going to be the target of some Russian and Transnistrian surveillance. If anyone looks like they’re taking an undue interest, let us know.”

  As soon as Hancock acknowledged, he hung up. Brannigan sat in the passenger seat of the UAZ van, watching the snow-blanketed city as they hit another traffic circle. There were a few vehicles on the streets, mostly older Russian models. Transnistria was clearly even poorer than Moldova.

  He came to a decision. They would be scrutinized for a while; they had to treat this place like the Soviet Socialist Republic that it was, internationally recognized or not. Just going straight to whatever cache their prisoner had in mind wasn’t going to work out. He twisted around in his seat and looked at Javakhishvili and the wounded gangster. “Well, we’re going to have to kill some time,” he said. “What sights are there to see in Ribnitza?”