Frozen Conflict (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  Chapter 10

  Polkovnik Beksryostnov walked into his apartment to find, to his irritation and alarm, that Ignatiev was inside, waiting for him. The lumbering Russian officer glowered at his unwelcome Spetsnaz guest, then squinted down at the door handle. There weren’t any scratches on it, but who knew what kind of training these Spetsnaz bastards got? And the locks in this miserable slice of a breakaway republic certainly weren’t of the best quality.

  Ignatiev smiled as he watched Beksryostnov’s inspection, the expression only widening as the Polkovnik slammed the door in frustration and started to shoulder out of his thick coat. “What are you doing here?” Beksryostnov demanded. “And how did you get in here in the first place?”

  Ignatiev held up a key. “Your landlady is lonely, and Madulin likes his women hefty.” He palmed the key. “It wasn’t hard.”

  “That is a major security breach,” Beksryostnov began but Ignatiev waved him off.

  “It is minor, Polkovnik Beksryostnov,” he said. “A little prank, that is all. You still outrank me, though my orders supersede yours for the moment.” He tossed Beksryostnov the key, and the fat Polkovnik scrambled to catch it instead of letting it fall to the threadbare rug under his boots. “We needed to talk in private,” Ignatiev continued, sobering.

  “My office is private,” Beksryostnov insisted, but Ignatiev shook his head.

  “Not private enough for this conversation,” he said. He stood, lifting a bottle of Kvint out of the shopping bag sitting next to the chair. “Shall we?”

  Beksryostnov grunted and nodded. It was still early afternoon, but to the commander of the Russian peacekeepers in Transnistria, there was no time that was too early for a drink. Which was something he suspected Ignatiev already knew, and he hated the man even more for it.

  Still, he got down two glasses, and Ignatiev poured the Transnistrian cognac into them before putting the bottle down on the table and lifting his own glass. They drank.

  “Several nights ago, someone attempted to storm a dacha on the bank of the Dniester,” Ignatiev said, sitting back down. “I have reliable information that the dacha belongs to Eugen Codreanu, the black-market arms dealer. Yes, I know about him,” he said, nodding. “MGB has done some business with him in the past, and saw the need to finally share that with GRU prior to this mission. He has been of some use in supplying the ‘volunteers’ in Syria and Donbass over the last few years. But now it appears that someone is trying to kill him.” He stared at Beksryostnov with the cold, unblinking stare of a snake. “I know that he has not attempted to leave the dacha since then. And your intelligence section reported to me that there have been several groups of Westerners crossing into Transnistria over the last few days, significantly all composed of adult men, without a single woman among them. Of course, they all maintain that they are tourists.”

  He leaned forward. “I need to know everything about the security situation here, Polkovnik,” he said. “Are your men keeping an eye on these Westerners?”

  “The Transnistrians are,” Beksryostnov said, leaning back in his own chair with an alarming creak. “None of my men are trained in that sort of surveillance.”

  “Is there extra security around Codreanu’s dacha at all?” Ignatiev asked.

  “There are a few extra Transnistrian Army patrols since the attack,” was the answer, “but most of the security is provided by Codreanu’s own people. They are all Romanians, and not very popular here. If not for the supplies he has provided for the Transnistrian Army, he would probably have been forced out of the country by now.”

  Ignatiev nodded, looking pensive. “Would the Transnistrians share their surveillance take with you?” he asked.

  Beksryostnov shrugged. “I expect so. We are here to lend our support to the PMR, and they know it.”

  Ignatiev nodded again. It was the truth; the Transnistrians wanted to be a part of the Russian Federation, and the Russians had a use for a military presence inside the breakaway republic, if only to provide a deterrent to Moldova’s ambitions to join the European Union. Moldova had been a Soviet State, once upon a time, and while the Romanian Moldovans outnumbered the Slavic Transnistrians by a factor of six, no impoverished country of three million people really wanted to piss off the Russian Federation.

  Which factors, Beksryostnov suspected, had a lot to do with just what Ignatiev and his men were doing there. There had been a great deal of disagreement in the Kremlin about just how to handle Transnistria, given that the wars in Syria and Ukraine were dragging on, and Ukraine was pushing back, often closing its airspace to Russian aircraft. Aside from the Dniester River, Transnistria was landlocked, making supplying a military force there difficult. Which was something that had prevented full Transnistrian independence for years.

  “Volunteers” like Ignatiev and his men didn’t show up anywhere just for their own amusement. He suspected that the Kremlin had come to a decision regarding what to do about Transnistria.

  “I need you to contact your counterparts with the Transnistrians,” Ignatiev said, pouring another pair of drinks, “and ask them to pull back all but the barest surveillance on the Westerners. And scale down the patrols near Codreanu’s dacha to normal levels.”

  Beksryostnov accepted the proffered glass of Kvint with a raised eyebrow. “He will be vulnerable if they try again,” he observed, before tossing the liquor back.

  “True enough,” Ignatiev said, taking a hefty swallow himself. “But I have my reasons. And Codreanu has become…unreliable of late. You don’t need to know all the details, but he is no longer in favor with the MGB or GRU. Call it a poor choice in clients.”

  Beksryostnov nodded with a sigh, as he looked through his glass. It had been quiet in Ribnitza for the last couple of years. There had been the usual crime, and even an occasional shooting; another Moldovan teenager had tried to run a checkpoint only the last year, and had been killed by jumpy border guards. Tensions had been slowly ratcheting up. But the war had been in ’92, and while everyone still acted like it could start up again at any time, he didn’t think that anyone really expected it to.

  That seemed like it was all about to change. Oh, well, he was due to retire soon. And if he cooperated with this efficient young “volunteer,” he might get a few more perks with his retirement than he’d been necessarily anticipating.

  “I will speak with Generàl Nekrasov,” he said. “I am sure he will eventually see things your way.” Ignatiev smiled thinly and held up the bottle. Beksryostnov nodded with a smile and held out his glass.

  ***

  “Were you expecting another team?”

  Flint looked up at him. Redrum hoped he was doing a good job of disguising his hatred for the man. He’d hoped and prayed that the Board wouldn’t see fit to send Flint, especially after the shambles that the Tourmaline-Delta op had turned into, but they had, anyway. Somebody had an unshakeable faith in the big psychopath.

  Redrum was a murderer and a generally amoral borderline sociopath, but Flint scared him. He knew a few things about the man’s history, and the chain of dead bodies he’d left behind him.

  Not all of them had been targets.

  “No,” Flint said with a frown, managing to make that one-syllable word express just how much he thought Redrum was a dumbass for even asking the question. “Why?” There was a sudden glint of suspicion in his eye.

  “Because one of our contacts, that has friends with the Army, says that two vans full of big dudes who looked like meat-eaters came across the bridge from Rezina this morning,” Redrum said. The contact in particular was a hooker who regularly serviced the Transnistrian and Russian soldiers in Ribnitza. With what Redrum and his team were paying her, she’d be able to disappear into Romania after they left.

  Though, if she tried to run before they left, she’d been informed quite clearly, they’d hunt her down and kill her.

  Flint’s oddly intense eyes narrowed. “They’re not ours,” he said. “My team was supposed to be it.”

&nbs
p; “Somebody else is after Codreanu,” Redrum said.

  “You seem awfully certain of that,” Flint said. “Nobody knows who we are, much less that he had dealings with us.”

  “That you know of,” Redrum replied tiredly. “The fact of the matter is, somebody who looks a lot like Western SOF guys just came across the river. They ain’t the Russians; the Little Green Men are already here. They ain’t our guys. That tells me that they’re a complication for our op.”

  “Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t,” Flint said, standing up and stretching. He’d been jamming magazines for his own M21. He was carrying a PL-15 on his hip, instead of the FK BRNO Field Pistol that he’d adopted as his signature. Getting that in had been a no-go, and he hadn’t stopped bitching about it since he’d arrived. “Maybe they’re CIA. Maybe they heard about the Russkis showing up and sent in some dudes to watch them. Doesn’t mean that they’re involved with our op at all.”

  He grinned. It was a feral, shark-like expression. “And if they are, we kill them along with Codreanu’s goons. Easy day.”

  Redrum didn’t comment. It rarely did any good with Flint, anyway. He wasn’t sure how much he believed it. They were in a delicate position in Transnistria, anyway. He’d had to drop three of his guys to play tourist and keep the Transnistrian security forces busy, while the rest of them went hunting and tried to find the right way to get past the Transnistrian Army patrols around Codreanu’s dacha once go time came around again. Even if these newcomers had nothing to do with his op, they could still screw things up.

  Flint clapped him on the shoulder. It was a comradely gesture, but coming from Flint, Redrum had to suppress a shudder. There was just something off about the guy. “Look at it this way,” Flint said. “If they’re here, they’re probably making the locals nervous, just like we did. That means the locals will want to keep eyes on them, which means fewer surveillance worker bees watching us. Win-win. Even more so if they get in our way and we get to kill them.”

  “Like the last bunch that got in your way, Flint?” Redrum asked quietly.

  Flint’s face went cold and hard, and he stepped back from Redrum, his hand suddenly poised over the butt of his PL-15. But Redrum already had his hand on his own pistol, and Flint’s eyes suddenly flicked down and noticed. When he looked up, there was something ugly and hate-filled in his gaze.

  Why the fuck did you say that, idiot? This is the last man on the planet that you really want to piss off. He knew that he had to watch his back around Flint, anyway, but now he’d made it worse.

  Flint visibly forced himself to relax, taking his hand away from his pistol. He smiled, though the expression didn’t come anywhere near his eyes. He put his arm around Redrum’s shoulders. “Those assholes got lucky that time, and they still lost,” he said. “I’m still here.” Redrum looked into the other man’s soulless eyes and tried really hard not to shiver. “I ain’t worried.”

  ***

  It turned out that there really wasn’t much in the way of sightseeing to do in Ribnitza. The place was somewhat scenic, but the primary economic center of the city was the massive steelworks that took up most of the northeastern quarter, not tourism. They still made a valiant attempt at it, trying not to look too suspicious and watchful, even as they scanned for anyone who might be giving them a bit too much attention.

  There was only so much they could do in town, however, and it was clear that the local security forces were keeping an eye on them. Brannigan thought that he might have seen one or two others that weren’t in uniform but were still clearly watching them.

  Finally, he asked their reluctant guide if there was anything to see out in the country, if only to get away from the city and their watchers for a while, as well as burn some more time. The man wasn’t much of a tour guide, but he finally suggested that they might try driving the road along the river, since it seemed like something that tourists would do.

  So, the two vans ended up trundling up the M4 highway, along the east bank of the Dniester. Winter held the countryside locked in snow, ice, and slush. The highway was wet and slushy, but the UAZ vans handled the snow fairly well, to no one’s particular surprise. They were off-road vehicles designed in Russia, after all. They might be inelegant, but they were workhorses.

  They went all the way up to Belochi before turning around. Their minders seemed to have left them alone shortly after they left the outskirts of Saratei, just north of Ribnitza itself. That had been a bit surprising, but Flanagan had suggested that the Transnistrians only had so much in the way of resources.

  By the time they finally got back down to the outskirts of Ribnitza, it was starting to get dark again. The snow had stopped falling, but the sky was still a leaden gray above the uniform white blanket covering the fields. That blanket started getting a little dingy the closer they got to the steelworks and rail yards.

  Dmitri—a name that the original Khadarkh crew seemed to find simultaneously amusing and ominous—guided them to a warehouse back in the trees near the steelworks. The mostly-clear road turned to snow- and slush-covered dirt as they turned in toward the fence and the gate leading to the corrugated tin structure. The warehouse and a couple more outbuildings were set on the edges of an open dirt parking lot, backed by thick stands of trees. A single light post stood near the road, but it was currently out. There were several cars, utility trucks, and vans parked in the lot, but no sign of movement or activity. The place looked closed up and deserted.

  Flanagan parked just outside the gate, and Javakhishvili asked Dmitri a question. “He says that it’s a combination lock on the fence, and he knows the combo,” Javakhishvili said. “We’ll go open it up, and we can pull the vans in.”

  “A lot of vehicles parked in here,” Wade commented. He’d pulled the compartment in the floor open, and had the Krinkov lying across his lap.

  “He says that only a couple of them actually run,” Herc said. “The rest are essentially camouflage. This place is a glorified junkyard.”

  Brannigan reflected that that was probably the case with a lot of Transnistria. The place still had to function, on some level, but as a wannabe Soviet state, it probably didn’t function all that well.

  “He says he doesn’t think that any of the other guys are going to be coming here,” Javakhishvili continued. “He doesn’t know of any movement due through this site for another week.”

  “He doesn’t think,” Wade repeated, his words laden with implicit threat. Dmitri looked over the seat back at him, and then quickly looked away. Dmitri might not speak English, but he understood Wade’s tone. More, he understood the promise in the hostile stare pointed at him above the Krinkov.

  “Let’s go,” Brannigan said quietly. “Time’s a-wasting.”

  We’ve already been on the ground for over two days. The bad guys are bound to make another try at Codreanu soon. Worse, Codreanu might finally gain enough intestinal fortitude to make another break for it. I’m sure that if he does, he’s going to disappear, vanish into thin air like smoke. If he’s feeling threatened, he’s going to crawl down a hole and pull it in after him, and there goes our chance to find out who his clients are.

  Javakhisvhili, the Tokarev now openly in his hand, slid the side door open and backed out, keeping the pistol on Dmitri. Once he was on the snowy ground, he waved with his off hand for their prisoner to come to him.

  Looking nervous and shifty, Dmitri hitched himself along the seat and lowered himself gingerly to the ground, as Javakhishvili moved away from the van, keeping just out of arm’s reach, still covering him with the Tok. Without offering to support him like he had before, he waved Dmitri toward the gate.

  Hunching his shoulders against the cold, Dmitri shuffled and limped toward the fence, reaching for the padlock hanging on its chain. He fumbled with the lock for a few moments, and it finally clicked open, the chain falling away with a metallic rattle that seemed echoingly loud in the snow-muffled quiet, even over the rumble of traffic not far away, and the click and roar of a
train on the tracks to the north of them.

  Javakhishvili didn’t step forward to help as Dmitri started to push the gate open. The mobster had the good sense not to complain about it; he knew full well by that time where he stood and seemed to have reached a sullen sort of acceptance.

  What are we going to do with him once we’ve got the weapons? We can’t exactly take him along with us. Brannigan stroked his handlebar, thinking. He knew what Wade would suggest, and Javakhishvili would probably eagerly agree. Jenkins probably would, too. They’d agree that they should just shoot him, or garrote him, and leave him in a shadowed corner of the warehouse.

  I’ve never killed a man in cold blood, and I have no intention of starting now. He knew the dangers involved, and that their current situation was tenuous, at best. Killing the prisoner would be the pragmatic thing to do. But he knew that he’d have to live with the crime afterward. Crossing foreign borders without authorization and engaging in irregular combat operations was one thing. Cold-blooded murder was something else.

  He watched Dmitri lean against the gate as Flanagan put the van back in gear and rolled forward into the yard. At the very least, we have to put him out of commission long enough that we can break contact without his buddies who finally find him knowing where we’re going. It’s a risk, but this whole op is a risk.

  Once both vans were inside the fence, their engines idling but lights doused, Dmitri closed the gate again. He started to re-lock the chain, but Javakhishvili stopped him with a sharp word. The gangster looked like he was going to object, but Herc’s stare and the aimed Tokarev didn’t brook argument. They weren’t going to trap themselves inside. Muttering under his breath, Dmitri limped toward the warehouse, as the rest of the Blackhearts got out of the vans, their meager assortment of weapons in their hands.