Zrada

by Lance Charnes

  Smoke scoured her lungs, watered her eyes. Her shoulders screamed.

  The reservoir at Osykove’s eastern end slid by on her right. She glanced to her left: Russian armor streamed west half a kilometer away. Trying to cut them off. Trying to kill them.

  Please, God. Help me get these poor men home. Please don’t leave us out here to die…

  Houses to her left hid her from the Russian tanks. She was safe for a moment.

  The lorry ahead of her suddenly veered to the left, blasted through a block wall, skimmed a massive tree and flipped on its side. Wounded men spilled out the back like sacks of wheat as she flashed by.

  Then with a burst of searing agony, her world went black.

  Chapter 28

  FRIDAY, 13 MAY

  Carson holds Galina, patting her back, repeating “Let it out, let it out” as Galina bawls into her shoulder. Carson’s never been good at dealing with crying people. When she was substitute mom for her three younger brothers, they rarely if ever let anyone see them cry. She never could. It was more a wolf pack than a family.

  So she rocks Galina and feels her back spasm with each sob and tries to dredge up something to say that isn’t impossibly sappy or cliché or stupid. Nothing comes to her.

  Galina eventually pulls away. Her face’s red and puckered, her tears running down her lips and chin. She grabs a rag she’d transferred from the Slavuta to the Octavia’s glove box, wipes her face, blows. Her shoulders still shudder. “Sorry.” Her voice is tiny, almost lost.

  “Don’t be. You needed that.”

  She huddles in on herself, her hands squeezed between her thighs. She stares across the highway at a big, leafy tree in front of a quiet farm compound, unremarkable except for the huge barkless gouge on the eastern side of its trunk. “I ran into that tree.”

  “You were hit?”

  “Yes. There was a sniper. His bullet went through my helmet and cut across here.” She runs her right index finger from front to back along the right side of her head above her ear. “Just a little bit over and…” A mammoth sob hits her so hard, Carson’s afraid it’s the prelude to a barf. “I fell over on the seat. He checked on me. Or someone did. I guess he thought I was dead. There was so much blood.” Her face dissolves again. “They were with the Makiivka Brigade. They shot…shot the wounded men…in my lorry…”

  Carson collects her and lends her an absorbent shoulder again. She’d been through some bad times, but nothing like this. How would I make it through this? Would I be a drunk by now? Eat a bullet? She strokes Galina’s hair. Who’d pat my back? Bo, maybe—her older brother Boris—but even he’s a little scared of her.

  Galina cries herself out. She slumps in the driver’s seat, staring at the green winged-arrow logo in the steering wheel’s hub, looking like she shrank in the wash.

  “How’d you get away?”

  “I woke up and wandered.” Galina snuffles. “A nice older couple found me and took me to their home. He used to be an animal doctor. He sewed my head together. When the ‘authorities’ came–”

  “‘Authorities’?”

  “The DNR so-called government.” She sneers the word. “Criminals. Always with their hands out. They make Kyiv look honest. The people who rescued me, they told the gangsters I was their daughter and I was sick. I stayed with them for a month. Then they took me back to our farm.”

  Carson waits in case there’s more, but there isn’t. “Want to visit them? Since we’re here?”

  “I would like to.” She points back the way they’d come. “They live back there. They said it’s too dangerous to come. People talk. Maybe someday…”

  “What about Bohdan?”

  A wince. “For a year and a half, I thought he was dead. Then I learned he was captured.” Her voice’s small and airless again.

  “By the Russians?”

  “By the militia. He was healthy, so they didn’t shoot him.” Galina looks around them. Is she seeing it the way it is or the way it was? “They gave him to the ‘authorities.’ They sold him and the other prisoners to a gangster who runs a labor camp in Shakhtarsk. A man came to our farm in February with a picture of Bohdan. He looked so thin, so old. The man said I have to pay two hundred hryvnia every month if I want them to feed him. I can have him back for five thousand euro.” For the first time since she stomped the brakes, Galina focuses on Carson. She looks as lost as she sounds. “Where do I get that much money? I thought about selling the farm. But who would buy it? And then what would we do?”

  “Then I came along.” That explains why she took the job: desperation. “So, five thousand gets him out. What’s the other six thousand for?”

  Galina looks away. Her hands twist and tangle in her lap. “To leave.” It’s almost a whisper. “Bohdan has a cousin in Krakow. He says it’s very nice. There’s work. Their language is like ours.”

  “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since we met.”

  Galina lets out a snuffle that could be a laugh. “I hate the idea. I hate letting these tarhany win. I hate”—she waves out the windshield—“that all this was for nothing.” Her voice hardens. “We did the hard fighting in Ilovaisk. Us, not the army. We won. They didn’t support us, they didn’t follow up. They left us to the Russians, us and the other National Guard units. It was…zrada.”

  “What?”

  “Zrada. Um…izmena.” The Russian word for betrayal. “Just like what this Stepaniak did to you. What the ‘authorities’ do to us. What the Russians and the gangsters do to Donbass. What Kyiv does to Ukraine.” She hurls a radioactive glare at Carson. “What you did when you made a deal with the people who killed my friends. All…zrada.”

  Shit. Carson had tried to be clever, using the Russians for top cover. Of course she ended up pouring battery acid into Galina’s biggest open sore.

  “I get it. I know what you’re feeling.” All too well.

  Galina snorts. “How could you know?”

  “I lost friends. I lost my career.” She hesitates. She hadn’t expected to get into this, but she wants Galina to know that she’s not alone in this boat. “Corruption. Russians, even.”

  “Was there a war? People dying?” Galina makes a rude noise. “You have no idea. Don’t talk foolishness.”

  That launches a bolt of anger into Carson’s gut. She fumes for a moment. “Told you I used to be a cop, right?” Galina sniffs and nods. “Didn’t tell you why I’m not now. I listened to your story; now you listen to mine.” She doesn’t bother to soften her words.

  Galina shifts in her seat and stares out her window again.

  It pisses off Carson even more. “I was in Organized Crime Enforcement. I got in because I speak Russian.” No reaction. “We were after a guy, Gennady Rodievsky. Pakhan of the local Solntsevskaya Bratva. Know what they are?”

  “Yes. Gangsters.”

  “Yeah. Probably a branch down here now. Some of those ‘authorities’ you told me about. We spent two years building a case on him. Finally got enough to bring him in on righteous charges. Did this big op, Special Weapons Teams, the whole thing. He was gone. Somebody tipped him.

  “Lots of pressure from upstairs to find the snitch. So we did the usual—stand in a circle, point at each other. Then everybody pointed at the Russian chick.” She finger-stabs herself. “No proof, totally convenient. Didn’t help that I was the only woman on the task force. I’d busted up with Ron, who was popular. So they flushed me. Got my name in the news. I was the crooked cop. Lost almost all my friends. Goddamn landlord kicked me out, said he didn’t want my kind there.”

  Galina’s watching her now, frowning. Carson can’t tell if it’s because of the train wreck or because she’s looking for a lie.

  “Turns out it was a senior superintendent who had a jones for nose candy. Rodievsky owned him. He got to retire quietly. Nobody said to me, ‘Gee, we’re sorry, want your job back?’ TPS dropped its case against me and slammed the door. Now I work for people I hate
”—Rodievsky, not Allyson, though sometimes...“to keep them from killing my dad for welching on a debt.” She matches Galina’s stare. “How’s that for zrada? Good enough?”

  Galina’s eyes examine the hands she has clasped on her lap. She nods once.

  With that, all the heat sluices out of Carson. She hesitates, then caresses Galina’s shoulder. “Look. I don’t wanna harsh on you. You had a shitty time here. You did things I can’t imagine. Just saying…well, I know what it’s like to have the world turn to shit on you. That you can talk about it and I’ll get it. Okay?”

  Galina swallows, then nods again.

  Carson glances through the rear window. The Tigrs’ silhouettes are almost lost in the distance. “Unless you’re gonna visit those people who saved you, we need to take off or Rogozhkin will sic his goons on us. Are you okay to drive?”

  After a deep breath, Galina says, “Yes.” She starts the car and pulls off the dirt shoulder.

  “Turn left up here. Stepaniak’s still in Mospyne.”

  About twenty minutes of stony silence later, Galina aims a basset-hound look at Carson. "I am sorry.”

  Carson gives her a half-smile. “Me too.”

  Chapter 29

  Mashkov trudges to his office from the mess tent, carefully balancing his aluminum bowl of rice porridge and the plated Doktorskaya sausage sandwich so neither ends up on the gravel. He usually enjoys eating with the men. But today he’s still dealing with the patrol disaster, as well as planning to deploy west to support Monday’s operation near Dokuchajevsk…if the Russians let them join it. That damned Proskurin, the Russian in charge of First Battalion, also asked for an urgent meeting. Coincidence? Mashkov has no interest in going through that on an empty stomach.

  Vasilenko jogs to intercept him. He’s toting a serious expression and a mess tin brimming with varenyky, which seems to be all the man ever eats. “Sir, may I have a word?”

  “Of course.” There’s been another disaster, judging from the look on the senior sergeant’s face. “What’s gone wrong now, Lenya?”

  Vasilenko falls into step beside Mashkov. He glances over his shoulder, then drops his voice. “The Russians are up to something.”

  “They’re always up to something.”

  “More than usual. I saw them come out of the training block next to the Ops Center about a half-hour ago. All the Russian officers together.”

  They’re usually not that organized. Mashkov tries to dissect this news as they approach the command building. “Where’s Second Battalion?”

  “Anna Company just reached where the patrol was attacked. They’ll rescue what’s left of it. Vasily Company’s following the GLONASS beacon eastbound on T0509 near Novokaterynivka.”

  “No sign of Rogozhkin and his cutthroats?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  They stop at the command building’s weathered steel front door. Mashkov watches the setting sun hover over the trees west of the camp. “I have a meeting with Proskurin in twenty minutes. The more I hear, the less I like the timing.” Puzzle pieces in his mind come together to make an ugly picture. “Come in with me. We need to make plans.”

  Mashkov sits back in his swiveling desk chair, holding the phone receiver to his ear, trying to be the image of calm even though he’s seething inside.

  He’s more or less prepared for Proskurin. The man has no use for him or any other Ukrainian; the Russian barely hides his contempt at staff meetings or operations briefings.

  Mashkov hadn’t expected a whole delegation. Every ranking Russian in the brigade follows Proskurin into Mashkov’s office, along with two soldiers Mashkov knows are Russian “volunteers.” The last one in shuts the door.

  The plan he’d made with Vasilenko is already in trouble. Proskurin wasn’t supposed to come with a pack of jackals. No way to go but forward. Mashkov says into the phone, “Yes, sergeant, that sounds appropriate. Initiate Measure Alfa.” As if they’d been having a long conversation about it.

  “Yes, sir. We’re standing by.” Vasilenko carefully disconnects.

  As he hangs up the phone, Mashkov scans the six men who now fill his office. Arrogance, contempt, and distaste are on every face except for the common soldiers, who look a little scared. Two officers even wear their ribbons, the cocky thugs. Do they think that will impress me?

  He levels a cold stare at Proskurin. “Colonel, I thought you asked for a meeting, not a formation.”

  Proskurin’s square face twists into a smile with no warmth or humor in it. Not that the man has any to spare. “Dima Artemovich, I know you like to come to the point quickly, so here it is: you’re relieved of your command. I’m taking over.”

  Mashkov’s surprised by how unsurprised he is. He’d heard of this happening in the other militias. Last year, several DNR commanders were assassinated, and the Russians didn’t even try to deny they were behind it. Well, he’ll be harder to get rid of. He pulls his blank face on tighter and folds his hands on the desktop. “On whose authority?”

  “Colonel-General Kishovsky of the Southern Military District.” Proskurin’s voice says he thinks that’s the last word.

  Mashkov wills himself to chuckle instead of throwing the desk lamp at the blockhead. “The last time I checked, he’s not in my chain of command. I answer to the commander of the First Army Corps, who reports to the Defense Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic. This Kishovsky means nothing to me.”

  Two Russian officers snicker. Proskurin’s face turns pink. “You’re a fool if you believe that. This”—he waves his hand toward the window—“so-called ‘brigade’ exists because we say it does. And you keep your shoulder boards because we say you do. And now we say, ‘No more.’”

  Each of the four officers aims his best glare at Mashkov. He stares back. He’ll be damned if he’ll let these thugs think he’s scared of them. “What are the charges against me?”

  Proskurin swaps a sly glance with Kuzmin, Third Battalion’s commander and a true pain in the ass. “You ordered your men to attack a Russian military unit deployed in the field.”

  You bastard. Mashkov stands slowly, resting his fingertips on the desktop. “That would be the Russian military unit that attacked one of my patrols, destroyed three vehicles, and killed two of my men?”

  “In self-defense.”

  The smugness on Proskurin’s face makes Mashkov want to throttle the man. “‘Self-defense’ means shooting back after you’ve been shot at, not staging an ambush.” He’s pushing harder than he’d planned. He didn’t expect this kind of abuse. He should have, though; he’d been taking shit from these people ever since they appeared from out of nowhere. Add to that the slow-rolling disaster surrounding that godforsaken money-for-art scheme and it won’t take much to let his anger get the best of him. Mashkov hopes Vasilenko is where he’s supposed to be.

  Mashkov lets his voice go hard. “You people have different definitions for these matters. ‘Advice’ seems to mean giving orders, and ‘assistance’ means getting in the way.”

  “Enough.” Proskurin’s face slowly darkens. He draws his sidearm but lets it hang by his hip. Maybe he believes the sight of a weapon will make Mashkov break down. He holds out his left hand, palm up. “Give me your pistol, you hohol moron.”

  The slur throws more petrol on Mashkov’s mounting anger. He again glances from face to face. Their superiority turns his stomach. Is their plan to shoot him here in the office, or take him outside and do it in front of the troops? Either way, he won’t survive if he does what they want. Neither will the brigade.

  Mashkov unsnaps his olive-drab holster, then slowly pulls his pistol. He holds it up for the Russians to see. “A Makarov. A Soviet copy of a Walther PP.” He gives Proskurin his best feral smile. “You people never were very original. Like your performance just now.”

  Proskurin’s face turns cherry red. He starts to swing up his pistol. “You—”

  Mashkov’s inner volcano finally erupts. He shifts
his grip on his Makarov and shoots Proskurin through his open mouth from less than two meters away. Then he swings right and puts a bullet into Kuzmin’s forehead.

  His office door slams open. Half a dozen of his troops rush in, weapons ready, Vasilenko in the lead. The two Russian privates are face-down on the floor in an instant with rifle muzzles pressed into their skulls. The two surviving Russian officers turn to fight, scrabbling at their holsters, but Mashkov’s men beat them to the ground with their rifle butts.

  It’s over in a few moments.

  Vasilenko steps out of the scrum to the front edge of Mashkov’s desk. “What do you want us to do with these bastards, sir?”

  I just shot two men at point-blank range. Mashkov watches the blood pool around Proskurin’s head. Bozhe, what have I done? All his insides congeal into stone. He’s never killed anyone until now, at least not by himself. I’m a businessman. I’m a logistics officer. I’m not—

  “Sir?”

  Mashkov shakes his head hard, trying to rattle his brain into thinking mode. “Put the two privates in the cells. They were just doing what they were told, but I don’t want them running free. The officers…” He doesn’t know. He hasn’t thought that far ahead. He hadn’t planned to kill anyone; he was supposed to say Yakov at the right time and Vasilenko—who had been listening at the door—would burst in with his men and arrest the Russian.

  This action was supposed to be about relieving an insubordinate underling…not a full-on rebellion.

  Well, he’s committed now. All the Russians were in on this. Unless he pushes back hard and fast, the captains and lieutenants will finish what the majors and colonels couldn’t. And he’s not about to let that happen to his brigade.

  Mashkov wishes that now, more than ever, he had the ransom money for those paintings. The Russian purse is going to slam shut. Two million euros can keep the brigade fed and equipped long enough to fight next week. After that…