Zrada

by Lance Charnes

  The sergeant concentrates on finishing the notes in his battered spiral-bound pad. “Are we assuming Rogozhkin is still alive?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, Lenya.” Mashkov shakes his head. “These people are hard to kill. Like tarakany.” Russian for cockroaches. “They may have our money. If they do, we can’t let them hide under the kitchen cabinets. I’ll be damned if we take our positions and can’t leave them because we’re out of petrol.”

  Rogozhkin paces around the militia Hunter with his satellite phone clamped to his ear. “What do you mean you can’t help us, Dmitri?”

  Zagitov makes an exasperated sound on the other end of the connection. “I didn’t say that exactly. I can’t be seen helping you. Rostov sent out a message a couple of hours ago. Any spetsnaz unit that sees you is supposed to report directly to Command. I’m wondering if fixing the Novyi Svit checkpoint for you will bite me in the ass now. And you didn’t even go through!”

  He’d never intended to. It does put Zagitov in a bad situation, though. “Sorry about that. We had to change plans on the fly. It was too much exposure. I appreciate the effort.”

  “Hope so. What’s your plan now?”

  Rogozhkin leans against the Hunter’s front-left door, conveniently covering the worn Makiivka Brigade crest. The column of militia vehicles endlessly rumbles west. At least they can do movement well. “We’re on the T0509 westbound. Anything we should look out for?”

  Zagitov rummages through some papers. “Styla. It’s the staging area for the second-line reserves. It’s also a huge fucking mess now they’re routing all the westbound military traffic through it. I swear, if this place had a decent road network…”

  “A big mess sounds perfect for us. Lots to get lost in.”

  “Normally, yeah. But there’s a battalion from the 45th Guards bivouacking there. People who know what you look like. If you transit the place, be careful as hell.” Zagitov’s hand scrapes against his phone’s mic for a good twenty seconds. “Look, Edik, I gotta go. Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks, Dmitri. Be careful out there.” The line goes dead.

  Syrov and his men must’ve made it over the border into Russia. That would explain why Rostov-on-Don sent the alarm to all the field units. Rogozhkin’s officially a fugitive now.

  Tarasenko better have a plan to get him out of Ukraine. He can’t imagine anything worse than falling prisoner to his own people. There’s nothing spetsnazovtsi hate more than disloyalty.

  Carson and Galina sit in the Octavia with the windows open to catch the freshening breeze. The wind-ruffled surface of the vest-pocket reservoir before them is as gray as the sky. Three hundred meters away, the highway’s still jammed with westbound military traffic. Rogozhkin used a gap in the otherwise endless convoy to get them here an hour ago; at least they no longer have to gag on the exhaust and feel the ground vibrate under them.

  Carson watches Galina stare past the steering wheel to the water. “What will you do when you get to Krakow?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Just interested. I don’t know much about you or Bohdan.”

  Galina busies herself with picking at the corner of her thumbnail. She glances at Carson, then looks away. “I used to be a cook. In restaurants.”

  “A chef?”

  “No, that’s too fancy. A cook. I could make Babka Yulia’s recipes in big batches. People liked them. They said it reminded them of their babkas’ cooking.”

  “Comfort food?”

  Galina shrugs. “I suppose. I will try to do that in Poland. There are enough Ukrainians there who might like it. Maybe I can start my own place someday.”

  Somehow, Carson had never imagined Galina doing something so domestic. She’d expected to hear about factory work or something, like Carson’s mother had done before she and her father had left for Alberta. “What’s Bohdan do?”

  “He’s a water engineer. He fixes pipes and pumps. He worked for Vodokanal, the water company. The Poles should need someone to fix their water pipes, yes?”

  “Guess so.” Carson tries to find an emotion on Galina’s closed-up face. “How long have you two been together?”

  “Eleven years. Married for nine. Apart for a year and a half.” She looks at Carson face-on for the first time in almost two hours. “I need my husband. He’s half of me. This time when he’s been gone, it’s—” She turns away suddenly, a little broken sound leaking out of her throat.

  Not more crying. Carson can understand why Galina would want to, but still doesn’t know what to do about it (if anything). She reaches out gingerly and lays a wary hand on Galina’s shoulder.

  Galina tries not very hard to shake it off, then concentrates on choking back her sobs. She manages to stuff them down her throat much faster than she had yesterday in Osykove. “I cry too much,” she mumbles.

  “You probably don’t cry enough.” Like Carson should talk. “The past few days’ve been rough on you. It’s way more than you signed up for.” She gives Galina’s shoulder a squeeze. “Thanks for sticking with me. You didn’t have to. You got your money.”

  Galina sniffs, then nods. “I promised to get you to the West.”

  “Yeah. Still doing the right thing?”

  “Following him around?” She tosses her head toward Rogozhkin, who’s pacing around the Hunter. “No. If I leave you and you die, your ghost will haunt me. I don’t want you butting into my dreams for the rest of my life.”

  Carson almost laughs. “Believe me, I don’t want to spend my afterlife in this place.”

  Galina waves a finger at her. “Be more careful, then. She who licks knives will soon cut her tongue.”

  Time trickles by. The convoy gets spottier, with larger gaps appearing in the file of vehicles. If I’m gonna ask, now’s the time. “When you left last night, did you take the knapsack?”

  Galina shoots her an annoyed glance. “Do you think I did?”

  “I don’t know. A million euros don’t just disappear. If you’ve got a secret, you may need me to help keep it. Don’t want to find out the wrong way what’s back there.” She thumbs behind her seat.

  A long, edgy silence drags by. “Yes.”

  At least she’s honest. “What are you going to do with it? It’s a lot of money. Life-changing money.”

  “I know.” Galina nibbles her lower lip absently. “We can buy a house or a farm. Start a business. Have some savings.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. Bohdan will help decide.”

  “Good luck explaining how you got it.” Carson’s been brooding all day about this conversation. She already knows where she has to take it. “You know I need to get the other picture away from Mashkov. The easiest way to do that is to buy it from—”

  “No.” It’s like a punch. “I won’t give you the money if you will give it to that tarhany. I will burn it first.” Galina thrusts a finger toward Rogozhkin. “Why don’t you ask him for the money he took? Why should he keep it? He’s not leaving his life behind—”

  “Actually, he is. That’s not the point. He—”

  “What is the point?”

  “I’m almost certain that with him, it’s either the money or the icon, not both. I need the icon more. I get too greedy, he dumps us and leaves.”

  “You don’t think he will do that anyway?” Galina’s voice is getting as hot as the flush in her face. “Why do you trust that Kacáps?”

  Shit, this again. “Who says I do?”

  “You let him take us who-knows-where. You do what he asks. You let him flirt with you.”

  “Flirting? Really?”

  “You haven’t noticed? Hmpf.” She shakes her head. “He’s a murderer. How do you know he won’t murder us when he’s tired of us?”

  Maybe he is flirting and he’s just bad at it. Maybe I can’t see it because it doesn’t happen to me much. “He’s got no reason to kill us. He needs me to help him get out of the country. You? I think he tolerates you because he doesn’t
want to piss me off.”

  “You wait. He’s planning something.” Galina spends more time watching Rogozhkin pace. “What if he leads us into a trap?”

  The same thought’s been nagging at Carson. “The people looking for us are looking for him. Tough needle to thread.” But not impossible; he’s got connections she and Galina don’t. “Look, we got the icon. If things get sketchy, we run. Okay?”

  Galina snorts. “Finally, you talk sense.” She leans forward and shoves a work-worn finger in Carson’s face. “Don’t make me choose between Bohdan and you. If you don’t run when we should, I will leave you.”

  Carson feels her spine turning to dust as they drive to Styla. The ten kilometers of highway are nightmares of broken and rutted asphalt. The dozens—maybe hundreds—of tracked armor and heavy military vehicles that had rolled through in the past few hours left behind unending washboard and loose chunks of pavement.

  Galina does her best to avoid the worst of it while she fumes. “These laiky! They destroy everything even just driving around!”

  Carson doesn’t know what laiky means and won’t bother to ask. Most of the Ukrainian insults she knows she learned from eavesdropping on her parents. This isn’t one they used.

  They pass a BMP on the shoulder with militia troops staring into the open engine compartment, like it’s a beater car that stalled. Galina snickers.

  Carson, who’s now driving, scams them past a Lev Brigade roadblock outside Styla. Rogozhkin leaves the women behind on the dirt road that skirts the town.

  She glooms over Rogozhkin abandoning them. Where’d he go? Did he leave us? Is he rigging a trap? Every minute, Carson expects to turn a corner and find another roadblock, or see Rogozhkin face-down in the dirt with a pack of militiamen pointing rifles at him.

  Thirty agonizing minutes later, they find Rogozhkin’s Hunter parked in a treeline a bit over a hundred meters away from the highway on the town’s west side. Carson pulls up behind the SUV on the dirt road’s verge. Rogozhkin climbs out the driver’s door in not-often-worn jeans and a pressed blue-gray button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows.

  Carson steps out of the car and gestures toward Rogozhkin’s outfit. “New uniform?”

  He nods toward the Hunter. “That’s not useful anymore. Mashkov knows by now that his scouts are missing. I’ll hide it in the trees and we’ll continue in your car. Or is it Galina’s?”

  “It’s hers.”

  “I hope she won’t tie me to the bonnet like a dead deer. It’s thirteen kilometers to Dokuchajevsk. There’s still onward movement on this part of the highway, but nothing like what we saw in Starobesheve. We follow the highway through the city, get lost in the civilian traffic, then transit the line and go through the Novotroitske crossing. If everything works well, we may be in the West before sunset.”

  Carson’s heard that too many times here. It never works that way.

  Chapter 46

  The closer they get to Dokuchajevsk, they closer they come to the war.

  From the front passenger’s seat, Carson watches the scars go by. Zig-zagging earthworks, now covered with grass. Abandoned, semi-sunken firing positions for tanks and artillery in groups of three or six abreast. Impact craters in fields. Burned-out hulks of trucks and armor near the road. Ruined buildings. The occasional dud Uragan canister sticking out of the earth. Twice they have to edge past unexploded mortar bombs embedded in the road, surrounded by broken concrete blocks.

  By the time they skirt the sprawling spoil heap from the local quarry—a klick wide, six to fifteen meters high—and pass the wind-rippled reservoir on the city’s eastern edge, Carson expects to see something like those pictures of Baghdad or Tripoli: ragged shards of buildings, piles of broken masonry, fallen wires, trash, roving skeletal dogs.

  But Dokuchajevsk isn’t like that. The first few blocks are the same kind of compounds as the ones she’s seen in the larger towns—houses with flocks of outbuildings, surrounded by walls or fences, citified versions of farms in places like Olhynske. Those give way to larger buildings, two or three stories tall with significant street frontage. People scurry along the sidewalks, a mix of civilians and military, mostly looking like they know where they’re going and when they need to get there.

  Galina—in the back seat—says, “Everyone is stocking up on food and water before the fighting starts. Especially water. The water system always goes down when there’s a battle.”

  Carson looks more closely at the people the Octavia passes. Their European string bags bulge with food. Little folding carts are stacked with flats of water. The car passes what looks like a market street packed with busy shoppers. “Are there that many battles here?”

  “Enough.” Rogozhkin waves toward the world beyond the windshield. He’d insisted on driving to keep up appearances: This is Ukraine. The men drive. “Kyiv claims the Minsk settlement gave the town to the West. There’s—”

  Galina grumps, “It did. You people won’t give it up.”

  He glances over his shoulder. “The people who live here don’t want to go back to being under Kyiv’s thumb. They—”

  “Disappear when they speak against you and your gangster friends in Donetsk?”

  Carson holds up a palm to each of them and puts on her mom voice. “Children, stop it. No civil war inside the car, or you walk.”

  Rogozhkin points over the steering wheel at the large, flat-topped gray hills straight ahead. "Galina, you’ll be glad to know that Kyiv’s troops are on the tops of those slag piles.”

  “They are?” Galina leans forward, poking her head between the front seats. She watches the piles grow steadily larger for a few moments, then falls back into her seat and claps her hands, cackling. “Thank you, Bozhe!”

  They turn right at an imposing school building, then head northwest along a commercial-verging-on-industrial strip. A steady stream of traffic rolls by in the opposite direction. Carson navigates Rogozhkin through a dog-leg onto the road west. Three hundred meters ahead, the westbound traffic stops.

  “Let me guess,” Carson says. “Another checkpoint.”

  Galina says, “Yes, near the line of contact. The local police make it for bribes.”

  “Is this normal?”

  “It’s normal to have a queue. The queue isn’t usually this long.”

  “How far to the checkpoint?”

  “Three kilometers, maybe.”

  Carson sighs. “We could be here ‘til dark.” She glances at Rogozhkin. “You’re not saying much.”

  He turns up a hand. “I know this route, but I don’t use it. We have other ways to get across.”

  “Why aren’t we using those?”

  “Because we’d have to walk. At night.” Rogozhkin twists toward Galina. “I assume you want to keep this car?”

  “Yes.”

  He turns to Carson. “So.”

  They sit in silence for a while. Galina broods in the back seat. She’d almost pitched a fit when Rogozhkin said he’s driving, and they’ve had hardly anything to say to each other since. Carson senses that Rogozhkin would like to talk to her—the regular glances her way and the navigation questions he doesn’t need give her clues. She figures he doesn’t want to be too chummy with Galina chaperoning.

  Carson’s brain has been grinding over the Galina-money problem since before Styla. Now’s the time to do something about it. She pushes open her door. “I gotta stretch my legs.”

  She drifts far enough ahead of the Octavia so that Galina and Rogozhkin can’t eavesdrop, then pulls her phone. She’d gotten Mashkov’s number from Rogozhkin when they met up west of Styla. He didn’t ask why she wanted it, but his eyes told her he knew.

  “This is Mashkov.” Lots of background noise, big engines, muffled shouts.

  “Tarasenko.”

  A long silence. “This is unexpected. How did you burn my lorries?”

  “I didn’t. I just took advantage of the distraction.”

&nb
sp; “That’s not all you took advantage of. You cost me my senior medic.”

  Poor Dunya. Lucky Dunya. “She was unhappy. I’m not proud of what I did to her. But now she can go have a life and be happy again. She loved you, you know.”

  Mashkov sighs. “I know that now. What do you want?”

  Carson heaves in a huge breath before diving into the shark-infested water. “It’s about what you want. Stepaniak’s money. I found it.”

  “You—” He breaks off. Carson figures she could hear him think if there wasn’t so much noise behind him. “Did Rogozhkin have it? I know you’re with him.”

  “I was. He’s dead, as far as I can tell. Doesn’t matter where it came from—I have it. I’ll make you the same offer I gave Stepaniak: the cash for the picture.” When he doesn’t answer right away, she says, “Don’t overthink this. Don’t be stupid like Stepaniak was.”

  “Why should I trust you? Lieutenant Fetisova trusted you and you betrayed her.”

  Yeah, rub it in. “I did what you teach your troops to do if they’re captured. I didn’t hurt her. A year from now, she’ll thank me. Anyway, I got something you want and you got something I want. We play this straight and we both come out ahead. We either both win or we both lose. How about it?”

  Mashkov’s end of the line goes silent. Carson checks; they’re still connected. Is he thinking? Talking to somebody else? Can he find where she is? She glances back at the car, which hasn’t moved since she got out. Galina’s chair-dancing in the back seat. How will I sell her on this? Will I have to fight her for the money?

  Mashkov’s phone un-mutes. “What do you propose?”

  “A swap in a public place. I bring the money; you bring the picture. I’ll have one other person with me for security. You can, too.”

  “Wait—you want me to come personally?”

  “Yeah. I’m—”

  “That’s ridiculous. I have to get the brigade ready for combat. I’ll send—”

  “If you want your money, you come get it. I’m tired of your people chasing me and shooting at me. How have middlemen been working for you so far, Mashkov?”