Yegor shut the door as instructed and looked over at his wife. “Don’t you dare hurt her,” he said to Marat.
Marat didn’t even blink. This wasn’t personal. It was business, something he was certain that Yegor was very familiar with.
“Have a seat,” Dmitry said, pointing toward the wooden chair across from him. “Marat, take the ladies into the kitchen so that we can talk.” He didn’t want the little girl to see the women at gunpoint when she moved. It would only make the situation worse. Normally, this wasn’t his style, involving women and children, but the Right for Donetsk had forced his hand.
Yegor walked slowly over to the chair, the floorboards creaking under his boots as he made his way across the room, and then motioned for his daughter. “Come to me, Anichka,” he said, voice quivering.
Dmitry set her down and let her run to her father. Rushing into his arms, the small little girl boasting bright gray eyes and golden hair hugged him tight. Yegor hugged her back and pulled her into his lap. Rubbing a hand down her dirty white knee-length dress adorned with pink flowers, he kissed the crown of her head.
“Do you know who I am?” Dmitry asked.
“Yes,” Yegor replied. “You’re Dmitry Medlov.”
That’s right, mother fucker I am, Dmitry thought to himself. But he verbalized a less threatening response. “In the flesh. We’ve been waiting for a while. Your mother was in the middle of fixing dinner, but I don’t think she’d invite us to stay.”
Dmitry eyed the little girl’s dirty bare feet. It was a shame that she had to grow up in this box of a house with a Nazi for a father. Still, it was not his concern for the moment. “No matter who you are in this world, if you are a family man, you are vulnerable, da.” His left eye twitched. “Even more so when you have a little girl.”
“My family has nothing to do with this,” Yegor answered.
Dmitry crossed his long legs. “I beg to differ.”
“Gabriel warned us that you’d come for us and our families,” Yegor said, unable to hold his cool. “Just kill us if you’re going to for God’s sakes. Get it over with.”
“Do you really want to leave this world without seeing your daughter grow up? Do you really want to sacrifice your beautiful little wife and your mother for someone else’s cause?” Dmitry watched as Yegor clinched his daughter. The thought of losing her must be excruciating. He had been there before. It was completely emasculating.
“What choice do I have in the matter?” Yegor asked. “I won’t beg.”
“I won’t ask you to,” Dmitry said, smiling at the girl. “I will, however, ask for your complete and absolute cooperation. From what my men tell me, you’re the man to see outside of Yuri. I bet you know his mind almost as well as he does.”
Yegor nodded. “I do.”
“How is my nephew? Is he well?” Dmitry asked, rubbing his hands together.
Yegor stuttered. “He’s…alive.”
“Have you maimed him?” Dmitry asked, suddenly wrenching his hands together.
Yegor felt the intensity of the man’s words from where he sat. “I have not touched him. I swear it. The only person who has is Yuri Danko.”
“Is he maimed?” Dmitry asked again, looking at Yegor’s daughter.
“He was badly beaten, but nothing had been severed. He is still a whole man,” Yegor explained, choosing his words carefully.
Dmitry sucked in a breath and swallowed hard. “Forgive me, I’m not normally this angry.”
The idea that the man was so very calm scared Yegor. Even in the heat, even wearing a suit, Dmitry was not sweating. His eyes were as cold as ice, like a crystal blue lake in the Artic. Yet, the hard lines of his tanned face seemed stretched and pulled around a skull that burned with pure fire. His presence was like standing at the gates of hell.
“What do you want me to do?” Yuri asked, breaking his silence. If Dmitry intended to instill fear, he had successfully achieved it.
Dmitry smirked. “What do I want?” He sat up in the uncomfortable seat, yanking at his pants as he pulled them up, revealing silk socks. Placing his elbows on his knee, he leaned toward Yegor. His predatory eyes locked on him. “I want useful Intel on how to get my nephew back. I want you to walk in and place a beacon in Gabriel’s cell where we can triangulate his exact location. I want a layout of your entire compound and all the people in it. I want you to turn like a rattlesnake on Yuri Danko. And I want this assault on a fucking 24-carat gold platter. Or…” He reached out and touched the young girl’s blonde locks. “I’m going to go into that thing you call a kitchen and personally dispatch your mother and then your little wife. Then I’m going to take your little girl home and give her shoes and Russian last name.” He looked back up at Yegor. “That’s after I gut you like a pig and feed your bloody heart to the wild dogs outside.” With a wink at the girl, he sat back in the chair. “And then I’ll still find a way to get my boy back, because that…is…what…I…want.”
Yegor knew that he was visibly shuddering, but when Dmitry pulled out a custom made knuckle knife from the inner pocket of his suit jacket and placed it on the small end table beside him, he felt tears run down his cheeks.
“Again, you have a choice. It’s yours to make,” Dmitry said, face going emotionless.
Yegor felt the trickle of urine run down his leg. His daughter tried to move, but he held her despite his accident. “Tomorrow, Yuri plans to send a fleet of trucks to pick up the shipment of munitions we stole from the Donetsk Revolutionaries at a warehouse in the center of the city. We will pick it up at 5:30 p.m. under the cover of night, deliver it to the compound at 6:30 p.m. He’s planning to stage an attack on you once you arrive with Valeriya’s dead body day after tomorrow. He plans to kill you and Gabriel. We have 80 people inside of the compound. Twenty-five of those people are still trainees. The code to the cell where Gabriel is being held is 88#.” Taking a deep breath, he wiped his face. “I will take the beacon. I will personally put it in Gabriel’s cell. Just please, let me and my family go.”
Dmitry twisted up his lip. “Was that so hard?” He looked over at his men. “Give him some paper so that he can lay out the compound for us, and so that he can write down the information that he’s so willing to share.” Looking at the pool of urine under the chair, he shook his head. “Do you need to clean up, my friend? It seems you’ve made a mess.”
“I’ll be fine,” Yegor said, sucking in a breath.
“Good,” Dmitry said, voice sounding more upbeat. “Well, let’s proceed, and I think it goes without saying that you will do this thing for me completely before you get your family back. If you don’t do all these things you have promised, then I will do everything that I have promised.”
“We are clear. You have my word,” Yegor swore.
Chapter Twelve
The Longest Yard…
Donetsk, Ukraine
Staging Area
Next Day
By the time the last man in Dmitry’s small army arrived to their temporary staging camp, to the east of Donetsk – an area protected by Russian military forces in territory long taken from Ukraine, there was a total count of 63 people preparing for the incursion on the Neo-Nazi compound holding Gabriel Medlov.
Housed in a large, abandoned warehouse district and surrounded by guards and dogs, the once blighted buildings, left empty because of constant war, were overnight transformed into a full base camp. It was excessive to say the least and extremely expensive, but it was also clear that Dmitry planned to clean house and leave one final message for Yuri Danko and anyone else who ever thought about touching a Medlov again.
After extracting the Intel, he needed from Yegor the day before, Dmitry had taken that sensitive information and the man’s family back to the camp and worked with his team to access the situation. They had stayed up through the night, plotting on maps, working on schematics and studying satellite aerial shots of the compound, and with Valeriya’s help to navigate through the city and identify trouble spots, they
had arrived finally at a final plan of action.
Valeriya was astounded at not only the sheer number of people there all working in unison, but also the resources that the Medlov’s truly had at their disposal. Even though she had worked with the Donetsk Revolutionaries to coordinate shabby, amateur-hour assaults in the past, she had never been party to such detailed and professional operations. This family was the real deal – where some crime families touted their reputations based on urban folklore and scare tactics, these men touted their reputation on their propensity to destroy in mass quantity. The men here had all sorts of military backgrounds in special ops, many from all over the world, others were just outright savages who specialized in profiteer wet work. Being in their presence while they worked was not only unsettling but also empowering.
Waiting on the men to rally for the operation, she stood in the middle of the floor as people moved around her inventorying their arsenal in the back of her mind. Rifles. Pistols. Shotguns. Fully-automatic, high-grade military weaponry. Flamethrowers. Grenades. Bikes. Cars. Trucks. Cell phones. C4. Detonators. RPGs. They’d even arranged for another fly over with their drone bomber. The only thing that was missing from this shit storm was a nuke, and she didn’t put it past Dmitry to drop that after he had gotten Gabriel back.
To her utter amazement, during the briefing, she had been told that the Russians were giving a ceasefire and had even agreed to push it up a day after Dmitry had found that the perfect way to infiltrate the compound without being detected would only be available today when Danko sent his men into the city to get the weapons being housed at Faddei’s warehouse.
That news shocked her most.
The weapons that had cost her brother his life and changed her forever would now be Gabriel Medlov’s salvation. Evidently, Faddei had been housing them the entire time. BASTARD. It brought her great pleasure to know that he was now in a box in Dmitry’s barn, begging from what she had heard, to be put out of his misery.
She wished that Alexei could have seen this – how everything had come back full circle to the night that his life was stolen. She wished that the Donetsk Revolutionaries could know that their fearless leader would soon be vindicated. But Dmitry had sworn her to silence and in that silence, she’d have to celebrate her soon-to-be victory alone.
“You getting cold feet?” Anatoly asked, walking up to her while she looked at the tracer rounds lined up on the tables against the concrete wall.
“No,” she said as she spun around to face him. “I’m getting ready.”
Anatoly knew that this operation would mean nothing to Gabriel if Valeriya didn’t come out alive. He stepped closer to her. “Stay close to me during the entire extraction. Don’t go running off trying to be superwoman, eh.”
“Do I detect concern?” Valeriya quipped. She knew that Anatoly was rough around the edges, but inside she believed him to have a heart of gold.
Anatoly rolled his eyes. “You detect a direct order.”
Looking up at his blonde hair pulled into a man bun, she smiled. “Nice hair. Did you have your stylist fly in and do it?”
“No one told you to cut your fucking hair. I said get ready, not get crazy.” He looked at her short crop and decided it didn’t look too bad. It actually fit her face, but he would never express one ounce of approval.
“I’ll remember that next time we run off to save someone.”
Shaking his head, Anatoly turned from her and headed to his father’s office. He could see why Gabriel liked Valeriya. She was fearless even in the face of death, but he hoped it was because she was smart and not just stupid.
Running a hand over her fade, Valeriya felt the gentle flutter inside her stomach. Her nerves always got the best of her before a fight, but today she was not afraid. She was finally going to get Gabriel back and when she did, she would never let him go.
Anatoly walked into the small office encased with old dirty glass to where his father sat behind the desk, looking at the market reports on his iPad. In full tactical gear, ready to get things started, he waited patiently in solitude as his men stood guard outside of the door.
“Are you going to say a little something to the men before we go?” Anatoly asked.
Dmitry pulled his eyes from the monitor. “You think they need a pep talk?” The smirk said that he was being facetious and did not have a problem with his son’s request at all.
The humor was appreciated. “I think their bank accounts are now reflective of our pep, but a word would be nice, Papa.” Anatoly rapped his tattooed knuckles on the metal table. “But we better do it now, because we’re out of here in 30 minutes.”
“Alright,” Dmitry said, standing up.
Leading out of the office, Dmitry walked with his men on his flanks to the middle of the warehouse and stepped up on a steel-topped table. Not that he needed any help to be seen at seven feet tall, but he wanted to make sure that his voice carried.
Valeriya walked over to the table and stood beside Anatoly, Vasily, Nadei, Marat and the other men. She looked up at Dmitry and felt him to be larger than life. Glad to be witness to it all, she listened intently.
Glancing down at Valeriya with a smile, Dmitry raised his hands and quieted the large crowd that gathered below him.
“Alright, alright. It seems that before men go off to war, they want a little encouragement,” Dmitry said, deep Russian accent booming like a microphone was behind it. “I want to thank all of you for coming together and agreeing to do this out of the kindness of your hearts.”
The crowd laughed. Mercenaries didn’t do anything for free.
Dmitry chuckled and then took a deep breath. “It’s not a thing any man wants to do – lose his family. But there are times when life is simply out of your control. All you can do during those times is react…accordingly. We are here to collect my boy, Gabriel Medlov. But we are also here to send a message. This organization, my organization, exists because of its consistent ability to deliver on a promise. All of you in my employ know that. This Nazi group seems not to know that; in fact, they seem dead set on disproving us as men. Taking Gabriel was a big mistake.” He sucked his teeth. “And today, we are going to prove to them that it was a mistake by taking every fucking thing that they hold dear.” He looked out across the room and clasped his large hands together. “I don’t want to hold back. I don’t want you to take hostages. I don’t want you to leave anyone or anything alive. It’s a day of pure bedlam boys and girls, the kind we don’t often get to enjoy, but today, we will be the people that they all say we are.” He shook his head. “Medlovs.”
“MEDLOVS!” the crowd cheered in unison.
“Medlovs!” Valeriya exclaimed. With tears in her eyes, she screamed as loud as she could, cheering the name of the man that she loved. Heart thudding in her chest, she clenched her fist and raise it with the rest of the men, ready to go to battle.
“Let’s do this,” Dmitry said, nodding at the crowd as she stepped down off the table. “How did I do?” he asked Anatoly as they walked back to the office.
Anatoly smirked. “All you needed after that speech was to say, This is Sparta.”
***
As instructed, Yegor arrived early to the compound before the sun could break the horizon and was allowed through the gate without a second glance. Next to him in the passenger seat, he carried his bag and the beacon that Dmitry had given him. It was small enough to fit into his pants pocket and smuggle up to the cell undetected, but he had to keep his wits about him in order to get it done.
Dmitry had his entire family right now, and he couldn’t get them back until Dmitry got Gabriel back. The order of things in Yegor’s life had dramatically changed. As he sat the night before alone in his house, still trembling and crying at the thought of what could happen to his family, he did not blame Dmitry Medlov as much as he blamed Yuri Danko.
Yuri didn’t have anyone else in his family to sacrifice, so discussing such a thing was not a problem for him. He did not have to worry about a
strange man threatening to do unspeakable things to the women he loved, because everyone and everything that he loved was already dead, except the Right for Donetsk, and Yuri was glad to take that away from his old friend for the position that he had put him in.
Going into the headquarters, he nodded at the guard and proceeded with his task. It was not unusual for him to drop off his things in the cubicle where he worked and then go off to feed Gabriel Medlov slop first thing in the morning. So no one suspected anything different today.
Like normal, he strode into the kitchen area, greeted the men and women working, grabbed the ladle, dipped in the soupy slop prepared specifically for prisoners that was heated on the communal stove and spat in by countless recruits, picked up the dog pale used to feed Gabriel, poured the contents in it and then waltzed right back out.
Passing by lower-ranking officers, he pushed open the metal door and hiked up four flights of stairs to the fourth floor where Gabriel was being housed. The guards at the front of the locked reinforced steel doors opened them for Yegor to get through and then punched in the code for the small cell. 88#.
***
Gabriel’s eyes popped open as soon as he heard the door swing open. Sitting up in the bed, he was surprised to yet again see Yegor. He sniffled, battling a sinus infection that could have been easily remedied if given any over the counter medicine and wiped his nose on his tattered clothes.
Slamming the door behind him, Yegor strode over and put the food right in Gabriel’s lap. The soupy slush splashed over on Gabriel’s clothes.
“Eat up,” Yegor said, exhaling a breath.
Gabriel looked down at the food in his lap inquisitively. “Huh, breakfast in bed. That’s a change.” Sticking his fingers in the food, he quickly scooped it up, even though today it was hot. Yet another first. Hot food was something that he had not tasted since he got here. He dug in like an animal, eating the food as fast as he could, before Yegor decided to take it back.
Gabriel's Regret: Book Two (The Medlov Men 3) Page 20
