Dark Territory

by Leo J. Maloney

  “Is it going to be enough?” Amina asked as she raised her muscled buttocks and stripped her bobsledder’s spandex down off her thighs.

  “It’s never enough,” Kreesat said. “But half an hour is all we have.”

  Amina laughed. “I meant the money.”

  “Ah, I think so, yes. Five hundred million from the Americans, and then the equivalent amount from the Russians.” He reached down and dragged her spandex off over her running shoes as she pulled her sports bra off over her blond head. “You can buy the silence of an entire African village with much, much less.”

  “Have you picked one out already?” She leaned forward and gripped his flesh in her fist, licking her lips as she pulled him toward her.

  “Yes.” He shuffled forward with his leathers crumpled about his boots, and he reached down for her ankles and lifted them up, high and wide. “It’s on the shores of an enormous lake in Ethiopia, Lake Tana. Maybe we’ll become pirates there.”

  “We already are,” she said, and then she raised a finger. “Take your pistol out, Major. It always bruises my ribs.”

  Kreesat pulled his CZ from his holster and laid it down somewhere. Then he gripped her by the hair, and she gripped his in turn, and they slammed into each other.

  * * * *

  Twenty minutes later—a full fifteen minutes more than Kreesat and Amina needed to sate their lust—Sasha and Boris stood inside the cargo car’s coupling, waiting to be told why they’d been summoned in the middle of the night.

  Sasha, of course, already knew that he’d fallen upon a mortally dangerous venture of some sort, and although he wanted nothing to do with it, there was no erasing what he had already seen. After Alex had ordered him to go fetch the policeman, he and Boris had only made it halfway back to the cargo car when she and that poor pathetic Svetlana woman had come rocketing toward them. Alex had stopped and gripped his shoulders and whispered in a rush, “I’m taking her and hiding her somewhere, Sasha. Don’t give us up!”

  So he and Boris had then turned around and wandered back to their separate quarters. But half an hour later, they’d both been gathered up by this tall, blond, pony-tailed Serb who called himself Bojan. That, in itself, was not a good sign, as Sasha knew that, in Serbian, the name meant “warrior.”

  And Boris, fairly much dazed and confused, was not going to be of much help. The old cops assigned to the Trans-Siberian were on the cusp of retirement and unarmed, which made them about as effective as a shopping mall security guard.

  The two stood in the vibrating coupling, with that Bojan character towering over them from behind. After a few minutes, the door to the cargo car opened and the large commanding one that Sasha had seen with the old scientist, smiled down at them, and it was not a smile of warmth and welcome.

  “What is your name, conductor?” Kreesat asked.

  “Alexander Dubkin. What is yours, sir?”

  “Kreesat. And you, policeman?”

  “Boris Spelski.”

  “Sounds vaguely Polish,” Kreesat said.

  “Do you have a complaint about something on this train?” Boris asked in his official policeman’s tone.

  Kreesat nodded. “I do. I have lost a valuable piece of property, stolen by one of your female passengers.”

  “You may file a complaint and I shall investigate,” Boris said as he pulled a small notebook and a pen from his uniform pocket.

  “I have no patience for apparatchik bureaucracy,” Kreesat said as he reached down and snatched Sasha’s large key ring from the elder man’s belt. He handed it over Sasha’s shoulder to Bojan and cocked his head at the coupling’s boarding door. “It is stuffy in here, Bojan. Give us some air.”

  The large blond Serb smiled, rattled through some keys until he found a large steel skeleton, turned it in the lock and slid the door open. The cold night air rushed in and thundered through the coupling chamber. Kreesat had to raise his voice.

  “Boris, I want you to collect the passports of all female passengers on this train and bring them to me.”

  Boris puffed up his chest. “I cannot do that, nor will I, sir.”

  Kreesat reached out with his left hand, gripped Boris’s uniform lapels and backed him over to the open door ledge. The policeman’s eyes bugged white and his mouth opened, but he was given no chance to change his mind as Kreesat drew his CZ99 and shot him point blank in the chest. Then there was nothing but the open doorway. Only Sasha remained, his knees trembling like those of a newborn foal.

  “And then there was one,” Kreesat said as the wind swept a curl of smoke from his gun barrel. “I trust you will be more cooperative, Mr. Dubkin. If not, you can expect every passenger on this train to follow in Boris’s footsteps.”

  Sasha said nothing.

  “All the passports, please. And this is a good time to do it, as the passengers will be either sleeping or in their berths or seats. Bojan here will accompany you. There should also be a ticket stub displayed at every passenger’s position, yes?”

  “Yes,” Sasha croaked.

  “Good. So, if anyone is missing, I am sure you will note that and advise me. Oh, and bring me the entire passenger list as well. You have one hour.”

  “I … I cannot do all of this so quickly,” Sasha protested. “We are nearing Irkutsk and many people will shortly be getting on and off. It is impossible…”

  Kreesat placed his left hand on Sasha’s shoulder and leaned down. He smiled as he turned his heavy pistol to the left and tapped the barrel against Sasha’s chest, as if it was nothing more harmful than a soup ladle.

  “Irkutsk is no longer a stop on this journey, my friend,” Kreesat said. “No one is getting on this train, and no one is getting off.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dan Morgan was driving like a maniac, which is to say that his vehicle habits on the outskirts of Irkutsk were not much different than those of a normal day back in Andover, Mass.

  However, his standard selections of American muscle cars—in particular his Shelby Cobra—weren’t available at the rental counters at Irkutsk International Airport, so he and Peter had had to settle for the weirdest contraption left on the lot.

  It was an olive-drab Russian UAZ-452 “vagon,” essentially an ugly eight-seater van with a bloated round shape, exposed wheels without fenders, and the laughable moniker bukhanka, which, in Russian, means “loaf of bread.” But Morgan didn’t care about automotive fashion.

  The distance from the airport to the train station was fourteen kilometers; according to Lincoln Shepard, who was sitting in the middle bank of seats behind Morgan and Conley, the Trans-Siberian would be pulling into the station in exactly eight-point-five minutes, and no one could say how long it would stay before thundering off to the next leg of its journey.

  “Take a left there,” Peter Conley said from the forward passenger seat.

  “Where?” Morgan asked.

  “Here!” Conley stabbed a finger at the windshield, Morgan spun the fat white steering wheel, and the van lifted completely off its left tires as it careened into a slim lane between high rows of Petrovian apartments. There was a breathless second while the vehicle just sped forward on two wheels, then smashed back down on all fours.

  “Jesus!” Linc gasped from his seat as his head banged the fuselage.

  “Give me a little more notice, will ya?” Morgan snapped at Conley.

  “Hey, I’m using a Russian nav app on a rented Bulgarian phone and the cell service sucks,” Conley said. “I think I’m doing pretty good.”

  “Actually, you are,” Morgan admitted.

  “Gentlemen, you’ll want to know this,” Linc said from the back. He had his headset on, and a smaller version of his Alienware open on his lap. “I’m getting encrypted comms from Diana, and she must be upset because she’s making typos. She hates typos.”

  “What’s the upshot?” Morgan aske
d over his shoulder.

  “Funny choice of words,” Linc said.

  “Stay straight here for two klicks,” Conley said to Morgan as he pointed dead ahead.

  “The upshot is,” Linc continued, “that this Deputy National Security Advisor at 1900 Pennsylvania Ave has confirmed to our own Mr. Smith that Major Maxim Kreesat’s claim of control over Laika II is no bluff.”

  “I could have told them that,” Morgan snorted. “Kreesat’s a slime ball, but he doesn’t bluff.”

  “Wait, there’s more,” Linc said. “The President’s been on the red phone with Vlad the Impaler. Seems Putin denied the whole MIRV platform thingy on Laika II, until Kreesat took it for a spin over Moscow about two hours after his drive-by over D.C. Then Russian Space Command tried to regain control over the bird, but Dmitri Kozlov’s been able to shut them out … probably under duress.”

  “Gee, ya think?” Conley said, then glanced down at his navigation app and pointed diagonally to the right—past the UAZ’s bulbous nose. “Get ready to take a hard right, up there by the Stalin monument.”

  “Okay, Linc, what’s the punchline?” Morgan said. “I know you by now. There’s always a punchline.”

  “Yeah, but it’s no joke, Cobra,” Linc said. “Diana had no choice. She had to tell the National Security Advisor, who, in turn, had to tell the Pentagon and POTUS, who, in turn, had to tell the Russian premier, that Laika II’s being controlled by someone aboard the Trans-Siberian, en route from Vladivostok to Moscow.”

  “Holy crap,” Conley growled.

  “That’s right.” Linc stopped looking at his laptop and leaned forward between the two senior agents. “The Russians want to scramble a flight of MIG-29s and take out the train—like now. Diana’s only been able to hold them off by having the National Security Advisor try to convince them to use commandos, rather than bomb a whole trainload of innocents. Meanwhile, Treasury’s keeping it going by getting Kreesat’s ransom together, while Moscow’s doing the same.”

  “Bastard,” Morgan spat. “What’s his fee?”

  “Five hundred million USD, a piece.”

  “A piece?” Conley turned and stared at Linc. “He must be using my ex-wife’s lawyer.”

  “Time check,” Morgan barked at Linc.

  Shepard checked the blinking icon on his iPhone navigation app. “Three minutes till the train pulls in.”

  “And what’s our ETA?” Morgan asked Conley.

  “Five minutes. And turn right! Right here!”

  Morgan spun the wheel the other way and Linc slid across the back seat like a dinner plate in a missile boat galley—banging the other side of his head.

  “Ow! Damn it, Cobra!”

  “We’re going to make that train,” Morgan grunted as he stomped on the gas pedal. “If nothing else, we’re going to grab Alex, toss her off the back, and jump after her before the Russian air force turns the rest of the passengers to toast.”

  But they didn’t make the train.

  Morgan pulled into the station with a minute to spare. The enormous building occupied two full city blocks—a beautiful edifice of pale, canary-colored stone rimmed in mint green trim, with carved white arches, its entrance braced by towers sporting Russian Orthodox ceramic caps. The wide thoroughfare in front of the station was barricaded so that drivers could only drop off or pick up passengers, but Morgan wasn’t looking for a valid parking space. He figured they’d dump the UAZ, call the rental company later to come and get it themselves, and let Zeta Division foot the bill. He screeched to a halt at the curb right in front of the main entrance, just as they all heard the locomotive whistling its warning to those inside on the platform.

  “Hustle up!” Morgan snapped at Conley and Shepard as they slammed the van doors, sprinted across the station apron, burst into the main hallway, and kept right on going for the other side of the building and out onto the platform. But as soon as they punched the second set of doors open, a blast of compressed wind slammed all three of them back against the glass, making their hair stand on end.

  The Trans-Siberian was rocketing right through the station, hell bent for leather, its whistle howling like a demon and sparks flying off its iron wheels. Its thunder pushed scores of waiting ticket-holders back on their heels, and as the Americans gaped, many of the wailing travelers were raising clenched fists, shouting and cursing at the insane engineer.

  And then the Trans-Siberian was gone.

  Morgan, Conley, and Shepard stared after the receding rectangle of the train’s caboose. Shepard spoke first.

  “Holy moly Mother of God, what now?”

  But he found himself alone, clutching his laptop on the platform as Morgan and Conley took off back through the station. He charged after them.

  “Hey! Wait!” he cried. “Where you guys going?”

  “Back to the airport,” Morgan called over his shoulder as he ran back to the van.

  “What? You can’t chase a train in a Lear jet!”

  “Forget the jet,” Conley said as they reached the UAZ and he and Morgan jumped in.

  “We’re gonna hotwire a helicopter,” Morgan said. Linc just managed to leap into the back as Morgan burned rubber backwards.

  “You can hotwire a helicopter?” Shepard gasped as his eyes bugged and he madly buckled his seatbelt.

  “No idea,” Conley said grimly. “Never tried it.”

  “Look it up on YouTube,” Morgan ordered Shepard as he gunned the engine and raced back toward the airport. “You’ve got nine minutes.”

  “Oh Lord,” Shepard whined as he flipped his laptop open, stabbed at the keys, and prayed.

  * * * *

  Twenty minutes outside Irkutsk, the Trans-Siberian went dark. The train had just entered a rolling plain of high yellow wheat and descended further into a valley of wild Siberian bristle brush—a stretch of sparsely populated vastness in which no government telecom engineers had bothered to erect any cell phone towers, because, as the Kremlin had decreed, “There is no one out there worth talking to.”

  Under normal circumstances, this “dark territory” deprivation of telecom service of any kind aboard the express would not have alarmed the passengers, as they’d been warned about it well in advance, and some had even chosen the route precisely for the experience. It was difficult to get through a meal nowadays or take a simple commuter flight without some inconsiderate bore yammering away on his cell phone, so it would have been a quaint sort of pleasure to be forced to read or even converse. Besides, the train’s engineer surely had some way of making contact with the outside world in the event of an emergency.

  So, dark territory would have been a welcome interlude—except that the train was supposed to stop at Irkutsk, but had rocketed right through the station, and now there were scores of passengers stomping up and down the corridors, trying to find out why.

  The train’s engineer did indeed have an alternate means of making contact with transportation headquarters in St. Petersburg. It was an emergency, high-powered radio transmitter, bolted into his console in the train’s forward cockpit, and similar to the emergency transponders aboard all modern airliners. Mayday situation? Hijack event? All communications failed and the oxygen masks flinging down? You could just flip the toggle guard up and slam your palm on that big red button that looked like Hillary’s failed reset with Moscow. It was the same here aboard the Trans-Siberian, and with its engineer, Ivan Petrovich.

  Except that Ivan didn’t dare reach for that button, because next to him, perched on the backup engineer’s fold-down stool, was a very muscular blond Serbian woman who was literally breathing down his neck. Amina sat there with her left hand caressing the back of Ivan’s tingling skull, her short fingernails scratching his scalp. In her right hand she held a Makarov 9mm pistol, and she was running the barrel across her bottom lip as her cold, green, feline eyes scanned his control console, searching for hi
s Mayday device.

  “Now, where, oh where could it be?” she sing-songed in Ivan’s ear as he tried to focus on the track lines ahead and not think about who the hell she might be or what she was doing in his cockpit with her muscular breasts pressed against his back and her hot breath in his ear. “Is it this one, perhaps?” She pulled the Makarov barrel away from her lips and jutted the foreblade sight at Ivan’s emergency communications module. He flinched involuntarily, and she smiled. “Oh, it is, isn’t it?” She sounded so pleased with herself.

  And Ivan nearly soiled himself as she fired two bullets into the radio set, at such close range that burning powder singed his hairy arms and he was momentarily blinded by the flashes.

  “There,” she said with utter satisfaction. “Now we’re really in dark territory.”

  * * * *

  Back in the cargo car, directly behind the locomotive where Amina was terrorizing Ivan, Kreesat was once more ensconced in Cargo Berth Four, from where he was managing his extortion scheme. Dmitri Kozlov remained his prisoner, and had now been joined in that role by Sasha, who had managed to deliver a hundred and forty-six “female” passports as well as the matching passenger manifest.

  Vlado Hislak, due to the ministrations of Amina and some additional nourishment, had begun to recover from his injuries and shame, and was now upright and stable on his feet, despite some considerable swelling in his groin. Bojan was out in the corridor, leaning back against the fuselage, and checking the springs on three full magazines of 9mm ammunition for his CZ.

  On instructions from Kreesat, Karl had summoned the last two Serbians up forward—a pair of blond, spiked-haircut cousins named Spiro and Mako—and the trio were now blocking the entrance between the cargo car and the First Class dining car. They were fully armed and unabashedly displaying their weapons to a packed-in gathering of alarmed passengers.

  As Kozlov sat hunched and deflated in the chair in front of the single sideband transmitter, awaiting the next set of horrible instructions, Kreesat perched on the corner of the metal table and ran a fingernail down Sasha’s passenger printout. On the other side of the table, Sasha stood murmuring complaints as he tried to alphabetically order the passports and respond to Kreesat’s inquiries by plucking the appropriate one from the pile to show Kreesat the owner’s photo.