by Dirk Patton
I put my pistol away when he turned to look at me.
“Can I move now?” he asked, his voice laced with heavy sarcasm.
I tilted my head toward the door into the house and stepped to the side so he could pass without coming close enough to make a grab for me or a weapon.
“Need my pack,” he said, pausing by the rear of the Rover.
“I’ll bring it,” I said, not wanting him reaching into the vehicle.
He sighed dramatically, shrugged and headed inside. Grabbing the pack, I followed, closing and securing the door from the garage.
Rachel had pulled a chair to the far side of the room, sitting with Dog next to her, pistol still in her hand. I didn’t see the need to tell her to put it away.
“Start talking,” I said, pointing at one of the chairs on the far side of the table.
I’d already checked the bottoms of each chair and the table, ensuring there weren’t any weapons squirreled away. I had little doubt that there weren’t at least some knives well hidden in strategic locations, but it could take hours to find every blade or pistol that might be in a clever hiding place. But knowing they were probably there gave me an edge. I simply needed to not let Bering out of my sight.
“What do you want to know?” he asked with a grin.
I glared at him, but didn’t respond to the slight provocation.
“How do you know Ray Cox?”
“So, you do remember him?”
“Answer the question.”
He sighed and leaned back in his chair.
“I work for something called the Athena Project,” he said.
Rachel and I exchanged a glance. The name had registered with both of us.
“You’ve heard of it?” he asked in surprise when he saw our exchange.
“Took a file away from some Russians in Omaha,” I said, unsure why I was revealing anything. “It was about the Athena Project.”
“Russians?” he asked in alarm. “Had they read it? Copied it?”
“Don’t think so,” I said. “Wouldn’t matter if they had. None of them left Nebraska alive.”
He looked at me for a long beat before nodding.
“Ray said you were a hard ass, too.”
“Fuck Ray,” I growled. “Why are you here?”
He took another breath and slowly exhaled as he looked me directly in the eye.
“The Athena Project’s mission is to undo bad things that have happened to America,” he said.
“Undo? What does that mean?” Rachel asked.
“It means going back in time and stopping bad guys before they have an opportunity to act.”
I stared at him a moment, then shook my head.
“Okay, fuck this!” I said with disgust. “Thanks for the assist with the Russians, but I don’t have the time or patience for bullshit. You keep your ass right there in that chair and we’ll be on our way.”
I was already waving for Rachel to follow me when he spoke up, apparently unfazed by my outburst.
“You died tonight,” he said, sounding perfectly rational and sincere. “All three of you. I can show you how it happened.”
I turned back to face him, opened my mouth to say something, then shook my head.
“I’m quite sane and I can prove it,” he said. “Give me five minutes.”
I looked at Rachel, who appeared as unconvinced as I was. Yet, something was nagging at me. Something she’d said earlier about a gut feeling that terrible things were going to happen to us if we came to Sydney. As much as I wanted to dismiss what the man was saying, there had to be something pretty special about the Athena Project for the Russians to have gone to the trouble they had to retrieve the file at Offutt Air Force Base.
“Five minutes,” I finally said, my tone leaving no doubt that he wouldn’t get one second more.
He nodded and started talking.
“You have spent the day today planning how to get into Barinov’s building. Rachel accompanied Wellington this evening to a gag gift store where they purchased two cases of fart spray and brought them back to the compound. But you were betrayed before you could launch your assault. You escaped with Lucas Martin and immediately began a running gun battle with a Russian kill squad.
“Lucas is fine, by the way. Bullet grazed his skull and knocked him out, but that’s it. You had thought you were clear of the Russians and were stopped by the Sydney police responding to reports of gunfire. What happened, the first time you did this, was each of you took fire as you escaped in the police car. Including him.”
He nodded at Dog.
“The wounds were mortal, but you were able to drive away. Rachel was behind the wheel and you were in the back seat with the dog. She was going fast and passed out from blood loss. The car crashed into a bridge abutment and exploded. Get the iPad out of my pack and play the video that’s queued up.”
I looked at Rachel, unable to read the expression on her face. After absorbing what Bering had said, I opened his pack and found the tablet. The screen came to life, a paused video file waiting to be started. Rachel came and stood at my side as I pushed the play button.
There was no audio, the video obviously patched together from pole mounted security cameras and what had to be satellite surveillance. We watched in silence as the events he’d just described unrolled on the small screen. Rachel caught her breath when the police car slammed into the bridge and burst into flames.
The video ended, playback automatically pausing. I looked up at Bering and he held my gaze, nodding. Returning my attention to the iPad, I rewound the file and hit play again. This time, I paid attention to small details. How did Rachel move? How did Dog move and react to us?
I’d had the thought that this was just a fancy CGI production to convince me for some unimaginable reason. If that was the case, they would have had to use actors and later superimpose our images on their forms. It can be quite convincing, unless you are intimately familiar with a person and how they move, which I was by now with Rachel. And, try as I might, I couldn’t spot anything that didn’t look precisely like what I’d seen for the past eight or nine months.
When the video ended, I rewound and started watching it a third time. Rachel moved away, sinking into her chair, wrapping her arms around Dog and burying her face in his scruff. The third time through, I looked for anything wrong. How did we react as bullets slammed into our bodies? Was there the right amount of debris from shots that hit the windshield? Were the bullet holes appearing in the sheet metal nothing more than Hollywood special effects, or were they real? I couldn’t find a single thing to make me doubt the authenticity of the video. Other than our deaths. We were standing right here. This couldn’t have happened.
“If this is what happened, why are we alive? And if it didn’t happen, how do you have this video?”
“It’s a really long story,” he said. “You might want to sit down.”
25
Igor set a fast pace, the SEAL matching him stride for stride as they followed Irina and her uncle’s tracks. He expected to catch up with them in no more than an hour, knowing the older man would slow her down and require occasional rest breaks. Despite Admiral Shevchenko’s age, he had seemed to be in surprisingly good condition. It had only been necessary to stop twice as they fled the prison camp, despite how hard Igor had pushed.
He had been tiring by the time they reached the clearing where Igor had sent them on. Still, he’d been steady on his feet and despite heavy breathing, had held his own. Now, with only the young American in tow, Igor ran hard. The air he was breathing was brutally frigid, the temperature still dropping as the night deepened and every breath felt like fire in his lungs. But Igor had been born and raised in exactly this kind of weather and prided himself on his ability to stoically endure the cold.
Dogs could be heard barking from behind and Igor suspected the guards had figured out who had been broken out of the camp. Shevchenko was an important prisoner, quite probably the most important prisoner in reside
nce. That meant there would be a frantic response to his escape. Normally, the guards wouldn’t even bother leaving their warm barracks, knowing the harsh Siberian weather would more than likely take care of the problem for them. All they’d have to do is go out the next day and follow the tracks in the snow until they came across a frozen corpse.
But there was no way the warden didn’t know the importance to President Barinov of the former Admiral of the Fleet. The man who had plotted a coup and had come close to pulling it off. Barinov was notoriously unforgiving of men whom he felt failed in their duties, regardless of the circumstances. The prison staff would be very aware of this and would go to Herculean efforts to recapture Shevchenko so they didn’t wind up inmates in their own camp. Or worse.
If only they’d been able to spirit Irina’s uncle out of the camp, as had been the plan. It had seemed as if that was going to be possible, but an unknown prisoner in the barracks where they had found Shevchenko had betrayed them. They had escaped only because Igor was armed and the guards had no idea who and what they were facing when they came to arrest him.
Igor had killed them all, fleeing the camp with Irina and her uncle in tow. A sick, old man imprisoned for criticizing the government over twenty years ago had tried to help them slip out unnoticed, but they’d run into a patrol and Igor had been forced to shoot their way past. From that moment, they had been running for their lives, barely staying ahead of pursuit.
Igor pulled to a stop and looked over his shoulder to the west. The SEAL stood next to him, deep breaths sending a plume of steam into the cold, night air. Before the American could ask why they’d stopped, he heard the distant pounding of a rotor. The two men listened for a moment as the sound came closer, exchanged a quick glance and began running again.
It wasn’t a certainty the warden had called the military and asked for a helicopter to aid in the search, but that was the most likely reason a helo was up and flying in this area in the middle of the night. Russia didn’t have many aircraft left in the motherland, most having been taken to America, and even less available pilots. That meant there had to be a compelling reason for someone to put a helicopter in the air.
“Will it have FLIR?” the SEAL called loud enough to be heard over the crunch of snow beneath their feet.
“Not know,” Igor said. “Maybe.”
“Fuck,” the SEAL mumbled, but his pace never wavered.
Within minutes, the sound of the helo had grown to the point that both men were able to identify it as a Hind gunship. That was bad news. Not only did it increase the odds that there was onboard FLIR, it also meant they didn’t stand a chance against its armaments.
Igor had hoped it might be a civilian aircraft that had been pressed into service. That would have meant the only threat it posed was limited to spotting them and relaying the information to pursuers. There was even a chance that they could have damaged it, or possibly shot it down, with the SEAL’s rifle. But not a Hind. Nothing short of an anti-aircraft missile was going to bring one of those beasts down.
The beat of the huge rotor continued to approach and now they could make out the whine of the turbines that powered the gunship. Glancing to their rear, Igor breathed a sigh of relief when he saw a spotlight come on and stab down toward the ground.
“No night vision,” he said, pointing at the beam of light.
“Finally, some good fuckin’ news,” the SEAL said.
They ran hard, pushing on through the night as the Hind went into a broad orbit to their rear. The spot slashed back and forth as the operator searched the ground. It was only a matter of time before their tracks were spotted. There was no way to hide them, especially from the air. As long as the aircrew understood what they were seeing, it would be simple for the helo to fly along the path they were leaving and spot them.
The only question was would they be content to find the two men and stay on station until the guards arrived, or would they notice the trail continuing to the south and follow it until finding Irina and her uncle. There was no way to know and no way to conceal the tracks they were following.
Risking a glance over his shoulder, he was thankful to see the Hind still in a search orbit. They hadn’t found the trail. Yet. But it was only a matter of time. He pushed harder, slightly increasing his speed. They were climbing a gentle slope, the snow deeper from the terrain having faced the oncoming storm.
In two places, he saw the imprint of a body where someone had stumbled and fallen. This wasn’t a good sign and gave him something additional to worry about. Was either Irina or her uncle reaching the point of exhaustion? If so, their chances of surviving the night were not good.
Reaching the crest, he nearly paused in surprise when the tracks suddenly veered to the right in the direction of the river. Why had Irina not continued to go straight south as he’d told her? Shaking his head, Igor plodded on, faithfully following the path.
At the bottom of the slope there was another imprint where someone had fallen, this time the snow around the marks jumbled as the other had obviously struggled to help. Igor noted this, but didn’t slow, dashing forward into a stand of tall trees. They were large, the thick trunks close together and the ground beneath their spreading boughs was clear. Despite a snow-free surface, Igor had to slow so they could weave their way through the forest.
“Sure we’re going in the right direction?” the SEAL asked after several minutes of not seeing any tracks.
Igor glanced at him, shook his head and pointed at the bed of carpet needles. At first glance, they appeared to be undisturbed, but if one paid attention and knew what to look for, there were clear signs of the passage of two sets of feet. Needles compressed by their weight. Faint marks where the side of a boot pushed them into a ridge as someone changed direction. And that was what Igor could see in the dark.
The SEAL looked at the ground but didn’t see what Igor was using to stay on Irina’s track. But he understood enough to not question the big Russian. He’d grown up a city boy and had never been in the wilderness until joining the Navy and going through BUD/S. He understood the concept of tracking, but didn’t have the skills and experience that Igor displayed. Keeping his mouth shut, he stayed close.
Behind, the sound of the gunship’s rotor suddenly changed. It had gone into a hover. Igor glanced back, but couldn’t see from within the forest. He didn’t need too. They’d almost certainly just spotted the path left in the pristine snow. A few seconds later, the noise of the helicopter approaching was final confirmation for him that they were out of time.
Slowing, he followed the path Irina had taken, but was in no hurry to move out of the forest and back into the open. It wouldn’t take the helo long to spot them, then there was nowhere to go. A radio call to the search parties and there would be a hundred guards and a dozen dogs on the way to their location. Even if they were able to stay ahead of the pursuit on the ground, they’d never be able to shake the Hind.
The gunship passed directly overhead a minute later. The ferocious downdraft from its rotor set the trees swaying, dislodging snow and sending it swirling down onto their heads. They hadn’t been spotted, but the helo returned a moment later, blasting more snow off the upper branches. Quickly, the tracks Igor had been following were obscured.
With a string of curses in his native tongue, he pushed on in the same direction, hoping nothing had caused Irina to deviate from what had been a nearly straight line since entering the trees.
“What’s the plan, Ivan?” the SEAL asked, looking up as it passed overhead again. “That bastard isn’t going away.”
Igor said nothing, remaining focused on what lay ahead. A few meters to the front was a break in the forest and they slowed, coming to a stop where the trees ended at the edge of a snow-covered road. Two sets of prints led to a pair of parallel tracks that had barely compressed the surface. Between them, the snow was churned, but Igor didn’t think enough to be noticeable from the air. He looked in each direction, unable to tell which way the vehicle had
been traveling.
“What the hell made that?” the SEAL asked.
“You call it… snow…car? Snow-car?” Igor asked, struggling with the American name.
“Snowmobile?”
“Da! Yes!”
“Well, fuck me. Who’d of thought you Russkies had snowmobiles?”
Igor shook his head and called the young American several derogatory names in Russian.
“Same to ya, Ivan. Whatever the hell all that gibberish means.”
Igor looked at him and grinned. He kind of liked the kid, even if he was irritating at times, but mostly he was happy that Irina might have found a way out. Even if that did mean he was left behind to face the guards.
“Ready fight?” he asked the SEAL, tilting he head toward the direction the guards would come from.
“ ’Bout goddamn time we stopped running. Let’s go fuck up some Russkies, Ivan!”
Igor shook his head again as the SEAL laughed.
26
“You should write novels with all the bullshit you’re spinning,” I said to Bering when he was through telling us about the Athena Project and how things worked.
He shrugged his shoulders, not saying anything. I looked at Rachel and couldn’t read her face, but was pretty sure she was dubious as well.
“Look,” he finally said. “I thought it was crazy, too. At first. But I’ve lived it. I’m here now. And you’ve seen the video. I get why you watched it a bunch of times. You were trying to spot a tell. Something that would indicate it’s a fake. Well, it isn’t.”
I shook my head, glancing down at the iPad that was still in my hand. For a moment, I considered watching the file again, but didn’t see the point. If I hadn’t already spotted something wrong, there was little chance I would now. I stepped to the table and returned the tablet to him. Dropping into a chair, I sighed and brought out my cigarettes.
“Do you mind?”
I looked at Bering who had an expression of disgust on his face.
