Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  Didn’t everyone deserve a warning? Isn’t that what Solzhenitsyn had done? Warn people? Isn’t that what the Prophets had done? Isn’t that what Volkhov himself had done?

  Vasily was no prophet. Nor was he a revered teacher. In fact, he was nothing more than a simple youth thought by his townsfolk to be a simpleton. But having recently been imprisoned with Mikail in the belly of the beast, the town’s prison where the brutal uprising had begun, he was determined, like Noah before him, to run to his town and tell the townsfolk what was coming, so they would at least have the option to leave.

  Vasily shook his head. “No. No. No. We can’t just leave all of these people, Pyotr. These are our friends and our neighbors. We’ve got to try to get some of them out. What about the Malanovskys? What about Irinna? Do you remember Irinna, the pretty girl who works in the bakery? Are we going to just leave them all here on this battlefield? We have to do something to get as many of them out of here as we can.” He was speaking as much from compassion as from bravery. It wouldn’t even occur to him to leave without taking others, even as he had given no thought to trying to help the two prisoners escape. For him, there was no higher calling than answering the instinct towards one’s fellow man. No greater love hath any man than that he lay down his life for his friends. Vasily, having lost his parents while still a very young boy, had no one in this world but his friends, and he was determined to try to save them

  “What can we do, Vasily? What can we do if you go up there and get yourself shot? What can we do if we wait here and the Spetznaz troops come down here and shoot both of us for participating in Lev’s breakout?”

  “I’ve got to go back, Pyotr. I have to,” Vasily said, shaking his head. The finality in that word hinted at both conviction and destiny. “You prepare yourself to go, and if I’m not back, or if you get spooked, or if you hear gunfire, you just go.” He spread his hands as if to answer any objections. He looked Pyotr in the eye and nodded to him. “Lev would have wanted me to at least try, Pyotr.”

  Pyotr nodded back at Vasily. “Ok. If that’s your decision. Do not be deceived though. If it comes to the point that I think you’re dead, I’m gone.”

  Vasily nodded and wondered when such a moment might come.

  ****

  Together they made plans, and then Pyotr took Vasily down into the basement under the house. To be accurate, it wasn’t really a basement, but more of a root cellar that Lev and Pyotr had dug out by hand, many years ago.

  Pyotr showed him that along the west wall, which had been concreted using trowels and coated with some kind of plaster or whitewash, there was a large, antique bureau that, upon very close examination, seemed to be attached to the wall. Pyotr pulled out the drawers of the bureau—all six of them—and then removed the wooden uprights and separators. As he worked, the dismantling of the bureau revealed an open space behind the wall. The entire piece of furniture was just an elaborate covering to a narrow entrance that led straight down into a tunnel.

  Vasily stared, dumbfounded. Pyotr explained that the tunnel had been dug painstakingly over many years, and that it had remained a secret precisely because it had been known to no one. “Do you understand the significance of that statement?” he asked. “Uncle and I were the only ones who knew about it. The dirt was removed a bucket at a time, hauled up the stairs, and dumped into the multitude of steps and raised gardens and landscaping that surround this house. Uncle Lev had the idea, believing gardens were the perfect hiding place for dirt. Make no mistake though, Vasily. We didn’t even let our left hands know what our right hands were doing. And we told no one else about this. You need to know that the moment you ask others to come here, the secret will be out and we will have a very short time to act.”

  Vasily pictured the gardens he’d just walked through as he climbed the stone walkway to the door, their boxed shapes and raised concentric circles now formed over with snow drifts and rounded to make it seem as if the house sat on a hill. He considered the truth in what Pyotr was telling him. Even if he remained intentionally blurry about the details when asking others to leave with them, it would not take long for them to figure out the truth. He nodded.

  “The tunnel leads under the west perimeter wire and then comes up in a small copse of trees only meters outside the fence. From there it’s a couple of miles straight through the forest to the old water treatment plant,” Pyotr explained. He smiled at the young man’s amazement.

  A cold wind whooshed through the tunnel and hit the two men in the face. It sounded like a mechanical nothing, a low audial hum, an ocean crashing endlessly upon a gasping needy shore.

  Vasily and the older man stood in the cold and listened. The waves on the other side sounded like freedom.

  ****

  Standing in the sparsely drawn cellar, Vasily remembered the backpack that he’d brought with him, and he ran back upstairs to retrieve it where he’d dropped it near the chair by the fire.

  Grabbing the pack and an extra candle he found on the table, he returned to the tiny subterranean room and placed the pack down on the floor. He told the older man how he’d come into possession of the pack, and that it was supposed to have useful items, but that he did not yet know its contents.

  As he kneeled to open the pack, he thought of the man who’d given it to him, the one called Clay, and he remembered the fear behind Clay’s eyes when he’d first met him, but how, when he saw him last in the prison cell, ready to escape, those eyes had become peaceful and resolved, as if something important had been settled in the man’s soul.

  “This was given to me by a man who loved your uncle,” Vasily said.

  Even as he said the words, they surprised him a little, but he remembered the way that Clay and Volkhov were talking together in the cell when he’d entered as their keeper. Although the two men had not known one another long, Vasily knew that his own words were true… Clay had loved Lev Volkhov as one loves his own flesh and blood. He knelt in the darkness of the cellar and turned the pack on its side, all the while thinking how it was all that was left of the man who had made such an impression on him.

  Vasily and Pyotr opened the backpack and carefully examined what was in it, cataloging the items they found, and talking about the things they would still need. Pyotr removed a camera and a radio. If Volkhov was right that an EMP would be coming soon, these items would need to be protected from the pulse. Pyotr put both electronic items into an ammo can and left them on the bureau by the tunnel so that they could take them when it was time to leave.

  They looked at the other items, including a knife, a few books, some clothes, a small blue box, a fishing kit, some blankets, and sundry other things. Vasily wondered at these personal effects, just as one does when finding some item that has been used by another life – maybe in another historical era. He felt like an archeologist, or anthropologist, searching through the lost tools of another culture. It felt peculiar, rifling through someone else’s property so soon after their owner had died. Vasily remembered something Clay told him in the prison cell before they’d attempted their breakout. He’d said that Vasily was the best spy in a whole town of spies. That was a kindness that had not been offered by many of the townsfolk—his own people. Warwickians had generally treated him like an idiot because he had not impressed them in the ways that they had demanded. It had taken this stranger to see his potential. He smiled and went back to his work.

  After a short discussion, they agreed that Pyotr would continue to sort the items and work on their preparedness, while Vasily would return to the gym. The older man said that he would busy himself devising plans for escape and making sure the tunnel was secured and cleared and ready to be used. They could not know how many people might be willing to leave with them. The more that decided to come, the more difficult would be their escape.

  In order to prepare for all contingencies, Pyotr said that he would put together some “go bags”—that’s what he called them. These consisted, he explained, of packs with some food, water,
and other needful supplies in them, ready to take with you in case of emergency.

  When he was ready to walk back to the gym, Vasily thanked Pyotr for waiting, and told him again how sorry he was about Lev.

  “Perhaps,” Vasily said, “I can find out more about what happened.”

  “Perhaps,” was all that Pyotr could say in response.

  “I’ll be back, Pyotr.”

  “I hope you will, Vasily.”

  “I have to do this.”

  “I know.”

  They shook hands, and Pyotr promised to pray for Vasily, and with that, they headed back upstairs.

  ****

  Vasily left Pyotr’s house, and as he walked, an omnipresent darkness seemed to sit upon him. It was brooding and heavy like the weight of ages. He was terrified and sad and angry all at the same time. He felt his rapid heartbeat in his throat, and he had the beginnings of a headache from the stress. The pain lay just behind the eyes and radiated outward to his temples. He felt as if he might be walking toward his own death, but then that thought was overwhelmed by his anger at what had happened to Lev and Clay, and what the gang had done to his town. He felt a sudden surge of adrenaline and a desire to fight. His emotions shifted with each step he took toward the gymnasium. Now he was curious and hopeful. Now he was angry. Now he was overcome by the terror of facing Mikail and Vladimir and Sergei and those Spetznaz troops and their machine guns.

  He kept walking forward, because that is what he had to do, resolving to do what was before him despite his feelings. Heroism is sometimes an accident of circumstance more than it is a product of design.

  The night felt surreal and dark, and the frigid wind spiked past his face and whipped at his coat. Lev had trained him to think in English—it helped with his English conversation, and to do away with his natural accent—but now he had to put that away and think in Russian. It would be fatal for him if he slipped up and gave anyone an indication that he spoke English at all, much less perfectly. Like a switch being flipped in his mind, he made the change to Russian, and he purposefully put on his Russian attitude and demeanor, even changing his walk. He became, step-by-step as he walked toward the gym, just stupid, harmless Vasily, the town idiot from Warwick, who nobody suspected because no one had ever bothered to walk in his shoes.

  ****

  It is odd the way a major event, some birth or death or loss or change, can make one see the world through brand new eyes. It is as if the world is a snow globe, and occasionally it gets shaken up so that, while the pieces all remain in the same environment, the whole somehow fits together differently.

  As Vasily walked through Warwick toward the gymnasium to face what could be his death, he noticed the intricately carved latticework on the eaves and rakes of the small wooden houses along his route. He felt the gravel crunch in the hard-packed snow under his boots as he listened to the moon’s stillness.

  In the distance, he could hear shouting and fluttering of action, and through a window he heard a chair scoot. He had walked through this town so many times at night, and the sounds and sights had always washed over him like rainwater on the windshield of a fast moving train, merely forming impressions, without announcing themselves and demanding that he stop and pay attention. Now, as he walked, he felt everything new, as if waking from a dream and realizing that the material world mattered.

  Here was the place that he and Arkady, a young boy who’d lived two houses down from him since the time of his birth, threw stones at a goat and the ricochet of their misses landed them in trouble with old man Kovalenko. Down Bunin Street, he saw the jutting façade of the home of the beautiful woman he knew only as Lyudmila, who paid him to gather stones in the forest, and to build a low-rising step for her door. Here was Irinna’s house, and there was the place he had first seen her, walking home from the bakery along a little side street toward her door, her arms full of bread that he could smell from across the street.

  This town was the only place on earth that he had ever truly known, and as he walked through the snow toward the gymnasium, he was struck by the thought that he barely knew it at all.

  Vasily was born to be a spy. Like some others of his age, this reality had always been clouded by the fact that he was born in a time when his personal value was questioned, not only by the people of his town who, as has been mentioned, saw him as having less than average intelligence, but also by the shadowy authorities who designed Warwick for the purpose of waging war with the Soviet Union. When that union dissolved, those authorities simply left the machinery of the charm school in place without giving it a discernible direction. Vasily, therefore, had grown up with a lack of direction, as if his existence mirrored the existence of the town. Not only was he a young man in a country that didn’t recognize him, and in a town that didn’t know him, but he was also a dreamer whose highest dream was almost certainly unattainable. He’d been, like all those who eventually did become spies and were caught out for one reason or another, abandoned to his fate and disavowed.

  So he’d thrown himself into his studies, but quietly, behaving as a child does who is bullied by his peers. He received threats and intimidation on a daily basis from his classmates, and was ridiculed for his small size, and the delicate features he had inherited from his mother. Of those who’d bullied him, none had done so as prominently as the youths in the gang who had just seized power in Warwick.

  Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov, Vladimir Nikitich Samyonov, and Sergei Dimitrivich Tupolev had, like him, been born to be spies, and like him, they had failed to achieve their ultimate goal of being picked by the Americans to spy in Russia. Though they had all been subjected to the machinery of the charm school’s training, they each were found unworthy of further commissioning into service—the latter two and Vasily because their performance on testing had resulted in less than optimal results, and Mikail because he was found too unstable to be acceptable.

  They all had learned, in their turn, that they were destined to stay, live, and die in Warwick, and each had reacted in different ways. Mikail and his gang became more aggressive among their peers, lashing out at anyone weaker than themselves. Vasily became a watcher of windows, a dreamer who decided that his only hope in life was to bide his time and wait for something better to come along. While he waited, he’d read books.

  Mikail, Vladimir, and Sergei had noticed their younger cohort’s reticence to action from the earliest days in school and in the streets of their town. They saw weakness and timidity where there had been only Vasily’s hopes, and they saw stupidity where there was his tendency toward silent and internal contemplation. At some point they had decided that he was an easy mark, and they’d treated him as such. He was, they thought, a fool, but they had read the cover of his book all wrong.

  Vasily never understood the gang’s need for aggression. He’d simply never felt the desire to belittle, or to rage, or even to be noticed. Well, that is not entirely true. He’d acted once before, and that action was the reason he’d been in prison when the coup erupted.

  As he rounded the final corner along Tsentralnaya Street and looked up the hill toward the prison where only a few hours ago he’d plotted with the men he was assigned to oversee, he passed the Orthodox Church and looked beyond it to the cemetery. It was in that cemetery—the only one in Warwick—that he’d been sitting and drinking one night, not long ago in the big scheme of things. On that night, a group of younger boys had passed him on their way to somewhere, and one of them had sneered at him and called him stupid, and he’d simply had enough of ridicule to take it from those who were younger. He fought with the boy and had been arrested for drunkenness and brawling, and the arrest had landed him in jail. That series of events had set him upon his present course. His current situation had begun in that one moment of his life in which he’d stood up for himself, and, having had a moment of doing what had been neglected for far too long, he had taken his first step toward what might now be his undoing… or his freedom.

  ****

/>   The Spetznaz troops were stationed around the gym, securing the perimeter as Vasily came over the sloping walkway. He felt his feet slide gently across the ice and snow, and the sounds seemed to be amplified in the chilly night. One of the soldiers raised a rifle and pointed it in his direction, and he held up his hands and stopped in his tracks for a moment, intending to show them that he was unarmed. From a commotion near the right of a little group of soldiers, he heard a familiar voice rise up, and as the soldiers parted slightly, he saw the images of Mikail and Vladimir appear and begin to walk toward him.

  “You there. Vasily Romanovich! Get over here!”

  There are moments one sees not from the perspective of an individual, but as if it were a movie, from a distance. If, from that perspective, one had watched and studied Vasily’s situation, one might’ve seen the two figures of the new bosses, Mikail and Vladimir, walk angrily toward the smaller youth in the distance. Their tones were insulting and angry.

  “Where have you been?” was not a question but an insinuation.

  “What have you done?” was not an inquiry but an invective.

  One might have noticed, had one viewed it as a movie, the youth’s quiet, and understood it to be fear, and such a reaction would have been understandable. The mixture of bravado and accusation that the two figures were displaying as they were surrounded by guns in the foreground was rife with contempt and pregnant with threat. The youth simply stood there in silence.

  There was a deeper reason for his silence, however. He was not simply cowering before the men who had terrorized him all of his life, and he was not merely carefully choosing his words. Instead, he was looking at four guards from the prison, guards he had known from his recent stay in one of its cells. They were blindfolded and lined up along the wall of the gymnasium. The Spetnaz soldiers were pointing their guns at them and waiting for an order to shoot.