Tsar

by Ted Bell

  “Afraid?” The look said it all. He was going.

  Stoke clapped him on the back hard enough to rattle his molars. “All right, man, cowboy up, and get your goddamn foul-weather gear on, little buddy, we’re going sailing!”

  33

  The big yellow Cigarette was bobbing pretty good, even still moored in her marina slip. Like a bronco in the chute, Stoke thought, boat saying, “Cut me loose, cowboy, I dare your ass.” Although the Miami Yacht Group’s marina was pretty well protected from the ocean, it was still choppy with whitecaps inside the breakwater. Sailboat masts swung wildly, a forest of aluminum sticks, whirling and twirling in the storm. The skies were now very dark purple with a funny greenish cast to them.

  Perfect.

  Like some pretty ladies of Stoke’s former acquaintance, the Magnum 60 was all bow and no stern. She had a small open cockpit aft, inside which were four deeply contoured bucket seats, bright yellow like the hull, with harness equipment like you might expect on the space shuttle. Along her sleek flanks, she had five oval portholes forward, meaning there was built-out space below.

  What you do down there, Stoke thought, is not take little nappies or read spy novels and do crossword puzzles. You go down there to take care of business with Mama once you get offshore and shut two engines down and crank up a third, the Johnson. Boat like this was all about testosterone, a little too much or a little too little, depending on the owner.

  “Looks like a Chiquita banana on steroids,” Stoke said, uncleating a spring line and heaving it aboard. The Russian guy fake-laughed, going for the stern line.

  He said, “This is the sister ship to the boat that won the greatest sea race in the world, Sheldon. The Miami-Nassau-Miami at an average top speed of over eighty-five miles per hour. You know what sister ship means?”

  “Lemme think a sec. Identical twins?”

  “You are a very intelligent individual. You’ve heard of Bounty Hunter? Don Aronow’s Maltese Magnum? These magnificent boats are names out of racing history.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Stoke said, as if he had a clue.

  Yurin started to climb down into the helm seat, and Stoke stopped him, grabbing his shoulder with a gentle squeeze. “I’ll drive,” he said. “You ride shotgun. You know what shotgun means?”

  “Shotgun?” the Russian asked.

  They already had their helmets on and two-way radio communication. It was the only way you could talk aboard these monsters, even when there was no hurricane blowing.

  “You want to drive?” Yurin said. “Are you serious, man?”

  “I just want to putt around. You know, here inside the marina. Get a little feel. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You think you can handle this thing? You have some experience with this kind of boat? Any kind of boat?”

  “Navy SEAL operations, Team Two. Riverine patrol boats in the Mekong Delta. Three tours.”

  The Russian looked at him with different eyes.

  “Good enough,” he said, and went around to the dock on the vessel’s port side, loosening the stern, spring, and bow lines. “Climb aboard,” he told Stoke. “I’ll cast you off and jump down.”

  Stoke saw that the helm seat had no seat to speak of, only a curved backrest with a narrow bench you parked your butt on. The sides wrapped around you nice and snug, especially snug for him, but okay. He turned on all three of the battery switches, checked the fuel level and oil pressure. All good to go.

  She had twin 1800-horsepower Detroit racing engines, and when he turned the key on number one, the response was one sharp blat and then a deep vibrating rumble. Followed by the second engine, the feeling of power coming up through the soles of his shoes was something else entirely.

  Yurin freed the last line and leaped aboard as Stoke started reversing out of the slip. There was so much power on tap you had to handle the throttles like surgical instruments. Tiny adjustments.

  Yurin was strapping himself into the portside seat as Stoke got the big Magnum turned around and headed toward the mouth of the harbor.

  “Where the fuck are you going?” Yurin said. “Gale-force winds coming right up the Cut! We’ll get knocked on our asses out there.”

  “Relax, Sunshine,” Stoke said, looking over at him. “I think we’ll poke our nose out in the Atlantic. Just get a touch of it, see how she handles the rough stuff.”

  Yurin started to say something, thought better of it, and just shook his head. He planted his feet and held on to to the stainless grab handle mounted on the dash in front of him.

  “That’s it. Just hold on, Yurin. We’ll be back in your office signing papers before you know it.”

  Stoke lined up in dead center of the narrow channel, aiming for a spot midway between the two massive cement breakwaters that enclosed the marina. The entrance was funnel-shaped, with the narrowest part on the seaward side. Beyond the entrance, the Atlantic looked like really convincing special effects, pretty much the way it did in that movie The Perfect Storm. Mountainous crests, cavernous troughs, the wind rising to a wailing gale, ripping the crests off waves, well-defined streaks of foam marching off to the southeast. A boiling black sky overhead.

  Stoke eased the throttles forward until he saw the tachs reading 2,500 rpm, mentally preparing himself like a bull rider in the chute.

  “Ready?” Stoke said, glancing over at Yurin. They were mid-channel, almost out in open water, about to enter the funnel.

  No reply. The copilot was wearing the thousand-yard stare, wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into, if his life was worth a measly million bucks for a plastic play toy.

  Stoke suddenly firewalled both throttles, and the boat came screaming out of the water, leaping forward with a thunderous roar of exhaust as the big props grabbed water. The boat went flying through the chute, wide open. At the other end, an oncoming wave was building, rushing toward them. It looked to be a green frothing wall about twenty, thirty feet high, and it was just getting started.

  “Watch out!” the Russian screamed.

  “Not a problem,” Stoke said calmly in his lip mike.

  The Russian’s eyes went wide with terror. His client seemed intent on slamming the Magnum head-on into the oncoming wall of water. They were going to smash it like a bullet to the forehead. Wave had to be forty feet high now. The water was glassy green, so clear you could almost see through it to the other side. The props whined as the sharp prow of the Magnum struck the wave, pierced it, and then Stoke just drove the boat right through the wall, the bow eventually emerging from the other side.

  The bow was suspended in midair, the back half of the boat, including the cockpit, was momentarily still inside the wave, and then they were through and pitching forward, the nose dropping and the bottom of Stoke’s stomach falling away as they went screaming down the wall of another big wave, into the trough of a brand-new wave just starting to build.

  “Holy fuck,” he heard Yurin say, sputtering. Stoke looked over at his drenched passenger and liked what he saw. Fear.

  What was left of the boat’s curved windshield was a mangled piece of chromed frame wrapped around the Russian’s chest, sheets of broken safety glass in his lap and on the deck around his feet.

  “Not bad, huh?” Stoke said. “I thought we’d lose a lot more than just the goddamn windshield. Look, we’ve still got the spotlight up on the bow. Now, that’s good construction.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Easy, Yurin. No way to speak to a prospective customer.”

  “Go back!” Yurin said. “Turn us around. You’re going to snap this thing in two out here!”

  “I’ll go back, but first I’ve got a couple of questions.”

  “Questions? About the boat?”

  “No. About you.”

  “Me? I’ll tell you about me. I’m going to fucking kill you, okay? I’m going to rip your ugly head right off your-”

  He was clawing at his safety harness, desperate to get out of his seat and remove Stok
e’s head. Stoke looked over at him, smiling.

  “Look, just calm down, okay? Let me explain something. Only take a second. You’re an asshole, all right?”

  A sudden surge threw both men back in their seats, snapping their heads back. They were angled sharply upward now, Stoke was using the powerful engines to climb the nearly vertical face of another building wave. And keep Yurin firmly planted in his seat.

  “What?” Yurin shouted. “What the fuck do you want to know?”

  “You’re Black Beret, right? All you security guys at the birthday party. Russian Black Berets?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just turn around and go back to the marina before you kill both of us!”

  “I will, but bear with me a sec. Spend a lot of time in Chechnya, Yurin? Whupping Chechen ass?”

  “Never been there.”

  Stoke put the wheel hard over to port, and the boat fell off the steep climb and started skidding sideways down the wave. Then the wildly cavitating props caught water, dug in, and she was headed on a better diagonal course down into the trough. Stoke had just enough control for a second to pull the 9mm Glock from inside his foul-weather jacket. Yurin saw the gun, and it seemed to make his already perfect day even more complete.

  “Yurin, listen up. Get out of your harness.”

  They were in the trough for the moment. Stoke pulled the throttles back to idle and unsnapped his own seat harness. If you planted your feet wide, you could probably stay on them. At least long enough to do what he had to do.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Get your ass down on the deck. On your knees, Red Rider. You’ve got three seconds before your brains won’t work so good anymore. One…two…

  “Three,” Stoke said. He turned and fired a round about a foot in front of Yurin’s nose.

  “Fuck!” Yurin unbuckled the fasteners and slid out of the harness, one hand still clenching the sissy bar, what the Navy called the “oh-shit bar.” They were still moving uneasily along the trough. The Magnum was rocking and rolling, and it wasn’t easy, but the Russian managed to kneel on the deck between the two seats without getting thrown out of the boat.

  “Jacket off. Everything off, waist up.”

  “Jesus. A fucking giant black homo with a death wish.”

  “Now.”

  Stoke tapped him gently on top of the head with the pistol butt. Yurin ripped at the zipper on his yellow slicker, somehow managing to get it off. The wind whipped it right out of the cockpit, and it disappeared aft in a cloud of spume.

  “Now the shirt.”

  He was wearing a black T-shirt, the same kind he had on the night of the party. Macho muscle-boy crap. People who had Ferraris didn’t wear Ferrari shirts. And people who had real muscle didn’t wear muscle shirts.

  The shirt came off as Stoke carefully moved around behind him and jammed his left foot into the back of Yurin’s neck, shoving him forward, facedown on the deck, the man’s neck and shoulder muscles all thick cords and knots bulging as he tried to squirm away. Made the image Stoke had expected to see a moving picture, but yeah, there it was, all right. He saw just what he thought he’d see.

  The Head of the Tiger.

  34

  The tiger’s head was tattooed right between Yurin’s shoulder blades. Stoke had to admit it was impressive, even though it was only about the size of a softball. But it was the work of an artist, beautifully etched into the skin. Below the scowling tiger’s face was the tattooed name Stoke had been thinking about ever since he’d first met Yurin and his black-shirted bully boys at the birthday blast.

  OMON.

  The Russian special forces, the so-called Black Berets. Death squads who had roamed Chechnya before and after the carpet bombing of Grozny, killing anything and everything in their path that remained alive. Elite forces during the war, paid killers after. He’d kept his mouth shut, hadn’t told Brock about his suspicions that night. He thought he’d pry around the edges a little and see what broke loose first. But he’d been doing his research.

  Now that Putin’s second Chechen war was long over, OMON worked for the new dark forces of the interior ministry inside the Kremlin. They roamed Moscow in armored personnel carriers, wearing their trademark black and blue camo fatigues, doing odd jobs for the powers that be. When they got bored, or loaded, they picked up gutter drunks in Red Square, hauled them off to the tank at Lubyanka in the APCs, and beat the shit out of them. Or worse.

  Stoke leaned down to speak directly into Yurin’s ear. He kept his foot planted on the guy’s neck, just to keep him from getting any frisky ideas. The kid had stopped squirming and bitching, but only because Stoke had put a little more weight on the back of his neck, compressing his vocal cords.

  “What brings you bad boys all the way to Miami?” Stoke asked.

  “Sunshine,” Yurin croaked as Stoke increased the pressure. And leaned down again to scream into his ear.

  “You want to go home tonight, Yurin? Hit the vodka? Sleep in a nice warm bed? Or do you want to be just another accidental drowning in a storm? Too many beers, taking a piss off the stern, oopsy-daisy. A tragic mistake, officer, happens all the time. Your call.”

  “What’s your fucking problem?”

  Stoke’s immediate problem was that he felt the Magnum starting to roll over on her beam ends as the sea started piling up rapidly on the port side.

  “Whoops, another big one coming. Hold on, Tiger.”

  Stoke grabbed the back of his seat, struggling to stay upright with one foot braced against the Russian’s head and the other on the deck. They were in free fall again, speeding down the face of a huge wave, rudder amidships, but now no one was at the wheel. Stoke couldn’t let go of the seat to grab it for fear of being thrown from the cockpit. The boat’s motion was ridiculously violent and disorienting, but Stoke had seen worse. He’d once ridden out a mid-Pacific typhoon solo in a two-man Zodiac. Six days of that, this little blow was cake.

  “Who do you work for, Yurin? I want a name!”

  “Get the boat out of this c-crazy-shit ocean, and m-maybe I’ll tt-talk,” he sputtered, his nose and lips mashed against teak decks that were now awash, seawater sloshing in and out of his damn mouth, just the kind of modified water-boarding technique Stoke had been shooting for out here.

  “Talk now, before we bury the bow again and wash both our asses into the drink. Who do you work for?”

  “The Dark Rider.”

  “The what?”

  “Dark Rider. What he’s called. No one knows his real name.”

  Stoke leaned forward and grabbed the spinning wheel. He held it hard over, keeping the nose from burying itself and instead starting up the next wall on a reasonable angle.

  “You get orders from somebody. Who?”

  “Directly from General Arkady Zukov. Retired now, from the KGB. A great Russian patriot. We are all patriots, working to restore Russian pride.”

  “Shitty job so far, Yurin.”

  “Piss off.”

  “Rostov? Is Rostov the Dark Rider?”

  “No. Not Rostov. Higher.”

  “Higher than the president?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What was that? I can’t hear you.”

  The boat was totally out of control.

  “I said yes! Higher!”

  “Here’s the big one, Yurin. Ready? What the fuck are Russian OMON troops doing here in America?”

  No answer.

  Stoke shifted his foot to the back of Yurin’s head, driving his face hard into the deck as they crested the thirty-footer. In a few seconds, they’d drop sickeningly down the other side.

  “Tell me about OMON. Now!”

  “Fuck. A mission. We’re here training for a mission.”

  “What kind of mission you on, Yurin?”

  “Hostage rescue.”

  “Like you rescued those schoolchildren in Beslan?”

  “Fuck you. Shoot me.”

  Stoke mashed his nose hard into the d
eck and heard a howl of pain.

  “Where you training?”

  “Oh, shit! Out in the Everglades. An abandoned airstrip.”

  “OMON is going to rescue hostages here in Miami? Is that it? Why doesn’t that make any sense to me, Yurin? Unless maybe you’re training to prevent a hostage rescue, know what I’m sayin’?”

  Yurin was silent.

  Stoke removed his foot from the back of the big Russian’s head, stepped over Yurin, and carefully slid back into the helm seat. He didn’t have it all, but it was a good start. It was enough to get Harry Brock’s attention. Harry was headed to Bermuda for a high level powwow with Hawke. Stoke had gotten what he’d come for, good hard intel. Russia was on everybody’s mind now, especially Alex Hawke’s.

  “We’re going back,” Stoke said, steering off the wave crest, taking a diagonal back down the face. “Get up. Slowly. See if you can get back in your seat without getting tossed into the drink, all right? I’m not in a rescue mood right now.”

  The big yellow race boat was pointed sharply downward on the foamy green face of the wave at a forty-five-degree angle.

  “Jesus,” Yurin said, managing to get to his feet by holding on to the bar. He slid back inside his seat, buckled up. Stoke kept the Glock in his hand, in case the guy got courageous. But he was a little green around the gills now, his nose mashed over to one side, the blood and spittle trickling out the sides of his mouth blown backward on both cheeks, not looking too sporty.

  “Your nose is broken, Yurin. You want me to fix it? I can do it back at the dock. What I do, I jam my two little pinkies straight up your nostrils and, pop-pop, voilà, straight as an arrow again. Hurts like a bitch, though, I gotta be brutally honest.”

  Yurin didn’t reply, didn’t even look over.

  It wasn’t easy getting through the narrow end of the funnel with a fiercely following sea, but Stoke managed it, just surfed a big roller all the way through the chute.

  When they were back in the relative calm of the marina, the seriously pissed-off Russian said, “Any reason why we couldn’t have had that conversation in my office?”