The Russian Bride

by Ed Kovacs

  Kit was completely disoriented but just kept firing at the spinning images until his gun magazine was empty and the spinning form of the man was now lying prone as it continued to spin around him.

  Kit knelt down and vomited again. Pain shot through his torso from the new gunshot wound. He took deep breaths, then took them quickly, oxygenating his brain. As quickly as the vertigo had come on, it faded.

  Then the real pain in his head began. It was on the right side only—a unilateral migraine—and the torturous feeling began to ratchet up in intensity.

  He stood, a little tentatively. No time to worry if anyone inside the building heard the guard’s shots. And no time to worry about the gunshot wound to his back; if the bullet traveled in his body and pierced a major organ or blood pathway, he’d be dead soon enough.

  With a bullet in him, with a migraine seriously eroding his operating capacity, and with the chance that others heard the shots and sounded an alarm, Kit decided to use the thermite now; he’d rather confirm the placement of the servers first, but he might not live long enough to do that. So he started pulling the pins on ALSG814 thermite grenades. He held three back in reserve, but he ignited twenty others, dropping them strategically on the roof above the room where the guard said the servers were located.

  Thermite can burn at 4,000 degrees. The intense heat, produced through a chemical reaction, unleashed molten iron onto the roof. Since a single thermite grenade can melt through a vehicle’s engine block in seconds, twenty thermite grenades burned through the corner roof section of Popov’s headquarters with a searing rain of liquefied hell that Kit was sure would destroy the computer servers in the room below.

  Even brief glances at the fiery thermite hurt Kit’s eyes with a stabbing trauma that traveled through to the back of his skull. And extreme throbbing pain from the migraine itself now raked the right side of his brain like a ball-peen hammer slamming steel.

  He moved away from the inferno and fought to focus his thoughts. His first priority was to find Kala. But he’d also have to make sure the servers were destroyed.

  * * *

  Vomit covered the fronts of the two guards who stumbled out from the CCTV room. The men looked green and could barely stand. A couple of guards sitting on a couch and smoking in the common room on the ground floor looked over to their comrades.

  “Damn, what did you two eat for dinner?” Clearly, the guards had not heard the gunfire from the roof. The building was buttoned up tight and soundproofed.

  But the nauseous guards couldn’t speak.

  “Go clean up, we’ll watch your post.”

  As the sick guards headed to the toilet, the other men crossed toward the CCTV room.

  * * *

  The bald hacker didn’t understand what had just happened, but a meteor—it must be a meteor—had just dropped onto his monitor in front of him and split it in two. Then a molten drop landed on his keyboard, and another glob hit his wrist, instantly severing his hand and instantly cauterizing the wound. As a scream formed on his lips, a blob dropped onto his waxed, shiny head and burned all the way down his spinal cord, through the chair he sat on, and burrowed into the floor.

  The heavily pierced girl with the tattoos on her neck going up onto her ear screamed maniacally. Her screams caught the attention of the long-haired blond guy, who pulled off his earphones, stood up, and looked to the ceiling right as a molten mass collapsed onto him. His body simply melted, as the hellacious ooze ate into the floor.

  The tattooed girl stumbled toward the door, instantly hyperventilating from abject fear. The one second it took her to open the door cost her her life, as a small drop of thermite landed on her back and pierced her with a very different kind of piercing than she was accustomed to, and burned right through her spine.

  CHAPTER 51

  Yulana leaned all her weight onto the battery-powered drill with a very long drill bit. The steel bit ate through the mortar with relative ease, but the wall was thick. She felt the give when the bit cleared the interior of the wall, and she backed the bit out of the cement. With shaking hands, she unwound plastic tubing and pushed the tubing through the hole she had just drilled.

  She bent down to the backpack at her feet and struggled to pull out a heavy steel canister that was two feet long and eight inches in diameter. She connected the tubing to the nozzle and then turned the valve to the ON position. The Kolokol-1 gas now pumping into the ground floor was the equalizer that might enable she and Kit to pull this off; she only prayed her daughter Kala was not being held on the ground floor.

  Yulana clicked the TALK button of her radio three times and heard three clicks in return. Then she ran for cover in the parking lot.

  * * *

  Kit felt a burning, searing pain from the bullet wound in his back as he opened the steel fire door at the bottom of the landing and entered the third floor. As he eased on a pair of sunglasses to shield his eyes from the lights, the acrid stench of burning flesh and plastic invaded his nostrils. In addition to sensitivity to light, most migraine sufferers, including Kit, had sensitivity to smells and sounds. The smell caused him to wretch, but there was nothing left to come up.

  He moved forward. Strangely, the floor was eerily quiet, until a piercing alarm sounded up and down the hallway. The sound hit him like a hot poker thrust into his brain stem and caused him to stagger and cry out. He regained his balance just as a hacker who’d been sleeping bolted out of a room wearing only boxer shorts. The man stopped just short of the barrel of Kit’s P90.

  Sweat now poured from Kit’s face in the cool confines of Popov’s headquarters. The hacker blanched when he took in Kit’s visage and greenish skin color.

  “That’s the server room?” Kit asked in Russian as he gestured to where smoke now wafted from a doorway.

  “No, the server room is on the ground floor, two floors directly below that room.”

  Damn it! The rooftop guard confused the hackers’ workroom with the server room! thought Kit.

  “Who are you!?” demanded the shirtless hacker.

  Kit stuck the barrel of his weapon under the man’s chin. “The data from the American fiber-optic strands … is it all in the servers or has it been sent elsewhere?”

  The man’s eyes went huge. “I-I don’t know.”

  Kit jammed the gun barrel harder. “You know.”

  “I-I can’t say.”

  “You’re lying again, so I’ll kill you right now.” Kit made like he was going to pull the trigger.

  “We have it all here!” said the hacker, hurrying to get the words out. “We haven’t sold access yet because we have yet to find the high-dollar strands.”

  Kit slammed the butt of his weapon into the man’s head, and he went down, unconscious. “Appreciate your cooperation.”

  Kit stumbled to the hackers’ room and saw the carnage. All of the computers were destroyed, but it hadn’t been his intention to kill the hackers, especially in such a horrible way. The rooftop guard had either been mistaken or had lied. Yes, the hackers were spies and thieves working hard to hurt the United States of America; maybe they were the ones who had stolen his mom’s life savings. Still, they weren’t targets to kill, and especially not with thermite.

  As shouts and commotion began to filter out from the various rooms, Kit hurried back into the stairwell; pain shot all the way up into his shoulder, and his head felt like a church bell being struck at noon.

  * * *

  Viktor Popov lay in a deep, satisfied sleep in a gigantic bed next to Sasha, his sexed-up red-haired personal assistant. And while ballistic ceramic sheeting lined all the walls, floor area, and ceilings of his personal rooms, the material didn’t withstand temperatures of 4,000 degrees. The ceiling began to bubble, and then a dripping white-hot chemical syrup poured down onto Sasha. Her body jerked awake as her legs were amputated on the spot.

  Popov woke to the sight of glowing, molten droplets raining down. He rolled clear and jumped off the bed just as a large chunk of the hackers
’ room upstairs, or at least the melted remains of it, collapsed onto his beautiful lover. It was the most horrific, insane, surreal sight he’d ever seen, and Viktor Popov had personally created many a horrific sight in his life.

  Popov screamed maniacally as his mind simply snapped. His knees buckled, he vomited, then, head spinning, he looked up into the flames of hell. And a devil was there. For Viktor felt certain he saw Kit Bennings’s face briefly appear, grinning smugly, formed from smoke and licking flames. Yes, he was sure of it.

  Bennings! In his own house, his bedroom! And Sasha horribly maimed and killed. How could it be…?!

  Popov shuffled along in a small circle, as if most of his brain’s circuits had been blown and he didn’t know which way to go. He was still functioning, but his thought processes had morphed into some kind of confused morass.

  Finally, some semicoherent thoughts crystallized: the deception was finished, that much he knew without a doubt. He would play out the game, fight to the last bullet, but he’d lost. It was all gone, all for naught.

  Everything ruined in the blink of an eye.

  He mindlessly reached for a gun and tucked it into the waist of his silk pajama bottoms as a piercing alarm ripped the night.

  * * *

  Room 8 on the second floor was empty, but a cursory look around told Kit that a little girl had definitely been staying there. He could search every second-floor room right now, but it was more important to make sure Kala hadn’t been taken downstairs, where she would be overcome by the sleeping gas. He wobbled slightly as he donned a respirator and headed down to the ground floor.

  * * *

  Kit flew through the steel fire door at the bottom of the stairs. That fire door was keeping most of the incapacitating agent to the ground floor. Bodies of guards sprawled everywhere. They weren’t dead but wouldn’t be happy when they awoke.

  Fighting excruciating pain with every step, he searched all the rooms, but there was no sign of Kala. He found the server room in the northeast corner. The thermite had eaten all the way through the second and third floors, and most of the server towers were already destroyed. He used the remaining three thermite grenades just to make sure the job was absolutely complete.

  * * *

  Yulana aimed very low and pulled the trigger. Her father had instructed her on how to shoot firearms when she was a young teen. She knew she had to breathe, to not jerk when she pulled the trigger. Still, this was incredibly hard for her to do, since Viktor Popov held her terrified daughter Kala in his arms as he stumbled barefoot in pajamas across the parking lot toward a Mercedes.

  His hair tousled, his eyes wild with some kind of insane incomprehension, he fired back at Yulana, holding the gun one-handed, but he didn’t really aim. Perhaps he was firing at apparitions, perhaps at the ghosts of those he had already killed, who, sensing some kind of reckoning, were now appearing on the scene for a resettling of accounts.

  Yulana wiped at her tears. Kala! Sweetheart! It’s Mommy! She could see the unspeakable fear on her daughter’s face, and simply ran toward her.

  CHAPTER 52

  Popov made it into the Mercedes and locked the door. He felt safer because the vehicle was armored: thick armored windows, armor plates in the doors, and run-flat tires, and it would take a tank to stop him. Do you have a tank, Bennings?! And, my God, she shot at her own daughter! I was holding her daughter, and she shot at me. What kind of mother does that? She is unfit, doesn’t deserve to have this child at all.

  Viktor felt confused, he felt sick, he was tired. He put the car into gear just as Bennings ran out of his burning building.

  Maybe he could just run him over?

  Bennings started shooting some kind of gun—why was the man wearing sunglasses at night?—but the bullets just glanced off the windshield. Where were all of his men? Where was Dennis? Once again, I will have to finish the job myself. So he tromped on the gas and veered toward the American. But then he slammed on the brakes and screeched to a stop.

  Kala was bawling, and he hadn’t secured her. So Popov reached over and buckled her seat belt as Kit tried to open the driver’s door. The mafia don then looked out, through the driver’s window into the eyes of his nemesis. The two men were no more than eighteen inches apart.

  Popov looked at him, then looked through him and thought of other things. He needed to leave this place and call for more men and regroup. Yes, he needed to regroup. All was not lost after all; just a change of plans. Have to move on. Have to go now.

  So as Bennings and Yulana emptied their magazines shooting at the tires and the engine compartment, Viktor calmly drove the Benz through the narrow stone archway, crashed through the iron gate, and turned east onto Nikolskaya.

  * * *

  Not quite believing what had just happened, Yulana watched Kit check inside the parked cars, but none of them had keys. After everything, after defeating the whole building, how could Viktor Popov just get into a car and drive away? It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right!

  Suddenly, a motorcycle roared to life, and Yulana ran forward as she realized Kit had fired up a beast of a bike. She gave him a look that told him she was coming, she was riding with him, so he nodded for her to get on, then he powered the bike after Popov and Kala, into the darkness before dawn.

  She felt something wet and sticky. In the strobe of passing streetlights she saw red soaking a large part of his jacket. Kit had been shot. She tried yelling, asking if he was okay, but the roar was too loud and she needed to watch the road, to lean with him as he drove the old streets in pursuit of everything that meant anything to her.

  * * *

  “We need a hard, hot entry,” said Buzz quietly.

  “I could use one of those myself,” said his LVPD detective gal pal, smiling.

  Buzz winked, then tucked his Savinelli pipe into a front pocket of his assault vest. The female detective nodded to a SWAT officer, who nodded to another SWAT officer, who swung a Thor’s Hammer breaching tool and smashed open the apartment door. Buzz and his lady friend rushed in right behind the SWAT guys, who were screaming, “Don’t move! Police! Don’t move!”

  Two Russians sitting at the kitchen table in the fourth-floor apartment slowly raised their hands. The one with the mustache had a radio in his hand, and Buzz took it from him. The Russians had been playing cards as they monitored the feed from a video camera set up on a tripod behind them, a camera pointed at the AT&T PIC across the street.

  As the Russians were cuffed, Buzz pulled out his own radio and said into it, “Phase two, go! Phase two, go!”

  * * *

  SWAT trucks drove through the chain-link gates surrounding the old motel and crashed through a barricade that had blocked off the U-shaped parking lot. Twenty officers began a room-to-room search of the compound but didn’t see a soul—until they came across four men smoking at a makeshift table in a gutted-out area next to a large deep hole in the ground into which all kinds of cabling had been run.

  * * *

  Jen, Angel, and half a dozen SWAT coppers didn’t bother buzzing the buzzer at the PIC’s gate, they just drove through it. At the entrance to the building, a startled employee wearing baggy, oversized gangster pants and a do-rag under a hard hat, let them in.

  “Take us to the underground room where the relay switch is for the fiber-optic trunk. And hurry the hell up!” shouted Jen as more LVPD vehicles drove into the facility.

  * * *

  Alex Bobrik scratched his head. Moscow wasn’t answering the instant-chat connection they had been using to communicate. There must be some kind of—

  The steel door to the stairwell suddenly swung open. Alex and his two assistants looked up to see police officers swarm into the cool confines of his domain.

  “Freeze! Police!”

  Alex watched as his female assistant with dark circles under her eyes ran across the room toward the fake panel. She pushed it inward and was about to crawl through when she was met by the barrel of a gun pointing at her from police inside
the tunnel. She held up her hands and started to sob.

  It has ended badly after all, thought Alex. Now he wouldn’t be seeing his family for a very long time. He had always feared the whole deception had been too good to be true.

  CHAPTER 53

  Kit felt weak. He knew he’d lost blood and should have taken the time to put a compress on the wound. He’d also been severely weakened by the migraine. At least now the symptoms had been reduced to excruciating head pain and light sensitivity. But even with the sunglasses still on, the headlights of oncoming traffic felt like staring into a thousand suns.

  He focused all of his energy on driving the bike, anticipating Popov’s moves and trying to think of how in the world he could stop the Mercedes. The man had looked … mad? Mad as in crazy, like his mind had snapped. Not only was Popov’s driving erratic, but he didn’t seem to be following a coherent route. If the Benz crashed, Kala would be protected by the solidity of the vehicle and the air bags, but Popov wasn’t even driving all that fast.

  Had Popov called for backup with the in-dash car phone? Was he just biding his time until a carload of goons or machine-gun-toting police showed up?

  This needed to end quickly for a lot of reasons, number one of which was that Kit was fading. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold it together as he muscled the bike onward.

  * * *

  Dennis wasn’t answering his cell. Neither was Mikhail. Had they made a pact with Bennings? Of course! They were hijacking the deception. This was a coup, a purge, a putsch. When had they approached him? Probably while the major had still been in Moscow. Mikhail, his nephew, the man he’d put though eight years of university studies, had probably set up a second data center and was right now stealing the billions that rightfully were his. Svoloch’! Bastard!