The Fifth Battalion

by Michael Priv

  “Norman, you cooking something,” Andrey alleged weightily, waving his gun in front of my nose. “You asked the guy for two mil. That’s how much you owe us. You didn’t ask for any kapustafor yourself. I know why. You’re not planning to pay us, that’s why. You planning to kill us out and keep our money. I’ll shoot you in the headkill you first, you bastard, I swear!”

  “But I got the two hundred grand here,” I protested. “That’s enough for me. You can take the rest.”

  “Two hundred’s nothing. You go to Caribbean with your old lady, you won’t even last a year.” “But I’m not going to Ca ribbean.”

  “You wanna stay here after what you did to these Marines? You think I’m stupid? What you cooking, man? You got ambush waiting for us, you svoloch?Where?”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t even know where the second position is. You never told me, remember? Plus, you got Linda. So, relax, man.”

  “I don’t trust you.” Andrey shook his head resolutely. “You’re too smooth. Too smooth! Would probably dump your girlfriend and take off with all our money. You don’t want more money, you have something cooking. What you cooking? Talk!”

  With a sigh, I took out the phone again.

  “Yes.” I heard Colonel’s voice, still irritated. So sensitive, jeez. “Eh-h, Colonel?”

  “Who else? What do you want?”

  “I want four million dollars now. Something just came up.”

  “Four million?! Unbelievable! Did you maybe want a blow job with that!?” “Well, I don’t know, it’s kind of unexpected. Are you goodlooking? Do you work out?” I had to hang up immediately following that exchange as the Colonel was getting positively hysterical.

  “Happy?” I asked Andrey. He wasn’t, I could tell. He was still suspicious, and the guns were now poking me in the ribs. “You called him only because I told you. You wouldn’t’ve called him on your own. You, traitor svoloch son of a bitch!” I got bored with this nonsense and simply walked away, shaking my head. Nobody shot me—I liked that. Andrey got into a long phone discussion in Russian, while I searched both Marine cars and found nothing of interest.

  Andrey finally got off the phone and, looking away, addressed me gruffly, “I am very sorry, Norman, I apologize for overreacting.” He must have been repeating verbatim what Eugene told him to say.

  “No problem, man, just doing your job, right?”

  Andrey nodded, shifting his weight from one foot to another uneasily, still not looking me in the eye. Bad news.

  “Where are we going now?”

  “Some old machine shop. About half hour from here. Nice and deserted—like you wanted.”

  18 We drove to the old machine shop in two cars. Two of the Russians in my car had their guns pointed at me. Apparently, I was not as close to my newly found friends as I’d believed. The money went in the other car. I fell asleep immediately and had a dream about my Linda, my lover, my life.

  After drowning with the fishing trawler during a storm in the North Sea, I did my best to be born again as a boy in Testerep, of course, to come back to my Ussie and the kids but I failed as usual. I was very bad at that. I hope to master this someday and get better. Some people retained their sense of orientation and full sight perception in a disembodied state. Not me. I was disoriented between lives and my perceptions were dim. That was how I ended up in Eindhoven, about two hundred miles east of Testerep, a part of Frisia then. At least I was a boy. I liked my new parents very much. They gave me a nice, manly name, Edgar. I must have been about four when I remember myself asking my mother where Testerep was. She pointed in the direction of the hills on the outskirts of town. “About a five-day walk from the foot of those hills,” she said. A small child of four, I remember staring at those hills a lot.

  At the age of eleven I was finally ready to walk beyond the hills, to make the journey, to return to Ussie. As fate had it, right then the Vikings raided us. The filthy creatures took the town by surprise. I fought that hopeless battle shoulder to shoulder with other men of my family. I was small, but still I was a man, I was brave. I jumped on one, trying to claw his eyes out, while older men of my family attacked the beast with knives. Together with my father, we killed two of the brutes. Then with my father dead, I killed one more by tripping him and plunging my knife deep into his eye. In all the commotion, as a family, we must have wiped out over half a dozen of the stinking animals. I remember my mother and sister attacking a wounded one with pitchforks and then setting him on fire. One of the filthy giants went after my mother, but I stood firm in his way, straining pitifully to hold steady a two-handed broad sword against him. The Viking gave me a long stare and turned away without a fight. They did burn down the house and the barn, though. The horror of that night is also etched in my mind forever.

  My father, uncle and older brother were all killed defending our home. When the dust settled, at the age of eleven, I became the head of our devastated household, having to take care of my now homeless family.

  My younger sister later died of her wounds and my mom’s sister froze to death that terrible first winter with no home. But life went on. People bury their dead and keep going. We salvaged some yarn and fleeces, mom and my aunt started knitting, I was selling things at the market and soon we were able to buy a cow. After almost a year of living in make-shift lean-tos, we finally built a small house the best we could. The Vikings killed our horse. It took us two years to get another horse and start harvesting enough food from our field to survive. Then eventually my mother remarried.

  I was finally free to go. With my mother’s blessing, I walked back to Testerep.

  19 I woke up in the car sweaty, with a pounding heart, thinking about Linda. My heart went to her with a ping. How was my hero doing there in Russian Mafia’s clutches? Deep down inside I knew she’d be all right. The Russians would not hurt her until they had the money. After that, yes, I could see that they could.

  The second position turned out to be a large barn with a cavedin roof. It was secluded. “Where do you want us?” asked Andrey. He still would not look at me. I wondered what orders he’d received from Eugene. Should I even wonder?

  Andrey tried to give me a silenced Scorpion, but I refused, as I had no use for a machine gun. I was packing a fully-loaded Glock, and I still had my 9mm Berretta. What else did a man need to be happy? A little human compassion, some love and understanding from his comrades at arms would be nice.

  I told Andrey that I expected very few people for this party, one of the guests being the Colonel, the only one of interest, as he was supposed to bring the money. I convinced Andrey that I wasn’t really expecting much trouble. We had no idea what the Colonel looked like. Actually, I had no idea about anything at all except for complete certainty about the money; we were not about to get any tonight, despite promises to the contrary. It was inconceivable that any government agency could possibly come up with four million dollars in a matter of minutes in the middle of the night. I decided not to share my thoughts with the Russians—what with Andrey being so impressionable and all.

  I breathed in deeply the smell of quietly decomposing wood and rusting machinery. I have always been partial to such rich, musty smells. The smells of time. The smell of the illusion of things enduring. In actuality, we endured forever, things never did.

  Meanwhile, Andrey set up Buriat with his antique weapon in a large poplar tree about seventy yards from the entrance. We took position inside.

  Around 6:00 a.m., it was still pitch dark when the guests arrived. Long night. I had managed to catch a few winks but felt like a truck hit me. My mouth tasted as if I had sucked on an old dusty carpet for a while. Peering out through the comforting darkness and shivering, I barely made out the vague outlines of two cars parked sideways in front of the barn. I bet one of the guys had a megaphone ready to make a speech. Andrey, noticeably frazzled, came over with the news of two more sedans out back.

  “Norman Bolstad, come out with your hands up! The place is surrounded
! You have nowhere to run!” I heard the artificially- enhanced Colonel’s familiar baritone.

  “They’ll butcher us here if they storm the place,” Andrey whispered, peering into the darkness with a concerned frown. “Damn! What went wrong? Too many of them. We’re trapped. And how are you gonna interrogate your guy now? What’s the plan?”

  “Plan? Me? Do I look like a man with a plan? Hey, don’t worry so much. Have faith. Watch how I do it.”

  “Come and get me, you motherfuckers!” I yelled out. “What the hell are you doing?” Andrey hissed at me excitedly, eyes bulging. “Are you crazy?” “Oh, relax, Andrey, will you? Don’t be such a crybaby . Just do your job. They don’t even know you’re here, they think it’s just me. Here, let me punch you guys in.”

  I fired my Glock twice in the general direction of the sedans, unleashing a semi-silent hailstorm of bullets upon us. The Russians scattered for cover, not yet returning the fire, looking for targets in the darkness. I raced to the place by the right-side wall that I’d noticed before, keeping low as stray bullets whistled around me. There it was, the rusty drilling machine, my mental marker, with the caved-in part of floor next to it. Crawling under the rotted-out floor, I made my way to the exterior wall. Groping along the wall, I found a vent, through which I inched my way out into the night. Yes, just as I had left it—pitch dark and wet. Bending low, I scuttled toward the front, hitting the dirt as I turned the corner.

  The Russians finally returned fire. Everybody except me had silenced weapons, which turned this particular firefight into a ridiculously subdued, although not completely noiseless affair. Keeping to the left and off the line of fire, I moved forward quickly to flank the cars. Several attackers moved toward the barn in the darkness, their silenced machine guns sputtering and spitting fire. One of them stumbled, as if hitting an obstacle, and fell. The rest were between my position and the barn, held by the Russians behind me. I passed the cars, giving them a wide berth, and kept going for a bit. I then doubled back, keeping low. Two shadows were cowering behind one of the sedans. From about thirty feet I studied them both carefully, remembering I had the Buriat behind my back ready to shoot at the drop of a hat. I finally decided that between the two characters in front of me, the Colonel was the pissed off and nervous one.

  A grenade explosion lit up the barn in front of us, momentarily outlining the Colonel and the second guy against the bright background, providing me with a great shot. After I shot the Colonel’s partner in the head, I tackled the Colonel, pushing him over the car as the Buriat’s bullet drilled the fender right next to my face. The Buriat’s next bullet punched the Colonel’s shoulder. The Colonel dropped his gun but recovered quickly and reached for the spare in his ankle holster, cursing loudly. He must have thought I shot him. For once I was innocent but that was about to change.

  Crouching behind the car, I shot him in the left knee and pocketed his other gun. Accompanied by the Colonel’s loud cursing, I crawled under the car, picking up a silenced Marine issue M16A4 which I’d found lying around, to face the Buriat in the tree. The Buriat’s body thudded in the dirt after I emptied the clip into the poplar tree.

  The Colonel screamed bloody murder, cussing. He had the air of a man who was used to getting his way, a hard man, a tough military officer—a terminal one-lifer asshole, in other words, and, to me, an arrogant and vicious bastard.

  “I told you not to piss me off, didn’t I, Colonel?” I hissed. He had some words about my mother. I slapped his face, hard. “You had to bring the damn army, too, didn’t you? You just had to get all these people killed. And I bet you forgot the money. You’re such a moron!”

  Ignoring the Colonel ’s whining, I pulled him into one of the sedans. It turned out to be a Crown Victoria—what else—with keys in the ignition. I drove into the woods for a few minutes with my headlights off. Then I stopped and dragged the cussing Colonel out.

  “ Colonel, I am going to ask you some questions. If you lie to me, I will shoot you in the extremities. If you tell me the truth, I will not hurt you anymore and I’ll get you out of here. Clear so far?”

  He kept cussing and wriggling around, trying to get to me. I took it as a “Yes.”

  “Who is issuing your orders?” The Colonel spat at me. I stuck the barrel of his gun into the bullet hole in his shoulder. He yelled and moaned. I couldn’t think of a faster way of getting the intel. And, honestly, I did not like this bastard. Not to even mention that his Marines had killed Yvette. All of them had pissed me off, but none more than their leader, the Colonel.

  “Who’s running the show?” The Colonel stopped fighting and was gazing at a very far place in his mind somewhere. “Why should I talk?” he asked with unexpected composure. “You’ll kill me anyway.”

  “ Do you want me to demonstrate why you should talk? Watch me shoot you in the knee, pay attention.” I cocked the gun and pointed it at his kneecap. The Colonel shuddered and started sobbing. “Who is pulling the strings?” I asked again. He spat on me. Or tried to but missed. A shot rang out and his knee cup shattered. I hated the guy, but had to admit he was holding up like a real hero.

  I pressed his gun against his crotch. “I will ask you one last time. You have exactly one second to tell me what I want to know. Otherwise, I’ll blow your balls off and leave you here to die. It will take a couple of hours and will hurt like hell. Last chance.” He moaned. “Who is in charge?” I asked.

  “General O’Hara,” he mumbled faintly.

  “Kevin O’Hara?” I choked up a tiny bit, hoping the Colonel hadn’t noticed. What had I gotten us into? “The fucking Defense Secretary of the fucking United States of fucking America?”

  “Yes, him.”

  Holy Jesus. “Personally?”

  “No…”

  “Talk!” I prodded his balls with my gun.

  “A-a! We answer to General Ken Roberts, Special Ops Chief,” the Colonel blurted out. “Why are they after me?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Did they order you to kill me?”

  “No…” the Colonel’s voice trailed off, but a good shove got him to focus again. “Roberts’ orders were to obtain the flash drive from you by any simple means, but I decided—”

  “I understand, Colonel, say no more. A little initiative, right? Or saving some taxpayers money? Brownie points?” “ Well, actually, no…”

  “How do you communicate with General Roberts?” “Cell phone.” He nodded weakly toward his breast pocket.

  I pulled the phone out of his pocket, opened it, removed the battery, and stuffed all the pieces into my pocket. “Okay, Colonel, thank you. I will get you to a medic later. One last question: where’s my money?”

  “Getting delivered to my C2 at nine hundred hours today. Furniture Connection on Florida and 27th. In the basement.” I nodded. “I will drive you back now.” A “ C2” is a Command and Control Post, the nerve center of any military operation. What he’d said made sense. I drove the car with the bleeding and unconscious Colonel to the barn where the silent firefight was supposedly still raging, and jumped out, leaving him in the car. Carefully, I made my way back to the foundation vent on the side of the building and crawled back inside to discover a body. With the Colonel’s silenced Glock on the ready, I turned the guy on his back. Dead. A blond Russian kid. Then I saw one of the Colonel’s men moaning in the shadows and another one lying still. How tragic.

  Will the insanity of people killing each other for no damn reason ever end? It started so long ago that you couldn’t fit even a small fraction of the number of years in a pocket calculator. Nobody knows how, when, or where exactly the wars started, but they’d sure seemed to be the favorite pastime ever since.

  Making my way through the barn, I found five more bodies, one of them was still alive and moaning. It was Andrey, wounded in the stomach below his vest and unaware of his surroundings. I shook him a bit and washed his face gently with some water from his canteen. Andrey opened his eyes with a grunt, focusing on my face slowly. />
  “You came back, you bastard! Svoloch!You set us up, you hui sobachiy!Didn’t expect to see you again.” “Of course , I came back,” I replied soothingly, propping him up a bit to make him more comfortable. “I took the boss for a ride into the woods. He told me all about the money drop. Then I rushed back here, while you guys held the fort. You and the guys did an excellent job here tonight, Andrey. Thank you. I mean it.”

  Andrey brightened up and smiled. “We did good, yes? Have you seen any of my guys alive?” “Not yet . I’ve only seen three so far, including you. The other two are dead—the Buriat sniper and the blond kid with the Uzi. I’ll keep looking.”

  “Buriat too? Sucks. The blond kid’s Dima, he loved his stupid Uzi. I can’t believe you came back, man.” Andrey moaned as his eyes glazed over.

  “Take it easy, man, hang in there. I’ll go look for the other two.” Andrey did not answer.

  I found another wounded Russian unconscious in the back, behind a jagged concrete protrusion, a part of the old foundation, next to a good-sized smoldering rip in the back wall. Probably a grenade. Must have been some battle. The floor was covered with spent bullet casings. Then I noticed a dead American soldier slumped against the wall in a dark crevice, still clutching his gun. Then another dead American.

  The Russians were just doing their job and so were the Americans. None of them had any insight whatsoever into the real picture—and neither did I at the moment—they were simply complying with their orders. People were manipulated into obeying orders, regardless of what side they were on. What kind of a stupid existence was that, I ask you, to always do what somebody else wanted you to do, even if you didn’t know why and even if it got you killed? Why not grow a brain for a change?

  Come to think of it, my existence wasn’t any different. I, too, had always been complying with orders lifetime after lifetime, idiotically priding myself in notbeing a nonconformist. Ah, the joys of being a conformist! Man, did I conform. But all these people here were supposedly nonconformists. They were convicted, tried, and executed specifically for flagrant and willful nonconformity. Lo and behold—as soon as they arrived at their prison, they immediately set up a system that enslaved them into full conformity, a system compelling them to follow orders to fight and kill each other in meaningless and counter-productive wars, even though they were all supposedly non-conformists. The irony!