In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Of course,” Morozov said, shrugging. “She is married to a spy. He has not yet divulged anything of interest. She, however, told us what little useful information she knew immediately. The only thing that required any time was...verification.”

  Torturing her to make sure she was telling the truth, you mean, Korolev thought. And this is the man who tells us to not play games with words? “And what of the Confederation spy?”

  Morozov frowned. “She has been difficult, I must admit,” he said grudgingly. “She will break, comrade. I assure you of that. We will know what she knows. She was obviously interested in the nuclear weapons program, and no doubt learned of its location from our now-deceased informant. But it will take time to learn what we wish to know.”

  “Perhaps that is not the best use of her,” Antonov mused.

  “You have a momentous thought for us, marshal?” Morozov said with a bored sigh.

  Ignoring him, Antonov turned to the chairman. “I suggest we use her as bait,” he said. “She clearly came here to learn of our nuclear,” he glanced sourly in Morozov’s direction, “weapons. Perhaps the Confederation fools hope to find them still in their storage bunkers at the Central Facility.” The place where the weapons were built and stored, a massive underground labyrinth of nuclear labs and storage bunkers deep in the mountains to the north, had never been given a name, only a bland project number. Yet everyone who knew about its true function simply called it the Central Facility. It was an underground fortress, protected by a full division, over fifteen thousand men, who were stationed inside the facility and in several well-concealed garrisons nearby. If there was an impregnable location on the entire planet, that was it. “I say, let them find the Central Facility. Let them come for the weapons. Let them try.”

  * * *

  Valentina lay naked on the frigid bare concrete of the cell, eyes closed, feigning unconsciousness. She was handcuffed, with the cuffs chained to a ring bolt set in the floor. Her face and body were badly bruised and bloodied from the beatings she had received. Her interrogators had been quite professional about it, and no doubt would have been disappointed had they gotten any information out of her so soon. They had not raped her yet, but she knew that would not be far off. The pain she had endured thus far was hardly trivial, but it was something she had been conditioned to in her training: they would not break her through mere physical torture.

  She was surprised that they had not already tried to use drugs on her, although that would also do them little good: she had chemical implants that had been inserted into her body at several key locations, deep in the muscle tissue. Transparent to modern medical imaging technology, they would react to a variety of drugs that were typically used for interrogation purposes, counteracting their effects. It would be up to her acting skills to convince her tormentors that she was under the influence of whatever drugs they chose to use, while keeping her wits about her, prepared to take advantage of any opportunity to escape. If that moment never came, one of the implants was a failsafe device: once the level of certain chemicals in her bloodstream reached a critical threshold, the implant would automatically release a poison that would kill her almost instantly. She would tell her captors nothing other than what she might choose to say to further her own goals.

  She assumed they were at the headquarters of the secret police in Saint Petersburg City, but could not be sure, as they had been transported in a box-bodied vehicle that had no windows. Sikorsky had initially been terrified, his eyes bulging with fear as they shoved the two of them into the van. By the time they arrived at their destination, however, his expression reflected only grim resignation. The two of them had been separated after that, although they had probably received their introductory interrogations — and beatings — at the same time: she could hear a man that sounded like Sikorsky screaming somewhere down the dim corridor from where she was being beaten in her own cell by a pair of burly guards and an interrogator.

  Sikorsky. For a brief moment, she allowed herself to feel guilty about him. He obviously had his own reasons for being involved, but having to face what would most likely be death by torture was more than most people would be able to deal with. She had the benefit of her training and experience, and being tortured and killed was also an accepted, if not particularly pleasant, risk of her job. I’ll get him out, she vowed to herself. I’m not through yet. Not by a long shot.

  Her opportunity arrived only a few minutes later. The same pair of guards, minus the interrogator this time, came into the cell, slamming the door shut behind them. She could sense the change in their breathing, heavy with expectation, rather than exertion, and their pause before they acted tipped her off to their intentions. This would be the rape, she knew. Or might have been, had they brought at least two more men.

  One of them stepped forward and delivered a vicious kick to her stomach that sent her limp body sprawling across the floor. His only reward was a grunt from the air expelled from her lungs. For all he could tell, she was completely unconscious. Of course, she knew that they would be much happier with her conscious so that she would understand what was happening to her. These were not the sort of men who would be finicky about such things: raping an unconscious woman was perfectly acceptable, especially since they knew they would be doing it quite a few more times when she was conscious before her suffering — and their entertainment — was ended with a bullet to her brain.

  Valentina expected them to take her while she was still handcuffed and chained to the floor, and she stifled an exclamation of amazement when one of them undid the chain to the eye bolt in the floor. Apparently they wanted a bit more freedom to position her the way they pleased than the short chain allowed. After rolling her over on her back, they undid their pants and knelt down on the floor, almost panting now. One took up position between her legs, while the other knelt to one side near her head, clearly intending to gain some oral satisfaction from his unconscious victim.

  Sorry, boys, she thought acidly, not today. As the guard between her legs was propped up on one arm, using his other hand to guide his manhood to its intended destination, she twisted her body and brought her knee on that side up in a lightning swift strike to his head, shattering his skull and knocking him off of her. She used her momentum to continue rolling in the same direction, which happened to be the same side that her other would-be tormentor was on. Before he could manage a shout of surprise, let alone anything more threatening, she rose to one knee, balancing herself with one hand, and landed a kick to his throat. He fell forward on his face, clutching his smashed larynx and gagging for breath. She pulled the small chain of her handcuffs around his neck and strangled him, finishing the job.

  Quickly searching the bodies, she found what the electronic keys to her cuffs and the guards’ badges. Unfortunately, she needed one more thing, which forced her to resort to a grisly expedient. The cells used biometric sensors that scanned the guards’ thumbprints. Since neither guard had a knife, she had to use her hands and teeth to liberate the guards’ thumbs.

  Her next problem was clothing. One of the guards was a fairly small man, not much larger than she was. Quickly stripping him, she donned his uniform and boots, doing her best to tuck in the extra material in such a way as to minimize its obviously poor fit. Fortunately, he had small feet for a man, only a size or two larger than her own. She couldn’t do anything about the bruises on her face, but she cleaned off the blood with a combination of spit and the tail of her “new” shirt.

  Hoping against hope that she could quickly find Sikorsky, and that he was in sufficient shape to mount an escape attempt, she stripped the other guard of his clothes, believing that his uniform might be a close-enough fit for Sikorsky.

  Ready now, she placed the thumb of one of the guards — Petrovsky, his name had been — against the biometric scanner and swiped his badge over the magnetic reader. The door instantly opened.

  Peering carefully outside, she could see no one else in the dimly lit hallway. The cell bl
ock seemed to be a single corridor with cells on both sides and a monitoring station and a personnel elevator at one end, and a large freight elevator at the other. The monitoring station was presently unattended. Presumably the guards she had just sent on their way to Hell had been manning it before they had taken a few minutes off for a casual bout of rape. Since only the guards had come to her cell, she assumed that their visit hadn’t been authorized; otherwise, they would certainly have called for more guards to man the monitoring station. That left her wondering how much time she had before their superiors became alarmed by the guards’ absence: certainly more than just a few minutes, but probably not more than half an hour. She would have to move quickly.

  Each cell had a small one-way window of armorglass set in the door, and she peered quickly into each one as she went, looking for Dmitri. She saw that all of them held one to three prisoners, most of whom lay in fetal positions in a corner of the cell. Some of the prisoners were sitting dejectedly against a wall, and a few were on their feet, pacing the small perimeter of their cell.

  She finally found Dmitri in the second to last cell on the right. Again using the bloody thumb and electronic ID card, she opened the door.

  “Dmitri,” she said quietly to the bloodied mass of flesh sprawled on the floor. If they had beaten her badly, they had beaten him far worse. For a moment, she thought he was dead. She knew that would have made her mission that much easier, but it was a death that would never have rested easily on her conscience.

  “Valentina?” he whispered hoarsely, turning his head to look at her with the eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “How...?”

  Closing, but not latching, the door behind her, she quickly knelt beside him. “Don’t worry about that now, my friend,” she said. “We need to get out of here. Can you walk?”

  “Help me up,” he grunted.

  Working together, she got him to his feet. His face was a wreck of cuts and contusions, and he was extremely unsteady on his feet. Just getting the uniform on him would be a struggle, and he would never be able to pose as a guard. Her original plan had been to try and escape by masquerading as a pair of guards and simply walking out of the building, hoping that no one would notice their ill-fitting uniforms. But Dmitri’s injuries would call immediate attention from anyone they passed, so she had to come up with something else. After a moment of feverish consideration, she had an idea. She hated herself for it, but there was no time for anything else.

  She managed to get the other uniform on Dmitri, who had drawn strength from her presence, and had recovered somewhat by the time he was dressed. She handed him one of the two submachine pistols she had taken from the guards.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the other thumb and ID badge. The thumb he took with undisguised revulsion, but took it nonetheless.

  She went to the adjacent cell and showed him how to use the thumb and badge to open the door. “Open all of the cells,” she told him. “We’re going to stage a breakout.”

  Dmitri grinned at her, and it was hard for her not to wince at the four bloody stumps where some of his front teeth had been knocked out.

  * * *

  “Not bad,” said the secret police colonel who, along with several others, had watched the Confederation spy kill the two guards and “rescue” her compatriot from the miniature video sensors in their cells. He regretted somewhat that the guards had not made any progress in their amorous pursuits with her, for she was extremely attractive and it would have made for some enjoyable viewing. But he had to admit to himself that her martial arts performance, though extremely brief, had also been quite exciting in its own way.

  “Should we not sound the alarm, comrade colonel?” one of the junior officers asked, his hand hovering above the alarm button.

  The colonel said, “No. We are to allow them to escape, then follow them. Those two,” he nodded at the naked bodies of the dead guards, “were a necessary sacrifice. We did not want this to appear too easy.” He shrugged. “She and her friend will no doubt try to impersonate guards and leave the complex. Our job is to make sure this happens, then follow them.”

  Nodding dutifully, although with an expression on his face that was clearly intended to conceal his doubts, the junior officer returned his attention to the displays. “Now what is she doing?” he asked quietly.

  The colonel leaned closer, a slight chill creeping up his spine. “I am not sure...”

  * * *

  Valentina and Dmitri quickly opened all twenty cells in the block and uncuffed the prisoners. Those who weren’t catatonic, she herded out into the corridor and toward the freight elevator. She had not bothered trying to tell them that she was trying to save them, because she wasn’t: while in her heart she hoped that some might escape, or at least survive, the cold-hearted truth was that they were nothing more than a tool she was using to help her — and Dmitri — escape. For all they knew, she and Dmitri were taking them out to be shot. Which was probably exactly what was going to happen to most of them in the course of the next few minutes. Thousands of lives, perhaps millions, hung in the balance if she failed.

  She used her stolen thumb and badge to open the freight elevator, and forced in the nearly thirty terrified inmates at gunpoint. Then she and Dmitri squeezed themselves in. Pushing the button for what she hoped was the ground level, she noticed that there was a second door to the elevator, in the back, that the indicators showed would be opening at the floor she had chosen.

  “Get out when the door opens!” she bellowed menacingly. As the elevator slowly ascended, she tightened her grip on the submachine pistol and worked her way to the new “front” of the elevator.

  * * *

  “Dammit!” the colonel hissed as the doors closed on the freight elevator, shutting the escapees away from their view; there was no monitor in the elevator, although the “escapees” would be under the eyes of more monitors when they emerged from the elevator, regardless of which floor they chose. The two spies simply marching out of secret police headquarters was one thing. Staging a major breakout — or using it to mask their own escape — was something else entirely. “That suka is going to make this complicated,” he muttered.

  Unfortunately, he had little discretion in the matter. None, in fact. The chairman himself had sanctioned this operation, which the colonel had thought outrageously risky, although he would never admit it. On top of that, he had received the orders directly from Morozov. In the secret police, such rare face to face orders either meant an opportunity for a major promotion, in the case of a successful operation, or a bullet to the brain for failure. There was no in-between, and no excuses.

  “Colonel?” the young officer asked. “What should we do?”

  After an agonizing moment, the colonel said, “Nothing, for now. Let us see how this plays out...”

  * * *

  When the door of the freight elevator rattled open, retracting upward, Valentina shouted, “Prisoner escape!” She had no idea if there was a way to escape on this floor, but they only had one chance at this. She just prayed that there would be a way out.

  For a moment, the prisoners just stood there, blinking at each other. They were so terrified, drugged, or simply so far gone mentally that they didn’t move.

  Then Dmitri loosed a deafening volley from the submachine pistol, blasting holes in the ceiling of the elevator. “Get the fuckers!” he bellowed.

  That got the message across. With shrieks and screams, the thirty-odd prisoners burst from the elevator and swarmed into what Valentina saw must be the headquarters morgue. Not surprisingly, it was quite large, with at least fifty refrigeration bays for bodies, and a dozen gurneys lined up with their grisly cargo in various stages of post-mortem examination.

  There were half a dozen men and women in medical gowns around the bodies, along with two guards. The shocked expressions on their faces would have been priceless had Valentina had the time to appreciate them.

  “Watch out!” Valenti
na shouted to the two stunned guards, “they have weapons!”

  She knew that the room was almost certainly monitored, and the words were only for the benefit of anyone who might be listening. She fired her submachine pistol, making it look like she was shooting into the mass of prisoners, with the first two bursts taking the guards in the chest. Then she slaughtered the medical examiners with tightly spaced shots, careful to avoid shooting the panicked prisoners.

  One of the examiners managed to reach a double door at the rear of the morgue. The woman was able to scan her thumbprint and swipe her badge in time to avoid being crushed by the prisoners fleeing toward her, but she couldn’t avoid the bullets from Sikorsky’s weapon. She fell in a bloody heap, the prisoners trampling her lifeless body as they fled outside, Valentina and Sikorsky close behind.

  * * *

  “Chyort voz’mi,” the colonel choked as he saw the catastrophe unfold in the headquarters morgue. The situation became even worse when he saw one of the examiners open the door to the outside. The prisoners would still be contained inside the compound, but there was only a single checkpoint at the rear of the facility and four guards. The two spies were supposed to escape, yes, but having the entire staff of medical examiners wiped out had not been part of the plan.

  “Colonel,” the young officer asked him again, quite urgently, “should we not sound the alarm?”

  “No,” the colonel said grimly. “Come with me. All of you.” Drawing his sidearm, he led the young officer and three guards at a run to the other side of the complex. He doubted he would be able to reach the morgue in time to salvage this disaster.

  * * *

  Valentina and Sikorsky herded the prisoners like cattle toward the only visible guard post that sat astride the gate through the wall surrounding the headquarters complex. She could see that Sikorsky was having a difficult time keeping up, and moved over to help him, but he waved her away impatiently. “I am fine,” he rasped. “Let us finish this.”