by Matt Rogers
He shivered, steeled himself against the numbing chill, and quickened his pace.
The three separate parties moved rapidly in the direction of the port, heading for the icy Sea of Japan. Slater knew exactly where the lead man was headed.
Medved Shipbuilding Plant.
Finally, after hearing rumours about the place for so long, he would soon be stepping foot inside, armed with a gate code and a death wish.
He didn’t even have a gun.
The mercenary’s blood dripped off the serrated combat knife wedged into his belt, staining one side of his jeans. He pulled his overcoat around the crimson stain and moved to close the distance, darting between a cluster of pedestrians to catch up to the two secret policemen. He wanted to be right on their heels when they moved to intercept the first guy.
Because he needed the first man alive.
He needed answers to the dark web of lies that had seen Natasha wrenched from her bed and carted off to an unknown location.
Natasha’s involvement made him angry. And anger clouded his judgment. And a clouded judgment skewered his rational mind, putting vital tendencies by the wayside in favour of intense focus on a single point in front of him.
And it all added up to make him blissfully unaware of his surroundings.
He didn’t consider the multi-faceted nature of his enemies in Vladivostok. He forgot how little it had to do with the secret police. He forgot about the other shadowy forces at work in the gloom.
So when the giant Russian man on the other side of the road weaved between cars, making a beeline for Slater’s position, he didn’t even notice.
He kept his gaze fixed on the secret policemen. He saw the first guy turn into a side street, and the pair of policemen quickened their pace to follow.
Then a giant tackled him around the mid-section, wrenching him off the sidewalk, dragging him forcibly through the open doorway of an abandoned shopfront.
An expertly timed move, utilising the weight advantage to knock Slater off-balance.
He was helpless to resist as he stumbled up the tiny flight of concrete steps and sprawled over the threshold, tumbling head over heels into the dark space that stank of rot and disuse.
He wondered if every building in Vladivostok was as rundown and deserted as he’d been led to believe.
The assailant loomed in the doorway, backlit as a dark silhouette against the gloomy sky outside. Slater lay sprawled on his back, out of breath, shocked by how hard he’d been thrust off-course. It took him a moment to regain his composure, and the big man made use of that opportunity to surge into the store. He reached down and grabbed two handfuls of Slater’s jacket and hauled him off the ground, taking the burden of Slater’s entire bodyweight.
Greco-Roman wrestling at its most fundamental.
All the reflexes and strength and brutal ability to beat down other human beings was rendered useless. Slater found his limbs flapping in the air, and the ever-mounting frustration of being wrenched away from his main focus sent chills down his spine.
Then the big man hurled him into the wall, crushing the faded plaster, sending him tumbling into the interior of the structure. One arm pinned against his side, both legs splayed at awkward angles, Slater scrambled to lever himself out of the hole in the wall. He planted one foot down on the rotting floorboards, started to worm his way out of the darkness…
…and sensed the big man stepping in to unleash a powerful right hook, heading straight for his chin.
If it connected, lights out.
Especially coming from a man of that size.
Slater hurled himself back into the dented plaster, slamming the back of his skull against the jagged material. Thankfully, it caved under his weight, preventing him from concussing himself in an attempt to avoid the incoming punch.
The fist sailed past, taking another vicious chunk out of the plaster beside Slater’s head.
He caught the arm, used it to yank himself out of the wall, and thundered an uppercut into the guy’s throat.
Choking, spluttering, wheezing, he went down.
Slater grabbed him on the way down and smashed the back of his head against the wall, crushing more plaster. He kneed the guy in the face, breaking his nose, then dropped an elbow into the top of his skull with enough technique and raw strength behind it to stun the guy into a semi-conscious state.
Fight over.
Just like that.
Panting with exertion, Slater crouched down and grabbed a handful of the man’s hair. The guy was bleeding profusely from the mouth and nose. His alertness diminished, his eyes partially glazed over, he was in no position to fight back. All from a concentrated barrage of strikes from Slater that had lasted no more than a couple of seconds.
When he won, he made it look easy.
He stared into the big man’s dazed eyes and said, ‘You’re going to answer a few questions for me.’
36
‘You speak English?’ Slater said, his voice resonating through the empty space.
In a rare stroke of luck, the rotting door frame had swung shut behind them as they’d stumbled into the shopfront, sealing them off from any prying eyes on the street outside. The room was dark and decrepit and dank, devoid of any furniture, a perfect interrogation site.
Slater hadn’t anticipated having to deal with this, but he’d never needed to worm answers out of a hostile under such considerable time constraints.
The big man hesitated for a moment, then shook his head.
Slater punched him in his broken nose.
The guy howled, hands flying to his face, and a giant sob wracked his body.
Slater didn’t feel a shred of remorse.
‘You speak English?’ he said again.
‘Yes,’ the guy mumbled, his voice stuffy, both nostrils clogged with blood, his septum mangled.
‘I don’t have much time,’ Slater said. ‘Why didn’t you shoot me?’
‘I don’t have a gun. I wasn’t expecting to run into you on the streets like that.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I work for Medved Shipbuilding Plant. I’m in security.’
‘What did you do before this?’
‘Russian military.’
‘Most of your co-workers do the same?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me everything you know about what’s happening with the icebreaker.’
The guy raised his gaze to meet Slater’s, intensity in his eyes. ‘You have to believe me. I don’t know.’
Slater reached out and flicked the guy’s septum with the tip of his finger.
As subtle as the gesture was, it brought about a world of agony. The man howled and cowered against the crumpled wall.
‘What were your orders?’ Slater said. ‘Regarding me.’
‘We’re told to intercept you as soon as we find you in Vladivostok. All the guards have the same orders.’
‘From who?’
‘The boss.’
‘Who’s the boss?’
‘I’m not telling you anything.’
Slater raised a fist, threatening a third consecutive shot to his shattered nose. The guy audibly whimpered.
‘Okay,’ the man hissed. ‘Okay. But if I tell you the truth you won’t believe me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We don’t know who the real boss is.’
‘What?’
‘Our orders get passed through a shell corporation of sorts. We have people to report to, but they’re just independent contractors or something. The real orders come from somewhere else.’
‘And you’re okay with that?’
‘Most of us are desperate for work. We just do what we’re told.’
‘You’re a certain type of worker, though, aren’t you?’
The big man said nothing, wincing as pain seared through his broken nose.
‘What are you talking about?’ the guy finally said.
‘All of you are waiting for something, and you know it. I a
ssume there’s a big payment coming down the line. When you go through with what you’re ordered to.’
The man hesitated, and Slater raised a fist, taking aim at his nose.
‘Ah!’ the guy howled. ‘No. Don’t. Okay, okay, fuck. I specialised in counter-insurgency when I was in the military. I’ve killed people before. I don’t have a problem with taking another man’s life if the money’s right. There we go.’
‘Why the hell did you rattle all that off like it belonged on a resume?’
‘Because that’s what I was asked when I applied for the job. Those three specific questions. And I was told not to tell a soul, and that there’d be a certain kind of payoff at the end of the contract that would use all the skills in my arsenal. But I wasn’t told what it was. We find that out tonight.’
‘Who’s telling you tonight?’
‘The guy behind it all. He’s heading for the shipyard now.’
‘You just passed him. I was following him when you tackled me.’
The guy’s eyes went wide. ‘I did?’
‘So you’ll be in trouble if they find out you’re talking to me?’
‘I’m a dead man if they ever find out what you know.’
‘Then you’d better hope I succeed.’
‘What are you going to do with me?’
Slater glanced at the doorway. ‘I’m on a tight schedule. I need to catch up to someone. I’m not going to kill you. But I need to make sure you’re not going to follow me. And if I were you, I’d get as far away from Medved as you can. Because that’s where I’m headed, and nothing good follows me.’
‘I won’t follow you,’ the guy muttered, his nose starting to swell.
‘Maybe. You already proved you don’t have a conscience though. It wouldn’t be hard for you to lie to me.’
‘Please, just let me—’
Slater stepped back, creating space between them, and then launched a thunderous punch into the bridge of the guy’s badly mangled nose.
A fourth consecutive strike, but this one had considerable weight and technique behind it, and the resulting crack sent a chill down Slater’s spine.
The big man screamed and collapsed on the floorboards, passing out from the pain.
‘You would have killed me,’ Slater muttered to no-one in particular, his voice falling on deaf ears. ‘This is a courtesy.’
He threw the door frame aside and ran out of the shopfront, hoping he didn’t have to make up too much ground.
37
As soon as he stepped back out into the open, a dark chill worked its way down his spine. He sensed death in the air — some kind of sixth sense activated deep within him, letting him know that something had changed since his confrontation with the mercenary. There was nothing palpable, but he’d spent so long surrounded by combat that the mere presence of violence and bloodshed tickled his awareness levels.
Checking to see whether anyone had noticed his violent detour into the shopfront, he came away satisfied.
Everyone in Vladivostok minded their own business.
The pedestrians milling around when the big Russian had tackled him through the doorway were long gone, replaced by a fresh cohort of glib, unfamiliar faces. None of them gave him a second look.
He picked up where he left off, double-checking his combat knife still rested in the same position in his waistband. He shuddered at the thought of the blade slipping out of his belt in the previous fight. All it would take was a single scrape against the side of his thigh to sever an artery, considering how effortlessly he’d cut the throat of the mercenary in the alleyway.
There was no sign of the blonde-haired mystery man or the two pursuing secret policemen, but Slater could estimate where they’d been heading. He made for the port, heading in the direction of the ocean. The wind picked up, blowing a gale, coming off the Sea of Japan and lashing through the city streets. Vladivostok had long ago hardened itself against the conditions, its residents growing accustomed to the assault from the elements, but it would take Slater some time to adjust.
The cold seeped into his bones, stiffening his joints.
He gulped back apprehension, moving as fast as he could in an attempt to keep warm.
If anyone else ambushed him now, he would be unusually slow to react. He would need the extra half-second to loosen his joints, and that could kill him.
With a rare bout of fear coursing through him, he turned onto a side street as the light in the grey sky began to diminish. Surprised, he flashed a glance at his watch. It was approaching evening time. He shook his head at how fast the day had flashed by, a whirlwind of discovery after discovery.
He must have spent hours with Bogdan and Pasha, but it had seemed like minutes at the time.
He hoped like hell they’d made it to safety.
He would never know.
Oh, shit.
The sight ahead froze him in his tracks, barely discernible amidst the quiet residential street but easily apparent to someone with Slater’s experience.
The bodies of the secret policemen lay splayed across the dirt under the shadow of a bush. The brambles draped over their bloody features, their cold dead hands already freezing over in the arctic conditions.
Slater felt sick to his stomach.
He’d missed it. The blonde guy had slaughtered the pair of them for even daring to follow him, and now he was gone.
No, not gone.
There.
Slater saw it at the edge of his peripheral vision, a brief flash of an overcoat disappearing around the corner of the next street, hundreds of feet in the distance.
He didn’t even have time to determine a cause of death. He didn’t know whether the secret policemen had been stabbed, shot, beaten to a pulp…
He simply had to move.
Reeling from one objective to the next, he broke into a flat out sprint down the quiet residential avenue. Dusk fell, and the sounds of the city fell away, replaced by the industrial uproar of the port. Slater imagined Medved Shipbuilding Plant was just one node of a gargantuan industry operating at the edge of the Russian Far East. And such an isolated location would be rife with exploitation — it was the nature of the beast. He recalled his last visit to the Far East and the nightmare he’d freed Jason King from. He recalled the horrors King had discovered in the depths of a gold mine.
Vadim Mikhailov. An ex-KGB executioner. The man who had led an army of hired guns, kidnapping innocent aid workers and villagers from the Kamchatka Peninsula and forcing them to fight to the death in a shocking tournament-style display of entertainment, live streamed from the pits of the gold mine to the faceless Russian billionaires and oligarchs bankrolling the bloodsport.
The very thought of the setup brought up nausea in the pit of Slater’s gut.
But he wasn’t naive enough to assume that was the only outrageous breach of justice happening out here in the cold, dead plains.
Vladivostok might have been a populated city, but anything outside its limits gave way to a freezing wasteland, barely inhabited by human civilisation.
And that left room for all kinds of horrors to take place.
Slater forced the thought from his mind. He’d returned to the Far East to round up the remnants of the mine operation and crush them forever, but that noble pursuit paled in comparison to what he’d stumbled on here.
So he pushed himself faster as the darkness closed in, rounding the corner and glimpsing the blonde-haired man hurrying down the next street. The houses in the quaint neighbourhood fell away, replaced by large swathes of unused land, which eventually gave way to industrial warehouses and fenced-off facilities. Slater shivered and gasped in the chill and hurried past towering factories, some belching smoke from their rooftops. The street lights barely illuminated the road, piercing through the fog that settled over the city in the evening time.
He moved quicker. The blonde-haired man had almost disappeared from view, and that was Slater’s only connection to the conspiracy surrounding Medved.
<
br /> He sensed they were approaching the shipbuilding plant.
There was a stench in the air.
The stench of fear. The stench of metal and ocean and darkness.
Night continued to fall, and Slater implemented every trick in his arsenal to stay invisible behind the blonde man, stalking him through the southern stretch of Vladivostok. He kept to the shadows, making use of the concealment, staying ever vigilant of threats on either side. He wasn’t taking any chances after his encounter with the mercenary from Medved. If the man had been armed in public, he would have shot Slater down in the street.
And Slater wouldn’t have known the kill shot was coming until it was far too late.
They rounded a corner, entering a new stretch of the industrial sector closer to the open ocean, and the Medved Shipbuilding Plant revealed itself in all its impossible size.
38
Pasha hadn’t been exaggerating.
The plant was effectively a miniature city within Vladivostok. A high-walled perimeter fence built of concrete and topped with barbed wire flanked the entire perimeter of the grounds, but the colossal ships being constructed on the other side of the wall towered over everything in sight. They were the size of ten skyscrapers mashed together — some merchant vessels, some icebreakers, some container ships. They hung ominously in the dusk, backlit ever so slightly by the dark blue sky.
Despite the late hour, Slater sensed the electricity in the air. He couldn’t hear voices, but the unmistakeable hum of operating machinery trickled over the wall. He identified the familiar beeping of forklifts — the construction sites were alive, and the workers in the shipbuilding plant were hard at work. But at the same time Slater sensed desolation — no matter how many men toiled away over the wall, there were vast swathes of dead land, home to dozens and dozens of warehouses and storage facilities and head offices and loading zones. The sheer amount of resources necessary to construct these behemoths was an operation unto itself.
