Out of Range: A Novel

by Hank Steinberg

  “I don’t like it,” Omar said. “We go through those doors, guards might be waiting.” He mock machine-gunned with his hands. “Boom, we’re all dead.”

  The other three men nodded.

  “We want the rest of our money now,” Omar said.

  Charlie shook his head. “That wasn’t the deal.”

  Omar grinned. “You don’t trust us?”

  “You don’t trust me?” Charlie countered.

  “We don’t know if you make it out of this alive,” Omar said. “Then we don’t get our money.”

  “The money’s on me,” Charlie said. “I die, you can take it off me then.”

  Omar’s smile faded. He exchanged glances with the other men and suddenly all four submachine guns were pointing at Charlie’s face. Much to his own surprise, Charlie didn’t feel frightened. Mostly just pissed off. They were underestimating him and wasting his goddamn time. He was about to tell them this when he heard the sharp clack of a rifle bolt.

  He looked to his right and saw Salim, weapon pointing directly at Omar’s head.

  “After,” Salim said.

  Omar turned to Charlie. “You got your own personal bodyguard?”

  “Why do you think I brought him? Now you want to get to work?”

  Omar laughed brightly and motioned for the others to lower their weapons.

  “Okay,” Omar said. “How we going to do this? You got big plan, Mr. Charlie?”

  Charlie weighed the alternatives. They could go down into the “cave” where the road disappeared. If there were any guards, they were sure to be there. Or they could go to the sheds and see if one of them hid an entrance to the facility. Again, if it did, the shed was likely to be guarded.

  Or they could try the ventilation shaft.

  “There’s a hole in the grill,” Charlie explained. “We climb down it, get into the building, catch everybody by surprise.”

  “Let me see,” Omar said, beckoning for Charlie’s binoculars.

  Charlie handed them over. Omar looked through them for a few seconds, surveying the area, then lowered them skeptically. “There are cameras,” he said.

  “Salim’s going to take them out,” Charlie replied.

  “The noise will give us away,” Omar argued. “And if someone’s inside watching, the picture going out will warn them we are coming.”

  “We leave the cameras operational, they’ll see us go into the ventilation shaft. We knock them out, at least they won’t know which direction we’re coming from.”

  Omar looked at the other men and reluctantly bent to Charlie’s logic.

  Charlie took back the binoculars and handed them to Salim. “There’s one on that large tree, just above the shed. The other one’s—”

  “I see it,” said Salim. “I’ll need to go to the rock.”

  “We all will,” Charlie replied. “In case there’s any guards in those sheds.”

  Charlie looked at his men. There wasn’t exactly great enthusiasm for the plan, but at least no one was arguing.

  They crossed the road as quietly as possible and settled behind the boulder.

  “Now we split up,” Charlie said. “Omar, you and Vlad get yourselves behind that bush, you’ll have a clear sight line on the first shed from there.” He turned to the others. “You two, there’s an old tree stump thirty yards to the right that’ll put you close enough to the second shed, though you’ll probably have to come out from behind it to get off a shot.”

  The men looked at Omar for final confirmation. He nodded his approval and only then did they follow Charlie’s orders.

  Meanwhile, Salim settled into a crouch behind the boulder, resting the stock carefully on the hard surface of the rock. He took a careful bead and waited for Charlie’s command.

  “You got it?” Charlie asked.

  Salim nodded. “Are the others in position?”

  Charlie surveyed Omar and his men. They appeared to be ready.

  Charlie took out his Sig Sauer, clicked off the safety and contemplated what was about to happen. He’d never thought when his old man was teaching him to hunt deer in rural Ohio, or even when he’d shot a few rounds from an M4 carbine with Navy SEALs in eastern Afghanistan, that he would be going into battle against hardened mercenaries and trained soldiers in God-knows-where Central Asia. That he would be holding a weapon in his sweaty right palm, ready to kill. Or be killed.

  He’d come face-to-face with his most primal self back at the river when he’d slain the mercenary under a pile of rubble, and again when he’d used that Mercedes like a battering ram to take out the drug dealers, but in both cases he’d been acting on pure instinct—an animal doing what it needed to do to survive.

  This was something different. This was premeditated. A choice to enter the battle.

  Charlie realized he would have to dispense with the childish revulsion he had felt after that first killing. In fact, he would need to savor and cultivate the rush of power that was his first reaction to the murder. That was the only way he was going to get through this and find a way to save Julie. And there was something crystallizing about that epiphany—the sheer rawness of it—that was oddly freeing.

  “Take your shot,” Charlie said.

  Salim hesitated for a long moment, then squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet thudded harmlessly into the shed at least a foot wide of the camera, but the loud crack of the shot echoed and faded, reverberating from one side of the valley to the other.

  Salim wiped his forehead and muttered to himself, “Wind. I forgot the wind.”

  Charlie’s eyes darted back and forth between the two sheds. Thus far, no guards had emerged.

  Salim took aim again and squeezed off another round. This time the camera exploded in a cloud of shattered glass and broken plastic.

  “You got it,” Charlie said.

  The kid lined up his second shot and was just about to fire when one of Quinn’s mercenaries came out of the first shed.

  “What you want me to do?” Salim asked.

  “Take out the second camera,” Charlie instructed.

  As Salim took aim, Charlie watched the mercenary lift his rifle and scan the area in front of him. The man’s eyes widened just as there was another sharp crack from Salim’s rifle.

  “Down!” Charlie whispered.

  They ducked as the shots ricocheted off the boulder. Then there was a burst of automatic weapon fire from their left. When it was over, Charlie looked up to see that Quinn’s man was down. Omar and Vlad had taken him out.

  Charlie held up his palm as if to say, “Wait.” He wanted to see if there were more guards stationed outside. When none showed, he signaled to both twosomes, “Let’s go,” and they bounded toward the ventilation shaft, guns ready in case they were running into an ambush.

  Charlie reached the shaft first and levered himself underneath the rusting grate. It was a tight fit and his pant leg snagged on the jagged metal. “Hurry!” Salim hissed.

  Charlie yanked his leg and a sharp piece of metal raked across his shin. He cursed under his breath, then slid under the grate to find himself at the top of a dark concrete cylinder.

  Looking down, all he could see was an inky blackness. But there was enough light at the top to make out a steel ladder embedded in the wall. He grabbed the top rung and swung himself out into the shaft. For an unbearably long moment he hung by his fingers, feet pawing the air until he found purchase on one of the lower rungs.

  Heart pounding, Charlie descended into the darkness.

  Chapter Forty-four

  Charlie could see Salim, Omar and the others moving down the ladder above him. But the farther down the shaft he went, the darker it became and soon he couldn’t see anything below him. He knew that he was getting closer and closer to the thrumming fan that propelled air up the shaft as the artificial wind tore relentlessly at his clothes. From the sound of it, the thing was spinning fast enough to chop his feet off. Was there any sort of grill to keep him from sticking his feet into the f
an? He looked down again, squinting, hoping perhaps that his eyes might become adjusted to the darkness.

  Suddenly, he saw a seam of light directly in front of his face. It was barely more than the width of a hair and he realized it must be a crack around some kind of hatchway. He pressed his eye to the crack and could make out a lightbulb attached to a concrete wall maybe five feet away.

  Feeling around with his right hand, he found a rough metal handle on the edge of the door.

  He considered his options. Go deeper, hope to find an entrance that afforded him a better view—and hope he didn’t get his feet chopped off by the ventilation fan—or take a chance and burst blindly out this door into the hallway.

  He opted for the hallway. But there was no way to signal the others in the darkness and yelling would potentially alert Byko’s men inside. So he was just going to have to hope the men followed quickly.

  He took a deep breath, his pulse hammering in his throat. Then he twisted the handle and yanked the door open. Its rusty hinges screamed and he swung into the hallway, imagining a half-dozen guards training their guns on him as he burst out the door.

  Instead, he found himself in a completely empty space. At the far end of the corridor was a large, heavy door with a circular handle like the doors of a submarine. That must have led to the old Soviet command center.

  It made sense. This place had been designed to take a hit from a nuclear bomb. If the ventilation duct had passed directly into the main working space, it would have been able to transmit fallout into the shelter. So the air had to pass through some kind of filtration while the access tunnel was shielded by an air lock.

  Charlie left the door open, which would flood the shaft with light and alert his troops to his route, but it was a painful ninety seconds as he waited for them all to arrive, and when they did, they were sweating heavily. As their supposedly fearless leader, Charlie hoped he didn’t look as nervous as they did.

  “Okay, listen,” he said. “We’ll probably have to split up once we get into this place. You’re looking for an Englishwoman with brown hair. If you find her, don’t do anything that would harm her. Just call me. Okay?”

  Omar swallowed and nodded, apparently on behalf of all of them.

  They made their way to the end of the hallway, where Charlie began twisting the big round handle of the “submarine” door. It was about four inches thick and moved with glacial slowness. When it was far enough open, he peered out, seeing a long, empty hallway that went in two directions. He could hear voices, speaking urgently in Uzbek, but he couldn’t tell from which direction the sound was coming. Charlie squeezed through the door, followed by the rest of the men. He pointed to Omar, signaling for him to go to the left. Omar nodded and headed that way, the other rogues following close behind him. Charlie started to cry out, to indicate that he and Salim needed one of them to even the odds, but they were already too far away. He and Salim would go to the right. Alone.

  They began moving rapidly down the bare concrete hallway. Behind them, Omar and his men disappeared in the other direction. In front of them, Charlie could hear voices. Bathed in sweat, clutching his pistol with both hands, he moved forward, twisting and turning through the maze of tunnels.

  The acoustics of the concrete caused strange echoes and dead spots, the sound of the voices getting louder and softer by turns, seemingly unconnected to the distance from the people who were speaking, and Charlie still couldn’t make out where the voices were coming from.

  Finally, as they continued to move forward, the voices became clearer. There was an urgency to the speaker’s tone and Charlie felt certain that the guards must have been discussing the intruders. But then he began to discern the words. It was someone complaining about the hours they’d been working. And there was a soft clinking sound—someone stirring sugar into a glass of tea?

  His eyes communicated relief to Salim. Somehow, no one in this bunker was aware that they’d shot out the cameras and killed the guard outside. As they rounded the corner, approaching the room where the voices were coming from, there was suddenly shouting from somewhere in the other direction and a deafening clatter of automatic gunfire.

  Before he could even begin to register what was going to happen next, two men burst out of the adjacent room and into the hallway. Charlie fired off twelve quick shots, emptying his chamber without a conscious thought.

  The two men fell, one dead before he hit the ground, the other gasping and holding his chest. The surviving man looked up at them imploringly, gasped his last few breaths and passed into the afterlife.

  Charlie groped in his pockets for another clip, reloaded and looked at Salim. The kid looked to be in shock. It was one thing to shoot a Coke can or a security camera, another thing to be four feet from a dead man who’d just been shot in the face. Charlie turned his attention to the opposite end of the hallway.

  The gunfire had ceased. In fact, the entire bunker was completely, eerily silent.

  Then a terrible, high keening of agony and fear pierced the quiet.

  Charlie sprinted back down the hallway toward the source of the screaming, Salim on his heels.

  There were two more gunshots.

  But the screaming didn’t cease. It became almost like a chant: “Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhh!”

  Closer and closer.

  Charlie rounded a corner. And walked into a bloodbath.

  Literally. There was blood on the walls, on the ceiling, splashed across beds and chairs. Splinters of wood and chunks of concrete and empty magazines lay everywhere. The air was still heavy with gun smoke.

  And only one man was alive. One of Quinn’s mercenaries. The screamer. Standing in the middle of the room clutching his face as blood poured through his fingers.

  “Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhh!”

  The man stumbled around the room, blundering into furniture, his mouth open in horror. Charlie raised his gun and put the zombie out of his misery.

  Silence fell as Charlie counted the dead. Six of Byko’s guards plus Omar, Vlad and the other two men from the town, all grotesquely shot up.

  “I’m sorry, Salim,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry about the men from your village.”

  This seemed to snap Salim out of his funk and he looked down at them without pity. “They were bad men.” He bent down and pulled the cash out of their clothes. “Here,” he said, offering it to Charlie. “Your money.”

  Charlie stared at the bloodstained dollars. “You keep it,” he said. “Give it to their families.”

  Salim stared uncomprehendingly at him for a moment, then tucked the money wordlessly into his pants.

  “Let’s go find your wife.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  The complex was constructed in a rough ladder shape, with two main longitudinal halls and a number of smaller connecting hallways, some of which were straight and some of which contained confusing doglegs and cul-de-sacs. Salim and Charlie started at the eastern edge of the tunnel complex and worked their way west, room by room, hall by hall. The first few hallways consisted mainly of living and eating quarters. Because the staff of the missile command had been far larger than Byko had ever needed, most of the rooms were empty and dank, smelling of mold and neglect.

  At the other end of the complex were briefing rooms, offices, control rooms and so on. Some were full of equipment that had been obsolete long before the Cold War was over—tube-driven amplifiers and radio sets, broken oscilloscopes, controls for missiles that had been dismantled decades ago.

  Occasionally they found signs of recent use—coffee cups, pens, stocks of tin cans, a microwave oven, an occasional box of ammunition. But no sign of Julie. No sign of Byko. And no sign of anything related to his planned attacks or where he and his men might have gone.

  As they worked their way closer to the end of the complex, Charlie began to feel less and less hopeful and then, halfway down the final hallway, they found the small white-painted room. Cameras in all four corners of the ceiling, drain set into
the concrete floor, white chair with Velcro straps at the wrists and ankles.

  This was where Julie had been held, and interrogated and tortured.

  “She was here?” Salim asked.

  Charlie picked out a couple of wavy brown hairs from one of the Velcro straps. He thought he could actually smell her.

  “I think she is still alive,” Salim said matter-of-factly. “If they killed her, there would be blood.”

  Charlie took in the boy. Six years earlier, Salim’s own brother had been killed in a room much like this. But that didn’t make the kid an expert. What he didn’t know was what the drain on the floor meant. Quinn could have easily drowned Julie in here and dumped her body in any one of the scores of rooms in the complex.

  One way or another, Charlie needed to know for sure.

  “Let’s finish,” Charlie said and headed back into the hallway.

  It hadn’t been obvious until they reached the final corridor, but now that Charlie was here, it seemed clear that this had been the area where Byko’s people had spent most of their time. The walls were freshly painted, the lights brighter, and the electrical system appeared to have been newly restored to fit the world of laptops and cell phone chargers. There were also full wastebaskets, uneaten food, discarded clothes, and various other signs that people had recently left in a hurry.

  “You start at that end and I’ll keep working my way down from this end,” Charlie whispered. “And be careful,” he warned. “If there’s anybody left, they’re here somewhere.”

  Charlie checked two more rooms. There were clear signs of recent use, but nothing that pointed to Julie’s presence. He was about to step back into the hallway when he heard a soft, stealthy creak.

  Charlie poked his head out and scanned the corridor. Salim was standing at the far end, fingers poised on the handle of a door, trying to pull it open. Apparently the door was locked and Charlie felt certain that the creaky sound did not come from Salim.

  That was when Charlie saw—halfway down the corridor—another door slowly opening. Before Charlie could call out, the door burst open and Hasan emerged.