She tried to concentrate, to consider the implications of the colonel’s presence, but after a moment the base commander repeated, “Please, I require medical attention.”
He was still down on one knee. His face was pale and he’d begun shaking as if suffering an extreme chill and Tracie realized he was going into shock.
It was tempting to make him suffer. Ryan Smith had suffered and was now dead because of these bastards, what possible motivation did she have to offer the slightest mercy?
Tracie stared at the men, conscious of the time ticking away.
She had some decisions to make, and she needed to make them soon.
35
February 3, 1988
12:30 p.m.
Ipatiev Military Research Facility
Ryan Smith’s room
She took one step forward and aimed her Beretta between the eyes of the civilian. His face paled and in half a second he looked as ghostly white as the wounded base commander.
“Patch him up,” she said.
He blinked. “But this is not my operating room. None of my surgical supplies are here.”
“Make do.” Her voice was diamond-hard. “And you’d better get moving, because you have exactly three minutes. If that man’s arm,” she nodded at the base commander with a tilt of the head, “is still bleeding in three minutes, someone’s going to die and it’s not going to be him. You follow?”
The doctor’s eyes widened in alarm, but the threat seemed to spur him into action. He hurried past Tracie, giving her as wide a berth as possible, rushing to the opposite side of the room where he began pulling open a series of drawers.
Tracie backed up against the wall to make herself invisible should anyone pass by in the hallway. She focused most of her attention on the dangerous Red Army colonel while sneaking brief glances at the doctor. He was now rooting frantically through a row of cabinets mounted above a long countertop.
Finally he mumbled, “Ah, here we are,” and when he began striding back toward his countrymen he was holding what looked like the Russian equivalent of several Ace Bandages.
“Two minutes,” Tracie said.
The doctor blew out a deep breath and began removing the base commander’s fur-lined winter coat. The major had already unzipped it and his right arm came out easily, but he’d bled fairly significantly from the bullet wound in his left arm and the material had become wet and sticky.
The commander spit out a curse aimed in Tracie’s direction but she ignored it. Finally the coat came off and the doctor began fumbling with the buttons on the man’s uniform dress shirt.
“One minute,” Tracie said, stepping up the pressure. It hadn’t actually been two minutes since she’d issued her ultimatum, but the base commander was part of her escape plan and things felt like they were moving in slow motion. She needed to pick up the pace.
“It’s going to take too much time to remove his shirt,” she said, her voice a staccato bark. “Remind me what happens if it takes too long?”
“I will die.” The man was panting in fear, nearly hyperventilating. Tracie almost began to feel sorry for him, but one look at the bloody, unmoving figure of Ryan Smith still chained to his hospital bed eliminated that momentary weakness.
“Exactly,” she said. “So forget about the shirt. Wrap the bandages around the sleeve. The point is to stop the bleeding, not to make his arm look pretty, not that I think you could manage that given what I’ve seen of your handiwork.”
The moment she suggested bandaging the arm over the commander’s shirt the doctor began unspooling the roll, starting just below the armpit and wrapping it around and around, as tightly as possible, ignoring the patient’s gasps of pain.
Thirty seconds later he’d finished and he spun to face Tracie. Sweat ran in rivulets down his face despite the fact the temperature inside this underground house of horrors couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees. He seemed more than a little surprised to still be breathing.
Good, Tracie thought. My only chance for survival is if no one gets too comfortable.
The base commander rose to his feet. He was pale and unsteady, but stood without support next to the doctor.
The KGB colonel looked unimpressed as he glanced from the base commander to Tracie. His lips widened in something resembling amusement.
“Congratulations,” he said snidely. “You’ve succeeded in wasting a significant chunk of what little time you have left. You are now even closer to being captured or killed. You should just surrender and spare yourself a sudden, violent death.”
Tracie pushed off the wall. She raised her Beretta as she walked slowly forward, stopping only when the silenced muzzle was pressed firmly against the colonel’s forehead. The wounded base commander and the terrified doctor parted at her approach, neither inclined to interfere.
“One of us is close to a violent death, all right,” Tracie said through gritted teeth. “But it’s not me.”
The colonel had been holding his hands down at his sides, and one twitched ever so slightly. His fury at being threatened by a woman, and an American woman at that, was obvious.
Tracie smiled coldly. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. You’re thinking, ‘She’s made a grave tactical error by putting herself within arm’s reach of me.’”
The man’s eyes gave away nothing.
“You’re thinking, ‘She is weak and slow, while I am strong and fast.’”
He blinked.
“You’re thinking, ‘I can slap her gun aside with one hand and punch her with the other and knock her out. I can end this right now.’”
His eyes narrowed and he said nothing.
“But you only think that, you don’t know it. Not for sure. And if you’re wrong, if maybe you’re not quite as fast as you think you are, this ends with your brains splattered all over the wall behind you.”
She shoved his forehead hard with the barrel and stepped back two paces. “And now it’s too late.”
She flashed another smile at the man. “I know how humiliating it must be to be taken prisoner inside your own facility. Well, your humiliation is just beginning, my friend, because you are going to escort me out of here. My escape will be entirely your doing.”
He snorted. “That will never happen. I would never help you escape.”
“Oh, it will, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you were going to risk everything to stop me, you would have done so ten seconds ago. Your ass belongs to me now. I know it, and more importantly, you know it.”
He opened his mouth to respond and she cut him off. “Shut up. You have nothing to say that I want to hear.”
She turned and faced the base commander. He seemed to have regained a bit of color, although he was sweating heavily, clearly in shock.
“You,” she said, and pointed to a telephone hanging on the wall. “Go over there and call the guard shack and guard towers. Notify them that the colonel just received an emergency call from Lubyanka. Tell them he must leave immediately and that they are to have the gates open and ready for his car to exit.”
“Lubyanka?” the colonel said. “You have no idea what you are talking about. How would Lubyanka call me?”
Tracie ignored him and continued. “You will tell the guards that the colonel will be accompanied by yourself and by a civilian and that no delay is acceptable. Tell them that anyone who even thinks about interfering with the colonel as he exits this facility will spend the rest of his life in the stockade. Do you understand everything I just said to you?”
“But it is impossible,” the commander said. “It cannot be done. Those telephones are connected only to the other offices inside this suite. They cannot call anywhere else.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate for you then.”
“I do not understand.”
“If you can’t make that call, then you’re no good to me. And if you’re no good to me, then you’re just in the way. And if you’
re just in the way, I have no reason not to eliminate you and cut down on the number of people I have to keep track of.”
Tracie had moved away from the three men after threatening the colonel, but now she approached again, halving the distance between herself and her prisoners.
She raised her weapon suddenly, holding it eye-level in a two-handed shooter’s grip, and said, “Goodbye, Major.”
“Alright!” he shrieked. “Alright, I will make the call, do not shoot!”
The KGB colonel shook his head in disgust and clucked his disapproval and Tracie grinned. “Just remembered the phones have more capabilities than you thought?”
The commander looked at her dully and she said, “That was a close call. Guess it’s your lucky day, isn’t it?”
The man trudged across the floor, the KGB colonel tracking him with a smoldering gaze. He reached the telephone in seconds and then stood staring at Tracie.
“Don’t forget I can hear everything you say,” she told him. “If so much as one word comes out of your mouth that I don’t like, you get a new hole in the head and I move on to Plan B, do you understand?”
He nodded in resignation.
“Good. Don’t forget it. Now make the call.”
36
February 3, 1988
12:40 p.m.
Ipatiev Military Research Facility
Ryan Smith’s room
By the time the base commander finished his call, Tracie thought she could have lit a match on the KGB colonel’s eyeballs. They were flinty and cold and he stared down the commander with all the loathing he offered Tracie.
She didn’t care. The major had done as she asked and as far as she could tell had volunteered nothing during the call that might have raised the suspicions of his men.
Aside from making such an unusual request in the first place, of course.
The base commander replaced the phone on the cradle and Tracie knew speed would now be essential. The more time the guards and the commander’s underlings had to consider the strange order and the fact it had not been made in person, the more likely it was that someone would become suspicious.
Would they become suspicious enough to disobey the order? She didn’t know. She also didn’t want to find out.
“Move back next to your two friends,” she said, flicking her weapon in the direction of the KGB man and the doctor.
The commander looked like he would rather drink gasoline, but reluctantly did as instructed. Tracie hoped the KGB colonel wouldn’t kill him before she could finish using him to effect her escape.
He hadn’t even finished crossing the room when she pointed from the doctor to Ryan Smith’s body. “You. Unlock this man’s handcuffs.”
Protasov stood frozen in confusion. “But, he is…dead.”
“Thanks for the expert medical opinion, Doctor.”
“But if he is dead, then why—”
“You have the key to the cuffs, do you not?”
“Well, yes. Of course I do.”
“Then walk over to the bed and unlock the cuffs like I told you once already.”
He glanced at the KGB man as if for support, or perhaps an explanation as to what the crazy woman across the room thought she was doing, but the colonel returned the look blankly.
So he did it. He trudged past her to the bed, trying to avoid stepping in Smith’s blood as he got close but unable to manage it. He pulled a large key ring from the pocket of his trousers and selected the proper key. There were a lot of choices on the ring but he found the handcuff key quickly, as if he’d used it a lot. Undoubtedly he had.
He wasted no time slipping the key into the locking mechanism of the handcuff encircling the bed rail. He clearly wanted nothing more than to fulfill Tracie’s bizarre request and get away from the dead man sprawled on the bed with his skull blown apart.
Before he could turn the key, though, Tracie said, “No, not that one. Unlock the other one.”
“What?”
“I want you to leave that cuff attached to the iron bed rail and unlock the one around the dead man’s wrist.”
“But…why?”
“Do it.”
His head snapped back as if he’d been slapped and his eyes widened in alarm, but he did as instructed. He had to lift Ryan’s hand to insert the key and as soon as the cuff snapped open the hand flopped nervelessly onto the bloody bed.
The doctor breathed deeply and turned to rejoin the other two captives and Tracie said, “You’re not finished yet.”
“What now?” He closed his eyes briefly as if aware he was not going to like the answer.
“Now get up on the hospital bed.”
The man’s forehead wrinkled. “I…I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“You heard me. Get up on the bed. Now.”
A trace of a smile flitted across the KGB colonel’s face, just for a moment, and then the hard fury returned, but the doctor still didn’t seem to understand or perhaps couldn’t quite believe what he was being asked to do.
“I…but there is…a…”
Tracie decided to help him out. Move things along. “A bloody corpse on the bed?”
He nodded and turned his confused gaze from the Ryan Smith to Tracie. “Yes. Exactly. A bloody corpse is on the bed.”
“That bloody corpse is on the bed because of you. Get up there with him. This is the last time I’m going to ask.”
Her voice was flat, thick with implied violence, and the doctor didn’t hesitate. He lifted one leg and climbed onto the bed, slipping in the blood as he did so. Then he lifted the other, using his hip to shove Ryan Smith’s body against the iron rail.
Then he leaned over and puked onto the floor.
Tracie said, “Cuff your wrist to the bed.”
She expected another argument, or at least another claim that he didn’t understand what he was being told to do, but he surprised her. Any fight left inside him had evaporated, replaced by a look of nauseous resignation. He used his left hand to slip the open cuff over his right wrist and then slapped it closed with a metallic whir.
“Tighter,” she said.
He pushed a little harder and managed one more click.
“Show me you’re secured.”
The doctor lifted his arm away from the bed rail and the cuffs clanked against the iron. Tracie watched them pull taut against his hand, stretching the skin, and she nodded, satisfied he could not escape.
She shifted slightly and once again faced the two Russian officers. “Now it’s time for us to—”
Without warning the door swung open and a man entered. He’d begun speaking before he walked into the room, saying, “Doctor, I think we…”
His voice trailed away and he froze for no more than a quarter-second, taking in the scene: his boss chained to a bed next to the bloody corpse of a man with part of his head blown off, a woman holding a gun on the base commander and the VIP guest.
Then he reacted. He reached behind his back and in the blink of an eye his hand reappeared holding a pistol. The swiftness of his reaction was impressive and somewhere in the back of her mind, Tracie thought, Another KGB officer. He spun toward Tracie, dropping to one knee and raising the weapon in two hands.
But Tracie’s gun was already out, already aimed in the general direction of the door. She’d been hyper-aware that the room’s entrance was her point of greatest weakness and had told herself to remain vigilant, to be prepared for this exact occurrence: an unexpected entry by another potential threat.
So even though the intruder was quick, Tracie was quicker. She swiveled her wrist and fired. She had anticipated the man dropping into a shooter’s position and her slug caught him square in the chest, driving him to the floor where the back of his skull struck the tiles with the crack of a lightning bolt.
He scrabbled with his heels on the floor in a desperate attempt to escape and she fired again.
Again the shot hit the man center-mass.
This time his legs stopped pumping.
Tracie squeezed off a third shot and the man went limp.
And the room fell still.
After a moment Tracie became aware of a whimpering coming from Ryan Smith’s hospital bed. Doctor Protasov was trying to remain quiet but couldn’t quite manage it. The two Red Army officers said nothing but the base commander had gone suddenly pale again. The KGB man seemed unaffected.
Tracie pointed at the base commander and spoke quietly, working to keep the adrenaline from causing her voice to shake. “Kick that man’s weapon over to me.”
He complied at once, shuffling past the KGB colonel and sending the gun skittering toward Tracie with a swing of his boot. She ignored it for the time being.
“Now, check your comrade for a pulse.”
The commander grimaced but dropped to a squat, careful to avoid soiling his uniform trousers in the blood that had begun pooling on the floor around the intruder’s chest. He placed the first two fingers of his left hand lightly on the man’s neck, just under his ear, as his injured right arm dangled at his side. He held his fingers in place for several seconds before shaking his head.
“This man is dead.”
“Check his wrist for a pulse.”
The colonel sighed, but did as instructed. A moment later he shook his head a second time.
“Still dead,” he said.
“If I find out you’re lying to me, you’ll be joining him on the floor in a pool of your own blood, do you understand?”
“I am not lying. You shot him three times in the chest from close range. He is dead.”
“Answer my question. Do you understand what will happen to you if I find out you’re lying about this man being dead?”
“Da. I understand.”
“That’s better. Now get up and rejoin your buddy. We’re going to take a little road trip. Won’t that be fun?”
37
February 3, 1988
12:45 p.m.
Ipatiev Military Research Facility
Ryan Smith’s room
The KGB colonel spoke up as the base commander rose to his feet and moved next to him. “You must know you will never escape this facility.”
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 141
