Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

  There was a sound. She knew her hearing was returning because she made out the deep-throated “thunk-thunk-thunk” from off to her right and behind her. Three smoke trails traced arcs overhead and landed in the midst of the enemy soldiers, erupting with a kettle-drum concussion, filling the air with brief flares of explosive white and roiling billows of black smoke. When it cleared, two of the soldiers were running, three more were writhing on the pavement, their camouflage turned from grey and green to scorch-black and blood red, limbs blown off or hanging by bits of flesh. One was just gone, nothing left of him she could identify.

  Ramirez had hit the ground, at least a half-second too late but still covering his head instinctively, and she saw blood stains on his flight suit. She wondered if he’d been hit, but then she saw more droplets in his hair and realized he’d been splattered by the remains of the soldier who’d exploded.

  Roach looked around, pushing away again from the girl, who’d fallen quiet in shock from the explosions, and saw two figures walking through the smoke from the mortar blasts. She brought up her pistol, thinking it was more of the soldiers, but these people weren’t wearing helmets. It was only another second before she recognized them as Fuller and Jenny. The older woman was holding the drum-fed weapon at the ready, a thin wisp of smoke curling away from its barrel. Roach had assumed it was a shotgun, but it was obviously a mini-grenade launcher.

  “Where the hell can I get one of those?” she asked, picking herself up off the ground.

  “We hang around here much longer,” Jenny snapped, unamused, “and you can salvage it off my dead body. We need to go.”

  Fuller said nothing, limping as he tried to keep up with her, the big, metal .45 filling his right hand. He and Jenny were upright and walking, but looked a bit worse for wear from the mortar blast. Fuller was bleeding from a cut above his right eyebrow, his clothes ripped and covered in soot and dust, while the right sleeve of Jenny’s cloth jacket was shredded between elbow and shoulder, blood seeping through her shirt sleeve from a shrapnel wound beneath it.

  Too damned close.

  “Our truck is that way,” Roach said, pointing back toward the roadblock. “Unless your vehicle is closer?”

  “My vehicle was an electric motorcycle,” Jenny told her, tone somewhere between annoyed and bitter. “And it was behind the damned fried chicken joint.” She pointed back at the collapsed and burning building. “And I ain’t walking out of here, so shag your tiny little ass back to that truck and I’ll cover you from back here and let you spring any ambushes them sorry-assed excuses for mercenaries left behind for us.”

  “I lost my gun,” Ramirez whined, finally getting back up to his feet, the front of his flight suit stained by whatever filth had been on the street. The teenaged girl was gone, presumably to whatever new hole the refugees had found to crawl into.

  “Shut up, Hector,” she told him, waving forward. “Let’s get out of here while we still can.” She fixed Jenny with a final, hard glance before setting off for the truck. “It’s a long drive back to our base. I expect we’ll have a lot to talk about.”

  11

  “I never said I was going to help you,” Jenny reminded her, sullen and taciturn in the front passenger’s seat beside Roach. “As a matter of fact, I think I said in no uncertain terms I was not going to help you. And I don’t want to go back to whatever hole in the wall you’re calling a base. You can drop me off in the Fry.”

  “Jenny,” Fuller said quietly from the back seat, where he’d gone without protest, which was more than she could say for Ramirez, “I’m afraid we may be past that. You keep a low profile, but you ain’t exactly a state secret. People know who you are, and now the wrong people know you’ve been seen with us.”

  Roach wanted to speak up, wanted to get tough with the woman and tell her she was going to share what she knew with them or get a boot in the ass, but Fuller knew her better so she stayed silent and drove. The road back through Norfolk to the old Coast Guard base was rough and broken, jammed with old cars and downed cell towers in places, treacherous even in good weather, and this wasn’t, and it was better she kept her full concentration on it.

  “I should’ve just deleted your damned message,” Jenny grumbled, her voice strained. Roach didn’t know how much of that was frustration from her situation and how much was pain from the shrapnel wound. Fuller had dressed it in the truck with the small field medical kit they kept in the glove compartment, but it needed stitches. “Should’ve known you were nothing but trouble.”

  “To be fair, darlin’,” Fuller said, “we didn’t know what we were dealing with. And we still don’t. Given that you’re sort of stuck with us now, maybe you should fill us in on what you know.”

  Jenny said nothing for several seconds, the silence broken only by the thump of the tires on ruts in the road and the squeak of the truck’s suspension. Roach felt like turning on the radio and playing some music from her phone, but she just drove and waited patiently. Patience was not an easy thing for her and she was feeling quite proud of herself.

  “The guy you showed me,” Jenny finally broke the silence, “used to be a Russian operative. I don’t know what his real name is, but everyone called him Prizrak.”

  “Used to be?” Roach interrupted. Jenny glared at her, but she shrugged it off. “You mean he doesn’t work for the Russians?”

  “It’s complicated. What’s happening isn’t quite as straightforward as the Department of Defense tells you. This isn’t as much an invasion by another country’s army so much as it is different factions in the Russian government trying to seize strategic areas to prove they should be the ones in charge. Which means what we’ve wound up with is the equivalent of a gangland turf war.”

  “Does that make us the cops?” Ramirez wondered from the back seat. “I’ve never liked cops.”

  “You’re not much of a cop,” Roach said scathingly. “You can’t even hold onto your damned gun.”

  “Regardless,” Jenny went on, an edge of annoyance in her voice at the interruption, “a lot of FSB agents and Spetsnaz operators who’re sent over here on what are ostensibly government missions wind up going into business for themselves. I don’t know for certain that’s what this Prizrak did, but it’s as good a possibility as any, because he’s definitely in it for himself now.”

  “He’s in what for himself?” Roach asked her. “What does he want if he’s not working for the Russians?”

  “He sometimes works for the Russians,” Jenny corrected her, “but like a contractor. He has a lot of former FSB and Spetsnaz working for him, too. He’s a fixer, goes in and cleans out the opposition for drug cartels, weapons traffickers, whoever has the money. I’ve heard he even works for the US government if the price is right.”

  “If he’s in it for the money,” Ramirez said, “what does he want with Nate?”

  “It’s not just money. He’s been building a power base of his own, from what everyone says. The money’s just a tool. He’s getting ready to make a play for something.”

  “Okay,” Fuller said, “at least that gives us some idea who we’re dealing with, if not the exact reason why. But why does this Prizrak guy look just like Robert Franklin?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. I haven’t heard that name in twenty years.” She shut up again for long seconds, staring out the window at the ruins of an old strip mall, burned down to the foundations. “I can tell you where to find him.”

  Roach’s head snapped around and she had to remind herself to keep her eyes on what was left of the road.

  “You know where he is?” she demanded.

  “I ain’t doing you any favors telling you,” Jenny warned her. “This guy is too much for you to handle.”

  “We ain’t lookin’ to take him down, Jenny,” Fuller promised. “They just want their friend back.”

  Roach snuck another sidelong glance at Jenny. The older woman was chewing on her lip, making a face like they were asking her to invest money in a get-rich-quick schem
e.

  “The last I heard, Prizrak was in DC. Apparently, there’ve been truckloads of gear going from here in Norfolk to DC.”

  “Any particular place in Washington?” Fuller prompted. “It’s a big city.”

  “Apparently, if Prizrak is Robert Franklin, he has a certain flare for the dramatic.” She snorted a laugh. “He’s set up in the old White House. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. You can’t miss it.”

  Svetlana Grigoryeva felt a pressure at her temples, the first sign of an impending headache. She got them infrequently, much less often than when she was younger, but they had once been nearly debilitating. Why one would be coming now, she wasn’t sure, but the noise didn’t help. Pallet jacks and dollies scraped against the floor tiles with worn treads on wheels badly in need of lubrication, and metal clone gestation tanks clanked against door frames and thumped hard against the walls as the workers pushed them through the hallways with more speed than care.

  She didn’t bother to stop any of them to ask what was going on. They wouldn’t have been told. Probably Franklin’s other lieutenants wouldn’t even know, since he hadn’t told her.

  Hell, he didn’t even bother to wake me up.

  It was three in the morning, but she was a light sleeper even when she wasn’t fighting a headache, and the workmen were loud enough to rival a herd of rhinos in a glass factory. The walk from her quarters, which had once been some famous bedroom, which she couldn’t recall, had taken a good ten minutes, and it seemed to her she became angrier with every step. By the time she reached the lab, and Franklin, she was angry enough and her head was hurting bad enough that she was considering pulling her pistol and either using it on him or herself.

  He seemed to be waiting for her, standing in the midst of the chaos like God staring out upon the face of the deep, waiting to begin creation. The lab had been disassembled, or was in the process anyway, and the techs were nowhere to be found. Guards followed the workers, sub machineguns at the ready in case anyone got a wild hair and decided to see how much the equipment might sell for on the black market.

  “What the hell is going on, Robert?” she asked him from the doorway, stalking up to him nose-to-nose before he even attempted to answer. “Are we evacuating?”

  “In our moment of triumph?” Franklin asked with an uncharacteristic grin. Her eyes narrowed and she tilted her head, confused. Franklin sniffed. “Sorry, classical reference. No, there’s been a problem with transportation and I’ve decided it makes more sense to gestate the duplicates closer to our area of operations.”

  She was just as confused now as at his attempt at a joke.

  “This was supposed to be our AO,” she reminded him. “The peace talks were to be held in DC. That was always the plan.”

  “Plans change. It wasn’t my call. Both sides were concerned with the political stability and potential for violence this far east. The Americans had never been happy about holding the talks so close to a war zone and they finally pushed Secretary Popov to agree to moving them out to Colorado.”

  The headache was in full force now, making the pulse pounding in her ears even more painful, and she gritted her teeth against the pain and the anger. Mostly the anger.

  “And you didn’t think it was significant enough that I should have been told?”

  “Nothing has changed as far as your duties,” he said, seemingly unaffected by her anger. “We won’t be leaving until closer to the conference. It’s simply transferring our resources to a more advantageous location. I didn’t think it was worth interrupting your sleep.”

  She worked on her breathing, trying to calm herself down, unsure why she was this infuriated about the whole business. He was the boss, and he was free to tell her as much or as little as he chose.

  “What about our prisoner?” she asked, changing her tack. “Is he going to Colorado as well?”

  “Not yet. We’ve done another memory reading.” He checked his wrist computer and held up a finger, correcting himself. “We’re doing another memory reading. Kovalev assures me this one has a seventy-three percent chance of a favorable outcome, which isn’t what I’d like, but I’ll take it as an insurance policy. But I’d like to keep working on his motivation, get it closer to an ideal reading and then take that one with us to Colorado and install it when the dupes are fully gestated.”

  “Isn’t that a risk?” she wondered. “We haven’t even begun the other phase of the procedure yet. I thought that was your primary motivation for bringing him here…him specifically.”

  “Oh, it’s begun, all right.” Franklin practically oozed satisfaction. “The tests on the stem cells we extracted were perfect. I can begin the treatments when we arrive in our new base in Colorado.”

  Anger brought more pain, which brought more anger.

  “You told me you wished to save your friend as well. You had me tell him this.”

  “And you will continue to do so.” Franklin’s voice and expression still seemed casual, relaxed, but there was something behind his eyes that turned the words into an order, almost a threat. “The promise of life, the idea I wish to gift him with this treatment, will go a long way towards giving him the mindset we require for a more certain memory transfer.” His eyes narrowed and he regarded her with a knowing stare. “Don’t tell me you, of all people, are upset I had you lie to him.”

  “You know damned well I don’t mind lying. It’s being lied to that I find disturbing.”

  “I’ve been more honest with you than I have with any of my other subordinates,” he pointed out, motioning towards the uniformed men overseeing the work, all of them former Spetsnaz. “Each of them only knows enough to do their job. Since your job involves the bigger picture, you know more, but still not everything.” He raised a hand, palm-up. “I needed this duplicate of Nathan Stout to test the procedure because he was the same generation as I am, and, more crucially, I was able to access the stored stem cell samples of his Prime.” He turned over the palm of his other hand. “I also needed an army I could sneak in under the nose of the Americans and the Russians, which meant gestating duplicates. It would be wasteful not to combine the operations into one, would it not?”

  He was testing her, judging her reaction. It was the only reason he’d bother to lay everything out plainly. She’d been told most of it, of course, and was able to guess the rest, but Franklin wasn’t a man to lay his cards so plainly on the table.

  “The Americans have a philosophy in their military,” she said, “of keeping their subordinate leaders informed of the plan in case they’re needed to take over in an emergency.”

  He laughed, more scorn than humor.

  “Teach your grandma to suck eggs, girl,” he scoffed.

  Svetlana goggled at him, her mouth left half open.

  “Why the hell would I want to teach anyone to suck eggs? And why would they care to learn?”

  “It’s a figure of speech. It means, don’t try to teach me something I already know better than you. I was working with the U.S. military long before you were a drug-fueled twinkle in your mother’s eye.”

  If he’d been looking for a reaction, she gave him one then, her lip quivering with rage, hands balling into fists. Franklin watched her carefully, taking a half-step back, the expression on his face suggesting he realized he might have gone too far.

  “I’m sorry, Svetlana,” he said, and his tone actually sounded conciliatory rather than snarky. “When you’ve lived as many lives as I have, you begin to forget other people are real.” He snorted, arms crossed over his chest. “Everyone seems to blur together, the years become indistinct and one city is much like the last. Or the next.”

  He turned away from her, staring through the faded paint of the walls into another time and space.

  “It’s a difficult thing living life as an immortal, but in chunks of ten or twelve years at a time. I am one hundred percent certain I am the same man as my Prime was, but I can never be sure if the people who dealt with the last version of me will accept me as the s
ame person they knew. I began working through cutouts, never dealing with people directly from one incarnation to another. It’s something I will have to work on, assuming things go as I’ve planned.”

  “And what of the man you called your friend?” she asked. “You spoke as if he were the only one you considered real, the only link to your past. Was that all to prepare me to deceive him? Do you feel nothing for him?”

  “I feel pity.” Franklin shook his head. “He’s not a whole man. He lacks a lifetime’s worth of memories and it will forever haunt him. I fear to extend the life he has would only be a punishment. The best thing I could do for him is to put him out of his misery. He’s been a puppet, the latest in a long line of puppets. And yes,” he admitted, spreading his hands in guilt, “I will be creating even more, but their lives will be short, far shorter than his. They will only live long enough to do their job before eternity claims them.”

  “Do you believe in the existence of a soul, Robert?”

  She asked the question without consideration, without care, surprising herself with the recklessness of it. He regarded her with a look that might have been scorn.

  “If you mean some ethereal spirit that inhabits us like a ghost, then no, I most certainly don’t.”

  “My mother did. I haven’t thought on it since I was a girl, since I killed my first man. But if there is a soul, do you wonder if you might be fragmenting pieces off of it every time you’re reborn?”

  Her gaze was hard and unyielding, beyond caring what he thought of her words.

  “I wonder what’s left of yours?”

  12

  The place had once been magnificent, Olympian, reminiscent of the most beautiful European capitals. Once. Now the façade of the chapel had crumbled, open sores weeping mud across the curved front face of the Naval Academy chapel.