“Why don’t you?” I said while the voice in my head screamed,
What are you doing? Don’t fucking taunt him!
“If you are killed, someone else will take your place.” He said this as if it was a matter of fact. Maybe it was, but I had my doubts. I was now pretty certain I’d been chosen for this gig because no one expected or wanted a result. Not great for my self-esteem. Lucky for me, I have a thick skin. And it made me all the more determined to shove it all back in their faces. I was suddenly deeply committed to peeling the scab off this little sore, because I was now certain that a voracious and malignant cancer was hiding below it.
The wind shifted slightly. It brought with it the
thump-thump
of helicopter blades, closer this time. “We must go now,” Radakov said, looking down the valley. We resumed the climb and reached the ridgeline a short while later, where the going became easier. There were a lot of questions in my head. I took potluck and asked one: “Were General Scott and Varvara lovers?”
Radakov actually laughed at that. “Lovers? No. He was full of American sexual repression. Just like you.”
“So, if they weren’t lovers, then why would Scott go to all the trouble of taking Varvara back to Ramstein?”
“He did not like my business. After his son died in Iraq, he wanted to save someone. It was as simple and as complex as that.”
The image of the two women back in the village came to mind. They were beautiful and young, born into a life of grinding poverty, war, and zero choices. Thanks to Radakov, they would spend that youth and beauty being screwed by loveless men for money, none of which they’d ever see. They were purchased human beings: slaves. Could I imagine General Scott, grieving over the loss of his son, risking everything to save just one person from this life?
That got me thinking about Abraham Scott. He’d been a mystery man when I began this investigation, but I was getting to know him. He was a man with morals, admired and respected by the people in his command. Something had disillusioned him and so utterly compromised his belief system that he risked his only child to bring it down. It was a gamble he had lost, and the guilt of it had crushed his spirit.
“Why do you trade in women?” I asked Radakov.
“Because it is easy money. There is a ready market and a willing supply. We Chechens are fighting a war, Cooper. Guns and bullets don’t fly into our hands.”
“You mean, grow on trees.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
And I finally saw it. Perhaps it was the fucked-up metaphor, not mine but his—the one about guns and bullets not flying into their hands—that peeled back the clouds over this case and let me see those confused markings on the ground with clarity for the first time. “When did General Scott realize that you were using NATO planes to fly sex slaves into Germany?”
Radakov didn’t answer right away. At that moment, he was probably reconsidering his decision not to kill me. “You are a clever man, Cooper. He is right to fear you.” The men walking up ahead paused to listen. I wondered exactly who “he” was. I was about to ask when Radakov raised his hand to stop me. The night was filled with the noise of crickets and frogs, but no more sounds from helicopter blades, distant or otherwise. Satisfied, the men ahead trudged on, climbing steadily into the frost, picking their way through the trees. “Over a year ago, Scott came to Riga looking into some unauthorized NATO flights,” said Radakov softly.
Yeah, the flight-progress strips, the highlighted RIX entries on the ATC log…
I also remembered glimpsing Varvara’s passport. “What about identities for the people you smuggled in?”
“German passports are not all biometric yet. They are relatively easy to forge. Moving outsiders around Ramstein was the only difficulty, but we found a way.”
“That wouldn’t have been by giving each of them a CAC card, would it?”
He glared at me, perhaps thinking he’d given up too much information. “You know about these?”
I nodded. There were those three hundred missing CAC cards the general had been checking into. Scott must have put two and two together and come up with a big fat rat. Radakov’s human cargo had been smuggled into Ramstein on NATO C-130s, posing as returning U.S. servicewomen. I almost laughed—a breakthrough at last. “So you must have a contact inside Ramstein. You going to tell me who it is?”
“No.”
“Is this still happening? Using Ramstein as a slave port?”
“No. There were six flights over a year ago—none since.”
The flights Scott was looking into. I let all this sink in. Who was Radakov’s inside man? I knew it couldn’t have been Harmony Scott, and not because she was the wrong gender. It had to be someone who had complete access to the base, someone who could authorize flights, someone with top-level security access. Then it hit me.
Jesus H. Christ!
I knew exactly who it was. And this time, I did laugh. And, yeah, he had every damn right to fear me.
“You will be quiet now, Cooper,” said Radakov, tense.
Not in a million years would I have guessed the identity of Radakov’s Ramstein connection. I sucked in a breath to get the mirth under control. There was nothing remotely funny about killing or slavery. I’d been looking forward to getting back to Ramstein to see Anna. And now I had something else to look forward to—the pleasure of stomping very hard on a murderous asshole.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I
got nothing more from Radakov. If there was anything else for him to give, he’d decided to keep it to himself. We trekked in fatigued silence for four more hours as the terrain steepened. The body we’d taken from the farmhouse was making the trip on a litter made from saplings roped together with bootlaces. I got the impression that none of the men felt particularly heroic or inspired about the enterprise earlier in the evening. Either they’d killed too many Russians over the years to give it any thought, or they would rather have been at home with their wives and children—if they had any—than walking cold, wet, and hungry toward the dawn. Perhaps they knew that the Russians would exact their revenge from people who were innocent of any crime, except for the one of being Chechen. Or maybe these men were just the walking dead, the light of their souls extinguished by a lifetime of hatred and bloodshed. In the end, did either the Russians or the Chechens gain anything except for a bunch of fresh holes dug in the ground?
Scott’s fascination with Russia’s spats with Chechnya still puzzled me. I couldn’t see how it fit in anywhere, unless it was to get an insight into Radakov. But I doubted that. There was something I’d missed, or something I didn’t know yet. According to Scott’s notes, the Russians had been fighting these people off and on for centuries. Apparently, even Leo Tolstoy had fought here, back in 1851, and the fighting was just as brutal then. Now, however, there was a new factor in the mix: oil. Moscow wanted it. Was that what this was all about? Oil? Or was the fighting here about something else entirely? There was nothing that stood out from Scott’s research, nothing that struck me as being related or significant.
The moon rose at some time during the night. It just appeared, a sliver of dull tin beaten over a cold, black stone. It emitted a ghastly light that fell exhausted through the trees. After this, if there was an after, I was taking a goddamn vacation.
We eventually came through the trees onto a muddy, rock-strewn road and picked our way along it for a time. Up ahead, a truck was parked, nuzzled into the bushes. One of the men whistled softly and the notes were echoed back by someone hiding in the deep shadows. It was the man with the red face, his rhubarb-colored splotches showing black in the ghost light. Another man jumped down off the back of the truck. I recognized him as being the man who’d read through Radakov’s purchasing agreement for the two teenagers, the same man who also—I assumed—provided the intelligence on the activities and whereabouts of the Russian interrogators. There was some quiet conversation between him and Radakov’s men, and then he knelt beside the body on its litter, wiped its face with a rag, and then gently kissed its dead lips. I heard him cry.
“It was his brother. He will be buried here,” said Radakov beside me, as the corpse was carried back into the trees.
“Where to now?” I said to Radakov.
He answered with a gesture indicating that I should get into the truck with the rest of his men. I didn’t have much choice. I pulled myself up, stepped under the tarp, and entered the familiar cocoon of smells that included shit, animal hide, and the rotten-egg stench of crude oil. I took a seat on one of the benches and found myself looking at the bent heads of the two young women from the village. They were sitting opposite. Wherever we were going, the girls were coming with us. One of the men stuck his hand up the skirt of the girl beside him. What he found there appeared to amuse him because he gave a hearty laugh like he was some pseudo Mexican bandit in a B-movie. Radakov stepped into the truck and whispered hoarsely at him to pull his finger out, or words to that effect. There was a brief, angry exchange of whispers between the two men, which, I suspect, had nothing to do with protecting the girl’s morals and more to do with not spoiling the merchandise.
I felt something brush my hand. It was the weasel. He’d managed to dock a syringe into the cannula on the back of my hand. He smiled. I shuddered. And then the lights went ou—
THIRTY-EIGHT
I
was dreaming one of those dreams, the kind you never want to wake up from because this sort of thing never happens in reality. I dreamed I was lying in a warm bed in a dark room with sheets that were cool and crisp and smelled vaguely of soap. Masters was also in the bed, naked. I smelled her perfume and felt the warmth of her skin on mine. She stroked the sensitive spot behind my scrotum lightly with her fingertips, as her mouth moved rhythmically on me. I reached down and ran my hand through the softness of her hair, and tried not to come. This was our first time together and I wanted to hold on—I didn’t want to blow it, as they say.
I was aware that it was the Midazolam—had to be. Hadn’t Radakov said erotic dreams were a side effect of the drug? Yeah, he had said something like that. This was the kind of side effect I could get into. I remembered the cannula, the hideous smile, and, in drug-induced euphoria, I didn’t even cringe at the memory. That was all a bad dream. This was a good dream. I pushed the bad thoughts away. Anna was being very determined about bringing the situation between my legs to a conclusion. It was getting to the point where I wouldn’t be able to hold back. I started to get concerned about coming in her mouth and was about to say as much when…damn, too late. I opened my eyes.
Reality.
The last thing I remembered was the smell in the back of the truck and looking at—
“Hmm, so you like Katarinya now?” said a voice under the sheets.
I froze.
A head popped up from under the covers and a warm body climbed on top of me. She straddled me and I entered her involuntarily as her legs wrapped around me and she began to move her hips. “My turn,” she said.
Katarinya? The girl from The Bump!
Jesus!
I pulled her off me and turned her so that she landed heavily on the bed beside me. After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “So you like it rough, yes? I can—”
“Shhh!” I said, putting my hand over her mouth. This was not what I wanted or, rather,
who
I wanted. I was completely disoriented. Had everything been a dream? The raid on the farmhouse, those bloody stumps where fingers used to be, the climb through the hills, the young girls bought and sold? I raced through my memory. How much time had passed? “What day is it?” I demanded. I looked at the face under my hand. Katarinya’s eyes were wide. I was scaring her. I didn’t care. This woman was part of Radakov’s bullshit. I hadn’t dreamed any of it, except maybe the part about Anna…
The last time this stripper had been in my room, Radakov’s thugs had come through the door, shot crap into my veins, and abducted me. That was not going to happen again.
The body in the bed beside me was getting nervous. She kicked me in the groin. My knee deflected most of the force of the blow, but enough of it connected to make me go fetal. I released her, dimly aware of her backing out of the bed and grabbing her clothes off the floor. Her ass flashed white in the darkness as she went through the door, slamming it behind her.
“Bye,” I groaned.
I waited for Radakov’s men to make an encore appearance, charging through the other room, but it remained dark and quiet. I snatched a glance at the clock radio. 0500 hours. I had no idea what day it was. How much time had I lost? The pain in my balls subsided to a dull ache and I could see straight again. In my mind, I apologized to Katarinya and Anna for the mix-up. I was innocent. If there was a guilty party here it was Radakov, or maybe it was inequality that was the real villain. Katarinya was probably no different from the two girls who had made the trip out of Grozny in the stinking truck. She’d probably left nothing behind in a small, dirt-poor rural town, only to have an empty life elsewhere—here.
The glow of the city beyond the window formed a thin blue halo around the drapes. It was the same room I’d checked into. I rolled out of bed and found my bag. Everything had been pulled out, but I couldn’t spot anything missing. I still had the general’s downloads, but that was all printouts, anyway—there were no originals, nothing worth stealing. I reached for my cell. I was tempted to turn it on. Anna would have left a message for sure, along with Brenda, Gruyere, and the fuck knew who else. I tossed it back in my bag. I’d connect when I returned to Germany.
I crawled across the carpet, cupping my testicles, and made it to the bathroom. I turned on the hot water and five minutes later slipped into a steaming bath. I lay there until the sunlight deposed the infiltrating neon of the street, mentally retracing my steps over the past week and a half.