Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) (30 page)

He rounded on her, eyes ablaze with anger. “We
know
who you are!”

“For god sakes, señor, who do you think we are?” Sebastian asked, frustration deepening his voice, although she could tell he was holding back the true force of his fury.

“You are spies!” the colonel shouted, stomping off across the room. End of conversation.

Mercy refused to let him dismiss her. “That makes no sense at all. Why would Americans be spying on—?”

One of the men who had sat with her in the Rover stared incredulously at her. “No, madam. We know you are Russian spy pig.” He brandished his rifle. “You think we are fools? You think we don’t see how they steal from us—our property, our land?”

She stared at the man in dismay. From the far side of the room came pitiful mewling sounds. Mihkas lay curled up on the cot, his eyes squeezed closed. No chance of helpful explanations from him.

Mercy had an idea. “I have proof we’re not lying. Bring me my blue bag from the trunk of the Lada.”

Sebastian frowned at her, clueless.

On leaving for the Virgin Islands, she’d taken with her that horrid photograph of her mother in captivity. A part of her had never wanted to see it again, but somehow she couldn’t make herself leave it behind.

The colonel stared at her for a long moment then tipped his head toward the door. One of his men rushed outside. Moments later he reappeared with her suitcase in hand and set it down in front of his commander.

“There’s a false bottom,” Mercy said. “Open the suitcase then pull up the lining from the lower left corner.”

Moving cautiously, as if he expected the thing to explode, the colonel did as she directed. His hand reappeared holding the 3 X 5 black-and-white photograph. He stared at it, then at Mercy, his face a blank. He seemed about to say something when a shout went up from one of the sentries outside the cabin.

The room exploded into activity.

Men leapt up off of chairs and cots, breaking out guns, shoving extra ammunition clips into pockets. The photograph fell from the colonel’s fingertips. He nodded toward the captives, shouted orders in Ukrainian. Two men roughly pulled Mercy and Sebastian to their feet, shoving them toward the door.

“Hurry, hurry!” one man urged in English, through the pandemonium.

“Where are we going? What’s happening?” Mercy dropped to one knee long enough to snatch the photo from the floor before a man dragged her back up onto her feet.

“Move!” he snarled. All around her, she could see panic flaring in the eyes of men who earlier had seemed so confident and controlled.

“Go, go, go!” men shouted at each other.

Outside, the three captives were shoved unceremoniously into vehicles. Mercy tumbled into the rear seat of the Land Rover. Sebastian entered only slightly more gracefully from the other side. The colonel and his driver took the front seats. All three of the militia’s vehicles sped off, even as the roar of oncoming engines filled the clearing around the cabin.

Whoever was chasing them opened fire. Men in the militia’s two Jeeps, trailing the Rover, shot back at their pursuers as the vehicles bounced over roots and rocks in a dirt road not much wider than a walking path. The Rover clattered into and then out of two-foot-deep trenches, plunged down a ravine, veered around downed tree trunks.

Mercy twisted around in her seat to look behind them and saw one of the Jeeps overturn. A pursuing ATV stopped beside it. Armed men dragged out the four militia men then shoved them face down in the road. Just before the Rover spun around another corner, a figure in black fatigues raised an AK-47 and ran a burst of bullets down the row of captives.

Mercy gasped in shock. “Oh, God!” She choked back sour bile rising into her throat.

“
Bastardos
!” Sebastian swore.

There was only grim silence from the front seats.

“What’s going on? Who are they?” Mercy shouted.

A shiny red ATV continued chasing the militia’s remaining vehicles.

“Tambov,” the colonel growled. “Filthy pigs!”

The ATV was better suited to rough terrain and gained on them. Firing from automatic weapons burst from its side windows. Mercy yanked Sebastian down onto the rear seat.

“What now?” she rasped in his ear.

Sebastian just shook his head. She read his thoughts: It would be suicide to try to overpower the colonel and his driver. The Russian gang, if that’s who they were, would be on them in seconds. After what she’d just seen, she doubted any of them would be allowed to live.

Mercy peered cautiously up over the back of her seat. The remaining militia Jeep veered away and onto a separate path. The ATV stuck with the Rover, edging ever closer then surged forward. Its front bumper kissed the rear of the Rover with a threatening jolt. The whine and roar of the two vehicles’ engines was deafening.

“Give us guns!” Mercy shouted pointing at the pile of semi-automatics the colonel had dumped on the floorboards at his feet. “Let us help you.”

He turned his head, stared blankly at her. His face had gone white, his red-rimmed eyes seemed not to focus on her or anything else.

“I know how to use an AK-47,” she said urgently.

“You don’t have a choice, Colonel.” Sebastian gripped the back of the driver’s seat as they flew up and over a rotting log that lay across the trail. “My guess is… as many as six men are crammed into that big ATV.” Nothing from the colonel. “For God’s sake, let us even up the odds or we’ll all be dead!”

The ATV again slammed into the rear bumper of the Rover, this time sending it lurching off the side of the road. Tree branches and thorny brush screeched against the metal sides of the still-moving vehicle. Their driver wrestled with the wheel, bringing them back onto the packed-earth path. Mercy was sure it was only a matter of time before the more powerful ATV forced them headlong into a tree trunk.

Without a word, the militia officer bent over, retrieved two guns from the floor and shoved them back between the seats. Mercy took the Kalashnikov, Sebastian the rifle. She studied the road in front of them and made a decision. “See that high pile of rocks on the hill ahead and to the right? Leave the trail and head for them. Turn hard around them then slow down.”

“Slow?” the driver yipped, hysterical.

The colonel blinked at her, scowled, but then must have understood. He barked an order at his man.

Mercy tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Soon as you start to slow down, we three bail out.” Mercy looked at the colonel. “Get behind the rocks. That’s a grenade on your belt, Colonel?”

He nodded.

“Any others?”

“My driver.”

Mercy held out her hand. “Give me his. You know what to do with yours?”

Their eyes met for an instant. He looked as if he was seeing her for the first time. “Of course.”

On cue, their driver snapped the steering wheel to the right. The Rover lifted off its two left wheels, skidding sideways around the boulders. Mercy threw herself out the door, hit spongy layers of pine needles and rolled away. Sebastian tumbled after her. As fast as they got to their feet, the colonel was faster, already scrambling around the base of the rubble pile. The Rover kept on going.

Mercy pulled the pin on her grenade and held it, counting under her breath, “One-one hundred. Two-one hundred. Three—”

Sebastian shouted, “Throw the damn thing!”

Mercy rolled the live grenade like a little bowling ball into the road. It stopped in the path of the oncoming ATV. The vehicle slowed to take the corner. The colonel, positioned above her on the hill, tossed his grenade with amazing accuracy through the vehicle’s open window.

There appeared to be a moment of frantic scrambling inside the ATV before both grenades detonated.
Pow! Pow!
The explosions like a double punch to Mercy’s stomach. Metal shrieking. Windshield shattering. The smell of burning rubber and petrol.

Tires screeched as what was left of the ATV careened off the road, billowing smoke. Two men tumbled into a weed-choked ditch. Bloody and blackened, neither got up.

Mercy rushed the vehicle, aware of Sebastian firing round after round to cover her. Then she heard him running, his footfalls thudding after her when no fire was returned from the Tambov goons. She looked inside the destroyed ATV, could see two more bodies inside. Neither moved.

                                          33

When Mercy turned around, the colonel was standing on the hill above them, staring at her. She walked back toward him. “Just an American woman looking for her mama,” he said.

She was still trying to catch her breath, felt her cheeks flush. “There is something more to it than that,” she admitted.

“Ah,” he said, and moved down the hill to meet her.

His driver came running through the woods, having left the Rover somewhere. He must have heard the explosions and gunfire. He thrashed through the brush, a look of horror on his face that turned to relief when he saw his commander standing unharmed. He glanced again at the wrecked ATV and winced. The two militia men exchanged a few words she was unable to translate. She decided they were reassuring each other that they were unhurt.

Suddenly, the colonel rested a hand on his man’s shoulder, as if to brace himself. Mercy saw pain flash across his pale blue eyes, tears well up in his eyes. Tormented by thoughts of the men he’d lost? But by the time he’d turned back to face her and Sebastian, his features had locked down again, emotionless and unreadable.

“We are safe for now,” he murmured. “I will take back my weapons, if you don’t mind, my friends. You will come with us. I want to hear more of your story.”

Back in the Rover they sped through a forest so dense that little light penetrated the lush canopy above them. Even in this desperate moment, Mercy marveled at the primeval beauty of this place. Her artist’s eye soaked up details—all around her stood evidence of nature’s miraculous healing powers. Man had unleashed terrible destruction on this land. Yet nature was taking back the wounded earth as her own, over the decades gradually replacing charred trees and slaughtered creatures with new life.

Just outside of another village, a smaller version of Pripyat, they met up with the second Jeep and its passengers, including a thoroughly shaken Mihkas. Both vehicles stopped in front of an old dacha that appeared abandoned, and everyone got out. Weathered clapboards had lost all evidence of paint, but the shutters still showed flecks of blue. It must once have been pretty, she thought.

Then Mercy heard voices and the clink of glasses from inside. She glanced at Sebastian.

“Neighborhood pub?” he murmured.

The colonel gave him a strained smile. “We make do.”

Once inside, Mercy could see that it was, indeed, a rustic tavern of sorts or at least a meeting place. Maybe a safe house. There were four long trestle tables with eight benches. No bar but, on one of the tables, a few bottles of vodka had been set out along with mismatched mugs, jars, and glasses. Off to one side stood a rusty open-topped cistern, half-filled with liquid. Floating on the surface was what looked like a two-inch layer of pond scum. The mixture smelled yeasty, like sour dough, but far less appetizing.

Home brew, she guessed, seeing several men dip their cups into the mess and then drink it straight down. Probably
kvas
, a strange beer-like beverage she’d read about on the plane.

Mihkas found a stool in a corner and collapsed onto it. His roentgen meter had been returned to him, and he rested the case on his knees then lovingly coaxed the machine from its case as if it were a lost pet. He peered at the dial then looked up at her, sighed and smiled. “Much better here.”

She felt sick at the thought that he might just as easily have ended up in the doomed Jeep. Was he even aware of what had happened to those poor men?

The colonel sat down at the first table he came to. His driver stood off to one side, studying him gravely through sad eyes, wool cap clutched between his hands. Mercy straddled the bench across from the militia leader, expecting the inquisition to begin. Sebastian remained standing, his body stiff.

The colonel folded his hands on the table’s edge, as if preparing to pray. He closed his eyes. Tears seeped from beneath his eyelids and down beard-stubble cheeks.

Their driver came around the table and whispered in Mercy’s ear, “His brother. Gavos was in the other Jeep.”

Mercy’s chest felt as if a piano had dropped on it.
Oh, God!
He’d seen those monsters gun down his brother in cold blood but chose to protect his remaining men, and two strangers, instead of going back to avenge him, then and there.

“I’m so sorry,” she breathed. “If we hadn’t—”

The colonel lifted a hand a few inches off the table, silencing her apology. He dashed away the damp traces of his mourning with the back of one leathery hand. “That had nothing to do with you,” he said.

“But if they were Tambovs, like you said, they have everything to do with why I’m here,” she said calmly, although she wanted to wail in outrage at the brutality she’d just witnessed.