Road Of Bones

Anuchin heard the restroom door swing open, followed by a scuffling sound and muttered cursing.

Dollezhal was fighting for his life.

Her first instinct was to rush out and help him, but the phut of a silenced weapon stopped her. Teetering on top of the commode, she waited, trembling, as footsteps advanced toward the stalls and their doors began to slam open.

The first touch on hers met resistance. A gruff voice said, “Here,” and the scraping of shoe soles converged. Knuckles rapped and a voice like a wood rasp inquired, “Are you there, little traitor?”

Irrationally, she kept silent, then bit her tongue to keep from squealing as another phut punched a hole in the cubicle’s door and cracked the tile behind her, stinging her neck with splinters.

“Open up!” a second voice commanded her. “We’re tired of playing now!”

She stood, unlatched the door, leaving room for herself as it opened, with the commode pressing against her calves. Three faces leered at her, three pistols aiming at her face.

“Surprise!” the middle gunman said. “We’re going for a ride.”

CHAPTER ONE

Yakutsk, seven hours later

Yakutsk owed its existence to the tide of war and tyranny. Constructed as a fort by Cossack warlord Pyotr Beketov in 1632, within seven years it had become the seat of power for an independent military fiefdom whose commander sent troops ranging to the south and east. Discovery of gold and diamonds in the late nineteenth century turned Yakutsk into a mining boomtown. The Sakha Republic still supplied twenty percent of the world’s rough diamonds, but Yakutsk owed its final growth surge to Russia’s Man of Steel.

Joseph Stalin was one of those people who chose his own name and made grim history—like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac killer, but on a grand scale. Born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, he didn’t like the sound of it, and so renamed himself Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin—Russian for “steel”—after joining the early Bolshevik movement and being convicted of bank robbery. Exile to Siberia couldn’t tame him, but it gave him ideas.

Climbing the revolutionary food chain with ruthless cunning, Stalin was Vladimir Lenin’s strong right hand in 1917 and beyond. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin rushed to fill the power vacuum in Moscow, exiling or executing his rivals and consolidating power in a dictatorship that scuttled any dreams of a Communist Utopia on Earth.

And he remembered Siberia. Over the next three decades, an estimated twenty-two million passed through Stalin’s Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies, better known as gulags for short. Based on figures released after communism’s collapse in 1991, some 1.6 million internees died in Stalin’s camps between 1929 and his own death in 1953.

But killing hadn’t ended with the cold war in the Russian Federation. Life and death went on as usual. Mack Bolan was in Yakutsk to prevent one death—and likely to inflict more in the process.

Business as usual for the Executioner.

It was a rush job, with time being of the essence. Bolan drove his GAZ-31105 Volga sedan along the Lena River’s waterfront with barges and an island to his right, warehouses on his left, looking for the address where he could—hopefully—collect his package from some people who weren’t expecting him.

And there it was.

He drove past, boxed the block and rolled back toward the water with the makings of a plan in mind. He’d keep it simple: hit and git, if that was possible.

If not…well, Bolan played the cards that he was dealt.

And on occasion, he’d been known to throw away the deck.

He parked within a half block of his target, killed the Volga’s engine and turned to his tools. First up was an AKS-74U submachine gun, nineteen inches long with its wire stock folded, weighing five and a half pounds unloaded. Size aside, it had the same firepower as its parent weapon, the venerable AK-74 assault rifle in 5.45 mm, with a cyclic rate of 650 rounds per minute. On paper, the little gun’s effective range was listed as 350 yards, but with an eight-inch barrel it was used primarily for work up close and personal.

For backup, Bolan wore an MR-444 Baghira semiauto pistol in a fast-draw shoulder rig. The Russian-made sidearm was chambered for 9 mm Parabellum rounds, carrying fifteen in a double-column box magazine.

His less-lethal option consisted of four GSZ-33 stun grenades, a flash-bang model equivalent to the U.S.-made M-84 that generated one million candela to blind a target on detonation, while shocking him deaf and nearly unconscious with 180 decibels of concussive sound inside a five-foot radius. When they were clipped to Bolan’s belt and the pockets of his long coat filled with extra magazines, he left the sedan and locked it, moving toward the warehouse with the address offered by his contact.

Despite the vote of confidence from Langley, filtered back to Bolan through his friends at Stony Man, there was a chance that his informant could turn out to be a rat. In which case, it was fifty-fifty that Bolan would never have a chance for payback.

Not in this life, anyway.

But there was one thing you could say about the odds on any battlefield.

They shifted when the Executioner arrived.

* * *

WHEN THE INTERROGATOR took a break, Valentin Grushin braced him, getting in his face to ask him, “Are you making any progress?”

The pale man regarded Grushin as he might a laboratory specimen, perhaps a frog or piglet offered for dissection. Grushin thought, again, how much the creepy bastard looked like Dracula. Not old Lugosi, long before his time, but Christopher Lee in the great Hammer films from the sixties and seventies.

“She’s tough,” the pale man said. “I give her that.”

His name was Ivan Shukov, but inevitably he was known within the dark world he inhabited as Ivan the Terrible. No surprise there, from what Grushin had heard—and now seen—of his work.

“I would have said you’re getting nowhere,” Grushin said, emboldened by his guns and three companions. “All this time, and nothing.”

All that screaming, and the generator humming, Shukov murmuring his questions as he placed the alligator clips for maximum effect. How many volts? Enough to singe the flesh without inflicting death or permanent disfigurement.

So far.

Grushin wasn’t unsettled by the screaming. He had made some women scream himself—a few from pleasure, others not so much. Insensitivity to suffering was part of what equipped him for his work, a subset of his general indifference to the fate of other human beings.

No. What made his skin crawl in the presence of a man like Ivan Shukov—and there seemed to be a surfeit of them in the world these days—was the disturbing sense that he, Grushin, might fall into the hands of such a man someday.

And then what would become of him?

It would be easy to transgress and fall from grace. A simple comment in the wrong place, at the wrong time, might betray him. Passed along maliciously, amended and redacted, any casual remark could turn into a death sentence. And while he didn’t relish death, Grushin had long since come to terms with personal mortality, accepting that the chances of a long and happy life were slim indeed.

It wasn’t dying that he feared, so much as screaming out his final breath while everything that made him human was extracted, sliced and diced or seared with flame, by someone like Ivan the Terrible.

Had he already gone too far in goading the interrogator? Would his criticism get back to the man in charge, be filed away for future reference and used against him somewhere down the line? Perhaps, but now it was too late to take it back.

“I’m thinking of a new approach,” Shukov said.

“Oh?” Grushin strived for a noncommittal tone.

“Selective applications, heat and cold,” Shukov explained. “You have dry ice?”

“Dry ice? No,” Grushin replied.

“But you can find some, yes?”

Grushin considered it. Where would he locate dry ice?

As if reading his mind, Shukov said, “I suggest the ice plant. Kulakovsky Street. You know it?”

“I can find it,” Grushin said, determined not to ask Shukov for the address.