Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

Scorpion fired once, hitting the Black Armband holding Iryna’s legs in the back of the head, dropping him. He charged the bigger man, who let go of Iryna’s throat to swing an elbow at Scorpion, who blocked with his forearm, then fired the Glock almost point-blank into the man’s face.

The Black Armband clutched his face, letting Iryna go. Scorpion fired again, shooting him through the hand, killing him. Then he whirled and fired at the Black Armbands running toward them from the gate, bringing two of them down. As the others stopped to take firing positions, he fired again and again, glad he had used the extended clip, remembering Delta training-that in the middle of a firefight, you don’t just shoot, but take the extra fraction of a second to be deliberate. He hit three of them, one after the other, grabbing Iryna’s hand as they went down. Together, they raced out into the turmoil on the field. Three more Black Armbands ran after them.

People in the stands were screaming and trying to get out. On the field, they were crashing into chairs and each other as they swarmed toward the exits. Someone was shouting something on the loudspeaker, saying that everyone had to leave.

“Pyatov?” Iryna asked as they ran. Scorpion shook his head.

A phalanx of militsiyu followed by dozens of Black Armbands shepherded Cherkesov and others from the stage toward the tunnel. Scorpion headed for a side exit, away from the tunnel, trying to lose himself and Iryna in the crowd. He risked a glance behind. The Black Armbands who had been chasing them were looking everywhere in the crowd. He and Iryna were caught in the middle of a dense wedge of people shouting and pushing toward one of the exits.

“You’re covered in blood,” Iryna said to him.

“We’ve got to change our look,” he said, snatching an oversized rabbit fur Ushanka hat, long earflaps and a wide front brim, from a woman’s head and planting it on Iryna. The woman started to scream, and a man with her shouted at Scorpion, who peeled out some money and shoved it in the man’s mouth before shoving people aside to put distance between them.

“You’re a crazy man, you know that?” Iryna snapped. “You can’t just take things from people.”

“Pull it down. Make sure it covers your hair,” he said.

The crowd pressed in on them. They let the force of it sweep them toward the exit. Scorpion glanced back at the tunnel. The officials with Cherkesov disappeared into it, surrounded by Black Armbands.

“What happened? I heard shooting,” a man wedged next to Scorpion asked him in Russian.

“Ya ne znayu.” I don’t know, Scorpion said. “You want babki?” Slang for money.

“You kidding me?”

“I like your shlyapa hat.” The man wore a rounded trapper-style sheepskin hat.

“What about me?” the man asked.

“Here’s five hundred hryvnia to keep you warm,” Scorpion said, managing to pull more money out of his pocket despite the press of the crowd.

They were moving off the field with the crowd, heading through the gate under the stands, the sound of talking and shouting echoing in the crowded space.

“It’s yours,” the man said, grabbing the money. He ripped off his hat and handed it to Scorpion.

“What do you think?” he asked Iryna.

“Your jacket’s still bloody.”

“I’ll deal with it. Sometimes it only takes a little change to throw people off,” he said.

They poured out with the crowd into the icy street. Facing them was a line of Black Armbands with AK-47s scanning the crowd. Scorpion moved to try to shield himself behind a tall man.

“Don’t look at the Armbands,” he cautioned Iryna. “Talk to me in Ukrainian. Tell me this is an outrage.”

Iryna began talking, raising her voice even as she looked away from the Black Armbands. They followed the crowd funneling through a gap in the line of Black Armbands, one of whom was waving people through. It’s no good, Scorpion thought. They were looking closely at everyone squeezing through the gap. He scanned the scene to see if there was another gate, but the crowd pressed in behind them, pushing them toward the gap. They were almost there.

Iryna’s eyes searched his. He put one hand on the Glock and the other on the SR-1 Gyurza pistol he had taken from Andriy in the Mercedes. It was bad and it was stupid, but he knew there wasn’t another way as they came up to the gap.

The eyes of one of the men watching them suddenly grew wide. Whether he had spotted Iryna or his bloody jacket didn’t matter, Scorpion thought, starting to pull the pistols out of his pockets. He saw the man take a breath to shout.

Suddenly, a car exploded in the parking area near the tunnel entrance. A ball of flame soared into the darkness, throwing a red glare over the scene. People were screaming and running in every direction in a panic. Scorpion dropped the Glock back into his pocket. No one was looking at them. The Black Armbands, everyone, were staring at the fire from the explosion.

He grabbed Iryna’s hand and ran with a mass of others through the gap and out toward the street. As they ran, Scorpion looked back at the burning car. It was one of the big Mercedes sedans. His knees sagged. The realization of what had to have happened hit him as though he’d run smack into a brick wall. Cherkesov was dead. Pyatov had been a red herring, a decoy. He and Iryna had been set up. If Akhnetzov and Gabrilov were telling the truth, Europe was on the brink of war.

Heads down, he and Iryna began to edge away from the crowd, then kept walking away from the stadium. She almost slipped on the ice and he had to grab her arm to keep her from falling. It was worse than mission failure, he thought, a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. He looked at her, that beautiful face wrapped in the fur Ushanka hat, and couldn’t tell whether she had realized it yet. They were the fall guys. Within the hour they would be the most hunted criminals in the country.

Just then something touched his eye. He looked up.

It had started snowing again.

Zaporozhye

Ukraine

The checkpoint was at the Zaporizka Shosye highway fork on the outskirts of Dnipropetrovsk, just past Babuskinskyi. They were in a district of factories, apartment buildings, and fields covered with snow. Scorpion had hoped to get out of the city before roadblocks were set up, but the politsiy had moved too quickly.

He moved the BMW into a waiting line of trucks, mostly Russian Kamazes and Czech Tatras. The checkpoint blazed in the darkness with light from the politsiy police vans’ headlights shining through the falling snow.

“Do you have a false ID?” he asked Iryna. It was the first time they had spoken since the Stadium. She shook her head no. He looked behind them in the rearview mirror. A big Tatra truck had come up behind, boxing them in. The truck cab was too high for its driver to see into the BMW through the back window.

“There’s a blanket in back. Hide under it on the floor and keep still,” he said.

“What about you?” she asked, still not taking it in. The news they had been listening to on the car radio since leaving the stadium area had stunned her into silence. Cherkesov and three of his aides were dead, including Ihor Oliynyk, the man who brought Scorpion to Gorobets. The bodies of eight more men had been recovered from the tunnel shootout. The election was in chaos. According to Radio Europa News, Kozhanovskiy campaign advisor Iryna Mikhailivna Shevchenko had been seen in the stadium. She, along with a foreign journalist named Mikhail Kilbane, were wanted for questioning.

“I have another ID,” Scorpion said.

“What about Michael Kilbane?”

“He no longer exists. I’m a South African businessman named Peter Reinert.”