Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

A third, tall man with thick sandy hair and wearing a black armband had retrieved the Glock. He stood in a shooting stance, the Glock aimed at Scorpion’s chest. A powerful lamp beside him cast the shadows of the swinging puppets, dislodged by the fight, dancing across the room.

Scorpion recognized the sandy-haired man. He had been Gorobets’s aide in the hotel suite in Dnipropetrovsk. For the first time, Scorpion was able to look around. In addition to the puppets, there were two bodies hanging from a ceiling pipe by their necks, the large shapes he had seen earlier. They were clearly dead.

The bodies were those of a young man and woman, both naked, their hands tied and both covered with welts and dark bruises. It took Scorpion a second before, with a shock, he recognized their bloated faces. The young people from the Black Cat cafe: Ekaterina and Fedir.

He had no time to pay attention to them, because there was another woman, also naked. She hung upside down, tied by her feet from a pulley, her long blond hair trailing down into a tub of water filled with chunks of ice. Her body was bruised and cut like the others and her mouth had been taped so no one could hear her scream. The pulley he’d heard earlier had been used to raise or lower her head into the ice water. There were wet rubber gloves lying next to the tub. The sandy-haired man had been holding her head under the water. She was still breathing, her eyes dazed, wild almost to the point of insanity. It took a few seconds till Scorpion recognized her from the photo. It was Alyona.

“Pane Kilbane, we saw you coming,” the sandy-haired man said in English. The damned approaches, Scorpion thought. There was bound to be someone watching.

“Remind me again. What’s your name?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I plan to remember you,” Scorpion said. He sensed the second man coming up behind him.

“I’m Kulyakov,” the sandy-haired man said. “I want you to remember me. Do you know Alyona?”

“Only by her photo in the Chorna Kishka cafe,” he said, so if she were listening she would know he knew who she was and that he was there to help. Unless her mind, after what they had done to her, was too far gone.

“She’s being very stubborn,” Kulyakov said. “All I want is some information.”

Then a heavily muscled arm put Scorpion in a choke hold from behind. The second man, he thought. His wrist was grabbed and twisted behind him in a painful hammer lock.

“Call off your sobaka, ” Scorpion gasped. Your dog. “I can help. We want the same thing.”

“What thing is that?” Kulyakov said, motioning to the second man to hold still for a moment.

“Shelayev. We’re both looking for him.”

“Are we?”

“Gorobets needs to make sure Shelayev doesn’t talk. Only he’s disappeared.”

Kulyakov shrugged. “So?”

“So you need to find him. Otherwise you’d have no interest in Alyona or her friends, except for your perverted little fantasies.”

“What is this, a Glock?” Kulyakov said, looking at the pistol in his hand. He smiled, showing bad teeth. “It’s light. I like this pistolet. You shouldn’t tempt someone holding such a light pistolet; so easy to shoot,” and he aimed it at Scorpion.

“Don’t be stupid. Killing me will make an assassination that everyone assumes I did into an assassination that everyone will assume Gorobets did,” Scorpion said, wondering where the hell Iryna was.

“No,” Kulyakov said. “Killing Cherkesov’s assassin will make me a hero.”

Then Scorpion heard a sound from somewhere behind him. Damn, he thought. She needed to be quiet.

Kulyakov said something in Ukrainian that sounded like an order. Scorpion felt the second man let him go and head back toward the other room.

“Don’t move,” Kulyakov said, aiming the Glock at Scorpion. “I’m dying to try out this pistolet.”

Two shots rang out. At the first shot, knowing the sound would distract Kulyakov for an instant, Scorpion moved. He stepped forward, parrying the Glock aside, the first move in the Krav Maga sequence, followed by taking the gun away from Kulyakov in a twisting wrist move. Scorpion debated killing him as he reversed the gun and pointed it in a shooting stance at Kulyakov. No, he needed to question him. He motioned Kulyakov to his knees. After a moment’s hesitation, Kulyakov glaring at him, knelt on his knees.

From the next room, Iryna screamed. Scorpion kicked Kulyakov in the face, whirled and ran back toward the other room, where he saw Iryna struggling with the second man. Sensing Scorpion behind him, the man turned and jumped at him. There was no time to think. Scorpion shot him in the head. The man fell facedown at Scorpion’s feet.

“What happened?” he asked Iryna, stepping over the body.

“I shot him in the shoulder,” she said. “He came too fast.”

“Come,” Scorpion grabbed her hand. “Hurry!”

They went into the puppet room.

“Gospadi.” Iryna gasped at the sight of Alyona and the hanging bodies. Kulyakov was gone. Alyona’s naked body was jerking like a fish on the line, her head underwater in the tub again. Before he had fled, Kulyakov lowered her back into the ice water.

Scorpion grabbed Alyona and lifted her up so her head was out of the water. She was coughing, squirming as she fought him. Holding her slippery body up, he tried to kick the tub of water over, but it was too heavy. He moved her body so it hung beside the tub and let her dangle head down while he ran to the other room to grab his backpack. She was still jerking on the line when he came back and used his Leatherman pliers’ blades to cut the cable holding her. He cut her bonds and freed her, pulling the tape from her mouth.

When Alyona saw Iryna, she screamed, clutched at her and began to sob. Iryna held her in her arms. The room was in a shambles, the puppets swaying in the shadows. Scorpion looked around. Kulyakov had to have used the metal stairs to the stage to get away.

He ran up the stairs and onto the stage. A door banged in the lobby. He leapt from the stage to the aisle and ran out to the lobby and the theatre doors, scanning the snow-covered walkways and steps. There was no sign of Kulyakov.

He went around to the side of the building, but it was too dark to see. He should’ve brought his night-vision goggles, he thought as he scanned the slope. There were what looked like fresh footsteps and a bloodstain on the snow. It could have come from Kulyakov’s nose when he kicked him. But there was nothing moving on the slope. He realized that Kulyakov must have made it to the trees, his eyes searching the mass of branches in the darkness. He was about to start down the slope when he spotted a militsiyu van, moving slowly on the road along the periphery of the park. The van stopped.

Scorpion stepped back into the shadows of the theatre entrance. From inside the van, a powerful flashlight was pointed at the theatre. The light moved toward him and he froze against the wall, holding his breath. If they found him, he would be in prison and the war would start. The beam of light almost touched him, then moved past. After what seemed like an hour but was probably less than fifteen seconds, he heard the van move on. He peeked out and saw it was gone, then went back down the stairs to the puppet room.

Iryna had found a canvas tarp to wrap around Alyona. She lit a cigarette and held it for Alyona, whose hand was shaking too much to hold it herself.

“She saw them killed,” Iryna said, indicating the hanging bodies. “She needs to go to a hospital.”

“What about Shelayev?” Scorpion asked.

“Can’t it wait?” Iryna said sharply. She put her arms around Alyona. “She’s shaking like a leaf.”

“No, it can’t,” Scorpion said.