Ted Bell - Tsar

“Sunshine,” Yurin croaked as Stoke increased the pressure. And leaned down again to scream into his ear.

“You want to go home tonight, Yurin? Hit the vodka? Sleep in a nice warm bed? Or do you want to be just another accidental drowning in a storm? Too many beers, taking a piss off the stern, oopsy-daisy. A tragic mistake, officer, happens all the time. Your call.”

“What’s your fucking problem?”

Stoke’s immediate problem was that he felt the Magnum starting to roll over on her beam ends as the sea started piling up rapidly on the port side.

“Whoops, another big one coming. Hold on, Tiger.”

Stoke grabbed the back of his seat, struggling to stay upright with one foot braced against the Russian’s head and the other on the deck. They were in free fall again, speeding down the face of a huge wave, rudder amidships, but now no one was at the wheel. Stoke couldn’t let go of the seat to grab it for fear of being thrown from the cockpit. The boat’s motion was ridiculously violent and disorienting, but Stoke had seen worse. He’d once ridden out a mid-Pacific typhoon solo in a two-man Zodiac. Six days of that, this little blow was cake.

“Who do you work for, Yurin? I want a name!”

“Get the boat out of this c-crazy-shit ocean, and m-maybe I’ll tt-talk,” he sputtered, his nose and lips mashed against teak decks that were now awash, seawater sloshing in and out of his damn mouth, just the kind of modified water-boarding technique Stoke had been shooting for out here.

“Talk now, before we bury the bow again and wash both our asses into the drink. Who do you work for?”

“The Dark Rider.”

“The what?”

“Dark Rider. What he’s called. No one knows his real name.”

Stoke leaned forward and grabbed the spinning wheel. He held it hard over, keeping the nose from burying itself and instead starting up the next wall on a reasonable angle.

“You get orders from somebody. Who?”

“Directly from General Arkady Zukov. Retired now, from the KGB. A great Russian patriot. We are all patriots, working to restore Russian pride.”

“Shitty job so far, Yurin.”

“Piss off.”

“Rostov? Is Rostov the Dark Rider?”

“No. Not Rostov. Higher.”

“Higher than the president?”

“Maybe.”

“What was that? I can’t hear you.”

The boat was totally out of control.

“I said yes! Higher!”

“Here’s the big one, Yurin. Ready? What the fuck are Russian OMON troops doing here in America?”

No answer.

Stoke shifted his foot to the back of Yurin’s head, driving his face hard into the deck as they crested the thirty-footer. In a few seconds, they’d drop sickeningly down the other side.

“Tell me about OMON. Now!”

“Fuck. A mission. We’re here training for a mission.”

“What kind of mission you on, Yurin?”

“Hostage rescue.”

“Like you rescued those schoolchildren in Beslan?”

“Fuck you. Shoot me.”

Stoke mashed his nose hard into the deck and heard a howl of pain.

“Where you training?”

“Oh, shit! Out in the Everglades. An abandoned airstrip.”

“OMON is going to rescue hostages here in Miami? Is that it? Why doesn’t that make any sense to me, Yurin? Unless maybe you’re training to prevent a hostage rescue, know what I’m sayin’?”

Yurin was silent.

Stoke removed his foot from the back of the big Russian’s head, stepped over Yurin, and carefully slid back into the helm seat. He didn’t have it all, but it was a good start. It was enough to get Harry Brock’s attention. Harry was headed to Bermuda for a high level powwow with Hawke. Stoke had gotten what he’d come for, good hard intel. Russia was on everybody’s mind now, especially Alex Hawke’s.

“We’re going back,” Stoke said, steering off the wave crest, taking a diagonal back down the face. “Get up. Slowly. See if you can get back in your seat without getting tossed into the drink, all right? I’m not in a rescue mood right now.”

The big yellow race boat was pointed sharply downward on the foamy green face of the wave at a forty-five-degree angle.

“Jesus,” Yurin said, managing to get to his feet by holding on to the bar. He slid back inside his seat, buckled up. Stoke kept the Glock in his hand, in case the guy got courageous. But he was a little green around the gills now, his nose mashed over to one side, the blood and spittle trickling out the sides of his mouth blown backward on both cheeks, not looking too sporty.

“Your nose is broken, Yurin. You want me to fix it? I can do it back at the dock. What I do, I jam my two little pinkies straight up your nostrils and, pop-pop, voilà, straight as an arrow again. Hurts like a bitch, though, I gotta be brutally honest.”

Yurin didn’t reply, didn’t even look over.

It wasn’t easy getting through the narrow end of the funnel with a fiercely following sea, but Stoke managed it, just surfed a big roller all the way through the chute.

When they were back in the relative calm of the marina, the seriously pissed-off Russian said, “Any reason why we couldn’t have had that conversation in my office?”

“Just two,” Stoke said, nosing the big Magnum back toward the Miami Yacht Group docks. “Number one reason, I’m a habitual thrill seeker.”

“Yeah? You Americans haven’t seen anything yet.”

“That’s a threat?”

“That’s a promise.”

“What’s your problem with Americans, Yurin?”

“You people are a fucking error that needs correcting.”

“So, I guess you don’t want to hear the second reason.”

“Yeah, yeah. What?”

“Me being just a fucking error, like you say, I guess you wouldn’t want to sell me this boat?”

“What?”

“I guess you don’t want to sell me the boat, Yurin.”

“You serious? You actually want to buy it?”

“Of course I want to buy it.”

“Jesus. You are serious. I thought Moscow was crazy. Miami is the freaking moon.”

“Windshield will have to be replaced, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Give me a number,” Stoke said, smiling at the Russian guy for the first time all afternoon.

Mayor Monie Bailey spooned the last little bit of macaroni and cheese into her four-year-old daughter’s mouth and then used a dishcloth to remove the rest of Stouffer’s finest from her child’s hair, ears, cheeks, and the scruffy terry bib hanging by a thread below her chin.

“More,” Debbie Bailey demanded, banging on the plastic highchair tray with a wooden horse. “More mac.”

“All gone!”

“No! More!”

“All gone, I said. Night-night time!”

“No night-night! More!”

“You ate the whole thing, Debbie. The whole Family Size. You must have worms.”

“No worms. Yucky!”

She plucked the child from her chair in the kitchen and carried her upstairs to the room she shared with her older sister, Carrie. The room always made her smile. It was what she’d always wanted as a girl but was never able to have. A pink powder-puff dream, walls, rugs, curtains, duvet covers, even the two dressers and the mirrors above them, all the same pale shade of pink. And the pink lampshades everywhere just made everything glow.

Carrie, who’d turned nine last week, was propped up against her fluffy pink pillows, reading. She’d received a hardcover illustrated Black Beauty for her birthday, but that remained uncracked, jammed in among all the shelves of well-thumbed graphic novels and paperbacks in the pink bookcase beneath the window.

“Hi, Mom,” Carrie said, her eyes never leaving the page.