David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“Finished your watch?” asked Alexei conversationally.

“I’ve been relieved,” he said. “They’re taking us the rest of the way.”

“Ah.” Alexei nodded. “Like a harbour pilot.”

“Yeah,” he said, and shivered a little. “But with no harbour.”

Alexei was about to ask something else when Holden burst into the room and fingered him. “You!” he shouted. “Get up to the bridge! It’s time to start work!”

“Okay,” said Alexei, and started toward the door. “See you later,” he said to the yacht’s former pilot.

“Screw the good-byes,” snapped Holden. “ Vite , Russkie, vite !”

As soon as Alexei got close enough, Holden grabbed his arm and all but hauled him up the stairs.

“These fucking Russians,” he muttered to Alexei, “are taking over my ship. Listen to what they say, and tell me after.”

“I will listen,” promised Alexei. “And keep my mouth shut, yes?”

“ Da ,” said Holden. “You’ll do fine.”

Less than ten seconds on the bridge, and Alexei wasn’t so sure.

“Hey!” shouted one of them as Alexei and Holden climbed up into the room. The men were all lean and athletic — they looked to Alexei like commandos more than anything. But they seemed completely at home on the bridge of an American motor yacht. “No one here but us!”

He was speaking English, but even so — he didn’t sound Russian at all. Alexei looked at Holden with a question in his eye, but Holden’s face was granite. Alexei felt his own stomach twist, even as one of the others muttered something in his native tongue.

No, it was not Russian — not even close to Russian.

He was speaking Romanian.

And Holden Gibson — Heather’s prick, who’d taken over this child labour ring and come here on the urging of a dream — this American couldn’t tell the difference between Russian and Romanian.

Alexei should have let on to Holden; the same way, he supposed, he should have worked a little harder to radio in some kind of a distress call over Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s disappearance. He could barely even speak Romanian — he remembered a couple of words, from a language course more than a decade ago, but languages had never been his strong suit.

“Get off! Or deal is done!” shouted the Romanian. He actually lifted his AKM from where he’d leaned it against a cabinet, and waved it at the two of them. Holden recoiled at that.

“Hey!” said Holden. “This is my ship! And—” he paused “—and Jimmy here doesn’t know jack shit about navigating boats! Do you, Jimmy?” He nudged Alexei hard in the ribs.

Alexei shook his head.

“So he’s staying up here! Like a guard!”

“Like a guard,” said the Romanian, and turned to his two compatriots. They whispered among themselves in Romanian, and Alexei struggled to listen. “Deal,” and “injury,” and possibly “water.” These Alexei could make out. Otherwise, he didn’t have a clue.

“No,” said the Romanian finally. “Don’t want to let us alone to drive boat, you turn around, go home. Deal off.”

Angry colour stained the capillaries of Holden’s face, and he stepped forward — unmindful, for the moment, of the assault rifle between him and the Romanian. “Fuck you!” he screamed. “Fuck—” and he jabbed his finger at the Romanian’s chest “—you!”

Alexei put his hand on Holden’s shoulder, and gently pulled him back.

“Maybe you don’t go home,” snarled the Romanian. “Off the bridge!”

Holden raised up his hands and backed down the steps, and when another of the Romanians motioned to Alexei, he followed. At the bottom of the steps, there waited two other Romanians. Holden didn’t argue when they ordered him back to the lounge, where the rest of the crew had been marshalled. It was there, explained one of the Romanians, that they would just have to wait.

“They said that you should stop meddling,” Alexei told Holden. “They said that you were a fat ugly fuck who could as easily be drowned. The one guy said, ‘Why doesn’t he do as he’s told?’ The other guy said, ‘Why don’t you just shoot him. He is a real prick.’ Then the guy with the rifle said, ‘Let me deal with this.’”

Of course, not having understood more than a couple of words of the Romanian’s conversation, Alexei had made it all up — but Holden seemed to swallow it as word-for-word Russian-to-American translation. And Alexei had read Holden correctly — the invective seemed to convince him more than anger him. Holden’s eyes wrinkled distastefully, but he nodded.

“All right,” said Holden. “All right, I was half-expecting some shit like this. These are the kind of people we’re dealing with. Right, Russkie? Hey Russkie, what kind of guns were those fucks waving?”

“AKMs,” said Alexei. “Like the AK-47, but a little better.”

“Hah!” Holden grinned broadly, and slapping Alexei’s shoulder. “You’re remembering shit! You remember where you come from any better?” He dug his fingers savagely into Alexei’s shoulder, and his grin turned feral. “Like maybe you recognized some people? Your comrades up there? For instance? Is this a fucking double-cross, Russkie?”

“Hey!”

Holden grunted as Heather grabbed his arm, and pulled it away from Alexei. “Leave him alone!” she hissed.

Holden turned to her, and for a second Alexei was afraid he was going to hit her. But he didn’t — instead, he reached around her with his other hand and patted her ass. She glared up at him, and he laughed.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m just yanking his chain. We’ll be done with this whole thing in a couple hours.” She let go, and glared at him as he made his way up to the podium. The rest watched him too, but without the same rancour; their heads swivelled like sunflowers marking the passing of hours. “Don’t worry,” he said to the group. “This is part of the plan — these guys are just super-cautious, all right? We’ll be ready to load up in a couple hours, tops.” And he raised his hands slightly, like a maestro at the ballet.

As if Holden had cued it, the motor yacht’s deck shifted to port.

He’d grabbed her ass. Alexei thought about the empty barracks down below with their tiny beds, and the slim likelihood that fraudulent magazine subscriptions were as far as this apparently highly profitable racket went. As they began the long, lazy turn, Alexei looked at Heather, then at Holden Gibson, and then something turned in his stomach. And he made his decision.

Fyodor Kolyokov hadn’t needed the isolation tank for a long time: not since the early days when all needs Physick were safely defined by the razor-wire fences of City 512. But need and desire often mingle to the same effect, and so as soon as he found a way, Kolyokov moved the tank from Russia to America. The tank was as much a part of his life as his eyes and his lungs and his heart.

The tank was an early prototype, baffled against sound with a set of casings pressed inside one another like nested Russian dolls — dolls made of iron and steel, concrete and horsehair, ceramic and lead. Sealed inside the tiniest doll, it wasn’t hard to imagine weathering a nearby nuclear detonation.

The Cyrillic notations stamped on the outermost doll indicated expectations falling just short of that. Kolyokov had at various times tried to fill those letters with different types of cement — but the cold steel of the tank sucked moisture from the air like a thirsty whore, and Kolyokov’s attempts at camouflage crumbled within days of their application. There was no making it into anything beyond what it was: an old KGB sensory isolation tank, that to anyone but Kolyokov would stink like an open sewer.