Michael Bunker - WICK

“Ok, so back to this plan. So you and I bust out the back, Volkhov, while Vasily goes out the front. Then he can meet up with—what is your nephew’s name, Pyotr?”

“That’s it,” Volkhov said, nodding his head.

The old man took Vasily by the shoulders and smiled at him affectionately for a moment. “Vasily, you will take the bag because you can surely get it out without being stopped. You must get to Pyotr. Whatever the cost. Tell him what we are doing. If we get out, tell him we will meet you at the pumping station. He’ll know what that means.”

Vasily nodded, and gave the old man a hug. When the embrace was broken, Volkhov added, “Let me tell both of you something. If anything goes wrong during this ill-advised and quixotic jailbreak, anything at all, you are to leave me behind. I will not go with you unless you promise me that. I am an old man, and I really don’t want to live through what is coming anyway. If the attack comes, it will be on Tuesday. That was the plan from the beginning. It will begin on the evening of the election.”

Both Clay and Vasily nodded. Something in the back of Clay’s mind should have noted that he was making a plan for escape with a young boy and an old man who had just stated that there was to be some sort of apocalyptic attack due on the day of an election, but he did not make that connection in that moment. The tension between his old world and this new world had snapped. He was simply a man fighting for his life in a cell with two other men who were doing the same, and who were offering to watch his back.

The excitement of making a decision had trailed off and an aura of sadness now permeated the cell. They stood silently for several moments before Volkhov again broke the quiet. “Come Tuesday, you guys have to really step it up a notch. Everything will change dramatically, even as it has already begun to change.

“Don’t drink municipal water anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. Stay away from any areas where masses of people are gathered. Don’t trust anyone in uniform…”

He paused to let that sink in.

“Don’t try to fight it out, because that is a loser’s game. The Soviet plan, or should I say, the plan of those on the third side, will be to foster instability and chaos and panic. The primary purpose of government in an advanced civilization is to prevent or minimize panic. That is it. Everything else is window dressing. You don’t have to invade a country to destroy it. The people will do that for you when their comforts evaporate.”

“Sounds ominous,” Clay said.

“You have no idea,” Volkhov replied. After a moment he said, “People who know such things will expect the bombs to start dropping immediately, but that won’t happen. They will want to maximize the damage from confusion and riots before they use bombs. You’ll have some time to get somewhere safe.”

“You mean we will have some time,” Vasily said.

“If I am alive, then yes. Anyway, as I mentioned during my boring speech, the higher-ups on both side know what is coming. It’s been planned all along. But the law of unintended consequences will come into play. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

“They’ll intend to launch missiles soon enough, but subordinates, and some free agents, and others throughout the system will have war-gamed that. The initial launches will be thwarted by massive EMP attacks in all of the critical places.

He paused and looked at the farmer-poet and the errand boy standing before him, his generals. He felt not a single bit, not even the scintilla of the slightest bit, of irony.

“We don’t have time for me to explain it all. Anyway… two weeks . That’s how long you’ll have. Then, the law of human ingenuity will kick in. Despite key cards and codes and fail-safes and guarantees it will only take two weeks before some brilliant minds on every side figure out a workaround. And they will figure out a workaround, you can bet.”

He stopped and let the word will sink in.

“Two weeks,” Clay said, nodding his head. “That’s if we get out of here.”

Vasily looked at Clay and said, “So, now you will have to be the one to imitate Vladimir’s voice. Can you do it?”

“I can,” he said, and Clay was pretty sure he could.

They went back over the plan quickly, noting that the guards would be expecting Vasily to exit at any time now. There was no benefit in making them suspicious. So after they had all agreed to the plan, Vasily shook their hands and departed. He was to grab the backpack, and head out the north door. His job was to not get caught, and to meet up with Pyotr.

“Do not turn back, no matter what happens,” they told him. They’d give him five minutes, then head out the south vestibule—the one through which Clay had entered this nightmare.

Five minutes passed like an hour. The air was so thick with expectation and fear and excitement and terror that Clay wanted to scream in order to cut through it — if only so that he could breathe.

Moving through the unlocked cluster doors, Clay and Volkhov tiptoed as silently as they could manage. All went well and they passed through the final door and turned to the right and Clay could see that the Tank’s door was open but the light was off and he assumed that Vasily had successfully removed the backpack.

Listening for a moment, they heard no sounds and that was a good sign because it meant that Vasily had made it outside without the guards being alerted or suspicious.

Clay and Volkhov had agreed that when they heard the lock in the inner door snap and when the door started to open outward, they would rush through the door and do their best to overwhelm the guard. There was supposed to be only one man standing guard, but he would be armed. Clay and Volkhov looked at each other with a shared agreement that they would see each other on the other side.

It was very dark and the overhead emergency lights provided little assistance, but the darkness should give them cover. Clay wondered for a moment about the mechanics of his body, how he should hold his voice out, just so, in order that his much smaller body could emit the same force of sound as the huge beast of a man.

He stepped to the door and felt the urgency in his belly. He cleared his throat silently and swallowed.

When they were ready and in place, Clay knocked on the door and with an authoritative voice commanded the guard to open up. He thought he did a pretty good job of it. He looked at Volkhov in the dim light and could see that the old man’s head was nodding approval.

The outer door opened and they heard the guard grunt and then they heard the key slip into the lock on the inner door, but then the sound stopped.

“Who is it?” the voice asked in heavily accented English, “say again who it is!”

“It’s Vladimir Nikitich, stupid! Open the damn door!”

They heard the grunt again and then the lock turned and the door began to pull outward and that is when they rushed through the door.

Clay slammed through the portal violently and felt the guard collapse into the vestibule wall as the door unexpectedly hit him across the face. He felt Volkhov rushing behind him, clasping on to the thin fabric of his prison jumper, and he saw the faint outline of the stunned guard with the machine pistol and he rushed him and put his hand on the gun, pushing it downward as he brought the full force of his body crushing downward against the darkened figure.

He was surprised when the guard recovered so quickly, and he felt the gun being ripped from his hand and a booted foot came upward and caught him in the chest and he was brutally kicked across the vestibule. He expected bullets to rip into his body at any moment, but Volkhov had responded like a man half his age and he crashed into the guard before he could raise the gun. With both hands the old man grappled with the gun and his head turned toward Clay, who had regained his feet…