Deep Cover (The Trigger Man Book 2), page 7
“Yes, I guess I’m a liability, being alive and all.” Pierce again pressed the Makarov hard into the back of Drossanov’s skull. He felt his anger surge in him again, and it took his every effort not to beat both these men to death after the tortures he had suffered this last half year. Instead, he drew in a deep breath, calmed his mind, and said, “What is the nuclear waste’s destination?”
“I don’t know.”
Pierce shook his head and made a “tsking” sound. “That, Colonel, we both know is a lie.”
The singlet-wearing man sobbed, then yelled out, “It’s not, I swear.”
There came a forceful knock on the door.
Drossanov’s demeanour suddenly changed, and he bellowed, “Shoot high! Twelve o’clock!” His face was now beetroot red with the anger exploding out of him that he had contained until now. “The fucker’s here!”
Pierce dropped suddenly as the air above him filled with fast-moving bullets, which shattered the door and disintegrated the only window. In the noise and confusion that followed, as soldiers burst into the room, Pierce rolled onto Drossanov, gripped his foe by his singlet and spun them both so the colonel became a shield. The two overkeen soldiers storming the room quickly peppered Drossanov and the broken-jawed soldier with sprays of bullets from their AKMs, with their barrels licking flames in their full-automatic fire settings.
With a sudden, sinking feeling in his gut, Pierce presumed he must have taken a bullet with all the shooting, but with the adrenalin surging through him, he felt nothing for the moment. While he was still operational, he aimed the Makarov and shot the two soldiers three times each, killing them both.
After the bodies dropped lifeless into the carnage building in this confined room, Pierce staggered to his feet, then felt all over his body for sticky wetness. Miraculously, he felt nothing and realised he was unharmed.
Deciding it was time to make his escape, Pierce entered the hallway to discover three more soldiers advancing up the stairs. He released the entire magazine of his AKM, killing them all as blood splashed across a wall and the stairs, and sent them tumbling down the stairs together. Pierce reloaded his assault rifle using magazines sourced from the dead soldiers, then pocketed two more and kept moving.
In the reception, the old man cowered under his desk.
“Are there any others?” Pierce shouted at him, keeping his assault rifle aimed at the main entrance should anyone surprise them.
The old man raised his arms in surrender and shook his head.
“Keep your head down for two minutes, then get yourself as far from here as you can. Understand?”
The man nodded as tears gushed from his eyes.
Outside, Pierce found the three soldiers he had incapacitated earlier and left under the closest Humvee. One was stirring, so Pierce put a bullet through the back of his head. He had tried not to leave them with lasting damage earlier because they were enlisted men, but after learning the truth from Drossanov, he didn’t believe this any longer. These men were nuclear terrorists after all, so they had death coming for them. He shot the other two men as well, to ensure none of them would come after him later.
Pierce jogged back to where he had left Irina, while always checking his back and corners in case other soldiers were on his trail or lying in ambush, but no one came for him. But when he found the parked Skoda, he looked inside and discovered that it was empty.
His heart racing, Pierce glanced up and down the streets. Someone had taken Irina, and there were no signs as to what might have happened.
Then he heard footsteps as someone approached.
Pierce raised his AKM in the direction of the sound, ready to shoot them dead, until it became evident that it was Irina who had materialised out of the darkness.
“What are you doing?” he asked, unable to keep the concern for her well-being out of his voice.
“Men were checking the cars. Not breaking into them but looking in with flashlights. I slipped out and hid in the darkness before they found me in there.” She nodded to their car.
Pierce nodded, as he realised this meant there were still more foes to deal with in this town, and that they had stayed longer than they should have already. “Are you okay? You’re not hurt?”
“I’m fine! But this is a terrifying situation.”
“Then let’s leave. Now.”
Pierce removed his uniform and threw it into the darkness, lobbed his AKM into the trunk of the Skoda, and when they were both inside and buckled in, drove off with speed into the night.
When they were on the road, it occurred to him Irina might have stepped out of the vehicle to make a phone call to her superiors, but he would never know until it was too late.
“Did you get what you wanted, Mark?”
Pierce clamped down on his teeth. “I did. Do you have any reason to stay in Kazakhstan?”
She shook her head vigorously.
“Good, then I’m getting us both out of here.”
12
Aktau, Kazakhstan
After an uneventful sprint out of Beyneu, Pierce drove through the night, stopping only once for gas and a moment to stretch their legs and relieve cramping muscles. When they were back on the road again, Irina slept.
With a quiet moment to himself, Pierce wondered why she had stuck with him this long. The only plausible answer was fear. Complicating circumstances associated her with Pierce now, and local authorities would blame her for the Kazakhs’ murders and the death of Drossanov and his men as much as they would blame him. In her mind, was it a preferable alternative that she run with Pierce, escape to another country, and start afresh with a new identity? He knew he would have done the same in her situation, and this was true whether she was a spy or a prostitute.
Hours later, they arrived at Aktau as the sun rose behind them. The modern but bleak city built on the edge of white cliffs looked out across the lapping inland ocean of the Caspian Sea. All streets had numbers instead of names, a practicality since Aktau had begun its life as an oil workers’ camp some seventy years ago.
Parking on the road encircling the cliff, Pierce stepped out and stretched. The lined jacket warmed against the cool, dry air, and he was grateful he had kept it. Three hundred kilometres over the water to the west lay Baku, their destination. But until they reached Azerbaijan, they could face further complications with the local police, the military, criminal gangs, and anyone else chasing them.
His thoughts turned again to Idris Walsh, the man who’d ultimately framed Pierce as a nuclear terrorist. Intelligence services and police forces across the globe always placed instigators of nuclear terror at the top of their capture or kill lists, and now the most active of those agencies hunting him would be his old employers, the CIA.
He looked at his hands.
They shook.
No matter how often he focused and stilled his mind, he couldn’t get his shakes under control.
Tremors were an infliction that had troubled him for over a year now. Early on, he’d believed these were the symptoms of neurological damage sustained during a grenade blast deep inside insurgent territory in Yemen. Then a nurse who’d treated him on a past mission believed they were psychological, convinced him they would “disappear” when Pierce “did the right thing”, aiding the less fortunate against tyrants. He had done little of anything for seven months, and nothing good, so the tremors had stayed.
Pierce closed his eyes, and when he did, he was immediately back in the dark, dank torture shack. Naked and strapped to a wooden frame. Electric volts surging through his body…
Pierce opened his eyes.
Irina stirred in the passenger seat. After stretching and yawning, she stepped from the Skoda, wrapped her arms around herself against the cold, and joined him.
“You sleep all right?”
She poked out her tongue. “I’ve had better nights’ sleep, Mark.”
He nodded and stared out over the inland sea with its many distant lights denoting offshore oil drilling platforms. The serenity of the scene calmed his mind, which he found to be odd, considering how much inner turmoil he’d been experiencing since his freedom. “That is my name, but I’m not a terrorist.”
She shrugged. “I was angry yesterday, but what do I care? You haven’t hurt me or tried to sleep with me or pimp me out. Hell, I have my own secrets too, some of which I’m sure would disgust you. So who am I to judge?” Irina turned and stood with her back to Pierce’s chest, so he was protecting her from the wintry winds blowing off the desert behind them. She too stared out across the water. “This is my first time seeing the Caspian Sea.”
“It’s an impressive view.”
“It’s ugly. See those lights; they are oil rigs. They pollute the water, kill the fish, and kill us.” She turned back to him. “Just so Russians and the Europeans can drive nice cars.”
Pierce raised an eyebrow at her activist spirit. Not what he had expected, not this clarity of thought, especially after the three violent encounters they had barely survived in the last twenty-four hours.
“If you are not a terrorist, Mark, what are you?”
He held out his hand, testing to see if he could control the tremors, but couldn’t.
He imagined those shaking fingers around Idris Walsh’s neck, tightening, strangling the life out of the man central to Pierce’s incarceration and torture, and wondered if doing so would cure him of his festering hatred for the man. Dark thoughts and wild emotions had never driven him before, but he had never endured prolonged and intense torture either. He also realised in that moment that he had trouble believing he was free again. “Men held me prisoner for seven months in a warlord’s camp. Possibly a black prison site.”
“Black? Prison? For African people?”
He shook his head. Irina might not be who she claimed to be, so he would be careful with what he told her. She could work for the Kazakh criminal gang, or for Walsh and the Australian, reporting his every move. She might even be CIA. But she could also be an innocent, in which case it was his duty to do everything in his power to protect her and remove her from further danger.
“No, I mean an off-the-books prison, but in Africa.” He saw she didn’t understand his Russian translation of a well-known English phrase. “A secret prison. A concentration camp.”
“Ah… A concentration camp… in Africa?”
“I don’t know where.” This was a lie. He knew the prison was on the Kadei River in the Central African Republic’s southwest region. Irina would benefit from that specific piece of information only if she planned on passing it on to someone else.
“What was it like?”
He shuddered, but not from the tremors this time.
“Horrible.”
“Did they torture you?”
He nodded. His shakes grew in intensity.
“Do you have scars?” Her question wasn’t unkind.
Pierce lifted his shirt, showed her the burn marks on his abdomen and chest where electric prods had singed his skin, leaving several small circular scars. Some of those scars were fresh.
Her eyes widened, as if this revelation had truly shocked her. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. It wasn’t your fault.”
She wiped her eyes. She empathised, and this was unexpected.
He turned to her and willed himself to maintain eye contact. “Did something similar happen to you, just as bad?”
She shook her head, then nodded. “Not me. My mother…” She looked away and said nothing more.
“You don’t have to tell me. I understand.”
She hugged herself tighter against the cold. “Can I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“The policemen at the oil fields. You didn’t kill them?”
The tremors in his hands spread to his legs. “No.”
“Why not?”
Since their escape, Pierce had fought to become the man he had been before torture and incarceration had nearly destroyed his mind. His old self had a much better grip on what was right and what was wrong. “They were just doing their job. I would never let them arrest me, but I would not hurt them anymore than I had to. They’d all have families who depend on them. They deserve to live as much as we do.”
“What about the soldiers and Drossanov? I heard gunfire. Lots of it.”
Pierce shrugged. “They were different.”
“How?”
“They were nuclear terrorists, who if left alive would cause suffering and death for hundreds or thousands more. It was them who framed me.”
Irina frowned, then said, “I thought you would kill me, eventually.”
“Then why did you stick with me?”
She shrugged. “If I tried to run, then I definitely thought you would kill me. But if I stayed, I feared my complicity in all the men you murdered would cause the Kazakh authorities to execute me too if they caught us. Both impossible choices. I don’t want to end my life in prison. I don’t want to die either. You were my best option, but only if you were a ‘good’ man.”
Pierce nodded. Perhaps she was who she claimed to be. “I won’t kill you. I won’t hurt you. That is my promise, Irina.”
She nodded and turned her gaze to the burning lights of the offshore oil drilling platforms. “That is where we’re headed?”
He nodded.
“Good. Then what are we doing standing around here?”
13
Pierce and Irina found a café, where he drank his first coffee in more than seven months. Black and strong, with rich beans; coffee had never tasted this good. He soon consumed the first and ordered a second.
Lunch was lamb kebabs with bread and onions. Flavours weren’t strong, but the food was nourishing. It too was the best food he had eaten in a long time.
The café sat on a cosmopolitan street near the central business district. Men and women wore western attire decades out of fashion. Many women wore hijabs, reminding Pierce that most Kazakhstan citizens were Muslim. Several men had holstered pistols in their belts, but that was not uncommon in this part of the world.
While they ate and drank, he monitored the patrons for anyone with unusual characteristics and focused on any repeat appearances. So far, nothing alarmed him.
“We have better food in Russia.”
Pierce shrugged. “I’m sure.” In his past, conversation came easily to him, but he had trouble engaging with this woman. He knew the problem lay with him and not her.
“You really were in a prison?”
“Yes. Well, more of a military camp, but a prisoner nonetheless.”
“Did you escape Africa on your own?”
“No. I don’t even know how I got to Kazakhstan. I woke in the same car I found you in. Prisoner of the same men who took you.”
“And yet you overpowered them. Killed them all.”
Pierce finished his second coffee. “I guess I had better training.”
“In fighting?”
He nodded. “And other skills. You ask a lot of questions.”
Irina looked away. “Most people are under this misconception that men — and sometimes women — hire prostitutes just for sex. But that’s untrue. Most people are lonely. They just want someone to listen to them, make them feel understood, empathised with, even if it is only for an hour and all an illusion. Helping others express their emotions and to feel heard is the most important skill I’ve mastered. Asking questions is something I do out of habit.”
Pierce lowered his utensils and leaned across the table. “Who looks after you?”
Irina flinched. “Now who is asking lots of questions.”
Finished with his dish, Pierce pushed his plate from him. “Too personal?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, not wishing to push her on a subject that made her uncomfortable. “If you’ve finished eating, we need new clothes and provisions. Then we secure passage to Baku.”
“That’s across the Caspian Sea. How, with the authorities looking for us?”
“Bus, ferry and car.”
“You’ve thought this all out.”
He was about to say “trust me” but considered the statement unfair, when Pierce himself had only trusted a handful of people in his life. He stood and paid the bill. “Let me show you.”
They spent the morning shopping for clothes, including long jackets and knit caps, to protect against the cooling weather. At a drugstore, Pierce bought scissors and trimmed his scraggly beard and hair to less than a few millimetres all over. Next, they purchased tickets for the ferry to Baku, a bus ride through Russia and Georgia taking them around the north end of the Caspian Sea, and another set of tickets for a different bus taking them south through Iran. By midday he’d used most of the Kazakh gangsters’ money.
“We’re not taking any of those routes, are we?”
“No.”
At the bus station, Pierce identified two German backpackers searching for cheap passage to Baku. He sold them his tickets at a discounted price. He did the same with an Iranian couple returning home to Tehran, and the ferry tickets he sold to two Kazakh men looking for work in Baku.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked when they were alone.
“To throw the police off our tracks, forcing them to investigate multiple escape routes. Police will interview these ticket vendors and discover conflicting stories.”
“But now we have no means of transport ourselves?”
“I’ll get us to Azerbaijan.”
“How?”
“You’ll see.”
During his career with the CIA, and his time before working deep undercover on a highly classified and protracted mission, Pierce had established multiple bank accounts through various tax havens across the globe. Funds that protected him in circumstances like this, where he needed to go dark and operate with no external support. In his time, Pierce had accumulated over three hundred thousand US dollars in a dozen accounts, but his incarceration had changed that. His savings were now considerably less. Still, there was enough money to cover short-term expenses.
