In the Shadow of Mordor

Chapter 18

Mihailo found Vasya the next day at a table in a small café near MGB Headquarters and headed straight for him.

“Greetings,” he said with abroad smile. “Remember me? You gave me a ride to Donetsk the other day.”

Vasya leaned away. “Yeah, I remember.” His voice was not particularly friendly. Maybe things were not all well with the MGB.

“They promoted me.” Mihailo sat without an invitation and pulled out the altered identification. “You probably heard that the command has changed, there’s a new Chief of Staff, and he knows me.”

“Congratulations.” Vasya had no desire to get on the bad side of anyone of rank.

“I have an almost official request for you,” Mihailo began. “The new command is looking things over, and they want to know what we have in the old Gorlovka munitions plant. They need to know exactly where the mines have been placed so that our boys don’t accidentally blow themselves up.”

“I can’t help you,” sighed Vasya. “You need to send an official request to Command. That’s the only way.”

Mihailo gave Vasya a stare usually reserved for the mentally disabled, and then spoke slowly and carefully. “Vasya, What Command do you have in mind? Yesterday they found the head of the Gorlovka militia on his own doorstep with a cracked skull. The assistant prosecutor was shot. Your Command won’t be around tomorrow, and the day after they’ll find them in a ditch. Don’t you understand? They’re taking out all of the locals, all of them. I survived only because I serve the Russians. And you have to serve them too, if you want to survive. They’re the bosses now. Forget about anyone else. I looked you up because I remembered you and want to help a good guy. If you do a good job for the new powers that be, they won’t bother you. Think about it. Things have changed. ‘Bes’ is gone. If you want to act like a bureaucrat you’ll end up like all the rest.”

The effect was immediate. “Actually there is no placement diagram,” he said. “I helped plant the explosives and can show you where they are.”

“Excellent. Let’s go.”

“Right now?”

“No time like the present.”

The ruined hulk of the abandoned factory resembled the set of an American post-apocalyptic movie. A clear September sky was visible through the shattered windows. Overhead, teetering slabs of destroyed walls leaned against steel girders, threatening at any moment to bury the entire building. Girders and rebar showed through gaps in crumbling sections of the floor.

Mihailo followed Vasya, climbing over piles of stone and rubble and stumbling on the uneven floor through half-ruined machine shops.

Periodically, Vasya would point out the location of a mine in a debris-covered corner. “Over here, and in the basement, too.”

Mihailo silently photographed it all with his smartphone and noted the positions on a crude building diagram he had drawn.

“Is that everything?” he asked Vasya after what seemed an interminable period.

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose so, or is that everything?”

“That’s everything.”

They were preparing to leave when footfalls sounded on the other side of the wall and echoed throughout the enormous space. Mihailo froze, and Vasya fixed him with a questioning eye. A camouflaged figure appeared around a corner with a machine-pistol Mihailo recognized as a Bizon 9X18mm Makarov, the same weapon he had trained on in Kharkov. The gun was pointed directly at them.

“Who are you?” barked the soldier. “What are you doing here?”

Vasya spoke first. “The Deputy Commander here wanted me to show him where the mines were planted.”

“Deputy Commander?” the guard squinted at them, the epitome of suspicion. “I spoke with the Deputy Commander not ten minutes ago, and he ordered me to see who was sneaking around the factory. The patrol reported a civilian vehicle on the property.”

“What do you mean?” Vasya stared at Mihailo, a shadow of comprehension clouding his face. He reached for his holster.

Mihailo reacted without thinking. He struck Vasya on the jaw with one hand and grabbed his pistol with the other before diving behind a fallen section of ceiling.

A shot rang out behind him, and then a burst of automatic fire. He sprinted for a door and turned the corner.

He’d last fired a weapon was during training hurriedly organized by the Donbas Battalion in Kharkov. He’d never fired on a living person in his life. Would he be able to pull the trigger now?

He ducked into another corridor and then another. Cries of alarm and the sound of many feet told him there was more than one pursuer.

Mihailo took a darkened flight of stairs to the basement, tripping over piles of debris, bumping into walls. His life was measured by the length of his stride, his laboring lungs, and the beat of his heart against his ribs. Bare pipes and metal mesh reinforcement crawled along the walls. He found another stairway that took him up to an abandoned foundry with mountains of rubble and iron sheets on the floor. Wind howled through breaches in the walls and roof.

A soldier appeared with his machine-pistol at the ready. Mihailo dove to the floor behind a brick wall covered in chipped whitewash and squirmed behind a large, metal plate. A burst of automatic fire tore the air above him as he pressed his body into the rock dust on the floor. Blood ran down his face from contact with the bricks.

He was a normal man, not a soldier. He was a child, a kindergarten adventurer pretending to be an intelligence operative. He could never in his life have imagined what it was like to be shot at.

An instinctive, animal-like desire to live, overcame him. He could see the figure of the soldier through a narrow space between the metal sheet and brick wall. Not a man, but a figure, rushing toward him, death in camouflage, an occupier prepared to kill him just as he’d killed many others. Biting his lip, Mihailo pressed against the cold wall and tried to move the metal sheet. Its sharp surface cut his fingers, but it moved. The Russian soldier turned toward the sound, but too late. Mihailo was already on his feet with pistol aimed, and he pulled the trigger.

A high, sharp cry followed the shot, echoed off the ruined walls and died. His feet leaden, Mihailo approached the body. He was shaking and encompassed by alternating waves of hot and cold. The room around him dimmed, and he prayed for strength. The enemy in camouflage lay at his feet, a thoroughly dead “little green man.” Mihailo picked up the machine-pistol and ran to a breach in the wall.

Finally and unredeemably, the war had caught up with him in all its relentless, bloody essence — with a single shot, his first kill, his first real battle.

He made it to the street and passed through some bushes and a hole in the factory fence.

The fake ID was still in his pocket. It would take some time for his pursuers to pass his name to the road blocks, and Mihailo hoped he could get as far as the recently liberated village of Kramatorsk and from there travel safely to Kharkov.