Scorpion Winter

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Kreshchatytsky Park

Kyiv, Ukraine

All the approaches were bad ones. The Puppet Theatre, looking like a miniature castle with spires, stood alone on a hill in the middle of a park, a large public space near the river. The steps and walkways leading up to the theatre were covered with snow. Footprints showed that people had come this way even though the theatre was closed mid-week. On a wooded slope away from the steps, Scorpion spotted two pairs of footprints in the snow; two people, one close behind the other. An unusual way of walking, he thought, unless someone was walking behind a captive.

The park was deserted. As the crisis escalated, people were leaving the city. Coming into Kyiv, Scorpion and Iryna had passed cars going the other way. A long line of army tanks and trucks were parked single file on Prospekt Akademika Glushkova. On the main street, Khreshchatyk, soldiers and Black Armbands patrolled silently as nearly empty mashrutkas went by. The shoppers were gone, the stores shuttered. Scorpion could feel the city’s fear, as real as the icy wind.

At a traffic light, a uniformed politseysky stared curiously at their SUV, reminding Scorpion that in spite of the crisis, the police were still hunting them. To be stopped now would be a disaster. The man studied them, while Scorpion kept his hand on the Glock in his holster. All they had going for them, he thought, was his mustache and her stupid blond wig. Iryna saw the politseysky watching them and quickly turned away. Scorpion could see the man shifting his weight, trying to make up his mind. He had just started toward them when the light changed and Scorpion drove on. When they were a block away, he and Iryna looked at each other, neither of them saying a word.

T hey left the SUV on a side street near the top of the hill and walked down Andriyivsky Uzviz to the Black Cat theatre cafe. The cafe was open, light from the window spilling out in the early darkness. Inside, there was only one customer, an old man smoking his pipe and reading a book by the window. A bald man Scorpion had never seen before was behind the counter. The woodsman puppet he remembered from his last visit still hung beside the stage, only now it was in shadow, making it look odd, more sinister.

“De Ekaterina?” Scorpion asked the bald man behind the counter. Where is Ekaterina?

“Ya ne znayu,” I don’t know, the man said, eying them suspiciously. “Who are you?”

“We’re friends of Alyona and Ekaterina,” Iryna explained. “We were wondering if you had seen them.”

The man wiped his hands on his apron.

“Are you ordering?” he asked, glancing over at the old man by the window.

“We’ll have the borscht,” Scorpion said, following his look.

“And chay,” Iryna said, ordering tea as they sat at a table away from the old man.

A few minutes later the bald man brought them two steaming bowls of borscht. He came back with their tea and black bread and butter, sat down at their table and motioned them close.

“Be careful what you say,” he whispered in passable English. “I don’t know this guy,” indicating the old man. “He is just coming the past three nights.” He looked at Iryna, obviously recognizing her. “I knew your batco,” your papa. “He was a good man, a patriot.”

She looked around as if ready to flee.

“It’s okay,” the bald man said, edging even closer. “I tell no one.”

“What about Ekaterina or the young man who was here a few days ago?” Scorpion asked while eating.

“Ah, her drooh, Fedir.” The man nodded. “I haven’t heard from either of them. Not in two days. I was hoping you knew something. We had to close the show.” He shrugged. “As if with the crisis, anybody was coming anyway.”

“So all three of them have disappeared?” Iryna whispered to him. “What about Ekaterina’s apartment?”

The man shook his head.

“Do you have any idea where they could have gone?” Scorpion asked.

The old man by the window tapped his pipe on the side of the table. He closed his book, and leaving a few coins in a saucer on the table, stood up. He put on his overcoat, scarf, and hat. Before he left, he looked at each of them in turn, as if memorizing their features.

“I don’t like that guy,” the bald man said.

“No,” Scorpion agreed, making a mental note to make doubly sure there were no tails when they left. “What about Ekaterina?”

The bald man motioned them closer.

“I remembered something Fedir said about a year ago. He had no place to stay and he told me he’d found a way into the Lyalkovy Teatr.” The Puppet Theatre.

“The one in Kreshchatytsky Park?” Iryna asked.

The man nodded. “He said he stayed in the basement under the stage. A big storage space where they keep the puppets. He said it was very private there.”

“Did you check it out?” Scorpion asked.

“Too dangerous. This city is crazy now,” looking out at the dark street. “Soldiers. Black Armbands. Politsiy. I got a wife, kids. I can’t go,” he said, not looking at them.

“We understand,” Iryna said, touching his hand.

“ Ni.” No. “I should have looked. There’s something wrong. They’re good kids,” he said, looking away; in that moment his face seemed older.

W hen they left the cafe, they were followed by two men who stayed well back so their faces could not be seen. They walked quickly down the street’s steep slope to Kontraktova Square, where they waved down a mashrutka that took them to the Metrograd mall in Lva Tolstoho Square. Scorpion wasn’t sure if a dark Lada was following them. Once inside the mall, they started to run, going from one level to another, through stores and out another entrance, then took two taxis, one after another, going in opposite directions before they were sure they had lost whoever had been tailing them.

It took them more than an hour to get back to where they had parked the Volkswagen SUV. But they had wasted their time, Scorpion thought. Because all the approaches to the Puppet Theatre were across open ground. He crouched behind a tree, Iryna next to him, and looked up the snow-covered slope at the shadowy outline of the theatre at the top of the rise. It was completely dark; the only light came from a streetlight that cast the shadows of the building’s spires across the snow.

“What do we do?” Iryna asked.

“You go to Viktor. They need you,” Scorpion said, taking out the Glock and fitting the silencer on it.

“ Gospadi, you don’t know a damn thing about women, do you?” Iryna said through clenched teeth. “I’m not some delicate flower and this matters to me more than you, so I’m coming. Got it?”

“In that case, make yourself useful. Where’s your Beretta?”

“In my purse,” she said, fishing it out.

“Wait three minutes, then follow. Watch where I go in. Don’t make a sound. If anybody gets in your way, don’t hesitate for a second. Kill him. Are we clear?”

They looked at each other. Her face, hard to see in the shadows, was beyond beautiful, he thought. Without a word, he began to move up the open slope. The snow was frozen hard under his boots, and he leaned forward, almost on all fours, to keep his silhouette low. His eyes scanned the castle-that was what it looked like and that was how he had come to think of it-for any light or sign of movement. There were only shadows, the cold wind trailing plumes of snow from the castle spires.

He reached the flat area at the side of the building. Keeping low, he went around to the back, looking for an entryway that Ekaterina’s boyfriend, Fedir, might have used. At the back of the building he saw a basement window, low to the ground. It was locked but it had a top latch that could have been left open at some time. He put his backpack on the ground and felt inside the pack till he found his Leatherman tool, the night vision goggles, and the duct tape.

Using the Leatherman’s awl with the hardened tip as a glass cutter, he cut a circle on the glass and pulled it away from the window with a small wad of duct tape. Reaching through the circular opening, he opened the latch and pushed the window open. When he had the goggles and the Glock in his hand, the safety off, he crawled inside.

He had come in on a worktable in a dark basement room, which was a workshop for building sets. He put on the night vision goggles. Strange cutout shapes stood against the wall, eerie in the green light of the goggles. The room smelled of sawdust and glue.

Scorpion eased down from the table onto his tiptoes, then moved quietly toward a door and pressed his ear against it. He could hear the sound of something, but it made no sense. It sounded like the squeak of a pulley and splashing water. Whatever it was, someone was on the other side of the door. He held the Glock ready.

He turned the handle and inched the door open. The light was bright, blinding his night goggles. He pulled them off, catching a brief glimpse of a room filled with hanging objects; dozens of medieval-looking puppets, witches and ogres, princesses and humanlike animals resembling something out of Grimms’ fairy tales.

There were two hanging objects too big to be puppets. He started toward them when a shadow next to him moved and an iron bar smashed down on his hand, stunning him and causing him to drop the gun. Almost before he could react, a second blow from the iron bar wielded by a big man came down at his head and he barely got his injured hand up in time to block the blow with a forearm. The pain was instantaneous; his entire arm felt numb and useless.

Almost without thinking, Scorpion twisted toward the attacker, closing with him. With a leg sweep, he used his uninjured left elbow to smash into the side of the big man’s neck. The man grunted but didn’t go down. As they fought, they banged against the dangling puppets, which swung and slammed into each other; a forest of grotesque swinging shapes.

“When attacked by surprise, go inside,” his CQC instructor, Koichi, used to say. The big man swung the bar again. Scorpion stepped inside the arc of the swing and kicked at the inside of the man’s knee while grabbing the arm holding the bar. Using the man’s own momentum, Scorpion hurled him with an arm bar twist down to the ground. Before the big man could react, Scorpion kicked him savagely in the side of the head, and using both hands like pointed claws, stabbed down at the big man’s eyes, deep into the sockets, blinding him. The man screamed with pain and rage. He swung the iron bar blindly at Scorpion, who just managed to dodge out of the way.

A second man, who seemed to come out of nowhere, launched a Russian Sambo-style kick at Scorpion’s midsection. With only an instant to counter, he grabbed the man’s foot mid-kick and twisted it violently with both hands, forcing him to the ground. Meanwhile, the big man had gotten to his feet. He couldn’t see and was swinging the iron bar blindly. Scorpion timed his swing, grabbed the man’s arm in mid swing and turned it into a shoulder lock, dislocating the man’s shoulder. He screamed in intense pain as the other man got up.

Scorpion twisted the iron bar out of the big man’s hands and smashed it into the side of his head by the temple as the second man came at him again. Scorpion feinted a high swing then jabbed the iron bar like a fencer’s thrust at his knee, hearing it crack as he sent him down. Incredibly, the big man staggered up again. His good hand grabbed blindly at Scorpion, getting hold of his neck and choking him with crushing strength. Scorpion swung the iron bar with all his might at his temple, landing a blow that sent him crashing to the floor, lifeless. Scorpion whirled with the iron bar to deal with the second man, who was backing away now, getting tangled in the hanging puppets. Scorpion started to look for the Glock, but it was too late.

A third, tall man with thick sandy hair and wearing a black armband had retrieved the Glock. He stood in a shooting stance, the Glock aimed at Scorpion’s chest. A powerful lamp beside him cast the shadows of the swinging puppets, dislodged by the fight, dancing across the room.

Scorpion recognized the sandy-haired man. He had been Gorobets’s aide in the hotel suite in Dnipropetrovsk. For the first time, Scorpion was able to look around. In addition to the puppets, there were two bodies hanging from a ceiling pipe by their necks, the large shapes he had seen earlier. They were clearly dead.

The bodies were those of a young man and woman, both naked, their hands tied and both covered with welts and dark bruises. It took Scorpion a second before, with a shock, he recognized their bloated faces. The young people from the Black Cat cafe: Ekaterina and Fedir.

He had no time to pay attention to them, because there was another woman, also naked. She hung upside down, tied by her feet from a pulley, her long blond hair trailing down into a tub of water filled with chunks of ice. Her body was bruised and cut like the others and her mouth had been taped so no one could hear her scream. The pulley he’d heard earlier had been used to raise or lower her head into the ice water. There were wet rubber gloves lying next to the tub. The sandy-haired man had been holding her head under the water. She was still breathing, her eyes dazed, wild almost to the point of insanity. It took a few seconds till Scorpion recognized her from the photo. It was Alyona.

“Pane Kilbane, we saw you coming,” the sandy-haired man said in English. The damned approaches, Scorpion thought. There was bound to be someone watching.

“Remind me again. What’s your name?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I plan to remember you,” Scorpion said. He sensed the second man coming up behind him.

“I’m Kulyakov,” the sandy-haired man said. “I want you to remember me. Do you know Alyona?”

“Only by her photo in the Chorna Kishka cafe,” he said, so if she were listening she would know he knew who she was and that he was there to help. Unless her mind, after what they had done to her, was too far gone.

“She’s being very stubborn,” Kulyakov said. “All I want is some information.”

Then a heavily muscled arm put Scorpion in a choke hold from behind. The second man, he thought. His wrist was grabbed and twisted behind him in a painful hammer lock.

“Call off your sobaka, ” Scorpion gasped. Your dog. “I can help. We want the same thing.”

“What thing is that?” Kulyakov said, motioning to the second man to hold still for a moment.

“Shelayev. We’re both looking for him.”

“Are we?”

“Gorobets needs to make sure Shelayev doesn’t talk. Only he’s disappeared.”

Kulyakov shrugged. “So?”

“So you need to find him. Otherwise you’d have no interest in Alyona or her friends, except for your perverted little fantasies.”

“What is this, a Glock?” Kulyakov said, looking at the pistol in his hand. He smiled, showing bad teeth. “It’s light. I like this pistolet. You shouldn’t tempt someone holding such a light pistolet; so easy to shoot,” and he aimed it at Scorpion.

“Don’t be stupid. Killing me will make an assassination that everyone assumes I did into an assassination that everyone will assume Gorobets did,” Scorpion said, wondering where the hell Iryna was.

“No,” Kulyakov said. “Killing Cherkesov’s assassin will make me a hero.”

Then Scorpion heard a sound from somewhere behind him. Damn, he thought. She needed to be quiet.

Kulyakov said something in Ukrainian that sounded like an order. Scorpion felt the second man let him go and head back toward the other room.

“Don’t move,” Kulyakov said, aiming the Glock at Scorpion. “I’m dying to try out this pistolet.”

Two shots rang out. At the first shot, knowing the sound would distract Kulyakov for an instant, Scorpion moved. He stepped forward, parrying the Glock aside, the first move in the Krav Maga sequence, followed by taking the gun away from Kulyakov in a twisting wrist move. Scorpion debated killing him as he reversed the gun and pointed it in a shooting stance at Kulyakov. No, he needed to question him. He motioned Kulyakov to his knees. After a moment’s hesitation, Kulyakov glaring at him, knelt on his knees.

From the next room, Iryna screamed. Scorpion kicked Kulyakov in the face, whirled and ran back toward the other room, where he saw Iryna struggling with the second man. Sensing Scorpion behind him, the man turned and jumped at him. There was no time to think. Scorpion shot him in the head. The man fell facedown at Scorpion’s feet.

“What happened?” he asked Iryna, stepping over the body.

“I shot him in the shoulder,” she said. “He came too fast.”

“Come,” Scorpion grabbed her hand. “Hurry!”

They went into the puppet room.

“Gospadi.” Iryna gasped at the sight of Alyona and the hanging bodies. Kulyakov was gone. Alyona’s naked body was jerking like a fish on the line, her head underwater in the tub again. Before he had fled, Kulyakov lowered her back into the ice water.

Scorpion grabbed Alyona and lifted her up so her head was out of the water. She was coughing, squirming as she fought him. Holding her slippery body up, he tried to kick the tub of water over, but it was too heavy. He moved her body so it hung beside the tub and let her dangle head down while he ran to the other room to grab his backpack. She was still jerking on the line when he came back and used his Leatherman pliers’ blades to cut the cable holding her. He cut her bonds and freed her, pulling the tape from her mouth.

When Alyona saw Iryna, she screamed, clutched at her and began to sob. Iryna held her in her arms. The room was in a shambles, the puppets swaying in the shadows. Scorpion looked around. Kulyakov had to have used the metal stairs to the stage to get away.

He ran up the stairs and onto the stage. A door banged in the lobby. He leapt from the stage to the aisle and ran out to the lobby and the theatre doors, scanning the snow-covered walkways and steps. There was no sign of Kulyakov.

He went around to the side of the building, but it was too dark to see. He should’ve brought his night-vision goggles, he thought as he scanned the slope. There were what looked like fresh footsteps and a bloodstain on the snow. It could have come from Kulyakov’s nose when he kicked him. But there was nothing moving on the slope. He realized that Kulyakov must have made it to the trees, his eyes searching the mass of branches in the darkness. He was about to start down the slope when he spotted a militsiyu van, moving slowly on the road along the periphery of the park. The van stopped.

Scorpion stepped back into the shadows of the theatre entrance. From inside the van, a powerful flashlight was pointed at the theatre. The light moved toward him and he froze against the wall, holding his breath. If they found him, he would be in prison and the war would start. The beam of light almost touched him, then moved past. After what seemed like an hour but was probably less than fifteen seconds, he heard the van move on. He peeked out and saw it was gone, then went back down the stairs to the puppet room.

Iryna had found a canvas tarp to wrap around Alyona. She lit a cigarette and held it for Alyona, whose hand was shaking too much to hold it herself.

“She saw them killed,” Iryna said, indicating the hanging bodies. “She needs to go to a hospital.”

“What about Shelayev?” Scorpion asked.

“Can’t it wait?” Iryna said sharply. She put her arms around Alyona. “She’s shaking like a leaf.”

“No, it can’t,” Scorpion said.

Iryna used her sweater to dry Alyona’s wet hair. “We need a doctor. Now.”

“Get someone private. Someone who won’t talk. Is there anyone you know?”

“I don’t know. My gynecologist. What good is that?” Iryna said. “Look at her!” Alyona was slumped over, her head down, the cuts raw and bleeding, her body still shaking.

“Why the hell do you think they were torturing her? Why do you think they killed the other two?” he asked, grabbing his backpack. He hooked it over his shoulder and went looking for Alyona’s clothes.

“I don’t know. Shelayev?” Iryna said.

Scorpion nodded grimly. “Whatever help we get her has to be safe or they’ll grab her again. Where are her clothes?”

Iryna asked Alyona in Ukrainian and she pointed with a trembling hand at a corner. Scorpion went over and found a pile of clothes. Some were from the dead couple, Ekaterina and Fedir. A pair of jeans, a top, and a jacket looked like they would fit Alyona. They used the dead couple’s clothes to dry Alyona off. Iryna helped her dress, while Scorpion went back upstairs to see if anyone was coming.

The park was deserted, the snow pale under the lone streetlight.

“We have to go. They’ll be back any second,” he said, coming back down to the puppet room. Iryna had succeeded in getting Alyona dressed. She sat on a bench, her head slumped.

“Can you stand?” Scorpion asked Alyona.

She didn’t move. Iryna looked at him.

“Take this,” he said, handing her his backpack. He stood Alyona up and threw her over his shoulder, switching the Glock back to his other hand. He climbed the metal stairs, Alyona a dead weight over his shoulder, and carried her outside, the going difficult on the frozen snow. She was shivering violently, making it hard to carry her. He kept looking around for any sign of Kulyakov as he went forward. For the moment they were hidden from the street. Luckily, they were going downhill, with nothing around but snow and bare trees.

Alyona had protected Shelayev despite the torture, Scorpion thought, and had seen Kulyakov kill her friends. She would protect Shelayev from him as well. He had to figure a way to get her to tell him where Shelayev was hiding. He sensed Iryna just behind him. It was hard going and they had to hurry. Gorobets’s men might be back any second.

Scorpion pushed on harder through the snow.