That only left the Captain, who Zubkhov hadn’t thought it necessary to sedate. He sat in a corner in a chair, watching events as though he was watching a mildly interesting TV show.
As Zubkhov approached him and held the needle up to do the air shot, the Captain smiled. “Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time,” he said.
Zubkhov hesitated, then lowered the syringe.
He realized then what he was feeling. It wasn’t pity, not exactly. It was the feeling that they had some sort of bond, him and the Captain. The two of them had been knocked down by the ammo dump blowing up, taken a direct hit from an American cruise missile, and they were both still here. Both of them had been left behind by that bastard Sergeant who had pissed off for Savoonga without a second thought.
They were survivors, the Captain and him.
He dropped the full syringe into a soda bottle with the others then put that into a plastic bag with his gloves and sealed it tight. Then he clapped the Captain on the shoulder, “Back soon, sir.”
Giving his comrades an overdose of NFEPP had been a simple and pragmatic solution to the problem of leaving them behind without anyone to care for them. He wasn’t a monster, he didn’t want them to spend their last days in agony, starving and thirsty and in unbearable pain. It wasn’t a solution he could use for the twenty or so Yup’ik town elders though. He didn’t have enough NFEPP for starters.
So he had taken some of the oral opioids he’d used to sedate the wounded Spetsnaz and mixed them in a saucepan with some melted chocolate he’d scrounged from the ruins of one of the town’s grocery stores. He couldn’t be sure all of the old people would eat the chocolate though, so he had also added the sedative to the huge pot of onion soup he’d cooked up for their lunch.
Outside the school administration building, Zubkhov picked up two jerry cans of diesel that had survived the cruise missiles and walked over to the gymnasium building. Early that morning he’d piled packing crates and wooden building debris around the outside of the sports hall and he started singing to himself as he went around soaking the wood in diesel fuel. The walls of the nearly twenty-year-old gym were wood framed, clad in light aluminum and painted with an oil-based paint so that the paint would flex in the extreme cold. Zubkhov had no doubt it would burn nicely and leave a big smoking wreck that looked just like every other burned building in town.
He dribbled a line of fuel through the dirt to a safe distance and then threw a match on it. The piled-up diesel-soaked wood went up with a whoomph that he could feel against his chest, and in minutes the blaze had really taken hold. Between the chocolate and the soup, he was pretty sure everyone inside would be having a nice nap by now, but just to be sure, he sat on a nearby ATV with his pistol in his lap and waited in case any of the old people ran out.
No one did. He didn’t even hear any cries for help.
He waited until the gym roof collapsed, sending bright orange sparks into the late afternoon air. One more job done. Now he just had to drag his comrades’ bodies into the grave he had dug with a small bobcat he had found and give them a proper Spetsnaz burial — they deserved that, after all — and he was free to start executing his exit plan. It was a very simple plan: find that ‘ghost’ radio handset, deal with whoever was using it, call his buddy in Anadyr, and start a new life as part owner of a fishing trawler.
There was just one problem, but it didn’t trouble Zubkhov. In fact, he was blithely ignoring it.
That offer from Zubkhov’s buddy in Anadyr? That had been eight years ago. The guy had gone broke, sold his trawler, and was a bank clerk in Vladivostok now. Private Zubkhov hadn’t spoken to him for about five years, but in Zubkhov’s shattered mind, it was like it had been yesterday.
Everyone deals with the brutality of war in their own very individual way. Private Zubkhov had seen a man decapitated, a town obliterated, his Captain lobotomized and his fellow soldiers killed and wounded, before being abandoned by his own NCO and the men he had believed were his comrades in arms.
He had dealt with this by going completely and irrevocably insane.
Devlin was also losing her mind. She had warned her colleagues in the State Department that Russia was not interested in Saint Lawrence and polar sea routes, it was going to go after Alaska. They had replied officially with ‘thank you but that doesn’t fit our internal narrative’ and unofficially with ‘Russia is going to attack Alaska? Has McCarthy been hitting the vodka a little too hard?’ Now Russia had attacked ground targets in Alaska, so of course her detractors had come crawling back to her saying ‘we are so sorry Devlin, you were right all along, we were fools not to believe you.’
Like hell they had.
The massive Russian air offensive over Alaska and the fact they were shoring up defenses in Savoonga were being used to further support the theory that Russia intended to permanently occupy Saint Lawrence. The new State narrative went like this: we have entered a cycle of escalation. Russia hit us in Saint Lawrence, so we responded with a massive air and missile attack. Russia cannot withdraw from Saint Lawrence without losing face, so it hits back at the only US facilities in reach — Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson. In this through-the-looking-glass view, the cyber-attack on the Enterprise was actually taken as further proof Russia was trying to limit the conflict. De-escalation is our best response, said the majority voice in State. No one wants full-scale war. Let them have their little island in the Arctic for now, we’ll leverage the outrage to get concessions in Western Europe and besides, we have bigger problems in the Middle East.
The Russian attack was highlighting how internally divided her administration was. On the one hand, she had her colleagues in the State department preaching de-escalation in the face of massive loss of civilian life and challenges to US air and sea power. On the other hand you had Defense in a rage over the attacks on its air bases and the crippling of its supercarrier and they were in no doubt what was behind that. Air Force had lost personnel in the air over Saint Lawrence and on the ground at Elmendorf-Richardson and Eielson and had been sent packing from the skies over its own territory. The Pentagon didn’t care why Russia was on the offensive, it only cared that it was, and it had no intention of playing some BS Cat and mouse game of airborne ‘tit for tat’. The Defense Secretary had pushed the margins of his power to the limit, moving nuclear first strike resources to within a few hundred kilometers, or a few minutes flying time, of key military targets within Russian territory. Unlike the State Department’s de-escalation proposal, the Pentagon narrative went like this: they took our territory in Bering Strait, they attacked our airfields in Alaska. We need to lay a tactical nuke on the Russian Northern Fleet home base at Sevoromorsk or the Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad and put Ivan back in his box. De-escalate my ass.
For once, as horrified as she was at the thought of anyone starting a nuclear shooting match, Devlin found herself siding with the hawks in the Pentagon, instead of the doves in her own State Department. And she had heard that the Pentagon point of view was prevailing with the US President, who had refused to take a call from the Russian president after the attacks on Eielson and Elmendorf-Richardson.
Which is why she found herself in a dilemma for her next meeting with the Russians. It wasn’t with Kelnikov this time. The crisis had moved beyond the stage where a lowly Ambassador could get face time with the Russian Foreign Minister, when even heads of State were not talking with each other. In fact, it had moved beyond the stage where she was able to have official contacts of any sort. Instead she had been invited to a back-channel meeting with a Russian industrial magnate, Piotr Khorkina, who was an old school friend of the Russian President’s son. Officially, he was interested to hear if the current military ‘situation’ would pose problems for a multi-billion dollar deal he was about to sign to supply lithium batteries to a US car maker. Unofficially, he had said he also wanted to pass on a message to the US administration from his friends in the Kremlin. She had chosen to receive him in her office at the Chancery and her aide had organized a nice tray of tea and delicacies.