- They are serious about it, forget it. I warn you, don’t interfere in this topic.
The conversation ended.
- Go to the cashier and be here in three weeks.
At the end of the general smiled.
- Whose school it is! And I'm really happy that you were able to get out.
"A swine" - thought Dux - "but, damn, he is so nice!”
*
Colonel talked to people remembered the past, went to the cashier. To make sure, he entered his little office, where he had a half of the table, a chair, and a safe. There was living a strange green youth. As Dux was a typical scout in the field and hated the staff work in all forms, he easily gave his table to anybody, without any jealousy. He barely passed through the piles of others things opened his safe, took all the contents and destroyed carefully unnecessary things. The night was falling. In twenty minutes, he had to cross the board of the aquarium, because the office was closing.
"I’m merged" - thoughtfully thought Colonel - "to an indefinite leave."
There wasn’t any sense to do something here. Dux slowly walked along the Hodynka, walked aimlessly along familiar streets, remembering his reckless youth. He went to the Leningrad Prospect, passed two "taxi" cars, caught the third one, then suddenly quickly crossed the street, caught the moonshiner driver by Moscovitch, passed one station and plunged into the subway. It was clean. A habit of a scout of many years, long ago entered the flesh and blood, and became the second breath.
At twilight, he met Shadow in the square next to the Profsouznaya. He prepared a passport and tickets Moscow to Bangkok for him. For reliability, Colonel played a happy family holiday on the Phuket. The couple named the Ivanovs even had a small child half a year.
- You did well, - Dux said Shadow.
Shadow and Colonel slightly smiled. People said that it was Shadows’ child, although it was only a version.
Shadow disappeared in the century lime trees of the brick seven-floor houses of fifties of good quality. At last, Colonel got his spare secret address. Dux entered the third entrance of the ground floor. The entrance met him with darkness, smell of cats, dirtiness. He suffered opening a shabby wooden door. A reinforced as a safe door called "the beast" was already glistening behind with expensive metal. The door opened quietly. Colonel pulled out off a small hiding place a dozen of banknotes in fifty hundred euros, checked two TT guns, turned on the TV on a channel where there was an dirtiness with Steven Seagal, undressed and went to the bathroom with pleasure. It passed just ten days since he left the hotel " Caesar’s Temple." The most awful thing was that he could not wash well. He remembered a cool story in Bishkek, there wasn’t time for the bathroom. And, in the forest hut, were only four big buckets each of them of twelve liters of ice water from the stream that was in the forest in half a mile from the cabin. "If there had been a bath" - thought Colonel about Shadow.
Dux rarely used his spacious apartment of the fifties of the last century for secret meetings. It was given to him by one of his friends, who once grew rich with the oil.
- I don’t need it, and you do - said Sergei, - you have a job as in a movie.
Colonel, as he could, strengthened the door, fixed candid mini cameras and put special frames with bulletproof glass by the brand SPbSN-4. With pleasure he stood under the tight ice shower jet. Suddenly, Dux heard an insistent impudent doorbell.
- Can I take a shower as others do? – thought Colonel. He put on a fluffy white bathrobe and went to the front door.
- Who’s that?
- This is a fire brigade.
He could see the silhouette of a big fellow in his prime.
- You don’t look like a fire brigade - he growled.
- But we are! - said the fellow not convincingly.
Dux turned on the mini-cameras. He saw other four silhouettes away from the door. Colonel rushed to the window. Commandos wearing masks got out of the dirty-green minibus. Delay might mean death. The doorbell again rang insistently.
- Open, it’s the police!
Colonel, putting on the trousers, shouted:
- Show your certificate!
They will break the door now.
Once upon a time, long ago, when we were boys, we were coached at Kubinka in dressing with the removal of gun’s safety device for thirty seconds.
- Thirty seconds! Thank good captain Klubov, may his memory live forever thought Colonel. Other thirty seconds to check the documents, money and bank cards and putting smoke shells at the door and an aperture. Just a minute. At the same time there were heard three powerful blasts and the members of riot squad started running from everywhere, shooting to kill. Again the death hissed unnaturally around him, death with a silencer. Dux threw a grenade into black puffs opening a steel hatch of his escape. At the last moment, gasping, he threw to the guys an ampule of the domestic intensified and instantaneous gaseous of fentanyl or as it was called in Moscow, “Fent”. It was used, a few years ago, by the directors of the famous sad musical. Already in the depths of the basement, he put on immediately a gas mask, put on an overall with a flash, closed on the inside, the heavy steel hatch with a stuck on a piece of linoleum and rushed into the black musty dust.
*
- Look for holes, burry yourself and you will live – said captain Klubov.
In the far eighties, at the second term, Klubov firstly took him to the underground. A strange captain’s hobby kept Colonel from the fear, horror and smells. A group of such crazy people has always spent time with him. Wearing black overalls, and sometimes hydro-costumes on a naked body like “Tegor” or “Chaika”, with gray gas masks, they could walk along multi-leveled systems of Moscow and Moscow area, for hours. At the second and third course during the "practice" in Angola, he had to use this invaluable experience in business, caves of the underground rivers and secret communication of 4 million population in Luanda. Dux became gradually turning into an idol of the underground, handling the theory and practice of many world cities.
*
He darted out into an opened basement, climbed through the narrow duct ventilation into a long pipe for sewage and withdrawal of spring waters, and in twenty paces got out of the sewer manhole, and he could escape from there.
But it was too late. Three men were waiting for him near the manhole and ran another seven people were running off the bus. There weren’t any way out.
- I'm sorry guys- thought Colonel.
Having knocked out the gun of young commando by two shots, he maimed boy’s both hands. The last yelled. The one who was far and another who was closer, instinctively jumped, looking for the rescue. There was enough a couple of seconds for Dux to partially cut down the injured. He grabbed him by the collar and rushed to the hatch, using the boy as a human shield, and the commandoes were confused. That was enough to get to the hatch. Suddenly the chief of this mad commando decided "Fire!" The swarm of nine-millimeter bullets Bison turned a young boy larded by them into some bloody mess from movies about Terminator.
- Their treatment to their people is cruel- thought pity Colonel, without removing the gas mask.
Sounding shrilly, the last bullets bounced off at the rebound of the hatch and scared the other two running away at incredible speed.
- Now, run very fast! – thought Colonel.
He jumped on all fours from sewage and piles, fired rare cameras of the sewage for warning for and went farther and farther along the great communications of the underground big city. He got out to the surface and in a dark alley of duct of some gloomy building like the UZPS, almost next at Profsouznaya. One could see through the bars an empty dark street. Dux took off an overall which ozonized badly and a gas mask, put them into special tight package, listened to the deceptive silence, carefully opened the hatch using the master key and walked along the footpaths of the multimillion city away from the epicenter of that drama. He slowly passed three quarters and sat on the back seat, having ordered Airport Vnukovo.