- Olivia!
- I'm with you!
Having cuddled up to him, she took his hat off.
- You are still alive !?
- Yes, both of them!
A street lamp was slowly going on with the dimmed yellow color.
*
- Frankly speaking, Skull impressed very much- thought Colonel – that one who was reading thoughts. There is something serious to be started. I seemed to manage to get on the trail! How can I break away? Probably, they just shoot me down or torture me before it.
Both Dux’ hands were firmly chained to two guards there were other two behind him who were pushing him painfully and constantly in his back with carbines. The smiling one was going ahead, constantly turning back and humming rhythmic Chinese song. The square moved slowly along the winding paths to the big massive building with a hovering weightless roof, in a Chinese style with the Spring and Autumn Annals. The cavalcade barged funny into a vast gym. The security was training themselves on the sports apparatus, doing different martial arts, and in the middle of the gym on the boxing ring two men were working each other in boxing over without any regulations. Some sullen spectators were stacking on. A smiling one with the mustache removed the handcuffs.
Forty pairs of guards’ eyes stared at Colonel. The smiling one exchanged glances with some man in a jacket and gave him a sign. Probably, his was so high and the last pushed Colonel out to the center of the gym. The gorillas formed a large circle in the middle. They were happily rubbing their hands and stacking on. Dux massaged swelled wrists.
- How long I haven’t been training, - thought Colonel.
Adrenaline added the pungency. Frankly speaking, the fight to the death was always for him the brightest sensation, comparable only with passionate lovemaking.
He was absolutely calm, observing with removal the final preparations of this eternal game.
*
"War is the father of all and king of all, who manifested some as gods and some as men, who made some slaves and some freemen. The hostile thing is in agreement with oneself. This space, the one for everyone, which wasn’t created by none of the gods, no man, but it has always existed, exists and will exist as the forever live fire, even igniting and even fading ".
Having braced himself, he tried, by all means, to curb his usual human passions to be ready for the most important meeting. The gorillas noised a little bit and pushed into the middle of the circle a very frightening giant.
- Where do such people come from? – thought Colonel.
It was a thundering cocktail called "Mother Earth." There was a Spanish beard on his swarthy face. He had a crooked aquiline nose, and lackluster brown Asian eyes, which were throwing angry glances. Relief biceps were bigger than Dux’ legs and from behind his figure was slim and chiseled as the best representatives of the black continent have.
He remembered the captain’s Klubov words.
- Do you think the war will never happen? You're wrong. The war is always and everywhere.
At training, at the firing ground the boys were given wooden imitation of knives and guns. The instructor captain Klubov, bypassing the strict instructions gave military knives, guns with live cartridges and ready for shooting and the AK-47. The modern war is too transient. You either already dead or you survived and killed everyone. How you did it, it is not very interesting. Of course, the constant training on the firing ground is very important but it is for the second time. To survive and to win the battle, you have to have something else.
The self-styled referee brought together the opponents, but they didn’t shake their hands. The battle began.
Frankly speaking, Colonel didn’t even know what was waiting for him. That’s why, just in case, he was jumping around the enemy at a short distance, waving his fists for appearances' sake. A moment later, the Terminator turned Dux left, leaving behind him. Colonel jumped from that mad monster.
- Ooty, Ooty, a dog! - whispered Dux.
However, his nose was already broken and blood was spread on his face. The gorillas happily buzzed and enjoyed it.
- Maybe he's twice champion in some kind of Aikido? I couldn’t even understand how he punched me strongly in the nose. I was lucky to break away! Colonel went on funny jumping back, but with any approach that monster painfully pinching and punching with three long fingers in the opponent's body, who was screaming of pain, to the joyful fans pleasure.
- Other such pinches, and I will be dead - he thought.
All enemy’s movements were perfected to the highest level. The place this type had touched was already pulsed with blood.
But he couldn’t understand some thin thread.
Something was wrong, and he felt bad. Maybe these devastating strange eyes? This machine of death can kill me without pathos just as a recycle machine does its job.
- I stake everything - he thought - A la guerre, comme a la guerre. They obviously want this?
He remembered once fighting with the master of Judo. Then he was told that the judoist was very angry because he couldn’t understand how he had lost. Colonel cared a straw. He allowed the freak to snatch at his shoulder, trying not to hurt his throat and gave him, as a leech, the opportunity to snatch at the body. The monster lost a bit freedom. It was enough for Colonel to turn his program of death on. With terrible punches in the groin, throat and neck, he tried to turn off the enemy. But the last compressed Dux’ head with a superhuman force. His face turned into a blood mask. Then Colonel moved slightly to the side and with the final punch crushed his Adam's apple, breaking his cervical vertebra.
The spectators darkened. Their furious evil eyes were very expressive. Each of spectators wanted to roast Colonel for a breaded cutlet.
Dux, covered with blood, intuitively felt the glances of the silent crowd. He looked the gym around and saw black shiny eyes of Skull, who was surrounded by dozen of bodyguards.
Colonel’s fate of the life and death was at stake at that moment.
*
Shadow was sitting on a stone bench of two feet length. A capital building, closed up with the metal sheet with small holes for air and a grating was depicted by the window. The walls of one meter wide, mixed on the raw eggs, built by great ancestors, didn’t allow blowing them up even with strong howitzers. There was a stinking close-stool and a wash basin from the all facilities. It was forbidden to lie down.
For the whole week, Shadow has been sitting in the pre-trial prison of the Federal Budget Institution of the Correctional Facility No. 90 seven kilometers away from Rybinsk. Surprisingly, that he took part of his life, as the inevitable and did not suffer. He imbibed the sounds of the prison with his mother's milk because he was born in a prison in Siblag in nineteen forty-seven. He has been dreaming for the whole his adult life to get his maternity hospital-prison somewhere in the Narym region, but he was afraid. He remembered as his mother has been crying a lot for the last days, and then she was taken away somewhere forever. Shadow has always treated to his compatriot with some merry sarcasm and a peppercorn, especially to those in the uniform. Life in orphanages in vast Sibera, army for two years in the construction battalion comparable by savageness to hard labor. When he entered the Bauman Moscow State Technical University he hardly fit into the life of those Moscow pupils. Shadow looked a bit older. But inside he felt thousand years old. He knew what the Motherland was and if you were under distribution, you could be saved only by case or something else, but not logic or reason. The perfected system easily reduced million human lives and turned them into camp dust, and again confirming the phrase "do not believe, do not fear, do not ask." So Shadow, finally, decided to have a rest. He was falling into drowsiness between exhausting interrogations, trying to sleep. And when he had some powers and pain, fear and worries about his strange unsettled life left him, he began thinking.