“Correct. And who might you be, gentlemen?”
“FSB,” said his partner. He had a flat, moon-like face and ginger hair. To add weight to his words, he emphatically produced his ID, holding it so that a pair of moon-like faces now stared at Sokolov, one real, one photographed. Captain Something-or-other.
“And you?” Sokolov turned back to the short, dark man.
Incomprehension crossed his face.
“Are you also with the FSB?” Sokolov clarified.
“Of course.” The bandaged hand produced a similar badge from the inner pocket of the grey suit. Displaying it, he rose slightly to the balls of his feet, as lesser men tend to do.
Sokolov peered beyond the threshold. The car’s engine was running. Apart from the driver waiting behind the wheel, another man, no doubt also FSB, was standing next to the car, smoking, ready to act as backup. Their strength in numbers was certainly alarming, as was their possible intent.
“If you dropped in for a friendly inter-service chat, I suggest you address my boss, the EMERCOM Minister. But he won’t be too friendly, I assure you,” Sokolov said nonchalantly.
“Mr. Sokolov—”
“Major Sokolov. I outrank both of you.”
The round-faced chekist was unperturbed. “The matter which brought us here is extremely serious. It concerns your brother.”
Lightning struck Sokolov. It was electric rage.
“What about my brother?”
The chekist’s tone was official, reciting a procedural cliché. “Your brother, Constantine Sokolov, is wanted for the murder of Metropolitan Ilia.”
Constantine? Murder?
“Impossible,” Sokolov breathed.
“You should know otherwise, since you were his accomplice.”
Sokolov’s hand clutched the lapel of the grey suit.
“It’s a lie! And you know it!”
Astonished, the chekist uselessly tried to pry away the fabric of his jacket from Sokolov’s death grip.
“You will tell me everything you know, right now!” Sokolov said coarsely. His arm trembled with fury.
The short man reached inside the suit again, and Sokolov knew this time he would show something more convincing than his ID.
“We are authorized to use force! Proceed with us to the car!”
He was pulling out his gun, and the smoker stepped forward to assist his colleagues.
Never letting his hostage go, Sokolov scythed the short chekist with a low round kick. The hit smacked inside his shin, wrecking his leg. He buckled, crying out in pain.
Seeing this, the smoker attempted to imitate the brutal kick, aiming it against Sokolov.
Sokolov used the attacker’s motion against him, countering the inept challenge with a well-placed heel strike to his ankle. The smoker sank to the ground, yelping, clutching his knocked foot that was swelling rapidly.
Metal cracked, clasping around Sokolov’s hand that held on to the moon-faced chekist.
The bastard handcuffed him!
“We can still do it the easy way or the hard way!” the round-faced man said, yanking the arm joined by the cuffs to Sokolov. “You choose.”
“The hard way,” Sokolov replied, propelling his unchained arm in an elbow uppercut.
His strike met the man’s nose, smashing cartilage.
Groggily, the smoker was rising to all fours. Sokolov axed a high front kick that went through his jaw. The force of the kick almost lifted him off the ground, and he rolled on his back, out cold.
While the man handcuffed to Sokolov was busy holding his bleeding nose, Sokolov seized the wrist he was locked to.
He crisscrossed his forearms over the wrist and corkscrewed suddenly. The bone crunched, breaking. The chekist screeched at the top of his lungs.
“Freeze!”
It was the driver, wild-eyed, aiming a gun. His hands were steady.
Sokolov pulled his handcuffed would-be captor — now captive — to act as a human shield.
“Go ahead! Shoot!”
“Put your weapon away, you idiot!” yelled the short man with the bandaged hand, failing to get up. “We must get him alive!”
“Where’s my brother?” Sokolov demanded.
“We don’t know, dammit!” barked the short man, and blood shot out of his forehead, half of his scalp gone.
The driver, with his inadequate pistol, attracted a volley of tracers that sizzled through him.
An ambush! The sound of gunfire was coming from the woods!
The round-faced man who was shackled to Sokolov gasped as bullets pierced his lungs. Reeling, the man crashed down, and Sokolov dove for cover as glass shattered and splinters flew.
He had to get inside the house — behind the walls and whatever protection those wooden logs could offer. Sokolov crawled, but the bulk of the dead man arrested him with the handcuffs. Sokolov tugged him by the chain, dragging him along the floor, as well as trying to keep his own head low.
Inside, the bullets were devastating walls and furniture, scattering broken fragments across the floor. Sokolov pulled the corpse in and cleared the doorframe, hiding in relative safety under a window sill where the wall seemed to absorb the onslaught of gunfire.
There was a strange swooshing sound, and an object streaked through the empty window above Sokolov, leaving a trail of smoke as it landed across the room.
Sokolov rolled into a ball, shutting his eyes and ears.
As the projectile exploded, everything around him burst into flames.
11
The incendiary grenade unleashed a voracious tempest of fire. The wooden walls and floor boards went ablaze instantly, enveloping Sokolov. The pungent black smoke made him gag, his eyes watering. Intensifying, the heat waves baked his skin.
He was still shackled to the corpse!
Sokolov tore away the keychain from the man’s belt. Releasing his hand from the bracelet, he scrambled away from the wall.
Sokolov sucked in air, suddenly dizzy. If he didn’t die like a thrashing human torch, it would be due to the noxious smoke suffocating him sooner than that. The oxygen was fizzing out quickly — he already felt the effects, his thought and action retarded.
Air! It was coming inside the house to kill, not save. The wide open front door served as a lethal passage for a draft that spread the fire with double speed. Sokolov kept on crawling across the floor, not daring to rise, as the smoke was clouding up.
The flames spared nothing. Above the kitchen, the automatic sprinkler did little to extinguish the firestorm, but it still improved his odds of survival. Upon activation it sent a signal to the nearest fire brigade. And the little sprouts of water fell like manna — he tore off a sleeve of his gi and soaked it under the tiny shower. The wet fabric, pressed against his face, would reduce the intake of poisonous carbon dioxide.
Sokolov saw that the wall leading to the dojo was gone. The easily combustible shoji paper of the partition, the fastest to burn, was turning to ash. Sokolov grabbed the first solid object his hand managed to find — a lamp — and wrecked it into the burning frame of the screen, clearing his way as he leaped inside, half-crouching.
Being the farthest from the epicenter of the explosion, the dojo was still intact, but the smoke and the heat transformed it into a gas chamber.
Everywhere, the dry timbers of the house cracked, threatening to cave in and crush him under an avalanche of burning wreckage.
There! The thin wall-length window was all that separated Sokolov from the backyard.