Abandoned Warehouse
Baracoa Beach
Cuba
Life as Oksana's prisoner turned out exactly as bad for his health as expected.
After she had thrown the unconscious Sonya in her trunk, Oksana made Michael sit in the passenger seat, his bound wrists once again secured to the grab handles on his side. After a two-hour drive which continued further east, hugging the coastline, she took them into another abandoned warehouse in another vastly secluded area.
Once there, she handed him and the woman, Sonya, to a bunch of Russian special forces soldiers in plain clothes. She instructed them curtly to 'have the prisoners prepared for interrogation', and took off in her car to an unknown destination.
Russian Chief Vladimir Duboff had his own special interpretation of the term, 'preparation.' Michael discovered it after spending about five hours in the small, cramped, identical jail cell they had installed next to Sonya's.
Most people always either picked up a baseball bat or a gun when they needed information. To Michael, that kind of heavy-handed approach always seemed a little excessive, like getting groceries with a flamethrower - it only made a mess and almost never worked. That was usually why the trained operatives of any respectable military service would follow certain protocols that were suited to the information needed and the physical and psychological profile of their captives.
But, in the instances where your need for information took a backseat to your need to see the captive suffer - be it due to a past misunderstanding, a miscommunication or a plain accident that left hard feelings - professionalism had a way of flying out of the window.
That was when an interrogation session became more about how much pain and suffering you could inflict before you were forced to move on to such things as asking actual questions.
That was the reality Michael found himself in when his captor came to fetch him from where he was lying on the cot in his cell, staring at the woman in the barred cage next to his. She was either incredibly good at faking or quite possibly dead.
"Grab him." Chief Duboff barked at the two giants he brought with him.
Despite having the appearance of two brain-dead meat mountains, they moved like a pair of well-trained soldiers. The one without any easily accessible weapons grabbed Michael by the shoulder while the other covered his comrade's moves with a semi-automatic rifle. Michael had to let them manhandle him the way they wanted unless he wanted to invite a barrage of bullets on his person.
"Hey, is there any chance we can talk about this?" Michael asked as he was being guided towards another section of the massive warehouse. The language rolled off his tongue easily, as if a good decade hadn't passed since he had been deeply embedded in a complicated web of lies and deceit back in the rapidly dissolving Soviet Union. "Honestly, I can assure you, I was minding my own business in my jail cell when the other guy decided to bring me on this field trip. I haven't been making trouble for you guys since…forever."
"Michael Westen, I had heard of you, of course," Duboff said conversationally as they arrived at a small room that was classically designed for torture. "For some reason, I thought you'd be more… bigger, and meaner somehow," he said, glancing sideways at Michael with something akin to disappointment marring his scarred, wrinkled face. "Not this–"
Michael took in the thick concrete walls and the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling over a bolted, steel chair at the centre. There was also a utility table that was pushed to a dark corner out of sight. He grinned cheerily at the sight to mask his trepidation.
"You mean you weren't expecting me to be such a polite, winsome and innocent-looking guy?" He batted his eyelashes at the Chief.
The Chief raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him. "You forgot annoying."
"Listen, I know you're already busy with what's her name– Sonya. I have nothing to do with any of that. I swear, I only saw her today, and the guy Oksana killed, only about a day and a half ago." Michael kept talking as the two soldiers secured the restraints on the chair around his wrists and ankles. It kept him distracted from the bad things he was about to experience. "What is their deal anyway?"
"Nothing you need to concern yourself with, if you don't already know." Duboff threw over his shoulder casually as he walked over to the table behind Michael.
"Aw, come on man! They basically kidnapped me and tried to sell me for that woman!"
"What can I say, Westen, sucks to be you."
Michael had to agree that it, indeed, sucked to be him for the next couple of hours.
He had heard it said that, whatever failed to kill you, only made you stronger, which he wholeheartedly believed was utter bullshit when it came to torture devices. The Picana Electrica, or in layman's terms, a cattle prod, for example, was capable of delivering shocks at only 1/1,000th of an amp. While completely non-lethal, the absolute, excruciating agony it sent through a human body with its 15,000-volt shocks, made one wish for a quick death when introduced to the business end of it.
It wasn't even just the cattle prod. Thug One and Thug Two took turns using him as a punching bag in between the shocks, while Michael could do nothing but pant and groan like a dying man to catch his breath. They were disciplined in their methodical beating. They changed between the two methods of pain delivery at measured intervals calculated to keep him awake to experience the whole thing for the longest time possible.
Michael gritted his teeth and held back a scream the first two times the cattle prod made contact, once on the side of his unprotected neck and the next just above the left pectoral muscle. Thug One started punching him in the gut before the white hot currents faded from his system, while Michael was still struggling to breathe through it. The pain from the bruised muscles on his torso was almost a welcoming distraction from the electrical shock that set all his nerve endings on fire.
By the time they were past the tenth shock, Michael had difficulty seeing and his ears buzzed with a weird loud static. He tasted blood in his mouth, both from having bitten his tongue once and a throat abused from continuous screaming. One of the thugs had to keep slapping him on the face harshly a few times to keep him from blacking out from an overloaded nervous system.
"Jesus, fucking hell, stop!" his demanding words came out in a hoarse slur. One of the Russians had to hold his head up by his hair so he could speak to Duboff without slumping in on himself. He had to blink hard to reduce the sheer number of Duboffs dancing in front of his vision to bring the count down to a reasonable three.
"Aren't you f-forgetting something?" He slurred some more at the hazy Duboff in the middle.
"Like what?" The Chief's smile, distorted by Michael's rapidly dwindling vision, was like something from a horror movie.
"I don't know," Michael panted, grimacing at the way he could feel his own drool starting to run down the corner of his mouth. "L-like asking me q-questions or something? This is getting ri-ridiculous."
The way his heart was beating so erratically and painfully against his rib cage, he had a legitimate concern that he might end up having a heart attack if this specific torture continued.
"The way I see it, Westen, you're still way too talkative," the Russian Chief's voice had a strange fluctuating quality that confused Michael. "The Colonel would prefer you to be silent, compliant and only speak when spoken to. I'm afraid that'll take some work on our part." He looked at the two thugs who did all the work while he watched, nodding at them to continue. "She asked us to have you prepared after all…"
The small reprieve Michael had managed for himself ended with another vicious shock that caught him in the ribs. His animalistic scream got caught in his partially shredded throat, and ended up turning into a hacking cough. He finally, mercifully passed out somewhere in the middle of it before the enthusiastic soldier duo could slap him back to his senses.
-0-
The sound of rushing water woke Michael a split second before a cold, harsh torrent of it made contact, drenching him from foot to toe in mere seconds. A surprised gasp made him inhale a lungful of water, which in turn made him dissolve into a bout of painful coughing.
A high-pitched shriek from the prisoner in the adjoining cell made him aware that they were both getting the same treatment.
"Rise and shine, Westen, Lebedenko," Duboff declared loudly from a few feet away while a different soldier Michael was seeing for the first time, continued to hose down the two cages. "Time to greet the day!"
Whether it was a morning, an afternoon or a night, Michael had no idea. There was no natural light inside the warehouse anywhere. Most of the areas, including the area where the cells were situated, were perpetually lit up by the fluorescent lighting embedded in the high ceiling.
Michael couldn't even be sure how long he had slept after passing out in the middle of the torture session. For all he knew, it could have been several hours.
Lebedenko, Sonya, spat out some choice words Michael hadn't even heard coming out of the Spetsnaz soldiers. The meaning of her cursing clued him in on the fact that this majorly unpleasant wake-up call was going to be a regular occurrence for the foreseeable future.
Michael only saw Oksana standing next to Duboff after he had gotten himself back under control from the shock and the coughing. The freezing water clung to his clothes, making him shiver in earnest.
The Colonel studied them both, her gaze glancing back and forth between Michael and Sonya before she made a decision.
"Get her." She nodded towards Sonya.
The water assault stopped the moment her order was received. One soldier opened the door to her cell and kept a rifle trained on her while the other went inside to grab her. To Michael, it looked like the second soldier expected the brutal struggle Sonya put up, and was more than ready for it. He managed to trap her in a headlock after exchanging a few swings, and dragged her sagging body out after she passed out in his hold.
"Always the same," Oksana shook her head in disappointment as she watched the soldier taking her to what Michael presumed was her own interrogation session. "Wonder if she'll ever learn."
Duboff stayed back for a moment after his Colonel took her leave.
"Lucky you, Westen," he said, flashing a sideways smirk at him, "But not for long."
Michael lay in his cot, his clothes still wet, staring listlessly up at the mould-covered squares of the ceiling.
He was tired, and everything hurt.
The pain from the road rash and the wounds Burke had inflicted digging up the subdermal trackers, was down to manageable levels, which was a relief. He was reasonably sure he hadn't split open any of the healing scabs, causing them to bleed all over again, which was probably the only silver lining in the very dark cloud he found himself trapped in.
He didn't even want to think about the bandages that covered all those said wounds. The last time they had been changed was by Burke, while he had been unconscious, which was more than forty hours ago, if his gut feeling was to be believed. His captors were yet to show any worry over a potential infection he might catch due to gross and filthy bandages.
But those were nothing compared to the constant dull ache that pulsated along to the rhythm of his heartbeat, sending occasional currents of white-hot agony all over the muscles of his newly tenderised chest, ribs and abdomen. It made him wonder if breathing was worth the effort to suffer through that particular ever-refreshing agony.
What concerned him even more were the tremors.
While he knew the shock weapon wasn't lethal, he wasn't sure about the after-effects of long-term exposure. His hands still had minute trembles and he felt muscles in his legs and back twitch and cramp at unexpected intervals. He wasn't sure whether it was a result of all the volts that had run through his system earlier or just pure exhaustion.
His internal clock, which hadn't been online since his special forces days and therefore not the most trusted source of date and time, was convinced it was well into the night, and that Oksana and her men had been interrogating Sonya for close to three hours.
Michael didn't even want to imagine what they were doing to the other Russian woman, or what she had done to end up on Zhirkova's bad side. The lack of any sort of surveillance, cameras or audio pickups, increased his misgivings about their captors' motivations and goals in general; it meant they weren't really after information from either of them, just plain old revenge.
As if summoned by his thoughts, the two soldiers dragged a much-subdued Sonya through the door towards her cell. From where he was, Michael saw that the entire left side of her face was swollen, and she was still bleeding from a split lip and an open cut on her chin.
They more or less threw her on the floor inside her cell and locked the door before leaving. Sonya didn't move for a long time even after the wooden door separating them from the rest of the warehouse banged closed.
Just as Michael was starting to wonder if she had passed out, Sonya uncurled herself from where she was on the ground and sort of crawled towards the shared wall of vertical bars of their cells. Then she pulled herself up to sit with her back to it, letting the steel bars take her weight and hold her up as she drew her knees close to her chest.
Even though she had her back to him, Michael felt like it was a sign of reaching out, from one miserable prisoner to another. He stayed silent and where he was, waiting to see if she would actually talk.
"Fucking Zhirkova and her fucking GRU…" Sonya mumbled after several long minutes, her gaze fixed on the drab wall outside her cell. "Fuck you too, Burke, you bastard. Hope you can hear me in hell, or wherever you are."
Her spiteful fury and pain made the already harsh consonants of the language sound even more grating and guttural.
"That bad, huh?"
His quiet comment got her to crane her neck to glance at him before turning away again. "Don't worry," she said, with a humourless chuckle. "You'll have your fun soon."
"I'm pretty sure your friend was trying to save you," Michael said, trying not to delve deep into why he was trying to connect with a terrorist, or why he was defending the other terrorist who was responsible for his current situation in the first place.
"I know," Sonya murmured quietly. "He should have let me die. He didn't have to show up and get himself killed for nothing."
There was a lot of genuine, heartbreaking grief in her voice, which she was trying to hide with a thin, transparent layer of anger. Michael knew something about that.
And I'd have been in a much cosier prison if he hadn't, Michael thought to himself, grimacing. He had never imagined actually missing the six by eight back in Gitmo, on the other side of the same damned island.
"I'm sorry for your loss." Was all he said, breaking the silence.
"Was he a friend of yours?" Sonya turned a little again to look at him with a sceptical frown.
"Oh, no," Michael said emphatically. "He went to my hometown looking for me and almost got a friend of mine killed. When he did find me, he kidnapped me to exchange for you. From where I'm standing, he deserved what he got."
Sonya flashed him a smile, one that reminded him of a shark. "Then why lie to me with your false sentiment?"
"It isn't a false sentiment," Michael shrugged and turned his head back to stare at the ceiling. "One man's kidnapper is another woman's brother in arms. Wasn't that what he was to you?"
"Yes." She looked away.
"I've lost people whom I fought with side by side,' Michael said, trying and failing to stop all those decades-old, fading faces from surfacing. "I know how it feels. It hurts. Blood, sweat and tears are all the same no matter which side you're on."
"True enough."
"Do you know what the good Colonel is planning?" Michael asked in a bid to change the subject. "Is she going to keep us here forever till we die or–"
"We have about a week until one of the 641s arrives. I heard them talking about it a few days back," Sonoya shrugged. Foxtrot-class, or Project 641, was the name for Russia's large, diesel-electric patrol submarines. Those usually showed up with nuclear capabilities and units of Russian commandos. The GRU having one of those under their command for support and transport meant they weren't taking chances with Michael and Sonya. "We'll be shipped back to the motherland."
The fact that they hadn't even tried that hard to keep that information hidden increased Michael's earlier misgivings. That meant they were quite confident that their prisoners had absolutely no means of escape.
While Michael tried to wrap his mind around their shared, fast-approaching doom, Sonya continued in a low voice.
"You'd be a propaganda tool, the spy they caught–"
It didn't matter that he wasn't even a spy anymore, or a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay. Michael was sure they had detailed records of every operation where he was the main suspect in sabotage and subsequent death toll. The trial they would put him through for crimes against Russia wouldn't be pretty. He didn't even know how the Company would react if they had any idea what the GRU had planned for him.
"You'll be found guilty and executed publicly for your crimes against the motherland," Sonya confirmed what he had concluded.
And the CIA would receive a clip of the video after the fact, Michael thought, to serve as a warning. It was how it worked. There wouldn't even be any retaliation, since he was already blacklisted, denied and discarded.
God forbid if a copy of something like that ever found its way to the hands of my way-too-resourceful friends,...or my mother, Michael felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wet clothing wrapped around him.
"What about you?"
"Oh, my list of crimes is worse than yours," she replied, sounding a little proud about it for some reason. "You're a spy. You did what you did because of your loyalty to your country. It was what your country demanded of you. I, on the other hand, am a traitor. I betrayed my country–"
"Why?"
"Because I found out that it was all a lie," Sonya spat, her face twisting in disgust. "The country I've been serving, gave my life to, lost all its values. It is not better than others, it's worse."
Micheal didn't want to let her words resonate with him. He may have lost his faith in the agency he had idolised once, but that didn't mean he had completely lost his love and patriotism for his country, or his faith in the men and women who called it home. He didn't even want to imagine what kind of realisation or indoctrination she had to have gone through to turn her back on her own country like that.
"So you what?" He asked, uncaring that his tone sounded judgemental. "Sold out to the highest bidder?"
Sonya laughed. "No, Michael Westen, I found a better purpose, a meaningful way of life, a true vision to follow and dedicate my life to. I've never regretted that decision for even a moment. What I work for, what I stand for… I have done for the good of this entire world more than any of these petty, rotting, decrepit intelligence services around the world combined."
"Well, good for you," Michael said, deciding to let the terrorist hang on to her delusions. There was a reason he started talking to her. "The way I see it, no matter the differences we would have outside this prison, here and now, we find ourselves with a common purpose. One that could serve our immediate needs–"
"That we do," she nodded, and drew away to let her head rest on top of her bent knees. When she spoke again, her voice was muffled, but Michael could still understand her. "We need to get out of here before they ship us back to Russia."
"Can I count on you when the time comes?"
"I need to escape just as much as you do, Westen. You have yourself a deal."
Michael let out a sigh and turned on his side, changing his view from the ceiling to the wall through the steel bars. Trauma bonding did have its advantages.
"Great."
-0-
They decided to mix things up a bit during the session on the seventh day.
It was the same room, and Michael was tied up to the same chair. Even the two guys who tied him up before taking their positions on either side of him were the same. Instead of checking Michael's resistance to electrical shocks, however, they decided it was time they tested his resistance against another one of their preferred torture methods: waterboarding.
Colonel Zhirkova was also present, and she watched the proceedings silently, standing next to Duboff.
Thug One wrapped a thick rag around Micahel's face and held it tight while Thug Two poured the water all over his nose and mouth from an upended gallon. Holding his breath was difficult due to the way the first thug dug his thumb and forefinger against his lower jaw, forcing his mouth open.
"Stop."
In the middle of frantic wheezing, coughing and suffocating due to all the water that was flooding his lungs through his nose and mouth, Zhirkova's unhurried command reached Michael in a fluctuating wave.
The water stopped, and the rag was removed instantly. Michael bent forward as far as the bindings allowed and coughed like a dying man, trying to get all the extra liquids and fluids out. Before he could even catch his breath, the command was given to repeat the process.
It went on like that for a while, and the water that was flowing down through his gullet started to feel like liquid fire. Just as the black spots he was seeing in his vision were starting to stretch and expand into a total blackout, Zhirkova finally gave a command to halt the torture.
"Enough."
The thug removed the soaked rag from his face and stepped back with his comrade. Michael let his head hang low after a bout of coughing that left a sour, coppery taste in his mouth. His pulse wavered and his entire body shook violently as he struggled to get some air into his abused lungs.
Zhirkova walked up to him and bent over, bringing her glare on level with his own burning vision. "I need you to think back to the year 1998. Westen," she said in a low voice, and Michael had to concentrate hard to understand the words. "The time you were running around in Kiev, do you remember?"
Michael needed more time to pull himself together. So he hedged. "Vaguely."
"You had already killed one of my teams and stolen the warhead," Zhirkova said with a calm smile. "All you had to do was secure it and send it back to your own forces, and then you were done. But, instead of leaving, you made a detour to a place quite out of your base of operations in Belarus–"
Michael blinked a few times, partially to battle away the sudden lethargy that was making his eyelids feel as heavy as lead weights, and partially to buy time to deflect.
"I can't say I remember."
"Allow me to refresh your memory, then," Zhirkova said, her gaze boring into him like two daggers. "The village's name was Krichev, located in Mogilev Region, and you took great pains to cover your tracks to this little detour of yours. It took me years to backtrack your journey through our side of the world before you left…a task that required a lot of dead bodies–"
Michael knew what she was talking about.
He had been in the Eastern European theatre closer to a year by then, and had done his homework on his target, then Major Oksana Zhirkova, to the point that he had known almost everything about her. He had learned about her career, family, her personality, habits and her thought process to the point he had, in a way of speaking, become her.
That was how he had been able to figure out the way she operated in the region and the movements of her troops, which had led him to successfully rescue the wayward warhead that had no business skulking in the hands of the Russians.
The downside of having learned about someone so thoroughly was that he also knew the consequences Zhirkova would face for his interference. While he had no reservations about leaving the headstrong officer to her fate with her own superiors, it was the knowledge of what would happen to her family that made him unable to leave as he should have.
Instead, he had used another contact he had in their logistics division to move a few names in the records before arranging a local militia group for a kidnapping. It had been a terrible move on the family that had been forced to leave the lives they had known, but it had been a kidnapping that had actually saved their lives.
Since he had already given his word to take that particular secret to his grave, especially since the said contact was still in active duty, Michael couldn't really speak of any of that to Oksana as she demanded.
"Belarus you say?" he squinted at her, "I'm really not sure. I was partial to the accommodation back in Kiev, to be honest."
Oksana gritted her teeth. It was not a comforting look to gaze upon a Russian Intelligence operative. "Why were you there?
"I wasn't–"
She slapped him. It was an open-handed blow that made his teeth rattle and jerked his head backwards painfully.
"I know you arrived there on December 12th," she snarled, moving close enough that he could feel her warm breath on his face and taste the scent of her perfume at the back of his throat, "Exactly one day before the day you were supposed to leave, and stayed for two days. What did you do, Westen?"
"I wasn't there," Michael panted, craning his neck back as much as he could to get away from her predatory look. "I swear. You found bad intel."
She let go of her grip on the chair and straightened. "Again."
The two soldiers moved as one at her command and resumed their task. Michael's lungs were starved of air to the point he was starting to forget what it was like to breathe, and was convinced that he would never drink a sip of water ever again.
His world was narrowed down to helpless struggling, panicked wheezing, gut-twisting coughing and frantic attempts to find air to breathe. It went on for so long, that he never even realised when it all finally stopped, or how they untied him from the chair to drag his semi-conscious body back to the cell next to Sonya's.
What woke Michael up from a blackout period of an unknown length of time, was the sounds of a commotion erupting in the cell next to his.
When he uncurled from where he was lying on the floor to lift his head up, he was greeted by the sight of two anxious Russians inside Sonya's cell. Sonya was lying on the ground, her eyes frozen wide open while the rest of her body convulsed violently on the ground.
Before he was even fully awake, Michael's instinct had him crawling towards their shared wall of steel bars. He used the bars to drag himself up to a standing position and leaned against them to take a better look.
The first thing he saw was that she was wet, soaked to the bone, and that gave him a pretty good idea of where she had been. What had their captors panicking was the fact that she was struggling to breathe as her body continued to writhe on the floor. Her skin had already turned a pallid grey and there was a bluish tint to her lips.
The two soldiers were both kneeling next to her, looking at each other in confusion and panic because they had no idea what to do or how to help. Michael didn't know whether that was because they were extremely inexperienced or scared of doing anything that went against explicit orders. All he did know was that they were never going to call for emergency services, and Sonya needed help immediately if she were to make it.
"Oi, she's choking," he barked at them, startling them both that they snapped their heads towards his direction. "She can't breathe."
"Yeah, we can see that." One of them barked back, eyes wide with indecision and possibly a touch of fear.
"Then do something," Michael yelled in exasperation, "She's dying."
"I know! But what?"
"Fucking hell," Michael muttered through his teeth. "Are you dumb? No, don't answer that. What happened? Was it the water or did one of you break a rib?"
If she were choking due to a broken rib sticking into her lung, Michael knew there really wasn't anything they could do for her, since there wasn't going to be any outside assistance arriving at all.
The duo exchanged a look and murmured something incomprehensible to each other. It looked like they were arguing whether or not to fill Michael in on what happened to her. Sonya didn't have enough time left for Michael to let them argue it out.
"Let me help."
That got both the soldiers to snap their mouths shut and gaze up at him with twin incredulous looks.
"Listen," Michael said hurriedly, "Do you want to drag her corpse out when Zhirkova comes? Do you want to explain to her why her prized prisoner is dead? Let me fucking help."
The reminded threat of their commanding officer's wrath got them to move almost on reflex. One stayed with her while the other unlocked the door to Michael's cell. A quick visual scan told Michael that they both had at least remembered to leave their rifles elsewhere when they had come running to help Sonya.
Too bad, he thought to himself as he quickly entered Sonya's cell. This would have worked out as the perfect distraction.
Sonya's convulsions were reduced to weak, sporadic twitching when he finally dropped to his knees next to her. When he opened her shirt, he was greeted by a number of black and blue bruises that could rival his own. As he carefully started to check her ribs for any breaks, he felt her left hand, which had been lying limp on the floor next to his knee, move out of sight of the two Russians to pinch his leg.
Years of training let him keep his expression from changing into one of shocked understanding. He had to admit, he was kind of awed at the lengths Sonya would go to keep up an act. She had actually been holding her breath to make it seem as convincing as possible to their rather inexperienced jailors.
Michael winked at her still unblinking eyes, and turned back to the Russians with a look of extreme agitation of his own.
"Alright. Something's blocking her airway," he said, thinking quickly. "We need to open it and stick a tube in so she can breathe again. An emergency tracheostomy. Do either of you know how?"
The two shook their heads just like Michael knew they would.
"Fine," he said, turning his attention back to Sonya. "I need a knife and tube, now," he said, pointing at her throat, "I need to make an incision to insert the tube, right here."
"A knife?" One scoffed incredulously.
"A tube?" the other sounded even more confused.
"Yeah, a sharp one, Michael said, ignoring the sarcasm. "I need to cut into her, here, about two inches wide and an inch deep, and I need to make a clean cut. Tube is for the air to flow so she doesn't get brain damage and die."
When they both stayed where they were, Michael used his most demanding voice and barked, "Hurry!"
It was all he needed to get them moving. One ran out of the door while the other stayed behind, and he unsheathed a knife from his belt.
"Here." he said, placing the knife, hilt first, in Michael's extended hand. "Pavel will bring the first aid kit and the tube. We have a suture kit and bandages in there."
"Perfect." Michael smiled. Then he moved.
The soldier never saw him lashing out with his foot against his shin, breaking it instantly and bringing him down in a heap. He continued to stare uncomprehendingly at Michael with his mouth opening and closing with a bloody gurgle, his hand clawing helplessly at the gaping stab wound in his throat his own knife had been used to inflict.
Michael was on his feet in an instant. Then he looked down, intending to haul Sonya up as well. For an instant, their gazes locked.
Michael didn't see Burke's acquaintance right then, or another terrorist. What he saw was a kindred soul tortured by a common enemy, one who had been pushed to the edge and was now beyond fighting by any rules. Even though he knew, intellectually, Sonya was also an enemy, at that specific moment in time, she was his only ally, the only one who had shared the same agony. The one who had the same determination and drive to escape.
He saw the same understanding in her clear gaze – in the feral smile she had on her face that he knew was mirrored on his own.
He extended his hand. "Ready to get the hell out?"
"Do you even have to ask?"
The dead soldier had a handgun strapped to his ankle, which Sonya promptly relieved from him. They had a combat knife and a gun with seventeen rounds, and two extra clips which she found in his pockets.
It wasn't the best, but those were weapons in the hands of two very determined and very dangerous operatives. Without another backward glance at the dead body, they left the room with Sonya in the lead, and Michael watching their six.
There were thirteen guards inside the warehouse in total.
They managed to kill five in total stealth before Sonya had to shoot one that tried to take a shot at Michel while he stabbed another Russian in the chest. Although no sudden alarms blared to life, they both knew that the loud shot drew the attention of the entire base, and they had to move quickly before they got rained on by rifle fire.
They met with the last three armed Russians as they made it to the front, who were covering the only serviceable exit. They had glimpsed two other exits while moving through the building, both welded shut with steel bars barricading them for good measure. The front door was the only way out.
"Where the hell are the two bosses anyway?" Michael asked as he crouched behind the wall opposite the one Sonya was leaning against.
"They left earlier."
"Neat time to pull the trick." Michael grinned, and scanned the area they had to cross.
There was a distance of about ten metres they had to cover from where they were to the door, with absolutely no place to duck behind to avoid the H&K MP5K submachine gun fire that would rain hell from close quarters at fifteen rounds per second.
"These boys don't even know how to breathe without orders," Sonya said, making a disgusted face as she checked her handgun. Most of them only had Glocks. Michael had the other sub-machine gun they had liberated from another dead soldier. "I knew this was our chance."
"We need to go through the three Rambos over there," Michael said, nodding at the three soldiers who had hastily regrouped and found cover behind the two concrete pillars just before the door.
"I have fifteen rounds and a clip," Sonya said, bringing her gun up in a ready grip. "That's it."
"I have half a mag," Michael reported his own ammunition status.
Sonya turned to him with a raised brow. "I'll draw them and you'll take them out?"
"Works for me," Michael confirmed.