“Kto yebat’ ty?!” Bullet Head grunted angrily. Holliday slammed the door in the man’s face as hard as he possibly could. Bullet Head dropped like a stone, heavy metal still pounding out of his ears.
“It’s me, the angel of death,” said Holliday, and began stripping the man of his weapons.
38
It took Holliday at least five minutes to ease Eddie down onto the pile of rubble below the open floor of the tunnel and another three or four to get him down to the platform and settled into one of the seats on the train. By the time he actually sat down at the driver’s seat of the self-propelled subway car he could actually hear the raised, echoing voices of the Spetsnaz team coming after them. They kept on calling out for Boris Byka, presumably their name for Bullet Head, who was still out cold on the rear of the platform where Holliday had dragged him.
Boris had been armed with a folding-stock AK-103 assault rifle, an OC-23 Drotik twenty-four-round automatic pistol, half a dozen RGD-5 fragmentation grenades and a very nasty-looking Kizlyar Scorpion bowie knife. Plenty of killing power, but the seven or eight guys coming down the tunnel would be at least as well armed, and with Eddie down the odds were pretty bad.
Holliday stared at the control panel. Lot of gauges, a big chrome steel T-throttle in the middle of the dashboard and a single pedal on the floor. The T-bar had black plastic inserts at the ends of the T.
There were five big buttons on the right. One red, one green, one yellow with a black lightbulb printed on it and two white ones. The white ones had arrows on them, the arrow on the top button pointing up, the arrow on the bottom button pointing down.
The one with the lightbulb seemed reasonably self-explanatory, so he pushed it down with his thumb. The lights in the car flickered on, then off, then on again, and there was the sudden sound of a generator kicking in. He pressed the button with the downward-pointing arrow. There was a pneumatic hiss and the doors thumped shut.
“So far so good,” he muttered. If he assumed the throttle was just that, a throttle, that meant the pedal on the floor was probably the brake. That left the small problem of motive power. In his world, red meant stop and green meant go, but this was a subway from Stalin-era Soviet Russia, so he pressed red instead. There was a mechanical moan like a car started up in freezing-cold weather and then a stuttering roar, and the whole car began to vibrate.
The throttle was resting in a notch, which Holliday assumed was the idle position. He gently slipped the T-bar out of the notch and gave it a tiny nudge, then let it go; the car moved forward a few feet before some sort of automatic device cut in and the car stopped dead. Holliday frowned, confused, and then realized that by letting go of the right-side black plastic insert on the throttle he’d initialized an automated dead man’s switch. His father had been a locomotive driver for one of the old unconsolidated New York railroads and had talked about dead man’s switches, but this was the first time Holliday had seen one in action.
He pulled the throttle handle back and into the notch, feeling something definitely disengage as he did so. The clutch. He looked out the open doorway of the driver’s cab. Eddie was slumped against the nearest seat across the aisle, his eyes half-closed.
“Eddie?”
“Si.”
“Stay awake, amigo. I’ve almost got us out of here.”
“Bueno,” mumbled the Cuban.
“Here we go.” Holliday eased the throttle out of the notch, keeping his right thumb down on the plastic insert. He pushed the throttle forward little by little; the car groaned and clanked but began to rumble out of the old station.
As he pushed the throttle farther the Spetsnaz team in the tunnel began to fire blindly, catching the back end of the car as it moved out of the station, shattering glass and puncturing the cracked plastic covers on the seats. One of the team even managed to toss down one of his RGD-5 grenades onto the platform. Unfortunately it was all a bit too late. The bullets did no real damage to the train, and the grenade only blew out a few tiles on the walls and ceiling and put a few white-hot pieces of shrapnel into the unconscious Bullet Head’s brain. By the time the first man reached the platform, the rear lights of the self-propelled car were already vanishing around a curve in the tunnel and Bullet Head was as dead as a doornail.
On that uneventful night in his equally uneventful life, Felix Fyodor Fosdikov sat in the toasty warm cab of his big GS-18.05 motor grader and watched the first snow begin to fall in the Kuntsevo district a few miles south of the Moscow Ring Road. As he watched the heavy snow begin to turn the world a uniform, featureless white, he bit into his wife’s black bread-sauerkraut-sausage-and-goat cheese sandwich and chewed. He took a sip of the hot, vodka-laced coffee his wife had prepared for him in his old battered thermos. During the spring, summer and fall Felix Fyodor drove a garbage truck for the Central Moscow district, which he preferred to snow removal.
When you worked garbage you found all sorts of useful and potentially valuable things you could sell at the big tailgate markets in Mozhaysk and other places outside the city. In his forty-six years on the job he’d found everything from a perfectly good gold watch to a pink-enameled artificial leg. Even if what you found wasn’t worth anything, there wasn’t a day that went by working garbage that wasn’t interesting.
Still, driving the big motor grader had its good points. He was alone in the high, glassed-in cab, so there was no one to answer to when the sauerkraut, cheese and sausage produced their inevitably pungent brand of oily farts, and no one to complain when he filled the cab with smoke from the cheap bulk cigarettes he favored.
He finished the first sandwich and started on the second. At sixty-two, with all those years on the job, he was getting far too old for the work, but he couldn’t see himself sitting around watching television or growing tomatoes in their little allotment, and his small pension wasn’t going to let him do much more than that. It didn’t matter, really; one way or the other his wife’s sandwiches and the vodka and the cigarettes would get him eventually, either from a heart attack on the road or straining on the toilet fighting to pass the rock-hard bowel movements the sandwiches caused.
Felix Fyodor glanced out of the side door of the cab. The blade of the grader was marked with reflective tape at five-centimeter intervals, like a ruler. When the snow reached the first strip of tape he would begin his route. The route took him east along the perimeter road of the big forest plot with the double razor-wire fence, then south and west and north until he got back to where he was right now. When he finished the big square around the forest plot, he’d put the grader onto the closest on-ramp of the highway into the city, then grade the snow all the way to the Ring Road and back again. Then he’d take a piss break, have a snack and do it all over again. On a night with a predicted heavy snowfall like tonight he’d probably do the run seven or eight times before his shift was over.
Once, years ago, he’d asked about the property behind the wire and he’d been told to mind his own business, but eventually he’d heard enough whispered stories to figure out that the land had been Stalin’s Moscow dacha-the place where he’d spent most of the great patriotic war and the place he’d died in on March 5, 1953, supposedly full of Alzheimer’s or syphilis or something and poisoned by the KGB chief Beria to keep him from signing death warrants for just about everyone in the government, including Beria. Someone had wanted to make a museum out of the place, but how did you make a museum for a mass murderer? Khrushchev had stopped the idea and the place had been empty and abandoned ever since. Felix Fyodor took a bite out of the second sandwich, trying not to think of the heartburn already climbing up his chest. It would be a long night and he needed nourishment. He looked down at the markers on the plow and wished the snow would fall a little faster. He was parked within a few yards of the entrance to the whole estate, and it spooked him more than a little.