Out of the Dark (36 page)

“Maybe not,” Buchevsky conceded. “But their superiors have to know at least roughly where they are. When they don’t check in on schedule, someone’s going to come looking for them. Again.”

He might have sounded as if he were disagreeing, but he wasn’t, really. First, because Basarab was probably correct. But secondly, because over the
course of the last week or so, he’d come to realize Mircea Basarab was one of the best officers he’d ever served under. Which, he reflected, was high praise for any foreign officer from any Marine . . . and didn’t keep the Romanian from being one of the scariest men Buchevsky had ever met.

A lot of people might not have realized that. In better light, Basarab’s face had a bony, foxlike handsomeness and his smile was frequently warm. Buchevsky was convinced the warmth in that smile was genuine, too, but there were also dark, still places behind those brilliant green eyes. Still places which were no stranger to all too many people from the post-Ceausescu Balkans or the Afghan mountains where Buchevsky had spent so much time. Dark places Master Sergeant Stephen Buchevsky recognized because he’d met so many other scary men in his life . . . and because there was now a dark, still place labeled “Washington, DC” inside him, as well.

Yet whatever lay in Basarab’s past, the man was almost frighteningly competent, and he radiated a sort of effortless charisma Buchevsky had seldom encountered. The sort of charisma which could win the loyalty of even a Stephen Buchevsky, and even on such relatively short acquaintance.

“Your point is well taken, my Stephen,” Basarab said now, smiling almost as if he’d read Buchevsky’s mind and reaching up to place one hand on the towering American’s shoulder. Like the almost possessive way he said “my Stephen,” it could have been patronizing. It wasn’t.

“However,” he continued, his smile fading, “I believe it may be time to send these vermin elsewhere.”

“Sounds great to me.” A trace of skepticism edged Buchevsky’s voice, and Basarab chuckled. It was not a particularly pleasant sound.

“I believe we can accomplish it,” he said, and whistled shrilly.

Moments later, Take Bratianu, a dark-haired, broad-shouldered Romanian in a leather jerkin festooned with knives, hand grenades, and extra rifle magazines, blended out of the forest.

Buchevsky was picking up Romanian quickly, thanks to Elizabeth Cantacuzène, but the exchange which followed was far too rapid for his still rudimentary grasp of the language to sort out. It lasted for a few moments, then Bratianu nodded and Basarab turned back to Buchevsky.

“Take speaks no English, I fear,” he said.

That
was obvious,
Buchevsky thought dryly. On the other hand, Bratianu didn’t
need
to speak English to communicate the fact that he was one seriously bad-assed individual. None of Basarab’s men did.

There were only twenty of them, but they moved like ghosts. Buchevsky
was no slouch in the field, yet he knew when he was outclassed at pooping and snooping in the shrubbery. These men were far better at it than he’d ever been, and in addition to rifles, pistols, and hand grenades, most of them—like Bratianu himself—were liberally equipped with a ferocious assortment of knives, hatchets, and machetelike blades that would have served perfectly well as short swords like the old Roman
gladius
. Indeed, Buchevsky suspected they would have preferred using cold steel instead of any namby-pamby assault rifles.

Now, as Bratianu and his fellows moved along the trail, knives flashed and the handful of Shongair wounded stopped writhing.

Buchevsky had no problem with that. Indeed, his eyes were bleakly satisfied. But when some of the Romanians began stripping the alien bodies while others began cutting down several stout young saplings growing along the edge of the trail, he frowned and glanced at Basarab with one eyebrow raised.

The Romanian only shook his head.

“Wait,” he said, and Buchevsky turned back to the others.

They worked briskly, wielding their hatchets and machetes with practiced efficiency as they cut the saplings into roughly ten-foot lengths, then shaped points at either end. In a surprisingly short period they had over a dozen of them, and Buchevsky’s eyes widened in shock as they calmly began picking up dead Shongairi and impaling them.

They worked their way through the entire stack of bodies who’d fallen to Buchevsky’s own ambush, cutting more saplings when their original supply ran out. Blood and other body fluids oozed down the crude, rough-barked stakes, but he said nothing as the stakes’ other ends were sunk into the soft woodland soil. Twenty-five dead aliens hung there, lining the trail like insects mounted on pins, grotesque in the tree shadows, and he felt Basarab’s eyes.

“Are you shocked, my Stephen?” the Romanian asked quietly.

“I . . .” Buchevsky inhaled deeply. “Yeah, I guess I am. Some,” he admitted. He turned to face the other man. “I think maybe because it’s a little too close to some of the things I’ve seen jihadies do to make the point that nobody better fuck with them.”

“Indeed?” Basarab’s eyes were cold. “I suppose I should not be surprised by that.
We
learned the tradition long ago from their Turkish co-religionists, after all, and it would seem some things do not change. But at least these were already dead when they were staked.”

“Would it have made a difference?” Buchevsky asked quietly, and Basarab’s nostrils flared. But then the other man gave himself a little shake.

“Once?” He shrugged. “No. As I say, the practice has long roots in this area. One of Romania’s most famous sons, after all, was known as ‘Vlad the Impaler,’ was he not?” He smiled thinly. “For that matter, I did not, as you Americans say, have a happy childhood myself, and there was a time when I inflicted cruelty on all those about me. When I
enjoyed
it. In those days, no doubt, I would have preferred them alive.”

He shook his head, and his expression saddened as he gazed at the impaled alien bodies.

“I suppose there have been many like me. Men who have been so angered, so hurt, by what was done to them or those they loved that they became monsters themselves. I think, though, that I became . . . more of the monster than many of them. I am not proud of all in my past, my Stephen, but neither am I mad any longer. I have been more fortunate than some of those others, because I have had time to wrestle with my inner demon. I have even been able to travel, to see other lands, visit other places not so soaked in memories of blood and violence. To let some of the voices screaming in my head fall silent, soothed by peace. I remember a doctor I spoke to once—in Austria I think it was. . . .”

His voice trailed off, and his eyes grew distant as he gazed at the impaled bodies. Then they refocused on the present, and he looked back at Buchevsky.

“Even so, I fear it took too many years—years that demanded too high a price from those for whom I cared, and those who cared for me—before I realized at last that all the cruelty in the universe cannot avenge a broken childhood or appease an orphaned young man’s rage at what was done to him and to those he loved.”

He glanced at the bodies again, then shook himself once more—this time with a brisker, more businesslike expression—and turned his back on them, as if he were turning his back upon that broken childhood, as well.

“But this, my Stephen, has nothing to do with the darkness inside me,” he said.

“No?” Buchevsky raised an eyebrow.

“No. It is obvious these vermin will persist in pursuing us. So we will give them something to fix their attention upon—something to make any creature, even one of these, hot with hate. And then we will give them someone besides your civilians to pursue. Take and most of my men will head south,
leaving a trail so obvious that even these”—he twitched his head at the slaughtered patrol without looking away from the towering Marine—“could scarcely miss it. He will lead them aside until they are dozens of kilometers away. Then he will slip away and return to us.”

“Without their being able to follow him?”

“Do not be so skeptical, my friend!” Basarab chuckled and squeezed Buchevsky’s shoulder. “I did not pick these men at random! There are no more skilled woodsmen in all of Romania. Have no fear that they will lead our enemies to us.”

“I hope you’re right,” Buchevsky said, looking back at the impaled bodies and thinking about how
he
would have reacted in the aliens’ place. “I hope you’re right.”

Water sloshed around Pieter Ushakov’s legs as the raft grounded and he waded the last few meters to the eastern bank of the Voronezh River.

He tried not to think too hard about the nature of some of the flotsam and jetsam they’d encountered on the way across. It helped—some—that he’d seen so much carnage by now that he’d been largely anesthetized, but there were still moments. Especially when the bodies were so small they reminded him of—

He chopped that thought off before it could fully form and looked around warily, AK-74 ready. He’d needed it once already today, but no immediate threat presented itself, and he relaxed . . . slightly.

The city of Voronezh, capital of the Russian oblast of the same name, had been the site of savage combat during World War II’s Stalingrad campaign. It had been rebuilt after the war, recovering to a population of over eight hundred thousand by 2010. Home to Voronezh State University, it had been one of Russia’s more cosmopolitan cities, although the locals sometimes wished it hadn’t. Foreign students attending universities in Russia usually went to Voronezh State University for a year first to hone their Russian language skills, and there’d been occasional clashes—some of them nasty—between the native Russians and the influx of foreigners.

That wasn’t going to happen anymore, he thought grimly, climbing to the stub of the more southern of the two highway bridges which had once crossed the river and gazing back into the west while he waited for the rest of his men to join him. The destruction the Nazis had visited on Voronezh in the 1940s was nothing compared to the total devastation the Shongairi had inflicted.

He and his thirty-five-man company of partisans were lucky they’d made it across the river alive. Despite the totality with which three-quarters of the city had been literally obliterated, there were still ruins around the
periphery, and those ruins were inhabited. If “inhabited” was the right word for half-starved bands of looters fighting over whatever food or other supplies might still be available in the wreckage, at any rate. Thirty-five well-fed (relatively speaking, at least) men with obviously hefty knapsacks had presented a tempting target for ambushes, even if they were all armed. Fortunately, only one band of marauders had been foolish or desperate enough to actually try an attack . . . which had resulted in the elimination of the band in question.

Of course, we haven’t made it
all
the way across yet, have we, Pieter?
he reminded himself sourly.

They’d crossed the worst of the devastation—and most of what had been the city—but the hinterland in front of them might be even worse. It had been devastated by blast and fire, especially along its western edge, along the river, and from here it looked as if there’d been at least one additional kinetic impact to the northeast, but it had been outside the primary impact zone. The majority of its structures were still more or less standing, and the burned-out sea of shattered walls, roofless ruins, and battered industrial buildings offered all manner of unpleasant possibilities. That was one reason he’d chosen to cross this stretch in daylight, when they’d have a better chance of seeing trouble coming.

Ushakov turned his head as Lieutenant Ivan Anatoliavitch Kolesnikov climbed up the bridge ramp to join him. Kolesnikov had been the senior platoon commander in his own company; now he and Ushakov were the only surviving officers of their entire engineering battalion. For that matter, as far as Ushakov knew, he, Kolesnikov, and Sergeant Fyodor Ivanovich Belov were the battalion’s only survivors—period.

“Well, that looks unpleasant,” Kolesnikov said, turning to survey the wasteland east of them. “Stinks, too.”

Ushakov nodded. Murdered cities, he’d discovered, had a charnel reek all their own—one that persisted well after the people who lived in them had been slaughtered. The heat didn’t help, either. He figured it had to be at least fifty degrees—what he supposed he would have had to get used to calling ninety degrees if he’d ever gotten around to taking Aldokim’s offer and gone to work somewhere they used the Fahrenheit system. That was pretty damned hot for Voronezh, even at this time of year, and the temperature and humidity combined to produce a sauna.

And to enhance the stench.

“I won’t be sorry to get back out into the open countryside myself,” Ushakov said now. “And not just because of the stink.”

“I know what you mean.” Kolesnikov grimaced. “You know, if
I’d
lived here I’d have moved out by now. All the farmland around here, you’d think at least some of these people would be considering the possibility of turning farmer before they starve!”

Ushakov nodded again. The farmland around Voronezh was rich and fertile, even by Ukrainian standards. And Kolesnikov was right—if the people hunkering down in the city’s ruins had only been willing to divert their efforts to farming they’d have found themselves far better off in a few months’ time, when today’s heat would be only a bitterly missed memory.

They’re going to starve . . . if they don’t freeze to death first,
he thought from behind blue eyes which had died with his family.
God only knows what winter’s going to be like, but I’d be surprised if twenty-five percent of the preinvasion population survives till spring. Assuming the fucking Shongairi let
anyone
survive
.