“Thanks. Check our pals, would you?”
James strode up upon the prisoners. The three kneeling men regarded the large black man with mixed fear and hostility. “Anyone speak English?” he asked. Three sullen glares was the only response. James clicked the Polish-issue bayonet onto his rifle. “You boys sure?”
The big, bald, wounded man spoke. “I speak.”
“Good, that’s real good.” James shot him a winning smile. “Russian, huh?” The man’s shoulders sagged. His leg was clearly paining him. James continued to smile and continued to keep the brutal-looking man kneeling in place. “What’s your name?”
The man seemed to search for strength.
“For the next forty-eight hours you’re mine. So, what would you like me to call you?”
The man closed his eyes. “Nikita.”
“Okay, Nick. Can I call you Nick? Good.” James took a big, deep breath of the misty, salty, dank Gdansk dawn. He sighed happily. “So, how are you enjoying Poland?”
Nick’s accent was very thick. “I hate fuckin’ place.”
“Rather be back in Kaliningrad, would you?”
Nick sighed fatalistically. “Never should have left Orsk.”
“Orsk?” James grinned. “I killed a whole bunch of guys in Orsk once.”
Nick didn’t bat an eye. “I believe.”
James looked at the other two. One was tall and skinny and one was tall and fat; they looked related. “Do those two speak English?”
Nick glanced at the men. They glared back. “No.”
“Who are they?”
“Hammerhead scum.”
Hammerhead was Russian slang for low-level mafiya enforcers and, to James’s eye, they fit the bill. As had their distinct nonmilitary behavior during the entire battle. James suspected if he stripped them, the two men would be covered in Russian prison tattoos. He regarded Nick shrewdly. He had an inkling Nick wouldn’t be. “If they’re hammerhead scum, I think that makes you podryadchik.”
Nick flinched.
Cal knew he’d hit pay dirt. Podryadchik was Russian for someone who was paid to do something for someone else. It was their word for contractor. Nick was former Russian military, probably special forces of one stripe or another, and was likely in private security, and now, it seemed, private wet work.
“What were you before you got saddled with these mafiya wing-nuts? Alfa-Tsenter? Moran group? RSB?”
James studied the man’s reactions and compared them to everything he had revealed in the past sixty seconds. James started reading him like a book. “Nah, you’re a good Russian boy. You love your homeland. And that’s where you do your best work. I bet you were Viking Group.”
Nick twitched again. James knew from past experience that Viking Group specialized in private security within Russia.
“You didn’t like this job from the get-go. You knew going into Poland was a mistake. But the money was real good, wasn’t it?”
“Screw you,” Nick responded. But he didn’t seem to have much heart in it.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Nick mumbled something in Russian that sounded very fatalistic.
“You know something, Nick. I like you.”
“I do not like you at all.”
“Of course you like me. You love me. But I’m a pillar of Nubian manhood, and that’s left a boy from Orsk a little confused.”
One corner of the Russian’s mouth quirked in amusement despite himself.
“Aw, you smiled!” The black Phoenix Force pro took out a pack of Marlboros. Nick blinked. James had given up smoking long ago, but a good deal of the planet hadn’t. In many of the world’s neighborhoods a pack of cigarettes was a perfectly acceptable small bribe or gift, and as an interrogator the offer of a smoke was often very useful in breaking the ice and bonding with a subject. It was Calvin James’s experience that most Russians smoked like chimneys.
As predicted, Nick gazed upon the pack longingly.
James shook the pack with an expert hand and put a cancer stick between Nick’s lips. He put the point of his bayonet between Nick’s collarbones and his finger on the trigger as he dug out a lighter. James lit the cigarette. Nick stopped short of sagging in relief. James lit one for himself to complete the bonding experience, and hated himself for enjoying the opportunity. The two soldiers spent a few moments smoking silently in the Polish dawn.
“Nick?”
Nick breathed out blue smoke. He savored the cigarette as if he suspected it was his last. “Yes?”
“You seem like an okay Ivan to me.”
“Thank you.”
“So I tell you what I’m going to do—despite the fact you tried to blow me apart with an antiaircraft gun.”
“This was nothing personal.”
“I know. Neither was killing most of your friends.”
“These men were not my friends.”
“I know. So you know what I’m going to do?”
“No. I do not know what you are going to do. I find you very unpredictable.”
“You’re a charmer. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to patch up that leg. I’m going to give you a shot of morphine and something to eat, and I’m going to let you live. The question is, do you want me to let you live here, handcuffed to that cannon after we drop a dime on Polish state security and anonymously tell them that there has been an armed Russian incursion across the Kaliningrad border. Or…”
“Or what?”
“Would you rather come with me?”
Nick looked as though he was getting a migraine.
“Maybe see Orsk again?” James cajoled. “Me? I’m going to Sweden. Want to go to Sweden with me?”
Nick turned pale, gray, bloodshot eyes on Calvin James. “I have never been on Swedish holiday with pillar of Nubian manhood.”
James turned to McCarter. “I like him! Can I keep him?”
McCarter got on the horn. “Dragonslayer, we need extraction. One guest.”
Right now the Stony Man chopper wore civilian clothes and currently bobbed upon the waves on pontoons just outside Poland’s three-mile international limit around the Gdansk Gulf.
“Copy that, we have room. Let me warm up the engines,” Jack Grimaldi returned from the chopper. “ETA ten minutes. You got an LZ for me?”
“It should be light by the time you get here. Right next to my signal is a glade. Hawk will be standing in it waving his arms. It’s mostly muck, but with the pontoons you should be able to land just fine.”
“Copy that. How did it go?”
“They were expecting us.” McCarter glanced at the twin barrels of the ZSU-23-2 cannons. He had grown rather fond of them. “And, Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I think they were expecting you, as well.”