Evacuation (The Boris Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Which side had mortars?

  She needed to go into town and gather more intel. Getting back on her motorcycle, she rode forward into town. As she approached the edge of town, she was waved to halt by one of the local police.

  Shit.

  Things did not look good if the police had sided with the NVG. She slowed down, thinking to turn her bike around and head back. Maybe try to infiltrate after it got dark, or go back to her team and see what they could do as a group. As she slowed down, three men rose from concealment pointing their rifles at her.

  Shit on a stick. She was screwed.

  One of them shouted, “Turn off your engine, get off your vehicle and keep your hands in sight.” She quickly estimated the odds in her head and decided that her best option was to comply and attempt an escape later on. They were not likely to know that she was in intelligence since she carried nothing that was distinctly military. There was definitely a better chance of escape than dodging bullets from three assault rifles. Following their instructions, she got off the bike and waited.

  Deciding to be as non-threatening as possible, she started to shaking slightly, as if in fear. One of the men slung his rifle and approached cautiously, keeping clear of the other’s line of fire. He gave her a professional pat down, and she was glad that her sidearm was hidden in the bike saddlebags. That would have been a giveaway to what she was and caused her more difficulties. Then she was handcuffed.

  The man who had waved her down had been talking to someone on the radio, and a police car was quickly approaching from town. It looked like the NVG had lost whatever disagreement had occurred between them and the townspeople. That meant, logically, that the NVG had been staying at the old military base that she had passed. It also meant that the mortars had been used by the townspeople. Shit, again.

  Talk about your intelligence fuckups.

  What information she had been able to access before being dumped in the cold had shown maybe forty or fifty active mercenaries living in the town, supplemented by an equivalent number of retired mercs. At least half of the active ones could have been away on operations. So seventy-five professionals, and maybe another hundred or so former recent conscripts had been her estimation. Not the battalion with indirect fire that she estimated would have been needed to attack the base without suffering massive casualties. And from the looks of the base, there was a well-armed, well-trained militia here that the local military intelligence had not picked up on.

  The police car pulled up, and she was put in the back with a uniformed police officer next to her. “Take her to Boris,” was all that was said as she was put in the car. She wondered who this Boris was. The Chief of Police was not named Boris. The only person of note by that name in the town was a mercenary. Well, THE mercenary she supposed, although the file was somewhat confusing. It had a history going back to the fifties, but the photo of him dated only a couple of years in the past showed a man in his thirties. He was known to have trained all the other mercenaries currently active from this region, but the file included no details on where he had received his own training.

  As the car drove off, she saw one of the four there take her bike towards a nearby barn. It was evident to her they were manning a rather subtle checkpoint.

  At least her clothes and equipment wouldn’t get wet.

  There was a knock on the door. Boris looked towards Bethany Anne and spoke, “They would only interrupt now if they felt it was something I - I mean we - should look into.” He turned to the runner. “Inform the meeting of the proposed Czarina’s conditions. If they agree, get the elders to organize the volunteers. Make it clear I have final approval on any who volunteer, and they will have to be fit in order to serve. The Czarina would have my head if I accepted anyone who could not provide a contribution with a good chance of survival.” Bethany Anne nodded at his last comment. “Enter,” he said more loudly, as the runner headed to the door.

  A police officer, one of the retired mercenaries, entered the room. He said “We brought in a woman approaching the town. Considering the timing, I felt it was suspicious enough to bring her to you. No one else unexpected or from outside the locality has arrived today.” He saluted.

  “Let’s see her. It’s probably nothing, but the timing is odd. I can make sure she can’t hurt you in any way,” Bethany Anne said.

  The woman entered the room. She was tall, about five feet eleven inches tall. With long blond hair and pale skin, her face was strong with Tartar features, displaying an exotic beauty. Bethany Anne felt Boris tense beside her. She looked at him and saw his face, never normally very tan, was whiter than usual. His expression wasn’t giving anything away. In fact, he seemed to have frozen it into one of non-expression.

  Boris, what is it? Do you know this woman? Bethany Anne spoke directly into his mind. She couldn’t hear or feel anything from Boris. It was as if he’d locked down his thoughts and emotions.

  Then she heard a soft whisper from his mind. Still like a calm pond. Repeated continuously, a mantra of desperation.

  Gott Verdamnt! Boris tell me what the problem is, or I will find myself ripping off your arm. I am not made of glass. I need to know what the problem is so we can solve it! She practically shouted in his head.

  Boris glanced at her and sighed. Then, responding with his thoughts, She could be the sister of the woman I loved a century ago. The one that was executed by the Reds. It took me by surprise is all. Especially since she even smells the same.

  Bethany Anne felt intrigued by this. Boris’s devotion to his old lover’s memory was apparent in the effort he had taken to keep his oath to her. His reluctance to explain was reasonable. He didn’t want to poke Bethany Anne’s recent wounds and was trying not to be overcome by his older ones.

  Luckily, TOM had a handle on her grief, which Boris had no way of knowing. She had too much to do right now, although she still spent at least an hour a day alone in a pod dealing with all of the unfiltered emotions of agony, frustration, and grief.

  Forcing Boris to explain caused him to lose the grip he had held his emotions in. Standing motionless next to her, he was a roiling mess behind the stony facade. It even seemed to affect his etheric signature. I’ve got this.

  Bethany Anne turned towards the woman and asked, “And you would be?”

  Janna’s mouth opened and then quickly shut before she could speak. She felt a need to answer with the truth. Had they somehow injected her with some truth drug while she was on the way here?

  Bethany Anne was intrigued. This woman was trying to resist her command, so this person was someone out of the ordinary. Possibly, she supposed, up to no good. Giving the strange woman the benefit of doubt suggested that she simply had no one here known or trusted. Even with that explanation, there was something strange about the resistance to Bethany Anne’s mental pressure. Anti-interrogation training maybe.

  Bethany Anne sighed and issued the command harder, “Look, if you don’t answer me, we are in for a very long afternoon. So you may as well answer. My name is Bethany Anne. Who are you and what is your job?” She supplied maybe fifty-percent more force than she used for Silvens-Werner.

  Without realizing she would speak, Janna answered, “Janna Dimitrievna. Captain, Russian Military Intelligence. At least until a week ago.” Externally she managed to keep her composure. Internally she was cursing up a storm.

  What had she been dosed with? Fuck. She’d scored high in interrogation resistance, even when drugged. But whatever they were using was cutting right through it. Then she thought she saw a slight red glow from the interrogator’s eyes and felt an involuntary shiver go through her spine.

  “And what were you doing here?” Bethany Anne continued.

  “I was coming to see if there was anything I could do to help the people of the town against the Nashi vooruzhennye gruppy. They were the group I was investigating before my team and I were disavowed. The last piece of information I received from inside the group regarded this attack. And it may have cost a
s many as fifteen lives to get. I would not want those lives wasted!”

  Bethany Anne’s face softened. “Ah. So you aren’t here to support the attack, and you have, effectively, been fired and left to survive or die on your own?”

  “Yes," Jana replied through a grimace, “though I hope to link up with some of my team. I doubt any of us would make it through a regular border crossing, though. I’m sure our faces are now flagged.”

  Boris finally spoke. “My name is Boris. I wonder, are you a patriot, Janna?”

  She looked over to the man, trying to put the face she saw in front of her, to the face in the folder, “Explain. That’s a question with many meanings.”

  Boris glanced at Bethany Anne with a twinkle in his eyes, “Are you loyal to the people of Russia, or the government?”

  Janna glanced between the two and settled back to Boris, “People are more important than politics.”

  Bethany Anne laughed, “A humanist who worked in intelligence. I would have sworn we would find an alien out here before that would ever happen.”

  Bethany Anne asked the Russian intelligence officer, “What if I told you we are facing a bigger problem for the entire human race? That if you were willing, you could help your country and the people of Russia by helping the world? I not expect you to believe my word without proof, I’ll show you.”

  At that point, Janna eyes opened, and she started cursing herself again. Damn, she had seen this woman before. Her brain must be sludge for her to have taken so long to put two and two together. This was the CEO of the company that had sent people into space.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Boris was tired. Sleep wasn’t a likely option either. He had five thousand volunteers for the action group. He’d picked a hundred from them easily. They had either served with him or had exceptional service records for their military service. That filled out the officers. He was planning on spreading both officers and operatives in a wide dispersal, using pods if necessary to travel between locations. No more than five hundred agents per area, but only seven proposed areas of operation. It wasn’t like they were expecting to set up bases or open resistance. They were planning to gather intelligence and fight limited actions against the NVG.

  Satellites would find it hard to impossible to get an exact count on the refugee column. Once Janna had been vetted by Bethany Anne, and she agreed to help, her current military knowledge was put to use in planning a route to the Mongolian border that kept to the highway as long as possible while avoiding all population centers. His people would be traveling slowly, and it would add several days but within three weeks they would be safe. The first group had gone ahead with half the Tundra pack and a couple of large strings of horses for the cross-country section. Half the column would still have to walk out once they left the highways, though. There were only so many vehicles available that could travel the off-road section. That included the fifty military trucks that they had scrounged and those captured from the NVG.

  The tundra pack had, to a wolf, decided to join the Guardians. This would expand the Guardians by two hundred and fifty wolves. Two dozen ‘lones’ that they tolerated in their territory had also decided to join. Some Wechselbalg wolves didn’t like company, much like most of the bears. But the adventure was enough to attract them.

  He had the officers and those who had volunteered to stay behind organizing the packing of supplies. Each person could take what they could carry on their back in personal possessions. Any off-road vehicle that had cargo-only space was being loaded to capacity with supplies.

  Danislav knocked on the door and entered the room. “Boris, at least half the wolves are leaving for the Guardians. Might be more when word reaches those who didn’t come to the meeting.”

  Boris shrugged and said, “Their choice. If I was a century younger and wasn’t the best person to try and keep a lid on Russia, I might choose that too.”

  Danislav snorted at the idiocy of the comment, “No, you wouldn’t. Have you got the officer list for the Czarina? She wants to get an early start on making sure your choices are right tomorrow so she isn’t tied up here for too long. ”

  Boris passed the folder over. It listed each person’s proposed position and relevant experience.

  “Oh and Boris, I’d take Vassily over to her first. I wouldn’t keep him trapped under guard for too much time. He does have a temper. But with his contacts, he could be very useful if he can be trusted.”

  Boris only grunted. He didn’t trust Vassily at the moment, but if he had proof that someone else had caused this mess Danislav was right. Boris looked at the clock. Time to get a few hours of sleep before he needed to do talk to Vassily, though.

  —

  Janna was surprised that she had been called to this early meeting with Boris and Bethany Anne.

  Yesterday Bethany Anne had done as promised. Janna blushed at the memory. When the pod had gone straight up, she’d grabbed Bethany Anne’s leg. The response had been “You are cute. If I were a man, I’d be flattered, but I don’t swing that way so remove your fucking hand.”

  At least she had apparently remained relatively calm when Bethany Anne had shown her true nature. She was unsure of how good her control had been, but Bethany Anne assured her that there had been many reactions that were far more extreme. Her trying to open a Pod door into vacuum didn’t really make her feel that her response had been particularly rational at that moment.

  Janna shook her head. She now knew more than Boris probably did about what was really going on, including a lot about him, personally. Although she was unsure regarding his capability to think clearly around her. With what she’d been told in private, her new boss insisted that a woman was needed on his command team who didn’t look at him with awe. The implication was that Janna was going to be Boris’s aide de camp.

  Boris had accepted that, though he had given Bethany Anne a strange glare. Then he’d put Janna immediately to work organizing and planning. It had been midnight before she’d gotten to bed. It had seemed like a very short time until a polite woman had awakened her in the room she’d been provided - at five AM.

  When she walked into the meeting area, Boris and Bethany Anne were seated at a table with an empty chair to one side. There was a hot breakfast laid out buffet fashion. She noticed that Boris had a huge pile of food on his plate which he was attacking with a vengeance. When he looked up, he waved to the chair on the other side of Bethany Anne.

  “Come, sit, eat. We are about to interview a person who might either be very useful or has condemned himself to death for his actions. First, you need breakfast.”

  He was glad Bethany Anne, with her ability to either sense or force truth, hadn’t left yet. He wasn’t entirely sure he trusted his own opinion on Vassily. It would also be good to have a second opinion on those he was effectively making officers.

  Bethany Anne looked at him, shaking her head. She’d finally met someone who could easily eat more than Peter. What Janna didn’t know was that this was Boris’s third plate. Bethany Anne hated to think how he’d survive without food

  He has a draw on the Etheric. The data set we have from his time in the pod shows he would suffer no ill effects. He may just enjoy eating.

  Thanks, TOM. I didn’t really think that one through did I?

  You have a lot on your mind. I only informed you so there was one less thing for you to worry about.

  As Boris finished his meal, there was a knock on the door, and Vassily was led in. He blinked when he saw Bethany Anne and was suddenly and obviously far more nervous.

  Boris started the discussion, “So Vassily. You thought I was gone and sought to butter your bread by pointing out the history of this town to you ‘friends’ in the government.”

  Vassily looked even more nervous now. “No Boris. I swear. I came because I found out who did tell them. I knew as soon as your last contract sponsor wouldn’t provide a photo of your body that you weren’t dead. Then I heard one of my government informants let slip abo
ut the force coming here and that the mercenary in residence was dead according to Phillip Simmons. He was on the list of contacts that use that particular method of contacting me. So it all added up in my mind.”