Page 26 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)

Ministry of National Defense Prison

Hanoi, North Vietnam

THE OPPRESSIVE HEAT WAS enough to drive one mad.

That and the smell. Adrik Voronin would never get used to the smell.

A mixture of urine, rotting jungle, dust, and gasoline, it was almost worse than the rats.

Almost. The rats could at least be killed.

They were disease infested so he knew he could not eat them raw.

But he could take the slightest bit of pleasure by crushing their small skulls, hearing their high-pitched screams as death found them.

One day he might give in and devour one, though he knew that would be inviting death, and he was not ready to leave the Earth.

Not yet. He refused to die hungry, of starvation, as had so many of his countrymen in the wake of the Great Patriotic War.

Hunger was his overriding memory of childhood.

Even when he slept with his stomach full on meals bought with his Soviet Army pay, he still dreamt of starvation.

No matter when he ate, he woke up ravenous.

He feared that feeling would remain with him until his dying day.

At first, they had kept him in a cell at H?a Lò, a place the Americans had nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton.

Adrik was familiar with it, as he had spent time there questioning prisoners in special interrogation rooms that had been built by the French in the early days of the twentieth century.

A guard had made the mistake of opening his cell door to deliver a small portion of rice and a root known as manioc.

Before other guards could respond, Adrik had beaten the small man to death by smashing his head into the edge of the concrete bed.

He was pouring his small bucket toilet overflowing with piss and shit over the dead body when the others had responded with wooden clubs.

After that, he was moved to solitary confinement at the nearby Ministry of National Defense Prison.

His two-meter by one-meter cell at H?a Lò had been luxurious compared to his current dungeon in a buried concrete box, his legs in shackles.

With no room to stand, his only ventilation and light came through a series of small pencil-sized holes above him.

It was more of a coffin than a prison cell.

At irregular intervals, the top of his cell opened and cold rice, rotten vegetables, and burnt rat meat with the hair still attached was thrown down on him.

Why were they even keeping him alive?

Adrik guessed it was because they did not want to explain the death of a Soviet advisor to Moscow.

He knew there were close to three thousand Soviet troops in North Vietnam and that the Soviet Union supplied the North Vietnamese with everything from Kalashnikovs to T54/55 tanks to MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighter jets.

They even provided the crews to SA-2 surface-to-air missile batteries that were so effective against American airpower.

Adrik knew that with that support came strained relations.

His imprisonment only exacerbated those tensions.

His captors were starving him to death. Dying of natural causes would be more politically acceptable when they informed Moscow of his passing.

Waking up, his pink-and-gray-striped prison uniform, known as pajamas, drenched in sweat, the morning sun piercing the thin holes above his head, Adrik swore under his sour breath.

Even he knew that he smelled of death. He would not be able to fend it off indefinitely.

For the past three months he had fought the urge to somehow end his own life, perhaps the way his mother had.

A former KGB assassin of Department 13, Adrik had walked with death since birth.

Down in his hole, his thoughts were occupied by questions of prayer.

But to what god? He had been born in Arkhangelsk, in Northern Russia along the Dvina River where it emptied into the White Sea, a place where many of the churches had been closed or repurposed decades prior in the aftermath of the October Revolution.

Religion had been replaced with government-sponsored state atheism.

His Orthodox grandmother prayed in private but never passed along her beliefs to the child she was raising. It was safer that way.

He closed his eyes and remembered. In his confined space beneath the earth, memories were all he had left.

Adrik’s grandmother had lived through many famines since the rise of the Bolsheviks in 1917.

She was a survivor, and when hunger struck like a rabid dog following the Great Patriotic War, she taught her grandson how to adapt.

Adrik’s father, a conscripted Red Army soldier, had fallen during the Battle of Stalingrad.

His mother, like many war widows, was marginalized, an unseen casualty of the fight with Nazi Germany.

She did not have the mental fortitude of Adrik’s grandmother.

She stopped eating and then one day did not leave her bed.

Soon after, she stopped talking, an expressionless stare replacing a once vibrant sparkle.

Adrik held vigil by her bed after school as she grew more and more emaciated.

It took three weeks for her to die, leaving Adrik and his grandmother alone.

Famine once again ravaged the Soviet Union, just after his eleventh birthday in 1946. The drought was unforgiving, as was the State. Already weakened in the aftermath of the war, Stalin refused to request foreign aid; the postwar world reeking of the Cold War that was to follow.

Adrik was the last of the Voronin men, and the old woman taught him how to stay above ground in Stalin’s Russia. Even with the vegetables from their meager garden, Adrik understood hunger. He also understood that he could survive with the constant pain gnawing at his insides.

It was the hunger that drove Adrik to his first kill, ending the life of a dirty vagrant he caught digging up potatoes and radishes in their garden.

His grandmother had been in town, and Adrik was walking home from school when he caught movement in front of their small home.

At first, he thought it was his grandmother, but as he drew closer, he saw it was a man stealing vegetables and putting them in a worn burlap sack.

That food was how they survived. This intrusion was more than a robbery, it was an assault, akin to murder.

Without the vegetables, they would starve.

Adrik moved to the side of a low stone wall that enclosed the small plot.

Though still small, he hoisted a heavy rock that had fallen from the wall up to his chest. The man was so frantic in his digging that he never heard young Adrik place the rock on the low fortification, slide over, pick it up, and approach him from behind.

Adrik did not even notice the weight as he lifted it high above his shoulders.

He waited for the right moment and then slammed the rock down on top of the intruder’s head.

It had taken a few more hits to ensure the man was dead.

Adrik felt strong.

When his grandmother returned to the small home that evening, she found the boy sitting on the steps gazing at the dead man. Together they buried him. They were never questioned by the authorities.

Not long after, Adrik and his grandmother were relocated from Arkhangelsk to Kaliningrad at the behest of the State, two of almost half a million Soviet citizens moved to replace the forcibly expelled Germans in what was once Konigsberg.

It was in a small village outside the port city between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea that Adrik would truly come of age.

Though the famine’s grip had thawed with the winter of 1947, Adrik and his grandmother still battled the elements to put food on their table.

The hunger remained, but now Adrik was stronger.

He would slip from his bed in the dead of night and join his friends on the streets of Kaliningrad, looking for food and money from any victims who might cross their path.

One night, a fight in an alley with another boy over a scrap of bread had ended in blood.

He remembered breaking a thin bottle, turning it into a jagged weapon, and driving the hewn edge into his opponent’s torso, meeting little resistance from the emaciated frame.

Life leaked from the weak body in seconds, but not so quickly that Adrik missed the boy’s final breath, a ragged, helpless release of air as his body went limp.

Pocketing the bread, Adrik made his way to the nearest dock.

He rinsed his hands of the blood and dried them carefully before tearing the bread in two.

He devoured his portion in the darkness and would leave the other half by the fire for his grandmother after he snuck back into their home.

That night would not be the last time Adrik killed for a meal.

Like many with meager prospects, upon turning seventeen, he followed in his dead father’s footsteps and joined what was now called the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. Though paltry, the meals could be counted on.

He was surprised at how quickly he was defeated by trained boxers in boot camp. But Adrik was a survivor, and survivors learned. He continued his boxing training in the 33rd Guards Kherson Mechanized Division in Romania, gaining a reputation for his quick temper and ferocious speed.

Adrik did his job well but struggled to adjust to the team as part of a tank crew. He worked better alone, and boxing allowed him that escape. Friends were few and far between.

His first taste of combat came when his division rolled across the Hungarian border on November 4, 1956. He and his tank crew fought their way to Budapest, the Soviet onslaught leaving thousands of dead rebels in its wake. Even in war, Adrik rarely missed a meal.