Page 169 of Enemy of My Enemy

Shouts rose from a car nearby, bitter cursing in muffled English and Russian. The car door flew back as Scott erupted from the smuggler’s hold, stumbling and struggling against the bound arms and legs. A strip of duct tape was over his mouth, fury in his eyes.

Sasha sighed. “The smugglers want an extra ten thousand because of him.” He helped Jack out of the car, letting Jack lean on him when his legs almost gave out.

Scott saw Jack leaning on Sasha and shouted. He turned to the nearest smuggler and hollered through the tape. Even muffled, Jack could make out his words. “Get this off me, you fucker!”

The smuggler waved a knife in Scott’s face.

Sasha snapped something in Russian and the smuggler stopped immediately, shoving Scott around until he could cut through the tape at his wrists and ankles. As soon as Scott was free, he whirled on the smuggler and punched him in the face, sending him sprawling to the ground.

Scott jogged to Jack’s side as Sasha tossed a wad of cash at the smuggler rolling in the dirt.

“You all right?” Scott took over for Sasha, holding Jack up.

“I’m good. Legs just fell asleep.”

Scott nodded, but his gaze took in everything, his head moving on a swivel. “Looks like we made it to Russia. I can’t believe we’re still alive.”

Sasha slapped on the hood of his jeep, idling on the side of the clearing. “Time to go!”

* * *

Barricades and roadblocksslowed their drive, but Sasha was waved through at each checkpoint. Gunfire echoed in the distance, and Jack couldn’t tell if it was just around the corner or three mountains away.

Camps of civilians littered the mountains. Russians, rebels, and separatists, ethnic minorities who had been fighting in the forest for decades, all camped together under the thick canopy.

“Moroshkin has bombed much of the region hunting us,” Sasha said, catching Jack’s eye in the rearview mirror. “We have over a hundred thousand refugees in this forest alone.”

Bullet-riddled police cars sat beside minivans outfitted with machine guns. The sights of a civilian insurgency run by an exiled president fighting against a totalitarian coup.

“Where is Sergey?” Jack leaned forward, his head between the front seats. Sasha had a radio and two rifles propped up in his passenger seat. Crackling static and low Russian faded in and out.

“Near the front. We are pushing north. But.” He glanced at Jack. “We have something to do first.”

They drove on, up and through the mountains until the air grew colder and fog formed in front of their faces. The sun set, and the forest dropped into darkness. Sasha kept the jeep’s lights off, driving slow by flashlight through the impenetrable blackness. He spoke quietly into the radio and listened for whispered Russian in return.

All around Jack, the darkness of the forest played on his mind. Banked coals were the only light for the people huddling in the thick woods, and dimly lit faces seemed to appear and then fade into the black. There were no sounds other than the crunch of the forest floor beneath Sasha’s tires—crackling leaves, skittering rocks—and soft, staticky Russian and a radio whine. His heartbeat seemed to fill the empty spaces in the world, his breaths as loud as gunshots. The chill air pressed in on him, as did Scott, and the jeep seemed too small, too tiny an oasis in this crazed world of hidden armies fighting against madmen. What was he doing? Entering a warzone? Trying to find Ethan? What could one man do, set against the impossible vastness of the world’s evil?

He was going after the love of his life. That was the goal. That was the mission. Ethan. Always, always Ethan.

His stuttering heart slowed somewhat, and he focused on the smell of the forest, the clean dirt and snow-slick air. He let his hope unfurl, hope he’d clenched tight to. Hope that he’d find Ethan. Hope that he’d feel his arms again.

The forest was the way to Ethan: through the darkness, back to his lover.

Finally, Sasha’s dim flashlight bounced off something other than a thick tree trunk. A concrete bunker, weathered and dilapidated, stood in the middle of the forest. Sasha whispered into the radio and parked the jeep.

“Old Soviet monitoring station,” he said. “We took it over.”

Jack and Scott piled out of the jeep and followed Sasha through the darkness, down the concrete stairs, and into the dark bunker. Over the door, an ancient red light flickered. Sasha shrugged before he pushed open the bunker’s door.

A bare concrete hallway stretched into darkness. Flickering bulbs hung down, most more dead than working. The bunker seemed to be empty, but at the end of the hallway, footsteps rang out, someone jogging their way.

Jack glanced at Sasha, trying to read him. Sasha’s faint smile told him everything.

“Sergey?”

“Jack!” Sergey appeared in the ring of light beneath a flickering bulb. His gaunt face beamed, and he held his arms wide as he jogged the last distance toward Jack and Scott. “You made it.”

Scott grumbled. “Thought we weren’t going to, once or twelve times.”