Reamde

IN THE WHOLE world, there might have been as many as ten thousand people who were better than Sokolov at falling and rolling around on hard surfaces. Circus acrobats and aikido masters, mostly. Also included in that group would have been many of the younger Spetsnaz men. The remaining six billion or so living humans did not even enter the picture.

Sokolov had come to it a bit late, since he had not been recruited into Spetsnaz until after serving a couple of tours in Afghanistan. But for exactly that reason his trainers had been ruthless with him, making him dive and fall and roll on concrete floors over and over again until blood had seeped through the fabric of his uniform wherever there’d been bone anywhere near the skin. The point being that if you did it right, there shouldn’t be blood, or even bruises.

Different special forces units around the world had different philosophies as to what was the best way to conduct close-quarters fighting. In Spetsnaz, it was a fixed doctrine that you should be in continual motion and most of that movement should take place at an altitude of considerably less than a meter. Standing there like an asshole looked good in cowboy movies but was not a viable tactic in a world filled with fully automatic weapons. Knees, hips, shoulders, and elbows should be used as fluidly as the soles of one’s boots. Hands, though, should be reserved for holding things, such as guns. Sokolov had been trained accordingly and had maintained that standard of training for as long as he had stayed in Spetsnaz. After he had moved into the private sector, he had continued to practice SAMBO: a Soviet martial art, similar in many respects to jujitsu, that involved a huge amount of falling and rolling. He had done this because, when you were working as a security consultant, trying to keep things safe for private clients—clients who might be, say, movie stars at ski resorts or CEOs’ wives at shopping malls—there were times when you just wanted to get someone on the ground or place them in a submission hold as opposed to riddling their corpse with bullets and shotgun pellets.

Usually, of course, he warmed up a bit first and swept the floor to make sure it was clean and free of little bits of hard stuff that could cause minor injuries. Those niceties were lacking here, but the fact that a tall black man—evidently an Islamic militant of some type—was swinging a loaded and cocked AK-47 over the table at him gave him all the motivation he needed to skip the preliminaries and go into motion.

First, though, he put four bullets into the wall just next to the door toward which he was diving. He did this because he had seen, in his peripheral vision, someone furtively poking his head around the corner and then drawing it back: behavior that triggered whole networks of neural circuitry built up in his brain during his work in Afghanistan and Chechnya.