Storm Front

“Corporal, are you okay?” a man said in Russian from somewhere up above. Storm had spent enough time in Russia to recognize the origins of the accent. The man was from Moscow.

Storm summoned his best impersonation of a Muscovite and replied, in Russian, “I stumbled. I’m fine.”

“You’re as clumsy as an ox,” the man said.

Storm replied, “And you’re as ugly as one.”

The man laughed. Storm pulled his knife out of the dead man’s chest, then took his flashlight. It was a full-size Maglite, a big, weighty steel thing, made heavier by the four D-cell batteries that powered it. Thinking quickly, he said, “I think I bent the firing pin on my gun when I fell. I’m going to have to come back up and get another one.”

“The general won’t like that.”

“I will have to offer him my apologies,” Storm said.

“No, Corporal. Take one of mine. I’ve got two.”

“Thank you, my friend. If we will be alive, we will not die,” Storm said, pleased with himself for hauling out that old Russian saying. It seemed to settle the conversation for the moment.

Storm stripped the T-shirt shreds from his feet. He had to sound like a clumsy Russian who was unconcerned about the noise he was making as he climbed back up. He began trudging noisily upward, to the third floor then up to the fourth.

When he made it to the last bend in the stairwell before he reached the top floor, his flashlight illuminated a pair of dusty black boots. Storm quickly swung the beam upward to the man’s face, blinding him. The man reacted by turning away and shielding his eyes with his left hand. His right hand held a gun by its barrel.

“Turn that thing off,” he ordered.

“Sorry,” Storm said, complying with the order. But by that point the man’s night vision was thoroughly ruined.

“Thank you again for the gun,” Storm said as he reached the landing.

“You’re wel—” the Russian began.

But the words were cut off. Storm had swung the Maglite at the side of his head, connecting with a crushing blow. Storm caught his body before its fall could make a sound. The crack of the Russian’s skull had been loud enough.

Storm stayed at the top of the landing for a minute, to see if anyone would come to investigate the source of the sound. When he was satisfied no one had heard it — or that it had been dismissed as related to the strange car explosion — Storm tucked the Maglite into his jacket and eased away from the stairwell.

He entered the long hallway that split the two sides of the building. It had doors — or, in some cases, merely door openings — scattered at irregular intervals along both sides. Small amounts of ambient light spilled from those doorways, giving the corridor a gloomy illumination.

Storm thought back to the schematic he had studied on Clara Strike’s phone. He did not have a perfect photographic memory, but he could close his eyes for an instant and see it. From where he was standing, the hostages were in the sixth room down on the right. There were also rooms on the left to contend with. Any one of them could have men in it.

He would have to go room by room, clearing them as he went. There was no other way to do it.

He wondered briefly how Clara Strike was doing — what obstacles she was facing, whether she had made it up the staircase yet, how many hostiles she had encountered — then put those thoughts out of his mind. Strike was a big girl. She could handle herself.

He drew the Glock. He inched to the first room on the left, then rounded quickly into the doorway. No one. He crept in. It was empty, save for trash.

He was about to exit when he heard two voices coming from the hallway, talking in Russian. They were heading toward the north stairwell. If they made it there and found their colleague with the crumpled head, they would sound the alarm and this operation would instantly change.

“I hear it’s painful,” one of them was saying.

“Oh, it’s the worst,” the other assured him.

“I had a gallstone once,” the first said.

“Kidney stone is worse, the only way to—”

The sentence became muffled. They had disappeared behind the door to the room immediately next to Storm’s. He had to act fast. He took one glance out into the hallway and, when he saw it was clear, padded silently to the next room.

He paused at the door. It was windowless and made of a cheap wood laminate. It had a piston at the top that kept it closed.

It presented Storm with a conundrum. Waiting for them to reemerge and taking them out in the hallway wasn’t much of an option: The hallway ran the length of the building, meaning he — or the bodies he felled — could be spotted from some distance. At the same time, the door ensured there was no way to enter this room without the inhabitants being aware of him.

He pulled his jacket over his head and hunched over, tucking his gun in his gut. He burst through the door, moaning, immediately falling facedown on the floor in a rounded lump as the door closed behind him.

“What the…,” one of the guards started to say.

“Ohhhh, my kidney stone,” Storm groaned in Russian.