Red Templar

could hear footsteps echoing in the tunnel behind them now. Maybe it was time to stop and fight. What? Bricks against AK-47s?

“We gotta go, Eddie boy,” said Holliday, putting on his worst Irish accent.

“Leave me, tio,” muttered Eddie.

“?Tio? I’m not your uncle, and this isn’t some stupid Audie Murphy film where that round-faced little Mr. Perfect stays back to zap a hundred crazy Japs with his machine gun and when he runs out of bullets he starts whipping them over the head with the red-hot barrel. You’re coming with me and you’re coming right now, goddamn it!”

“?Que? Who is this Audie Murphy?” Eddie asked. Holliday dragged him to his feet, got his arm under his shoulder and stumbled forward. A few yards later the tunnel turned sharply to the left and then ended. Holliday would have fallen over the edge if his headlamp beam hadn’t dipped out of sight first.

“Shit,” said Holliday. He played the light from his lamp over the edge and realized where they were. A foot beneath him the pile of broken rubble drifted down to the old metro station with its waiting self-powered car. He suddenly realized he could see a faint light coming from the driver’s cab in the front of the car. There was someone inside. As calmly as he could he reached up, switched off his own lamp and eased Eddie downward until his legs were dangling over the edge of the opening.

“Remember the old metro station we saw with Genrikhovich and Ivanov, the priest?”

“Si,” said Eddie, his voice quavering with fatigue.

“It’s right under us. There’s somebody on the train. Some kind of guard, I think. I’m going to take him out, but I’m going to have to leave you here for a minute or two. You okay with that?”

“Si, Popo Tio.” Eddie smiled. He was in some kind of shock-driven la-la land now.

“Okay,” said Holliday.

“Okay.” Eddie nodded, his eyes half-closed in sleep. The footsteps behind them were much louder now.

“Shit,” said Holliday.

“Si, mierda.” Eddie grinned.

Holliday eased Eddie to one side, then lowered himself carefully down onto the pile of rubble. He made his way blindly down the pile, concentrating on the little square of weak light coming out of the front of the subway car. He finally reached the platform. The doors of the car were still open. He stepped quietly inside, gripped the door handle of the driver’s compartment tightly with one hand and rapped on the door with the knuckles of his other hand.

The door burst open and a belligerent bullet-headed figure appeared, iPod buds dangling from his ears. Holliday could distinctly hear Slayer’s “Angel of Death” playing at earsplitting volume.

“Kto yebat’ ty?!” Bullet Head grunted angrily. Holliday slammed the door in the man’s face as hard as he possibly could. Bullet Head dropped like a stone, heavy metal still pounding out of his ears.

“It’s me, the angel of death,” said Holliday, and began stripping the man of his weapons.

38

It took Holliday at least five minutes to ease Eddie down onto the pile of rubble below the open floor of the tunnel and another three or four to get him down to the platform and settled into one of the seats on the train. By the time he actually sat down at the driver’s seat of the self-propelled subway car he could actually hear the raised, echoing voices of the Spetsnaz team coming after them. They kept on calling out for Boris Byka, presumably their name for Bullet Head, who was still out cold on the rear of the platform where Holliday had dragged him.

Boris had been armed with a folding-stock AK-103 assault rifle, an OC-23 Drotik twenty-four-round automatic pistol, half a dozen RGD-5 fragmentation grenades and a very nasty-looking Kizlyar Scorpion bowie knife. Plenty of killing power, but the seven or eight guys coming down the tunnel would be at least as well armed, and with Eddie down the odds were pretty bad.

Holliday stared at the control panel. Lot of gauges, a big chrome steel T-throttle in the middle of the dashboard and a single pedal on the floor. The T-bar had black plastic inserts at the ends of the T.

There were five big buttons on the right. One red, one green, one yellow with a black lightbulb printed on it and two white ones. The white ones had arrows on them, the arrow on the top button pointing up, the arrow on the bottom button pointing down.

The one with the lightbulb seemed reasonably self-explanatory, so he pushed it down with his thumb. The lights in the car flickered on, then off, then on again, and there was the sudden sound of a generator kicking in. He pressed the button with the downward-pointing arrow. There was a pneumatic hiss and the doors thumped shut.

“So far so good,” he muttered. If he assumed the throttle was just that, a throttle, that meant the pedal on the floor was probably the brake. That left the small problem of motive power. In his world, red meant stop and green meant go, but this was a subway from Stalin-era Soviet Russia, so he pressed red instead. There was a mechanical moan like a car started up in freezing-cold weather and then a stuttering roar, and the whole car began to vibrate.

The throttle was resting in a notch, which Holliday assumed was the idle position. He gently slipped the T-bar out of the notch and gave it a tiny nudge, then let it go; the car moved forward a few feet before some sort of automatic device cut in and the car stopped dead. Holliday frowned, confused, and then realized that by letting go of the right-side black plastic insert on the throttle he’d initialized an automated dead man’s switch. His father had been a locomotive driver for one of the old unconsolidated New York railroads and had talked about dead man’s switches, but this was the first time Holliday had seen one in action.

He pulled the throttle handle back and into the notch, feeling something definitely disengage as he did so. The clutch. He looked out the open doorway of the driver’s cab. Eddie was slumped against the nearest seat across the aisle, his eyes half-closed.

“Eddie?”

“Si.”

“Stay awake, amigo. I’ve almost got us out of here.”

“Bueno,” mumbled the Cuban.

“Here we go.” Holliday eased the throttle out of the notch, keeping his right thumb down on the plastic insert. He pushed the throttle forward little by little; the car groaned and clanked but began to rumble out of the old station.

As he pushed the throttle farther the Spetsnaz team in the tunnel began to fire blindly, catching the back end of the car as it moved out of the station, shattering glass and puncturing the cracked plastic covers on the seats. One of the team even managed to toss down one of his RGD-5 grenades onto the platform. Unfortunately it was all a bit too late. The bullets did no real damage to the train, and the grenade only blew out a few tiles on the walls and ceiling and put a few white-hot pieces of shrapnel into the unconscious Bullet Head’s brain. By the time the first man reached the platform, the rear lights of the self-propelled car were already vanishing around a curve in the tunnel and Bullet Head was as dead as a doornail.

On that uneventful night in his equally uneventful life, Felix Fyodor Fosdikov sat in the toasty warm cab of his big GS-18.05 motor grader and watched the first snow begin to fall in the Kuntsevo district a few miles south of the Moscow Ring Road. As he watched the heavy snow begin to turn the world a uniform, featureless white, he bit into his wife’s black bread-sauerkraut-sausage-and-goat cheese sandwich and chewed. He took a sip of the hot, vodka- laced coffee his wife had prepared for him in his old battered thermos. During the spring, summer and fall Felix Fyodor drove a garbage truck for the Central Moscow district, which he preferred to snow removal.

When you worked garbage you found all sorts of useful and potentially valuable things you could sell at the big tailgate markets in Mozhaysk and other places outside the city. In his forty-six years on the job he’d found everything from a perfectly good gold watch to a pink-enameled artificial leg. Even if what you found wasn’t worth anything, there wasn’t a day that went by working garbage that wasn’t interesting.