different faces. Dark hair, small nose. Hard bones. He didnât care about her red lipstick or her short dress, and he didnât mind her vicious smile. She was a denizen of this world, but then again, so was he. He liked the idea of some rough, violent romance that would shatter that part of her. A romance that would never occur, and that he would never act upon. Not and, he thought, because he would never act on it. He would never even ask her name.
âLa Rus,â Ivan said with mock surprise, as the Wolf approached the table. Ivan was enormous and blockheaded, so he never had any use for subtlety. He was Belenkoâs enforcer; he came with the oligarchâs contract to find the traitor Karpenko. The million-dollar reward being offered by Putinâs FSB, though, was the Wolfâs real reason for being here.
âIâm shutting it down. The club is off-limits.â
âWhy, La Rus?â The Wolf wasnât sure where Ivan had heard that phrase for Russians, but it was an insult. âAre we finally going to do something?â
Typical. Foot soldiers always thought of the fight as the work. It was the part, after all, that was glorified in the old Soviet film footage. The stand outside Leningrad. The tanks on fire. The endless fistfights and car chases of American movies.
But it was these moments, the maneuvering before the encounter, when a true soldier thrived. The Wolf had learned that lesson from Sun Tzu and practiced it himself, in every battle of the last thirty years, from the mountains outside Kandahar to the shattered apartment blocks of Grozny and Tbilisi.
He was from the lost generation, the foot soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, at the tail end of the worldâs last great empire, when troglodyte commanding officers had plowed relentlessly ahead, in the old Soviet style, leveling villages and slaughtering the population to kill a few insurgents. He had watched helplessly as men like Andrei Sirko, his commanding colonel, turned the tribes against them and good Russian soldiers to heroin, and even now, thirty years later, he hated those incompetent commanders for the humiliation: the greatest country on earth, with the greatest weapons in the history of the world, brought low by primitives with a few Stinger missiles.
And then, a few months after their retreat from Kandahar, the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Soviet Union soonafter. He had spent a month on his army base in Bolgrad, getting smashed on vodka and cursing men like Colonel Sirko. He spent the next two months thinking the Soviet Empire was better off dead, and the next two years watching corrupt politicians sell state-owned factories; corrupt senior military officers sell off state munitions; and hardliners in the Red Army stage a coup for the honor of the Motherland . . . only to be upstaged by Boris Yeltsin, the Politburoâs drunk.
After the coup, he lost hope. The army was in tatters. The KGB and security systems dissolved. He considered joining the new society, working as a bodyguard for the emerging capitalist class, but Sirko saved him. He had seen one of the new oligarchs on television, not Karpenko but one of the Russian bears, and behind him, for a moment, he had glimpsed Col. Andrei Sirko, with his rigid military bearing, and he knew that world wasnât for him.
So he lit out for the Balkans when Yugoslavia collapsed. He was the Lone Wolf then, odinokiy volk, quarrelsome and surly, fighting for the Serbs but fighting, really, without cause or country. He didnât fit it in the new world, he had decided, and he didnât want to. He was a soldier. Fighting was his life.
But he discovered something else in Bosnia, besides the cleansing power of war. He discovered that there were others like him. Thousands of others. Tens of thousands, even, young soldiers cut loose by the collapse of the empire, angry and lost, looking for money and adventure and trained in the
âLa Rus,â Ivan said with mock surprise, as the Wolf approached the table. Ivan was enormous and blockheaded, so he never had any use for subtlety. He was Belenkoâs enforcer; he came with the oligarchâs contract to find the traitor Karpenko. The million-dollar reward being offered by Putinâs FSB, though, was the Wolfâs real reason for being here.
âIâm shutting it down. The club is off-limits.â
âWhy, La Rus?â The Wolf wasnât sure where Ivan had heard that phrase for Russians, but it was an insult. âAre we finally going to do something?â
Typical. Foot soldiers always thought of the fight as the work. It was the part, after all, that was glorified in the old Soviet film footage. The stand outside Leningrad. The tanks on fire. The endless fistfights and car chases of American movies.
But it was these moments, the maneuvering before the encounter, when a true soldier thrived. The Wolf had learned that lesson from Sun Tzu and practiced it himself, in every battle of the last thirty years, from the mountains outside Kandahar to the shattered apartment blocks of Grozny and Tbilisi.
He was from the lost generation, the foot soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, at the tail end of the worldâs last great empire, when troglodyte commanding officers had plowed relentlessly ahead, in the old Soviet style, leveling villages and slaughtering the population to kill a few insurgents. He had watched helplessly as men like Andrei Sirko, his commanding colonel, turned the tribes against them and good Russian soldiers to heroin, and even now, thirty years later, he hated those incompetent commanders for the humiliation: the greatest country on earth, with the greatest weapons in the history of the world, brought low by primitives with a few Stinger missiles.
And then, a few months after their retreat from Kandahar, the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Soviet Union soonafter. He had spent a month on his army base in Bolgrad, getting smashed on vodka and cursing men like Colonel Sirko. He spent the next two months thinking the Soviet Empire was better off dead, and the next two years watching corrupt politicians sell state-owned factories; corrupt senior military officers sell off state munitions; and hardliners in the Red Army stage a coup for the honor of the Motherland . . . only to be upstaged by Boris Yeltsin, the Politburoâs drunk.
After the coup, he lost hope. The army was in tatters. The KGB and security systems dissolved. He considered joining the new society, working as a bodyguard for the emerging capitalist class, but Sirko saved him. He had seen one of the new oligarchs on television, not Karpenko but one of the Russian bears, and behind him, for a moment, he had glimpsed Col. Andrei Sirko, with his rigid military bearing, and he knew that world wasnât for him.
So he lit out for the Balkans when Yugoslavia collapsed. He was the Lone Wolf then, odinokiy volk, quarrelsome and surly, fighting for the Serbs but fighting, really, without cause or country. He didnât fit it in the new world, he had decided, and he didnât want to. He was a soldier. Fighting was his life.
But he discovered something else in Bosnia, besides the cleansing power of war. He discovered that there were others like him. Thousands of others. Tens of thousands, even, young soldiers cut loose by the collapse of the empire, angry and lost, looking for money and adventure and trained in the
Similar Books
