15. Damir #3
He reaches the ground floor as Nikolai and two others force the attackers near the loading bay to retreat behind a delivery truck. The truck engine roars to life. One of the rear doors hangs open, showing nothing inside but empty space and two men firing from behind the frame.
Not an extraction. A distraction.
I see it too late.
“Mikhail,” I say into the comm. “South exit.”
Static.
Then Mikhail swears.
The captain is not running for the truck. He’s running for the south exit, where the old river gate opens to a narrow service road beyond the fence.
I jump the last six steps instead of taking them.
Pain snaps through my knees when I land, but I keep my balance and cut across the warehouse floor.
A bullet hits a crate near my head, sending wood splinters across my cheek.
I fire once without slowing. The shooter drops behind the truck wheel and doesn’t rise.
The captain reaches the south door. He shoves it open, and cold air enters the warehouse.
I catch him before he clears the threshold. My shoulder hits his back, and both of us crash through the doorway into the service yard. Gravel tears under my shoes. He twists as we fall, landing a punch against my jaw hard enough to turn my head. I taste blood.
He’s good.
Not good enough.
I drive my elbow into his ribs, once, twice, then pin his wrist beneath my knee before he can reach the pistol at his ankle. He bucks, snarling now, all professionalism gone under the animal need to survive.
A black SUV waits beyond the fence. Its headlights cut across the yard. Someone inside raises a weapon through the open passenger window.
I grab the captain by the vest and haul him up just as the shot comes. The bullet hits him in the back, and his body jerks against mine.
The SUV reverses hard, tires spitting gravel, then swings toward the service road. I lift my gun and fire at the windshield.
Once.
Twice.
The glass spiders but doesn’t break.
Nikolai appears behind me with a rifle and fires a controlled burst into the rear tires. One tire blows. The SUV swerves, clips the fence, throws sparks from the metal, then keeps going on the rim, screaming into the dark until the road bends and swallows it.
The captain collapses against me. I lower him to the gravel. His mouth fills with blood. I press my hand hard against the wound in his back, not because I care if he dies, but because dead men answer nothing.
“Stay with me,” I say.
His eyes roll toward mine. He tries to laugh, but it comes out wet and broken.
“Who?” I ask.
His mouth moves, but only blood comes out.
I grip his vest tighter. “Who?”
His eyes fix on something over my shoulder, not fear now, not loyalty either. Just calculation dying too late. Then the light goes out of them.
“Fuck,” Mikhail says behind me.
I let the body drop back to the gravel. “Convenient.”
I stand, blood from the captain dark on my hands, mine or his, impossible to separate now.
Inside the warehouse, the gunfire has stopped. That silence has its own weight.
We move back inside together. The floor is a mess of splintered wood, shattered glass, smoke, and bodies.
My men are already clearing weapons, restraining the wounded attackers, checking pulses.
Three of ours injured badly enough for doctors.
Two minor. One possibly dying near the loading dock, Nikolai’s medic working fast with both hands red to the wrists.
I stop beside the back office.
The door hangs from one hinge. Inside, filing cabinets have been pulled open, papers scattered across the desk and floor.
The safe remains closed. The ledger cabinet is locked, though someone tried to force it and failed.
Mikhail’s “breathing” attacker is tied to a chair in the corner, head hanging forward, blood dripping from his chin.
He’s young. A hired piece, not the hand that moved them.
Mikhail wipes his knife on a rag. “He doesn’t know who paid.”
“Everyone knows something.”
“He knows a meeting point, two faces, and that payment came in foreign accounts. No names.”
“Accent?”
“Ukrainian, maybe. Could be trained out of something else.”
“Marks?”
“No family tattoos. No prison marks visible. Hard to place him with a family.”
Nikolai appears in the doorway. “Four dead attackers inside. Two wounded. One escaped in the SUV, driver unknown. Weapons are clean. Serial numbers removed. Ammunition imported.”
“Not Sergei’s usual.”
“No.”
“Mikhail?”
He looks grim. “The timing is too good to be coincidence.”
“Yes.”
“They hit after the wedding, after everyone expects Sokolov or Antonov retaliation. That makes it easy to blame either.”
I look at the open files on the floor.
The attackers breached the office but took nothing.
I crouch and pick up one of the scattered documents. Route schedule. Next month’s movement through the eastern corridor. Not the most valuable file, not the most obvious, but enough to map pressure points if someone already knows what they’re looking for.
“They knew where to go,” I say.
Mikhail’s face hardens. “Inside information?”
“Maybe.”
“From our side?”
I look around the room, at the broken cabinets and at the dead men scattered around me. At the one young attacker bleeding into his shirt, terrified enough to piss himself but not knowledgeable enough to matter.
Nikolai shifts. “So Sergei?”
“Maybe.”
Mikhail shakes his head once. “Sergei would want you alive long enough to suffer publicly. He wouldn’t send men without marks to die in your warehouse unless there was a larger game.”
“There may be.”
I look at the captain’s body being carried in from the yard, his face already slack, blood black against his beard.
“Find the SUV,” I say.
Nikolai nods. “Already have men on the road.”
“Find the driver.”
“Yes.”
“Mikhail.”
He straightens.
“Pull every file on old Volodin, Antonov, and Sokolov routes from the last twenty-five years. I want to see everything laid out in front of me.”
Only then will I get to the bottom of things.