Chapter 1
Chapter One
In which Konstantin blows shit up.
Konstantin…
“Our last year, brother.”
Lucca toasts me with his beer bottle, and I click my glass of vodka against it. We sat on the stone ledge, legs dangling, outside the open floor-to-ceiling windows in the common room in our suite, watching the wind tear over the sheer surface of the cliffs bordering this side of the Ares Academy.
Our rooms face the vivid, stormy blue of the Atlantic. Despite the blazing fireplace keeping the main room toasty, we’re still sitting out here like idiots, freezing our asses off and watching the waves beat futilely against the cliffs.
Rubbing the back of my neck, I groan. “It’s hard to be excited when I know every faculty member will attempt to wash us out of the program before June.”
Lucca shrugs. “We survived the first three years. By now we know all their tricks.” He took another gulp of beer. “I hope.”
“You and me both,” I said.
“You’ve been a gloomy asshole since you came back from the Trans-Siberian railway trip,” he nudges me with his shoulder. “Something going on with you and Mariya?”
“Besides the usual bickering and her never-ending snotty behavior?”
Lucca laughs, “Oh, you give as good as you get. Did something happen that night?”
We both know what night he’s talking about. The explosions, how they rocked the train cars, the heat searing my skin, I still see it in my dreams.
Stalling for time, I get up to refresh my drink and grab him another bottle of beer.
“Thanks,” he says, tapping his bottle to my glass. “So? What happened?”
“I… fucked up,” I admit.
Lucca settles himself more comfortably. “Oh, I know I’m going to want to hear this story.”
When Maksim, Pakhan to the Morozov Bratva, agreed to his American-born wife Ella’s wish to take a week’s trip on the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok, it became an extended family vacation. Ella is an incurable romantic and after she’d seen a documentary about the railway being the longest in the world, there was no stopping her.
But a Morozov “family trip” isn’t just for them. There are important alliances through marriage and close friends. Because the Morozov Bratva is allied with the Toscano Mafia through marriage, Giovanni, Dario, and their wives boarded the luxury train with us. The Turgenev Bratva is allied through my upcoming marriage to Mariya, and we all came as well.
Each family that joined the trip came with their own security forces. By the time we boarded the train, there were over a hundred of us. Even though we’re traveling halfway across Russia, Maksim made certain that the security protocols would be insanely tight. We were better protected than any king or president would be.
“The trip was pretty cool, even though I still thought it was the worst fucking idea in the world as a security risk,” I said. We stopped in cities I’d never been to even as a native-born Russian, like Tyumen to see the ancient Trinity Monastery with its gold-capped domes. We walked along the Yenisey River in Krasnoyarsk and sampled the Pelmeni dumplings in Irkutsk.
“How about the train?” Lucca asks.
“The train Maksim procured for the trip was some serious high-end shit,” I said, “a black and red series of cars with all this fancy gold detailing. The interior of the train cars looked a lot like the Four Seasons in St. Petersburg, you’ve been there, right?”
“I get the vibe,” he nodded, “crystal chandeliers, expensive furniture, and lots of gleaming wood paneling and polished brass accents? Hopefully, high-end liquor?”
“Slava bogu, yes, thank god,” I laugh. “We had less than two weeks before we had to head back here to the Ares Academy and being stuck on that train and on my best behavior in front of my parents was not how I’d intended to spend my last days of freedom before our professors attempted to murder us in our last year here.”
“And the attack? When was that?” Lucca asks. I’d only had a chance to make a couple of quick calls to let him know we were alive after we could get off the train.
“We had three stops left,” I said. The wind was getting colder, but my Russian blood didn’t feel it as much. “We were having dinner that night when Maksim’s Obshchak came rushing in. He barely managed to say we were under attack before a train car behind us exploded into shrapnel.
“I’d been waiting for it,” I snorted. “The heads and heirs of three major crime families all together on a train in the middle of the fucking Gobi Desert? It would have been easier to strip naked and stand in the middle of Red Square, hand our enemies a gun, and invite them to start shooting!”
“Walk me through this again?” Lucca asks, “I’m trying to picture how you handled a gun battle on a train. Oh, and the tank and the helicopter.”
On the train…
The wave of heat from an incinerated train car behind us swept through ours, sending everyone scrambling for cover. Each of the three families had taken responsibility for arming sections of the train and I knew the dining car had half a dozen wall panels stuffed with Turgenev weaponry. I slid open one of the doors hidden in the wood wainscoting and shouldered one of the AR-15’s.
Soldiers from our three families poured into the car with extra guns and ammunition and I handed my mother a Glock, checking to make sure it was loaded first. Mariya didn’t wait, pulling a sniper rifle out of one of the stashes and hauling up one of the windows to shoot through the gap.
“There’s a tank blocking the tracks in front of us,” my father shouted, listening to someone yelling information in his headset, “and a helicopter just landed behind us. Kon, with me.”
He carried an FIM-92 Stinger missile launch tube under his arm the way other men would carry their briefcases. Scooping up the BCU gear that holds the launch tube for firing, I raced after him.
“We must be at least three train cars away from the dining car or the blowback could set it on fire,” he said. The door ahead of us burst open and he had his gun out and shot the first man through the door before I could even raise my rifle.
At least I shot the next bastard in the head, exploding it into red vapor and throwing his body back against the other two men behind them. Unfortunately, one of them had submachine gun, sticking the muzzle through the opening and spraying the seats with bullets as we ducked behind them.
“Cover your ears,” my father shouted, ducking, and I just barely got my hands up as he hurled a flashbang grenade at the invaders, then rising to casually shoot one, then the other. I winced, even with my hands slapped over my ears the percussive force of the grenade made my eardrums bulge ominously. My father pointed up, and I could feel the vibration of boots thudding on top of the train. We both aimed and shot upward as the footsteps got closer and smiled as the bodies thudded heavily against the roof and rolled off onto the tracks.
“Two more cars!”
The scramble through the last train car was mainly in a crouch, kicking through broken glass, my ears still ringing from the flashbang. My father put his hand to his earpiece, trying to hear the information being shared in his headset.
“Our bird’s in the air and they’re about to drop the tank-killer charge,” he said, “hang on. Three, two-” The train car rocked violently and there was screaming above us as the last of their soldiers on the roof of the train were blown to pieces from the destruction of the tank.
There’s always the moment in a gun battle when everything turns into a blur of light and sound, the heat of explosives searing skin, and hearing mutes from the gunfire. Everything narrows down to the sight of who was shooting at me.
We were almost to the caboose; I could see the helicopter behind the train and a clot of the enemy’s men blocking our route to fire at it.
“This is close enough,” my father said, “get the gear set.” He put down some cover fire as I set up the missile and braced the blast-proof shield in front of us. He had timed me over and over before on weapons assembly and I’m fast with the shoulder-mount Stinger. Once my hand was on the grip stock, he slapped me on the back and nodded toward the door. “Straight through.”
We watched the streak of fire tear through the caboose, the men and continue its inexorable path straight into the helicopter, already hovering off the rails like they realized the fight was lost. It exploded in a blue-white flare of light and heat, sending flaming chunks of metal in all directions.
“Good work. Let’s get back,” he said, “your mother probably has bodies piling up as we speak.”
Shit, I thought, knowing Mariya, she does too.
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