AGENT 192 - An Alex Dorring Thriller, page 1
AGENT 192
Copyright © 2019 by Vince Vogel
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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1
It had snowed during the night and rained during the morning. Black icy sludge covered the pavement and roads. Tire tracks cut through it and cars sent it flying up onto the pedestrians that loped along.
Sitting snugly in the far corner of a west London coffee shop, Philip Foster was able to ignore the weather. He had thoroughly thawed in the twenty minutes he’d been there and it was only when the door opened and the chill wind swept in with the latest patron that he felt the bitterness of the winter morning.
While reading emails on his phone, Foster felt a fresh sweep of cold air, accompanied by the jingle of the bell above the door. Like all previous occasions, his eyes didn’t lift for a single second. He couldn’t care less who strolled in. Only that they quickly closed the door after. But on this instance, he was forced to look up when a shadow alighted over him and his table. It appeared that the latest patron had walked straight up to him.
His eyes narrowed.
Standing before him was a man he’d not seen for several years and certainly not in such a casual setting as a Chelsea coffee shop.
“Yuri?” he said.
The man sat down opposite. Yuri was Russian intelligence. Middle-aged with brown hair peppered gray. Cropped haircut and a sullen expression on his pink face.
“Would you like a coffee?” Foster asked him.
“No,” he said curtly. “I only have minute.”
“I heard you were at a conference in the city. Looks like you brought the weather with you from Moscow. I wasn’t—”
“Shut up!” Yuri snapped at him. He glanced around. No one had noticed the sudden raising of his voice. Turning his eyes back on Foster, he said, “You wanted to know if he ever showed up, da?”
Foster was all attention. The clang and chatter of the coffee house faded from his ears.
“Yes,” he said.
Yuri took something from the inside pocket of his coat and slid it across the table.
“What is it?” Foster asked as he gazed down at the folded scrap of paper.
“These are the coordinates of the place where they are keeping him.”
“Who’s keeping him?”
“I can give you no more,” the Russian said sternly, “than to tell you it isn’t Ukrainian or Russian authorities who have him. It’s something else. I will give you a forty-eight-hour window to monitor with your satellites and then get him out of there. I’d get working quickly on how you do it.”
“Get him out of where?”
Yuri didn’t answer. He merely stood up from his chair and nodded at the paper, before adding, “Get him out and do it quietly. I shall be very upset if your men are caught in this act.”
And that was that. The Russian turned on his heels and Foster watched him leave, pull his collar up, duck his head down and push onwards along the pavement in the freezing wind.
Foster’s eyes turned back to the paper. Coordinates written in pen. He placed them into his Maps app on his phone. A marker immediately lit up in the middle of the Crimean wilderness.
2
The facility in Crimea had once been an oil drilling station, but it had been abandoned ten years ago when the oil dried up. Now it was nothing more than a collection of concrete shell buildings and rusted pipes in the middle of nowhere, the machinery long since seized up.
Ten men manned it. Untrained and uncivilized, they were scattered about the place with no communication equipment. Five inside and five outside on sentry duty. Not that sentry duty was easy this time of year. The air that whipped around the concrete and pipes was thick with snow, a blizzard beating away at the place, and it was impossible to see more than a few meters in any given direction.
One of the men stood on a corner of the main building on a metal balcony so cold it stuck to his rubber boot heels. Snow encrusted his long coat and he shivered inside it. A Kalashnikov rifle hung from his shoulder and his gloved hands filled the coat’s deep pockets. The air was so cold that the drip on the end of his nose had frozen. Standing in a slight recess with his back to a wall, the building rising up a single floor above his head, he stared out into the swirling icy debris of the storm, complaining inwardly at the stupidity of keeping watch in such weather.
Maybe he should have taken the role more seriously. Maybe it would have saved his life.
Before he even knew what was happening, the wire loop dipped down under his chin and tightened sharply around his neck. His hands flew out of the long coat and grabbed at it, but there was no use. He couldn’t wedge his gloved fingers behind the wire, and all he could do was kick out at the snow as he was lifted from his feet. Looking up, he saw a man leaning over the edge of the building, hovering over him and lifting him by the wire as it bit into the flesh of his neck, clamping the windpipe shut. He struggled and kicked until he lost consciousness and went limp, nothing more than a corpse swinging gently in the wind.
The member of the extraction team lowered him to the floor, before jumping down and checking the man’s pulse. When he found that it was no longer there, he retrieved the wire from the neck and stepped over the body, entering the building by a nearby door.
“East section entrance secure,” he whispered into his comms.
He entered a cold maze of corridors. Strip lighting cast the place in shuddering gloom. Thick, rusted piping ran along the damp concrete walls. Water dripped from the ceiling and its sound echoed through the building. To his shoulder, he held tight a L119A1 assault rifle. It was a variant of Colt Canada’s C8 carbine assault rifle. It was used primarily by British Special Forces.
Approaching the end of the corridor, he heard footsteps. Loud and heavy. The undisciplined men guarding the place weren’t expecting anyone. Probably never even considered that someone would be stupid or crazy enough to come all the way out here during a blizzard.
The SAS weren’t stupid. But they sure as hell were crazy enough.
He waited at the corner of the corridor. The guard carelessly walked around and was immediately grabbed, knife placed to his throat. He froze, his eyes glaring down at the blade, which glittered in the dull light.
“Where’s the Englishman?” the SAS soldier asked in Russian.
“The next corridor,” the man replied. “Second door on the left.”
“Thank you,” the soldier said as he slipped the blade across the man’s throat.
It took several passes to cut through the flesh and reach the carotid artery, the neck thick and grisly. On the third saw, he broke through and hit the mainline. Blood sprayed out and the guy dropped gently from him. The SAS soldier stepped over the body and moved onwards. As he made his way along, he heard the various clearance calls of his three comrades over his comms.
“North section secure.”
“South section secure.”
“West section secure.”
He came to the second doorway and stepped onto a rusty balcony that traveled along one side of a large room. It must have once been the main pump room. All the machinery had long since been stripped down for scrap and taken. The room was now completely empty except for a wooden board lying in the center of the floor. As for the man they were looking for, there was no sign of him.
His feet clanged down a flight of stairs that led from the balcony to the floor below. He saw his comrades enter from different ends of the room.
The four men reached the board and stared down at it.
“What now?” one asked.
“The guy I spoke to said he was in here.”
“Maybe he meant under there,” one of the men said, nodding down at the sheet of ply.
“Then we better take a look.”
One of them shouldered his weapon, kneeled down beside the board and dragged it away from a round hole in the concrete floor that was about three meters in diameter.
Nothing but darkness existed underneath. Dust and cold air came billowing up out of it. Then something else. A stench. A terrible stench.
They shone their flashlights into the hole. It went down for at least thirty feet. At the bottom, they saw the outlines of people. They were expecting to find only one, but counted t hree. They all looked dead. Their lights illuminated the decaying face of a woman, blonde hair like wet straw draped across the gray, bloodless flesh. She was sitting with her back to the damp bricks. A neat little hole stood in the center of her forehead from where she’d been shot with a low caliber weapon. Something lay across her lap. They cringed when they saw that it was a half rotten dog. On its flank, part of the flesh had been eaten away to reveal the ribs. It was crawling with maggots. Then there was what looked like a man sitting with a young girl on his lap. His head was bowed and his face pointed downwards, so all they got was the top of it, hair matted with dirt and dried blood. On his lap, the little girl was dead. They could see her eternally sleeping face bloated from decay and another hole in her forehead.
“Hey!” one of the men shouted down.
They never in a million years expected any of them to move. But the man did. He looked up at them, his gray eyes shining from the darkness.
3
Philip Foster stood in a corridor, looking through the window of a hospital room. It was in a military hospital in Germany. Part of a U.S. Army base in Brunswick. He was staring at the man they’d pulled from the well. They’d had to strap him down to a wheelchair. Because when they’d tried to take him away from the two corpses, he’d fought with every ounce of strength left in his body. Two gray eyes, drugged and half open, stared blankly from his recently shaved face.
A door at the end of the corridor opened. Foster didn’t turn to look. It wasn’t until a man was standing next to him that he bothered.
Foster didn’t recognize the tall man, most likely in his forties, dressed in a suit and wearing a smug expression on his face, but he knew immediately what he was.
Defense Intelligence.
“Deacon Cole,” the man said as he offered a well manicured hand.
Foster took the soft fingers and shook it.
“Philip Foster,” he said back.
“I know,” Deacon Cole said as if it was a known fact that he should know. “I’m with Defense Intelligence,” he added.
For the first time, Foster spotted the papers Deacon Cole held in one hand. He had a bad feeling about them.
“So this is the great Agent One-nine-two,” Cole said.
“It is,” Foster said.
“Doesn’t look so great anymore.”
“Well, you try spending some time in a well with the dead bodies of your family and see how great you look afterwards.”
“The bodies were his family?” Cole asked.
“The woman was Tatyana Shatov.”
“The one he ran off with?”
“Yes,” Foster said. “The wife of Sergei Shatov. Although, she’s One-nine-two’s wife now. Or at least was. They were married five years ago. Shortly after they eloped together. Did it in a small church east of Kyiv. It was the last piece of intel I had on him till Yuri Bulgakov slipped me that piece of paper.”
“What about the child?” Cole asked.
“I don’t know exactly. He’s not said a word since we pulled him out. But I gather she was theirs.”
“The cruelty of it,” Cole said, shaking his head gently. “Imagine the trauma of being placed in a hole like that with your dead wife and daughter. Left there to watch them rot. Turn to dust. It’s not worth thinking about.” Cole thought about it for a few seconds, shrugged and then asked, “How long was he down there?”
“We’re not sure,” Foster said. “But by the decomposition of the bodies, they’ve been dead at least a month.”
“Christ,” Cole said, shaking his head as though he refused to believe it. “I read his initial psych report. He’s suffering from severe post-traumatic stress.”
“They say he’s in shock,” Foster said.
“Any idea who put him down there?”
“Nothing concrete. The men guarding him haven’t come up on any of our identifications.”
“What about Bulgakov?” Cole asked. “Won’t he help in their identification? After all, it was him who gave you the location.”
“Yuri merely shouts down the phone when I call him,” Foster said. “Like he said when he slipped me the paper, this is as far as he’s willing to go. So no, we have no idea who killed his wife, child and dog before locking them in a well with him.” There was a brief pause as both men stared at One-nine-two through the glass. Then Foster turned to Deacon Cole and added, “Can we cut the bullshit?”
“Of course.”
“Why’re you here, Deacon Cole of Defense Intelligence?”
A white-toothed grin opened up on the other man’s face and he turned it on Foster. The latter wanted to punch it.
“I like a man who gets straight to the point,” Cole said.
“Me too,” Foster said, staring him blankly in the face.
“Essentially, I want him for my program,” Cole said next.
This, it appeared, was the point.
“What program?” Foster wanted to know.
“One that’s classified,” Deacon Cole said evasively.
“Then I won’t be giving him to your program.”
“Not your decision to make.”
It was then that the papers in Deacon Cole’s hand made an appearance. They were thrust in Foster’s direction. He gazed down at them for several seconds. Cole rattled them. Foster grabbed the papers disdainfully and read. It didn’t make for good reading. They stated that Alex Dorring, Agent One-nine-two, had been selected for a patients program run within the Ministry of Defense. Pine Hills MOD Psychiatric Institute. There was no more detail that that. Simply, it was a patients program. At the bottom, it was signed by Sir Terrance Golding of MI6. Foster’s boss. There’d be no arguing.
“So I take it it’s some kind of psychiatric program,” Foster said.
“In a nutshell, yes,” Cole said. “A program for members of our armed forces or secret services who’ve suffered psychological trauma on the job and need help in reengaging with the world. See if we can’t get them out into the field again or at least back home.”
Foster glanced at the sorry image of the drugged Dorring.
“You’ll need all the luck in the world to even get him to tie his own shoelaces again,” he said. “I’ve seen men like this before. Men sent mad from torture. From trauma. None of them make it through to the other side in any healthy state. At best, they remain under care for the rest of their lives.”
“Well, I always did like a challenge,” Cole said. “Plus, where I’m taking him, he’ll get the best care in the world.”
4
It was the dog barking that woke Dorring.
“It’s probably a fox again,” Tatyana said sleepily as she rolled over in bed next to him.
Dorring sat up, gray eyes glaring into the pitch black. He got out of bed and went to the window. Standing to the side, he opened the curtains and stared across fields of swaying barley at a line of trees some hundred yards or so from the cottage. In the black sky, a bank of swirling storm cloud moved steadily towards them, coating the moon and stars like a veil. It exploded with lightning and illuminated the trees in a flash of brilliant light.
It was then that Dorring saw them.
Five silhouettes emerging from the edge of the trees. Rifles in their hands as they marched their way across the barley.
“Get up!” he cried at his wife.
“What’s the matter?”
She was sitting up now, a distressed look on her face.
“We need to get Katya,” Dorring said as he stormed out into the hallway.
Opening the door to his daughter’s bedroom, he found the girl sitting up in bed staring at the dog, who stood at the window, its paws on the sill, barking into the night. Alex came up behind and quieted the dog before gazing outside.
He scanned the windswept barley and saw more shadows moving across it. Glancing along the length of field, he saw at least ten men wading through the crops in a column. By his calculations, they’d be coming from all sides, closing in on them like a noose tightening around a neck.
Dorring dashed from the window. Tatyana watched him with petrified eyes as he stormed past her at the door, across the hallway and checked the kitchen window on the other side of the cottage. From there, he spotted more men coming from the copse of trees at the edge of the lake, so that the noose was complete and tightening around the cottage.
