At the small table in a corner of the ridiculous restaurant, Borodin tore open a sugar packet with his teeth, shook it into his coffee, and stirred with a plastic stick. It was an awkward procedure with his left hand. His right arm was still compromised. The bullet fired by one of Kalnikova’s officers had passed through his biceps, the track no deeper than a centimeter. When he had been younger, he would have laughed off so minor a wound. But the swelling had stiffened the arm to near immobility, so he kept it in a sling, taking care not to further inflame it. His plan for Monday didn’t require he have the use of both hands, but it was always better to enter combat prepared for the unexpected, because the unexpected was combat’s one great constant.
Monday. That thought stopped his reflection on his physical condition, turned his attention to the future. More than two years of planning, and in less than eighty hours it would be over. Vengeance.
The insipid coffee had cooled enough for him to drain the cup, treating the sugar and caffeine as fuel. Though his squad was still on schedule, it wasn’t time to rest. That would come later. There were still preparations to make and now tests to run. The general would never send an untrained soldier into battle. It was time to see what TYR’s replacement could do.
Borodin settled back, tensing his right shoulder as his wooden chair creaked against the flimsy wood paneling of the wall behind him. He didn’t understand how this rundown establishment, little more than a shack off some dismal side road, could remain in business. Ten tables, a short counter with eight stools, the awful stench of years of burnt meat, old oil, something rancid. How could anyone entering this place have an appetite? The gaudy movie posters, mounted deer heads, steer horns, and framed and badly faded photographs of nameless grinning fools added to the miasma of neglect. But all that made this a perfect proving ground.
This restaurant would not be missed, and neither would the seven customers and three workers currently in it at the supper hour, none of them knowing they were eating their last meals.
Borodin checked his watch, set it to stopwatch mode. Then he slipped a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, placed it by his empty coffee cup, put a lighter on top.
“Yo, man!” It was the chef of this establishment. Portly, unshaven, in a stained white apron, calling out from behind the counter.
Borodin gazed at him, an insect beneath notice.
“No smoking!”
Amerikantsy, the general thought. So many rules, so little discipline.
He couldn’t resist.
Keeping his eyes on the chef, he shook out a cigarette from the pack. Picked it up from the table, held it between his lips.
“Hey, man! You could get fined!”
Borodin laughed. Operated the lighter with his left hand.
“I’m warning ya!”
The chef balled up a rag, slapped it down on the counter like an aggrieved nobleman in the time of the czars, throwing down a glove in anticipation of a duel.
Borodin lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply, well aware that now everyone in the restaurant was staring at him, the man who broke the rules!
The chef stormed out from behind his counter, marched officiously toward Borodin at his table.
Stopped in shock as the others in the restaurant gasped.
One old woman gave a short scream. A plate crashed to the floor.
Borodin was no longer alone at his table.
Across from him sat what remained of the late Colonel Yuri Vasilyev, now TYR, attired in the black uniform of a shadow warrior.
The colonel’s containment unit, fully charged, was in the Winnebago in the dusty parking lot outside, watched over by Korolev and the others.
Borodin’s squad had released TYR, given him the first stage of his mission: Find his commanding officer, General Borodin.
Borodin was pleased at TYR’s prompt appearance as scheduled. It meant Vasilyev had properly imprinted on him during the drawn-out process of his physical death.
“What the shit…?” the chef wheezed, standing still, frozen by growing fear. “Where’d he come from?”
Borodin stared at the chef without compassion, without contempt. He just didn’t care about the man or about any of the others. They weren’t even the enemy. Only targets.
“TYR, to me,” Borodin said.
He looked into the face of the dead man, the echo, the berserker. Its eyes were lost in impossible shadows, unseen and unknown. For a moment, Borodin wondered if Vasilyev comprehended his transformation, or if, as the experts maintained, he was simply an automatic system who would operate as programmed. In the end, it didn’t matter. Whatever else he might be, first and foremost, he was a weapon.
It was time to test him. Borodin started the timer on his watch.
“Kill them all,” he said.
* * *
Afterward, when TYR had been recalled and slept in the safety of his containment unit, Korolev and Janyk joined the general to assess the newest warrior’s effectiveness.
They wore painter’s shoe covers to avoid tracking blood.
“Interesting,” Korolev said. “Almost all are head kills.”
Borodin had noticed the same thing. “Trained as an assassin,” he said. “Not as a soldier.”
The other shadow warriors almost always struck their victims in the chest, the center of mass where soldiers were trained to fire their weapons. Ideally, the first bullet would hit the enemy’s heart, but even if the aim was off by a few centimeters, it would still strike something. Aiming for the head was a different matter. A much smaller target, increased opportunity to miss, though favored by snipers who had more time to be certain of their aim.
The chef had been the first to fall. TYR had stretched his hand so that it passed through the screaming man’s face, then solidified so that the face erupted in an explosion of gore.
A few of the doomed customers had tried to escape then, rushing for the main door.
Borodin had been pleased to see his newest shadow warrior effortlessly disappear from beside the chef’s body and instantly reappear in front of that door. There, TYR had dispatched his targets two at a time.
Then he had swept the room, first obliterating those who cowered and begged, then searching for the two who had sense enough to attempt to hide and remain silent. One behind the counter, the other in the restroom.
In all, it took one minute, thirty-seven seconds. Exactly.
Janyk cocked his head as he studied one of the headless corpses. A baseball cap sat atop a blood-glazed mound of shattered bone and lumps of glistening brain matter. “Might this not cause a problem?”
Borodin and Korolev joined him. “How so?” the general asked.
“Identification of the dead,” Janyk said. “What’s the sense of killing so many notable people if the authorities can’t confirm who has been killed?”
Borodin treated the question seriously, though he knew it didn’t matter. His men still believed they were on the mission he had described for them—one to make them proud.
“There will still be fingerprints,” he said. “DNA. Even the contents of their wallets. If there is confusion, even better, yes? If photos are released showing injuries like these…” He gestured to all the mangled corpses. “So much outrage.”
Borodin’s soldiers agreed with their general: The more confusion, and the more outrage directed at America, the better. They didn’t know that America wasn’t the target. Certainly some notable people would die in three days when his shadow warriors were unleashed at the target site, but to the general, those victims would be inconsequential.
His squad didn’t know it, but this mission had only one target.
Korolev started the fire in the kitchen. Janyk opened the valve on the 200-pound propane tank outside the back wall. By the time the authorities sifted through the charred rubble and connected the shattered bodies to those at the hacienda in Sonora and the warehouse outside Albuquerque, it would be too late.
Borodin heard the explosion as they drove away: thunder from the approaching storm.