Chapter 85 - The Sins of the Patriarch
The mercenary pinned Claire against the cold concrete, his heavy armored knee driving into her ribs with enough force to crack bone. His hands wrapped around her throat, choking off her oxygen with crushing, mechanical force. His visor hovered inches from her face, his breathing harsh inside his respirator.
"The General sends his regards, 187," the man snarled through his com-mic.
Claire didn't panic. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel of red static, but her training overrode the primal terror of asphyxiation. Instead of fighting the man’s hands on her neck, she slid her right hand down to her boot, finding the hidden ceramic push-dagger sheathed against her calf.
With a lightning-fast upward thrust, she drove the four-inch double-edged blade up through the mercenary's chin, piercing clean through the pallet and into his brain stem. The man’s body locked in a sudden, violent spasm, then went limp, collapsing heavily onto her chest.
Gasping for air, Claire shoved the heavy corpse aside and rolled to her feet, coughing violently.
Kovacs emerged from behind the steel cabinet, holding a twelve-gauge combat shotgun, his single eye wide with grim admiration. "You haven't lost a step, sparrow."
Julian staggered out from behind the blast door, his face pale as chalk, his trembling hands holding his empty sidearm. He looked down at the three bodies, then at Claire, who was already calmly stripping the fallen team leader of his magazines, night-vision goggles, and communications gear.
"They're finding us too fast," Julian breathed, his voice cracking with rising hysteria. "How do they know where we are? Kovacs's bunker was supposed to be completely off-grid! Margaret didn't even know this place existed!"
Claire stood up, securing a captured tactical radio to her chest harness. Her face was an emotionless mask carved of granite. "Margaret didn't know. But Arthur did. Kovacs was Arthur's supply sergeant in Berlin back in 1989."
Kovacs froze. The metal barrel of his shotgun slowly began to shift toward Claire.
"You knew the moment we stepped through that door who was paying the tab, didn't you, Kovacs?" Claire said, her voice dropping into a lethal, monotone calm. She didn't raise her weapon; she didn't need to. Her hand was already resting on the dead commando’s sidearm.
Kovacs stopped the movement of his shotgun, a bitter, defeated smirk cracking his weathered face. "He offered me five million dollars, Claire. He told me you were broken. He told me you were coming here to sell out whatever was left of your brother's legacy to the highest bidder."
"And you believed him?" Julian cried, his voice trembling with righteous fury. "You thought my sister was a traitor?!"
"In our world, everyone is a traitor, boy!" Kovacs snapped. "Your father made me. He gave me my first contract when the Wall came down! He owns half of Eastern Europe’s shadow infrastructure! You cannot fight him! He is a god in the Urals!"
"He's not a god," Claire said softly, stepping closer to Kovacs. The sheer aura of death radiating from her made the hardened mercenary back away until his shoulders hit the concrete wall. "He's just an old man who has lived twenty years past his expiration date."
She reached out, grabbed the barrel of Kovacs’s shotgun, and smoothly wrenched it from his grasp before he could react. She racked the slide, ejecting the chambered shell, and tossed the useless weapon to the floor.
"You’re going to give me the train manifest for the Trans-Siberian freight line out of Warsaw," Claire said, leaning in until her eyes bored into his soul. "And then you're going to tell my father that his extraction team failed, and his daughter is bringing the war directly to his front door."
Kovacs swallowed hard, the arrogance completely draining from his eyes. He slowly reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a leather-bound travel ledger. "Platform 4. Warsaw Central. Midnight tonight. Train 704—military logistics transport carrying heavy generator equipment to the Yamantau sector."
Claire took the ledger without a word. She grabbed Julian by the arm and pushed him toward the emergency exit tunnel.
"Claire," Kovacs called out hoarsely from the shadows of the ruined bunker. "He's not alone down there. He has an army of six hundred men who believe he is the savior of the new world. You will not leave that mountain alive."
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Claire turned back at the mouth of the dark tunnel, her eyes gleaming like obsidian. "I don't plan on leaving, Kovacs. I plan on burying him there."
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