The Book of Dragons. Группа авторов

shoot back as soon as there was opportunity was hard to resist, but Yuli signaled Wrona to wait. The little pop of the sniper rifle was unmistakable. The woman screamed, and Yuli and Wrona both opened up on the flanking enemy who had been briefly surprised to realize how far out of safety he had drifted. Just like that, two of the men were dead. Killing the last one and the woman took longer.

      Afterward, Pintador brought down the Humvee while Yuli and Wrona went through the houses, the shed, the truck, and the cars. The heroin was in the shed, where Yuli had expected it to be. Fifteen bricks wrapped first in plastic and then cloth. It was what they expected to find. The binders in the sedan were a surprise.

      Yuli still remembers seeing them: five three-ring binders with blue plastic covers and spines as wide as his hand. They had reminded him of medical records. When he picked one up, it felt too heavy. He remembers his first thought: the paper had gotten waterlogged. When he opened it, each page was a cardboard backing with a grid of clear plastic pockets four across and four high. A gold coin rested in each pocket; some were krugerrands, some American gold eagles. Each was an ounce of gold. Each sheet, a pound. Each binder, between fifteen and twenty pages deep. At the time, it was a little more than half a million dollars. Gold has gone up since then. Now the coins are worth nearly two million.

      Yuli had never heard of the target trading in coins. Everything was supposed to be American dollars, if it was anything. This was something new. Yuli had wondered who the man in the suit was and who he had worked for, but there was no identification in his pockets or in his car.

      Pintador had loaded Nowak into the Humvee, wrapped in plastic film they’d brought for the purpose. No evidence left behind was the rule, and a dead mercenary was evidence. Wrona went back to the shed and returned with three bricks of heroin. He had tossed one to Yuli.

      “Spoils of war,” Wrona said.

      Yuli tossed it back. “You take it. I’m keeping these.”

      “You sure?” Wrona said. “The shit will vanish. Show up with those, someone will notice.”

      Yuli had taken one of the coins out, enjoying its luster in the faint light of the coming dawn. The weight of it on his fingertips. Some part of him had known even then that he wouldn’t sell them.

      “I’m keeping these,” he’d said again, and Wrona had shrugged. Then it had been time to finish up.

      Wrona and Pintador took cans of gasoline from the Humvee and soaked the compound. Yuli got the flamethrower and, standing outside the fence line, he turned it on everything. The dead men, the woman, houses, truck, Jeep, sedan. The dogs. The earth.

      The flames roared, and he had roared back until his breath and the fire were one thing.

      The tunnel narrows down. The roots and soil you were going through at the mouth are thinning out, and you can see the carved stone. This is a worked passage. Not just something natural.

      Goblin warren. I’m telling you this is a goblin warren. This is bad.

      Better than going in the front door.

      The tunnel turns to the right. About twenty feet farther down, you can see an opening. Like it comes to a bigger chamber and ends there. No door, it just opens out. There’s light.

      Okay, I’m dousing the torch.

      Don’t kill the fucking torch! We need to see!

      We don’t need to announce ourselves. Anyway, I’m carrying it, so I douse it.

      It gets dark.

      We wait until our eyes adjust.

      Everyone roll perception, and let me know if you miss.

      Ah. I’m down by one.

      Anyone else miss? No? Okay, you were looking at the torch before it went out, and so you’re taking longer to get your dark vision. Everyone else, you see that the light at the end of the passage is reddish and flickering. Like there’s a fire nearby. And because of the way the light hits the stone, you can catch the shadows where something’s carved into the walls.

      Like runes? Something’s written there?

      More like there were places for something to be set into the rock. Braces maybe. But they’re gone now.

      I use my amulet for detect magic.

      You don’t find anything particular to the marks.

      I don’t like that. I roll for traps, and … make it by two.

      Yeah, that’s the kind of thing you’d see if someone had put in a winch or something. If you had to bet, you’d say one of those stones is a pressure plate, but you can’t tell what the mechanism is that it triggers.

      Well, folks, you don’t make something like that unless you’ve got something worth guarding. I’d have to say we’re getting close.

      Yuli stands naked in front of his full-length mirror and wonders how he let it get this far. His arms are thin, pale, and grayish. His belly doesn’t pouch out much, but the skin is slack. He has tits like a twelve-year-old girl. He keeps slouching. He’s getting a little bald, a little gray, but that’s just time. His teeth are yellow from cigarettes and coffee, because that’s how it goes. But he’s weak and slow, and that is his fault. Complaisant is another word for stupid, and he is finished with being stupid.

      The cigarettes go first. He breaks each one over the toilet, dusting the piss water with tobacco so that he can’t go back and fish one last cigarette out of the trash. Next is the alcohol. Then the sugar. He can’t believe how much shit he’s been eating: frozen pizzas and chocolate candies and bread so white it looks like slices of snow. Now that he sees it all clearly, it’s amazing that he isn’t in worse condition.

      Next is the guns. Those, anyway, are still in good condition. Three pistols—two matching Glock 17s and a Sig Sauer P220 that had been given to him as a present by an old girlfriend. He also has a Bushmaster M4 semi-automatic carbine that he has carried for almost a decade. There are people who think more guns are better. Yuli thinks that’s wrong. Someone who has used ten thousand guns once is an amateur. Someone who has used one gun ten thousand times is an expert.

      He puts a clean towel over the kitchen table to keep the oil off it, then cleans them, assembling and disassembling them until all the parts find their familiar places in his fingers. He spends hours dry firing them, aiming at the microwave, the kitchen faucet, the people passing by on the street. Click click click, training his hand not to anticipate the kick, practicing like a pianist playing scales.

      When the boy sees the guns, his eyes get wide. Yuli doesn’t talk about them, and the boy doesn’t either. When the boy is at school, Yuli runs up and down the stairs, pushing himself. The first time, he only manages four trips down and up and down again before his heart is tapping on his eardrums and he’s shaking. He has to sit on the bottom step and put his head against the wall, a long, slow trickle of Russian profanity dribbling out from his lips. Weak old man. When he gets his breath back, he runs up and down two more times, pushing until he is literally incapable of doing it again. The next day he hurts like someone has beaten him, and he does it again. The third day is worse. The fourth, he does ten rounds before he has to stop. He wants a cigarette. He wants a drink. He feels sick from the pain and the craving, and he revels in his suffering. It is his strength coming back.

      He would like to find a boxing club. Someplace he can hit someone and be hit. A way to remind his body what violence is. He should have been doing this all along, and the impulse to do it now is as bad as the nicotine withdrawal. Tactically, going out to a gym is a mistake. He doesn’t know where the enemy is, and every trip out of the house is an exposure. Instead, he strips his bedroom bare and works there. Push-ups, sit-ups, lunges. He finds a couple of old cinder blocks half buried in the alley, and brings them in for weights. He starts getting biceps again. He starts seeing gains, and the gains come faster.

      He was a predator for many years, and his body remembers what it was like. Wants to return to that way of being. Is hungry for it.