"Very good." To Anatoly. “Toss him in. The Harris bitch will take care of him for now."
Anatoly tosses the boy in like so much garbage. Scrambling for the hatch, the boy would have had his fingers smashed if I hadn't lunged for him at the last second, looping my bound arms around him.
He thrashes in my arms, screaming.
“Hey, hey, hey," I murmur, trying to stay calm. "I'm a friend. Amiga. I'm an amiga. Calm. Calm."
He slows a little. "Madre. Mamá, mamá. Le dispararon."
"I know," I whisper, guessing at what he's saying. "I know. I know."
He twists. "Cómo te llamas?" His eyes are big and dark and wet, intelligent and scared.
I know enough Spanish to answer that. "Bryn."
"Soy Renihno." Ren-IHN-yo.
"Hi, Renihno."
"Hola." he blinks hard. "Mi Madre…"
"I know," I whisper again. "I'm sorry. But you have to stay calm. Okay? Calm."
He blinks hard, nodding, visibly gathering his courage. "Sí. Tranquilo."
"Sí,” I echo. "Tranquilo. Stay calm and they won’t hurt you."
He nods—I get the feeling he understands a bit of English, even if he can't speak it.
He twists in my arms again, putting his back to my front. For a few moments, he's still, but then I feel his shoulders shake.
He weeps quietly for a long, long time.
What do you say or do when a kid just watched his mother get shot?
Not a damn thing. I just keep my arms around him and let him cry.
The longer this shitshow goes on, the more it feels like mere death is too good of an ending for these soulless monsters.
Objectively, torture is wrong. I know this, okay?
But these people? Maybe it'd be a little less wrong.
16
16: MEETING OF THE TITANS
Thanks to Alexander, we know exactly where Bryn is—the techno-wizard extraordinaire was able to remotely undo what he did, somehow. He tried to explain it, but only Lear followed any of it. The upshot of it we—the surviving RMI blokes and me—are doing my least favorite thing in the whole bloody damned world: waiting.
We're sitting around in a hangar at the arse end of a shitty, rundown old airfield just across the border in Germany. It was likely a Nazi staging ground or supply depot back in the second World War. The hangar, if you can call it that, is little more than an overgrown Quonset hut without a front, open to the elements and stuffed full of derelict aircraft parts. I'm sitting on an old jet engine manifold, cleaning my rifle with a kit borrowed from Chico.
We're waiting for Bryn's dad to arrive in some sort of fancy super jet that's able to make the trip from France to Germany in a fraction of the usual time. On board are the legendary original six Alpha One Security members; every operator on the earth knows their names: Harris, Thresh, Duke, Puck, Lear, and Anselm. The baddest of the bad. Their exploits are damn near mythological, at this point.
Fuck me, I'm nervous.
I get jittery before a firefight, especially if I know I’m going into one. I feel fear when Death brushes up against me.
What I don't get is fucking nervous. Ever. I wasn't nervous when I stood before Vivian's husband, the DSF; I was scared shitless I was going to be thrown in the brig, or worse— vanished into a blacksite, for example. Officially, our lot don't use them. Unofficially? There's always a place where undesirables can be disappeared and questioned using "advanced interrogation techniques." I was convinced I'd find myself on the wrong end of such a one.
