Mirage tof-9 Read online

  The mountainous man shrugged as if agreeing. “Let’s see where you’ve been, little fish. Take off your shirt.”

  Tattoos were like a résumé inside the Russian penal system, telling others how many years a man has been inside, what kinds of crimes he’d committed, who he had worked for on the outside, and all manner of other information. A cat tattoo meant the man had been a thief, and if he had more felines inked on his body, it meant he worked with a gang. A cross on his chest was usually applied involuntarily and meant he was someone’s slave.

  The driver glanced at the guard, who nodded at this slight deviation from procedure and proceeded to unlock the leg and wrist irons. When he was free, the prisoner stood as a statue, his eyes never leaving those of Marko, the lifer who sat at the apex of prison hierarchy and actually ran it for the guards.

  “Take off your shirt or you won’t leave this room alive,” Marko said.

  If being threatened with death a second time in as many minutes intimidated the prisoner, it didn’t show. He remained motionless and unblinking for a beat of ten seconds. Then, with slow deliberation as if it were his idea, he unzipped his thin jacket and languidly unbuttoned his shirt.

  There were no crosses on his chest, though nearly every square inch of skin was decorated with ersatz prison ink.

  Marko pushed himself from the wall, saying, “Let’s see what we have.”

  The prisoner, one Ivan Karnov — though he had many names over the years, and given his southern rather than Slavic features, this too was no doubt an alias — knew what was coming. He knew prison culture, understood every subtext and nuanced meaning, and the next few seconds would determine how the rest of his time here would be spent.

  Marko towered over Karnov as he sidled up behind him, and the stench of garlic that oozed out of his skin despite the chilled air was overpowering.

  Ivan Karnov gamed it in his head, watched angles and postures, but mostly he kept his attention on Marko’s consigliere. When his eyes widened just the tiniest amount, Karnov spun and grabbed at Marko’s wrist an instant before he almost powered his massive fist into Karnov’s kidney with a hammer blow that would have likely ruptured the organ. Next, Karnov’s knee came up as he forced Marko’s arm downward. The two bones, the radius and the ulna, shattered upon impact, and their sharpened ends erupted through the skin as the forearm was bent in half.

  Karnov was in motion before Marko’s nervous system told his brain of the massive damage. He was across the room in two strides and slammed his forehead into the other prison trustee’s nose. The angle wasn’t optimal because of the man’s height, but the nose shattered anyway.

  In a fight, this move accomplished one critical goal. No matter how big an opponent, or strong, the eyes watered copiously as an autonomic response. For the next few seconds, the man was effectively blind.

  Marko’s agonized roar filled the room as his mind finally reacted to the trauma.

  Karnov pounded the second man’s nose. Right, left, right, and then he slammed a stiffened hand into the guy’s neck, shocking the muscles so they clamped down on the carotid artery. Starved of blood, the man’s brain simply shut down, and he collapsed.

  Elapsed time: four seconds.

  More than enough for the driver and the prison guard to react. The driver had stepped back a pace while the guard had come forward, his hand on the lacquered black nightstick fitted through a ring on his utility belt. The guard was concentrating on making it a clean cross draw, knowing once he had the weapon out all advantage swung to him.

  That was the mistake of thinking a weapon gave you an advantage before it was deployed. His concentration was on his own actions and not on those of his opponent.

  Karnov got his hand on the nightstick’s tip just before it pulled free of its restraining loop and crashed into the guard while his arm was drawn awkwardly between their chests. Both were solid men, and the impact when they hit the cage wall was more than enough to pop the ball joint at the top of the guard’s humerus bone from the glenoid socket of his scapula and tear several connective muscles and fibers.

  The guard outside the caged room had his rifle up to his shoulder and was shouting incoherent orders but had the presence of mind not to fire into a confined space where only one of the five men was a threat.

  Karnov whirled to face the driver and had eight pounds of steel shackles swung at his head and nowhere near enough time to avoid them.

  The blow sent him staggering as blood sprayed from where the sharp manacles had flayed open skin at his temple. The driver was on him even before he collapsed to the floor, not quite unconscious but not all there either. In quick, practiced moves, he had Karnov fully cuffed at the wrists and ankles.

  Karnov began pressing himself up from the floor.

  The driver stepped back and said softly, “Good luck in here, my friend. You’re going to need it.”

  The outside guard finally thought about the alarm and tripped a switch under the desk. The klaxon brought a half dozen men within seconds. Karnov was on his feet now, but the defiance that had made his face such a mask was gone. He’d done what he needed to do — establish himself quickly. He was not a man to mess with, but his fight was with the other prisoners, not their guards. The dislocated shoulder was collateral damage only.

  “I am done,” he said to the guards frothing to tear him apart. “I will resist no more, and I am sorry for your man here.”

  The first guard finally opened the door, and despite Karnov’s words and passivity, the men wouldn’t be denied. Karnov was only grateful as they swarmed him and began a vicious pummeling that they were using only their fists and not their nightsticks. And then a guard kicked the crown of Karnov’s head with a steel-toed boot, and the beating faded away from his consciousness.

  Time was meaningless after that, so Karnov had no idea how much had elapsed before he came to. His body ached all over, which told him the beating went on long after he’d been knocked out, but that was to be expected. He couldn’t imagine mercy being a job requirement for a guard at a supermax prison at the ass end of the world.

  His cell was tiny, barely big enough for him to stretch fully across its freezing floor. The walls were unadorned cinder blocks, and the door was solid metal, with a slot at the bottom for food and another at eye level for observation.

  He was locked down in solitary.

  Perfect, he thought.

  He was still fully shackled, and in the confusion the guards hadn’t realized that he still sported the transport manacles he’d had on at his arrival.

  Perfect, he grinned.

  Also in their anger and their desire to see the prisoner punished, the guards hadn’t performed the customary full body search, otherwise they would have taken away his prosthetic leg.

  Perfect. He knew he was home free.

  Juan Cabrillo had busted out of more than one prison in his life, but this was the first time he’d ever busted into one.

  The whole purpose of the fight had been to get himself thrown into solitary as soon as he arrived. Marko and his goon buddy had made perfect targets, but if necessary Cabrillo would have taken on the guards just as easily. None of them here were upstanding citizens doing a needed but dismal job. They were handpicked thugs who were pretty much part of a private army commanded by Pytor Kenin, a fleet admiral and perhaps the second-most-corrupt man on the planet. Cabrillo’s whole plan was to bypass the prison indoctrination process entirely.

  He touched the spot where he’d been hit with the shackles. The bleeding had mostly stopped. He looked down at his chest. The tattoos did look real, even though they had been applied in four-hour-long sessions over the past week aboard the Oregon. Kevin Nixon, a former Hollywood special effects artist who’d painted on the special ink, had warned him that it would begin to fade quickly. Hence Cabrillo’s desire to get himself tossed into solitary as soon as he arrived at the prison.

  Juan rolled up his pant leg and checked the artificial limb that attached just below his knee.
It was neither the most realistic of his collection of prosthetics nor even the most functional. This one was special built for this mission to allow him to smuggle in as much equipment as possible. The leg was almost a perfect cylinder, with only a slight indentation for an ankle. Had a guard slapped on the shackles, he would have been suspicious right away, but the driver who’d done the cuffing was on Cabrillo’s payroll for this mission. Throughout the entire incident, only he had manacled Cabrillo’s legs, as they had planned and choreographed over and over.

  Juan fingered his bloody temple and wished they’d rehearsed that bit a little more.

  Not knowing the prison’s routine, he decided it best to wait for a while before making his move. It would also allow him some time to recover from the beating. The first part of the operation, hijacking the truck carrying the real Ivan Karnov, had gone off without a hitch. The two drivers and their prisoner were trussed up in an abandoned house at a largely forgotten port town that was the closest to the prison.

  When this op was over, a call would be placed to the village’s authorities, and Karnov would once again be headed to whatever fate awaited him here.

  The second part, getting smuggled into the prison, had gone as well as to be expected. It was the third phase that gave Cabrillo pause. Max Hanley, Cabrillo’s closest friend, second-in-command of their 550-foot freighter Oregon, and all-around curmudgeon, would call it insane.

  But that’s what Juan Cabrillo and his team did on a routine basis — pull off the impossible for the right reasons. And the right price.

  And while this mission had a personal component for Cabrillo, he wasn’t above accepting the rest of the twenty-five million dollars they’d been guaranteed.

  Over the next thirty-six, frigid hours, Cabrillo figured out the routine for solitary confinement. There wasn’t much to it.

  At what he guessed was near noon, the slit at the base of his door was opened and a metal tray with thin gruel and a hunk of black bread the size and consistency of a hand grenade was passed through. He had as much time to eat as it took the jailor to feed the other prisoners on this level and empty the slop buckets the men passed out to him. Judging by the sounds of the guard doing this dreary work, there were six others in solitary. None of the prisoners spoke, which told Cabrillo that if he tried, there would be reprisals.

  He remained silent, ignoring the food, and waited. A hairy hand reached back for the tray. The guard muttered, “Suit yourself. The food ain’t gonna get any better,” and the slot slid closed.

  Knowing now that no one checked on the men down here other than the once-a-day feeding, Cabrillo set to work. After removing his artificial leg and opening its removable cover, he carefully set his equipment around him. He first used a key to unshackle himself from the irons. The key was a duplicate made from the original the driver carried. Not clanking around like the ghost of Jacob Marley was a relief unto itself. Putting on the shirt and jacket that had been dumped into the cell with him was sublime. Next from the leg came nearly a dozen tubes of a putty-like substance — the key to the whole operation. If this didn’t work as advertised, if Mark Murphy and Eric Stone, Cabrillo’s crackerjack researchers, had messed up, this would be the shortest prison break in history.

  He strapped his leg in place and uncapped one of the tubes and applied a thin bead of the gel to the mortar seam between two of the cinder blocks nearest the floor.

  All manner of horrible thoughts flashed through Cabrillo’s mind when the gel didn’t react as it had when they were experimenting back on the Oregon. But the brain can think up scary scenarios in fractions of seconds. The chemical reaction was a tad slower.

  Stone and Murph had deduced the chemical makeup of the mortar used here by reading through thousands of pages of declassified documents in Archangel, where the company that had built the facility back in the ’70s was located. (In truth, a team from the Oregon had broken into the facility and scanned the documents over a three-night period and fed them into the ship’s mainframe computer for translation, and then Eric and Mark had gotten to work.)

  In less than a minute, the acidic putty had completely broken down the mortar. Cabrillo then attached a probe to the tube, so he could stick it into the narrow slit he’d created, and applied more gel to etch away the remaining mortar on the far side of the block. When he was certain it was clear, he kicked the block into a narrow crawl space between his cell’s wall and the prison’s exterior basement wall. He peered into the gloomy space and saw that the next obstacle was a preformed slab of concrete resting on poured-cement footings. Each section probably weighed ten or so tons.

  The mortar acid wouldn’t work on it, but the pack of C-4 plastic explosives would more than do the job.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It took Cabrillo nearly an hour to enlarge his one-block hole into an aperture he could crawl through. On the off chance of a random inspection through the peephole, he stacked the blocks in front of it with just enough room to squeeze behind. In the cell’s dismal lighting it would give the optical illusion of a solid wall.

  Next, he attacked the wall next to the cell door. Rather than use the acidic putty to remove individual blocks, he first eroded all the mortar he could reach in an area just wider than his body. Again, this was a precaution in case a guard or the warden came around. Only when he was ready to make his move would he blow through the rest of the mortar.

  The second-to-last item in his prosthetic limb had been a tiny transmitter. Once he hit the button and its burst signal was sent to the men waiting on the ship, he had six minutes to get the man he had come here to rescue, blow the C-4 he’d already planted, and make it up to the surface.

  Yuri Borodin had been imprisoned here for just a few weeks. While the man ate like a bear, drank like, well, like a Russian, and exercised every third leap year, he was still in pretty good shape for a man of fifty-five. But the guards could have done anything to him in that time. For all Juan knew, he’d find a broken and shattered man in Yuri’s cell, or, worse, Yuri’d already been executed and his ashes added to the mound outside.

  No matter what he found, Cabrillo’s six-minute deadline was carved in stone.

  He went to work on the last of the mortar, committed now beyond all shadow of a doubt. When he was done, he got his lock picks ready, the last trick to come from his cache, and kicked his way through the cement blocks. They tumbled to the floor in a chalky heap, and Juan dove through headfirst.

  “Yuri,” he called in a stage whisper when he got to his feet.

  He was in a long corridor with at least twenty cell doors. At the far end he could see where the hallway bent ninety degrees. From his study of the construction diagrams, he knew there was another door just around the corner and, beyond that, stairs that rose to the prison’s first floor. It was like Hannibal Lecter’s cellblock without the creepy acrylic wall.

  “Who’s there?” a voice he recognized from their years of dealings called back just as faintly.

  Juan went to the door where he thought Yuri was being held and drew back the observation slit. The cell was empty.

  “To your left,” Yuri said.

  Juan drew back that slit, and there in front of him was Admiral Yuri Borodin, former commandant of the naval base in Vladivostok. It had been at Borodin’s shipyard that the Oregon had been refitted and the sophisticated weapons systems integrated after the original ship had outlived her usefulness and was nearly scrapped. The fitting of her revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic engines had been carried out at another shipyard Yuri controlled. Both jobs had neared a combined cost of one hundred million dollars, but with Juan’s former boss at the CIA giving him the go-ahead to convert the Oregon into what she was today, financing had not been an issue.

  Borodin’s normal helmet of bronze hair lay limp along the sides of his open face, and his skin had an unnaturally sallow mien, but he still had the alert dark eyes of the canny fox he was. They hadn’t broken him yet, not by a mile.

  He had a look of wary co
nfusion as he regarded the man before him, as if he recognized him but couldn’t place him. Then his face split into a big toothy grin. “Chairman Juan Cabrillo,” he exclaimed loudly before moderating his voice to a whisper again. “Of all the prisons in all the towns in all the world, why am I not surprised you are in this one?”

  “Proverbial bad penny,” Cabrillo said deadpan.

  Borodin reached through the observation slit to rub Juan’s head. “What have you done to yourself?”

  “Making myself pretty just for you.” Juan started working the lock picks.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Misha.” Captain Mikhail Kasporov was Borodin’s longtime assistant and aide-de-camp.

  “God bless the boy.” A sudden dark thought occurred to him. “To rescue me or kill me?”

  Juan glanced up from the lock, which he almost had open. “Does your paranoia know no bounds? To rescue you, you idiot.”

  “Ah, he is a good boy. And as for my paranoia, Mr. Chairman of the Corporation, a look at my present surroundings shows that I was not paranoid enough. So what is new, my friend?”

  “Let’s see. The civil war in the Sudan is winding down. The Dodgers again have no pitching staff. And I think half the Kardashians are getting married while the other half are divorcing. Oh, and once again you’ve managed to anger the wrong guy.”

  On his ruthless rise to power within the Russian Navy, backed by hard-right political cronies, the mercurial Admiral Pytor Kenin had left a trail of destruction in his wake — careers ruined and, in one instance, a rival’s suspicious death. Now that he was one of the youngest fleet admirals in the country’s history, rumors abounded that he would soon turn to politics under the guiding wing of Vladimir Putin.

  Yuri Borodin had become one of Kenin’s enemies, though he was too well positioned among the general staff to be dismissed outright and had been arrested on trumped-up charges and sent to this prison to await trial — a trial that he would most likely never survive to see. A company Kenin controlled ran the prison on behalf of the government in a public/private cooperative much like the ones that gave rise to the oligarchs in the days after communism’s demise. His death could be easily arranged and would likely happen after the initial flap over his arrest died down.