A step back, then a short three-pace run-up to break down the door. The plywood-and-batten construction, as expected, couldn’t withstand the charge of a hundred kilograms of mass — it flew off its hinges and greeted the police invasion with a triumphant crash. He and six other fighters — a many-armed, many-barreled assault team — found themselves in a narrow little hallway, swept the walls with quick glances, ran the floor plan back through memory, and with a shout multiplied by seven throats — “Freeze, motherfuckers! Everyone on the floor!!!” — burst into the rooms.
He ended up in the smallest one — stale and dark. The stagnant, fume-heavy reek of days of drinking, mixed with the smell of unwashed bodies sprawled right there underfoot, hit him in the head, washing over him in a wave of disgust and revulsion. Wincing from the lack of oxygen, he made his way to the balcony exit, which needed to be blocked, and, automatically carrying out the single most important item on his current list of duties — namely, standing with his back to the decrepit transom — carefully inspected the citizens sprawled on the floor, candidates for detention. There were six of them.
There were six of them — two girls and four males around twenty, judging by the complete absence of fabric in the relevant places, who had been copulating filthily, drunkenly, senselessly all night, right up until his arrival here, on twelve square meters of lust and depravity, diluted with three liters of Stolichnaya and some other muck. From where he stood, the labels on the bottles by the door were hard to make out. He let his eyes slide over the walls, scrawled with some kind of nonsense, snorted “A den of vice,” and switched his attention to the pale patches of backsides — the girls were lying face-down and seemed to be slowly waking up. The wrong, trembling movements of limbs searching for clothes — underwear, to be precise, lying nearby but out of sight — pointed unmistakably to a faint shadow of shame breaking through the hangover. Pride becomes a woman. The impregnators lay motionless. Nothing could have become them.
He spat through his teeth at his feet, ran a palm over the short barrel of his rifle, and listened to the commotion coming from the neighboring rooms. By the sound of it, he’d drawn the calmest room: drunks flattened by post-orgasmic apathy, incapable even of lifting their heads to register the fact that the police had invaded private property. At least he’d gotten lucky here. Next door, though, things were far from calm. Through the flung-open door came the sound of someone resisting: “You bastards! Ah, fuck! It hurts!!!”
He smiled.
This wasn’t picking pockets or shaking down kiosk owners. This was the riot squad.
He wiped the smile off his face. An odd stampede of footsteps came from the stairwell: who’s running? from where? to where? Strange. And in the neighboring rooms the sounds of a struggle wouldn’t let up, which was doubly strange. According to the intel, there were about ten people in the den, and six of them were right here, right under his eye. Could a whole squad of fighters really still not handle four half-criminal mugs? They’d taken down whole crews, not just riffraff…
Very strange.
A shape flickered in the doorway.
— Get him! — a shout rang out from the next room. It was Lyokha shouting, the master of the takedown. Looked like today it had slipped. He’d let one get away.
He assessed the situation instantly. Chasing the runner and leaving six waking suspects unattended was not an option. Especially with rookie Yegorov standing at the door — who had begged, practically in tears, to join the assault team but had been left on backup instead. “Well, let’s see what kind of backup he makes,” he thought. In that same instant, three single shots rang out. They came from the stairwell, right where Yegorov was posted and right where the runner had been heading. This was an emergency. This was a—
He tore for the door to burst out of the apartment and assess the situation. Why three shots? Why?
The answer was simple. The first two shots had wounded Yegorov and thrown him against the wall, where, rolling his terrified eyes, he was inspecting a pair of blood-oozing holes in his bulletproof vest. The third shot had punched a hole in the wall opposite. Nobody had ever taught Yegorov how to shoot. This wasn’t firing at paper targets in a range — out here, only the fast and the accurate survive.
— Lyokha, hold my room, — he shouted back over his shoulder and rushed down the stairwell, chasing after the crash of criminal feet two floors below. “Gotta catch him, catch him, catch him,” the blood hammered at his temples, leaving a faint salty taste on his palate — the taste of the chase.
The chase was supposed to end at the entrance doors, where the patrol group was standing by as backup. The guys, hearing the shots, weren’t supposed to lose their heads. If only they managed to draw their weapons in time. They had to make it. They had to.
He tore up four flights of stairs in one go and— oop! The crash of a door being broken down reached him. The man he was chasing turned out to be an old hand who knew, knew, that brave lads with guns at the ready were waiting by the entrance. So, to avoid getting close to them, to avoid seeing them at all, the criminal broke down a door on the second floor, shoved aside the stunned owners of the now doorless apartment, and made for the balcony, which faced the opposite side of the building. A resourceful bandit!
He smiled and ran after him, past the utterly bewildered owners of the apartment. Well, what did they expect… They should have put in a metal door! He burst onto the balcony and — sure enough! — saw a retreating back some thirty meters off. The bandit, dodging between the trees, was running toward the not-too-distant railway line. A good three hundred meters to it. Catchable. His wind was still decent, his gear wasn’t dragging him down too badly — especially since he, considering himself a sensible enough man, had long ago pulled all the plates out of the back of his vest, cutting its weight exactly in half. Why protect his back? He’d never turn it to bandits. He glanced down, gauged the height — three, four meters — and, before he even had time to feel the chill in the pit of his stomach, stepped out into empty air, meaning to land on knees bent to absorb the fall, remembering for an instant his service in the airborne troops, and—
And nothing after that. A sharp burst of automatic fire threw him flat onto the ground. In that same second the shooter exhaled: “Shot one of our own, fuck!”
One of our own.
The brave sergeant standing by the entrance heard the stampede of feet, the crash of a door breaking right nearby, quickly ran up a flight, burst into the doorless apartment, saw the fleeting blur of someone’s huge back in the balcony doorway, and instantly pulled the trigger. Only afterward, only after the punch of gunpowder smoke hit his nose, did the sergeant realize that the stranger’s back had been wearing a blue police-issue vest, and a tangle of scattered thoughts spun through his head: “Maybe it missed? Maybe the kid’s still alive? Maybe the vest saved him? It has to have saved him! It has to!”
Nothing of the sort.
He, shot down mid-flight by his own man, lay with his arms flung wide on the withered grass, his green eyes staring at the dull coin of a gloomy sun, and his whitening lips whispered:
— …and you’re going on about the concept of postmodernism in the context of contemporary literature. Well, would you look at that, fuck…