Page 73 of Gryphon

“It’s a theory,” Mike explained how it fit, without mentioning Holly’s little-toe geography theory. Max didn’t seem like the sort of guy that would impress.

“Hell of a distraction aiming the Russian president’s attention at the far corner of Europe. Guy’s a psycho, real hard to predict.” Max had poured them each a stout or a lager from Georgian NaturAle.

Mike was more of a Pinot Noir man, but Holly gave the stout a solid four out of five. Tad had knocked back his lager like a Marine in a bar, not a man needing to stay sober on a dangerous mission. Only after he finished it, and saw Mike and Holly had taken little more than a taste, did he appear to realize what he’d done. Max refilled it without comment, but Tad worked on the second more slowly.

Max had a shot glass of Jack Daniel’s Twice Barreled Whiskey neat that he hadn’t touched yet. At upward of three hundred a bottle retail in the US, it had been a long time since Mike had tasted that. Max noticed his attention and slid the glass across. He tried to refuse, but Max poured himself another. They toasted each other and sipped. It didn’t punch, it bloomed in his mouth. Each of the flavors—malt, cocoa, vanilla, sherry from the finishing barrels, and a soft cherry finish—came out and took a separate bow. A raised eyebrow of appreciation between them before they turned back to the matters at hand.

“You’re talking to me, why?” Max had returned to crossed-arms mode.

Holly crossed hers in response, probably not understanding that for a guy, it wasn’t only a distrust gesture, it was also simply comfortable.

Mike leaned in before she released her umbrage on their only contact’s head. “We don’t know your country, you do. If someone was doing this, who would it be? How do we find out and stop it before it turns into a war?”

“A war in Scandinavia sounds fine to me. That’s fifteen hundred kilometers from here.”

“Actually, twenty-one hundred and sixty-two if you want to avoid Russian and Belarusian airspace.” And Mike remembered every forsaken minute of his first long solo flight without Miranda. In truth, his second. He didn’t remember last April’s flight nearly as well; he’d been too worried about flying an unfamiliar and bigger plane into Russian airspace to have time to contemplate the flight itself. The flight to Georgia had been practically mundane, even with the bad weather, which left him far too much time to think.

Max nodded, “Just my point.”

“Are you a pilot?”

Max shook his head.

“I’ll ask one other question then. You follow the jet stream much?”

Max squinted at him.

“Russia nukes Stockholm. It won’t be Chernobyl with the meltdown fallout caught up in local winds spreading to Central and Northern Europe. They won’t be putting down herds of Finnish reindeer and fighting new cancers across the region. It’ll punch straight up into the jet stream, and you’ll never guess where it gets dumped.” Mike thumped his finger on the bar, then picked up his shot of whiskey so that his hand wouldn’t shake. Even the thought of it hung like a black cloud seeping into the bar.

In reality, the jet stream would dump fallout from a Scandinavian strike on Moscow itself. And a retaliatory Moscow strike would mostly poison a lot of Siberians, but Max wouldn’t know that. It would take a bomb on London or Paris for the heaviest fallout to be over Georgia because of the shape of the jet stream’s meandering path over Europe.

Max looked up at the arched brick of his former bomb shelter lost in the shadows. The lights were off except for directly over where they sat.

Mike pushed, “And if all NATO pitches in and something goes astray, this place wouldn’t stop a normal modern bomb. A nuke…” he shrugged as if he didn’t care. It was a role, he was merely playing a role, that’s all. But the lovely whiskey didn’t warm his insides when he sipped it, instead it lit a furnace burning his gut into full churn.

He felt Holly staring at him, but he didn’t dare look away. She would understand the technique and he’d wager that she wouldn’t approve. For all her games, she was as straight-laced about the truth as they came, well, in any crowd without Miranda. Andi would have approved though.

Max’s gaze met his the moment he looked down from the bar’s ceiling. “Okay, made your point.”

Mike waited.

Max looked away first. Not down in defeat, but up to the left, the I’m thinking quadrant for someone who communicated the way he did—quiet hands, steady eyes, all attention on the words.

“Yeah, I may know somebody. Can’t reach out right now. I’ve got a place you can crash for a couple hours.” He glanced at the UNIQ diver’s watch on his wrist. “Make that four hours.” The red-and-white Georgian flag on the dial had three words written below it in the curly script of Georgian.

“What’s it say?” Mike asked. He’d never seen a UNIQ before, though he knew they were very high-end and built right here in Georgia. Mike himself wore a Lilienthal Berlin Meteorite for its clean lines. He liked the thin slice of actual meteorite used in the dial face.

Max glanced down at his watch in surprise, then smiled. “Georgian Special Forces. It’s custom for the unit only. So you’d best not be fuckin’ with me.”

“Not for a single tick of the second hand.”

Holly wore twenty-dollar Timex watches that she killed with alarming regularity. For Christmas he’d have to find her whatever the Australian equivalent was to Max’s watch.

Then he jolted.

“What?” Max’s eyes narrowed.

“Nothing,” Mike swallowed against a dry throat. Then he knocked back the last of his whiskey, which burned all the way down.

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