Page 57 of Dead Fall

He had been a mercenary for over two decades, rising to become one of the top battlefield commanders in the Wagner Group. All of his life, he had watched as the oligarchs in Russia enriched themselves by pillaging his country’s wealth and resources. He had seen high-ranking Wagner men, including the company’s founder, do the same.

He had come from a poor family with an overbearing, overweightbeast of an alcoholic father and a frail, idealistic mother who, despite an unhappy and frequently abusive marriage, had higher hopes for her only child.

Disillusioned with the inability of the state, especially in the realm of education, to help her son advance, she had encouraged him to take control of his life. Her advice was that he never depend on anyone but himself. If he saw something he wanted, he should take it. The world was rough, and cruel, and cheap, and disappointing. The sooner he realized this, the sooner he could figure out what he wanted and then go get it.

On his sixteenth birthday, his mother died by suicide.

His father blamed him. He said that his mother had always felt inadequate and that having a child had only made her insecurities worse. She had developed what the doctors call postpartum depression and had never fully recovered.

Having a son who received terrible marks and showed so little promise had been an immense burden on her. According to his father, he was an embarrassment to their family. They couldn’t show their faces anywhere. In constant trouble at school and with the police, he made them ashamed. His mother had taken her life to finally be rid of the indignity of it all.

He knew his father had been lying. That it was his drinking and the subsequent beatings his mother had to endure that had worsened any depression she may have had, and that finally drove her to take her own life. His father was a horrific human being and even worse when drunk. He was also very large—too large for a boy of only sixteen to deal with. Until one night, when he had passed out on the toilet after consuming two bottles of vodka, which happened a couple of times a year, and the opportunity presented itself.

The decision had not been hard. He had been fantasizing about murdering his father for as long as he could remember. The question was not what to do, but whatnotto do.

He had wanted to pick up a hammer and to take out every ounce of his rage. He had wanted to make the man pay for all the pain he and his mother had suffered.

But even at sixteen, he had been smart enough to know that if itlooked like a murder, especially a violent act of passion, all suspicion would fall on him. Therefore, it had to look like an accident.

The benefit of spending years fantasizing about killing your father was that you tried countless scenarios on for size in your mind. He had done his homework and knew which kinds of murders the police solved, which went unsolved, and what types they didn’t even bother investigating. His plan was to have his father’s death fall into the very last category. Knowing that the man was dead and that he had caused it would be incredibly unsatisfying, but it would have to be enough.

Not knowing how long his father would remain passed out, he had needed to act quickly.

He had a friend whose family had a food packaging facility. Often, they would sneak into the warehouse and steal blocks of dry ice to use to make fog at parties. He knew how to get inside, exactly where it was kept, and how to get precisely the right amount back to his apartment without anyone knowing.

After placing it in the bathroom sink, he sealed the air vent and the bathroom door. When he returned to check on his father two hours later, the man was dead.

Technically, he had died from hypercapnia—a buildup of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream that pushes out the oxygen—brought about by the gas given off as the dry ice melted.

The police had chalked it up to a fat guy who’d had too much to drink and ended up choking himself to death after he had passed out. No obvious signs of foul play meant no investigation. The boy was sent to live with an aunt in another city.

His problems at school and with the police only continued to grow. He was a bully, which extended well beyond the schoolyard.

A growth spurt had kicked in. He had inherited his father’s large frame, though not yet the man’s paunch. Not satisfied with simply terrorizing his schoolmates, he had begun strong-arming shop owners, taking things and refusing to pay. The police delivered his aunt an ultimatum—either the young thug cleaned up his act, or they planned to send him off to a youth detention facility.

A month later, he had run away from his aunt’s home and, falsifying his age, had joined the Russian military.

For a time, the Army felt like the perfect place for him. He was a brute who even intimidated some of his superiors. His aggression and coldheartedness were encouraged. He built his body to an impressive size through weight lifting and by injecting himself with steroids and human growth hormone.

He fought in underground, no-holds-barred fight competitions on the weekends and was unstoppable.

But as his body and his impressive list of wins continued to grow, so too did his ego. He had believed himself untouchable. Right up until the extremely toxic relationship he was in crossed over into abhorrent physical abuse.

The young woman had been keeping the relationship secret from her parents, especially her father—the base commander. When her nose and jaw were broken there were no more secrets.

Her father had had the boyfriend beaten with bats and lead pipes. He was kept in solitary confinement and given the bare minimum of medical care until he could walk. Then, in the middle of winter, he was dishonorably discharged and thrown off the base in only his underwear—no money, no ID, no jacket, no shoes, no socks, nothing.

Between his still incompletely healed injuries and a crippling case of hypothermia, he had almost died. But for an old farmer who had seen him collapse into a snowbank along the road, he would have.

Unable to lift the man, the farmer had used his tractor to drag him back to his barn, where he and his wife had tended to him. It took a full two months to recover.

When he was ready to leave, he did so in the middle of the night, having helped himself to the old couple’s car, a firearm, and a tea tin in which they had hidden their emergency savings. He never said good-bye. He never thanked them. They were disposable to him.

He spent a year beating around, working odd jobs, fighting in bouts when he could find them, drinking, abusing women, and being an all-around asshole, until he started hearing rumors about a new, clandestine paramilitary organization called the Wagner Group.

Wagner was looking for men with prior military experience. Even better, they were not averse to accepting men who had been dishonorably discharged.

Making his way to St. Petersburg, he identified and then mercilessly harassed a recruiter until he received an interview. As it turned out, the recruiter had also done some no-holds-barred fighting and put in a good word. Within a week, he had been hired.

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