Page 58 of Dead Fall

From that point forward, he saw action in multiple civil wars, including Mali, Libya, Syria, and the Central African Republic.

As a member of Peshkov’s private army, or the “little green men,” as they became known, he’d also spent a lot of time waging war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Once Peshkov had decided that his annexation of the east wasn’t enough and that he intended to take the entire country, the man—now an incredibly seasoned mercenary—had been called to battle yet again.

The Colonel, as his men called him, had learned to love war. He loved it more than anything he had ever loved in his life. The power. The destruction. The pain. The pleasures. It was lived at full volume, in full vivid color, at its most brutal and intense. One was never as alive as when one was at war.

This most recent war, however, had taken a heavy toll. In his decades of combat, he had never seen anything like it. For every Ukrainian that was killed, the Ukrainians killed two Russians. Both the Russian Army and Wagner had run out of fresh recruits, which was why the Colonel had come up with the idea for his unit of Ravens.

The way Wagner had chosen to use the men had angered him. Instead of taking the time and expense to properly train and equip them so that they could strategically maneuver and leverage opportunities on the battlefield, they were thrown at fortified Ukrainian positions in high-attrition human waves.

He understood that because they had come from the worst prisons and mental asylums, Wagner had considered them to be expendable and nothing more than cannon fodder. But that wasn’t how you won wars. That was how you lost them. Eventually there’d be no more meat to feed into the grinder.

The writing was on the wall. No matter what happened, the policy wasn’t going to change. The elites back in Moscow and St. Petersburg had their minds made up. With that being the case, the Colonel knew that he needed to make his mind up, too.

It wasn’t easy. After losing his boyhood home, he had gone on to lose his home in the Russian Army. Now he was weighing whether or not to leave Wagner, which had been his home longer than anything else. But then the opportunity of a lifetime had dropped into his lap.

He and his Ravens had been involved in a ferocious, three-day battle with Ukrainian forces. They had no food or water and were almost out of ammunition.

Moving to a more defensible position, they had come across a small, extremely well-equipped detachment of Russian Army soldiers. Certainly they could share some of their supplies to help his beleaguered Ravens achieve their objective and secure the entire sector.

But the soldiers were rude and arrogant. They claimed to be on a much more important assignment. Not one ration nor one bottle of water would be shared with the Wagner mercenaries.

There was something odd about these men. They were not down-and-dirty soldiers. From their uniforms to their hands, they were too clean; several of them too soft.

Many of the Ravens were, by nature, unstable. Under even the best of situations, they could be difficult to control. The tone and posture of the recalcitrant soldiers pissed them off. Things got very heated, very quickly.

For his part, the Colonel liked what he was seeing. His men were asserting their dominance. The Russian Army soldiers had been given a chance to be cooperative and they had chosen not to be. Now the Ravens were no longer asking for help. They were going to take what they needed. And once the violence switch had been flipped, things escalated exponentially. The bloodbath happened so fast, the soldiers didn’t even know what had hit them.

By the time the gunfire had subsided, the Colonel was already sitting on the hood and helping himself to food and water from one of the officers’ vehicles. There would be some work to do, dressing up the scene tolook like an ambush by the Ukrainians, but he was confident that it could all be taken care of, and they could be on their way within the hour.

He was taking a long pull of water when one of his closest subordinates approached.

“You should see this,” the man said, holding out an accordion file he had removed from one of the other vehicles.

“What is it?”

“The details of their assignment.”

Setting down the water bottle, he motioned for the man to hand him the file. The first thing he pulled out was a map. More specifically, it was a map of the Kharkiv region. On it, different locations had been numbered and marked. None of it made any sense until, in another pocket, he found a list, complete with descriptions that corresponded to the numbers. These men weren’t soldiers after all.

They were looters.Professionallooters. In fact, they were treasure hunters sent by the Kremlin to scoop up some of Ukraine’s most valuable and culturally significant pieces of art.

In his hands, the Colonel was holding a treasure map. He knew nothing about art, but that didn’t bother him. He knew people who knew people. If he could get his hands on any of the items on the list, much less all of them, the battle would be half won. He could find buyers or, at the very least, someone to act as a middleman, a seller.

It was an incredible stroke of good fortune. Something that came along very seldom, especially during war. He had heard of Wagner mercenaries who had gotten rich looting and smuggling antiquities out of Libya and Syria. A bounty of this proportion could be worth millions of dollars, maybe even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Remaining with the Wagner Group was no longer a question. His mind was made up. He and his men would carve their own path. They were done taking orders from the elites. From that moment forward, they were the masters of their own destiny.

That was what had brought them to a small, shuttered winery outside yet another tiny village and set amid rows of wild, untended vines.

According to his map, there was a treasure hidden here. No matterwhat symbolic resistance the occupants might put up, he was going to find it. He and his war dogs always found what they came looking for. Torturing people in the process only made the experience more enjoyable.

As he heard the howls from his men inside, he knew that they had found something.

He hoped that it was a fresh, attractive young woman. The one that they had taken from the orphanage and were keeping back at their outpost was on her last legs.

He was looking forward to killing her himself. But not until they had found a replacement.

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