Page 76 of Dead Fall

Harvath pulled through the once ornate, wrought-iron gates, which had been ripped from their hinges, and parked on the convent grounds, nearest to the main building with its blue, onion-shaped domes.

Bundled up against the night air, a pair of old men with sawed-off shotguns in their laps sat guard outside the convent’s large double doors.

“Wait here,” Harvath told his team. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Leaving his rifle, he exited the truck and cautiously approached the men. In broken Russian, he explained who he was and pointed to the patch on his uniform. It was the logo for the GUR and depicted an Owl with outstretched wings dangling a sword over a map of Russia. On multiple levels, not the least of which being that Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, employed a logo of a bat, and owls eat bats, the logo had been called an epic troll of the Kremlin by the Ukrainians.

Harvath told the old villagers that he was very sorry about what had happened at the convent. He and his team were here to pay their respects and gather evidence in order to bring the perpetrators to justice.

“Give them Ukrainian justice,” one of the men said, hefting his shotgun.

The other man just looked at Harvath and concurred by drawing his thumb across his throat like a knife.

Harvath nodded. These men didn’t want justice. Not in the conventional sense. They wanted revenge. The more painful for the evildoers, the better.

After the men pointed out the small support building that had been prepared for him, he returned to the vehicle to get the team.

“This is where we’re spending our night off?” asked Krueger.

Harvath nodded. “But first I need to show you something.”

“I sure hope it’s a shower,” replied Biscuit.

Reading the solemnity on Harvath’s face, Hookah said, “It’s not a shower, is it?”

“No,” Harvath answered as he retrieved his rifle. “It isn’t.”

“What is it, then?” asked Jacks. “What are we supposed to see in there?”

“A war crime.”

CHAPTER 22

It was a scene of abject horror. The screams of the nuns, though now silent, seemed to echo psychically throughout the structure. It was something so malevolent that even Dante himself would have rejected it forInferno.

From the moment the two old men opened the doors and stood aside, the blood was everywhere—on the stone floors, the plastered walls, even some of the arched ceilings. There had been a great, splashing orgy of barbarity and terror here. The Ravens had unleashed hell on earth and had chosen a place of solitude and worship in which to do it.

Scattered braziers loaded with coal that had been used to heat fireplace tools as instruments of torture were still warm to the touch. According to the evidence shown to Harvath on the train from Poland, the attack had happened only two nights ago. After a local Ukrainian Army unit on its way to the front had confirmed the depraved attack, the convent had been sealed and a local guard posted. This was the first time it had been opened since.

The Army unit had transmitted their photographs back to its headquarters and those photos, along with the unit’s report, had made it to the GUR. That was a big piece of what the man with the briefcase had shared with him.

But even having viewed the photographs, Harvath knew he wasn’t fully prepared for the actual scene.

As they moved toward the expansive chapel, he steeled himself. No matter how much unspeakable violence he had seen over his career,when it was visited upon the innocent and most defenseless—especially women and children—it still had a profound impact on him.

The team stepped through the wide entrance and into the chapel together. To a man, no one spoke. No one could speak. Not even Harvath. They had been rendered fully speechless. They could do nothing but gawk at the carnage.

It was Biscuit, the youngest in their group, who finally broke the spell. Rushing back out into the hallway, he puked his guts out in a corner.

The others stood transfixed—not just by the amount of blood, but by the bodies of twelve naked nuns who had been slaughtered and hung upside down from the ceiling.

Their bodies showed significant forms of trauma, including burns akin to branding marks, as well as different types of welts resulting from lashes, indicating that they had been beaten with objects such as belts and electrical cords. Many had had large pieces of scalp torn out. Some had been disemboweled. All showed signs of severe sexual abuse.

Though a majority appeared to have suffered blunt-force trauma to the head or facial area, it was hard to say what the precise cause of death was, as each of the corpses had also had its throat slashed.

The floor of the chapel was slick with blood. How additional blood could be found all the way up to the front doors of the convent was unknowable. If Harvath had to guess, his money would have been on the Ravens having chased their petrified victims throughout the building—torturing and then killing them before dragging their bodies back to the chapel.

While Biscuit was still retching out in the hall, Hookah was the first to actually speak. “What kind of sick motherfucker does something like this? This isn’t even human. This is straight-up, straight-out-of-hell evil.”

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