Liberation Day

  Other works by Dustin Stevens:

  Motive

  Krokodil

  Quarterback

  Be My Eyes

  Scars and Stars

  Catastrophic

  21 Hours

  Ohana

  Twelve

  Liberation Day

  Just a Game

  Ink

  Four

  The Zoo Crew Novels:

  Tracer

  Dead Peasants

  The Zoo Crew

  Liberation Day

  Dustin Stevens

  Liberation Day

  Copyright © 2013, Dustin Stevens

  Warning: All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work, in whole or part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, is illegal and forbidden, without the written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, settings, names, and occurrences are a product of the author’s imagination and bear no resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, places or settings, and/or occurrences. Any incidences of resemblance are purely coincidental.

  The injury done to a man ought to be such that

  vengeance cannot be feared.

  --Niccolo Machiavelli

  Prologue

  Heidelberg, Germany 1943

  The first time Anton Chekov saw her, he had no reason to think she was about to change his life forever.

  On the surface, it was a completely unremarkable afternoon. The day was bright and clear, the slightest hint of encroaching fall in the air as he and his family sprawled out in the park to eat lunch. A solid blue blanket was spread over a swath of green grass, ample room for all five to lounge in the warm sun.

  After finishing his second sandwich, Anton leaned back onto his elbows and lifted his face to the sky, his stomach distended before him. At fifteen years old, he already favored his father’s appearance, his body thick throughout, with a uniformity of width that ran from his knees to his shoulders, a square chin, and a hooked nose. Both his hair and eyes were deep brown and a small gap showed between his teeth when he smiled.

  Feeling the strain of his pose, Anton rolled onto his stomach and rested his chin atop his hands, inventorying the scene around him. To his right, his parents discussed plans for the afternoon while his younger siblings, Anya and Yuri, finished eating. On his left, a group of children laughed as they chased one another. A young couple strolled hand in hand. An elderly gentleman shuffled by with his miniature Schnauzer in tow.

  All the trappings of a picturesque day in the park.

  The onset of fall was a welcome change for the town of Heidelberg. The summer had been unseasonably warm for the Bavarian town, seeing abnormally high temperature spikes during the day with little reprieve at night. For many the summer heat had been so oppressive it forced them to alter their schedules, limiting outdoor activities so as to avoid the midday sun as much as possible.

  For Anton and his family, being away from the temperate climate of their native Russia for the first time, the summer had been a veritable hell on earth.

  Four months prior, Dmitri Chekov had been named a diplomat to Germany. It was a post none of them were excited about at the time, even less so with each passing day of Adolf Hitler’s meteoric rise to power. Ultimately though, for a man in Dmitri’s position, there was nothing that could be done.

  One night the family sat down to eat dinner at their home in Kazan. The next morning, they were bound for Heidelberg.

  No further discussion. No opposition of any kind.

  The first few months of the trip had been lived entirely in fear, each day spent glancing over a shoulder, always waiting to be on the receiving end of the atrocities they’d heard so much about.

  Over time, that fear ebbed to little more than an active awareness as one by one those rumors were dispelled. There were no monsters in the night waiting to devour them, no angry hordes storming the street, ready to purge anybody that might be a bit different from the Aryan model.

  By and large, the German people treated them well. There was always plenty to eat. The weather, though hot, was nice. Nobody wanted for anything.

  Months passed and active awareness eroded even further into apathy.

  The first time Anton noticed her, he didn’t actually see her. Rather, he saw a flash of bright auburn hair as she streaked past the reflecting pond through the center of the park. Full and vibrant, it snapped his gaze up from the yellow leaves strewn haphazardly across the surface of the water, following the unknown figure sprinting through the park.

  Slight of build and short in stature, she looked to be about the same age as him, dressed in a nondescript school uniform. A look of pure terror was splashed across her face as she repeatedly cast glances over her shoulder, paying very little attention to the path in front of her.

  Halfway across the park she dropped the books she was carrying, the items slapping the pavement in a flurry of loose pages. No once did she slow or make any effort to retrieve them, instead keeping a steady pace across the grounds, disappearing from sight just as suddenly as she’d arrived.

  Her entire appearance took little more than an instant.

  Confused and intrigued, Anton watched as not a single other person present seemed to notice her, nobody even glancing after the apparition that had come and gone. With great effort he rose slowly and dusted himself off, his hands slapping against the canvas front of his trousers.

  “I’ll be back. I need to use the restroom.”

  Still engrossed in their meal and the conversation it entailed, nobody in his family seemed to have noticed the girl. More importantly, they appeared oblivious to his determination to follow her.

  “Don’t be too long,” his mother said without looking up at him, her voice distant. “We’re leaving soon.”

  The admonition was no more than out of her mouth, the words barely registering, before Anton set off at a brisk walk. He left the books lying in the dirt, stepping between the scattered pages as he went, cutting a path towards the far corner of the park where she had disappeared. As nonchalantly as his adolescent curiosity would allow, he paused to make sure his family wasn’t watching him before slipping away. Once out of sight he raised his pace to a jog, sweat beginning to dot his forehead.

  Two blocks passed beneath Anton’s feet as his breath became labored in his chest. A few cars were parked along the street, a pair of black sedans rolled by, but otherwise the throughway was almost deserted in the early afternoon sun, his panting the only sound.

  For six blocks Anton continued on, stopping at every corner to cast a look in either direction, hoping for another flash of color to catch his eye, praying a stray noise would guide his search. Instead, all that found its way to his ears was the faint static of a radio through an open window, an occasional bird overhead, even a few dogs barking in the distance.

  Nothing resembling the flight of a scared young girl.

  Just shy of a dozen blocks, a full half mile from where he had started, Anton abandoned the search. His lungs burned as they fought for air and his shirt clung to his back, sweat seeping from his body, plastering the cotton material to his skin.

  Desperate to leave the warmth of direct sunlight he hooked a right onto a side street and began his loop back towards the park. Shoving his hands into his pockets he pressed forward, extending one foot in front of the other, his gaze on the buildings rising three stories tall around him. Paying no attention to the uneven ground on which he walked, he never saw the raised chunk of concrete as it caught the toe of his shoe.

  Never had a chance to pull his hands from his pockets as his body pitched forward.

  The side of Anton’s face was the first thing to connect with the ground,
the rough surface scraping a chunk of skin away from his cheek. A full moment passed before a wave of pain roiled through his body, his vision blurring, tears glassing over his eyes. Bright lights popped in small explosions before him, followed by tiny dark pin pricks, his body laying flat on the ground, unable to move.

  For several long moments he remained just that way, grey cobwebs nudging into the corners of his vision. He lay flat and let the cool of the concrete seep through his pant legs before working his hands free, grunting as he pushed back onto his knees.

  Staining the concrete beneath him was a wet smear of blood, the bright red stark against the pale gray stone.

  Beside it lay the broken half of a tooth.

  Feeling another jolt of nausea pass through him, Anton raised a hand to the side of his face and dabbed at the warmth running along his cheek. An involuntary wince crossed his features as more pain coursed through him, his fingers snapping back to reveal dark crimson stains on his fingertips.

  Using the tip of his tongue he felt along the front bridge of his teeth, finding the gap where his shattered tooth once was, tasting the metallic tang of blood in his mouth.

  “Are you all right?”

  The voice seemed to come from nowhere, snapping Anton into a defensive stance, his attention jerked to the right. There, huddled in the corner of the doorway, peering out at him with large round eyes, sat the very reason he wasn’t still on the blanket with his family.

  She was crouched low, her body pressed against the wooden frame of the door, hidden from view, with only her neck craned out towards him. “Are you all right?” she repeated.

  “I think so,” he replied, his voice sounding a bit different as it passed through the broken tooth.

  Without another word the girl nodded before retreating back even tighter into her corner. The shadows of the doorway concealed her tiny frame, though were no match for the shock of bright red hair atop her head.

  “Are you all right?” Anton asked, feeling the warmth of fresh blood as it dripped from his mouth, hitting his bottom lip and running down his chin.

  “Yes, I am fine,” the girl snapped, finality in her tone.

  “Are you sure? I saw you running through the park. You looked scared.”

  Again she answered without looking at him. “I said I am fine. Now please, go.”

  Anton sat back on his haunches and again touched his face. Fresh drops of blood decorated his hand, dripping down onto the ground below. A feeling of anger welled within him as he watched the droplets fall, splashing against the concrete.

  “All this happened to me because I was coming to check on you. The least you can do is talk to me.”

  The girl scanned the street around them. “Please. I do appreciate you coming to check on me and I do feel badly about your fall, but you have no idea what’s going on here. Please, for both of us, just go.”

  Anton started to reply, but thought better of it. He cast a sideways glance at her and shook his head before rising to his feet, taking a few steps back the other direction. “Can you at least tell me what you were running from? Haven’t I earned that much from you?”

  The girl chewed at her bottom lip, eyeing him from her perch in the corner. “You are not from here, you would not understand.”

  Anton attempted to respond, his voice drowned out by the harsh din of a siren. It started low and even, rising with each passing second into an angry wail that filled the street and reverberated off the buildings. As it grew closer Anton pressed his palms against his ears, his face contorted as the pain of his fall and the deafening crescendo erupted in his head.

  Turning on the ball of his foot, he saw the source of the noise round into view, a flat-bed truck that pulled onto the end of the street and came to a stop. From the back of it descended a detachment of German soldiers, all in matching uniforms, all staring back at him as they filed out.

  “Oh, no!” the girl yelped from behind him. In a flash her small hand was inside the crook of his arm, her body leaning in the opposite direction, pulling him away.

  “Wait, what are you doing?” Anton asked, his arm held parallel to the ground by the girl’s incessant tug.

  “You don’t understand. They are who I was hiding from!”

  Confusion clouded Anton’s features as he glanced from the girl to the soldiers behind them. “Who are they? What do they want?”

  “They’re the SS,” she yelled. “Hitler’s personal police.”

  The words were at last what we needed to hear.

  Despite a significant height advantage, it was all Anton could do to keep up with her. With each step it became a little harder to stay upright as a maddening dizziness filled his head.

  “But why are they after us? We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The girl offered no response as behind them the SS broke into a run, little by little gaining ground. The lead guard pulled a whistle from his jacket and began to blow wildly, the shrill sound filling the air, mixing with the steady wail of the siren at the other end of the street.

  “My parents are in the park, if we can make it there we’ll be all right,” Anton said, his voice coming in ragged bursts, his body clawing for air.

  Hand in hand, the mismatched pair made the corner and veered to the right, the park, their salvation, just a few blocks ahead. Behind them the guards continued to gain ground, swinging wide around the corner and spilling out into the street in pursuit.

  As the sound of their footsteps grew closer, Anton threw a frantic look over his shoulder to check their progress.

  He never saw the lone SS guard step from the doorway in front of him.

  Anton’s opened his mouth to cry out for his parents as the guard’s nightstick caught him across the bridge of the nose. For the briefest moment he felt the sensation of his feet coming up from beneath him, his body suspended weightless above the ground. The girl, her hand still clasped in his, did the same as her tiny body rose in flight beside him.

  The two of them landed together in a heap, Anton existing just on the edge of consciousness. He could feel the girl’s weight splashed across him, his own body refusing to move.

  A fearful cry rolled out from her as she tried to wrest herself free, her limbs clawing for purchase against his soft form.

  “Aw, now isn’t this cute?” a guard asked, mocking in his tone, carrying a club in his right hand and tapping it into his left palm.

  Just inches from his face, Anton could see tears form in the girl’s eyes. “Please, we’ve done nothing to you,” she whispered.

  “Since when does that matter?” the guard replied before raising his nightstick and in a move practiced a hundred times before, brought it down across the back of her head. A thin trail of blood streamed from the back of her skull, dripping onto the front of Anton’s shirt as the haze started to take control.

  A moment later he too descended into darkness, the combined effects of the preceding ten minutes finally too much for his young body to handle.

  Chapter One

  Boston, Present Day

  A plume of white mushroomed around Tommy O’Malley’s head as he stood in place, bouncing on the balls of his feet in the cold night air. Part of it was cigarette smoke from the filtered Marlboro he clutched between his fingers, the remainder his warm breath meeting the cold Boston night.

  “Christ Almighty,” O’Malley muttered, pulling his pea coat collar higher around his neck. On his hands he wore knit gloves with the fingers cut out. A thick ski cap covered his head.

  Combined, they did little to shield his body from the icy air enveloping him.

  “I thought you bastards said it was supposed to be eighty degrees in two days!” O’Malley yelled at the radio perched inside the guardhouse. In a huff, he snapped his cigarette out into the darkness and returned inside, closing the door behind him. He pulled his gloves off and blew warm air through his fingers, his head bobbing along as U2 came on over the ancient receiver.

  Tommy had started working nights at the D
orchester docks just over two years before to help get through college. One semester at UMass was enough to tell him he wasn’t going to be a Congressman, so he traded in the books and went to the docks full time. His class schedule had dictated he work the night shift and over time, he grew to like it. After the classes fell by the wayside, he didn’t see a reason to change.

  Most nights he sat in the guard booth and listened to the radio, talked on the phone, occasionally flipped through a girlie magazine. Every once in a great while he’d bring in a flask of something or nod off for a bit, though those nights were rare and hadn’t occurred in quite some time.

  The men he worked for were fair to him and he tried to do the same by them.

  The digital clock on the wall said it was a quarter past two when a shiny black sedan turned in off the street and made its way towards the guard post. The crunch of the tires biting into asphalt and the low purr of the engine cut through the still night air, alerting O’Malley long before it arrived. Out of habit, he flipped the radio off on the desk and waited as the low beams moved towards him.

  O’Malley checked the appointment schedule on his clipboard and found it clear, just as it had been several hours ago when he arrived. The implied rule on the docks was that anybody wanting to access their cargo after hours needed a reservation, though the maxim was never explicitly stated. Many of the people that used the docks weren’t the type to be bothered with strictures and if firm enforcement was implemented, they’d take their business elsewhere.

  O’Malley had been through it enough times to know that if someone showed up at two o’clock in the morning wanting access, he gave it to them and reported it up the line. If a suggestion for compliance needed to be made, it would be from someone a lot higher in the pecking order than him.

  “Here we go again,” O’Malley muttered as he pulled his hands through the fingerless gloves and went out into the night. The temperature had dropped another few degrees and it grabbed at his throat, sucking the air from his lungs.