Struggle. Retribution in the Twilight
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– Looks like you were right about resource sharing....
Tikhomirov had already taken a sip of tea and felt it warming his brain. It was strong enough, though not bitter, as it was with the tea the miners brewed for themselves, calling it chifir. And it was cooked quite differently – boiled in a pot, not infused in a kettle like this one.
– Of course… What else is there to share? But I still think this division looks a little different than just "give me this and I'll give you that". – replied Tikhomirov, sipping his tea and thinking that it would be better if it were miner's chifir, to which he seemed to be accustomed.
– You mean it's easier to change the hand holding the cards rather than flip those cards between each other?
– Yeah, sort of… You have an enviable place, so to speak. And you've set it up pretty well… I'm pretty sure you've got a lot of other things besides this base. And if that's the case, then there's a lot of people to displease with your existence… And now I would think about what once happened to Khmelnitsky in his Unit-14....
– I understand that you have already taken care of such questions at the mine. – Cobra smiled, clearly pleased to have such an interlocutor with him, intelligent and not competing with him in anything. – We'll have a look at something new… Let's go.
They left the office, went to the far end of the corridor, then down the stairs to the first floor and down to the basement. It turned out to be a large parking lot, now also divided into separate rooms. Still without numbers on the doors, which were aluminum barriers. Behind the one they entered were two men looking at the severed human heads lying on the floor. There was plenty of blood, but apparently the heads themselves had not been severed here, or else it would have been stained not only inside the room, but would have leaked out.
One of the head examiners approached Cobra:
– Only two have been identified…
– As expected…" replied Cobra. – Leave us…
When Cobra's two handmaidens came out he pointed at the lying heads with his hand and continued:
– See those heads. Thirty-two to be exact… Someone interrupted the Bravo team when they were guarding the approach to the Deez sector from the industrial pipe, and then fired mortars at us. And your patron pointed out at the time that 80-millimeter mortars were too heavy for the Maquis to carry that far… But what surprised me more was not that, but that someone had gotten so stealthily close to the Bravo group that not a single shot had been fired. And during the whole time they were interrupted, too… Their heads were left for us not far from an industrial pipe with a stick buried nearby, to which a still-living snake was nailed. It's clear that it's a message to me. You can still move, but you can't do anything… Someone knew too well when they acted. Too quiet, too stealthy, too sure and too aware of everything. And then he withdrew just as quietly… While the shelling was still going on, I ordered to change the frequency, and on the spare frequency I had already told the neighboring units to go around the attackers' position from both flanks Then I
switched to the old frequency and heard a familiar voice from there, which announced to me that they knew all our moves and it would not be possible to take them Of course, we did not take
anyone, but only found booby-trapped corpses without heads What do you think about this story?
– Obviously whoever interrupted Bravo's group knew them personally. Just why didn't they report seeing someone, even if it was their own.....
– Yes. That's the question I was most concerned about. And now we know the answer to it…
See these heads," Cobra pointed to the severed and mutilated heads of people.
– Yes, you are.
– Only two of the Bravo group are actually lying here. The others are so disfigured that they are unrecognizable. But we have our own methods of doing this. And not everyone knows about
them. We measure the skulls of all the fighters so we can distinguish them if they die. It is most
likely that at least in some form the skull will be preserved, so it is more likely to be recognized… Whoever did this didn't know about this trick of ours. And hoped to remain anonymous Well,
almost. Because the answer to why Bravo Team didn't report someone arriving is that no one did.
It was Bravo's group that fired on me, having previously killed the two who didn't want to be involved, and having prepped the bodies of the apparently dead Maquis beforehand. That's where all the awareness and confidence in their actions came from. And that's why the voice was so familiar, though he tried to change it. It was Bravo's group commander…
– Looks like we need to pay more attention to our own safety. – Tikhomirov smiled a little this time. He was pleased that he had thought of SMERSH himself before he heard the story.
Masha
It's a very strange feeling when you get used to something no longer being the same in your life. When someone is gone, someone you never imagined life without. When that someone used to fill all the space in your life, and now they're not there at all. And this feeling of continuous emptiness in a place previously filled all the time, on the one hand, makes you stop feeling anything, and on the other hand, makes you sometimes look at everything too detached. It's as if there was never any of this before. It was always empty.
That's how Masha started thinking about six months ago. And now that the baby was born.
Her baby and Raphael's baby, she had a new life. And that life filled a void. This boy filled that void. And strangely enough, he slept most of the time.
He was almost a month old now, and he was still sleeping quietly, only waking up occasionally to drink his mother's milk. And then to sleep again. And it was very surprising,
because she herself had seen how newborn babies scream at night when they were teething, how they did not let everyone sleep, and only absolute fatigue does its job, cutting off to sleep the working somas.
She remembered Raphael hugging her and the baby screaming somewhere nearby. It was probably not only because he was teething, but also because there was nothing to eat. Everyone was still sleepy, and those who were exhausted did not even hear the crying, while those who were not so tired continued to listen to the baby's cry, sometimes grumbling a little about it.
Raphael thought then of what might still be lacking in someone who had just begun to see the world with his eyes and hear its sounds with his own ears. Such a small creature would certainly lack the connection between the movement seen by the eyes and the sound that would correlate with it all. He had read about an ancient toy for children, called the most important among others-the rattle. The next day he made one: a small wooden ball on a stick and with bits of charcoal inside.