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I started the engine and it came to life with a grunting, throaty roar. I revved it and heads turned all around us: it sounded like a T-Rex in a bad mood. Tanya rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “It’s very American,” she told me. “Very you.” And she leaned over and kissed my cheek.
“Alright,” I said, and threw the truck into gear. “Let’s go find out what Steward left for Maravic.”
We hauled ass out of there, stopping only once to quickly swap the license plates with those of another red F150 that was sitting in a different dealership. We made good time all the way to Ohio, but then a storm rolled in and the traffic slowed right down. We kept looking around at the other lanes of traffic: was Maravic on the same road, stuck in the same traffic, a few cars ahead or behind? Or had he taken a different route and was blasting past us? We had no way of knowing.
Finally, a little over eight hours since we left DC, we found the backroad Steward had talked about and turned onto it. By now, it was night and we could only see the narrow slice of the world that the headlights lit up. The backroad narrowed and turned to dirt, with thick foliage on either side.
Tanya had been watching the GPS coordinates on her phone. “Should be somewhere along here,” she muttered. The truck started to bounce and then squelch as the rain turned the road to mud. Then, Tanya pointed to something on our right. “There!”
I stopped the truck and looked. Just visible through the bushes was a patch of orange-red, painted metal. A shipping container.
We jumped out. There was no sign of any other vehicles. Was that good or bad?
Both of us pulled out our guns and we circled around through the bushes. We looked at the shipping container indecisively. It seemed quiet but with the rain hissing down, it was hard to hear anything. If Maravic was in there, we didn’t want to race in and get gunned down. But if Maravic was still behind us, he could be there any minute and we needed to hurry.
We cautiously approached. There was a chain and padlock hanging from the container’s doors and the chain had been sliced through with bolt cutters. Oh no...
I inched the door open and Tanya shone a flashlight inside. There was a big wooden crate in the middle of the container and the side nearest us had been pried open. Tanya swept the flashlight beam over it and—
It was empty. Maravic must have beaten us there, probably by minutes. Tanya cursed in Russian and I slumped, defeated. There goes our hard evidence. And now we had no leads at all.
“We should check inside,” said Tanya. There wasn’t a whole lot of hope in her voice. “Just in case.”
We pulled the doors all the way open and walked inside. The sound of the rain pounding on the metal box was overwhelming, like someone was pouring out a bag of marbles next to my ear.
There was a smell that made my nostrils burn, and it got worse the closer we got to the wooden crate. Both of us wrinkled our noses. “Chemicals,” I said. “Maybe they shipped them the raw ingredients to make explosives?”
Tanya shrugged and moved closer to the crate, crouching to look. There was a wet stain on the wood near the front corner, as if something had leaked, and smaller stains on the metal floor of the container.
I left her to it and searched the rest of the container, which didn’t take long. There wasn’t a damn thing in there except the crate.
Wait: what was that, right in the corner? I shuffled forward, squinting. It was hard to see anything because the only light was Tanya’s flashlight behind me and it was throwing my shadow ahead of me. I squatted and peered down at the thing. I thought I recognized the shape, but I had to reach down and touch its fur before I was sure. Yep. Rat. Good thing Tanya didn’t come over here. The poor thing probably got locked inside the container at some point and starved to death.
I shuffled sideways to let some of the light from Tanya’s flashlight come past me and—
There was something wrong with the rat. I leaned closer.
Its front and hind paws faced almost in different directions. It had twisted and thrashed so hard, in dying, that it had virtually snapped its spine.
There’s one thing that strikes fear into the heart of all soldiers, around the world. We train for it, but we hope to God we never see it. I turned and ran towards Tanya. “Get out!” She was just leaning towards the wet stain on the crate. “Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it, get out!”
