The Soviet Comeback by Jamie Smith (best ereader for academics TXT) 📕

woods, only for them to be dismissed as tourist tat and overlooked by islanders and visitors alike. Not by everyone though, she mused.

The piece was taking shape, but the Cyclades ebony was a very hard wood that took patience to fashion into a figure like the dog he had requested. She wondered how he would feel about her making him a second one to keep the first company. “Why would anyone want a carving of a black dog?” she muttered to herself. Even despite the tears in her eyes that had rarely left since the news of her uncle’s death had reached her, she couldn’t help but smile weakly. There was little about Nathan that made sense. He said so little and was so impassive, but somehow, she felt a deep well of emotion within him, disguised by the mystery and enigma in which he cloaked himself. She wanted to know more; she wanted to see him again. She flushed at the thought of the morning, and how unlike her it was to do anything like that. She found she didn’t regret it at all, which made her flush all the more. She wondered if he would come to the funeral with her; the support would make the thought of facing it somehow less daunting, but perhaps it was too much to ask so soon.

She put him from her mind and her thoughts drifted again to her uncle Giorgos. It just felt so wrong that he wasn’t around any more. Everyone had known that truck was on the brink of dying, but no one had seriously thought it would take him with it. Of all the things to take him, he who claimed to know every pothole, bump and track better than any other on the island.

She realised she had drifted to gazing absently out of the window, lost in thought and turned back to the carving of a dog, unaware it bore an eerily close resemblance to a Black Russian Terrier, the type of dog being trained, thousands of miles away to work in a world she was unknowingly teetering on the edge of.

***

Nikita gazed through the shop window, this time careful to avoid being seen. He stood well back in the shadows, with stray tourists ambling past. Leaning against a faded blue wall, he could see directly through the open door to where Elysia was sitting, her bare feet just visible poking out from behind the wooden counter and her hair shielding her face as she worked intently on something in her lap that he couldn’t see.

A part of him ached to enter the shop, ached to feel that warmth, but already that part of him had been packed away so deep that he was barely aware of the longing.

He saw now why he’d been sent to Skyros first. Not because of Zurga or the island’s strategic importance between East and West. It was because here mistakes could be made and learnt from without the repercussions being felt far and wide.

A dark car stopped down the street. The driver got out, his face obscured by mirrored sunglasses, and beckoned to Nikita. Choosing to overlook the fact that Kemran had clearly known he would return here, he took one last look at Elysia, soaking up every detail of her beautiful golden face, before walking to the car and not looking back.

Inside the shop, suddenly sensing eyes on her, Elysia’s head snapped up from the carving to the open doorway. Nothing could be seen other than a dusty street, a couple strolling past and a blank faded blue wall. In the distance she heard a car fire up and pull away.

***

As the small propeller jet ferrying him and a smattering of other tourists lurched away from the island, taking them back to Athens on the Greek mainland, he gazed down from the window at Skyros, with its clear blue seas, golden beaches, villages and mountains all packed into just a few short miles. Somehow his fear of heights never bothered him on planes. The island was so small, yet so much had happened in only a few days there. A part of his soul would be forever lost on the island, lying with all the blood that had soaked into the earth at his hand. That, and the murder of Giorgos and the old woman would remain forever on his conscience. His training meant he felt detached, but he nonetheless knew that there was no going back from the point he was at now. He was a killer, and he could no longer convince himself otherwise. Not only was he a killer, but he was good at it.

But I will never enjoy it, he said to himself. Blood would be paid for with blood, and he knew not if he would get out of it alive and cared even less. But his family, they were different.

Reminding himself, as he had so many times before, of the reason he was here, and the reason he had become what he had, he sat back, closed his eyes and prepared himself for what lay ahead. Prepared himself for the United States of America.

On his lap, clenched firmly in his fist was a manila envelope, the contents of which laid out the challenge that, if successful, would alter the history of the entire world.

CHAPTER 13

US Secretary of Defense Simon Conlan leant on the wooden post and cracked open a beer as he looked out across his sprawling ranch, basking in the knowledge that everything visible right to the horizon belonged to him.

The dusts of Texas were being whipped up in the November winds blowing across the arid plains west of Odessa. In his grandaddy’s time the soil had been black with oil but now much of the land lay barren. Some cattle roamed, living off the tough Texan grass that seemed to endure anything.

The Cherokees