Free Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters by John Birmingham

katana did hum then, as though in pleasure. Karin felt it, a warm buzz that spread from her hands where she gripped the ancient weapon, up her forearms and into her shoulders, spreading out through her body like the warmth of a long hug from a favorite grandparent.
    When she put the sword down again, she was crying.
    She knew what Ushi to yasashi to was.
    She knew what she had become.
    ###
    Ex-fil arrived mid-afternoon, only two of the team came up to the apartment, the other three stayed with their vehicles and did their best to secure a perimeter. As far as they would ever know Colonel Ekaterina Varatchevsky was in a good physical and mental state, having evaded the American security apparatchiki.
    They successfully extracted the subject from the safe house, removing her to another address, a flat above a small gymnasium owned by a minor figure in New York’s Russian mafia and frequented exclusively by tattooed émigré gentlemen of the same ilk.
    Varatchevsky insisted on taking the antique sword she had stolen from the Warat Gallery. It was very valuable, she said. Nobody should touch it. Ever.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    For such a terrible place, the gymnasium was strangely reassuring to Karin. It looked as though it might once have been a boxing gym. Faded photographs of old fighters looked down on a ring where two men were sparring. But they fought with knees and elbows. They grappled and wrestled, contending with each other in the mixed martial arts style which had become popular on cable television. She recognized elements of Muay Thai, TKD and judo in their techniques. The thugs and criminals who looked on, waiting their turn in the ring, were of no mind to her. She had dealt with worse. She was worse. But the smell of the place, the reek of hard gain and sacrifice, recalled for Karin the world of her childhood, and the words of her first coach; wisdom beaten into her over many years in the little gymnasium in Volgograd—literally beaten into her, with a long bamboo cane.
    “Ekaterina, if you are any good, you will know you could be so much better.”
    The bratva , lords of this squalid realm, and their sullen petukh serfs and butt boys studiously ignored her when she arrived with her minders. She wore gray sweatpants and an NYU hoodie, and carried Ushi to yasashi to wrapped in a towel. The gym men were all huge with steroids, grotesquely tattooed and dead behind the eyes. Her extraction team were anonymous in smart business casual. Not suits and ties, but pressed slacks and sports jackets. They could have been real estate agents on a day off, or owners of a chain of garden stores. Nobody would remember them and she knew them only by first names. Vladimir, their leader. Josef, the second in command. And Nikita, Leonid and Yuri.
    “So Mikhail just missed out,” she joked.
    They did not smile.
    Vladimir and Yuri escorted her through the gymnasium where a dozen men punched heavy bags, or grunted and snarled while lifting weights, or just leaned somewhere, smoking. Probably awaiting instructions to shake down a luckless restaurant owner or travel agent. Karin suppressed the sneer that wanted to crawl across her face. They were scum, but they had their uses. And the pindosi would get nothing from them. Not with pliers and blowtorches.
    The small bedsit in which she was to stay before extraction was a long way down-market from the safe house where she had first hidden out. It was a bare two rooms, one with a cot and table, the other provincially furnished with a toilet bowl, sink and two kitchen appliances—a toaster and a kettle—on a shelf over the water basin.
    A woman waited for her, a doctor to judge by the medical bag she carried. Vladimir and Yuri waited outside the room while the woman examined her.
    “Take off your clothes, please.”
    She was young, and quite pretty. Anybody else might have speculated on what path had led her to this place, but Karin knew that such paths were many and treacherous and often hidden.