Red Vanguard: Post-Mortem

“The attitude of a political party toward its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is.”

The book, like everything else, was small in the hands of a man like Ivan Stanislav. All of the words within were useful. Cherished. Precious.

Alexei didn't answer, but his machines did. A steady, rhythmic whirring confirmed that something was still happening. Even in this state, Alexei was fighting.

His face, however, was motionless. The public knew Ruslan in a state of perpetual, apoplectic rage. It was an act honed by a mind that had spent its life manipulating others. In private, Ivan had often seen him wear a mask of calculating silence.

But this was different.

There was no calculation here. Nothing withheld.

He read the line again. Not for himself, but for the listener.

“The attitude of a political party toward its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is.”

He closed the book.

When Ivan arrived, Gema had met his eyes, sharing a look of mutual, silent grief before stepping out into the hall. She pulled the door shut behind her, leaving Ivan and Alexei alone with the mechanical breathing of the machines.

Ivan rested the book against his knee. He noticed a single strand of Alexei’s mustache was longer than the rest. He rose, produced a pair of trimmer scissors, and leaned over with surprising gentleness.

He trimmed the hair and waited. He instinctively expected a sharp intake of breath or a biting comment about his lack of precision. He looked for any sign of the stubborn man who never allowed a detail to go uncorrected.

The silence remained absolute.

He wiped the hair from the lip with profound sadness.

“Can you hear me, Alyosha?” he whispered, his voice cracking against the sterile air. “Tell me not to make a second mistake.”

The first mistake had been disguising mercy as strategy. Ivan had looked at three Western men and decided to trust them. To leave that error standing would be the second.

Red Bear Retreat and his Squad Goals team had been an unexpected challenge. There, sitting at the fire with the three outsiders around it, Ivan had given them something he hadn’t planned to give. Afghanistan. Kliment. The enemy turned friend, Farid.

Alexei had brought them together, and it had happened, organically. Ivan had thrust them into a situation none, not even he, had wanted, and he had tried to bridge the gap and meet them halfway.

As he leaned over Alexei, pain bloomed across Stanislav’s back. He had watched the video dozens of times, trying to count how many bludgeons he’d absorbed in their match. It was more than forty. Less than sixty, maybe.

And not one of his “allies” had come to help him. Even those who had been eliminated. They simply abandoned the team.

The door opened suddenly. Dr. Vorobyova didn’t knock. She hadn't knocked in three weeks.

Ivan straightened slowly, the scissors in his hand. The woman in the doorway was fifty, grey at the temples, her confidence unshaken by the towering monolith of the man who had haunted her hallway for twenty-five days.

“Starshy Praporshchik,” she said. Her Russian was Muscovite, clipped, and weary.

Ivan set the scissors on the bedside table. He didn't speak. He had spent a month listening to her talk about hypoxic injury and induced comas. He was finished with definitions.

She consulted the chart, but it was a formality. She had already memorized the stagnation of the patient’s data. “The acute phase is over, Starshy Praporshchik. The stabilization is complete.”

“And yet,” Ivan said, his voice a low vibration. “He does not answer.”

“The recovery curve for this kind of injury is no longer moving,” she said, meeting his eyes. “Unless a miracle occurs, we are looking at months of maintenance. Perhaps longer.”

Months. The word hit him harder than any strike he had taken in the Squad Goals match. For weeks, he had been a soldier on guard duty, waiting for the order to advance. Now, she was telling him the line was static. The room tilted by three degrees as he tried not to wobble. He recovered, but he hated that she saw the tremor.

“Dr. Vorobyova,” Ivan said quietly. “He is the strongest man I have ever known. If he does not recover. If the worst happens. It will not be because he failed.”

He stepped toward her, allowing the storm cloud to coalesce in the small room.

“It will be because you failed. And if that occurs, I will investigate the state of his care. Closely.”

The doctor knew exactly what he meant. It was her turn to stop the room from tilting.

“Of… of course,” she whispered.

Ivan didn’t watch her go. He turned back to the bed and picked up the book.

—

Ivan noticed it immediately upon folding into the back seat. The leather was excessively soft, the climate control calibrated to pure luxury. The silence beyond the tinted glass felt engineered to specifically insulate its occupants from the struggle of the outside world.

Alexei would have said it was wasteful. He wouldn’t have even looked up from whatever he was reading at the time, as if it required no thought to come to such a conclusion.

Ivan settled his weight into the seat and watched Minnesota pass by.

Maksim sat across from him, thumb scrolling a thin tablet with a rhythmic, digital click. He was the picture of the new Russia. Streamlined, polished, and scrubbed clean of struggle.

“The logistics for 86 are finalized, Starshy Praporshchik,” Maksim said, his voice smooth enough to match the steadiness of the car. “I arranged for a company to load your equipment into the arena, so neither you nor the Red Army need to worry about a thing. A four-way match is favorable and without any distractions, you can focus on them and them alone.”

Efficiency. Focus. Favorability. Maksim spoke in that far-away language of a man sitting in an office while a war raged below. The youth looked at the wreckage of the Red Vanguard and saw a dip in a graph. Ivan was going to liquidate the variables.

Wrestling sounded wrong in Maksim’s mouth. He was not invested in the fight. Only in Russia, and in himself.

And Ivan hated how comfortable and smooth the ride was.

He reached down and pressed his thumb into the side of his knee. The one that hurt. Constantly. The one that reminded him of the Luchador. He hated that old ache.

He hated it even more when the comfort of the vehicle took the pain away.

“Focus?” Ivan said, “What do you know about such a thing? Alexei didn’t spend his life buried in an electronic device.” His voice a low rumble that failed to shake the smooth suspension of the vehicle.

Maksim paused, his thumb hovering over the screen. He regarded Stanislav. “I understand, Starshy Praporschik.” He said quietly. “I am not Alexei, or any of the others who have taken up your banner and championed your cause.”

Ivan narrowed his eyes, but listened.

“When we first met, I tried to modernize you. You denied me and you were right. You have been Universal Champion. Twice. You are the Intense Champion. Feared by enemies, loved by our people. You are Ivan Stanislav. You are what you are, and it works. I see that now.”

The Russian Bear was unsure quite where Maksim was going with this, but he rested deeper in the leather seat.

“But until Alexei returns, afford yourself a small luxury worthy of your station. Let someone else sit in discomfort for once. Please.”

Ivan didn’t answer. He didn’t thank him. To thank him would be to acknowledge that Maksim was, in some way or form, a benefactor. He simply closed his eyes and let the silence of the car swallow the rumble of the engine.

Ivan opened his eyes as the car hissed to a stop. He hadn’t realized he’d nodded off. Through the tinted window, Red Bear Retreat looked cold. The last time he had been there, it housed betrayers and thieves.

Alexei was also healthy.

Maksim stepped out first and opened Ivan’s door without being asked. Ivan unfolded from the seat and stood in the cool air and looked at the building.

“I can come in,“ Maksim said. “If it would be useful.”

Ivan didn’t look at him. He just felt the gravel beneath his feet and approached the door.

“Wait here.”

—

When the car door thudded shut, the silence of the wilderness rushed to meet Ivan. It was a sharp, early-morning cold that bit down to his bone.

It reminded him of home, and he loathed it.

Behind him, the tinted windows of the car remained opaque, a wall of modern, efficient indifference. Maksim was inside, scrolling through his tablet, bouncing around the world and ignoring everything around him.

Ivan didn’t look back. He reached into the pocket of his heavy coat and grasped the thick key that opened the main door to Red Bear Retreat. Just a utilitarian piece of old-school iron that Alexei had given him.

Off in the distance, the pond had thawed. He thought of the times he sat there with Alexei, just a few fishing poles between them and the constant debate between worms and fish.

“If the world gets too loud, Vanya, the water is always quiet,” Alexei would say.

In the remote wilderness, the world was very loud now. The noise of the past few weeks was a physical pressure at the base of Ivan’s skull. He stepped onto the porch and felt the wood groan under his heavy frame. He slid the key into the lock, turned it, and pushed.

The stale air inside was a vacuum, preserving the ghosts of the Red Vanguard experiment. It smelled of cedar and the ozone of Alexei’s surveillance equipment wired into the molding.

Ivan didn’t turn on the light. He let the morning sun cast long shadows across the room where four men had once pretended to be a team. Walking to the center, his body told the story his mind wrestled with.

His knee, absent from the luxury of the car, hurt again. It was a welcomed pain.

The ache across his shoulder blades was a different discomfort. Sharp, lashing, the ghost of multiple chair shots he’d absorbed when the line broke. Scott Hunter no doubt sat backstage, after giving himself up and folding to Lindsay Troy, and laughed as Ivan was assaulted.

He looked down at his right hand. Faint, jagged white lines across his knuckles, souvenirs of the glass from the parking lot. Bobby Neptune’s price. The cuts had healed, but the skin felt tight. Tension made physical.

Finally, there was the porcelain surface of the “Jasmine Tooth.” A cold, hard anchor in his mouth. A reminder of his most hated enemy: Chandler Tsonda.

His body was a map of the Vanguard’s failure.

Each wound had a name. Hunter was surrender disguised as friendliness. Tsonda was vanity dressed as greatness. Neptune was hope without discipline. The upcoming contest was not a match against teammates or rivals. It was a match against three different lies Ivan had briefly allowed himself to believe.

Every pulse of pain a voice telling him that the experiment was over, and the execution had begun.

He stopped at the long timber table. Where they had eaten. He could almost see Chandler Tsonda sitting there, his Dior shades reflecting the firelight like the eyes of a predator. Ivan relived the moment vividly. Extending his own hand in a gesture of “civilized” leadership, and the way Tsonda had swatted it away. Not refusal. Dismissal.

At the time, Ivan had filed it away as the ego of a Western man fighting the inevitable. But in the cold post-mortem of the lodge, the truth was different. Tsonda hadn’t been resisting. He had been sabotaging. He had saved Ivan from elimination in their match, and it had surprised him, but only so Ivan would be forced to endure the humiliation at Troy’s hands.

Tsonda did not betray the team in the match. He betrayed it the moment he decided nothing larger than Chandler Tsonda was worth serving.

Ivan turned to the couch, where Scott Hunter had sat, head back, and eyes closed. He'd tried to reach him, to show him what life could be like when one had true meaning behind it. Not the transactional cruelty of Vae Victis. Not cheap jokes that others chortled at. Of the three, Hunter seemed like the most likely to listen, strange as that might be.

And he threw himself onto the mat and surrendered to Lindsay immediately. Afterwards, in the pink ushanka, with a “dossier” of jokes, pretending to be victorious with Troy, petting a “pelt” of Ivan Stanislav while he made a mockery of his life, accomplishments, and family.

The fury in Ivan’s chest was permafrost. Hunter had been a jester taking notes for a comedy routine. A useful idiot for Lindsay Troy, and Ivan’s faith in him had been misdirected.

Finally, the window, where Bobby Neptune stared at the stars. Bobby was the one who had looked him in the eye and said, “I’ll pay it.”

Neptune was the worst because he made Ivan lower his guard. Hatred is easy to read. Earnestness is not. He was the reason Ivan had walked down the corridor. Why Ivan had offered the Farid story in the first place. Bobby had almost made Ivan believe the experiment could work. Neptune carried neither Tsonda’s hatred nor the Vae Victis poison that lived inside of Hunter.

The young man had accepted the debt on the plane, then walked through the parking lot with Kenny Freeman as if the world was a friendly place.

There was nothing left to do with the thought. No further lesson to draw from it. No one in the room to correct, command, or condemn. The silence of Red Bear Retreat gathered around Ivan and made the place feel less like a lodge than a tomb. It had heard all of it now, the hope, the humiliation, the error. And in that heavy stillness, he remembered that the house still held one witness worth speaking to.

A heavy bookshelf in the corner caught Ivan’s eye, filled with texts on military history, Soviet politics, and communist philosophy. Ivan approached it and moved the books. Behind the third shelf was a small recessed panel. Alexei’s ears. Ivan knew them well.

He didn’t touch the panel with precision. He pressed his massive palm against the wood beside it, leaning his weight into the wall. The timber groaned and for a second, it felt like the building was leaning back.

“Alyosha,” he whispered and pressed his forehead against the cool wood and closed his eyes. “I am in the center of our mistake.”

He thought of fishing poles and quiet water. How his brother, who admitted to loving the silence, was now trapped in the deepest silence of all.

“You once said the water was quiet when the world was too loud,” Ivan said, and his voice cracked on the last word. “But you never told me what to do when the silence is the thing that screams.” He shut his eyes. “They took our Vanguard and made it into a joke.”

Ivan sagged against the wall and let his full weight go into it, as if the timber alone could keep him standing. “I am alone, Alyosha. Utterly and completely alone.” His breath shuddered once. “Please. Hear me.”

Nothing answered him.

Red Bear Retreat held its silence. No footsteps. No barked correction from Ruslan. Only the ragged breathing of a man who had outlasted empires, buried his family, and still could not find a way to reach his surrogate brother.

Ivan bowed his head for one final second and let the truth settle in him. No answer was coming through the wall. No hand was reaching back for him. What remained was the pain in his jaw, the pull in his back, the old injuries singing in his bones, and the work still left to do.

His fingers spread against the wood. Then they pressed.

Ivan Stanislav did not rise. He reassembled himself. Muscle by muscle, breath by breath, the weakness folded away. Pain became fuel. When he finally pushed himself off the wall, there was no hesitation left in him. He did not look at the bookshelf again. He had already spoken. He was his own answer.

Cold Minnesota air struck him in the face as he stepped outside. He pulled the door shut, turned the old iron key in the lock, withdrew it, and snapped it in his fist. The broken pieces fell into the gravel. He left the mourning man inside, in the dark.

The car was still idling. Maksim was still there, sealed behind leather and glass. Ivan walked toward it with a face like stone. In the black window he saw only what mattered now: the Intense Champion. The Russian Bear.

And elsewhere, inside the hidden speaker buried in Red Bear Retreat, the words he whispered for Alexei remained. Waiting in the dark for the day his brother could hear them.

—

Hunter.

He sat in this house and listened as though listening were loyalty. I believed that there was something in him beneath the noise, beneath Troy, beneath the need to turn every serious thing into a performance. I was wrong. He did not fail under pressure. He surrendered before pressure truly found him. He is a man who feeds on the weight others carry.

Tsonda.

I still feel Jasmine’s tooth in my jaw. I still remember the blood. He wanted his grievance honored more than he wanted victory secured. When a man serves his pride before the objective, he has already betrayed the line. Chandler Tsonda was never part of anything larger than Chandler Tsonda.

Neptune.

The most dangerous of the three. Not because he hated me. Hatred is easy to read. Because he did not. He looked me in the eye and said he would pay the price. Neptune thought a debt had already been settled and history had been forgiven. That was his betrayal. Naivete so complete it became insult.

He is out there right now, Alyosha, no doubt wearing the cuts from that parking lot like a badge of survival. Young fools think that when Ivan Stanislav leaves them in a pool of their own blood, the battle is over. It is never over. He hasn’t seen the worst of what we can do. The parking lot was only a down payment on a debt he cannot afford.

Alyosha.

We thought this place could be a proving ground. We thought I could gather these men, shape them, and point them toward something greater than themselves. There were no men here to shape.

I think of Lenin’s words, brother. The test was never about whether we erred. The test was how we answered the error.

Now the matter becomes simple.

This match is about correction.

In a match like this, fools mistake motion for control. Hunter will run. Tsonda will posture. Neptune will trust youth and nerve to solve what age and endurance have survived for decades. Let them circle. Let them lunge first. Let them spend themselves proving they are not the same. I know they challenge one another. But all of them hate me.

It will not save them.

In the end they will arrive where all men like them arrive, close enough for me to put my hands on them.

I will erase every word I spoke in this house. I will correct the record. Even with half of us silent and the line abandoned.

Lenin wrote that we are judged by our attitude toward our mistakes, Alyosha.

They will feel it at ReVival 86. My three failed comrades will have nowhere left to run. They squandered the mercy I afforded them in this lodge. Hunter was surrender disguised as friendliness, Tsonda was vanity dressed as greatness, Neptune was hope without discipline. Now that their disguises are gone, I will reduce them to their reality. I will assign them the only station men of such small worth deserve.

I will correct it, Alexei Gregorovich. For us.

And when you wake, because you will wake, you will see the destruction I have wrought to make it right.

It did not have to be this way.

But once a mistake is seen clearly, only a coward leaves it uncorrected.

I’ll make Comrade Lenin proud of us.