by Alex Dryden
She lowered the binoculars and walked to the left along the escarpment to the first of the line of smaller boulders she’d prepared. Below her, on the road which arced into the mountain, the two huge boulders she’d managed to heave down the slope stood immovable, preventing a vehicle from passing easily. They would have to stop and then carefully go around the edges of the boulders, avoiding the chasm that opened out on the far side.
She watched as the three vehicles disappeared behind a jutting ridge below the higher ground where she was. The next time she’d see them would be when they appeared around the corner and into the arc of the road, and they saw the boulders.
She sat down and armed the Thompson, stringing a band of ammunition around her jacket; a single firing gun, but one with great accuracy. Then she made doubly sure the two pistols she’d taken from the dead conscripts were also armed, and she thrust these into two diagonal pockets in the jacket. They had maybe three miles to cover before they reached the arc in the road. She tested the first branch under the boulder and felt how little leverage it would take, then she tested the others. She would go from one to the other. Another line of prepared boulders lay over to her left, but they were useless now. They were in case a vehicle approached from the other direction, the other side of the boulders in the road.
She finally caught the distant sound of a rasping jeep engine and then the truck’s gears clanking down as the vehicles climbed up the plateau. Two minutes, three perhaps, before they appeared. She looked up in the sky and saw an eagle circling high above. Then she saw two hawks lower down, wary of the eagle above them. But maybe they had already sensed the approach of carrion.
The first jeep came into view and at once the two men inside saw the boulders on the road. The truck and the second jeep hadn’t appeared, both slowed down by the truck’s weaker engine, she guessed. The first jeep pulled up twenty yards or so from the first boulder in the road. The driver stepped out, looked up at the escarpment and, seeing nothing, slowly walked up to the boulder and checked the width of the road to the side of it, before it dropped into the chasm. Then he walked to the second of the boulders. Satisfied, he turned, looked up again, and Anna shot him through the heart at thirty feet.
It was then she heard the truck’s roaring, grinding sound as it appeared around the bend. The second jeep was behind it. Once they’d gained the flat ground on the slope from beyond, where she could see, they were travelling at greater speed in order to catch up with the first jeep; twenty or twenty-five miles an hour. She didn’t look at the passenger in the first jeep who was now out of it, walking towards where the driver had fallen, but she shot at a hundred and fifty yards, through the screen of the second jeep and hit somewhere near the driver’s neck. The jeep slewed, even at its relatively slow pace, and she knew she had a hit. And then, to her great good fortune, the whole jeep continued its slewing motion across the road and over the edge into the chasm, taking the dead or wounded driver and his live passenger with him.
Anna saw the face of the truck driver now; confused, unaware of a shot above the noise of the truck’s engine, but still seeing – in the truck’s mirror – the jeep behind him swerving erratically, swinging from side to side as though it were being shaken, and finally tilting over the edge into the chasm. Then he looked ahead and saw the first jeep stopped. The truck driver was unaware too, perhaps, of the boulders in front of it. When he saw the halted jeep in front of him, the truck driver slammed on the brakes and it skidded to a halt, huffing and growling from the hood, brakes strained to the maximum. He was just fifty feet away from Anna and she shot him through the chest too. Three bullets, time for loading between each, no need for the conscripts’ pistols to back up her firepower.
But when she looked back at the first jeep, its passenger was out of the seat and had disappeared. He’d seen the driver shot as soon as it had happened and there’d been seconds, but valuable seconds, to get out and conceal himself. Anna scanned from the dead body of the first driver, past the empty jeep, to the slumped driver of the truck behind and the flailing tracks of the jeep that had disappeared over the edge. Nothing. A sudden silence. One on one. That must be how it was now. Otherwise, if the truck contained men, they’d have been out of the back by now, deployed along the road, concealing themselves as best they could. But there was no one else; just the first jeep’s passenger.
From behind the rock where she lay flat on her stomach, she armed the Thompson again, this time with a high-powered rifle round, and took one of the loaded pistols from her pocket. The scree slope that led thirty feet to the road below her contained no cover. But there was only one place the man could have hidden, could still be hiding – behind the first jeep. He was waiting too, also armed and ready now, and aware perhaps that he was the only one left. There was only one thing she could do to draw him out and that was to come out herself.
Finally ready, she stood up from behind the rock. The pain in her thigh coursed up through her body, the conscript’s pistol in her bandaged left hand dug into the wound. But her right hand was free for the Thompson; thirty feet with a rifle round was devastating. She had one advantage – her height on the slope above him. He had another – cover. But he would have to show himself to shoot and, while she was supremely deadly, fearless, he was undoubtedly terrified. He’d seen the entire cortege wiped out, but for himself. He had no idea who, or how many, there were up on the slope above the road. But she knew he wouldn’t dare to try to surrender, no matter how much he might like to. Surrender was clearly not the game with two dead men on the road and another two at the bottom of the chasm.
She began to half walk, half limp down the slope, the two guns ready, and she aimed at the jeep. She saw now that the driver had opened his window, the window nearer her, as he’d first looked out at the boulders, and then descended from the jeep to his death. The air was still. There was nothing living except her, the man, and the eagle and two hawks which still circled lazily above. But the opened window seemed like an invitation.
She descended ten feet, then fifteen. She was halfway to the road, limping painfully on the steep rocky slope. Fifteen feet; she would risk it. She had the height and he hadn’t shown himself. With the Thompson aimed at full arm’s stretch, she shot the rifle round through the opened window, and downwards, through the inside of the flimsy passenger door of the jeep on the far side. The explosion shattered the silence, but she heard nothing after it, just the ringing in her ears. She crouched, swiftly rearmed the Thompson with another rifle round, without ever taking her eyes off the jeep. She descended a few more steps, fired again, the same trajectory, through the open window and the door on the far side. This time, she rearmed as she continued down the slope to the road, rolled on to her stomach and looked beneath the jeep.
What she saw were two military boots, their toecaps facing upwards, then legs in fatigues and an arm splayed to the side in death. She didn’t know which of the shots had killed him, but it didn’t matter. She stood and walked around to the far side of the jeep and saw his face had been blown to indistinguishable meat.
Anna stood up, pocketed the conscript’s pistol and walked over to the first man she had shot. Then she turned and walked back the way the cortege had come until she reached the truck, its driver slumped over the steering wheel. She went to the back of the truck and opened the flap, untying cords that held it to the tailgate. She flung back the flap, fastening it open, the Thompson drawn and ready. In the dark of its interior, she saw nothing at first. It seemed entirely empty. But then she saw a box, made of heavy wood, by the look of it. She climbed over the tailgate, her leg an agonising presence, using her right hand only to claw her way over and leaving the Thompson momentarily inactive. She stood inside in the half-darkness and breathed away the pain from her body, until she felt her head begin to cease its spinning. She threw open the other flap of canvas to let in more light.
Then she walked over to the box.
Before she was five feet away, she saw that the box was
a coffin. The cortege was escorting a dead person; another death.
She looked around the inside of the truck until she found a tool box and, deep inside it, a tyre wrench. She put down the Thompson and picked up the wrench. Then she returned to the coffin. She dug the sharp edge of the wrench into the crack where the lid was nailed to the base and began, with one hand, the slow, hard process of heaving up the lid. Each nail came away, one by one. The lid was half free by the time she was able to yank it free completely with a splintering crash of wood and torn nails.
There was a winding sheet of sorts and she pulled this away, using the wrench as if to touch it with her hands might contaminate them.
Under the sheet was a face she recognised at once; the craggy, deeply lined face of the 68-year-old Professor Vasily Kryuchkov. She stared, first in horror, then in shock, and finally with a sickening, dead feeling that her life – all the lives – had been wasted. She turned her head and retched on to the bed of the truck. When she’d choked up everything she’d eaten from her guts, she looked back at Kryuchkov’s face again, lifting the veil for the last time. Too clever to die, but finally too dangerous to live.
She dropped the wrench on the truck bed, picked up the Thompson, and walked to the back of the truck. As she stepped painfully over the tailgate on to the ground, she heard a crack, then felt a stinging sensation in her side. She half turned, half fell. She saw the truck driver lying, crawling on his belly, a pistol in his hand, raised again for the kill. She aimed the Thompson without thinking and fired, blowing his skull in two through the bridge of his nose.
Then Anna fell, slammed down on to the road, and remembered nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
PETROV FOUND THE body of Anna some two hours later. From the entrance to the cave, he hadn’t returned to the funeral feast that was being given for his grandfather. The billowing black smoke, of aviation fuel, so he thought, changed everything. And maybe the wolf too, which had lurked stationary for half an hour, until finally it disappeared over a ridge in a steady, loping run.
He’d turned towards where the smoke was coming from, and began to walk, first up over a ridge and into a canyon, then up another ridge and down again into another canyon. The shaman’s coat was still draped over his arm.
But he was too wary to approach up close to the site of whatever it was that had crashed. All he knew was that it was the woman, somewhere the woman was near. The woman was behind everything he thought and did now.
From down below the small plateau where the burning of the helicopter had died down, he saw three or four more helicopters hovering high above and then he saw the occasional movement of men on the plateau as they explored the accident. He caught sight of them only when they came close enough to the lip of the plateau to catch a glimpse of an arm or a leg, the side of a body in military fatigues. But he kept himself well hidden, under overhangs in the rock, and walked swiftly away from the scene of devastation until he could no longer hear the sound of helicopters and the world was silent again.
It was later that he saw the footprint. More than an hour of walking had passed when he saw it in the deep cleft in the canyon, just after it had dog-legged to the north. He knelt and examined it and saw at once that it was most likely a woman’s boot. For several miles after that he followed her tracks, losing them occasionally as she climbed over rocks, then finding them again after much searching. But he knew it was her. He walked for ten miles or more, until the tracks started to lead upwards, out of the canyon, towards a ridge beyond which, he knew, was the road that led to the missile silos and the research station thirty miles to the north. When he reached the top of the ridge, he looked down and saw on the road a still life – a jeep, a truck, three bodies lying at intervals in the road. A still death.
He went to the body of the woman immediately. He saw the gash that had opened in her thigh, her bandaged hand, a long-barrelled handgun he’d never seen before, fallen by her side, a Russian military pistol thrown aside by her fall. And then he noticed bleeding from above her waist. The blood had slowed to a stop some time before. He pulled back her jacket and saw the bullet wound where it had entered just above her hip, through just flesh, and exited an inch or two behind. A surface wound, but one that had been enough, along with her other injuries, to bring her down and leave her down.
He knelt on the road and put his ear to her mouth. He felt nothing, not a breath. But he kept his ear there and placed a finger on the pulse of her right hand. He could feel the faintest movement, a jagged, muted struggle for life. And then he felt the thin, interrupted breath from her mouth. It seemed to last a minute between each breath, but it must have been less.
He looked up at the jeep and thought he should lift her into it, drive her to the nearest hospital in Norilsk. But at once he knew he couldn’t take the woman there. Whoever she was, Valentina Asayev, a former SVR colonel, a traitor, a defector, a terrorist, or… none or few of these.
He slung the shaman’s coat over her inert body and picked her up. Then he walked back up the slope, and over the ridge until he was out of sight of the road, then down again, scrambling, crawling, sliding into the darker depths where there would be water. Several times he put her body down, to rest certainly, but also to try to cover his tracks up from the road. It was most important they didn’t find his tracks up – or hers down. When he was thirty feet or so above the road, he saw the smaller boulders she’d arranged and evidently hadn’t used. He set them rolling down the slope and then tried to cover where she’d set them.
He walked over rock wherever he could, and finally found a sloping rock ridge that would take him to the foot of the canyon on the far side of the road from where he’d first come. There would be water there.
He bathed her wounds in a stream and dribbled some water into her mouth. She was pale, bloodless, but one time he felt her lips move a little as he wetted them.
Time no longer existed here, not any more, not amongst his own people, or in the land of endless light.
He walked on ten, fifteen miles along the broken canyon until he was at the foot of the slope that led up to the cave and the meadow where the camp and his people were. He never knew how he’d done it, no matter how strong a man he was. It was a superhuman effort, he thought dimly, something that he could never have done in the ordinary way of things.
For nearly two days, Anna lay on a palliasse of bound grasses with a deer hide laid over them before she was able to speak. She was in Petrov’s and his mother’s choom and it was Petrov’s mother alone who treated her wounds. Many herbs were used. Petrov noticed nine herbs in all and he remembered his grandfather’s story the night that he died, about the teaching of the nine herbs. Maybe, he thought, Gannyka had passed on the shaman’s language to his mother. But she never replied when he asked her.
In the meantime, Petrov made his daily calls to Colonel Fradkov. He learned of the crashed helicopter that he’d seen and Fradkov informed him of the ambush on the military road. Petrov intimated surprise and shock. He was then ordered to stop all his people’s usual activities and to command them to spread out along the roof of the plateau.
‘We have other developments,’ Fradkov told him on the second day. ‘Four terrorists have been arrested in Norilsk. They, too, were on board the Rossiya. They had explosives and a highly dangerous explosive material with them. From our interrogations, we understand they were heading to the far north towards Dikson. Apparently they intended to blow up Russia’s new and unique Arctic reactor. After further questioning, they will be executed, of course. But from our interrogations, we know there are at least two others still free.’ Fradkov paused. ‘Those we’ve captured are being questioned twenty-four hours a day. There will be little left of them before they’re shot.’
And Petrov knew the dark meaning of his words.
Petrov asked him if they were connected to the woman.
‘Everything is connected,’ Fradkov replied angrily. ‘Find the woman. Remember what I told you. The rewards
will be astronomical for you. Failure, however, may have other implications,’ he added threateningly.
They will blame everyone but themselves, Petrov thought.
In and out of consciousness, Anna thought of one thing only; the death mask of Professor Vasily Kryuchkov. And with it, the failure of her mission, the waste of life, the loss of what she knew was a great – if not the greatest – opportunity for mankind. Sometimes in these moments she struggled for life, at others she felt the peace of near death and almost welcomed its embrace. But the attentions of Petrov and his mother, as well as her own deep desire for life, somehow always prevailed. She knew she would recover, though she understood in her rational mind that there was little point in doing so. Her mission had replaced her life.
On the evening of the second day, she was well enough to speak and Petrov’s mother left him with her. He drew up the small wooden stool he’d sat on as his grandfather died and sat next to the grass palliasse where she now sat, painfully, but upright, leaning against the backing of wooden sled runners. Petrov’s mother had made her a cup of tea – more of the herbs she seemed to know so well – and he offered her a drink of vodka from the bottle. She drank a little, then two mouthfuls, and she was alert again.
Petrov sat and watched her for a long time without speaking. And she, too, studied his face intently for the first time.
What she saw was his brown skin at first and, even without the surroundings of a reindeer hide tent where she lay, he was clearly from one of the tribes of the north. She noted a dilated face with a frontal retraction at all three levels – intellectual, emotional and instinctive. The man’s forehead was well differentiated, his eyes set back, protected. It told her he had a clever, deductive mind. On his forehead she saw a round-ish mark of curved lines, rather than the normal straightness. She believed then that she was looking, not just at a man who was clever at the twists and turns of life, but at someone who had some great spiritual quality. His high, full cheekbones, straight and protected nostrils, were a sign that he lived his life through passion, yet a passion that was guided and controlled by honesty and discretion. His jawline, she noted, was immensely strong. Whoever sat before her possessed a vital force and the capacity to carry on to a designated goal with great determination. As her eyes travelled across his gentle but strong face, her training told her that here was a man it was possible to trust.
