Field of Fire

by Marc Cameron

  She pressed on the throttle with her thumb, taking the ATV up a low hill, chancing a quick look over her shoulder as they reached the top. Behind them, the endless tundra stretched for miles. So far so good, but one small problem nagged at her stomach. Polina had no idea she was on her way.

  Chapter 46

  Ilia Davydov walked a half step behind the other two Russians, eyes flitting back and forth among the weathered houses. Surely every home in this remote place had several guns. So the men were out hunting. Did it not occur to these fools that the Native women might also know how to shoot? Davydov had always considered himself head and shoulders above these cretins in brains. The way they walked so boldly into such a danger only proved him right.

  All three men stopped in their tracks as the figure of an elderly woman emerged from among the houses and walked toward them amid the falling snow. Her navy blue parka was trimmed in the rich brown fur of rosomakha—wolverine. Armed with nothing but her righteous indignation, the old woman hobbled on elderly legs, shaking her fist at the approaching men. She spoke in a guttural Native tongue that sounded as if she was talking around a mouthful of spit.

  Davydov couldn’t understand her words but her meaning was clear. They were to leave her village immediately.

  She made it to within ten feet of the men before Kravchuk began to laugh derisively and shot her in the belly with his rifle.

  Doubling over in pain, the woman dropped to her knees. Yakibov began to laugh as well and shot her in the arm. They were toying with her.

  The poor woman’s face convulsed and twitched, and it was obvious she was in tremendous pain, but she said nothing, glaring instead at the men.

  Kravchuk gave a heartless chuckle. “Let us see how brave you are when—”

  Davydov shot the woman in the head with his pistol, ending her suffering but bringing a sneer from Kravchuk and Yakibov.

  “Your heart is much too soft, my friend,” Kravchuk said. “I consider it my duty to toughen you up.”

  Yakibov pointed his Kalashnikov toward the village with one hand, where small groups of women and children ran toward the school. “The old woman was stalling us,” he said. “Kravchuk, you go ahead and secure any communications at the school. Davydov and I will clear the remaining houses, then we will join you there. If people are not already fleeing toward the haven of the school, they are still sleeping. This should go quickly.” The former Spetsnaz man nudged Davydov and grinned. “Maybe we can toughen you up with a little fun and games while on the way.”

  Chapter 47

  Quinn knelt among the thick willows beside Beaudine, peering through the dead leaves and falling snow at the old fuel shack that stood between them and the main dirt street of Needle. The village was laid out in a lopsided T with the long road stretching approximately a half mile between the small airstrip and the school. The top of the T, which was now to Quinn’s left, ran up from the river in front of the blue metal school, continuing on to what looked like the dump a few hundred meters out of town. It was difficult to tell from his vantage point but Quinn guessed there to be no more than ten weathered wood-sided homes along the main street and another four or five on the shorter street beyond the school. Green hides hung over two-by-four wooden banisters in front of nearly every house. Here and there, partially butchered caribou quarters hung on wooden frames, now covered with snow.

  Trails of fresh footprints led toward the school.

  Quinn took a slow breath, scanning.

  “We should have landed further upriver,” he whispered. “The tracks would have given us an idea of how many we’re dealing with.”

  “Or they would have heard the boat and killed us before we hit the beach,” Beaudine said.

  “There is that,” Quinn said. He nodded toward the school as two more women hurried up and banged on the front door. A young man with a red beard and glasses waved them in quickly before shutting the door again.

  “Looks like everyone’s moving to shelter,” Beaudine said. “That’s good.”

  “The school is the center of—” Quinn stopped mid-sentence and held up a hand to silence Beaudine, tipping his head slightly toward the back of the houses on the other side of the fuel shacks. A Native girl, who looked to be in her mid-teens, dragged a small preschool-age boy through the snow toward the school. The girl crept slowly, skirting junked snow machines and sagging meat racks. Obviously terrified, she checked back over her shoulder every few seconds.

  The old fuel shack was located nearer the school on the long leg of the T. A newer fuel shack—two pumps surrounded by a tall chain-link fence—had been built fifty feet upriver, likely to meet some safety code about standoff distance from the school. Quinn waited for the girl to look behind her and motioned for Beaudine to follow him, breaking out of the alders just below the new fuel shack.

  Believing any threat was coming from the airport, the girl focused her attention backward and didn’t see Quinn until he’d already come up behind her. He clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her back into the alders as gently as he could. Beaudine followed with the child.

  Quinn was surprised how strong the girl was. She kicked and jerked and screamed into his open hand, almost spinning out of his grasp several times. It took everything he had to keep her arms pinned to her sides without hurting her.

  “We’re friends!” he hissed, his lips next to her ear. “Here to help.”

  It took a moment for the message to sink in, and the girl snapped her head back, narrowly missing Quinn’s nose with what would have been a devastating head butt.

  “I’m Jericho,” he said when she calmed down. The little boy fell into his sister’s arms and clung to her, his brown eyes wide with fright at being dragged into the bushes. He stared at the scar on Beaudine’s face, and Quinn realized he probably didn’t look much better. “This is my friend Khaki,” he whispered. “We’re police, chasing those bad men out there.”

  The little boy nodded, giving Quinn a wary eye. “Like the Troopers?”

  Quinn raised his eyebrows. Village kids often had no other contact with law enforcement beyond the Alaska State Troopers. “Yes,” he said. “Like Troopers.”

  “I’m Hazel,” the girl said. “This is my little brother, Herman.”

  “Your family okay?” Quinn asked.

  “My mom works at the school,” Hazel said, eyes welling with tears. “I saw those men shoot Ms. Bernadette. . . They shot her and just laughed . . .”

  “How many are there?” Beaudine asked.

  “Three,” Hazel said. “They’re big and scary. All of ’em have beards.”

  “Only three?” Quinn said. That was odd. According to the Russian at the lodge, Zolner was clean-shaven like a soldier.

  The girl suddenly froze, eyes flicking toward the bushes. Quinn heard the wheezing grunt of someone shuffling through the snow. He turned slowly to see a lone man with a thick salt-and-pepper beard trotting behind the houses. Eyes focused toward the school, the man moved to an outbuilding behind the house nearest the abandoned fuel shack and stopped. Made of unpainted plywood and blue tarps, the six-by-six shed was not quite five feet tall. A rusted stovepipe and pile of split wood outside the door said it was a sweathouse.

  The man scanned the houses in front of him, and then turned to face the side of the sweathouse. He let his Kalashnikov fall against the sling and pushed it behind his hip while he unzipped his pants.

  “He’s stopping to take a leak,” Beaudine said, raising the AR-10. “Is that one of the men?”

  Hazel nodded.

  Quinn put a hand on top of the rifle barrel and shook his head. “We can’t afford to let the others hear the shot.”

  He slipped the pack off his shoulders and stowed it with the Lapua in the willows to retrieve later. That left him with only what he had in his pockets and his war belt of the Kimber pistol, two extra magazines, and the Riot—a stubby but razor sharp sheath knife—allowing him to move quickly and, more important, silently.

  “Hazel
,” he said. “You and your brother keep an eye on the river and make sure no one sneaks up on us.”

  He drew the Riot and crouched, glancing toward the airstrip to make sure his target was alone before looking back at Beaudine, directly into her eyes. “This is one of those times I warned you about.

  She gave a doubtful frown. “You’re going to fight him with a knife?”

  Quinn shook his head. “This won’t be a fight.”

  * * *

  The silent killing of an unsuspecting enemy was conniving, cold blooded, and barbaric. Even when accomplished for a good cause, it felt an awful lot like murder. An otherwise moral man needed some kind of disconnect to kill another human being. Famed Border Patrol gunfighter Bill Jordan called it manufactured contempt. The memory of Lovita’s death was still raw in Quinn’s gut, making the total annihilation of any of the people involved an end game he was happy to work toward. Justice was just another name for societal vengeance, and Quinn had long before come to grips with being the instrument of it.

  Shooting someone from even a short distance away offered a certain protective layer that cushioned and blunted the barbarity of the act. Sneaking up silently behind someone to snuff out their life with a blade was far different from pitched battle where emotions and rage boiled into the fight.

  Quinn was a hard man, accustomed to violent action, but the inevitable sounds and sensations of a life seeping away put an indelible mark on anyone’s mind and soul.

  Snow covered the ground and filled the air, dampening the sound of Quinn’s approach. His target was out of shape and breathing hard from trotting in from the airstrip. Quinn doubted he could hear anything above the sound of his own wheezing—and perhaps the spatter of his urine as it hit the side of the plywood sweathouse.

  Quinn’s training in both Air Force Special Operations and OSI had been excellent in all manner of fighting discipline and art, but courses in killing enemy sentries were non-existent. The only time it was even touched on, in some pre-deployment training, the preferred method was a suppressed 9mm carbine with subsonic ammunition. Emiko Miyagi, the enigmatic Japanese woman, had been deliberate and diverse in her teaching, demonstrating several relatively quiet, if extremely bloody, methods with blade and garrote. Many Internet experts revel in the philosophical niceties of the various arts of killing, but Emiko had actually done it, many times—and it brought a certain detachment to her eyes.

  Quinn moved up behind the man without hesitating, knowing when he got within fifteen feet that he was too close to turn back. He snaked his left arm over the unsuspecting man’s shoulder and clasped his hand over his mouth, stifling a scream before it could escape. At the same time, he drove the thick tanto blade of the Riot into the right side of the man’s bull neck, just below the chin, sharp edge facing forward. Pulling back with his left hand, and pushing forward with his right, the razor-sharp Riot cut neatly through windpipe, jugular, and carotid in one quick and sickening motion.

  The man’s hands flew to his throat. A great swath of blood sprayed the plywood, but with his face pressed tight against his target’s shoulder, Quinn heard instead of saw it. He felt no pity for the man he killed, but a great deal of pity for mankind in general that such a person ever existed at all.

  In the movies, the enemy usually died instantly, but in reality, movement and noise could go on for some time. Quinn held the Russian for a full fifteen seconds until he ceased to struggle, then lowered the lifeless body to the snow. Unwilling to leave a rifle unattended, he stooped to pick up the dead man’s Kalashnikov when a deafening boom caused him to duck for cover. Something hit the plywood sweathouse with a rattling splatter. Quinn jumped sideways as a searing pain stitched his thigh.

  There was no mistaking the feeling. He knew he’d been shot without even looking down.

  Chapter 48

  Russia

  The secure telephone connection between Providenya and Moscow was spotty at best, and Rostov could not tell from General Zhestakova’s voice if he was still upset or if he’d grown ambivalent about the gas attacks on the United States. His sister was married to the Director of the FSB—the modern successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB. Salina Zhestakova was smart, but not a particularly handsome woman. Many supposed that the union required the general to pay a large sum of money in order to make the marriage go through and unite GRU and FSB as if they were powerful clans or allied nations instead of two security and intelligence components under the umbrella of the same government. It was not uncommon for Zhestakova to borrow talented FSB agents from his brother-in-law for particular missions in which he did not want the GRU directly involved—or loan GRU operatives to FSB for their more sensitive head shooting.

  Rostov drummed his fingers against the desk blotter, trying to calm his nerves at having to speak with the famously impatient head of his organization. “The Black Hundreds would appear to want the same thing we do,” he said.

  “My mistress wants me to take her to my dacha on the Black Sea,” Zhestakova said. “I would very much like the same thing, but I do not blather about that fact to my wife. The problem with these new Black Hundreds is that they do not know when to keep their mouths shut. They are idealistic with patriotic goals of a Mother Russia that cannot exist if we engage in a mutually destructive war with the United States. Would it be a terrible thing for the Americans to spend their resources tracking an unknown Islamic terrorist cell? Of course not, but we have seen what they do if they even have an inkling some nation is in possession of weapons of mass destruction.”

  “Yes, General,” Rostov said, “but Russia is no insignificant desert nation.”

  “We are not,” Zhestakova said. “But if we are honest with ourselves, we are merely a ‘near peer,’ not an equal. I am not saying we are weak. A smart dog can defeat a much larger wolf if he will but remember that he is a dog. Fighting jaw to jaw would destroy us. The Black Hundreds will kill hundreds, even thousands—some might even be willing to martyr themselves for the cause of a Novorossiya. The remaining zealots will bluster and rant—and then run back to you and me for protection.”

  “I understand, sir.” It was pointless to say anything else when the general was on a tirade.

  “Do you?” Zhestakova said. “Do you really? Because I am under the impression that you and Captain Lodygin have taken this for a game.”

  “I assure you, General,” Rostov said. “I do—”

  “You may not.” Zhestakova cut him off. “But it is clear that Lodygin does, and Lodygin falls under your command. If he is brash, it is because you allow him to be so.”

  “Yes, General,” Rostov said. There was nothing more that he could say.

  “I have a sense about him, you know,” Zhestakova said. “He seems to me to be a damaged man.”

  “I assure you, General, he is capable.” Rostov couldn’t quite work up the will to endorse the captain any more than that. The truth was, Lodygin was broken. But he was loyal to a fault when it came to Rostov, and that alone meant something where jealousy and backstabbing were standard operating procedure.

  “Perhaps,” Zhestakova said. “But I would not put him in charge of my pigs, not to mention a program with the importance of Novo Archangelsk. How is he getting this information? Who is telling him Black Hundreds are behind the theft?”

  “A school friend of Dr. Volodin’s daughter.”

  “Are your men making progress in retrieving Dr. Volodin?”

  “I was informed this morning that they are about to make contact. It is my belief that they already have, considering the time.”

  “Your belief?” The sound of Zhestakova’s fist against his desk was clearly audible over the phone. “Do not your men have a method to communicate? It seems to me that if they were to avert a nuclear war with America they might give you a call immediately.”

  “Of course, General,” Rostov said. “I have sent my best men. They are close. I am certain of it.”

  There was a long silence on the line. Rostov thought for a
moment that the general had simply hung up, but he’d just been conferring with someone else in his office. Rostov wondered who it might be, and went through a mental list of all the people in the Kremlin who hated him.

  “This situation necessitates extreme caution,” Zhestakova said. “The President has further questions that need to be answered before certain decisions can be made.”

  “Very well,” Rostov said, feeling numb. When the ranking general in the GRU summoned you to the Kremlin, there was nothing else to do but comply. “I will arrange a flight to Moscow first thing in the morning.”

  “Do not bother,” Zhestakova said. “There is someone en route to you.”

  “Do I know this person you are sending?” Rostov said, digging—hopefully not his own grave.

  “No,” Zhestakova said, “I am quite sure you two have never met.”

  “Tonight?” Rostov said.

  “At any moment,” Zhestakova said. “It would be best if you were waiting at the airstrip when my jet arrives.” He ended the call without another word.

  Rostov felt a cold wind blow across his neck—as if the Fates had just cut short the threads of his life.

  Chapter 49

  Alaska

  Quinn rolled and came up with his pistol in time to see Hazel run from the willows waving her hands and shouting. An elderly Native woman stood around the corner two houses away, pointing a pump shotgun at Quinn. She eyed Quinn warily but lowered the shotgun when Hazel explained that he was friendly.

  Any element of surprise evaporated with the shot. The other two Russians would come out to investigate in no time.

  Quinn waved Beaudine out of the bushes, shouting for her to bring the Lapua as he retrieved the dead Russian’s AK. He plugged his left ear and fired a string of three rounds, one-handed, into the snowbank in front of him. Beaudine ran up behind him. She started to talk but he held up his hand and reached for the radio on the dead man’s belt. Predictably, another voice broke squelch to check on him.