Stormbound

by A P Bateman

There was no movement, but there was smoke. The super-heating of the previously ice-cold barrel and the residue of hot propellant created both steam and smoke. He could feel a gentle breeze on his face, mirrored it in his mind, estimated the amount of dispersal the smoke and steam would make in the air as it left the barrel, and sighted two-metres to his right. He fired a round and was met with the sight of a figure clad in traditional furs jump to his feet and run back into the treeline. Something about the way he moved, the way the rifle dangled on its sling-strap. King worked the bolt. He had best-guessed and he had hit his target. But he knew it would have been a graze, a skim across the shoulder. Enough for the wound to have stung like a hundred bees and shock his attacker. King got to his feet, but he darted to his left before he made his way into the treeline. He needed to space himself, not follow directly. Should the gunman turn, take cover and wait for King, he wasn’t going to have it easy. He’d have to be watching his flank.

  King entered the treeline. He moved carefully, slowly. His clothes rustled, and the

  snow crunched underfoot. But he knew that if he had hit the gunman, then he would have his own problems. He no longer had the advantage. The man would be scared, and he would be in pain. Both these factors would raise his heartbeat, increase his breathing rate. Affect his decision-making.

  King took another couple of paces, put a tree between himself and the direction the man had taken. He hesitated when he heard an engine behind him, followed by a rev of power that wound up to a crescendo. He turned and ran back through the trees to the clearing. He hesitated, stopped at the tree and bent down to retrieve the orange capsule.

  It had gone.

  King scoured the ice, dusting his hand over the surface. In a background of white, he knew he was wasting his time searching further. He could see faint footprints around him. Two dents in the snow where someone had rested on their knees.

  He stood up, scanned the area around him, then went to the woman’s body. He could see the flap of her pocket had been opened. He checked, and the Glock pistol was no longer there. He checked the other pockets. Her phone was gone too.

  Another engine started, and King raced in the direction of the sound. He could hear the revs gaining, reaching as frantic a crescendo as the other machine. King ran as fast as his clothing and footwear would allow against the terrain. He caught sight of a snowmobile at almost one-thousand metres distant. The figure riding was clad in grey and white. The same person who had been shooting at him. The second snowmobile was following, five-hundred metres behind. And that put it at five-hundred metres from him. King shouldered the rifle and sighted on the figure. He moved the crosshairs ten-feet or so in front of the snowmobile and fired. He worked the bolt and gave the vehicle more of a lead. He estimated it was traveling close to seventy-miles-per-hour. He gave it a full fifteen-feet and fired again. The snowmobile and the rider parted company and the snowmobile slewed and rolled and came crashing to a halt fifty-metres further on. The rider was still sliding and rolling. King aimed at him and fired, but it was a miss and the man scurried over to the snowmobile and took cover. King ran back to the clearing. He picked up the loose round he had called the woman’s bluff with and ran across the clearing to where they had both parked the snowmobiles. He started the engine and adjusted his goggles, then powered away, turning hard and traversing the edge of the clearing to come out on the other side. The terrain was bumpy and ridged with ice shelves, but after a few minutes, he found flat ground and headed down onto the frozen lake. He thumbed the throttle and found the tracks the other snowmobiles had made. He could already see the snowmobile on its side and he slowed and took out the Walther, moved it to his left hand, riding steadily with just his right hand on the handle grip and his thumb feathering the throttle.

  There was no sign of the man. He could see that there were more tracks. The other snowmobile had come back for him in the time it had taken King to get to his snowmobile. He eased forwards, then got off the machine and walked over to the ruined snowmobile. King noted there was no blood on the ground. He could see smoke coming out of the snowmobile’s fairing. There was the noxious smell of fuel, too. He could no longer hear the snowmobile’s engine in the distance. He could track it easily, but he had only just realised how dark it was getting. As he surveyed the scene, he realised that most of the light came from the ambience of the snow on the ground.

  King felt in a quandary. He could well follow, but if they stopped and took cover, then they would both hear and see him coming. They still had a rifle and local knowledge of the terrain.

  King called it. He was still alive, and he intended to keep it that way. He walked back to his snowmobile and checked the compass and fuel gauge. He turned the machine around on the opposite heading they had ridden from and made his way back across the lake to town.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The town was in darkness. The streetlamps lining the main strip were sporadic in both number and layout and only illuminated the base of the lamps. The snow, as always, creating enough ambient light to make out the road, the sidings and the houses that had been cleared of snow and ice. King wondered how dark the place would be in the spring and summertime, but then he remembered that it would be daylight for most of the time. At least for the eight weeks of summer. It really was a strange place in which to contemplate living.

  King parked the snowmobile outside the police station, next to his truck. There were no lights on within the building. He took off his gloves, opened the zipper to his jacket and tucked the gloves inside. He took out the Walther, switched over magazines, and with the already chambered round, this gave him eight in total and a further six in the other magazine, which he tucked into his left jacket pocket. He would have preferred to carry a different weapon, one with more power and capacity, but the Walther was a solid piece, both reliable and easily concealed. Its fixed barrel, though old in design, provided a solid base in these temperatures and the action would not be prone to contracting and this limited the potential for feed stoppages and jams. He reflected that it had been chosen well.

  King took the steps cautiously and opened the door. He looked for a light switch, found a bank of them on his right and flicked them on. The corridor lit up, and the light above his head flickered and illuminated the foyer and desk in front of him. The door was locked, so King went behind the desk and looked for a release. Standard in law enforcement buildings around the world. He found it on the underside of the desk, pressed it and the door buzzed. He stepped back out around the desk and pushed the door inwards.

  The office at the other end of the corridor was empty, but he suspected it would be. He made for the door at the other end of the office and tried the handle. Locked. He could see the keypad on the doorframe. He wouldn’t be able to bypass it without tools and time. He didn’t have either. He still had the .300 rifle strapped to his back. He took it off, released the safety and stood back. He aimed at the door hinge, or at least where he estimated it should be, eight-inches down from the top of the door. He chose the area on the jamb, rather than the door. If the bullet met resistance from the metal hinge, then it would deform and take out a large amount of wood and metal. King didn’t aim, simply held the muzzle where he wanted the bullet to go and squeezed the trigger. The shot, in the confines of the office,

  was deafening. Time was now a factor. He didn’t have much of it before someone would become curious. Or maybe the building would deaden it altogether? It was heavily insulated after all. He wouldn’t take the chance though.

  King had no more rounds left for the rifle. He propped it against a desk, picked up the Walther and aimed a kick at the door. It pivoted and spun in the frame, and after two more kicks, the bottom hinge broke out of its fixings and the entire door crashed onto the floor inside an area of cells and equipment lockers.

  The room was warm. Well-insulated and heated. It was a holding cell, after all. And King could already smell a familiar odour. He didn’t have to look to know there was a body in here. Maybe mo
re. But he would have to look, have to confirm. Or maybe there was a morbidity to seeing, to linking the smell from olfactory to visual senses.

  The female police officer was bound to a chair, her mouth gagged. A single, ragged hole permeated her otherwise faultless features. The bullet would have entered the back of her head and exited through her forehead. There was a lot of blood. That was the nature of headshots. The blood would pump around the body for as long as the heart received messages from the brain. The hole was sizeable. It would have been like turning on a tap. King could see it had pooled on the floor and congealed.

  King turned to the male police officer. He had fared better. He had been shot through the back of the neck and by the look of the absence of all but a few blood splatters, it would seem the spinal cord had been severed by the bullet. In both cases, a medium calibre pistol round. King would have guessed one of the missing 9mm Glock’s from their holsters. Likely to be the Glock Lena’s Russian imposter had been carrying, and that had been taken by one of the men at the clearing. The woman had admitted she hadn’t killed anybody, so had she been present? From the way she had behaved when she had seen Fitzpatrick’s body at the morgue in the medical centre, he suspected not. But he guessed the two people on the snowmobiles had.

  King looked around the room. He could see a CCTV camera, but it would be useless; the wires pulled out and hanging limp. He glanced at his watch. He had spent enough time here. He needed to report this to somebody. But he would call Thames House first. He walked back out into the office. He had missed it earlier, but he could see wires stripped out of the wall above a CCTV receiver and recorder unit. There were no lights displayed on the unit. They had covered their tracks.

  King zipped up his jacket and put the Walther back in his pocket. He put his gloves back on, hesitated as he decided whether to take the SUV or the snowmobile. He settled on the SUV, but circled the vehicle a few times, slowly looking for footprints around it. The vehicle had been parked there all day; it would have made a nice target for a boobytrap or IED. He couldn’t see any footprints or tell-tale markings in the crust of ice. Nobody had swept the area clean. He took his chances and opened the door. The inside felt like a freezer. King started the engine. The heaters were still set to full from earlier. The air that rushed out was super-chilled. King decided to get the vehicle moving. He pulled out of the parking lot, the headlights cutting swathes of light across the snow, eerie shadows created by the many pine trees lining the road. He couldn’t get his head around the fact it was not yet four-PM. He neared the medical centre, saw a light within. The vehicle hadn’t even warmed to -10°C on the inside, so King wasn’t reluctant to switch off the engine. He stepped outside, turned as he heard the high revs of a snowmobile roar off from behind the medical centre. He could see the headlights light up the forest, and within a few seconds, it was already out of view, the lights fading as it tore away and became a faint hum in the distance.

  King frowned. It seemed erratic behaviour in the darkness. The forest may well

  be sparse this far north, but there would have been all manner of obstacles, not least the trees themselves.

  The door to the medical centre was open, but there was nobody inside. Where a receptionist and assistant had sat earlier in the day, an empty swivel chair was all there was behind the desk. King took off the gloves, pulled down the zipper and tucked the gloves inside his jacket. He took out the Walther and felt that dream-like experience of déjà vu. The building was utterly silent and the feeling of anticipation in King’s chest was becoming overwhelmed by a sense of dread in the pit of his stomach. He turned down the corridor and headed to the door he had been through with two Russian insurgents only seven hours before.

  Doctor Engelmann was seated behind his desk, his head lolled to one side. His thick hair and copious facial hair gave the impression his head was twice the size of most men. The thick, over-sized spectacles seemed to close off the only part of his face without hair. King studied the way the man slumped. There was a great deal of blood and an empty vodka bottle on the desk in front of him. The man’s wrists had been slashed and King could see a surgical knife on the floor beside him. King stepped closer, looked at the man’s wrists and studied

  the depth of the gashes. Tendons had been severed and King could see at once that the man had not inflicted the wounds himself. One perhaps. But not both. He would not have been able to hold the instrument for the second cut. The man’s murder had been made to look like suicide. Another resident, new to the area and unable to cope with the loneliness, the darkness and the cold. It happened in many places near the Arctic circle. The long hours of darkness in the winter, the midnight sun throughout the summer. It messed with sleep and eating patterns, occasionally turned people insane. It was the flip side to the happiest population medians on the planet.

  King searched, but he did not find the receptionist. He made his way back outside and replaced his gloves, zipped up his jacket. And then he noticed the footprints around the SUV.

  Chapter Fifteen

  King found a torch in the desk behind reception. He was tiring of undoing clothing and removing gloves. The effort in simply moving around in a set of thermal snow clothes over the top of his clothing was becoming tedious. The shockingly abrupt temperature change from stepping outside a heated building was playing havoc with his lungs, as well as his eyes. The heat made his eyes water, then the cold outside air froze the tears. His hands were already gloved, so picking the frozen gems from the corner of his eyes was not an option. Every movement, every process was an effort.

  He had taken a coat hanging from a peg in the foyer and spread it on the ground beside the vehicle and on top of the footprints. He needed to be able to move freely, so he removed his jacket and gloves. He knew he had only minutes to perform his tasks. The cold was biting him. His heartrate increased greatly, and he could feel perspiration at his armpits solidifying. He lay on the coat and pushed himself around the underside of the vehicle, shining the torch’s meagre light into the wheel arches and behind the wheels themselves. He used his feet to scull himself, the coat sliding on the ice. He found the device wedged between the fuel tank and the chassis. He ignored it and continued his search. You never stopped the search on the first thing you saw. Many good bomb disposal specialists had slipped up in such a way. Usually through complacency because of their workload. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated this with copious quantities of IEDs. It made for over-worked personnel and bombers who had been quick to exploit this. Temperature was a factor and the Taliban and ISIS knew this. They would plant IEDs inside hot vehicles. Deep under the seats. A specialist in a bomb suit pulling up car seats could be working in 50°C or more. Sweat in their eyes, clammy hands, too hot to function, unable to breath. They found what they thought was an IED, called it and missed the main device as they exited the oven and made for fresher air.

  King made his way around to the engine bay and shone the torch. He knew enough about engines to know what shouldn’t be there. It all looked ok. He got out from underneath and got to his feet. He was freezing now, shivering. He looked at his hands. Shaking. Not what you wanted for removing a device from a fuel tank. He thought back to the upturned snowmobile. He could have given chase. And he could have walked into an ambush. He looked at the SUV and called it right there. Any device not connected to a door, boot lid or bonnet

  would only be detonated in one of two ways. Remote control; but then it would have gone off already. Or movement. Doors and lids detonated a device by pulling a pin to open an electrical or fuse connection. Movement devices were almost certainly reliant on a ball of mercury which rolled to complete an electrical circuit. Removing one, if that was an option, was a complicated affair and not best attempted with shaking hands and a bad case of shivering.

  He put his jacket back on, tucked the hood up over his beanie and put on his gloves. He was done here. It was time for a drink.

  Chapter Sixteen

  King dropped his bag at re
ception and put the key on the desk. He hadn’t stayed in a hotel with a physical key for a long time. The brass tag with his room number on it looked old fashioned, but he missed those sorts of things more these days. Everything was seeming so clinical and characterless the older he became.

  “How can I help?” the receptionist asked.

  “How busy are you?” he asked but could see the confusion on the young woman’s face. He added, “The hotel, I mean.”

  “Oh, about half-full.”

  “I’d like to check out,” he said. “And check into another room.”

  “You are not happy with your room?” she asked.

  King looked around, then leaned forward conspiratorially. The young woman did the same. King said quietly, “I’d like you to check me out,” he paused, slipped a one-hundred-euro note across the desk. “I’m a writer, and I work under a pseudonym, a pen name. I’m being hounded by my agent to finish a project, and it’s ruining my creativity. I don’t want anybody knowing I’m still up in these parts.” He slid the note over to her and she placed her hand over it. He kept hold of the note, bonding them in clandestine transaction. “This is for you,” he said. “Just book me in for two more nights under a Finnish name, and I’ll pay for the room in cash. I really appreciate your help.”

  The receptionist smiled. “No problem, Sir…” She looked at the computer screen and clicked the mouse a few times. She unhooked a brass key from the cabinet beside her and slid it across the desk. “Room two-ten,” she said and smiled.

  The room was one-hundred and fifty-euros a night and King slid another three, one-hundred euro-notes across the desk and returned her smile. He knew how hotels worked. Everybody had a scam – it helped get the staff through the unsociable hours, lack of respect from guests and low wages. A click of the mouse and a twenty-euro note to a trusted housemaid and King’s stay could be made invisible. And that was what he was counting on.