All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  Nothing.

  To my right, through the trees, what might have been the porch light of a farmhouse flickered weakly through the snow. Whoever it was must have been heading home. If I’d really seen anyone at all. I was almost hallucinating from tiredness, and I knew it. There was no time—and no point—in chasing ghosts now. Perhaps there never had been.

  Come on, Max, keep it together.

  I stepped out into the blizzard and stuck the torch into my belt.

  The base temperature had risen a few degrees, but the wind chill made it feel like minus twenty. I pulled Aleksandr Denisovich’s cap down and blinked into the white storm swirling unseen in the blackness between the trees. But as much as the weather blinded me, it also blinded anyone trying to follow me. It would be impossible to get a drone or chopper up, and a satellite would be useless. And although a thermal-imaging scope would pick me up as easily here as it would have done in Arkhangel, they’d need to get close enough to identify me, not just detect me. At six hundred meters the glow given off by one man looks the same as any other. I hoped not even Russian officers would want to start shooting up their own troops.

  Their night-vision kit was going to be of limited use, too. It was so dark, there was almost no image to intensify, and I was crowded by trees. I’d taken the torch for signaling, not navigation. Switch it on, though, and even in those conditions I’d be painting myself a bright green target.

  There was no hiding the car. But snow was falling thick and fast enough that my footprints disappeared almost immediately—not, at this point, that there would any longer be much doubt where I was going. I looked up. For the first time in hours a smudge of light in the sky silhouetted the tops of the trees. I stepped forward and counted twenty paces—pistol at the ready—running my hand along the ice bank for balance until I found the break in the branches that marked the opening to the track.

  Thirty minutes to RV.

  I stopped, momentarily overwhelmed by the cold and the darkness. And then I heard my mother’s voice, clear against the white whistle of the storm song, whispering “Bayu Bayushki Bayu,” warning me to be careful lest the gray wolf snatch me away into the woods.

  The wind dropped a little. I mouthed a pointless thank-you and sniffed the air. The intensity of the snowfall softened. High above, the blanket of cloud was beginning to fray. Here and there moonlight bled through the rents in fleeting flashes of silver, pooling for a second or two on the forest floor.

  It was a straight shot for another kilometer until I hit Highway 178. It was doable. I could do it.

  Just walk, Max.

  I stumbled immediately, falling as my boot found a rabbit hole. I cursed as my already-bruised ribs crunched on the ground. I picked myself up and listened. But I could hear nothing except the wind ebbing and flowing and my mother’s voice, steel-sharp in my brain, singing lullabies to her wicked son. I willed myself westward. My hands, cheeks began to sting. Frozen beads of ice clogged my eyes. I took another step. And another. My legs moved like lumps, weaving me in an uncertain path between the birches. After what felt like a few minutes, I checked the time again. I’d been out of the car for a quarter of an hour.

  Fuck.

  I pressed on. And then the path stopped abruptly. Trees on three sides. The scattered moonlight that had gotten me this far was swallowed by the forest. I groped in the dark, squinting obliquely along what I thought was the trail, using any faint scrap of light to see the way. I cracked my shin on frozen deadfall. In my mind’s eye I saw the satellite map I’d memorized in Poland—lush green in the spring photographs, almost useless in the winter darkness. The track should have veered sharp right, but now I was trapped. I must have disoriented myself when I fell. I turned a silent circle. And then another, spinning myself inside the vortex of the dying storm.

  And then I stopped still and breathed out, and accepted the deeply inconvenient truth that I was profoundly lost. I listened intently for my mother’s voice, racked my brain for any solution that did not involve retracing my steps. But I was blind and deaf and out of options.

  I was almost out of time, too.

  If Jack Nazzar had assembled a team on the border he wouldn’t, couldn’t, keep them there indefinitely, however much he might want to. And whatever it turned out that Frank really wanted, I could guarantee it wasn’t a land war on NATO’s eastern border. The wind dropped to a standstill. I bowed my head and listened again.

  Above the gentle whisper of snow falling on snow, I heard the unmistakable sound of a man’s cough. I held my breath. Ten seconds. Twenty. And then again, muffled this time, as if the mouth had been smothered by a hand. Six to eight feet away. Low down. Directly in front. Unmistakable. A man for sure. I extended my right arm, aiming the Makarov down into the darkness.

  The wind picked up again. Clouds scudded overhead. Moonlight flitted across the clearing. It took a heartbeat for the landscape to take form. When it did, the ground in front of my feet seemed to turn in on itself, churning shadows into the snow, whipping a branch toward me. But it wasn’t a branch. It was the barrel of a rifle. No one was trying to follow me. They were already here. A soldier in winter camouflage, lying prone on the forest floor, was turning to engage his target: me.

  I fired first.

  Two shots center mass. The sniper’s white ghillie snowsuit turned him into an amorphous abominable snowman. He fell back but not down. The muzzle of his rifle dipped. I couldn’t see my sights, but at that distance I didn’t need to. I fired again into his white balaclava as the moon hid itself again. He disappeared into the shadows. I was on him in an instant, firing another shot into his torso at point-blank. But he was already dead.

  A round from the Makarov had obliterated the mouthpiece of his comms set. I pocketed the pistol, pulled the headset free and held it to my ear. An operator was asking him in Russian to confirm his position, confirm contact. I dropped the radio and picked up his weapon: an SV-98—a standard-issue Russian sniper rifle fitted with a tactical suppressor, and a thermal scope mounted in line with the optics. Good enough.

  I brought the scope to my eye and scanned the tree line. The silver-dark of the birch forest morphed into a black-and-white thermogram. It was like looking at a video shot in photographic negative. Heat gave off a bright white signature; cold showed up as inky black. As I swept the optics across the black snow around me, white outlines darted between the trees at two and three hundred meters on either side of my position. And if I could see their heat trace, they could see mine.

  But unlike them, I could positively identify my enemy.

  Either they’d been waiting for me or I’d stumbled into a border exercise. I wasn’t planning on asking them which. The man I’d just killed had been lying down, facing away from me. No sniper would do that in those conditions unless he was covering a choke point and expecting his target—imminently. It was a sure bet that the path I’d been looking for unwound in front of him. Getting lost had almost certainly saved my life.

  If I ran now, they’d know to shoot me. If I stayed put, I risked not being able to outpace them when they caught up with me. The safety on the rifle was off. I eased the bolt back and checked the breech. Bullet brass glinted in the moonlight. I set the scope magnification to times six and dialed in one hundred meters. Weapons free.

  I stood up.

  Deep breath. Long exhale. Stop. Settle. Squeeze.

  The first outline dropped into the black snow sea at his feet. I pivoted. Cheek on the stock. Eye to the scope. Right hand working the bolt.

  Acquire.

  Fire.

  Two more dead men in the snow—and more soldiers to come than I had shots left in the rifle’s magazine. I racked the bolt and checked the trees again. On either side and forward of my position men were scuttling through the undergrowth. From the way they were spread out, it looked as if I’d walked into the back of a cordon stretching north and south along the
road. Whomever they’d been expecting, they’d assumed their target would come up Highway 178—which was less than two hundred meters distant through the trees as the crow flies. It looked like they’d fanned out along it.

  I squirmed down next to the rapidly cooling corpse of the sniper I’d shot in the face and considered my options. It was a further six hundred meters along forest track to where it joined the highway. From there it was another seven hundred meters along the road to the northwestern Estonian border post. I couldn’t risk cutting back the three hundred meters to the southerly crossing. There was even less of a guarantee that Jack would have his men in place there—and if they weren’t, the odds were that the Russians would take a gamble and keep up their pursuit. The corner of Estonia that lay to the southeast was effectively cut off, and my chances of getting more than a gunshot ahead of the enemy were bleak.

  The wind started to bite again. Snow fell from the branches overhead. Through the scope I could see that the cover up ahead was patchy. If they had men on the other side of the road I’d be a sitting duck at the crossing point. The pain from whatever I’d done to my knee falling off the bridge in Moscow made it impossible to maintain a steady kneeling position. I sat instead, locking my ankles, bracing my elbows against the insides of my thighs.

  I studied the white traces of the men closing in on me, slipping like ghosts through the undergrowth. The nearest had gotten to within a hundred meters. Putting them down would telegraph my identity to anyone else with a thermal scope within half a kilometer or more. I looked at the luminous hands of my watch. Ten minutes to RV. I adjusted the scope and took out the soldier to the right of me with a single shot to the chest. But as I swung round looking for the next target, the air filled with the zip-crack of incoming high-velocity rounds. I rolled sideways and flattened myself into the snow, squirming down behind the body of the dead sniper and a tangle of fallen branches. Everyone within range opened up simultaneously. Chips of ice, bark and bone blew into my face. Whatever cover I had left was being shredded around me, the dead-body barricade included.

  I rolled right and got myself back on the gun. I could see the left side of the nearest shooter, who’d taken cover behind a skinny birch. He stepped sideways to fire. My steel-core 7.62 cut his legs out from under him. I worked the bolt, sending spent brass spinning into the night. A bullet clipped my left bootheel. I moved the rifle up and to the right. His wingman was seventy meters farther out—crouching, firing. My fingers were freezing, my breath erratic, and all the while my body was leaching heat into the frozen ground. If I didn’t run soon, I wouldn’t be able to run at all. The wingman stood up. I fired. He toppled sideways into a bank of snow.

  I took more suppressing fire from my right. It was working. I was pinned down in a game of full-contact murder-in-the-dark. I needed to take out the shooters directly ahead of me—and then split. If I made it to Highway 178, and then kept tight to the tree line, there was a slim chance I could outmaneuver them. It was a gamble, but the snow was falling so thickly again that it might cover me enough to reach the frontier. But however fast and loose the Russians might play it, there was no way Jack Nazzar or the Wing would cross the border itself. If he was waiting, though, he’d know for sure by now what was going on.

  I turned a tight circle and rose to take a shot. A bullet clipped my left shoulder. Another passed between the inside of my left arm and rib cage, punching through the jacket, grazing skin. I pulled the trigger and felled one of the shooters as another round scored a line above my temple.

  Go. Now.

  But as I got ready to run, the snow in front of me lifted, filling the air with a thick white curtain. A deep, resonant boom filled my lungs. Shock waves expanded under me, flipping me into the air, twisting me onto my side. I clawed the ground, coughed blood into the blackness. My ears rang, chest heaved. Then another eruption, from behind this time, knocked me forward, sprawling me headlong between the trees. White-hot shards of steel peppered the snow. A splinter of shrapnel gouged my back. Another tore at my left bicep.

  Rifle grenades.

  Deep snow had absorbed the impact of the blasts. As soon as one hit a tree I’d be in trouble.

  I pushed up onto my elbows. More rifle shots zipped between the trees, the usual snap, crackle and pop of incoming rounds muted by the snow. I reached for the SV-98 but dropped it smartly as the stock split, cracked by a direct hit.

  Moving forward was impossible. I hauled myself up and lurched back along the trail, head down. Every footfall was like driving a knife blade under my kneecap. I dodged around the trees as best I could, pursued by a stream of copper-coated steel. I was slow, snowbound. Fragments of ice blown from a tree-trunk ricochet blinded me momentarily. A round nicked my right calf; another, my left wrist. I stumbled on, twisting, ducking, zigzagging my way back to the Lada. However I was going to get to the border, it wasn’t going to be on foot—and it had to be fast.

  I emerged back into the lane as the clouds pulled apart enough to wash the landscape with moonlight. Dead ahead, eighty meters away through the trees, was the light I’d seen when I’d pulled up—a porch lamp, perhaps, or a security light for a barn or an outhouse. I was in a crook on the lane, the point where it looped back on itself, and I could see only a few meters in either direction. Behind me: shouts. I turned and faced the Lada and took a step toward it. And then the moonlight was overpowered by a bright white flash.

  For a fraction of a second it looked as if the four-by-four had been lit from the inside by a bolt of lightning. And then the windows buckled and exploded outward. The chassis jumped clear of the ground, lurching sideways. The kaboom of the blast ripped down the lane. Metal twisted around metal. Razor-sharp cubes of glass cut my face, neck. I dived flat as the gas tank went up, sending a pall of oily orange flame up into the treetops.

  After the explosion, shots. Electric green tracer lit up the night sky like lasers.

  I crossed the track and ran toward the farm buildings ahead. My legs buckled. I grabbed a branch and levered myself forward. More shots. The soldiers reached the road, distracted by the burning Lada. I limped free of the trees and into a frozen meadow.

  I was well met by the moonlight reflected from the snow in the air and on the ground. Out of the silver-white night a row of wooden buildings emerged. The lamp I’d seen was suspended on a pole over a small enclosed field. The individual houses also had lights over the doors, but they shone too weakly to have been seen from the road. From one of the doorways a man stepped out, torch in hand. He fixed me with the beam.

  “Stoi!”

  But I wasn’t going to stop. I drew the Makarov and leveled it at him.

  “Drop it,” I shouted in Russian, “or I shoot.”

  “Don’t,” he blurted out. “You’ll hurt them.”

  The torch tumbled to the ground and then I was on him, left hand at his throat. He wasn’t a man, but a boy: fifteen at most. Moments before, he’d been defending the family home. Now he was shaking with fear. In the woods behind me firing started again. Tracer arced over us. I looked at the boy, at the buildings. Above the chaos of shots and shouts, I could hear another sound, too—wild and free, an echo from my deepest childhood memories. They weren’t houses, and he wasn’t protecting his family. He was a stable boy, protecting his horses. I spun him around and shoved him forward.

  “Davai!”

  He walked quickly toward the nearest stable block, hands up, breathing hard, and went in first. I followed. An intense, heady tang of dung and hay and sweat and leather rolled over us. Half a dozen stalls were lit by dim tungsten lamps. In the nearest, a sixteen-hand Akhal-Teke stallion nodded over a half door, his palomino coat glowing a deep gold under the orange lights. He was, simply, stunning. I stepped away from the boy, still clutching the pistol.

  “Tack him up.”

  Tears ran down his face.

  “Please,” he said. “Not him. Any other one, but not h
im. Please, mister.”

  “Just do it,” I said. “And be quick. He’ll be OK,” I added. “I promise.”

  He went to work and I went to the door and pushed it closed, trying to keep beyond the reach of thermal scopes. I pressed my eye briefly to a tiny gap in the doorjamb. Despite the scattering cloud, gusts of fresh snow still swept across the open ground. It was impossible to see more than a few meters. I peered into the darkness around the halo cast by the outside lamp. Shadows moved at its edge. Then, dead ahead, a white-clad trooper stepped into view, assault rifle in his shoulder. Then to his left, another. And another.

  I stepped back. The Akhal-Teke whinnied. I turned to the boy and placed my index finger to my lips, urging silence. He’d gotten the tack on—English saddle and a simple snaffle bridle. I beckoned and he led the horse out of the stall. I pressed my eye to the door again. Outside, the soldiers edged closer—forming and vanishing as the wind picked up, sweeping flurries of snowflakes across them.

  Fifteen meters.

  I turned to the boy again.

  “Hold him steady,” I whispered. He nodded, eyes still wet with tears. “What’s his name?”

  “Boynou.”

  “Is he fast?”

  “As an arrow.”

  I stepped carefully back to the door.

  Ten meters.

  Close enough.

  From the adjacent stall I led a gray Don mare by her halter. The two horses touched noses. I handed the Don’s lead rope to the boy and took the Akhal-Teke’s reins in my left hand and the pommel in my right, still holding the pistol. I put my left foot into the stirrup and pushed up, pulling myself over, into the saddle, gritting my teeth at the pain in my knee. I found the other stirrup, and cocked the Makarov.

  “Let go of the lead and open the door,” I said in a stage whisper. “And then get down.” He put his hand on the wooden catch. “Now.”

  He pushed down and the door swung open. As a blast of frigid air ripped into the stable, I slapped the unsaddled gray on her rump and she bolted into the night. I dropped low on Boynou’s shoulder, leg on, and squeezed hard.