lurked behind the soft cadences that were all that was left of his boyhood Alabama drawl.
Avery loosened his seat belt and leaned back, pondering his next move.
Should he brief the rest of his team now? He dismissed that notion as quickly as it arose. There was no way he could inform the other Americans without telling their Russian counterparts — and they were still on a Russian plane over Russian territory. There were still too many unanswered questions to take that chance.
He risked a quick look across the aisle at his own opposite number, Colonel Anatoly Gasparov. The squat, jowly Russian had his head back and his eyes closed — to all appearances dead to the world.
Every American arms inspector had an assigned Russian counterpart who accompanied him from Moscow. Gasparov had evidently finagled the assignment because it let him travel frequently. Rumor said the Russian colonel had shady contacts on bases all across the former Soviet Union. There were stories that he made tidy profits as a deal-maker in the black market buying and selling everything from Western cigarettes to Russianmade small arms and air-to-air missiles.
Some said he had contacts inside the Mafiya, the loose slang term covering Russia’s powerful organized crime syndicates.
Avery believed those rumors. Especially now.
He’d noticed Gasparov’s apparent chumminess with the commander of the 125th Air Division, Colonel General Feodor Serov, during both the welcoming dinner the night before and the inspection today. That could just be part and parcel of his counterpart’s usual brownnosing. Or it might be an indication that the two men were deeply involved in some shady business together.
Either way it made no sense to alert Gasparov to his findings.
Avery turned again to the window, trying to trace their course southward across the sunlit sea. Every kilometer the An-32 flew put them that much further out of any enemy’s reach.
He felt suddenly weary, wrapped in a haze of utter mental and physical exhaustion. The stresses and strains of the long day were finally taking their toll. Lulled by the unvarying roar of the plane’s engines, he felt himself starting to drift off. His eyes closed … Avery sat bolt upright. Something was wrong. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and checked his watch. He’d been asleep for less than half an hour. But what had startled him awake?
The sound came again. The steady, comforting drone of the An-32-s starboard engine faltered, roared back to full power for a split second, and then died. The plane sagged to the right, drifting downward.
“Christ.” Avery yanked his safety belt tighter.
Seconds later, the portside engine revved higher and the An-32 leveled out again, then banked gently to the left.
A calm voice crackled over the passenger compartment PA system. “This is Major Kirichenko, your pilot. I regret to inform you that we have a slight problem. Our starboard engine has failed. But there is no danger. I repeat, there is no danger. We can easily maintain flying speed with the remaining engine at full power.”
Kirichenko paused, muttered something inaudible to his copilot, and then continued. “However, as a precaution, we are diverting to an emergency field at Medvezhyegorsk. We should be on the ground in approximately fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Chilled again, Avery looked out the window and down at the terrain below. They were “feet dry” now — well inland after the relatively short hop across the narrow White Sea. According to the maps he’d studied, they were over a wilderness of pine forest and marshland that stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction.
But he couldn’t make out anything definite. This close to nightfall, it was dark down there — pitchblack. There were no lights. No signs of any civilization.
He pulled his eyes away from the blackness below and found himself staring across the aisle at Anatoly Gasparov.
The Russian colonel stared back, white-faced. He licked his lips, muttering, “My God… my God…”
The smooth roar of the port engine changed abruptly — running ragged for an instant before surging back. Then it, too, sputtered, once, twice...
...and stopped.
The An-32-s nose tilted forward — angling downward toward the ground.
Avery’s chest tightened at the silence. Air rushing past the fuselage showed they were still flying — but for how much longer?
The sound of pumps cycling broke the silence, and the plane shuddered.
He craned his head and saw a dark mass streaming away below the port wing — a spray of droplets glistening in the fading light. Their pilots were dumping,fuel — desperately lightening the An-32 to stretch its glide path as far as humanly possible.
As the transport plane descended, falling at an eversteeper angle, the plane’s crew chief, a frightened young Russian sergeant, struggled through the passenger compartment — stowing loose gear and double-checking safety belts. The buffeting worsened as low-altitude winds and roiling updrafts tore at the powerless aircraft.
Avery’s inspection logbook slipped off the seat beside him and slid out of his reach before he could grab it. The An-32-s nose dropped further.
The PA system squawked again. This time the pilot’s voice sounded strained. “We’re going in! We’re trying for a clearing or a river.
Brace for impact! Brace for impact!”
Avery couldn’t tear his eyes away from the window, desperate to know how high they were. He could see the trees now, pointing upward like a bed of nails, their tops needle-sharp. His heart froze.
Still moving at more than one hundred miles an hour, the An-32 slammed into the forest. Avery was thrown forward against his seat belt with agonizing force. Horrified, he saw the fuselage rip open in front of him. Too late, he opened his mouth to scream. A tidal wave of flame and shredded metal swallowed him whole.
CHAPTER ONE
SHADOWED WOODS
The shadow cast by the giant Mi-26 helicopter rippled over mile after mile of evergreen forest brushing across vast stands of northern pine, spruce, and fir trees. Many of the trees were dead or dying, choked by acid rains and smog-laden winds from Russian mines, smelters, and industrial plants. Wherever the forest thinned, pools of standing water glistened in the pale sunlight.
Much of northern Russia was a tangled mix of woodland and swamp.
A lean, tough-looking man sat next to one of the helicopter’s fuselage windows, staring down at the ground. From a distance, his taut, sun-darkened face looked boyish. The illusion disappeared up close.
Years spent in the field and in command had put lines around his steady green eyes. And the same stresses and strains had turned some of his light brown hair gray.
Colonel Peter Thorn frowned.
They were more than one hundred miles out from the Arkhangelsk airport, and nothing in the view below had changed. Except for a thin strip of settled land around the fringes of the White Sea, this stretch of Russia six hundred miles north of Moscow was empty. There were no roads. No buildings. No signs of human life. A few villages had sprung up over the centuries and then vanished. Even Stalin’s prison camps, the gulags, had been abandoned — left to rot and molder and sink back into the swampy wilderness.
Thorn looked away, shifting around in his fold-down seat to face the helicopter’s cavernous interior.
“Hell of a country, isn’t it?” the tall, gaunt man seated next to him said into his ear, pitching his voice just high enough to be heard over the clattering roar of the Mi-26’s engines and rotor.
“Probably hasn’t changed much since the last Ice Age.”
Thorn nodded. The tall man, Robert Nielsen, was a pilot and aeronautical engineer by training, not a geologist, but he had a good eye for terrain. Stone Age hunters following the retreating glaciers north would have moved through the same dark, wet woods.
Thorn grimaced. “Bad place for a crash.”
