without them.
The captain and the corporal rechecked their weapons and gear. Bear stifled a comment and peered out the window. A
The two soldiers laid their automatic rifles down and tested straps and bindings. When they finished with themselves, they glanced at each other to double-check. Bear felt certain the look they exchanged wasn’t regulation.
Cossacks were like that, he mused. The enlisted men were animals, the officers were clever at manipulation, and they all worked in tandem with the Czar’s intelligence service. Bear had to keep telling himself that these people weren’t really Okhana agents, merely hired mercenaries.
He didn’t like them, but they paid good, steady wages and he didn’t have to take their orders if he didn’t want to. He could always quit.
“Are you ready, Crepov?” the captain asked.
“Am I ready for what?”
“Are you ready to take the field and find these men for us?”
“I wouldn’t have entered this borscht-maker if I wasn’t.”
“Good.” She turned to the corporal. “Crepov will lead, I will go behind him, and you will follow me.”
“But, Captain, I think it’s not good for you to be between him and me. What if he attempts—”
“Corporal, I
“
The engine changed pitch and they banked to the left. Crepov looked out his window and found himself staring straight down at a snow-covered meadow. A branch of the Toklat River, frozen and brittle, wound along about a kilometer away.
The craft dropped in a tight spiral and Crepov’s heart tried to fly out his mouth. He swallowed in a vain effort to make it retreat. His gorge attempted to follow, but he successfully kept it down.
Just as Crepov thought the noisy machine would crash into the ground, it leveled off and gently landed. The engine died and the great blades swooshed to a stop. He slid the door open and stiffly dropped to the snowcovered ground.
After allowing his legs to know the earth for a moment, he turned and pulled his skis off the special rack on the landing skids. Mounted on the other side of the tubular skid strut was a 9mm machine gun that the pilot could fire after aiming his machine at the target.
Crepov decided there might be something to these things after all. He placed his skis, stepped into them and clamped the bindings over the toes of his boots. After stretching his legs for a minute, he struck off toward the game trail he had spotted from the air.
Where are you going?” the captain snapped. “I didn’t order you to move out.”
Crepov stopped and twisted to regard her.
“I’m going to do my job. I will also do as I please. You may do the same.” He moved out again, setting a track for them to follow.
Not until he reached the game trail did he look back. They were methodically closing his hundred meter lead. He carefully examined the trail.
Only small game and predator tracks; no ski had passed since the last snow. From the crust on the white mantle, he would estimate the last snowfall at over a week before.
The captain slid up to him, trying not to breathe hard. Crepov pointed to the trail.
“What?” she asked, looking at it then back at him.
“No human has been by here yet. Are you sure this is where our quarry will pass?”
“Yes, as sure as I can be.”
“Then let’s find a good ambush site.” He skied down the trail toward the tree-covered ridges.
21
Grisha and Nik sat and ate a cold lunch on a pile of needles under an unusually large spruce tree. After swallowing his last bite of moose jerky, Grisha said, “I want some fresh meat.”
“We don’t have any.”
“I know that. I want to hunt for a while. This is a game trail.”
“Not now. Maybe tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to hunt if you don’t want to, General,” Grisha said.
“But I’m hungry for rabbit.”
“But…”
Grisha abruptly stood and secured his poles to his pack before swinging it onto his shoulders. He put on his skis and finally picked up the recurve bow and his quiver.
“Grisha, please let me be in front.”
“I’m a better hunter than you are,” he said with a grin. “Better shot too. Besides, you’ve been in front all day long. It’s my turn.”
“Tomorrow you can be in front. Today I want to be first.”
Grisha stared hard at his companion.
“I heard a saying once that they use down in the American countries.
’Go fuck yourself,’ is what they say. And that’s exactly what you can do.” He skied away, pulling an arrow out of the quiver as he went.
The game trail wound through the woods and curved into a cut separating two ridges. He decided there could be game in the heavy brush at the cut. He nocked an arrow and skied as quietly as he could into the entrance.
Abruptly a snowshoe hare bolted out of the brush ahead and ran toward him for three lunging strides. Suddenly the animal saw Grisha and veered off to the man’s right. For five seconds the hare presented an easily accessible target before disappearing in the timbered flank of the ridge.
Grisha didn’t shoot. His heart thundered in his ears and he concentrated on maintaining his grip on the bowstring.
He crept forward a step, then hesitated. He glanced behind him. In the distance, Nik slid into his pack and took his first sliding stride toward Grisha.
He jerked his head around to face the cut again. The merest breath of a sound carried across the snow to his ears. The bow suddenly seemed like a child’s toy as he recognized the protest of oiled metal against metal.
Another glance over his shoulder. Nik moved forward swiftly, craning his head to get a better look at Grisha.
Slowly, quietly, Grisha eased the skis backward. No good—he had to keep looking back to judge his steps. He bent down and rapidly unfastened his bindings.
He pulled the skis up and jammed them butt down in the snow. Watching the cut as closely as possible, he carefully retreated back down the trail. Nik slid to a stop ten meters away and waited.
Grisha got to his friend’s ski tips before he allowed himself to whisper.
“There’s somebody in the cut.”
“How do you know?” Nik stared past Grisha, watching the cut.
He told about the snowshoe hare, hesitated.
“Then I heard someone chamber a round.”
“Your hearing must be extraordinary,” Nik said softly, “or else you’re imagining things.”
