“That little nubbin of a thing is flying you out to the lodge?” Abbey looked up long enough to grimace before going back to rummaging through the back of her Tahoe. Every so often, she’d find something she deemed important enough to stuff into a tattered waterproof duffle.
“She is indeed,” Quinn said. “That little nubbin is one of the best pilots I’ve ever flown with. We’ve been through a lot together. I trust her.”
“Well that’s something.” Abbey paused, sniffing an extra pair of her pink wool socks before stuffing them into the duffle. “Because it looks to me like you’re about to head into the bush with an FBI lady who’s going to fight you every step of the way.”
Quinn shot a glance at Beaudine, who stood twenty feet away, gritting her teeth and grinding her cellphone against her ear. “She’s too busy fighting herself to have much of a war with me.”
Lovita ran up and threw her arms around Quinn, pulling him down in a tight squeeze that lit up his bruised ribs. She smelled of cigarettes and smoked salmon and was amazingly strong for such a little woman.
“What’s this?” Quinn frowned, eyeing the wad of punk ash — a mixture of leaf tobacco and burned tree fungus — she has tucked under her lower lip.
She groaned. “Don’t you start with me,” she said. “I’m still tryin’ to quit smokin’. One thing at a time.”
“Well, quyana,” Quinn said, using the Yup’ik Eskimo word for thank you. He decided it was best not to hound Lovita on her tobacco use since she’d flown through the darkness to get to him. “I know it was short notice.
“It’s okay,” Lovita said. “I saw the biggest herd of walruses ever, hauled up on a sandbar out in the sound.” She winked. “But I’m still gonna charge you for the flight.”
Quinn explained the change of plans and the need to make the two-hour flight out to the Bornite Lodge rather than just flying around the Nome area. Putting her pilot hat back on, Lovita nodded quietly then pulled a small salmon-colored book from the pocket of her pink fleece. It contained descriptions of virtually every airstrip in Alaska.
“Us Eskimos got a sense about the weather, but lemme check with the gussaq weather guessers just in case. I’ll top off with fuel.” She looked at her watch. Quinn smiled when he saw it was a TAG Heuer Aquaracer identical to his. It was big for her small wrist, but she didn’t seem to care.
“We can be in the air in twenty minutes,” she said, checking the weather on her iPhone while she spoke.
Quinn thought about the men with Russian accents who’d just taken off in pursuit of Volodin. “Ten minutes would be better,” he said.
Lovita raised both eyebrows. A silent “okay.”
Aunt Abbey came around from the back of her Tahoe with a duffle in one hand and a long black case in the other.
“Take my AR-10,” she said, handing the bags to Quinn. “I put three thirty-round mags in the case.”
“A state gun?”
“An Abbey gun.”
“Best aunt ever.” Quinn grinned in spite of the uneasiness in his gut. He kicked himself for coming to the bush with nothing but his pistol. A ten-millimeter had the equivalent stopping power of a .41 Magnum, but the rifle would make him feel better.
Khaki Beaudine stomped back a moment later in her own little bubble of discontent. She looked like she could melt the snow with her glare.
“Jackasses,” she muttered to no one in particular before turning to Quinn. “And, how come she gets to call herself an Eskimo? I was told they didn’t like it.”
“Some do, some don’t.” Abbey smiled. “I figure I’ll leave it up to them.”
“What did your brass tell you?” Quinn asked.
Beaudine rolled her eyes. “I gave my A-SAC a rundown of what we have going on.” The A-SAC was the assistant special agent in charge — always spelled out with the FBI since for some reason they didn’t want to be referred to as sacks. “Considering we got Russians chasing our guy, you’d think he’d free up some help for us. But nooooo.” She wagged her head for effect. “The stupid shit said every other agent in the Bureau is too busy running down more promising leads. I’m supposed to go to this lodge and interview Volodin, then report back.”
“Good,” Quinn said. “We need to go out there anyway. Since you have orders, I’ll let the FBI voucher out the cost of the air charter.”
In truth, Quinn didn’t mind not having a large group of backup agents. If Palmer hadn’t ordered him to take Beaudine, he would have left her behind as well. Some things, like dealing with thugs — Russian or otherwise — were best done alone, with as few witnesses as possible.
Chapter 19
Yegor Igoshin stared at the back of the pilot’s head. He would ultimately have to kill the man; that went without saying. Gachev was larger, so he sat in the front seat of the Cessna 206 to the right of the pilot, a young and underfed man who explained that he was building flight hours as a bush pilot so he could eventually work for a major airline. The idiot droned on as much as the airplane’s engine. Thankfully, Gachev would be able to fly the plane out once their mission was complete.
Mikhail Orlov sat next to Igoshin in the backseat, their shoulders overlapping one another in the cramped cabin. None of the men were small, each weighing well over 200 pounds. Igoshin was the tallest of the three and as a soldier, clean-shaven. He had deep brown eyes and kept his dark hair cut close to his scalp. Gachev and Orlov were soldiers once, and like Igoshin, had enjoyed the certain loose latitudes of behavior Russian soldiering brought them. Instead of staying in when their military commitments were up, they had moved on to the more lucrative world of the professional contractor — which, it turned out, provided an even wider latitude when it came to behaviors. They had let their beards go, and their hair reminded Igoshin of two shaggy dogs. Their kit, however, the weapons and gear in the bags on the seat behind them, was in perfect condition. Igoshin’s rifle, an American Remington 700 chambered for the powerful .338 Lapua Magnum topped with a Nightforce 5.5-22 power scope, lay lengthwise in a padded case in the back of the plane. One way or another, he was going to try it out on this trip, even if it meant letting the pilot make a run for the river. Igoshin made a lucky shot during his last deployment to Chechnya, killing a separatist leader with his Kalashnikov. An officer, who’d needed something positive to report to higher command, walked off the distance and announced in front of everyone that it was an 800-meter shot. It was probably half that if Igoshin was lucky, but it was enough to get him decorated so he had not argued. Russian needed her heroes — one of them might as well be him. Everyone assumed Igoshin was a crack shot and he began to believe them. He found he actually had an aptitude for long-range shooting and made an honest 1100-meter shot at the range. But he’d been sitting at a table, with the rifle resting on a bag. He’d yet to break in the rifle on a living, moving target.
Perhaps this would be the trip.
When they weren’t actually on a mission, each of the three men spent their time exercising their bodies or abusing them with vodka and women. Far from the sculpted muscles of the American gym rats, these men were thick and brutish, preferring the raw power of a barbarian to the look of a body builder.
Spitting rain shot past the wings and trailed along the windows as the little airplane banked into a tight downwind on their approach. The cloud ceiling was high, well above three thousand feet, providing a clear view of the lodge nestled among the pockets of green forest and brown tundra below. Out of habit, Igoshin built a mental map as they overflew the facilities.