Vladik pitched face-first into the snow seventy-five meters from his dead brother. Feliks had taken both men with clean shots through the head.
Nine-year-old Feliks Zolner looked down the barrel of his rifle, past the terrified face of his mother at the bodies of the two men he’d just killed — and smiled.
Malvina Zolner threw the rickety wooden ladder against the edge of the loft and hauled herself up to where Feliks sat with his rifle. Her chest heaved under the tattered coat. Her breath came in deep, wheezing croaks from sprinting through the sub-zero air. Frozen tears frosted her eyes, forcing her to keep wiping her face with the back of her arm.
“Oh, lapushka,” she wept, “why would you? Why? Why would you shoot those men?”
Feliks pulled the rifle to his chest, hugging it tightly. “You say why, Mama.” He smiled sweetly. “I say why not?”
Feliks Zolner looked out the window of the Cessna 185 and watched heavy snow zip by like gray bullets. His spotter, a squat but powerful man named Kravchuk, who he’d worked with for the last three years, sat in the rear seat beside a former Spetsnaz soldier named Yakibov. It bothered Zolner to have anyone sit behind him, even a man he more or less trusted, but at a height of over two meters, the front seat of the cramped aircraft was the only place he would fit. He was acquainted with Yakibov but didn’t know him well enough to show his back, so he made certain Kravchuk occupied the seat behind him and put the Spetsnaz man behind the pilot.
Zolner was clean-shaven, with flecks of sliver in mouse-colored hair. A perfect crew cut lorded sternly over a brooding forehead and blocky jaw that looked as if it were carved of granite. His smallish, almost button nose looked out of place surrounded by the otherwise severely masculine face. He was a rawboned man, with a thick neck and brutish muscles. Large hands hung from the end of powerful arms. He was built much like his mother’s grandfather so far as he could tell from the only photograph he’d ever seen of the man, standing beside a dead Nazi in the rubble of Stalingrad. Broad in proportion to his height, even now, his shoulders pressed against those of Ilia Davydov, who was not himself a small man. Zolner had known the pilot slightly longer than he’d known Kravchuk. His hands were too soft to be of use for anything but piloting, but he was exact in his actions — and for now, that was enough.
“The lodge is off of our left wing,” Davydov said, bringing the Cessna around in a shallow bank.
“Hopefully they are still here,” Yakibov said, sneering.
Davydov gestured out the windscreen with the flat of his hand. “We are going to be here until the storm passes. The wind in those clouds would turn us on our heads.”
Kravchuk scanned the area below with a pair of powerful Komz binoculars. “There is one airplane at the end of the field.” It was getting dark, but the man’s eyesight was almost as good as Zolner’s. “Two male individuals standing in the river north of the small buildings,” he said. “I believe they are fishing.”
Davydov glanced at Zolner, fighting a buffeting crosswind as he brought the Cessna in line with the gravel airstrip. “We know your target came here,” he said. “But what of the other team?”
“They are professionals,” Zolner said. “If they have not yet reported in then something has happened to them.”
“And what of the others in the lodge?” Kravchuk said.
Zolner took a long breath, exhaling through his mouth with a slight pause at the bottom, the way he did when he was preparing to shoot. Correct breathing was important in all aspects of life and helped to settle his mind.
“Do not worry, my friend,” he said. “I will let you take care of them. Colonel Rostov has been very clear. There can be no witnesses.”
Chapter 33
Something heavy dug into Khaki Beaudine’s ribcage. No matter how much she willed it to move, her right arm refused to obey. Her head twisted unnaturally to one side, nose against a cold, orange blur. Beaudine briefly considered that she might be dead, and if she was dead, the fact that everything around her smelled of wood smoke and gasoline didn’t bode well for her final destination — not that she was surprised. Then she realized she needed to pee. Her toes wiggled, so she was relatively sure she wasn’t completely paralyzed. For one panicked moment she thought she might still be trapped in the airplane, but then she remembered the blizzard. Surely she would have frozen to death had she still been trapped in the plane. The orange blob in front of her nose smelled like a plastic pool toy and brought back distant childhood memories of trips to the lake… before things went crazy with her family. She had a vague recollection of Quinn dragging her through the snow.
A fire popped and crackled outside, casting dancing shadows against the tent wall. Beaudine could feel the reach of its warmth on the top of her head. Beyond the fire, a gossamer curtain of green and purple swept across the sky, ebbing and flowing, brilliant in the surrounding blackness. The mournful howl of a wolf lingered over the lumps and shadows of the snowy ground. It was an incredible sight, beautiful despite the terror of the situation. Beaudine tried to rise, but every muscle and bone rebelled, pressing her back to the rocky ground.
Pain cleared away the fog of sleep, and Beaudine slowly came to realize the weight across her ribs was an elbow. The body connected to that elbow was tucked in beside her, breathing gaspy breaths against her neck. There appeared to a sleeping bag laid out underneath them and some sort of foil space blanket above, but it was Jericho Quinn who provided most of the warmth that enveloped her.
The longer she was awake, the more Beaudine realized how badly she hurt. Her knee was on fire. Her left eye seemed to be glued shut, and she was pretty sure she’d cracked a front tooth. Even the slightest movement of her neck sent excruciating bolts of fire arcing down her spine, but she could move it, so that was something. She knew all too well how to work through pain.
She tried to push herself up on all fours, causing Quinn to draw back his arm and roll away, not exactly in recoil, but like someone who didn’t want to loose an important appendage.
“Sorry.” His voice was deep and came with a phlegmy morning cough. Hearing it brought back memories of the crash and with them, images of Lovita’s death. Babying her neck, Beaudine rolled onto her side so she faced Quinn. Even this small movement brought a stab of pain to her hip, but it was a worthwhile trade in order to get a better look at her surroundings in the orange darkness of the shelter.
Beaudine felt the welcome warmth of the fire reflecting on her face.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “If you were still asleep, how do we still have a fire?”
“Don’t worry,” Quinn said, his exhausted voice muffled against his own arm. “It wasn’t the little people. The storm stopped about an hour ago and I got up to add more wood then.”
Beaudine relaxed a notch. She’d always thought of herself as a wilderness girl, but the woods she knew didn’t come with plane crashes, creepy little goblins, or killers named Worst of the Moon.
It could be noon for all she knew. Dancing flames cast long shadows from the scrub willows onto the gravel bluff overlooking the river. Everything looked cold and sinister and much larger than it actually was. A curtain of black closed in beyond the reach of the fire, but this was Alaska, so darkness accounted for a large chunk of day at this time of the year.
Beaudine used her elbow to nudge a heavy pocket of snow that sagged the tent, sending it sliding down the fabric with a hiss to the drifts along the base. At least six inches had fallen during the night.
Quinn lay on his stomach, one arm trailing by his side, the other up under his face like a pillow against the rocky ground. Healthy black stubble from the day before had grown into a respectable beard overnight. Dark hair pushed up over his ear in lopsided bed head.