The horses tirelessly drew the sleigh in the trail left by Harcourt's truck. Over the course of the afternoon, the grade increased from a slight incline to a slope of nearly thirty degrees. The tracks in the snow soon began to tell the story of the difficulties experienced by the group in the truck. Erratic variations led to massive drifts, evidence that the vehicle had on more than one occasion veered off track and become mired in deep snow. The laborers in Harcourt's party had probably been called upon to dig the truch out and carve a path back to the main road. Kismet estimated that there was an accumulation of ankle deep snow atop an icy hard pack of nearly five feet deep. With the use of traction chains, the heavy truck tires had penetrated down to the base, permitting them to make gradual progress up the mountain.
Soon, Kismet realized that their course was taking them laterally across the face of the mountain. Although there was no road marked on this portion of the survey map, he surmised that the primitive track they were following probably cut back and forth across the range in a series of switchbacks. Their own progress was apparently better than Harcourt's had been. The horses' hooves bit into the packed snow, but did not sink as deeply as the truck tires had, and the sleigh glided across the powdery surface with negligible resistance. As the incline grew steeper, the horses had to exert themselves more, but they required little more than a verbal command and a shake of the reins for motivation.
With the increased elevation, the chill factor grew more intolerable. Irene unfolded two of the blankets, wrapping them about both their shoulders, so that their shared body heat kept the cold at bay. Kismet found the arrangement especially pleasing, if a little distracting.
Night fell gradually as the sun dropped into the distant Black Sea horizon. With Irene pressed tightly against his chest and her arm around his waist, he realized absently that his vigilance was slipping. As they rounded a corner, the horses stopped abruptly, giving him a much needed wake-up call. Lying in the path, directly in front of them, was a body.
Irene's hold around him went slack, and Kismet immediately sensed her terror. He thrust the reins into her hands and shrugged free of the blanket. "Stay here," he directed, in a tone that brooked no refusal.
It had snowed at least once since the person had fallen in death. A layer of crystalline precipitation had accumulated on the corpse, partially melted, and then frozen into a translucent crust. Kismet hastened to examine the body and quickly realized that the dark spots on the ground around the motionless form were not shadows but bloodstains. The person had died within a few steps of whatever trauma he had suffered. He knelt beside the corpse and brushed away the shroud of snow.
A pair of blank eyes stared up at him, causing him to start. He took a deep breath to compensate for the surge of adrenaline that left his lips feeling numb, and then resumed his inspection.
The body was male, no more than twenty years of age. The young man's hair had been cut in a close, military style, but he was clothed in ill-fitting civilian garments. Kismet noted the eastern European facial characteristics, but there was nothing to indicate what he had been in life. It was far easier to determine how he had died.
The man's chest was a mess of ravaged flesh. Kismet immediately recognized the ragged tears as exit wounds. The tight grouping was unmistakably a burst from a sub-machine gun at close range. He had been shot in the back.
"Nick?"
Kismet looked up, reading Irene's concern. "It isn't your father," he answered, trying to comfort her. "I'm not sure who he was. Only that he was shot trying to run."
"Should we do something for him? Bury him?"
Kismet frowned. "Yeah. But we don't have the time." In the end, he settled for dragging the corpse off the track and covering the young man with heaps of snow. His efforts to close the young man's eyes were in vain; the flesh had frozen beyond any postmortem manipulation. Ten minutes after discovering the fallen man, he returned to the sleigh.
He silently cursed Severin for having confiscated his gun. All that remained in the way of defensive weaponry was his Gurkha knife. Although he was confident of his ability to use the heavy blade for self-defense, he doubted that it would help much if they were pinned down by foes armed with assault rifles.
Nevertheless, he positioned the haft of the kukri where he could reach it in a hurry. It wasn't his pistol, but it made him feel a little more secure. "The stakes just went up," he declared in a tight voice. "Harcourt and his men have killed. They won't hesitate to do it again."
Kismet checked his watch; it was after midnight. They had journeyed for nearly six hours after sundown to reach their destination. Now, perched behind a snowdrift, they gazed down at a loose collection of tents lit up by a chain of klieg lights and the lazy half moon overhead — Harcourt's mountain camp.
They had left the sleigh and horses some distance away in the woods to avoid detection. Harcourt's party had been blessed with extraordinary luck, driving their truck — a beat-up deuce-and-a-half — all the way to the site, in spite of the heavy snow. This had in turn worked favorably for Kismet and Irene, enabling them to travel on into the night. The trail was not without perils however. The track often skirted steep drop-offs, with overhanging shelves of ice and snow posing a constant threat of avalanche. Their caution and persistence paid off though, delivering them to their destination in one piece.
A single sentry patrolled the perimeter of Harcourt's camp, a limit that was delineated by a triple thickness of concertina wire. He had worn a path in the snow, the sharp tips of the crampons strapped to his mountaineering boots biting into the subsurface ice. Kismet could not make out the man's face, but his marching steps were rigid and uniform; he was not taking his duty lightly. His routine of moving from one edge of the camp to another was as regular as clockwork and that, Kismet surmised, was the weakness that would allow them to slip in unobserved.
Kismet carefully monitored his wristwatch as he watched the guard make three circuits; each round was within twenty seconds of ten minutes. He estimated that it would take four minutes for them to steal down to the edge of the camp, during which time they would be exposed to any watchful eyes. He saw no evidence of other lookouts, and thought it unlikely that Harcourt would be expecting intruders, but Kismet was nonetheless cautious.
The rolls of razor wire, which were stretched out to form a barrier around the camp, were merely an inconvenience. Because they were staked down to the snowpack, Kismet needed only to burrow out a crawlspace, which he did using his kukri like a shovel, during the moments when the sentry was out of view. With this one difficulty surmounted, he prepared to infiltrate the camp.
"I'll go first," he whispered. "Keep an eye on me. When I give the signal, you follow. But if I get caught, promise me that you'll go straight back to the sleigh and down the mountain."
She nodded, but he could tell that she wasn't committed to the idea of leaving him. He saw that it was pointless to argue the issue, and refrained from further exhortation. Instead, he waited until the sentry had turned his back on their position, and then started down the hill.
The descent went smoothly. In less time than anticipated, he reached the outermost tent and ducked behind it. He could hear the sound of the guard's boots crunching in the snow as the man marched his patrol route. Less distinct was the sound of a generator, humming as it produced the electricity to power the lights.
Kismet checked his watch again; five minutes until the sentry completed his round. He decided to use the time to reconnoiter the immediate area. He began by looking back for Irene. She was not visible, wrapped in the shadows where she hid, but something he did see started his heart racing.