She had to get out now. Kropodkin had been wearing a heavy flannel shirt with a hooded sweatshirt over it. With her night-adapted eyes she could make out where they had been discarded on the floor. They would have to do. For a fraction of a second she considered the sleeping bags in the bunks. No good. Too bulky. They would slow her down for those first few critical moments of flight.
The question from the room outside was repeated, more pointedly. Randi snatched up Kropodkin’s garments, then grabbed for the carrying handle of the tape player atop the locker. Swinging it with all her strength, she smashed out the heavy thermopane of the bunkhouse window.
Mess table chairs crashed to the floor.
Randi threw the shirts over the bottom edge of the window frame as protection from the glass shards and rolled through to the outside. Behind her, the door to the women’s quarters tore open.
She felt the blowing ice spicules stab at her face, and the explosion of outside cold. It all depended on that cold now. If the snow crust had frozen solidly enough in the night to support her weight, she would live. If she broke through and bogged down in a drift, she would die. Scrambling to her feet and clutching the shirts to her, she ran for the safety of the darkness.
She heard enraged shouting and started to weave and sidestep as she ran. A flashlight beam stabbed after her, and someone emptied a handgun out of the window. Bullet strikes sprayed snow around her feet. Pray that nobody in there had grabbed a submachine gun!
The toe of her boot broke through the snow crust, and for a hideous moment she stumbled; then she caught herself and ran on. Out of the light’s reach, she veered sharply to her left. An Agram SMG started its angry typewriter chatter, but the gunner was firing blind, wildly spraying the night.
Randi diverted laterally again, heading away from the camp, the cabin lights fading rapidly to indistinction in the swirl of the snow. She was clear! She paused, panting, and struggled with the stolen shirts, untangling them, shaking out the glass shards and drawing them on, augmenting her ski outfit. Already she was feeling the bite of the cold. They weren’t going to be enough protection out here tonight. Not nearly enough.
She ripped the tail off the flannel shirt and bound it over her face as an ad hoc snow mask and drew her already aching hands up into the overlong sleeves of the shirts. She looked around in the bleak near pitch blackness. The wind would be her compass. She would move north and try to join up with Jon and Valentina.
Randi’s one course of action, her one chance, was to keep moving and somehow find the others. She would work on the premise that they had come down from the crash site to find Wednesday Island Station occupied. Given that, she would further presume that they would divert and go to cover on the island’s central ridge, where they could both find shelter and keep the camp under observation. Knowing Jon, he would try to work in close during the night to try to establish the identity of the landing force and learn what had happened to her and Trowbridge.
The odds were not good. If her teammates hadn’t come down from the crash site or if she couldn’t find them, then she would die before morning. But the death out here looked cleaner and more defiant than the death back there. Hugging herself to conserve body warmth, Randi began her stumbling trudge through the growing blizzard.
Pouring through the broken window, the cold filled the bunkhouse like the touch of death. In the harsh white glare of the gas lantern, the naked body and bloody, ruined face of Stefan Kropodkin looked exceptionally obscene and grotesque. Kretek tore the sleeping bag from the bunk and covered his nephew.
His men stood by awkwardly, their faces impassive but with a suppressed glint of fear in their eyes. Someone had taken something from their leader. He did not react well to such acts, even in far lesser matters.
Kretek stared at the muffled mound at his feet. The one connection he’d had left to this thing called family. It was a current that ran deep through the Balkan cultures, even through a blackened soul such as his.
He had been a fool. He had made the mistake of viewing the blonde woman not as a threat but as a treat, like a bite of chocolate to be consumed casually in passing. Instead she had been a time bomb waiting for an opportune moment to explode.
He could read the signs. At her own choosing, she had torn loose, swatted Stephan like a cockroach, and made her escape. She was a professional in the deadliest possible definition of the term, and a pretty face and a nice pair of tits had blinded Kretek to this.
Stefan’s hand protruded from beneath the sleeping bag, his fingers half curled in beseechment, pleading for revenge.
“Find that whore.” Kretek’s words were a growling whisper. “Get out there and find her. The only way any of you will ever leave this island is if you bring her back to me alive. Do you hear me? Alive!”
Vlahovitch, his chief of staff, hesitated only a moment before speaking. “It will be done, Anton. Come on, the rest of you. Let’s get a sweep organized. She won’t get far in this weather. Move!”
Anton Kretek said nothing more as his men geared up to start the search. His thoughts were distant, planning what he would do when the golden-haired woman was brought before him.
Chapter Thirty-six
Saddleback Glacier
Behind them, Jon Smith heard the thud of the explosion, faint in the face of the gusting wind. Straight off the Pole and unchecked by terrain, its cold was searing. Still, Smith viewed that wind and the ice particles driven before it as allies tonight. They would cut their pursuers’ long-range vision and scour his party’s crampon marks from the surface of the glacier.
Then there was also the subliminal human instinct to seek the easier path and turn away from a direct confrontation with that river of freezing fire, to keep your back to it. Accordingly, Smith would leave instinct to his enemies while he and his people would drive into the gale.
“Our friends reacquired their hand grenade,” Valentina commented. She was a shadow at the end of the safety line, her words muffled by her snow mask.
“Sounds like,” Smith replied. “We’d better keep moving. They won’t be too pleased with us now.”
“They weren’t all that fond of us before, Jon. I see we’re still angling to the northwest. Shouldn’t we be turning south to pick up the flag trail back to the station?”
“We’re not taking the trail back. Presumably the Russians know about it. They’ll move to cut us off, or at least that’s what I hope they’ll do.”
“Where are we going, then?”
“To the station. But we’ll be taking the scenic route. We’ll drop out of the saddleback on the north side of the island and follow the shoreline around.”
“Uh, Jon, excuse me, but doesn’t that mean pioneering a two thousand-odd-foot descent down broken glacier fall and sheer rock cliff at night and in a bloody blizzard?”
“Essentially.”
Valentina’s voice lifted. “And you intend to do this with one total climbing tyro, i.e., me, and one trussed-up captive?”
The third member of the party had no commentary to add. Major Smyslov stood by silently, his hands bound in front him and the safety rope knotted to his pack harness.
“Play the glad game, Val,” Smith replied. “The Russians will never imagine us trying it.”
“With excellent reason!”
“We don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Val, you have the point and I’ll take the center slot. The farther down we go on the north side of the saddleback, the more broken and treacherous the ice will become. If a crevasse should open up under you, I can go on belay and haul you out.”
“All right, but a pox upon the man who came up with ‘ladies first.’”