The Eskimo he had taken hostage was a cowardly, foul-smelling brute. As they sped away from his igloo, he began trembling with fear, and Mikhail was expecting him to break out in tears at any moment.
What the veteran mariner hadn’t expected was the moment the idiot tried to break out of his grasp.
This abrupt move caused Mikhail to temporarily lose control of the vehicle, and it went plowing into the face of a snow drift. Mikhail had been thrown right out of his seat by the force of this collision, and as he scrambled to his feet, he spotted the Eskimo desperately digging into the overturned vehicle’s storage compartment. There was no doubt in Mikhai’s mind that the savage was after the cockpit voice recorder, and his hand went straight to his bolstered pistol. At the exact moment Mikhail raised his Kalashnikov, the Eskimo turned to face him, and the veteran shot him a single time square in the chest.
As the native went sprawling to the snow, Mikhail righted the vehicle and after a bit of effort, finally got its motor started. It had been whining away with a vengeance ever since.
With a bone-jarring jolt, the snowmobile dropped down upon the pack ice. It would be on this frozen medium that he would find his lift back home to the Motherland. While checking the dashboard-mounted compass to make certain his course was correct, Mikhail opened the throttle wide. As the vehicle zoomed over the ice, his thoughts returned to the last time he had killed a man face-to-face.
It had been during the closing days of the Great War. As the Nazis retreated to make a last stand at Berlin, both the Soviets and their western allies rushed in to fill the void. Mikhail had been sent to occupy the German port complex at Danzig. Here at the Schichau shipyards, a revolutionary new class of German submarine was being constructed. Known as Type XXI, this vessel represented a last-ditch effort by Admiral Donitz to turn the tide of war. Able to dive deeper for a longer period of time and at a greater speed than any previous class of submarine, the Type XXI was an engineering masterpiece. Yet it went into production too late to serve the Nazi cause, and Mikhail’s job was to complete the five hulls that had already been laid down in Danzig.
It was while touring the partially completed engine room of the boat known as U-3538 that he’d been attacked by a German engineer. The grease-stained Nazi was high on schnapps, and came at Mikhail with wrench in hand. Even though the German was powerfully built, Mikhail was able to take advantage of his drunken state and throw his attacker down to the deck. Without giving the German a second to catch his breath, Mikhail jumped down upon the man’s heaving chest and began strangling the life out of him. With his hands tightly gripped around the Nazi’s neck, Mikhail watched the German die. During the last frantic seconds, their glances directly met, and he actually saw the manner in which death took him.
That incident had taken place over four decades ago. Yet it was still so fresh in his mind that he could actually smell the scent of fear that exuded from his attacker’s pores.
And now, forty-five years later, fate had once again put him in a position to directly take another’s life. And once more, he felt strangely stimulated by this godlike power. This was the case even though the Eskimo was nothing but a subhuman. The savage was little more than a beast, and shooting him was like putting an injured horse out of its misery.
Back in Siberia, such natives were welcomed as an integral part of the Motherland. They were educated and taught a trade, and today their culture flourished like never before. It was on account of them that vast tracts of Siberia were able to be developed, as centers of mining, hydroelectric power, and animal husbandry.
Their Canadian cousins were in vast contrast. Exploited by their government, they were forced to live like wild beasts, dependent upon the fickle whims of mother nature and an occasional government handout.
They lived in incredible squalor, as the igloo Kharkov had just visited amply showed, and drowned their sorrows in vast amounts of cheap alcohol.
Such a waste of humankind was a pity. But the Capitalists only cared about exploiting their ancestral homes for oil and minerals, leaving behind nothing but a legacy of pollution and broken dreams.
Under the new world order that would shortly come to pass, such imbalances would be corrected. The exploited masses would be freed from their chains, as brotherhood and equality became the chants of the day, Unfortunately, there were many who had to be sacrificed along the way so that this Socialistic dream could come true. Premier Alexander Suratov had been one of these unlucky ones, as were the five brave sailors who would not be returning to the Neva with him, and the pathetic Eskimo as well.
Each of these individuals had been called before his time, to serve as fodder for the great revolution that would soon sweep the world.
The key to this uprising’s success lay locked away inside the snowmobile’s storage compartment. Here a single cassette tape would soon change mankind’s very destiny. Stored in the cockpit voice recorder’s interior was the certain proof that his colleagues in the Politburo had demanded in exchange for their support. And once this support was given, the reins of power would be his!
That thought thrilled the white-haired veteran, who was forced to turn his current means of transport hard to the left when a sudden lead of open water showed itself before him. His heart pounded away as the thin ice beneath him cracked in protest.
Yet the great speed at which he had been traveling kept the ice from fracturing altogether, and he was spared a certain fatal dunking.
As he zoomed over an elevated ice ridge, the horizon suddenly opened up and he spotted the distinctive silhouette of an immense, lowlying, black-hulled object seemingly entombed in the distant ice. Looking like a lonely beached whale, the Neva beckoned like a long-lost friend, and Mikhail dared to open the throttle full.
The snowmobile lurched forward in response, and the Admiral of the Fleet knew that it wouldn’t be long before he’d be returning to the Motherland in utter triumph. And one of his first treats to himself would be a visit to his cherished dacha on the shores of Lake Baikal. With the flat, frozen white landscape whipping by him in a blur, he mentally visualized yet another corner of this great planet. Here an ancient wood stood in all its inspiring glory. And unlike the desolate, ice-encrusted wilderness he currently crossed, this forest was a shrine to life itself.
Surely by now the first real snows had fallen, and the pines would be matted in fluffy shrouds of white. Yet the tumbling brook would still be flowing, the diverse creatures that inhabited its banks now leaving their tracks in the powdery snow.
How he missed this peaceful, pastoral haven! It was the real source of his vision, and without it, he’d be as empty as the jagged ice fields that presently surrounded him. Thus inspired, Kharkov felt a new sense of urgency as he charted the quickest route back to the Neva.
Chapter Sixteen
It was noon, and the Arctic sun still lay low in the heavens, as Matt Colter returned to the Defiance. His weary, bone-chilled party included two new faces. One of these individuals had to be carried aboard on a makeshift stretcher, while the other stood erect on the ice-covered deck where he wished his shore-based coworkers a hearty goodbye.
“I’m leaving the squad in your capable hands, Sergeant-Major. Please try to assure the Inuit woman that her husband appears to be all right. That bone necklace he was wearing most likely saved the poor bugger’s life, but it will be up to the pharmacist’s mate to bring him back to consciousness.