Beyond the first turn of the passage, they had to cautiously work their way past a jumble of old radio equipment, smashed by the grenade attack. There was no sign of life or death here, either, but ahead a gash in the tunnel floor resisted the probing beams of their tactical light—a descent into a larger, lower passage. This would be a natural choke and ambush point.
“Flare,” Tomashenko breathed.
The noncom snapped a fresh round into the projector. Together, with utmost caution, they eased up to the entrance of the lower cavern, moving as silently as well-trained warriors can move.
“Now!”
Sergeant Vilyayskiy fired the illumination round into the gut of the blackness, and Tomashenko whipped his assault rifle to his shoulder, ready to send bullets after it.
The flare hit, bounced into the rear of the lower cavern, and ignited.
Barsimoi! There were only supposed to be two of them!
Half a dozen figures stood on the cave floor, backlit by the pulsing blaze.
“Back! Get back!” Tomashenko squeezed off a wild burst and threw himself away from the cavern entry. Clawing at his bandolier, he tore out another hand grenade, Sergeant Vilyayskiy mirroring his actions.
Tomashenko hurled the grenade down into the cavern, the steel sphere ringing as it bounced off stone. It exploded with a roar and an ear-popping shock wave. The Spetsnaz troopers shrank back as shrapnel screamed and whined around the cavern interior. A second grenade followed, a third. Smoke and powdered lava saturated the air, and a fist-sized chunk of rock dislodged from the tunnel roof, glancing off Tomashenko’s shoulder.
“No more!” he yelled in sudden fear. The whole damn mountain might come down. “Cease-fire!”
The echoing reverberations and the faint, ominous grating of rock against rock faded. There was only silence from the pit of the lower cavern. Darkness as well, for the volley of hand grenades had blown out the flare.
“More illumination, Sergeant!” Tomashenko commanded.
The flare gun coughed once more, sending another scintillating ball of light bouncing around the interior of the cave.
“We got them, Lieutenant!” Vilyayskiy exclaimed. “The bastards are down!”
They augmented the flare with their tactical lights, playing the beams across the cluster of bodies on the cavern floor.
“We only saw the two Americans. Where did these others come from?”
“I don’t know, Sergeant. Be careful. There may be more.”
There was something strange about the way those bodies lay so rigidly. And then it hit Tomashenko. There was no blood! They had killed no one! Those men down there had died fifty years before!
Swearing, Tomashenko led his men down the lava slope to the floor of the tunnel. They had blown apart the stiff, frozen bodies of their own people! The dead crewmen of the Misha 124 had been strung up like grotesque puppets on a network of climbing rope, criss-crossed between pitons driven into the walls of the cave.
In a growing fury, Tomashenko recognized the delaying action, deftly rigged by someone who would understand the psychology and instincts of a military force in a cave-clearing operation. And he, Pavel Tomashenko, had reacted just as his enemy had hoped. Of the Americans themselves, there was no sign. Nor was there any clue to the fate of Major Smyslov.
Tomashenko became aware of an uneasy murmur passing among the enlisted men of his platoon. They were soldiers of the Russian Federation, but they were also Yakut, not far removed from the magics and superstitions of their people.
“Spread out and search!” Tomashenko roared them into action again. “There must be another exit from this cavern! Another tunnel! Find it!”
It took several minutes of searching to find the passage into the next section of tunnel. It had been blocked with chunks of basalt stacked into it from the far side.
The Americans were buying themselves time. But to what end? They were still rats trapped in a sewer pipe. Unless...
“Forward! After them! Move!”
Recklessly Tomashenko dove through the gap into the next tunnel section. He must not give them the time and opportunity to set up any more of their monkey tricks. He had the numbers and the firepower. He would use them.
“Illuminate! Light this place up!”
Volleys of flares were hurled ahead, filling the tunnel with the scarlet light of hell, the chemical vapor for their combustion tainting the air and burning the lungs. This section of lava tube was as broad as a highway and as high as a two-story building. The platoon advanced fast and dirty, snaking through the jagged jumble of rock slabs on the cave floor in a leap-frogging overwatch, half the force moving while the other half covered, ready to unleash a storm of gunfire at the first sign of life or hint of resistance.
But there was none, and as the advance continued and the tunnel lengthened, Tomashenko’s fears began to solidify. And then there it was, a thick fall of pale, compacted snow drooling down the left side of the tube. The rock floor of the tunnel was slick with clear condensation ice, but this was from the outside. Damnation, there was a second exit, and the Americans had found it!
A series of steps had been axed into the face of the icefall. Sergeant Vilvayskiy scrambled up the slope for a closer look. “There’s a snow tunnel here! They must have escaped through it, then caved it in behind them.”
The Americans had logically projected that Tomashenko would tighten his security perimeter around the main cave entrance in preparation for his assault. They had simply waited for his screen to contract past their concealed escape hatch; then they had slipped away, leaving a series of delays and diversions behind to buy them running time.
“Sergeant! Get that tunnel open immediately and get after those bastards! Keep Corporal Otosek’s section with you. I’ll take the rest of the platoon back to the main entrance! The Americans must be heading back for the science station. You trail them while we try to cut them off. Move!”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” the Yakut noncom replied, stoically snapping open his entrenching tool. “You, Private Amaha, get your ass up here and help me!”
In seconds, the two Spetsnaz troopers were assaulting the snow plug. Tomashenko turned and started to double-time the remainder of his force back the way they had come.
Tomashenko abruptly hesitated as the thought caught at him. The American bastards were clever. What if...
Private Amaha plunged his entrenching tool into the mass of loose snow blocking the route to the outside. As he scooped the burden aside, he felt a resisting tug. Glancing down in the flarelight, he saw a thin cord hooked over the blade of his shovel. He stared at it for an uncomprehending instant; then he understood and screamed.
The plastique-augmented hand grenade Private Uluh had attempted to drop into the cave entrance earlier that day fulfilled its destiny.
Concentrated by the confines of the tunnel, the concussion hurled Tomashenko face-first to the cavern floor. He tasted blood, the bitterness of high explosives, and the metallic taint of basalt. Over the howling ring in his ears he faintly heard the groans and pained swearing of the other downed members of the platoon. He levered himself to his feet and peered through the rosy haze of flare-illuminated dust that filled the cavern.
The passage to the outside had been blasted open, and the bodies of Sergeant Vilyayskiy and Private Amana had been hurled against the far wall of the lava tube and plastered there, like bedbugs smashed under the thumb of an annoyed sleeper.
There was no curse potent enough to be worthy of the sight.
Tomashenko staggered back down the tube and clambered up to the blackened fissure in the stone revealed and emptied by the explosion.
He looked out into the storming night and couldn’t believe what he found. The cave exit opened into the same cove in the mountainside he had used as his command post for all that afternoon. This man Smith must have crouched within twenty feet of him, watching and listening, and Tomashenko had never realized it! There had never been a hint!
This was a s
hame his career could never survive! “Get after them!” he raged. “They die tonight!”
Chapter Thirty-five
Wednesday Island Base
Randi Russell lay on her back in the lower of the two bunks in the women’s quarters, her wrists over her head and cuffed around the bunk’s vertical stanchion. A swath of light cut through the darkened room from the open door, issuing from the gas lantern in the main room. Intermittently the armed guard seated at the mess table glanced in her direction.
To the guard, she lay apparently unmoving, possibly even asleep. He couldn’t see into the shadows at the head of the bunk, where Randi’s fingers flexed and clenched slowly and continuously like a cat kneading its claws. She must not allow her hands to swell and get stiff.
Even as she had been prodded and shoved back to the bunk room that afternoon, she had been making her plans. When her captors had handcuffed her into the bunk, she had seemingly resisted for a moment, earning herself another impatient slap across the face. But in a deft bit of positional legerdemain she had also managed to ensure that when the handcuff had been resnapped around her right wrist it had closed over both the sleeve of her sweater and the heavy thermal long johns she wore underneath it.
She had worked the fabric out from under the cuff, loosening it. She had also made sure that her fists had been tightly clinched when the cuffs had been locked on, gaining herself yet another precious fraction of an inch of play.
She rolled a little on the bunk, as if hunting for a more comfortable spot. Under the cover of the movement she again found the joint in the bunk stanchion and practiced wedging the connecting links of the handcuffs into it. Then she folded her fingers in as tightly as she could and gave an experimental tug. Given enough adrenaline, it would work. It wouldn’t be very pleasant, but it would work.
Her eyes scanned the semidarkness, gauging distances, plotting positions, considering the potential assets. How big was the window in the end wall of the cabin, and how thick was the thermal glass? Remember how the big boom box tape player was positioned atop the cabinet against the far wall. How deep was the snow drifted against the cabins, and how would the snow crust bear weight? Listen to the wind and gauge what the weather was like and how the visibility would be outside. What about outer shell garments? She supposed her own cold-weather gear was still over in the lab hut. She would have to improvise when the time came.
In her hours of imprisoned waiting she had made every mental and physical preparation she could. For the rest she must trust to patience, luck, and Slavic sexual propensities.
The smell of cooking rations filled the bunk room, and a growing number of shadows moved across the bar of light streaming through the door. The chief smuggler—Kretek, she had heard him called—was feeding his crew in shifts. The scent of hot food pointedly reminded Randi she hadn’t eaten since a very sketchy breakfast. A meal would be a very good thing to have just now, but she didn’t dare ask for anything to eat, for fear of disrupting the scenario she had built.
She recognized the voices of Kretek and Kropodkin. They were in the bunkhouse, having dinner. Russian was the lingua franca of the group, although Randi could recognize half a dozen different Balkan dialects and accents. Over their meal the shop talk was about the coming day’s operation: the blowing open of the Misha’s fuselage and the sling lifting of the anthrax reservoir, and the precautions that must be taken when dealing with the deadly bioagent.
They also discussed Jon, Professor Metrace, and Major Smyslov. From what Randi could gather, there had been no contact with her teammates so far. Plans were being proposed for hunting them down.
The clink and rattle of eating utensils trailed off. She smelled pipes and acrid Balkan cigarettes being lit. The conversation grew more genial, the laughter more frequent. The men were relaxing after dinner, joking, discussing women and sex.
It wouldn’t be long now.
Randi heard Kretek’s bull’s-bellow voice say, “Well, Stefan, you’d best get on with it. You have a lot of men standing in line for their rations here.”
So it would be Kropodkin.
She heard the ex-student laugh sheepishly, followed by a bellow of humor from around the table and a barrage of coarse suggestions and advice.
“Just don’t mark up that pretty face of hers, lad.”
“Why do you worry about her face, Belinkov? What are you going to do? Draw her picture?”
“What can I say? I have a romantic soul.”
A shadow occulted the light. He was in the doorway, looking at her. She could hear his rasping breath, still hampered by the nose she had broken. She could hear the scuffle of his booted feet on the floor, smell the rancidity of his body.
Kropodkin stepped into the women’s quarters...and drew the accordion door closed behind him, plunging the little room and the two of them into darkness.
Got you, you son of a bitch!
If Kropodkin had been a show-off or if Kretek’s crew had been up for a gang bang on the mess table, Randi knew she would have been in trouble. But she had been involved in sexual relationships, both romantically and professionally, with Russians before. She knew that a strong streak of inherent prudishness still ran deeply through many of the Slavic cultures. Overt sexual exhibitionism still frequently triggered a guilt-shame response. She had been counting on this.
Kropodkin was kneeling beside the bunk now and his hands were on her breasts, squeezing and kneading them with a brutal childish eagerness. “Things are different now, aren’t they, Miss Russell?” He spat her name out like an epithet. “You have a great deal to make up for. A very great deal. You may start begging my pardon any time you please. I might listen.”
She could make out his silhouette in the bar of light down the edge of the door and see the sparks of red light glinting in his eyes. She spoke directly to those sparks, her voice a soft whisper, audible only to him.
“Just so you’ll know, I’m still going to kill you.”
Kropodkin spat out a true epithet, a counter to the chill rippling down his spine. Standing, he tore off his clothes. He would destroy the hex this deadly, beautiful witch had put on his soul with her degradation.
Then he was stripping her, dragging her ski pants, thermal underwear, and panties down to her ankles. Not bothering to force the snug garments off over her boots, he was content to hobble her with them. Then Randi’s sweater and long john top were being forced up and over her head and into a wad around her wrists, leaving that firm, pale body bare save for her bra. That he tore away altogether with an angry, painful wrench, leaving her nothing.
She did not speak again or try to resist, not even in the slightest. She just looked into his face, those dark eyes glittering. It was as if what he was about to do to her simply didn’t matter. As if he were irrelevant, already dead and gone.
But if it was frightening, it was also exciting. He would make this bitch notice him. He would master her and break her and make her scream and cry. He was atop her in the bunk, hunching down under the springs of the upper mattress, mounting her, feeling her back arch under the stab of his dry penetration. She would break or she would die.
Randi rode out the initial, tearing burst of pain. She could hear the sound of Stefan Kropodkin’s breath hissing through his clenched teeth, and the laughter and shouted advice from the other arms smugglers just a few feet away beyond that paper-thin door. She felt Kropodkin’s hands moving from her bruised breasts to her throat.
Above her head, the links of the handcuff chain clicked as they locked into the shallow notch in the stanchion, and the fingers of her left hand took a grip on the clothing wadded around her right wrist, so she could clear her right hand.
Kropodkin thrust savagely within her, and her pain and rage reached critical mass and exploded. Her skin tore as she ripped her right hand out of the loosened handcuff.
Lost in the sensual softness of the prostrate body beneath him and the brutality of his rape of it, Kropodkin didn’t realize what Randi’s convulsive
movements meant. She pushed completely free of her sweater and long john top, letting them fall to the floor. Then Randi’s left hand, still burdened by the handcuffs, whipped up and clenched in Kropodkin’s lank hair, yanking his head back.
“Told you so.” That whisper was the last thing he heard. Then the heel of Randi Russell’s right hand smashed an angled blow under Kropodkin’s nose, driving his sinus cartilage into the frontal lobes of his brain, killing him instantly.
Randi felt the gush of blood over her hand, the death spasm racking Kropodkin’s body. She rolled him onto the floor, clutching him in an awkward embrace to muffle the thud of his fall. Escaping from the handcuffs and killing her would-be rapist had been no major problem. Getting away afterward, with a dozen armed men a meager yard or two away beyond a flimsy unlockable door, was. It was only a matter of time, a very brief time, before they realized something was wrong in here. She faked a pained, whimpering outcry to buy a few more seconds as she wiped the blood from her hand. Hastily she redonned her clothes. She didn’t have enough to wear for the outside. No doubt there was more clothing in the wall lockers, but she didn’t have the time to rummage for it in the dark.
The laughing voices were trailing off out in the main bunkroom, and someone, Kretek, called out a question to Kropodkin.
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.