by Cindy Dees
“Can you think of anything else that might help us find this guy?” Ivo murmured.
“He had a weird name. Started with a vowel.” Astrid frowned, concentrating like something was dangling just out of her reach. Then, suddenly, her face lit up. “Izzy! That’s it! I told you it was weird.”
Ivo glanced over Jens’ way. “I put a call in to the sketch artist before I came over here—just in case. He can see you tomorrow morning.”
In that moment, Jens could’ve hugged Ivo. God, he was such a sap. But hey. Dads are allowed to look out for their daughters.
They were also allowed to find the bastards who fed their daughters tainted drugs and bury them. Very, very deep.
Southeast of Lakvik, March 7, 1:00 a.m.
By narrowing the signal bandwidth even more while she listened to it, she was able to home in fairly accurately on Jack’s signal. In fact, she was able to narrow the transmitting site down to one of three mountain peaks. From there, it was simply a matter of choosing the tallest one to try first.
But what a mountain. It was steep, icy and criss-crossed by treacherous crevasses. It was insane to hike it alone. If she slipped and hurt herself or fell down one of the deep cracks in the ice, the odds of anybody finding her alive were absolutely zero.
And she didn’t care one bit. Pin pricks of cold and exertion stabbed her eyeballs, and a throbbing ache started right in the center of her head and radiated outward. With every pounding pulse of agony, her fury at Jack Scatalone grew. Arrogant bastard. Tried to mold the Medusas in his image. Didn’t care a bit if they were women and could use a break now and then. Never cut them an inch of slack. Parked himself on the highest goddamned mountain in Norway and dared them to come and get him.
Oh, she’d get him all right. He’d be on the lookout for a full frontal assault, or something equally spectacular from the Medusas. And why not? They’d learned about grandstanding from the master.
Jack wouldn’t be looking for a lone hunter coming in swift and silent on wings of fury. And that was why she’d spill his blood all over the snow. God, it would be a thing of beauty. One foot after another, step after step, closer and closer to vengeance.
She knew from the signal tracker that Jack and the Norwegians had to be on this southern face of the mountain. So, she worked her way gradually around to the north to come in from the opposite side. It put her in the way of even more wind-carved crevasses and deadly drops, but the danger only served to fuel the raging glory running through her.
In the end, it was an easy matter to spot the two low mounds of snow in the lee of a tall rock face. The spot was reasonably protected from the winds howling up here. Karen worked her way down a fissure in the rock face until she was crouched in a deep shadow at its base. One of the mounds was small and round, in the Alaskan Inuit fashion. The other one was longer and much larger, more oblong in shape, along the lines of what Anders had taught her to build. It could hold six guys. A tight fit, maybe, but she’d found their camp.
Exultation roared through her and she nearly laughed aloud. This was going to be so easy. Jack might as well have put a neon sign over his shelter saying, “Jack Scatalone is sleeping here. Come and get me.”
And that gave her pause. It was too damned easy. Jack knew better than to make a camp right out in the open like this. She took a closer look at the snow drifting across the two tunnel entrances leading to the shelters. Both openings had accumulated a small drift of snow with a tiny, perfect overhang of crystallized ice. They looked like waves exactly at the moment they break over, but frozen in place, never to crash down to the sea.
Those drifts were too perfect. No one had been in or out of those tunnels in a good twenty-four hours, if not more. The igloos in front of her were a trap!
Rage exploded across her brain like a fireworks display, great booming chrysanthemums of fiery red and blazing white. Jerk! Bastard! A roar of fury rose up in her chest, only barely cut off by the need to hunt. To find her prey. And to kill.
Jack had to be close. Her signal detector was pulsing strong and steady. She had to be all but on top of the damned transmitter. She lay down in the snow and began to move. By inches. Which was why she spotted the trip wire nearly buried in the snow as her eyeballs drew level with it.
She didn’t have Aleesha’s surgeon hands when it came to disarming traps. She’d better go around it. She glanced up. If she stood here in her white camo coat and pants, she’d show up against the black cliff as though a spotlight was on her. Better to go under it. She rolled ever so slowly onto her side, presenting her back to the camp. Her movements thus protected from prying eyes, she dug carefully with her hands, forming a shallow ditch beneath the wire. And then came the difficult limbo-dance maneuver to slide under the trip wire without touching it. No telling how sensitive a switch it was connected to.
The whole exercise took close to a half hour. And with each passing second, her impatience to get to the kill grew. She could almost taste blood on her tongue, and it was sweet and salty and satisfying.
It took another thirty yards of low crawling, which took another twenty minutes, to go around the fake camp. But eventually, she lay at the edge of a tall outcropping of rock, looking down the south face of the mountain. And spotted the second camp. This one was much better concealed, the shelters nearly flush with the snow and dotted unevenly across the mountainside in between upthrusts of rock and shadow.
She nearly crawled into a couple of more trip wires, but both of these were so placed that she could rise to a crouch and ease over them without showing herself.
The signal detector was now clicking quickly in her ear. “You’re getting hot,” it seemed to whisper. “Hotter. Burning hot.”
She lay in the snow, oblivious to its grasping cold as it greedily sucked the heat from her body. The fire within her replenished everything the snow took and more. She felt as if her coat was strangling her. She eased a hand up to unzip her parka a bit. Fingers of cold wind seeped down her body. Fire and ice collided in her and she reveled in the pain. God, to feel so alive was breathtaking!
Her eyes narrowed. Seven shelters. And one held her target. Using every bit of stealth Jack had ever taught her, she glided on her belly into the middle of the camp, like the python she was named for. Now, to figure out which one was his.
It took her two full circuits around the camp over the course of an hour to spot it. A footprint frozen into the snow just outside one of the tunnels. She hadn’t grown up hunting with her father for nothing. She was an extremely skilled tracker and read signs with the best of them. The print was the right size and depth for a man of Jack’s size.
Only person likely to have been in Jack’s shelter was Jack. The hut was too small to accommodate more than one man without the occupants having to get uncomfortably close. And more to the point, the print was an American combat-boot tread pattern. She’d noticed before that when Anders took off his boots and turned them upside down to dry, the tread pattern on Norwegian boots was different than hers.
Bingo. Houston, we have positive target acquisition.
She didn’t particularly care about being caught after she offed Jack. If he died noisily and the Norwegians came out to investigate, so be it. As long as she spilled his blood all over the snow first like she did that other guy’s. Ever so carefully, she buried herself not far from the tunnel entrance to Jack’s igloo. She left her eyes and nose above the snow, but that was all.
And now to wait.
Time lost all meaning for her. There was only the cold and the dark and the hunt. The wind blew, and a thin drift of snow accumulated on and around her. And the fire raged on inside her.
Sometime later, in the deepest still of the night, her predator’s trance was interrupted by a movement. Someone was coming out of Jack’s shelter. If she’d had a tail, its tip would have twitched. Adrenaline ripped through her, and every ounce of bloodlust within her surged forth. She was ready. Jack Scatalone was a dead man.
He rose up out
of his tunnel, his foot landing in almost exactly the same spot as the previous footprint she’d found. He glanced at his watch and moved over to an antenna sticking up out of the snow. She’d found it earlier and had probed the snow to verify that the jamming device was, in fact buried in that spot. But that was no longer her target. She was hunting bigger prey, now.
Jack hunched down on his heels, his back turned to her.
Her fingers wrapped tightly around her knife, and she rose up slowly out of the snow, silent and lethal, a living specter of death. It was time.
Every muscle in her body uncoiled at once. She shot forward, too sudden and quick for her prey to escape.
Let fly the wings of fury! I am fate and my name is Death, Jack Scatalone.
Chapter 12
White House living quarters, March 6, 9:00 p.m.
Henry Stanforth propped his feet up on the coffee table in front of the sofa and picked up a file from the stack beside him.
“Don’t put your feet up on the table, Henry,” his wife reproved mildly. “After all, we don’t own it.”
“I took my shoes off. My socks won’t hurt it.”
It was a running argument with them. He insisted on actually living in the White House, and his wife labored under the notion that they’d been locked in a museum for four years and shouldn’t touch anything the entire time they were here.
He had some catching up to do from earlier today. A talkative group of farmers lobbying for increased farm subsidies had taken too long in the Oval Office, and his schedule, usually planned down to the last, efficient minute, had been fouled up for the rest of the day. His secretary had been near cardiac arrest for most of the afternoon.
He’d barely had time to dive into a preliminary point paper on next year’s budget when a quiet knock sounded on the hallway door. His wife went over to open it.
She smiled a greeting at the Secret Service agent and said dryly over her shoulder, “It’s for you, dear.”
Wasn’t it always? “What can I do for you, John?” Stanforth asked.
“There’s a phone call for you, sir. Prime Minister of Norway. Mr. Bjornsen says it’s not an emergency, but if you have a moment, he’d appreciate a word with you.”
“Transfer it up here, will you?”
“Yes, sir.” The man backed out of the room and closed the door behind him.
He wished the Secret Service guys wouldn’t wear those stupid white cotton gloves whenever they opened and closed doors. Who’d ever heard of living in a house where the doorknobs were such priceless collectibles you couldn’t touch them? If he had his way, he’d take a hammer to every last Lalique-this and Steuben-that doorknob in the place.
The phone rang beside him and he picked it up.
“President Stanforth, thank you for taking my call at this late hour. I recall you saying you’re a night owl and I took a chance that you might still be awake.”
Stanforth laughed. “Our work is never done, is it? What can I do for you, Tryg?” After they’d spent an afternoon together last summer sailing in a magnificent Norwegian fjord, protocol allowed them to use first names in private like this.
“I’m afraid I have a rather strange question for you, Henry.”
“I get lots of strange questions in my line of work.”
Bjornsen replied, “I know the feeling. I received a letter a few hours ago. A set of demands, really. It came from a delegation of Sami people from Nordland. You might know them as Laplanders. And in case your Norwegian geography is a little dusty, the county of Nordland is up in the Arctic Circle. Northern tip of mainland Norway.”
“I’m with you so far,” Stanforth replied.
“The list of demands are predictable for a native people struggling to maintain a separate identity in the face of encroaching modernization and the defection of their youth to the cities.”
“And your strange question?”
“Well, it’s not the demands that have me puzzled. It’s something else. The Sami people follow an old belief system. Polytheistic, nature-based stuff. A little bit of Viking mythology mixed in. And they believe in prophecies. Apparently, the fulfillment of one of their prophecies has led them to approach me now with their list.”
Stanforth was lost. What the hell did any of this have to do with him? And why was it important enough to bother him at this hour of the night? It was 3:00 a.m. in Oslo.
The Prime Minister continued. “It seems this prophecy concerns the second coming of a Viking warrior goddess to their people. Freya, to be precise, if you happen to be up on your Norse mythology.”
“And?”
“I got in touch with my military to find out who exactly this warrior goddess might be, who has suddenly appeared to the Sami people. My own officers refused to tell me a thing. All they would say is that I must contact you or a General Wittenauer to get the details.”
And then it hit Stanforth. The Medusas. He burst out laughing. He wouldn’t admit the Medusas existed to many world leaders, but Tryg Bjornsen had proven himself time and again to be a man of prudence and great personal honor, not to mention an unswerving ally of the United States through trying times. He’d keep a secret if asked to. Stanforth would bet his life on it. More to the point, he’d bet the Medusas’ lives on it. “My girls have become goddesses, have they? What are they up to now?”
“Fomenting rebellion among my native peoples for one thing,” Bjornsen answered a bit tartly. “Who are these women? My Special Forces wouldn’t tell me a word about them. Just told me to call you.”
Stanforth did his best to contain his mirth, but wasn’t entirely successful at it. “Well, Tryg, a few months back, we tried an experiment. Trained ourselves an all-female Special Forces team. Turns out they’re pretty darned good, and we made them permanent. But, for obvious security and political reasons, we’re keeping them a deep, dark secret. Only a handful of people in the entire world know they exist. That’s why your people wouldn’t talk about them. We swore your Special Forces to complete secrecy before the Medusas were allowed to go to Norway to train with your people.”
“Some training they’re doing! I’ve got Samis parked on my steps all but demanding their own country because of your ladies.”
“Ahh, Tryg, if it wasn’t the Medusas, it would be something else. Your Samis would find another reason to make their demands sooner or later. Have you considered giving the Samis exclusive rights to run casinos in Norway? It’s done wonders for the economic plight of the Native American population.”
“Thanks for the suggestion,” Bjornsen replied dryly, “but gambling’s already legal over here.”
“Too bad. So, what do you need me to do about the Medusas?”
“Perhaps have them back off of stirring the Sami people to rebellion?”
“I’ll pass the message along. You’ll be glad to know it’s a very short chain of command from me to my snake ladies. Only two men. General Wittenauer and the ladies’ direct supervisor, Colonel Jack Scatalone. I expect he’s in Norway with them. Last briefing I got, the Medusas were heading for the Arctic Circle to do some winter-survival training.”
“We’ve got plenty of winter up there for them.”
“Tryg, I need to ask you for your complete discretion. Their existence is a very closely held secret. It’s why they continue to be such an effective weapon for us. Nobody expects a team of women.”
“Thank you for your candor, Henry. As always, you know you can trust me. The Medusa secret is safe.”
South of Lakvik, Norway, March 7, 4:00 a.m.
The distance between her and Jack Scatalone melted in slow motion. Her hungry blade raised itself high over her shoulder, a serpent’s fang, dripping death. She took aim at the back of his neck. The kill zone. The very kill zone he’d taught her how to strike.
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of her mind, a tiny voice forced itself through the red haze, one whispered, barely heard word at a time.
What.
Are.
You.
Doing?
He’d made her the warrior that she was. He’d pushed her to the breaking point and beyond. Had shown her she had no limits at all. Whatever she could imagine, she could achieve if she only worked hard enough and put her mind to it. He’d found her greatest weakness and torn back the layers of her psyche that protected her Achilles’ heel—her embarrassment over her size and power. She’d fought against it ever since. Because of him.
And in this suspended moment out of time, this critical turning point of student destroying master, something unexpected happened. She was glad for her exceptional size, her muscular power. They were the very attributes allowing her to succeed now and kill the man who’d taught her how to harness both. Had it not been for Jack, she’d never have made her peace with either. But he’d forced her to face who she was. To embrace it. He’d given her the final tool that made her invincible.
The little voice pushed through the bloodlust again, a little louder this time. Why are you killing him?
A lightning bolt of clarity burst through.
She looked up at her fist, gripping her hungry knife. The blade was ravenous. Eager for the hot, iron taste of life flowing across steel. It urged her fist downward. Plunge me into flesh. Feed me life’s blood!
She recoiled in horror. Stumbled to a stop. Her fist went slack, her fingers opening one by one. The blade tumbled from her numb fingers into the snow.
“Jack,” she rasped.
He whirled around, leaping to his feet.
And then she had to get rid of it all. She pulled out her ankle knife and threw it in the snow. Stripped the MP-5 off her back. Even with rubber bullets, it still represented death. Pulled out the rubber-handled garrote. Absolutely everything she could imagine using as a weapon, she scrambled to get away from herself. Tears flowed freely. She was filthy. Tainted. The hunter had nearly gotten the best of her. She’d become a monster. A killer had put on her skin.
“Karen! Are you all right?” Jack asked urgently.
“Take it away. Get it off me,” she sobbed, scrubbing at her skin now.