Nobody tried very hard to do anything these days. The trappers sold most of their furs on the black market and some of them even into China. Alekhin had done it himself. He knew what was going on better than most of the KGB, although some among them were good, and a few were very good.
By the time he reached the fire, Rukovsky and Suvarov were eating. He moved up and stood on the edge of the camp for several minutes before Rukovsky saw him. The sight of him standing there so near angered Rukovsky, who had had quite enough of people slipping into his camp without warning.
“You!” he demanded. “Who are you?” The sun was in Rukovsky’s eyes and he could see nothing.
“I am Alekhin.”
“What?” The man was a legend in Siberia. “Come in! Come in! Will you join us?”
He was a big man, Rukovsky noted, who moved like a cat. Alekhin moved up to the fire and sat down cross-legged.
“You look for the American?”
“I know where he is.”
“What? Then why don’t we take him? If you know—”
“I know. Taking him is not easy. You go with all those people and he is gone, poof! I will take him. Me.”
“Where is he?”
Alekhin jerked his head to the rear. “Up there. You go for him, your men will die. They are fools. They do not know how to search for this man.”
Rukovsky was inclined to agree, but not to admit it. “He was here this morning, early.”
Alekhin’s heavy-lidded eyes stared at him. Rukovsky had an idea he had surprised Alekhin.
“He was here; had tea with us. Tied up three of my men. Then he took my packet of rations and was gone.”
Alekhin sipped his tea. Inside he was angry, coldly, bitterly angry. The American dared to do this when he was around? He would pay for that.
“I will get him,” he repeated. “I will get him soon now.”
He looked across the fire at Rukovsky. “If you follow him, men will die. Take your soldiers and go home. It will be better.”
Colonel Rukovsky’s back stiffened. “Your advice is not needed.” His tone was cold. “If you expect to take the American, I would suggest you get on with it.”
Deliberately, he turned to Suvarov and began to speak of other things. Inwardly, he was seething. Who was this buffoon that he should tell him what to do?
Alekhin ignored them. He took his time, finishing his small meal and the tea. Then he arose and without a backward glance, walked away. He did not care what they did. If men died, it was of no importance to him. By the time he had reached the forest’s edge he had forgotten them. He had not warned Rukovsky because of any humanitarian principles, simply because so many men would tramp out all the tracks, destroy what indications the American might have left.
He had been here this morning? Some sign would be left, then. He cast back and forth. He already knew the length of the American’s stride, knew some of his methods of travel. Soon he would know all. Deliberately he had waited, wanting the man to tire himself, wanting him to become overconfident and hence careless, wanting the others to drop the chase.
The American was somewhere near the head of the Indigirka or the Kolyma, and he believed the former. The canyons were excellent places in which to hide, but the man would have to eat, and if he killed for food he would leave a part of the carcass behind. That would attract the carrion eaters.
It was a wild land of broken rock, gray cascades of talus, and a few stunted trees. Alekhin paused to look down a great gash in the mountainside, a gash choked with fir trees. It was a steep descent and a harder climb back up if he found nothing or if it ended, as so many such did, in a vast drop to the canyon floor. Vainly he searched for some evidence of a man’s passing. He found nothing but the droppings of a mountain goat and a few patches of snow.
He looked across the canyon at a curling lip of snow below that bank he had observed earlier. Bad country, a slide poised to go with a million tons of snow, rock, and dead trees behind it. Left alone, the snow might melt off gradually, but if someone tried to cross, or if there were some sudden sound, the whole thing would come down.
He shook his heavy head. Rukovsky was a fool! He should go back to country he knew! Such a man was a danger in the mountains, to himself and to others. Alekhin did not care about the others as long as he was not one of them. He did not like Rukovsky. Too smart, too efficient, one of those officer and gentleman types. He liked none of them, but he preferred to work with Zamatev. The man was cruel, ice hard, and ruthless. Alekhin did not like him, either, and it would be only what he deserved if the American turned around and went back to find and kill him.
Zamatev had said he was coming out to take personal charge. The fool! What could he do? Take charge of what?
Yet Alekhin knew that Zamatev had made a sudden flight to Moscow and back. He had returned bursting with confidence. Shepilov was to be called off, told to return to things that concerned him. Zamatev and the GRU would handle the American.
As if they could!
Alekhin paused. A pebble, pressed into mud when it was wet, had been kicked from its socket in the long-dried mud. Something or somebody had passed this way. If it was the American it must have been done at night when he was moving fast. It was unlike him to leave such an indication.
Pausing, Alekhin looked carefully around. A dozen times he had come upon traps left for pursuers, and he had seen several men die from those traps. Others had been crippled, temporarily at least.
Nothing seemed wrong, yet he was wary. With this man you made only one mistake.
He heard the footsteps behind him and muttered angrily. How could he accomplish anything with those fools tramping around over the mountains?
It was Rukovsky again. “We’re making a sweep of this slope, Alekhin,” he said. “If we find anything we will call you at once.”
“You?” Alekhin demanded rudely. “What could you find?”
Colonel Rukovsky controlled himself. “We might find a great deal. A hundred eyes are better than two.” He pointed.
“I’ve started a patrol on the other wall of the canyon. We’re right here where it begins, so I had them cross to the other side.”
Alekhin looked across the canyon. A thin gray line of men walked in single file and then, as he watched, spread up the steep slope in a skirmish line, to cover everything.
Alekhin did not care in the least, but he said, “I hope none of them have families.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“They will die,” Alekhin said coldly. “You have just condemned them to death.”
Rukovsky stared at him. The man was not only arrogant, he was insane!
Alekhin’s eyes held contempt. “You! What a fool you are! Whatever you wanted to accomplish is finished. You are finished.”
Alekhin turned his back and walked away before he could reply. Rukovsky stared after him. Alekhin was Zamatev’s man, and one did not lightly cross Zamatev. Nonetheless—
He glanced around. His men were scattered along the rocky face of the mountain, scattered among the fir and the cedar, their weapons ready, moving forward and upward in an uneven line. There were scattered spruce trees along the slope and several patches of Dahurian larch. Rukovsky paused to take in the wild, barren beauty of the place.
He was a man who read much, who thought much, a man who loved good music and who had been reared in an atmosphere of art and artists. His youngest sister was in the ballet and already accepted as one of the best.
He wished suddenly that she could see this: the vast gray mountain splashed with patches of snow, the dark columns of the spruce, and his soldiers advancing. He turned to look across the canyon. It had widened, and he needed his glasses now to make out the men. They were on bare rock, as here, but were approaching a wide bank of old snow. The snow ran down to the very edge of the canyon, some loppi
ng over the abyss.
Captain Obruchev was in command of that group, a fine officer and a good friend.
Alekhin had disappeared! Irritated, Rukovsky looked around. Where could the man have gotten to?
He was an impudent fool! Yet he had been warned that Alekhin was no respecter of authority. He simply did not care. He wanted nothing they could give him and was afraid of nobody. Zamatev used him, needed him for this sort of thing, and had often said that Alekhin, when he wished, could simply vanish into wild country and lose himself. Just as this American seemed to have done.
He slapped his gloves against his thigh, irritated. He glanced around him, then started forward, his own eyes searching.
What exactly did a man look for, a tracker like Alekhin? Surely, there was nothing Alekhin could see that he could not.
But he could find nothing on this barren, rocky slope. He looked ahead, and along the ridge he saw jagged, serrated rocks with occasional towers, almost like battlements in some places. Directly before him, there was a grove of wild, wind-torn trees looking like a clutch of hags with their wild hair blowing in the wind. Only there wasn’t any wind, just those ragged trees.
He stepped carefully, for a misstep on this broken rock could give a man a nasty fall.
What did Alekhin mean that he was finished? That his career was at an end? Hell, if all went well he would be a general before the year was out! He knew he was in line for promotion and knew that the right people had been spoken to and were interested.
He smiled, mildly amused. After all, so little had changed since the time of the Tsars! Only the names had changed, and instead of the old nobility you had the Party members, and in place of the Grand Dukes you had the Politburo. Only, the Grand Dukes had usually had less power.
Gorbachev had more ability than most of the Tsars, and hopefully he would do something to build Russia internally before it came apart at the seams. But it was hard for any man to move against the sheer inertia of entrenched civil servants who did not want change and feared to lose their privileges.
Wild and treacherous as these mountains were, they possessed a rare kind of beauty. He was glad he was momentarily alone. To truly know the mountains, one should go to meet them as one would meet a sweetheart, alone.
Alone as he was now. Colonel Rukovsky looked off across incredible distances behind him. Far below he could see a helicopter setting down. Three trucks were toiling up the very bad road, looking no larger than ants, although he knew the tops of their radiators were as high as his head.
Whatever else the American’s escape had done, it had brought him here to this unbelievable beauty, which otherwise he might never have seen.
A cold wind blew along the mountain, and he shivered. There were ghosts riding this wind, strange ghosts born of this strange, almost barren land. Far to the west and against the horizon was the Verkhoyansk Range.
He paused, hearing a bird in the brush near the larch. It was a nutcracker; he remembered them from his boyhood.
What had Alekhin meant, saying he was through? It was absurd, but the words rankled. They stuck like burrs in his thoughts, and he could not rid himself of that dire warning.
He was near the haglike trees he had seen, and close up they looked even wilder. One of the trunks was battered and beaten, struck hard by something until the bark had been shattered into threads. Suddenly he remembered a brother officer, a hunter of big game, who had told him of wild rams battering such trees, butting them again and again in simple exuberance and lust for combat.
He paused again to catch his breath. The altitude was high and the air was thin as well as being crisp and cold.
Far off, he thought he heard a shout. Looking around, he could see nothing.
Then, high up on the mountain, Alekhin appeared, pointing. Rukovsky ran forward, looking across the canyon.
His men were lined out, moving in their skirmish line across that vast field of snow above the canyon’s edge.
Then, from somewhere down in the gorge, came a shot.
Colonel Rukovsky saw then a sight he would never forget. His men, twenty-odd of them, were on the field of snow when the shot sounded in the depths of the canyon. An instant of trembling silence when the sound of the shot racketed away along the rocky cliffs, and then horrified, he saw that whole vast field of snow start to move!
There was an instant of frozen stillness as the snow moved, and then his men scattered, some running forward, some running back, a few crouching in place looking for something they could grip. And there was nothing. The whole mountainside seemed to be moving, and then, with a thunderous roar, the snowfield gathered speed and swept toward the rim of the gorge.
Spilling over the lip, it fell like a Niagara of snow into the vast depths below!
One moment he saw his men, swinging arms wildly, fighting to stem the tide; then over they went, and far away as he was he seemed to hear their screams, screams that he would never forget. And one of those who fell was Captain Obruchev, engaged to his sister.
After the roar of the avalanche, silence.
THIRTY-EIGHT
MAJOR JOSEPH MAKATOZI crouched beside a giant spruce, looking up the canyon. He was sheltered from the wind, always a major consideration, and his coat made from the hide of a mountain goat was warm. The pelage of the mountain goat is the finest, softest, and undoubtedly the warmest of any animal. Being white, it blended well with the occasional patches of snow. His pants were made of the same material.
From beside the spruce, he had seen the patrol start across the snowfield. This was war, and they were hunting him to kill or capture. And capture meant eventual death.
He watched them move out on the snowfield with exasperation. What could their commander be thinking of? Certainly, he was not a Siberian, but any Russian accustomed to mountain travel should know better than to walk across a slope that was obviously unstable.
He found himself almost hoping they would make it across, but if they did they would be in a position to see into his hanging valley, and they might even see him in his hideout above it. Certainly, a man with a good glass would be able to pick him out. And he was, for the time being, tired of running.
Joe Mack knew that in such cases, with snow poised to start, a sudden shout or a shot might be enough to start it, particularly in the narrow confines of the canyon.
Their movements on the snowfield might be enough to start a slide, but he could not leave it to chance. He lifted the AK-47 and fired.
He did not aim, because he had no plan to hit anything. He did not know the accurate range of the weapon, although all guns carried farther than most people believed, but the men were a good half mile away. He simply fired, and whether it was their movements or the shot he did not know, but the slide started.
At least two of the soldiers at the rear threw themselves back off the snow, while another two or three had not reached it, but for the others there was no chance.
When the roar of the slide ceased and snow puffed up in a thick cloud, he settled back against his tree and waited. He was relatively secure. There was nowhere on this side of the canyon that overlooked his hideout and no way it could be easily reached except above and behind him, and even that was not a simple way.
He guessed that the patrol he had seen was but one of several. No doubt they had planned to work along both sides of the canyon, but only an officer unfamiliar with such mountains would have attempted it. In such canyons there are usually several levels left by the water in cutting its way through the rock and carving out the gorge. A thorough search might be made on one level while leaving unseen hiding places on the next. Of course, many of these were visible from across the canyon, as his would have been had the patrol crossed the snowfield.
The tilted slope opposite him and somewhat higher was now almost bare of snow. He could see several men huddled together, who seemed in shock. He
did not blame them. The snowfield had extended several hundred feet above them and back. It must have seemed that the whole side of the mountain was moving. As he watched, the men turned and started back the way they had come, occasionally turning to look back as if in disbelief of what had happened.
Going to the little hollow at the back of the bench, he built a small fire of dry wood that gave off almost no smoke. He made tea and a thick broth of meat scrap and melted snow. Occasionally he peered through the trees, and always he listened. Alekhin was out there somewhere.
The months of living in the snow and cold had built his resistance to it. It had begun to warm up, and at thirty degrees below zero he was almost warm. He remembered long ago reading an account of Byrd’s men in Antarctica shoveling snow, stripped to the waist at ten degrees below zero. Given a chance, the human body had an amazing capacity for adapting itself to changing conditions.
Undoubtedly a patrol was coming along on his side of the canyon. Knowing the terrain, he knew that the patrol must either be well scattered or fail in covering the area. The nature of the country left only a few possible routes.
His present position was invisible from below. Looking up, they would see only a forested mountainside much too steep for travel. From below, as he had seen for himself, there was no indication of the little bench on which he was camped.
The only possible way of seeing it was from across the gorge where the soldiers had been headed who were carried away by the avalanche. He had meat, and he could afford to sit tight. Hard as it was to remain still, that was just what he must do. The risk was great, yet he needed the rest.
The very nature of the traps he had left behind denied him the chance to know if they had worked. If nothing else, they would make his pursuers move more slowly and with greater caution. Yet now he was within a few hundred yards of at least two such traps.
Here he was sheltered from the wind and from observation except by aircraft, and if he was under the trees they might see his hideout but not him. However, sighting the hideout might lead to a search. Was there communication with the ground forces by radio? He had to believe there was, although there might not be.
Last of the Breed (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 31