Life is strange.
Nik beat him to the top and glided off into the trees. Grisha plodded along until he found his companion’s skis jammed down into the snow. The tall Russian was scrounging wood for a fire.
Grisha checked the sky. Royal blue sliding into purple, no clouds. Tonight the temperature could drop again, but probably no wind. He pulled the shelter half out of his pack and rigged it to reflect the fire’s warmth onto his back.
After stowing his gear, he went looking for firewood. No matter how much they collected, it would not be enough to last the night. In this part of Alaska the temperature dropped to minus sixty Celsius in the winter and climbed to plus forty Celsius in the summer. The extreme temperatures dried wood to tinder. In Southeast Alaska wood never dried, it rotted.
The Dená Republic is an extreme place, he thought, and so are the people. Other than his military service, being treated as an equal had not been a part of his life in Russian Amerika. A few Russians paid lip service to the Czar’s equality ukase, but only the priests took it seriously.
In the Dená Republic he not only commanded equal status, he was prized, needed; all due to reasons for which the Czar’s government had thrown him away. He stuffed one more fragment of tree limb into the wad of branches clutched in his left arm.
But I still want my boat back. I want my life back—I know how to live it now.
He struggled back to the campsite, where a light plume of smoke already drifted above Nik’s head. He dropped the load next to the strange, educated, taciturn man who had become his friend. Grabbing his hatchet, he cut fir boughs to put under their sleeping bags for insulation.
Nik rigged a holder and hung a pot of water up to boil. Tea would warm them up. As soon as he pissed, Grisha would turn in for the night. After putting down two layers of boughs he rolled out his sleeping bag, sat down carefully, and sighed.
“Starting out late today was a good thing,” he said with a yawn.
“Tomorrow it won’t be as hard to get started as it would have been after a full day.” He stared at the back of Nik, who prodded at an already blazing fire.
“What are you scared of?” Grisha asked in a vague tone designed to suggest indifference.
Nik stopped poking the fire. He didn’t move. Grisha pulled out a piece of squaw candy and chewed the lightly smoked strand of salmon. He could live on this stuff.
Nik moved over to his pile of fir boughs and began to weave them into a mattress. He didn’t speak or look at Grisha.
“I wasn’t trying to be insulting,” Grisha said. “You’re getting me worried. You’ve gotten stranger and stranger since you took up with Cora.”
Nik looked across at him, his eyes dancing through the curtain of heat.
“Don’t you understand that this is a real war?” His voice rang hollow, as if bouncing off a rock wall. “People out there want to kill us, and we want to kill them.”
“I don’t particularly want to kill anybody,” Grisha said.
“But you’re expected to kill. Sabotage, prison breaks, raids on warehouses, and attacking Cossacks all lead inevitably to killing or being killed.” Nik’s face became more distorted through the rising heat.
Grisha stared back in consternation.
“Well, of course people are going to get killed. But if we do it right most of them will be Russians.”
“Exactly. And then they will retaliate and slaughter a village or two and everything will be over. Hundreds of Russians and Dená dead for what, a principle? An impossible idea?”
“I don’t think it’s impossible,” Grisha said staunchly.
“That’s because you’re a Creole.”
Grisha’s confusion instantly condensed into anger.
“And white Russians know more than everybody else!”
“No,” Nik said, nearly moaning. “We’re just more treacherous. They’re all going to die, you know.”
“Who, the Russians?”
“No, the Dená. Once their camp is identified with cadre training, they’re doomed.”
“The Russians don’t even come into Dená country, especially in the winter.”
“Grisha, the goddamned RustyCan runs right through the Dená country!”
“So what? That means the Russians own a three-hundred-meter-wide ribbon across a country that they couldn’t hold if anyone tried to take it away from them.”
“Not all their planes are helicopters. They have Yak fighters, too.”
“Nik, the Indians own the forest.”
“For the time being, yes.” Nik crawled into his sleeping bag and turned his back to the fire.
Grisha fed the fire, deep in thought. The subarctic night settled. The temperature dropped, and the aurora borealis flickered teasingly before scrolling across the sky from horizon to horizon. The lights fascinated him.
The northern lights were not unknown in Akku. But the phenomena in southeast skies, when the clouds cleared, were usually subdued compared to this, even at their best. Above him they bent and circled in scrolls that had to be a thousand kilometers high. Bands of light winked on, broadening from a pinpoint to a swath of unimaginable width in the space of three breaths. Great sections of sky would suddenly present a mist of pink, green, or even yellow.
He wondered about Nik. What ate at the man so voraciously? What aspect of their current life could cripple him like that?
“You must be livin’ a different life than me,” Grisha mumbled through the flames at the sleeping form. “I really don’t think it’s so bad.”
They’re all going to die, you know.
That tone wasn’t what Nik called rhetorical. He said it like he knew it for fact. Grisha frowned, tried to remember how the other guards had treated Nik.
They had left him alone. But to be fair, he was always reading and writing in little notebooks; maybe the other soldiers just thought Nik pretentious and avoided him, most of them couldn’t read anyway. Grisha scratched his head and yawned.
He pushed himself up with a grunt and walked to the edge of the camp before urinating. The temperature had dropped for sure; his urine froze with a crackle in the air before hitting the snow with soft thuds. After piling more wood on the fire, leaving some for the morning, he crawled into his bag and closed the heavy zipper.
Moments later someone shook his shoulder, hard. He pried open one eye and peered at Nik’s face.
“Let me sleep, okay?”
“It’s time to get up. You’ve been asleep for hours.” Nik stood and laid wood on the coals of the fire. Coals.
Grisha didn’t feel like he’d slept at all, but he pulled himself out of the warm bag anyway. His full bladder added proof he had slept. As he relieved himself he noticed the overnight temperature had risen slightly.
“Nik?” he said, walking back to the fire, suddenly chilled.
“Yeah?” He was packing his bag.
“Why didn’t the other guards talk to you?”
Nik froze for a long moment; then continued stowing his gear.
“Because I could read. Because I had gone to school for more than three or two years. Because my English is as good as my Russian even if I didn’t come from southeast.”
“That’s what I thought,” Grisha said with finality. “But I wanted to hear you say it.”
“Why? Do you think me incapable of lying?”
“I think I could tell if you were lying, and I don’t think you are.”
Nik shook his head. “Are the Kolosh a perceptive people?”
“Sure, most peoples are or they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to become a race. My mother’s people can tell by a person’s name who they are related to, where they fit in the house where they live, and even where they fit into the village.”
“My God, that’s even more stratified than Russian life!” Nik said.
“It’s more complete, I think. It’s also a clan culture, not something that would work in St. Petersburg and maybe not even St. Nicholas.”
“Does anybody
ever pretend to be something they are not in your mother’s culture?”
“Why would they bother, to make a joke? Everyone would know they weren’t telling the truth.”
“But you’re part Russian, too, Grisha. Did your father know where he fit in Russian society?”
“Yeah. At the bottom,” Grisha said, his voice revealing the bleakness he suddenly felt. “I started from the bottom and worked my way to major’s flashes in the Troika Guard. Then I was sacrificed for political reasons and had to start over, got back to where I owned a boat and was master of my life.”
“What happened?” Nik asked, his face rapt.
“I’m not sure, and I’ve thought about it a lot. I took a charter job where the customer wasn’t what he said he was, went places we weren’t supposed to go, and did things we weren’t supposed to do.”
“Sounds like smuggling to me.”
“No, at first I thought that’s what was going on, too. But, we picked up a woman who knew the man and on the way back they talked about the other North American countries. You know, the U.S.A, the Confederacy, all them.”
Nik nodded.
“Then Karpov, the guy, got drunk and tried to snag the woman, got real direct about it. So there was a fight and we killed him.”
“We?”
“Da. While he was choking me, she hit him in the back of the head with a halibut club, the spiked kind.”
“So why did you end up in Tetlin Redoubt? Did they only hang her for murder?”
“She told them I did it. They were going to hang me, but then they changed their minds and sentenced me to thirty years hard labor instead.”
“You wouldn’t have lasted another thirty days,” Nik said with professional disdain.
“I thought I was going to die that day. If the Dená had waited another minute before attacking, I’d be dead. Life is strange.”
“It’s getting light. We need to go.”
“Nik, I’m not going anywhere until you tell me why you’ve turned into a moody bear.”
“I don’t think you’d understand.”
Grisha swallowed the anger that immediately flared through him. It left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Why not, because I don’t have enough education?”
“You wouldn’t like me anymore, take my word for it.” Nik strapped on his skis and pushed off down the trail, heading for the cut that dropped into the next valley.
“Nik!” Grisha yelled. “I want a real answer, a real reason!”
The Russian stopped and looked back.
“I’m a traitor. I’m a traitor and I can’t stand to live with myself.”
Then he skied away and Grisha scrambled to follow.
20
Near the Toklat River
Bear wasn’t sure about this helicopter stuff. He didn’t understand what held the damned things up. But it sure covered the distance as they raced along twenty meters above the treetops in excess of sixty exhilarating kilometers an hour.
They had flown from Tetlin Redoubt to St. Anthony Redoubt the day before and spent the night there. They left early this morning, long before the winter sun rose, so they would be in the target area during the brief subarctic day.
He noticed the captain watching him with her superior little smile that said he was only shit and she knew it. He wished he could catch her without her bodyguard corporal and his machine pistol. Today the dog of a soldier even carried a Kalashnikov.
Between the three of them they could stand off a dozen Indians. He thought them heavily armed for this mission. The captain remained adamant about only the three of them going into Indian country alone.
With Wolverine White dead, there wasn’t anybody he trusted to fight at his back anyway. Now he faced the world alone.
“Ten minutes to landing zone, Captain,” the pilot said in his jovial voice. He would stay with the aircraft and keep the engine warm. If the other three weren’t back in exactly twenty-four hours, he would return to base without them.
The captain and the corporal rechecked their weapons and gear. Bear stifled a comment and peered out the window. A promyshlennik never neglected his weapons; they were ready when he walked out the door of his cabin.
The two soldiers laid their automatic rifles down and tested straps and bindings. When they finished with themselves, they glanced at each other to double-check. Bear felt certain the look they exchanged wasn’t regulation.
Cossacks were like that, he mused. The enlisted men were animals, the officers were clever at manipulation, and they all worked in tandem with the Czar’s intelligence service. Bear had to keep telling himself that these people weren’t really Okhana agents, merely hired mercenaries.
He didn’t like them, but they paid good, steady wages and he didn’t have to take their orders if he didn’t want to. He could always quit. Promyshlenniks were known for their independent spirit.
“Are you ready, Crepov?” the captain asked.
“Am I ready for what?”
“Are you ready to take the field and find these men for us?”
“I wouldn’t have entered this borscht-maker if I wasn’t.”
“Good.” She turned to the corporal. “Crepov will lead, I will go behind him, and you will follow me.”
“But, Captain, I think it’s not good for you to be between him and me. What if he attempts—”
“Corporal, I am armed.”
“Da.” The corporal evenly regarded Crepov, then stared out at the passing scenery.
You’ll pay for that one, pet.
The engine changed pitch and they banked to the left. Crepov looked out his window and found himself staring straight down at a snow-covered meadow. A branch of the Toklat River, frozen and brittle, wound along about a kilometer away.
The craft dropped in a tight spiral and Crepov’s heart tried to fly out his mouth. He swallowed in a vain effort to make it retreat. His gorge attempted to follow, but he successfully kept it down.
Just as Crepov thought the noisy machine would crash into the ground, it leveled off and gently landed. The engine died and the great blades swooshed to a stop. He slid the door open and stiffly dropped to the snowcovered ground.
After allowing his legs to know the earth for a moment, he turned and pulled his skis off the special rack on the landing skids. Mounted on the other side of the tubular skid strut was a 9mm machine gun that the pilot could fire after aiming his machine at the target.
Crepov decided there might be something to these things after all. He placed his skis, stepped into them and clamped the bindings over the toes of his boots. After stretching his legs for a minute, he struck off toward the game trail he had spotted from the air.
Where are you going?” the captain snapped. “I didn’t order you to move out.”
Crepov stopped and twisted to regard her.
“I’m going to do my job. I will also do as I please. You may do the same.” He moved out again, setting a track for them to follow.
Not until he reached the game trail did he look back. They were methodically closing his hundred meter lead. He carefully examined the trail.
Only small game and predator tracks; no ski had passed since the last snow. From the crust on the white mantle, he would estimate the last snowfall at over a week before.
The captain slid up to him, trying not to breathe hard. Crepov pointed to the trail.
“What?” she asked, looking at it then back at him.
“No human has been by here yet. Are you sure this is where our quarry will pass?”
“Yes, as sure as I can be.”
“Then let’s find a good ambush site.” He skied down the trail toward the tree-covered ridges.
21
Near the East Fork of the Toklat River
Grisha and Nik sat and ate a cold lunch on a pile of needles under an unusually large spruce tree. After swallowing his last bite of moose jerky, Grisha said, “I want some fresh meat.”
“We don’t have any.”
&nb
sp; “I know that. I want to hunt for a while. This is a game trail.”
“Not now. Maybe tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to hunt if you don’t want to, General,” Grisha said.
“But I’m hungry for rabbit.”
“But…”
Grisha abruptly stood and secured his poles to his pack before swinging it onto his shoulders. He put on his skis and finally picked up the recurve bow and his quiver.
“Grisha, please let me be in front.”
“I’m a better hunter than you are,” he said with a grin. “Better shot too. Besides, you’ve been in front all day long. It’s my turn.”
“Tomorrow you can be in front. Today I want to be first.”
Grisha stared hard at his companion.
“I heard a saying once that they use down in the American countries.
’Go fuck yourself,’ is what they say. And that’s exactly what you can do.” He skied away, pulling an arrow out of the quiver as he went.
The game trail wound through the woods and curved into a cut separating two ridges. He decided there could be game in the heavy brush at the cut. He nocked an arrow and skied as quietly as he could into the entrance.
Abruptly a snowshoe hare bolted out of the brush ahead and ran toward him for three lunging strides. Suddenly the animal saw Grisha and veered off to the man’s right. For five seconds the hare presented an easily accessible target before disappearing in the timbered flank of the ridge.
Grisha didn’t shoot. His heart thundered in his ears and he concentrated on maintaining his grip on the bowstring.
What scared the animal? Wrong time of the year for bear. Nik is behind me. Maybe a moose? St. Nicholas, please let it be a moose.
He crept forward a step, then hesitated. He glanced behind him. In the distance, Nik slid into his pack and took his first sliding stride toward Grisha.
He jerked his head around to face the cut again. The merest breath of a sound carried across the snow to his ears. The bow suddenly seemed like a child’s toy as he recognized the protest of oiled metal against metal.
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