The Survivor

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You tossed a cigarette out the window.”

  Yuri smashed his palm to his forehead, a big show of self-recrimination, and swore at himself in Ukrainian.

  The ranger bobbed his head, amused. “Where you boys from?”

  “Ukraine.”

  “I got a sister-in-law from Russia.”

  “Different country,” Misha said.

  Yuri turned his head slowly and offered Misha a covert glare.

  “St. Petersburg,” the ranger said. “Beautiful.”

  “Yes,” Yuri said.

  “I tell you what. I know how you folks smoke there, so I’ll just give you a warning. This is fire-hazard country. You can’t be doing that here.”

  Yuri gave him a thumbs-up. “Okeydokey.”

  “And careful climbing. Watch yourself. I don’t want to have to search-and-rescue you.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  The ranger nodded and started away.

  “Officer,” Misha called out, the handcuffs hidden in his lapel pocket giving off a faint jangle as he leaned forward.

  Yuri’s hands clenched the wheel.

  The ranger came back to the window. Misha held out the map and the piece of paper. He pointed to the address of the cabin. “We are looking for a friend’s house. But the street is not on the map.”

  The ranger looked at it. “Oh, right. There’s a turnoff here. See? Marked by a big stupid Santa Claus sign. Take that road a quarter mile and you’ll see the house. No more’n five minutes.”

  Misha smiled. “Thank you very much.”

  Yuri rolled up his window and eased out onto the road. They drove awhile, finally spotting the ridiculous plywood sign of Santa astride a motorcycle——WHAT’S YOUR WISH FOR THE NEW YEAR?

  The cell phone rang, and Yuri answered on Bluetooth, Pavlo’s voice hissing through the speakers: “He’s coming. Get here now.”

  The reception flickered in and out, and Yuri pulled over in the shade of the plywood sign to hold the connection. “What happened?”

  “He went to New Odessa, passed threat to me through the Georgian. Said he is coming for me. I served time on the Arctic Circle, and he thinks he can say anything to threaten me?”

  A rare show of outrage. Yuri and Misha looked at each other. “We will be right there.”

  Yuri clicked off the call.

  Misha tapped the window with a knuckle, indicating the turnoff right beyond their front tires. “We are all the way here. Why not go and look?”

  Yuri hesitated, casting a glance up the dirt road. “Because Pavlo did not tell us to.”

  “How long can one look take?”

  Yuri weighed this, then slotted the gearshift into drive and started down the road. They coasted around the bend, the cabin coming into view way up ahead, a stream of smoke rising from the chimney. An older man appeared from the side of the house and started up the porch, bearing a stack of firewood in his arms.

  Yuri’s phone rang again, once, and then the signal went dead.

  He touched the brakes. Stared down nervously at the phone. No bars.

  Up ahead, the screen door banged shut, the man vanishing into the house.

  Yuri exhaled through his teeth. “The father is alone. No sign of the Jeep.” He considered a moment longer, then flipped the car around.

  Misha made a sound of disappointment. “Okay, then. We will go to Pavlo’s house and prepare for Overbay.”

  “Why did he go to the Georgian?” Yuri asked. “Why does he warn us?”

  Misha lifted the pistol from beneath his leg, dropped the mag, then locked the slide to the rear so the bullet ejected. It spun shimmering in an arc before his face until he trapped it in a fist. “He wants us all in one place.”

  Chapter 59

  During the drive back to his father’s cabin, Nate’s muscles hummed with energy. The weakness remained, sure, but the current of adrenaline seemed to be recharging them. He passed a few outsize forest ranger trucks, a fancy Jag, a minivan or two, but mostly the canyon roads were quiet.

  When he arrived, Janie, the kids, and his father were playing Pictionary before the fire as Casper slumbered on the hearth. Janie’s head snapped around at Nate’s entrance, her face gentle and sorrowful; amid the greetings they shared a private understanding. He had just run a few errands, nothing more. And tonight he’d run a few more.

  He quickly excused himself to the bedroom, the game raging at his back, Jason’s booming voice drowning out the competition: “It’s a cat a cat with a wig dogs playing poker the Cat in the Hat chimney sweep CHIMNEY SWEEP!”

  Nate peeled off his clothes. His foot dragged across the bathroom tile, which did not bode well, and he had to take extra care stepping over the lip of the tub. In the shower he leaned his head into the stream as if trying to shove through it, warming his tendons and joints as a prophylactic measure against the strain to come. He spoke the mantra in his mind: I can still feel this. My nerves still function. My muscles still work.

  After an appropriate delay, Janie appeared. He heard the door click, and she sat on the sink, and they shared in each other’s company silently. After, he shaved, brushed his teeth, and dressed slowly, meticulously, Janie sitting on the quilt, knowing. He pushed buttons into place, threaded his belt, smoothed down his jeans over his socks, his hands trembling slightly but obeying.

  The board game had broken up by the time they emerged. Jason and Cielle were out front on the porch swing, Nate’s father cleaning dishes.

  Nate found two cans of Campbell’s tomato soup in a cupboard and cranked off the tops with a rusty opener. He cleaned the jagged circles of metal, dried them on the thigh of his jeans, and slipped them into his pocket. As he walked out, leaving the open cans full on the counter, his father just looked at him. Janie followed him to the front door, his father and Casper trailing.

  Stepping onto the porch, Nate could feel his heart like a fist pressing up toward his throat. Jason picked quietly at his guitar, and Cielle sat sideways against one armrest, reading a vampire book, her feet wedged into him for warmth. Distracted.

  Nate regarded her for a moment, the beat in his throat intensifying, then leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. A fine mist had come up, dappling the nodding leaves framing the porch. The Jeep waited, parked right off the steps. The sky grew darker by the second. He could feel the soup-can tops pressing into the meat of his thigh, and he thought of the brutal use he intended for them. Soon. Too soon.

  “I’m gotta go take care of a few things,” he said.

  Jason looked up. “Want me to drive?”

  The thing was, the kid was serious.

  “If you run into Brobocop,” Jason continued, “you might wish I was there.”

  “Right,” Nate said. “Yellow belt, green stripe. Jeet Kune Do.” Jason started to protest, and Nate held up a hand. “Kidding. I know, I know, tae kwon do. Chillax.”

  “Just sayin’. I got your back.”

  “I know, Jay,” Nate said. “Thanks.”

  He brightened. “Jay,” he repeated. “Right on.”

  Nate’s father lingered near the Jeep, peering through the rear window. The barrel of an assault rifle poked up, barely in view. Nate saw the old man’s posture wilt, his down-bent face loosening with realization, and something in his own chest gave way a little.

  Cielle spread the book across her knee. “Where you going, Dad?”

  Nate’s father stepped in front of the window, blocking the rifle from her line of sight. Nate gave him a tiny nod of appreciation, and his father looked away, his mouth bunching.

  Nate turned back to his daughter. “Just need to handle some business with the people who are after us.”

  “Like when you got all mad at those guys at the bank?”

  “Oh, honey,” he said, “I haven’t gotten mad yet.”

  Her extraordinary brown eyes, set off by those long lashes, took his measure. “Is it gonna be okay?”

  He remembered a trip
they’d taken when she was four, their airplane shuddering over the Rockies. He’d been convinced they were going to drop out of the sky, but he’d told her it was all fine, that’s just how airplanes flew sometimes, and she’d gone contentedly back to her coloring book while he and Janie had white-knuckled their armrests and braced for a plummet.

  “Yeah.” He smiled down at her. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  Satisfied, she returned to her book.

  Her take-it-for-granted faith in him was the most precious gift she could have given him.

  He stepped from the porch into the mud, and his father came up off his lean on the Jeep. They regarded each other, his father’s face shifting as he grappled whatever he was feeling back under control.

  Nate said, “Dad, I want to tell you how much—”

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” He squeezed Nate’s shoulder once, gently, then lowered his head mournfully and moved inside, the screen door banging after him.

  Janie stood in the mud with Nate, before the Jeep. The mist had given over to a faint rain, her blond wisps turning dark at the points. Focusing to make sure his hand listened to what he was telling it, Nate put the key in the door.

  “Bye, Dad!” Cielle called out from the porch swing. She waved, flashed a big smile, then went back to her book.

  “I’m gonna tell her to come over,” Janie said. “You should get to hug her at least—”

  “No,” he said. “This is perfect.”

  A few guitar chords vibrated the air around them, Jason working out the progressions of “Blackbird” on the porch behind them. Janie pressed her fist to her mouth, and her shoulders rose, but she was fighting everything down, not wanting Cielle to see. Nate lowered his hand to her as if asking her to dance.

  She took it, her flesh cold and wet in the rain.

  Water ran down her face, mixing with tears. The delicate lines of her collarbone, visible beneath her soaked T-shirt, rose and fell with her quick breaths. A smile tugged at her mouth but didn’t quite take. “See ya around, Husband.”

  “Catch you on the other side, Wife.”

  She stepped into his kiss, and he gripped her narrow shoulders, raised and trembling against the cold. He savored the feel of her full lips and then pulled away, and they touched foreheads, the rain making them blink. Those translucent blue eyes. Her wide, lovely mouth. The sporadic band of freckles against her milk-white skin.

  “I was drowning,” he said, “and you saved me.”

  He tore himself away, climbed into the Jeep, and drove off, wiping at the wetness of his face. He didn’t look back, because his self-control would not withstand another glimpse of her.

  Around the bend he became aware of Casper galloping beside the Jeep, still favoring one front paw, and he skidded over in the slush and climbed out. He walked back, and they confronted each other in the road.

  “Sit,” he said, and the dog obeyed.

  Nate put down his hand. “Shake.”

  Casper offered up a muddy paw.

  Nate said, “Stay.”

  Casper’s square head pulled back regally on his muscular neck. The yellow of his eyes shone through the brown, intelligent wrinkles furrowing his forehead, and it seemed in the way it has seemed for centuries between men and dogs that he understood precisely what was being said and what was not.

  Casper withdrew his paw, let it drop to the wet earth.

  Nate straightened up. “Good boy.”

  He kept the muddy smudge on his palm, not wanting to wipe it off. In the rearview he could still see Casper there, sitting in the down-slanting rain, watching him drive away.

  Chapter 60

  The grille of the Jeep pointed up the paved walk at Pavlo Shevchenko’s front doors. A stretch of twenty or so feet, two drops of three concrete steps each, then the house itself, nestled into the hillside.

  The engine ran, though Nate was not behind the wheel or even inside the vehicle. With an AR-15 assault rifle slung over his shoulder, a Glock 19 shoved into the band of his jeans, and a frag grenade wedged in his front pocket, he stood behind the open driver’s door, holding in his hands a football-size hunk of fine-grained granite he’d pulled from Pavlo’s own front yard.

  Around the corner, parked under the protective cover of a neighbor’s drooping sycamore, he had prepped everything. Danny Urban, with his militia-like sensibilities, had made Nate’s job easier by acquiring gear familiar to an army grunt. Nate had wrapped two blocks of C4 with tape, adhered them above the gas tank, and sunk a military-issue M6 electric blasting cap into the white putty. Then it came down to junior-high physics, creating a simple circuit.

  There was no leg wire in the duffel bag, an omission owed to Nate’s haste in raiding the evidence locker. After pondering the dilemma, he’d removed one of the Jeep’s rear speakers and stripped out several lengths of radio wire, which he’d connected to the blasting cap and the car battery before laying the two ends well apart on the ground before the front bumper. From his pocket he’d removed the two soup-can tops and taped one lead to each. When the jagged metal circles touched, they would complete the circuit and the Wrangler would go apocalyptic.

  Now he needed a piece of paper to buffer the soup-can tops until contact. He searched the Jeep, finding nothing. No flyers, no CD jewel case from which to pull a cover. The service manual was long gone, his registration tattered and thin, and the proof-of-insurance slip too small to risk. How was it possible that there wasn’t a single piece of sufficient paper in the vehicle? His concern mounted, edging on panic. He couldn’t imagine coming all this way and having to deconstruct the bomb, drive down the hill, and go paper shopping.

  A young father approached with his daughter, laughing and splashing through puddles in their rain boots. As they passed, the man stared at Nate curiously. The wires, C4, and duffel were not adequately indistinct even in the darkness. Nate forced a smile and said, “Engine trouble,” and the pair hurried along.

  Watching them leave, hand in hand, Nate felt a solution take shape. He reached for his back pocket, removing the two photographs. Cielle crouching beside her soccer ball, her grin punctuated by gaps. Janie laughing with him at their wedding. Closing his eyes, he kissed them each. Very carefully, he taped the soup-can tops around the pictures, sandwiching them, and adhered the makeshift pressure plate to the Jeep’s grille. A collision of any force would tear the photographs and push the metal circles into contact.

  He’d seen this make of car bomb a half dozen times at checkpoints in the Sandbox, and he knew what the aftermath looked like. Two point five pounds of explosives supersized by a half tank of gasoline should be enough to open Pavlo’s front door.

  Standing now at the end of the walk, his weakened arms straining under the weight of the granite, Nate said a silent prayer to Lady Luck and dropped the stone onto the gas pedal. The engine roared. Reaching across, he cranked on the radio, and Shithead Jason’s AC/DC disc spun to life, Brian Johnson wailing from the remaining car speakers: “—won’t take no prisoners, won’t spare no lives—”

  Below, the front door cracked open, Valerik poking his head out, the stub of his sleek ponytail wagging into view. The heel of his hand rode the stock of an AK-47. They were ready and waiting.

  But not for this.

  Nate yanked the gearshift into drive, and the Jeep rocketed away, knocking his arm.

  Valerik’s head reared back, the whites of his eyes pronounced, and the big door slammed shut.

  The Jeep caught air off the first set of stairs, bounced off kilter, and hurtled toward the front door at a tilt, Nate already walking behind, tugging on the sling, rotating the assault rifle into his hands.

  “Gonna take you to—”

  The explosion was expansive, the front door and surrounding wall obliterated, the front windows turned to shrapnel. Nate kept on through the blowback, heat and wind scorching his cheeks, his dropped left foot shushing across the concrete. The air stank of gasoline and burned metal. He sliced through a billowing wall of so
ot and drifted into the crumbled foyer, the Angel of Death. Cloaked in the swirling cloud, rubble loose underfoot, he listened for sounds of life.

  A gurgle.

  Squinting, he cut through the dense air and found Valerik slumped at the base of a blown-out wall. The blast overpressure had ruptured the air sacs in his lungs, thick dark soup pouring down his chin, drenching his collar. Nate pictured McGuire in his green-and-khaki ACUs, joking over a failed suicide bomber rustling and gagging on a dirt warehouse floor: Looks like homeboy won the wet-T-shirt contest.

  Valerik burbled up at Nate.

  “Hi there,” Nate said.

  Crouching over him, Nate pulled the pin from the grenade and nestled it under his body so the spoon held. He jogged a few steps into the powdered air, hid behind a burning cabinet, and waited.

  Panicked voices, feet pounding a staircase, then creaking overhead. Pavlo, retreating to safety.

  Nate was about to press on when he heard ragged coughing coming from the kitchen, followed by hoarse cries. “Valerik? Valerik?”

  Gun in hand, Dima jogged by, his form resolving briefly from the dust, though Nate couldn’t risk stopping to aim and fire, not with his weakened left hand slowing his reaction time. He kept his back to the cabinet, the AR-15 at the ready. It was a low-end model—single-stage trigger, uncollapsible stock, and no floated barrel—and he reminded himself to use it calmly and carefully.

  There came a moist choking as Valerik tried to warn his friend, and then a blast blew a tunnel of clear air through the foyer and partway down the hall. Shrapnel studded the cabinet and the adjoining wall. Nate heard Dima’s body strike tile, then the sound of scrabbling limbs. He was up, moving; Valerik’s body must have shielded some of the blast.

  Nate pivoted out from behind the cabinet, fire licking at his sleeve, and headed toward the kitchen. Dima staggered away, a bobbing run, his silhouette framed by the lights sparkling through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the rear of the house. As Nate approached, Dima turned, broad chest flexing as he tried to lift the gun, and Nate stitched a line of bullets from groin to clavicle. Dima flew back against the blinds, knocking them flat, the bright skyline beyond disappearing. His body stood propped against the glass. Taking no chances, Nate unleashed a torrent of bullets into the standing corpse, the pane shattering, the blinds stretching to hold the body’s weight and then ripping free. Dima tumbled through, vanishing into the abyss of the canyon, followed by a cascade of glass pebbles.