by Paul Kenyon
Blizzard!
The snowflakes fell, thick and wet and heavy. The horizon began to disappear.
Vana! He was out there on skis. Aslak and the other man would lose his trail. They wouldn't be able to find Vana's discarded clothes. Vana would kill the wolf. She was as sure of that as anything. But then, violent activity over, he would be naked in a blizzard, soaking with sweat.
He'd die.
She hurried back to her tent and stuffed her pockets with the things she'd need. The Lapps were already talking about Vana as if he were a dead man. It would be useless and dangerous to go after him, they told her. Aslak and the other man would wait out the storm, return to the encampment when it was over. Then they'd all try to find Vana's body.
They pleaded with her not to go. She brushed them off and started out into the snowstorm on skis.
Maybe the Lapps couldn't find Vana. But she could. She had a trick up her sleeve. Literally.
She was Vana's only chance.
She traveled by compass at first, following the direction Vana had taken, unable to see more than a few yards in the swirling snow. The little chemical scent detector on her wrist showed nothing. Its needle swung at random.
Then it picked up a few molecules of scent. Butyric acid. It was a prime constituent of sweat.
She lost the trail. She fanned out in a broad zigzag. The needle quivered again. This time the indications were stronger. Dozens of butyric acid molecules triggering the chemical receptors.
She'd set the detector for human sweat because something like two hundred and fifty billion molecules of butyric acid pass through the sole of a shoe at each footstep. A dog can detect a millionth of that amount — a quarter of a million molecules. The Baroness' technological marvel responded to only eight molecules of any given scent. She'd put any bloodhound to shame.
She skied. There was nothing except the blinding snow and the illuminated dial on her wrist. She plodded up the rises and pushed herself gliding along the level stretches and slid down the shallow slopes. After a couple of hours she reached in her pocket and swallowed some energy rations, not stopping. It made her feel better. She plunged blindly into the swirling white fury.
Vana was dead. He must have caught up with his wolf long before now. It had killed him or he had killed it. Either way he was dead. Naked, he couldn't last more than a quarter hour in this.
The concentration of butyric acid was increasing. The digital indicator was counting thousands of molecules, even through the damping effect of the snow. She pushed herself along, following the needle.
There! There was something ahead. She brushed the snowflakes from her eyelids and hurled herself forward.
Two dark shapes showed patchily though the snow. Neither of them moving.
She reached the first one. It was in the shape of a wolf. But there was something wrong with it. It was a purplish red, like raw liver.
She skidded to a stop in front of the other shape. It was another purplish thing, a lumpy ball not much larger than a duffle bag.
It moved. She bent over it.
"Buurist," it said. God save you.
"Vana!" she sobbed with joy.
A head poked out of the bloody bundle. Vana's blue eyes crinkled at her. He grinned, showing even white teeth.
"You skinned the wolf and wrapped yourself in the hide!" she said. The thick fur, inside-out, and his own body heat, had kept him warm at forty below zero, in a howling storm.
"I did it once before," he said. "That's where I got my wolfskin coat. They sing a joik about it."
She knelt beside him and cradled the protruding head against her breast.
"How did you find me?" he said.
"Darling, I just followed your scent, like any bitch on a trail."
He let that pass. "You must stay here until the storm passes," he said. "Aslak will find me in the morning."
"I hadn't planned on leaving, darling."
"We can scoop out a hole in the snow. Perhaps we can keep one another warm enough to stay alive."
She laughed. "Darling, I can do better that that."
He watched in amazement as she reached under her tunic and took out a tight bundle of fabric the size of a folding umbrella. There were three metal prongs sticking out of the end. She pulled them out into pencil-thin rods about six feet long. They were hinged somewhere at the top. She spread the rods out into a squat pyramid shape with a seven-foot base and pushed the prongs into the snow. The skeletal pyramid wore a little fabric cap that she pulled down over the framework.
"A tent!" he said. "But it will blow away!"
"Not on your life, darling," she said. She attached the polymer cables to the metal feet and fired the explosive pitons. The icepick-size devices drove through the snow and buried themselves deep in the frozen soil beneath. The points spread and took a grip. Penelope tightened the cables.
She zipped the floor into place and said, "Get in."
He obeyed gratefully, moving at a crouch, the wolfskin wrapped around his shoulders. She caught a glimpse of the tight pouch of his scrotum, and above it a pathetic blue acorn, shriveled with cold. She smiled. Never mind! The warmth of the tent would take care of that! And she'd do the rest!
She let him keep the wolfskin while she adjusted the heater. It was a flat box the size of a transistor radio, fed by a pint bottle of gas. A microminiature thermostat and a space age combustion chamber that burned with the efficiency of a moon rocket engine would keep the tent warm for at least seventy-two hours.
"So warm!" Vana said wonderingly. "And yet the tent is thinner than the skin of a fish!"
She fed them both with energy rations and bouillon made with snow she scooped up by reaching through the tent flap and a couple of L. L. Bean dehydrated camping meals reconstituted in a folding saucepan. When they finished, Vana slapped his flat stomach and belched.
"A meal like that from an envelope as light as a piece of birch bark! It's magic! Truly you are the Ice Queen!"
Her nerves tingled in warning. The Ice Queen! Where had she heard that? She remembered. The Russian, Gorev, had made a slip: Our primitive friend saw the Ice Queen head west out of camp…
"What's the matter?" Vana said, giving her an intent look.
"Nothing, darling. I don't feel like an Ice Queen."
"It's an old legend. A woman made of snow with a heart of ice. Nothing could melt it. Until she met her match in the mighty hunter." He gave her a veiled, sly glance.
The hell with it, she thought. She didn't care if he was a Russian agent! This savage creature was one of the most exciting men she'd ever met. There was a bond between them: they'd hunted the Arctic wolf together, armed only with staff and knife. They were two of a kind — hunter and huntress from out of the dawn of time, living in a world that didn't understand either of them. They'd each made a place for themselves on their own terms. Hunter's terms! He in his way, she in hers.
She might have to kill him tomorrow, but tonight they were going to enjoy one another.
He'd be a worthy adversary. She remembered the way he'd faced the wolves, taller than he was when they'd leaped upright at his throat. She shivered with excitement.
There was a growing warmth and wetness between her thighs. It was all swollen and throbbing down there.
Vana's keen nose detected the scent of a female in rut. Matter-of-factly he took off the wolfskin and spread it on the floor of the tent, furry side up. No longer was there a shrunken blue acorn between his legs. It was a shank of veined ivory, formidably large, standing out as straight and smooth as a narwhale's tusk.
She was pulling off her clothes, fingers trembling, making little whimpering sounds. She thought she'd never get the damned things off!
There were no preliminaries. Neither of them could have waited. Penelope lay on the wolfskin and spread her legs, knees up. Vana knelt between them. He put a hand under each buttock and lifted her up to impale her on that long tusk. She pushed herself forward on her elbows to meet him. His tool slid into h
er effortlessly, riding the buttery fluids of her desire. She groaned. His shaft was a radiating presence in there, filling her, spreading a hot tingle through the fleshy caverns of her body.
It was luminous inside the tent. The midnight sun was spreading a ghostly light through the snowstorm outside, a light that filtered, as the cold could not, through the thin translucent layers of the tent. It turned them both white, white as ivory. Vana's face hung above her like a triangular moon, pearly and phosphorescent, the meaningless grimace of lust spread across it. He thrust himself into her again and again, panting harshly.
She pushed against him, moaning, gasping with pleasure at each collision of her swollen vulva with his hard pubic ridge. The hard thing within her worked away, a sweet torment that was impossible to bear. There was an avalanche gathering within her, a massive irresistible weight building up to spill down a long ravishing slope of desire. She squirmed with bliss.
She could feel the fresh-killed wolfskin rubbing against her back and buttocks at each stroke, a rough bristly sensation like a scrub brush. The smell of wolf blood was in her nostrils. Once she'd made love, carelessly, on a $20,000 mink coat. It was nothing like this.
It was coming closer. She wrapped her legs around his waist and drove against him, riding on her elbows and working the powerful muscles of her thighs and calves. His hands were still under her buttocks, lifting, pushing. He bent forward and nipped her breast and throat.
With a mighty heave, she jackknifed upward and embraced him with arms as well as legs. Her sharp fingernails raked his back. They strove together, a swaying upright of intertwined flesh. His cheek was against hers, smooth and angular. Her breasts were crushed against his hard hairless chest. She sank her teeth into the side of his neck and tasted blood. He didn't notice. His animal force was concentrated in a region of mutual ecstasy down at their melted loins, pushing and pulling the hot slick post of flesh in and out of her feverish scabbard.
She slid a hand down his back and under the tight narrow cleft of his buttocks, and caught his scrotum in her hand. She could feel his body stiffen with surprise. Bites he knew about, but none of the simple Lapp girls he'd known had ever done this. She manipulated the testicles within their sac. He growled, stirred to a new level of passion.
His balls writhed in her palm. She decided to give him something new to think about. She extended her long middle finger and stroked the tender flesh between his buttocks. He grunted and continued his accelerating mating rhythm.
Did Lapps kiss? Or did they rub noses like Eskimos? She fastened her mouth on his lips. His lips parted and his tongue thrust between her teeth. If Lapps didn't kiss, he was giving a damned good imitation.
His pelvis continued to gyrate, not missing a beat. She was fastened to him at two points now. There was a hot volcanic core stretching between, down the length of her body. In the milky white light of the tent, Penelope had the illusion that the two of them were glowing cherry red, like a stove. The avalanche poised within her was heating, a pile of incandescent stones. Between their pressed bodies was a sheen of sweat.
He was going at it like a jack hammer now, a vibrating high-speed violence that drove her frantic. She heard her voice, sounding strange and far away: "Uh, uh, uh…" She twisted and squirmed on the ivory shaft that impaled her. She clawed at his back, pressing her mons against him, trying to get all of him inside her. There was a vast dispersed loosening. One of the glowing rocks tumbled, then another. She shuddered as they hit bottom, willing with all her force that the others stay poised for just a moment, a fractionated eternity.
Then it was too much and she came: a great shivering paroxysm that wracked her entire body with blessed convulsions. The avalanche tumbled down her interior slopes, bubbling and steaming, releasing her from its poised weight. Somehow she was aware of Vana giving a huge shudder and cry at the same moment, triggered by her spasms, blending his own flooding joy with hers.
They clung to one another, panting. The tent swam back into focus. He pulled his head back and looked into her face with an expression of wonderment.
He pulled himself out of her and immediately rolled over on his back, beside her on the wolfskin, taking great heaving gulps of air.
She leaned over him on her hands and knees, her breasts dangling over his face.
"You were fantastic, darling," she said.
He grinned at her shyly. Somehow he'd managed to drape a corner of the wolfskin over his crotch. Penelope smiled at the gesture of primitive reticence.
"Are you a sorceress?" he said.
"Just a warm-blooded girl with a heart of ice."
It was no joke to him. He looked at her with superstitious awe. "What magic did you work on me? Never before have I felt so powerful the strast."
"You had it in you all the time, darling. Bottled up. You just needed me to bring it all out."
She kept her face from showing anything. Vana had used another Russian word in an unguarded moment Strast. The storm of passion. He could have expressed his meaning much more precisely in his own Lapp dialect.
He looked away from her breasts. "You should put on your clothes," he said.
She reached over and peeled the wolfskin away from his groin. She saw why he'd been shy. Already his penis was standing up, straight and firm, with their mixed juices not yet dry on the long smooth shaft. He lowered his eyelids in embarrassment.
"I don't think I'll bother," she said. "I'd just have to take them off again."
* * *
The long line of white snowmobiles sped across the shore ice, a ghostly procession with muffled engines. Some of them were pulling sledges that were loaded with equipment. The rearmost sledge carried something that looked like a boom: a long metal cylinder the size of a 20-foot length of telephone pole.
Chu Fei sat hunched behind the windscreen, his gloved hands on the steering bar. The automatic weapon slung across his back felt comforting. Everything had gone well so far, but he was nervously aware of being in Russian territory.
He squinted through his goggles at the bleak shoreline he was following. The ship with the false Norwegian identification had deposited them on an ice floe in the Barents Sea and continued on a fake course toward North Cape that would satisfy the Russian radar on Novaya Zemlya. It would wait out of radar range and sail back to pick him up when he was ready.
He had a hundred men with him — a big force, but the minimum he needed to penetrate the security at the Russian biological labs. He shrugged. One hundred or fifty or one — it was all the same if they got caught.
They'd drifted in on electric outboards, the miraculous device from the 29th Radio Factory camouflaging their metallic hardware against Russian radar. They'd come ashore at the tip of the finger of land that stretched into the Arctic waters between the Yamal Peninsula and Cape Kanin. Another two hundred miles of travel westward would carry him around the Cheshkaya Gulf to the base of Kanin.
No one had seen them. No one except a polar bear and a few seals.
Chu rounded a bend in the shoreline and saw a dark shape ahead. A man. On foot; there was no vehicle near him. Chu frowned. He slowed down a little.
It was a fisherman, dropping a line through a hole in the ice. He looked up and waved.
Chu pulled up about twenty meters from the fisherman and let the man come to him. The man's behavior suggested puzzlement rather than alarm. He was probably wondering why the column of snowmobiles had stopped short of him. It didn't seem friendly. And he was probably speculating on what kind of an expedition, for what reason, had bothered to come this far north to a barren stretch of Arctic shore that held nothing.
The man was close enough so that Chu could see the smile on his face. He was a snub-nosed Russian in his fifties or thereabouts, wearing a fur cap with earlaps. The smile wavered. He was close enough so that he could see that Chu's features were Chinese. You could tell that he was trying to puzzle it out.
Chu didn't give him a chance. He unslung the submachine gun and fired a quick burst
. The man spun around and went skidding for a couple of meters along the ice.
Chu motioned to his wing man, an enormous round-faced Cantonese named Huang. Huang ponderously dismounted and walked over to the body. He poked it with his foot, then dragged it over to the hole in the ice. He stuffed the fisherman into the hole head first, then threw the man's gear in after him — a stool, a small camp heater and a duffle bag containing fishing equipment.
"He walked from somewhere nearby," Chu said.
Huang pointed. 'There are his tracks."
"Someone may have heard the shots," Chu said.
He issued his orders swiftly, and the column of snowmobiles swung left, following the tracks. They topped a rise and saw the settlement.
It wasn't much — a dozen log cabins, chinked with mud and moss, laid out in a rough street. At the end was a somewhat bigger building, a trading post or some such. Chu couldn't imagine how the people lived. Hunting and fishing, perhaps, trading their catch of furs once a year for rubles.
He drove down the street and stopped at the end, the snowmobile caravan pulling up behind him. There were a couple of little boys, bundled in winter clothes, playing in the street. They looked up in astonished curiosity. They probably didn't see strangers for months on end.
He gave a signal, and his men dismounted. They split up into five-man squads and headed purposefully toward the log cabins.
Some of the squads met villagers at the door, coming out to see who the men on snowmobiles were. The automatic weapons lifted and spat fire. The Chinese pushed past the bodies and went inside. There was the sound of more firing.
Other squads were kicking in the doors that hadn't opened. Timing was essential. There was a prolonged chatter of automatic weapons.
The two little boys were staring toward the cabins, open-mouthed. A Chinese soldier came out of a door and saw them. He raised his gun and shot them.
Huang came over, picking his teeth. He'd found some food in one of the houses. "Wan pi te," he said. "All finished."
Chu pointed at the bodies of the two children. "Take them inside, out of sight. I don't want anything visible from the air."