Field of Fire

by Marc Cameron

  “And?” Rostov prodded. “Spit it out.”

  “Kaija,” Lodygin said, “I mean to say the young woman with Volodin is not his child mistress after all. She is his daughter by a woman named Maria Merculief.”

  “His daughter?” Rostov mused. “That makes sense.”

  “There is more,” Lodygin said. Rostov thought he detected a slight wag in the man’s head, as if he was on the verge of gloating. “According to Rosalina Lobov, Miss Merculief is not fifteen as we had previously believed but in reality is twenty years old.”

  “She attended secondary school?”

  “She did,” Lodygin said.

  “And no one at the school thought to verify her age?”

  Lodygin bounced his knee. “I’m sure they did, Colonel,” he said. “But I doubt that they were very thorough. Who would lie about their age in order to attend school all over again?”

  Rostov leaned back in the chair, steepling his fingers in front of his face. This was interesting news. “And what of this girl’s mother?”

  “Maria Merculief,” Lodygin said. “Deceased. Apparently she and Dr. Volodin were together for several years while he taught at the university in St. Petersburg.”

  “What did she do?” Rostov asked. “The mother.”

  “Ah,” Lodygin said. “That is where it gets interesting. We have no record of her doing anything. Everyone assumed both she and the girl were prostitutes.”

  “But they were not?” Rostov said. “Get to the point, Captain!”

  “According to Rosalina, both mother and daughter were involved with the Black Hundreds.” Slender hands still holding his bouncing knee, Lodygin gloated, triumphant in this revelation.

  Rostov’s hands dropped to the desk again. This was news. The Chornaya Sotnya, or Black Hundreds, was an ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic group from the early twentieth century. Extremely Russia-centric, they had denied the existence of the Ukraine and considered all borders of Russia prior to 1917 to be sacrosanct. In recent years a new Black Hundreds had emerged. These were as fiercely protective of all things Russian as the earlier group had been of the monarchy. They held fast to a fervent belief in a Novorossiya, free from the Zionist tyranny of the United States and the World Bank.

  A fringe group to be sure, but even the Kremlin utilized their watch cry of a New Russia when it suited political aims.

  “I want to talk to this Rosalina Lobov,” Rostov said.

  Lodygin’s hands fell away from his knee. He uncrossed his legs. “That would be . . . I mean to say, that would not be advisable, Colonel.” He gave a smile capable of curdling milk, and then steered away from the subject.

  “How did you get her talk to you so openly?” Rostov looked at him through narrow eyes.

  Lodygin shrugged but said nothing.

  “Is she in custody?” Rostov asked.

  “Of a sort,” Lodygin said.

  “Are you . . .” Rostov raised his hand, turning away. “I do not want to know.”

  “I think that is best, Colonel,” Lodygin said. “Dear Rosalina did divulge to me that Kaija Merculief is quite the scientist herself, sometimes assisting her father with his work on the New Archangel.”

  “Rosalina Lobov knows of the work on New Archangel?” This was too much.

  Lodygin nodded. “I am afraid so. According to Rosalina, Kaija is brilliant, and has a photographic memory.” The captain inhaled through his nose, closing his eyes as he mulled over some delightfully nasty memory. “But I have a strong feeling the girl is holding something back.”

  “Where is this Rosalina Lobov now, Captain? New Archangel is a state secret. She cannot be allowed to speak of the things she has heard.“

  The smirk on Lodygin’s pursed lips slowly crawled across his face to form a tight smile. “You have my solemn word, Rosalina Lobov poses no future risk to this endeavor.”

  Rostov resolved to shoot Lodygin in the face if the man ever so much as looked at his daughter. But still, there was a need for animals like him in moments such as this.

  “I assume you will cover your tracks,” he said, feeling the urge to wash his hands in extremely hot water.

  “Of course, Colonel,” Lodygin said.

  Rostov drummed his fingers on the desk, his mind whirring with old problems and new possibilities. If Volodin’s daughter was a member of the Black Hundreds, she was certain to have contacts around the world, contacts who could help her deploy the New Archangel in Dallas and Los Angeles. Strategically focused, such a network could be useful to the Kremlin. As it stood now, they were a liability, likely to incite an American response that could level the Russian map.

  “Volodin and his daughter must be stopped,” he said.

  “My men will locate him,” Lodygin said. “I mean to say, you have my assurance of that.”

  “No, Captain,” Rostov said. “I am in no mood to depend on your assurances. If your men ever do get around to contacting you, remind them that Zolner is already en route. If they value their lives, they should stay out of his way.”

  The smile brightened on Lodygin’s lips at the mention of the name. “I have always admired Zolner’s work.”

  “I do not doubt that,” Rostov said. In truth, the two men were both savages, though Zolner carried his savagery under the guise of a man’s man.

  PART II

  ACQUIRE

  Now no one learns to kill while young.

  This is very short-sighted.

  —HAGAKURE, The Book of the Samurai

  Chapter 32

  Winter 1981, Verkhoyansk, Siberia

  Feliks Zolner’s mother kissed him between the eyes—the only part of his skin left exposed to the freezing air. He caught the hint of black tea and wild cherry jam on her breath, felt the dab of moisture on the end of her nose. Even at the young age of nine, he knew she’d sacrificed, taking only a glass of tea and a scant spoonful of homemade jam while he ate the last of their stewed sweet cabbage and simple black bread.

  She pulled the scarf up immediately after the kiss to cover her full lips, but Feliks could tell she was happy by the frosted outline of a smile on the cloth. Another drop of moisture formed on the tip of her nose, freezing immediately. She brushed it away with the back of her hand out of habit. Tucking his scarf into the collar of his wool coat to be certain his ears weren’t exposed, she patted the rifle in his hands.

  “Wait here, lapushka,” she said.

  Her presence gave him warmth against the incredible cold, but Feliks thought himself well beyond the age of childish names. They were too poor to have any animals that they could not eventually eat, so he had to fill the niche of family pet. Malvina Zolner assured him that no matter how old her son became, he would always be her lapushka, her “little paw.”

  It would be dark soon, but Malvina made sure to place him so the sun was at his back. Orange light filtered through the white birch forest and cast a diffused glow across her wind-bitten face. Ice-blue eyes sparkled, and her button nose, which looked much like his but for her heavy crop of freckles, wrinkled, the way it did when she concentrated hard on a thought.

  A hard winter had brought marauding wolves to the birch forest around the village. Malvina said the government in Moscow called them a super-pack, estimating there were more than three hundred animals. The powerful killing machines had slaughtered dozens of reindeer in three days time, gutting many of the horses the villagers kept for milk and meat while the poor animals stood helplessly in the drifted snow. Feliks had been at once horrified and mesmerized to watch how the wolves nipped and tore at their victims’ flesh, ripping away at the hams and belly until the animal lost enough blood it could no longer kick or run.

  The shadow of a wolf loomed behind every tree around the village or along the snow-covered road. The blacksmith’s partially devoured body had been discovered in the alley behind his shop, but it was generally agreed that he had died from an over-indulgence of vodka, and the wolves had merely been the beneficiaries of his frozen carcass. No other
human deaths had been attributed to this pack, but that would not hold. There were too many children and too many wolves.

  Most of the able-bodied men—including Feliks’s father—had gone to fight the war in Afghanistan—leaving only those who were old or crippled—or crazy like Stas and Vladik Pervak to look after the village. The brothers lost nine ponies to the wolf pack and seemed to believe that as they had seen such a great loss, they should be in charge of wolf reprisal. Feliks did not like either of the men, who always drank too much to look after as many ponies as they had. They leered at him when he passed them in town, and often mumbled filthy comments about his mother. Even as a child he knew these men were nasty and vile.

  His mother had killed three wolves that morning, shooting a big gray female from a distance of well over two hundred meters as it bounded away. Malvina Zolner was without a doubt the best shot and the finest hunter in the village now that his father was away. She should have been hailed as a hero, but if anyone else thought so, they didn’t mention it to Feliks. They were jealous. That was it. She was beautiful and skilled. Feliks sensed that this combination was too much for some men to accept. Besides, they said, there were too many wolves for three to make a difference—and as the Pervak brothers pointed out, Malvina was only a woman. Instead of thanking her and seeing to it that she received the bounty for killing the wolves, they had insulted her in their drunken rage. Feliks had cried openly, earning contemptuous looks that gripped at his throat like a fist and made it hard for him to breath.

  Even now, hours after the drunken taunts, his small face glowed red under the rough wool scarves.

  “You must understand, my lapushka,” his mother said, her words short and panting in the bone-numbing cold. “These men are beside themselves with fear.” At seventy degrees below zero, the moisture in her breath froze the instant it left her beautiful mouth, forming ice crystals that tinkled to the ground. The old people called it “the whisper of angels.”

  “I know we must kill the wolves, Mama,” Feliks said, jutting his chin to make room for his voice under the heavy scarf. “I do not hate wolves, but I hate those men.”

  “Fear often makes men the more dangerous of the two,” Malvina said, patting him on the head. White crystals of frost lined her delicate eyelashes, reminding Feliks of a snow princess he’d seen in a book.

  Gathering him in her arms for another moist tea-and-jam kiss, she wrapped a second wool scarf around her son’s neck and picked up her own gun with her gloved hand, leaving him to sit completely still on a thick pile of hay in the loft of their three-sided barn. The crude wooden loft was low, no more than six feet off the ground. It would be accessible even to the weakest of wolves if one wanted to jump up and eat him. But Feliks was not afraid. He had his gun, and he knew his mother would come back for him once it was too dark to shoot.

  She always came back.

  Feliks squeezed his rifle as he watched his mother trudge past the rough ball of hair that was their milking cow, and toward the shooting hide she’d built in a tall spruce tree two hundred paces away. Her reindeer skin boots left tiny tracks in the snow. Feliks stifled a laugh at the oblong shadow cast by her ratty fox fur hat. It made her look like she had a pumpkin on her shoulders. Her wool coat hung down past her knees, but Feliks could see she was shivering. The coat was much too thin to keep her warm in such bitter cold, and it would only get worse as darkness fell. She had two good scarves, but had given her second to him.

  A wolf howled to the west, beyond the house, and was immediately answered by another somewhere in the endless expanse of trees behind Feliks. It was a foreign noise, chilling yet inviting and made Feliks want to join in with the howling. The boy kept his eyes fixed on his mother but imagined the magnificent animals loping silently through the birch forest, making no sound but for their mournful cries—and the crunch of teeth on bone.

  Malvina stopped as she approached the homemade ladder at the base of her spruce tree and turned slowly to study the woods to her right. Felix held his breath. She must have seen something in the trees.

  Feliks kept completely still, flicking his eyes sideways, following his mother’s gaze without moving his body. Why did she did not raise her gun if it was a wolf? Slowly, fluidly, so as not to draw attention to the loft, Felix brought his knees up. He crossed his ankles so he could rest his elbows on the muscles of his thigh and peer down the iron sights if his rifle. He scanned the woods beyond his mother, controlling his breath the way she’d taught him, keeping the front sight perfectly aligned with the notch in the laddered V at the rear.

  Zolner was large for his age, but his mother made certain not to teach him bad habits by giving him a firearm fitted for a grown man. She’d sawed off the butt of her father’s Mosin-Nagant carbine and worked down the stock to fit Feliks’s shoulder and length of pull, carefully rasping down the wooden grip behind the action so his small hand could wrap around it when he placed his finger on the trigger. Malvina’s grandfather had been a student of the famed Soviet hero, Vasily Zayt-sev during the Battle for Stalingrad. He had survived, and taught Malvina how to shoot. She’d handed down this knowledge to Feliks, demonstrating proper breathing and trigger control. The more important aspects of shooting—the cold and calculating instincts that could not be taught—she had passed down to him with her blood.

  A wolf howled again, and Felix shifted slightly, beginning to worry since his mother still stood at the bottom of her tree. She turned toward the woods and took a step away from the ladder. A lone man emerged from the forest, his hands raised as if to show he had no weapon. It was a curious thing that a full-grown man would stroll through the wolf-infested woods with no rifle at any time of the day. To do so in late evening was madness.

  Feliks recognized the man by his lopsided sable hat and patched greatcoat as Stas, the larger of the Pervak brothers. Stas took a few steps toward Malvina Zolner gesturing wildly, pointing toward the trees. Malvina peered in the forest, rifle in hand. Feliks could not hear it, but he felt certain the man was speaking hateful words, as he’d done earlier in the day. Without thinking, the boy rested the post of his front sight on the man’s ear. His mother should not have to hear such words. Feliks had the power to stop them. The trigger broke cleanly. The rifle bucked in his small hands, but he kept his eye on the target, watching the lopsided fur hat fly off along with a piece of skull. Feliks grinned under his wool scarf, feeling a peculiar warmth he’d never felt before. Stas Pervak would speak no more words, hateful or otherwise.

  Half his head gone, the remainder of Pervak’s body stood there for a moment, unaware that it was dead before collapsing into the snow in a heap of filthy rags. Malvina’s head snapped around at the sound of the shot. He waved. Certainly she would be proud of him. He had taken Stas in the head from well over three hundred paces. Malvina began to run toward him, flailing her arms, staggering to keep her footing on the frozen ground.

  A moment later Vladik Pervak charged out of the trees another hundred meters beyond the house. His rifle was slung over his shoulder. The lead rope of a wooly pony draped over one arm. He stopped in his tracks when he saw his brother’s body and the spray of frozen carnage around it. The pony dropped its head, nibbling at the snow. Vladik began to scream. At that distance Feliks could not make out the words, but it did not matter. If a Pervak spoke, it was bound to be vile.

  Feliks swung the cut-down Mosin-Nagant toward Vladik as he ran toward the body of his dead brother. He took a deep, calming breath estimating the distance at two hundred meters, and led the man like he would a running reindeer. He held a hair higher than he had on Stas, knowing the bullet would drop at least six inches in that distance.

  Feliks exhaled slowly, pressing the Mosin-Nagant’s crisp trigger in the moment of respiratory pause at the bottom of his breath, where his body was completely still.

  Vladik pitched face-first into the snow seventy-five meters from his dead brother. Feliks had taken both men with clean shots through the head.

  Nine
-year-old Feliks Zolner looked down the barrel of his rifle, past the terrified face of his mother at the bodies of the two men he’d just killed—and smiled.

  Malvina Zolner threw the rickety wooden ladder against the edge of the loft and hauled herself up to where Feliks sat with his rifle. Her chest heaved under the tattered coat. Her breath came in deep, wheezing croaks from sprinting through the sub-zero air. Frozen tears frosted her eyes, forcing her to keep wiping her face with the back of her arm.

  “Oh, lapushka,” she wept, “why would you? Why? Why would you shoot those men?”

  Feliks pulled the rifle to his chest, hugging it tightly. “You say why, Mama.” He smiled sweetly. “I say why not?”

  * * *

  Feliks Zolner looked out the window of the Cessna 185 and watched heavy snow zip by like gray bullets. His spotter, a squat but powerful man named Kravchuk, who he’d worked with for the last three years, sat in the rear seat beside a former Spetsnaz soldier named Yakibov. It bothered Zolner to have anyone sit behind him, even a man he more or less trusted, but at a height of over two meters, the front seat of the cramped aircraft was the only place he would fit. He was acquainted with Yakibov but didn’t know him well enough to show his back, so he made certain Kravchuk occupied the seat behind him and put the Spetsnaz man behind the pilot.

  Zolner was clean-shaven, with flecks of sliver in mouse-colored hair. A perfect crew cut lorded sternly over a brooding forehead and blocky jaw that looked as if it were carved of granite. His smallish, almost button nose looked out of place surrounded by the otherwise severely masculine face. He was a rawboned man, with a thick neck and brutish muscles. Large hands hung from the end of powerful arms. He was built much like his mother’s grandfather so far as he could tell from the only photograph he’d ever seen of the man, standing beside a dead Nazi in the rubble of Stalingrad. Broad in proportion to his height, even now, his shoulders pressed against those of Ilia Davydov, who was not himself a small man. Zolner had known the pilot slightly longer than he’d known Kravchuk. His hands were too soft to be of use for anything but piloting, but he was exact in his actions—and for now, that was enough.