by James Cobb
She jacked the model 12’s pump action repeatedly, but only a single round of magnum-load buckshot ejected to clatter on the tabletop. “Three shells in the gun when it left the camp, three men with this gun when it left the camp. One of each came back. Do the math.”
“I fired those shells as a signal, Doctor, out on the ice pack! Will you make this woman listen?”
“The boy is right,” Trowbridge protested with growing vehemence. “At least he has the right to be heard.”
Randi’s cold stare never left Kropodkin’s face. “All right. That’s fine with me. Let’s hear him. Where’s he been? What happened to the others?”
“Yes, Stefan,” Trowbridge interjected almost eagerly. “Tell us what happened.”
“I have been trapped out on the damned pack ice for two nights, and I have been wondering what happened to the others!” He took a deep, shuddering breath, bringing himself under control. “Dr. Creston, Ian, and I were looking for Dr. Gupta and Dr. Hasegawa. We thought maybe they had gone out onto the pack after a specimen or to get around the ice jam along the shore. Somehow, when we went out onto the pack, I became separated from the others. The ice near the island is very broken, with many hummocks and pressure ridges.
“Then the wind shifted and a lead opened in the ice. I was cut off from the island! I couldn’t get back to shore. I called for help! I fired shots. Nobody came!” Kropodkin’s eyes closed, and his head sank onto his chest. “I had no food. I have not eaten for two days. No heat. No shelter but the ice. I thought I was going to die out there.”
Randi was unimpressed. She picked the single shotgun shell up from the table. “The standard firearm distress signal is three shots fired into the air.”
Kropodkin’s head snapped up. “We found signs of a polar bear out there! I kept the one shell for him! I didn’t want to be devoured on top of dead!”
“And how did you get back?” Randi kept her words emotionless.
“Tonight the lead in the ice closed. The wind must have changed, and I managed to get back to the shore. Then I came straight back to the camp. All I wanted was to get warm again!”
“That’s odd,” Randi said. “I was out there tonight, too, and the wind seemed to be holding steady from the north, just as it’s been all along.”
“Then it must have been the tide, the current, the Holy Virgin-God knows I prayed enough! I don’t know! All I know is that when I finally get back to camp, someone pushes a machine gun in my face and accuses me of murdering my friends.” Awkwardly Kropodkin twisted in the bunk, looking to Trowbridge once again. “Damn it to hell, Professor! You know me! I have taken classes with you. You were on my selection committee. Are you a party to this insanity as well?”
“I…” Trowbridge stammered for an instant; then his sleep-puffy features tightened in resolve. He could not have been so totally wrong. “No, I am not! Ms. Russell! I must protest. This man has obviously undergone a serious ordeal! Could you at least put off this inquisition until after he’s had a chance to rest and have a hot meal?”
Randi’s eyes still didn’t shift from Kropodkin, and her slight smile held the chill of the polar katabatics. “That’s an excellent idea, Doctor. He should have something to eat.”
Standing, she removed a paratrooper’s knife from the slit pocket of her ski pants and thumbed the button that snapped out the hook-shaped shroud cutter. “Turn him loose, Doctor.” She set the open knife in the center of the table. “He can fix himself a meal.”
Trowbridge picked up the knife. “I’ll do it for him,” he said, self-righteousness trembling in his voice.
“I said he fixes his own meal, Doctor!” Randi snapped, catching up the MP-5. “Just cut off the cuffs and don’t block my line of fire. Then go to your bunk, put on your pants, and stay out of the way.”
Wordlessly, but red-faced with anger, Trowbridge cut the disposacuffs from Kropodkin’s wrists. Keeping the student covered, Randi reclaimed her knife and pulled her chair to the farthest corner of the bunk room. With her back to the wall, she settled down once more, the stock of the MP-5 tucked under her arm, and the barrel leveled.
“Okay, Mr. Kropodkin, you can stand up and fix yourself something to eat now. But don’t get funny. It would be a very bad idea.”
The room went quiet beyond the wind moan and the clatter of pans and cutlery. Kropodkin heated a can of stew and a kettle of water on the bunkhouse’s primus cooker. Occasionally he cast his eyes in Randi’s direction, but every time he found the barrel of the submachine gun tracking him as if guided by radar fire control. Something hovered in the air of the room…expectancy, but her glittering jet eyes were totally unreadable and unrevealing.
“May I pick up a knife to cut myself a slice of bread?” he asked with biting politeness.
“If you make a move I don’t like, you’ll find out about it.”
In the far corner of the bunkroom Trowbridge finished dressing, regaining his pomposity along with his trousers. “I think, Ms. Russell, that it is time for us to clarify a few things…”
“And I think, Doctor, that you had better shut up.”
The academic’s voice started to lift. “I am not accustomed to being spoken to in this manner!”
“You’ll get used to it.”
Trowbridge had no choice but to subside.
Kropodkin set his dishes on the mess table and wolfed into his tea, stew, and bread, eating rapidly and glancing between Trowbridge and the woman silently covering him.
Randi let him get half the meal down before she spoke. “Okay, let’s get this finished. Your name is Stefan Kropodkin, you are a Slovakian citizen of Yugoslav descent, and you’re attending McGill University on a scholarship and student visa.”
“The doctor must have told you that,” Kropodkin said around a mouthful of bread and margarine.
“He did. He also said you were a top-flight student and a very capable individual. That’s how you got the posting to this expedition.” Randi leaned forward in her chair. “Now, let’s get on to what you say. You say you were on a science party with two other members of your expedition, the doctors Gupta and Hasegawa, when suddenly the two of them disappeared. You came back here and reported their disappearance. Then you went out on the search party with Dr. Creston and Ian Rutherford. You went out onto the pack ice while searching; then Creston and Rutherford vanished as well. You were trapped on the ice by an opening water lead. You just happened to be the man with the shotgun, and you just happened to fire two shots from it.
“You were stuck out there for almost two full nights; then the ice leads closed and you made it back to camp only an hour or so ago. You have no idea what happened to Gupta, Hasegawa, Creston, or Rutherford, and you have no idea who may have killed Kayla Brown here at the camp. Is this essentially your story?”
“Yes, because that is the truth,” Kropodkin replied sullenly, after taking a gulp of tea.
“No, it isn’t,” Randi said matter-of-factly. “You’re a liar, and a murderer and probably a number of other unsavory things that we’ll find out about.”
She rose slowly out of her chair. “To begin with, your name isn’t Stefan Kropodkin. I’m not sure what it really is, but it doesn’t matter. There are other people tearing your fake past apart right now, and they’ll find out. They’ll also learn about the Middle European ‘businessmen’ who are sponsoring your education. That should prove interesting as well.”
Kropodkin stared at her warily, the tip of his tongue moving along his chapped lips.
“I suspect you came to Canada, the university, and Wednesday Island for reasons other than higher learning,” Randi continued, pacing slowly between the mess table and the cooking counter. “The collegiate ivory towers might make a convenient hideout for a man on the run. It’s the kind of place the police or the security services wouldn’t look, granted you kept your nose out of the conventional campus radical groups. As I said, we’ll learn more about that later.
“But you still wanted to have a secur
e mode of communications with your backers while you were laying low, just in case. That’s why you brought this with you.”
Randi slipped one hand into the pocket of her ski pants and produced the transparent plastic evidence envelope that contained the mini hard drive. “I found this where you’d hidden it in the radio shack. The correspondence files on it should be very interesting. I’ll also bet you were sloppy enough to leave fingerprints.”
Randi returned the hard drive to her pocket. “I’ll also wager you were curious enough to make a private visit to the Misha 124 crash site. My friends who are up there now will find out about that. Maybe it was pure curiosity, or maybe you caught the scent of something when your expedition was warned away from the wreck. Be that as it may, you went aboard that old plane and you found out what it was carrying. You recognized that the biowarfare agent aboard the bomber would be worth several fortunes to the right parties, and somehow you knew how to contact those right parties.”
Kropodkin had forgotten about his food.
“You told them about the anthrax, and they cut you in on the deal. You were to be their point man on Wednesday. You were designated to eliminate the other members of the expedition, securing access to the anthrax before the arrival of your partners!”
“I deny this!” the Slav exploded.
Randi took a step toward the mess table. “Deny away, but it is the truth. Your new partners weren’t quite in position to make the collection yet, but the expedition’s extraction ship and the crash site assessment team were on the way. You had no choice but to start the eliminations! You had to thin down the number of witnesses on Wednesday before the odds got worse!”
Her words flowed, precise, steady, and cold, accusing and then supporting each accusation, a prosecutor closing in for the kill. “So while you were out there on the ice with Gupta and Hasegawa you murdered them and hid their bodies. Then you came back here with a story about their disappearance. And when the search party set out after them, you made sure you were carrying the only gun on the island. You led Rutherford and Creston out into the middle of nowhere and you blew them away with two of the shells that were in that gun!”
Kropodkin was crushing the chunk of bread in his hand, the crumbs and margarine squeezing out between his fingers.
“Then you came back here for Kayla Brown, and when you scoped out the camp you found her in the lab building sitting beside a live radio, talking with the Haley. A complication. You had to disable the radio first so she couldn’t say anything she shouldn’t. But you managed that and then you went in after her and you took her up on that hill and you bashed her brains out with your ice axe.”
Randi tapped the tabletop with the muzzle of the MP-5. “Then you came back to the bunkhouse and you sat down at this table and fixed yourself a sandwich. Corned beef, plenty of mustard.
“But your snack was interrupted by the arrival of our helicopter, and you had to take off. You’ve been out there all afternoon, keeping an eye on us. You watched my friends leave for the crash site and you watched us turn in for the night. Then you crawled out of your hole and you came down to this hut with the intent of axing Dr. Trowbridge and me to death in our beds.”
Trowbridge stared at Kropodkin as if he had suddenly sprouted horns. “You have no proof!” Trowbridge croaked weakly, not wanting to hear any more. He could not have been so wrong. He could not have sat across a desk from such a monster.
“Oh, I have proof, Doctor,” Randi replied so softly that both men had to keep silent to hear her. “For one, let’s consider the state the laboratory hut and radio room were in when we found them. Totally undamaged. There was no sign of a struggle. No resistance at all. Then let’s consider the state of Kayla Brown’s body. She was fully dressed in all her cold weather clothing. She had been allowed to gear up and leave that hut under controlled circumstances when she started up that hill. There was no indication of haste, of flight. No indication of panic. In short, she was not frightened.”
Randi glanced at Trowbridge. “You were in the radio shack aboard the cutter that last night, Doctor. We were talking with one very nervous and upset young woman. She knew something was very wrong on this island. I doubt she would have left the lab hut on her own, and I very much doubt she would have left so casually with a stranger. I suspect she was with someone she knew and trusted. Someone she saw as a friend. Him.”
The MP-5 barrel gestured toward Kropodkin.
“No,” the Slovakian gritted.
Randi moved to the edge of the mess table, immediately across from Kropodkin. “Then we come to his story about being stuck out on that ice flow. It’s a total fabrication. He wasn’t starving for two nights running. He was forted up somewhere, chewing on the emergency rations from the survival pack the rescue party had taken with them.”
“How can you possibly know?” Dr. Trowbridge whispered, intrigued in spite of himself.
“His atrocious table manners,” Randi replied. “Have you ever had to go hungry, Doctor? Really hungry? Several days worth of hungry in a hostile environment? I have, on several occasions. When you finally get a chance at a meal, you don’t bolt your food like this gentleman did. You don’t eat like you’re just hungry. You eat like food is the most wonderful experience in the world. You eat slowly, getting the most out of each mouthful. Personal experience.
“And while we’re on the subject of food…” Randi leaned forward across the table. “When we came into this hut, we found the half-eaten meal Mr. Kropodkin had left on the table. That corned beef sandwich and tea, hot tea.”
Hate glittered in the look Kropodkin aimed up at her. “It was not mine!” he spat.
“Oh, yes, it was.” Randi’s voice was almost hypnotic. “There was something a little bit different about the way that tea had been served. You see, it was in a glass. Now, we had a group of Anglo-Saxons, a couple of Asians, and one Slav on this island. When someone of Anglo-Saxon or Asian cultural descent makes hot tea, he or she drinks it from a cup or a mug, automatically, as a cultural norm. Only an Arab or a Slav would drink hot tea from a glass…” The barrel of the submachine gun swung across the table and lightly tapped the rim of the steaming glass at Kropodkin’s side, producing a clear ringing ting. “And there aren’t any Arabs on this island.”
Kropodkin grabbed for the inviting gun barrel. Randi, who had been expecting and waiting for the desperation move, yanked the submachine gun back, then smashed the muzzle full into Kropodkin’s face, hurling him backward off the bench.
Screaming a curse, Kropodkin scrambled to his feet, but Randi had already rolled over the tabletop, confronting him before he could recover. To a flabbergasted Dr. Trowbridge, she moved in a golden-haired blur. Three blows were landed with the submachine gun within two seconds; a two-handed horizontal strike across the forehead with the receiver, another savage punch in the groin with the muzzle, and a final butt stroke across the back of the neck as Kropodkin folded over in agony. Randi was careful to pull the finishing blow so it would not quite fracture the spine.
Kropodkin dropped like a dynamited bridge.
Dropping to her knees beside the Slovakian, Randi first checked his breathing, then yanked his arms behind his back, applying a fresh set of disposacuffs.
“Help me get him back onto the bunk, please, Doctor.”
Trowbridge just stared down at her and at the graduate student, sprawled bloody-faced on the floor.
“I can’t believe it,” he mumbled. “I can’t believe that anyone could kill so many people so casually.”
“There are more of them around than you might expect, Doctor.” Randi rubbed her eyes, suddenly very tired. “You’ve been sitting in a room with two of them.”
Chapter Thirty
The Misha Crash Site
Gradually Jon Smith became aware of dawn growing beyond the overhead astrodome. He also became aware of an imbalance in the warmth surrounding him, a comfortable emphasis favoring his left side. Then came a very definite snuggle.
The
congealed frost of his breath rasped on the cover of his Jaeger sleeping bag as Smith lifted his head to look around the radar-observer cabin. A second occupied Jaeger bag was nestled firmly against his. Valentina Metrace, in her catlike connoisseurship of comfort, had burrowed close in the night.
Smith couldn’t help but cock an eyebrow. Randi had been right. Where there was a will, there was most certainly a way.
Female companionship had not been a major factor in Smith’s life for some time. At first, in the direct aftermath of Sophia’s death, the concept had been too painful, too much a breaking of a faith. Then, afterward, emotional relationships had seemed an added complication in an already overly complex life. But now this particular female seemed to be making it clear in a hundred subtle and not so subtle ways that she intended to make herself a factor.
Exactly why was beyond Smith’s comprehension. He had always viewed himself as a fairly prosaic individual. Any romance that might cling to him was only a reflection of his careers, and likely a misunderstood one at that. He had always felt very fortunate to have gained the love of one beautiful and intelligent woman. To have this second bold, enigmatic and decidedly attractive female move deliberately into his orbit was an unexpected phenomenon.
He felt Valentina’s head lift, and she shook free of her sleeping bag’s hood and face flap, peering into his face from a range of a few inches. “I would cheerfully and without a moment’s hesitation kill,” she murmured, “for a long, hot soak in a bathtub, and a change of lingerie.”
“I could loan you a spare disinfectant towelette,” he replied.
“Your counteroffers are growing steadily more pathetic, but I suppose I’m stuck with it.”
She rested her head on his shoulder, and for a few moments they lay together in the bizarre little pocket of intimacy they had found on the ice-slickened deck of the ancient bomber. The wind outside had subsided to only the faintest intermittent whisper. In the crew’s cabin aft, they could hear Gregori Smyslov snoring softly in his bunk.