Tanner took her gloved hand.
“I know walking that way will be tougher for you, but I think there’s a prize at the end.”
“What prize?” Sara asked.
“Pavel didn’t walk back here and he couldn’t have flown in this storm. He must have a snowmobile. If I can find the tracks it made and follow them, we could ride out of here and be back in Barnaul in no time.”
“I’d love that,” Sara said. “But what if Pavel approached us from the west?”
“The land to the west is lower. I’m thinking that Pavel tracked Matthews and his people by looking down on them from that eastern ridge.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“Polina, please help Sara when we get to steeper ground.”
Polina took Sara’s hand.
“Sara is my friend, of course I help her.”
“There’s one more thing,” Tanner said, and then he told them about the wolf that killed Volya.
“The poor thing,” Polina said. “He saw his whole pack killed, and now he is all alone in the world. Imagine how he feels.”
Tanner’s shoulders slumped after hearing Polina’s words. He didn’t have to imagine what the wolf was going through. He had lived it.
He was the sole survivor of a massacre that ripped his family from his life when he was not much older than Polina.
Sara reached out and caressed Tanner’s cheek. She knew something of his past, and understood what he must be feeling.
“Lone wolves can find new pack mates. They don’t need to be alone their whole lives.”
Tanner looked at her, and as he did so, he felt something stir in his heart. Although they’d only been a couple for a few weeks, their history spanned far more time than that, along with a wide spectrum of emotions, beginning at hate, and ending at… love?
“Thank you, Sara.”
“For what?”
“For giving a damn.”
“I give more than a damn, you know?”
“I know… and so do I.”
“What are you two talking about?” Polina said.
Tanner remembered the scarf he found in Volya’s pocket. He took it out and wrapped it around Polina’s graceful neck, for extra warmth.
“Sara and I were discussing something personal, and it’s time to move out.”
Polina smiled as she touched the scarf.
“My neck was cold, thank you, Tanner.”
“You’re welcome,” Tanner said, but he was looking over at the tracks they made earlier, which were only faint depressions. A few more minutes of heavy snow and they’d fill in completely.
They headed east with Tanner in the lead and Polina and Sara moving along with care. They were the hunted, and the deadliest of prey.
15
Mush!
When they were reaching the top of the ridge, Tanner raised a hand, indicating that Sara and Polina should stop walking.
They did so, and heard the faint whine of a snowmobile’s engine.
“That’s Pavel maneuvering behind us, while Matthews and the others head toward us,” Tanner said.
“We will outsmart them and take the snowmobile,” Polina said. “But Tanner, what if Pavel has the key?”
“I’ll figure out a way to start it, but on most older models you just have to lift the hood, reach in, and yank out the ignition switch to open the circuit.”
“It’s that easy?” Sara said.
“It can be.”
The whine of the snowmobile ended and Tanner came across the tracks the machine had made when it passed by.
Something about the angle of the snow caught Tanner’s attention. It looked too flat. After taking out a knife, Tanner dug at the snow and found what appeared to be an old concrete road surface. There were wide cracks all through the section he could see, but it was a welcome sight.
“At some point in the past, this area was more populated. There’s a road under the snow.”
Sara greeted the news with a nod, while grimacing in pain. Her knee had paid a price for making the climb, and her limp was becoming a hobble.
Polina helped her to move along, but Tanner saw no reason to wear Sara out. He guided them both behind a fallen pine tree that still had green needles showing.
“Rest here. Once I get the snowmobile I’ll come back and get you, since we’ll be heading north anyway.”
Sara looked relieved.
“I could use the rest. My knee is bad, Tanner. I think I’ll need to see a doctor when we get back.”
Tanner kissed her, then placed a finger playfully on the tip of Polina’s nose.
“Stay alert for any sounds. And don’t forget, there’s a big bad wolf roaming about.”
Sara smiled.
“That could describe you.”
Tanner smiled back at her, and moments later, he was lost in the swirl of white coming down.
Miles away, Jacques Durand was looking at the rear ends of two Siberian huskies as he rode along in Sasha’s sled.
The sled dogs were about the only thing he could see as the thick snow came down on an incoming angle.
Sasha told him that they were doing only nine miles an hour because of poor visibility, but it felt faster than that. With the effect the snow made, Durand had the constant feeling of flying down a white tunnel.
They’d been out since dawn, and he was growing disheartened by the vastness of the landscape and the lack of anything manmade. He was also freezing, despite having put on four layers of clothing and a thick pair of mittens.
Sasha took his advice and headed south. She informed Durand that there weren’t any clearings or fields in that direction long enough to land a plane on.
However, there was good news. If the small plane Tanner and Sara had been riding in developed trouble, there were three lakes large enough to use as landing strips.
Sasha headed to the lake farthest south first and, if there was time, they could check the others as they headed back.
Durand spotted the tail of Yaromir’s plane, but before he could point it out to Sasha, he felt the dogs change direction and head toward the plane wreck.
If they hadn’t been ground level, the plane would have gone unnoticed, as inches of snow coated the wreck. Just a spot of red lettering peeked out of the snow coating the aircraft’s tail section, but it had been enough to stand out.
“That looks bad,” Durand said, but then he looked up at her and saw that Sasha was smiling.
“Oh, I’ve seen much worse. I think someone must have walked away from this.”
Her opinion changed as they drew closer, and it became evident that the small plane had been shot to pieces.
Sasha gave Durand a guarded look.
“Is there something you forgot to tell me?”
Durand dug into an inner pocket and brought out his official ID and badge.
“You’re a cop?”
“Of a sort, and my friends work with me. I think they were chased here by someone wanting to kill them.”
Sasha kicked at the snow and uncovered several brass casings.
“Do you want me to check the plane for you?” she asked.
Durand grimaced at the thought of what he might discover inside the plane, but he was not a man who shied away from the truth or avoided unpleasant tasks.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“All right, but be careful, she’s sitting atop a hole in the ice, and it looks like it made another one back that way when it first hit.”
“How thick is the ice here?”
“As cold as it’s been? This ice is plenty thick, but if you feel the plane moving, jump free of it. You’re better off breaking an ankle than you’d be falling in that icy water fully clothed.”
Durand took off the mittens so he could climb easier, and his finger stung from the cold wind blowing across the lake. He clambered atop the wing, which was on a precarious angle and coated with frost. Durand steadied himself by grabbing hold of an antenna.
When he clear
ed away the snow from the door and saw that someone had used duct tape to seal it shut, it perplexed him. And when he realized what it meant, he steeled himself for the worst.
Someone had sealed the cabin so that no animals could disturb the contents, namely, a corpse. That meant someone had died.
The plane shuddered and dipped lower. Durand slipped, but managed to keep his grip on the antenna.
Sasha asked Durand to get off the plane, as she feared for him, but he ignored her and ripped open the door.
It was the old man, Yaromir, and someone had given him the dignity of covering him with a shirt.
Duran smiled. Sara was alive.
“Poor old man,” Sasha said. She had come up behind Durand and her head was at the height of his waist, which meant the plane had dipped a foot deeper into the water.
“He must have died on impact. The bullet wounds bled little,” Durand said.
“So your friends survived, that’s great. But, how did they walk away from all this firepower?”
“Sara Blake is resourceful, and Tanner, well… he is not a man known for losing, regardless of the odds.”
“What are they, like secret agents?”
Durand ignored the question and pointed north.
“We should have passed them on the way here.”
“We may have in this storm, but it’s a wide area. They may have heard the dogs, but we’d never hear them call to us with this harsh wind.”
Durand looked back the way they’d come and saw that their tracks were filling in. At the rate the snow was coming down, two feet of accumulation sounded like an underestimation.
Sasha laid a hand on his arm.
“We can’t do much more out here, Mr. Durand, not in this storm. But here’s what I’ll do, on our return trip, I’ll go slower and weave back and forth. If your friends are out there, we should come across their tracks.”
“That sounds good, yes, let’s do that.”
Sasha tossed a GPS tracker inside the plane. She had duct tape, and Durand used a fresh strip to seal the cabin door again.
Back north they went, while weaving east to west, and the snow kept falling and falling.
16
Peeping Tom
Tanner found the snowmobile and went to work getting it started.
The key was gone, but that was to be expected. What Tanner hadn’t foreseen, was that Pavel had taken out the sparkplugs.
That was only an inconvenience. Tanner could retrieve the plugs from Pavel’s corpse once he killed the man.
However, the snowmobile had an electronic gas gauge which was useless with the engine off. But, after using a stick to check the fuel level, Tanner saw that there was barely any gas left in the tank. It was certainly not enough to get them back to the city, but it was a sufficient amount to aid Pavel in hunting them down.
Tanner’s first impulse was to ruin the machine so that no one could use it, but then, a better idea occurred to him.
After damaging the steering stem, Tanner took a rag he’d found beneath the snowmobile’s seat, dipped an end of it in the tank, and smeared gasoline in strategic places beneath the hood.
It was a crude booby-trap, but if it worked, Pavel might break his neck, or be badly burned. In any event, he would be on foot like the rest of them.
Pavel’s boot prints, although fading, were still visible. Tanner followed, but stopped every now and then to listen and make sure that Pavel hadn’t doubled back.
When the shooting began, Tanner moved behind a tree for cover, but no shots came his way. The sound of raised voices did carry to him, the voices of Gleb and his brother, Aleksandr. They had been firing at the wolf again, and once more they had missed it.
It was remarkable for a pack of wolves to attack a single human. The lone wolf hunting Matthews’ party must be mad to risk attacking a group of armed people, and Tanner wondered if the beast could be rabid.
A third voice shouted. It was Pavel and he was furious.
Tanner moved closer to be able to see what was going on, and to do that, he took to the trees. When he reached a height of twenty feet, he could see them. Given the swirling snow, they were indistinct, but their voices carried on the wind.
Being up in the tree had sparked a memory, and Tanner recalled another time and another tree, and of the man who had been stalking Genevieve on that long ago hunting trip.
Cody and his grandfather had woken early and gone out to the parking lot to start the old man’s truck and let it run for a while.
It had been a frigid night with the temperature dipping into the single digits. Cody’s grandfather wanted to be sure his pickup truck would start.
They hadn’t needed to use the truck since they arrived for the hunting trip, but the engine kicked over right away and the battery seemed strong. With the truck running and time to kill, they went for a drive about the area.
There wasn’t much to see, and other than the ranch, there were only a few homes spaced about, most of which were smaller ranches.
A trip into the nearby community revealed that only the coffee shop was open at such an early hour, and so they decided to eat in town and skip the morning meal at the lodge.
“You’ll be eating alone tonight, Cody. I’ll be having dinner with Genevieve’s mom, Deanna, in the lodge’s dining room.”
“Oh, okay, but can I order room service?”
“Yes sir, and have anything you want.”
“Genevieve will be eating alone too, maybe she’ll let me hang out with her.”
“Is she talking to you yet?”
“She was just grossed out by watching me field dress the deer. She’ll get over it. She likes me.”
Cody’s grandfather smiled.
“You’re a confident one. Hold on to that. Boldness is a rare quality in this world.”
They returned to the lodge, and as they were walking back from the parking lot, Cody spotted the man up in the tree.
The tree was across from a snow-covered hill that faced the rear of some of the rooms. One of those rooms belonged to Genevieve and her mother. The man hiding among the branches was looking down into it while peering from binoculars.
“Granddad. Look at that guy in the tree. I think he’s a peeping Tom.”
Walter Parker squinted, but couldn’t make out the man’s face, or even his age.
“Hey! Buddy, what are you doing up in that tree?”
The man in the tree startled after hearing the old man’s shouted words. He dropped the binoculars into the snow and nearly lost his footing upon the branch he stood on. As Cody and his grandfather moved closer, the man half-climbed, half-jumped off the tree and ran into the forest.
Cody’s grandfather shook his head in disgust.
“Damn weirdo. I’ll let the lodge know they have a peeper in the area.”
The man was more than a peeping Tom.
Hours later, he’d return to the lodge and abduct Genevieve.
17
Pay Attention
From his vantage point up in the tree, Tanner watched Pavel as he marched toward Gleb and Aleksandr. It struck Tanner that Pavel had the bearing and demeanor of someone who had served in the military.
Gleb and Aleksandr were much taller than Pavel and twice his weight each, but Pavel showed no fear of their greater size as he berated the brothers for firing at the wolf.
“Did you not understand that we were trying to place Tanner in a pincer movement, and that it required stealth?”
“Yeah, but Pavel, we can’t let that wolf live. He killed Volya,” Gleb said.
“And how many has Tanner killed? I saw your planes, your other men, we need to kill Tanner and I need to get the girl back. If you’re too stupid to see that, I suggest you separate from us.”
Aleksandr stepped closer to Pavel. If it was an attempt to intimidate the man, Aleksandr had failed. Pavel didn’t even blink, not even when Gleb moved beside his brother, the two behemoths forming a wall of flesh.
Gleb pushed Pavel by
shoving the smaller man’s chest.
“Call us stupid again and we’ll hurt you.”
Pavel turned his head and spoke to the others.
“Pay attention. This will be a good lesson for you to learn.”
A knife appeared in Pavel’s hand as if by magic. That same hand moved in a blur, then, Pavel pushed between Gleb and Aleksandr until he was standing behind them.
An instant later, the brothers’ necks gushed blood and sent streams of red into the snow. Gleb grabbed onto Aleksandr as Aleksandr took hold of him. Each man had been hoping the other would help him, only to discover that they’d both been dealt the same fate.
The brothers reached out to stem the flow of blood on each other’s neck in a futile attempt to stave off death. While Liliya vomited at the sight of the spurting blood, Gleb and Aleksandr fell first to their knees, then settled on their sides, where they died while facing each other.
After dipping the blade in the snow, Pavel wiped it clean on Gleb’s pant leg and put it away. He then pointed his rifle at the others. They all took a step backwards.
“If you can’t help me kill Tanner and retrieve the girl, then, I have no use for you. Spread out, look for tracks, and find that bastard.”
Fedor took Liliya’s hand, and moved away.
“I’ll find Tanner, Pavel, and I’ll kill him.”
“Good man, but do not harm the girl.”
Nikolai and Boz went off together, while Matthews chose a different direction, after taking a final look at Gleb and Aleksandr’s bodies.
Up in the tree, Tanner had seen Pavel kill the two brothers, and the man had been as graceful as a swan as he moved, graceful, deadly, and experienced.
Tanner didn’t know about the others, but Dan Matthews was smart enough to figure out that, no matter the outcome, Pavel would kill them all.
Matthews was headed north into the storm and away from Pavel. If the others had any sense, they’d be doing likewise.
White Hell (A Tanner Novel Book 17) Page 9