Backlash

by Brad Thor

  After chugging it down, he quickly whipped up another batch. Judging by how much he had been sweating, it was no surprise that he needed to replenish himself.

  He took the second cup more slowly, savoring it as he had his breakfast. There was no sound other than the wind and the occasional clumps of snow falling through the boughs of the trees. In any other circumstance, it might have been peaceful, beautiful even.

  Removing his compass, he marked which direction was west and then finished off his drink.

  Packing his cup with snow again, he placed it on the little stove and stood up to take a leak.

  His urine, no surprise, was dark, and proved what he already knew—he hadn’t been hydrating enough. It was a luxury he couldn’t afford at the moment. Though it wasn’t healthy, he had to push himself in order to stay ahead of anyone who might be coming after him. The alternative—getting captured—wasn’t an option.

  Sliding back under the tree, he spent the next fifteen minutes melting snow and refilling the condoms. Before tying them off, he added what was left in the drink mix and electrolyte packages to each, along with some of his sugar and a little bit of his salt.

  Steadily consuming that mixture would allow him to go harder, longer. It would also reduce the likelihood of cramps and headaches. He had to start thinking of it as a marathon, not a sprint. There was no telling how far he’d need to travel before he would feel safe enough to stop.

  With his makeshift bladders topped off, he extinguished his fire and repacked his gear. Putting the snowshoes back on, he checked his compass one last time and then headed out.

  As the storm continued to recede and the curtains of snow parted, he began to notice signs of life throughout the forest. A couple of blue hares came into view, as well as a red fox. Then, half an hour later, he spotted a lynx, and suddenly, it was decision time.

  Fresh meat was a godsend in a survival situation. It also came with a certain amount of risk.

  Topping Harvath’s risk list was that the shot from his rifle could give him away. The odds that anyone was going to hear it, though, seemed pretty remote, especially as the weapon was suppressed and its retort would be considerably reduced.

  He had a day’s worth of food left, two if he stretched it. He was going to need every single calorie to stay alive, and to stay ahead of his pursuers. The moment he stopped putting fuel in his tank was the moment his mileage would start to drop.

  What’s more, there was no telling if the weather was going to continue to improve, or if what he was seeing was the precursor to something even worse. This part of Russia was renowned for terrible storms that could bring both bitter cold and mountains of snow.

  He decided the risk was worth it.

  Unslinging his pack, he lay down in the snow, picked up his rifle, and balanced it on top.

  Without even thinking, his mind went into marksmanship mode, focusing on the big three: breath control, sight alignment, and trigger press.

  He wasn’t going to take the animal back to a taxidermist, so he didn’t care where his shot landed as long as it did the job.

  Wanting the easiest target, he abandoned a head shot and focused on a lung shot, just behind the cat’s shoulder.

  Sucking in a deep breath, he tried to oxygenate his blood and get his respiration under control. Because of how strenuous the snowshoeing had been, his heart was thudding in his chest. It was like running in a marathon and abruptly having to stop in the middle of the race to perform surgery.

  The conditions weren’t terrible. The animal was in range; visibility—at least for the moment—was decent; and the wind was in his favor.

  Lining up the front and rear sights, he took one more breath, exhaled, and applied pressure to the trigger.

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  * * *

  The subsonic, 9x39 mm round didn’t produce the loud “crack” most people associated with gunfire. It was designed to be quieter, especially when coupled with a suppressor. The tradeoff, though, was less muzzle velocity—the speed with which the bullet left the gun.

  But while it was moving more slowly and packing less punch, it still had an effective lethal range of more than five hundred meters, perfect for Harvath’s purposes.

  Still peering through his sights, he watched as the bullet struck the lynx and the animal went down.

  Then it got back up and took off.

  Harvath was confused. It had been a clean shot and should have dropped the cat right there.

  He prepared to fire a second time, but the voice in the back of his head said “No.”

  As a kid, he had read, and watched, everything he could get his hands on about the great American mountain men. Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, Jeremiah Johnson, and Jim Beckwourth were some of his favorites. He remembered even asking his father if there’d been a rule that only men whose names started with J could be mountain men.

  He also remembered something else—and it was that something else that stopped him from taking a second shot. In one of those books, or in one of the many movies he had seen, some grizzled old mountain man had passed on a key piece of survival information to a newcomer: Only shoot once. If you shoot again, the Indians will be able to find you.

  So, instead of taking a second shot, Harvath decide to track the animal. It had gone down pretty hard, and he was relatively certain it couldn’t have gotten too far away. He just hoped it hadn’t scrambled up a tree.

  Flicking the lever above the trigger guard, he rendered the weapon safe and got to his feet.

  Dusting the snow off his pack, he put it on, and then slung his rifle across his chest. He wanted to be able to get to it quickly, just in case the cat had any fight left and decided to come at him. If that happened, Indians be damned, he would fire again.

  Slogging through the snow, he arrived minutes later at the spot where he had shot the lynx. There was a bright patch of blood on the ground and a trail leading off into the distance. It wouldn’t be hard to track.

  Harvath took a quick check of his compass. The animal was headed south. He needed to be going west.

  He wasn’t crazy about having to divert, but he not only needed the food, it was also the right thing to do. If you wounded an animal, you tracked it and finished the job. You didn’t let it suffer.

  His father, a SEAL instructor, had drummed that into him. It was not only the morally correct thing to do, but there was this notion that if you left the animal to die, you were inviting a host of bad things to happen.

  What those things were, his father never explained. It stemmed from an American Indian belief that if you were worthy, the Great Spirit would provide. And as it did provide, you should take only what you needed. The land and all things in it and on it should always be respected.

  His father had been a fascinating font of wisdom. A rugged individualist, he probably would have made a good mountain man. A lover of American Westerns and standing up for the underdog, he also would have made a great gunslinger—riding into town, righting wrongs, and then riding off into the sunset.

  All of those things were what likely had drawn the elder Harvath to the SEAL community. They were unquestionably what had developed his son’s character and path in life as well.

  It was a shame that the two men hadn’t realized how similar they were before the elder Harvath had died in a training accident. Perhaps it was because they were so similar that they had often been so at odds.

  Following the blood trail, Harvath made sure to constantly scan the area around him, as well as look up into the trees. Lynx were highly intelligent predators. They were known for ambushing their prey and could take down adult deer weighing more than three hundred pounds. The last thing he needed was to miss that the cat had doubled back. He had no desire to be attacked.

  Soon enough, he noticed that the blood spatters had changed direction and were heading uphill. He raised his gaze toward the top of the ridge, but there was no sign of the lynx.

  Adrenaline and an animal
’s will to live notwithstanding, it was starting to look as if Harvath’s shot hadn’t been that well placed after all.

  Ready for any even deeper burn in his legs, he leaned into his snowshoes and began to climb. It was like scaling the back of an icy wave.

  Several times during the ascent, he was overcome with the feeling that he was being followed—convinced that someone or something was on his tail. But each time he stopped and turned around, there was nothing there.

  Once at the top, he noticed more blood and that the spatters were coming closer together. Based on the length of the lynx’s stride, he could tell that the animal was slowing down. It wouldn’t be long now.

  When he finally caught up to it, the majestic cat was an incredible sight to see. It was a healthy, full-grown male, at least sixty pounds in weight. Black-tipped ears and a short, black-tipped tail offset its dappled, silver-gray fur.

  Short clouds of labored breath escaped from its mouth and rose into the cold like puffs of steam from a dying locomotive. The wound, which Harvath had been sure was a lung shot, had been off by several inches.

  While only a bad carpenter blames his tools, he assumed the sights on the rifle had been damaged in the plane crash. It would explain what had happened to the lynx and, fortunately, why the Spetsnaz operative’s bullets had failed to hit him inside the wreckage.

  He watched as the cat’s breathing continued to slow. Its eyes appeared fixed on him, yet they seemed to look right past him at the same time. The animal didn’t hiss or growl as they were known to do.

  Harvath hadn’t thought much about what he was going to do once he found his quarry. Would he take that second shot? Or would he find some other way to humanely finish the animal off?

  In the end, the lynx made the decision for him. The cat exhaled one final time, releasing its spirit with its last breath.

  After making sure the animal was dead, he took out his knife and went to work.

  Lynx was a lean meat that was alleged to taste like pork or chicken. Harvath couldn’t say for sure, as he had never tried it. What he did know was that, like rabbit and squirrel, it didn’t have a lot of fat. In a survival situation, that could be a problem. You could actually get too much lean protein.

  Splitting the animal open, he worked quickly. The only internal organs he was interested in were the liver and kidneys. Everything else went into a guts pile. It was messy work, but he was grateful for the food.

  He was about to skin the carcass when the hair on the back of his neck stood up, just as it had at the wreckage. He didn’t need to turn around to know why. The growling of the wolves was all he needed to hear.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  * * *

  Gray wolves were the greatest predators of the lynx. Whether the pack had come for Harvath or for his kill didn’t make a difference. He wasn’t going to let them have either.

  Grabbing the rifle, he spun and began firing.

  He was amazed at how close they had gotten before his Spidey sense had kicked in. He was also amazed by how many of them there were. He had never seen a pack this big. It was a sea of teeth, and claws, and fur.

  As he had back at the crash site, he kept his shots controlled, moving back and forth, focusing on the wolves closest to him. And all the while expecting to be flanked.

  Though the suppressor dampened the sound of the rounds leaving the rifle, it was still loud enough to scare most of the wolves into halting their advance.

  The other great thing was that the bullets he was firing had an air pocket in the tip that caused them to tumble when they hit soft tissue.

  At this range, not only was he able to hit his targets without relying on the screwed-up sights, but it was as if each wolf he shot had been hit with a mini buzz saw. The rounds chewed right through them.

  Standing his ground, one snowshoe on the lynx to prevent it from being dragged away, he waited to see if the wolves would regroup and come back at him. As he did, he unzipped his parka, indexed a thirty-round magazine from the rig on his chest, and reloaded. Never once did he take his eyes off his surroundings.

  He tucked the depleted mag into his outer pocket, breathing a little bit easier now that he was topped up on ammo.

  Scanning the dead wolves that littered the snow in front of him, the same question from earlier popped back into his mind. Where was the alpha?

  He had a feeling he’d know soon enough.

  In the meantime, he needed to make a choice—wait the pack out and see if they dispersed, or run his ammo down by taking out as many of them as possible.

  If he didn’t make a stand against the pack here, they’d keep coming for him. But every round of ammo he expended now was a round he might wish he had later, especially if the Russians ended up coming for him.

  As the wolves glared and growled only yards away, he made his choice and opened fire.

  He dropped three and was trying to line up a fourth when the pack turned and disappeared into the trees.

  Their sudden retreat was followed by an unsettling quiet. Next to the ringing in his ears, the only thing he could hear was the blowing of the wind.

  While he couldn’t see them, he knew better than to assume they had completely given up. If this was the same pack, they had been stalking him for hours. He needed to find some way to put distance between him and them.

  Removing his snowshoe from the carcass, he slung his pack. Then, with one hand on the pistol grip of his rifle, he reached down with his other hand and grabbed the lynx.

  Dragging the cat next to him, he sidestepped up to the very top of the ridge and looked over the side. It was steep, which might be a plus, or could be a minus.

  It would be a plus if it was too steep, or the snow too deep, for the pack to follow him. It would be a minus if it turned out to be too difficult for him to traverse and he ended up injuring himself. Or worse.

  Because of the limited visibility, it was impossible to see how far the slope descended and where it stopped. But as Harvath didn’t have the luxury of any alternative routes, this was it.

  Swinging the lynx over his shoulders, he took a deep breath and stepped over the edge.

  The blowing snow had significantly built up on the opposite side and was quite deep. The incline was also much steeper than he had anticipated.

  As soon as he put his snowshoe down, a large sheet of icy snow cracked and broke away.

  This whole thing was a deathtrap, but so was going back the way he had come. Avalanche versus wolves—his own Scylla and Charybdis.

  Adopting a technique called “side-hilling,” he pushed the uphill side of each snowshoe into the slope as he traversed across its face in a zigzag pattern.

  It was monotonous, but he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t go straight down. It was too steep.

  What he really needed to help maintain his balance was a pair of poles. He kept his eyes peeled and eventually found two sturdy branches that would do the trick.

  Tying the legs of the lynx together, he continued, stopping every so often to glance behind him, while constantly listening for any danger.

  The good news was that the wolves seemed to have given up, and the snowpack was holding. Half an hour later, the slope leveled off.

  Though the snow was still blowing, some of it had tapered off at this elevation. He appeared to be in a valley of some sort with a frozen river running through it.

  The ice, where patches of snow had been blown away, was clear, and he could see water moving beneath it. Confirming with his compass that the river ran somewhat westerly, he decided to follow it, hoping that it would lead to civilization.

  As he drove his legs forward, he looked for possible places to build a shelter. There were only a few more hours of daylight left. If he had to dig out a snow cave, he wanted the job done before dark. Engineering a fire in such a way that it would keep him warm while also keeping predators at bay and not giving his position away to any search-and-rescue aircraft was going to be an undertaking.
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  It was a good thing to keep his mind occupied. Too often his thoughts had drifted to Lara, Lydia, and the Old Man, and the rage would threaten to overtake him. One foot in front of the other, he’d remind himself, drawing his focus back to what he needed to accomplish simply to stay alive.

  He was fortunate that he had food and water covered. That meant heat and shelter could be at the very top of his to-do list.

  As far as what kind of shelter he might create, there were several options. If he wanted to carve blocks of packed snow, he could build an igloo. He could also dig out a snow cave or snow trench. There were enough evergreen trees around that he might build a lean-to with a fire in front if he chose.

  The problem with lean-tos, though, was that they were largely exposed. They could be nice and toasty with a fire going in front, but if the wind shifted or a storm intensified, they could become rather inhospitable.

  No matter what shelter he chose, he was going to have to hoist the lynx carcass, along with any garbage from his IRP, into the trees, to keep predators away.

  The best scenario would be to find an empty cave that he could move right into. So far, though, the topography wasn’t cooperating. He hadn’t seen so much as a rocky overhang that he could shore up and spend the night beneath. It was pretty clear that wherever he ended up overnighting, he was going to have to build his shelter from scratch.

  Up ahead, the river looked as if it took a ninety-degree turn before disappearing from sight. If he hadn’t found a good spot by the time he got there, that was where he’d dig in for the night. He simply couldn’t go any farther. It was only by sheer force of will that he had made it this far.

  One of the hardest things about snowshoeing was the wider stance. Even if you were as fit as Harvath, hadn’t had your body abused by Russian captors, and were pushing only a fraction as hard, the first day out was brutal on your body.

  He knew that the pain he was feeling now was nothing compared to what he was going to be feeling in the morning. Overnight, as the lactic acid built up in his muscles, things would only get worse.