by Brad Thor
As the light faded, the already frigid temperatures continued to drop. On one of the streets up ahead he saw the headlights of a passing vehicle. Other than that, the only visible lights were from inside houses where locals were preparing dinner.
Harvath assumed that, as in Alaska, in such a remote area, a snowmobile passing through town didn’t even warrant a second look. And even if someone did glance outside, they wouldn’t have been able to see much of his face, bundled up as he was in the trapper’s fur outerwear.
As he moved past houses, he kept his eyes open for opportunity—cars left running, dwellings that were uninhabited, as well as gasoline and other supplies. He also kept his eyes peeled for anything resembling local police or military.
Not only did the fading light provide him a certain level of camouflage but it also helped hide the bloodstains covering his anorak. One good, clear look at him would have raised a ton of questions. Better no one see him at all. That was the way he preferred it—especially now.
Making his way through the snow-covered back streets, he kept on the lookout for signs of a pharmacy or doctor’s office—even a veterinarian’s would have done the trick.
Like the surrounding landscape, the town was bleak. If hopelessness were an actual color, this place would be all fifty shades of it.
It was exactly what he pictured when he thought of life during the interminably long, dark winters north of the Arctic Circle. He was astounded by the fact that the Finns could be so close, yet so different. The Russian psyche did not lend itself to upbeat, sunny optimism. The sooner he was out of here, the better.
More important than where he could steal the antibiotics he needed was where he could stay warm and hidden for the night. Though he had kept his eyes peeled for signs of an uninhabited dwelling, he wasn’t finding any. Every home appeared to be spoken for.
If the trapper had a primary residence in town, it wasn’t marked on the GPS. Following the signal, it led Harvath to a sparse, central square with a rundown, kitschy, tropical-themed café. Its mascot was a pelican wearing a parka.
Behind the frost-covered windows, he could see people drinking and having a good time. Though he could barely make it out over the noise from his engine, it sounded as if there was music playing as well. No matter how bad the weather was, alcohol and other people tended to make things better. It was a comfort that he would need to remain a stranger to.
Pushing through the town center, he found what he was looking for on the other side. It was a drab, one-story building that billed itself as a medical “clinic.” As best he could tell, the clinic practiced family medicine, specializing in infants to senior citizens, and also handled “minor” dental emergencies. There was a number to call for appointments, as well as one for after hours. Harvath drove his snowmobile around back.
There had been no vehicles in front, nor were there any at the rear of the building. None of the lights were on, either. It looked as if everyone had left for the evening.
Figuring he could hike back to the café and steal a car if he needed to, Harvath decided to shut off the snowmobile’s engine. Erring on the side of caution, though, he broke out the spare jerry can and filled the sled’s gas tank. The needle had been hovering just above empty since he arrived. Be prepared was more than just a motto in his book. It was a way of life. There was no telling what kind of an exit he might have to make out of town. Better to do it on a full tank of gas.
After tucking the GPS and its power cord into his rucksack, he did a quick sweep of the building for alarm sensors. Not seeing any, he knocked on the back door. When no one answered, he raised his boot and kicked it in.
The frame splintered and the door gave way. Pushing the pieces of wood back in place to hide the damage, he gathered up his rucksack and shotgun and then hurried inside, carefully closing the door behind him.
For several moments he stood and listened. There was no one there but him.
The heat must have been turned down for the night. It was quite chilly inside. Locating the thermostat, he turned it way up. Somewhere, an old furnace groaned noisily to life. The place reeked of antiseptic.
There were two examination rooms, a small procedure suite, a break room, a waiting room, and a front office. Starving, Harvath hit the break room first. He helped himself to a yogurt and a bottle of Sprite Cucumber he found in a small refrigerator.
In a cabinet above the sink were tea, coffee, sugar, and two tins of cookies. He grabbed all of it and stuffed it into his pack. Then he headed for the procedure room.
Careful not to alert anyone outside to his presence, he kept the lights off and used only the dull-beamed flashlight he had taken from the trapper’s cabin. It was enough to see by, and that was all that mattered.
Along the near wall was a medical storage cabinet. He gave the handle a try, but it was locked. Removing a screwdriver from his rucksack, he pried it open and shined his light over the contents.
Reading the contents of canned goods or IRPs was the absolute outer limit of his Russian vocabulary. That meant deciphering the Cyrillic names of medicines was completely out of the question. He didn’t have a clue what he was looking at.
The last thing he wanted to do was ingest or inject himself with something that not only wouldn’t help but could very well make things worse. There had to be some way to figure this out. Picking up the shotgun, he headed toward the front office.
It was an enclosed space that sat behind the counter facing the waiting room. It looked like any other doctor’s office or minute clinic he had ever been to. And like those places, it had a computer.
As backward as it was, Russia had a high level of connectivity to the Internet, even in some of its most remote areas. If he could get online, he could not only search for the correct spelling of the drugs he needed but also send a covert message back to the United States for help.
The moment he sat down at the computer he realized that he was out of luck. The keyboard was completely in Cyrillic. Damn it.
Leaning back in the chair, he tried to come up with a plan. He knew how to read a handful of words only because he had memorized them, not because he had learned the Cyrillic alphabet. But maybe, like a Rosetta stone, it might be enough. He had to give it a shot.
Pressing the Power button, he waited for the decades-old computer to boot up.
Once it had, he was greeted with another disappointment—a password request.
He tried 0000 and 1234, neither of which worked. He turned the keyboard over, hoping to find a sticky note with the password. There was nothing there. He opened the desk drawers. Nothing still. He ran his hand under the desk and came up empty.
It was a doctor’s office, albeit a Russian one, so he shouldn’t have been surprised that they took computer security seriously. He was going to have to figure out another plan.
Standing up, he walked over to a long bookshelf and, aided by his flashlight, studied the titles. In the era of Google Translate, the likelihood of finding an English-Russian dictionary to help with translating medical articles was basically zero.
His pessimism was proven correct. Every book, textbook, journal, and manual was in Russian. There was only one other thing he could think to do.
Unlike clinics back in the United States, this one still relied on paper charts. Opening one of the many office file cabinets, he grabbed a stack of charts, carried them over to the desk, and set them down.
There was a particular word he knew the Cyrillic for. His friend Nicholas, who had grown up speaking Russian, used it all the time: собака. Dog.
The only reason he could imagine the word appearing in a medical file would be because a patient had been bitten. Nine out of ten times, oral antibiotics would be prescribed. Only in cases where it wasn’t known if the dog had been vaccinated would a course of rabies injections be necessary. He felt confident that if he could find one dog bite case, or, better yet, two, he could figure out the name of the medication he was looking for.
Before
he started reading the files he opened a large, leather ledger sitting next to the phone. It was the clinic’s appointment book. As each day wrapped up, someone had drawn a slash through the date. Based on what he could understand, the first appointment was tomorrow morning at 0800. That gave him literally all night to wade through the files if he wanted. It was more than enough time.
Taking off the anorak, he made himself comfortable. There had been a small task lamp in the break room, and he went and got it. Draping a dishtowel from the break room over it, he was able to dim the light enough that he felt comfortable using it to work by. He had no idea how much juice was left in his flashlight, nor how long his search was going to take.
Just like American doctors, Russian doctors had terrible handwriting, too. Using a blank piece of paper, he went through line by line. He was about a quarter of the way through the files when he found what he was looking for.
Two brothers had both had some sort of incident with a dog. Their charts were right next to each other. In both cases they had been prescribed антибиотики.
Harvath was pretty certain this was what he was looking for. After writing the word down on the blank sheet of paper, he headed for the medicine cabinet in the procedure room.
But when he stepped into the hallway, someone was waiting for him. And that someone had a very large-caliber weapon pointed right at him.
CHAPTER 32
* * *
* * *
Who are you?” the woman demanded in Russian. “What are you doing here?”
She was dressed in a dark-green down parka, black snow pants, and winter boots. In her hands, she held a bolt-action hunting rifle with a large scope.
Harvath hadn’t even heard her come in the rear door, probably because the furnace was so loud. Stupidly, he had his shotgun over his shoulder. At this range, if he reached for it, she’d put a hole in him so big you could drive a tank through it.
Keeping his hands where she could see them, he held out the piece of paper with the word antibiotic written in Cyrillic.
“Who are you?” she repeated.
“I am not a threat,” he replied in his broken Russian.
“Last chance,” she stated, as she took a tighter grip on her rifle. “Who are you?”
“Menya zovut Scot.” My name is Scot.
“What are you doing here? Why did you break into my clinic?”
She was going too fast. He couldn’t understand what she was saying. “My Russian is terrible. Please. Do you speak English?” he asked.
Moments passed as she tried to decide whether she wanted to engage with him in his language rather than hers. Finally, in English she said, “What are you doing in my clinic?”
“I’m injured.”
“I can see that. You have blood all over you. Why did you break my door?”
“I’m sorry. I needed medicine.”
“So you just broke in?” she replied.
“You have every right to be angry.”
“Of course I do. This is my clinic.”
“Again, I’m sorry, but—”
He had begun to lower his hands and she stiffened, applying pressure to the trigger. “Keep them up,” she commanded.
Harvath put them back up. “I’m not a threat. I won’t hurt you.”
“Is that so? Then why don’t you tell me why my uncle’s snowmobile is parked outside, why you’re wearing his clothes, why you’re carrying his shotgun, and why you’re covered in blood?”
Harvath was stunned. “The fur trapper? He was your uncle?” He could see some resemblance in her face, a hint of Sámi around the eyes—but not much.
She was blonde, with high cheekbones, a thin, delicate nose, and full pink lips. She looked more Caucasian than anything else.
“What do you mean was?” she demanded. “What happened? What did you do to him?”
“Nothing,” Harvath insisted. “He saved my life. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do the same for him.”
The woman, though obviously distraught at hearing a family member had passed, kept the gun pointed right at him, waiting for him to continue.
“I was in a plane crash. The only survivor. I can’t even remember how long I was walking before I found your uncle’s cabin, but I was on the other side of the river. When I tried to cross, I fell through the ice and almost drowned. Somehow, I made it inside and was able to start a fire before I passed out. When I woke up, I realized he had been sitting in a chair near me the entire time, but it was only what remained of him. He had passed away days, maybe even weeks before I arrived at the cabin. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was a heart attack or something like that. All I know is that it’s because of him that I’m alive.”
“And the blood? Are you actually injured? Or did that come from someone else?”
“May I?” he asked, gesturing that he wanted to lift up his shirt and show her.
She nodded, and Harvath lifted up his shirt. With his free hand, he began peeling away the pieces of duct tape that had been covering his bite wounds.
Her eyes grew wide. “What did that to you?”
“Wolves.”
“That explains the bite marks, and perhaps the bruising was suffered during the crash, but it doesn’t explain the lacerations. They look like they were caused by some sort of a whip, like you have been tortured.”
Harvath lowered his shirt but didn’t respond.
When he failed to provide an explanation, she pressed him. “I still don’t understand why you had to break into my clinic. The evening telephone number is written outside. You could have stopped anyone in town and they would have brought me to you. Why do this?”
It was the moment of truth. Harvath had to decide if he was going to bring her into his confidence or not. His espionage training, all of the lessons the Old Man had drilled into him, told him to lie. His gut and his hard-won experience, though, implored him to tell her the truth. He decided to go with the truth.
“Three days ago, maybe four, my wife was murdered and I was taken captive. Two other people I cared for very much were also killed. The men who did this put me in shackles and loaded me onto a plane. When we landed in Murmansk, we changed planes. It was the second plane that crashed.”
The woman didn’t believe him. “Something like that would have been all over the news. Whenever a boat or plane goes missing, they always ask us to keep an eye out—especially our woodsmen, the hunters and trappers.”
“If your government is anything like mine, the flight would have been kept very quiet,” he said. “It would have been off the books.”
“Why?”
“Because sending a team to kidnap an American citizen on American soil is an act of war.”
She didn’t know how to respond. It was an absolutely outrageous claim, but nothing about the man’s demeanor suggested he was lying. In fact, he struck her as serious. Deadly serious.
“What did you do that made them take such a risk?”
Harvath shook his head. “It’s a long list.”
“Name one thing.”
“The suicide bomber that leaped the fence and detonated just outside the White House, did you hear about that?”
“Yes. It was a Muslim terrorist.”
Harvath kept going. “How about the assassination of the American Secretary of Defense in Turkey?”
“Also Muslim terrorists.”
He smiled. “All Muslims, yes. But they were recruited and trained by the same man. He had been a student at Beslan during the terrible school siege and hostage crisis. His father had been the principal, his mother an art teacher.
“After it was all over, Moscow had combed through the survivors. They had interviewed all of them. It was an experiment of sorts. Their hope was that the trauma those students had experienced could be weaponized. Only one child showed any promise, and he was off the charts.
“They poured everything they had into training him. He worked with all of the best Moscow had to offer—spies, Spetsnaz, e
verything. I heard someone refer to him as Russia’s Jason Bourne. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but he was incredibly valuable to the GRU.”
“What happened to him?” she asked.
“I tracked him down and then put him in a deep, dark hole.”
“And so that’s why you were kidnapped?”
He shrugged. “That’s just one reason. There are plenty of others—things that never made it into newspapers or onto television. Like I said, it’s a long list, but what connects them all is me. I have a tendency to prevent Moscow from getting what it wants.”
There was a beat, and then the woman said, “Good,” as she lowered her rifle.
“Good?”
“You have your reasons for not liking Moscow. So do I.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I have lost someone, too,” she said, coming in for a closer look at his wounds. “My husband.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He knew what he was doing.”
“How did he die?”
“He was a medic for a mercenary group. He was killed fighting in Syria—a place I don’t think Russia should ever have been. But the Kremlin was paying his company a fortune.
“I told him that I didn’t care about the money, that I didn’t want him taking such risks. He had other plans, though. He wanted us to move to Moscow. He planned to open a private security company with a couple of his friends. But he couldn’t do it without the money. And now he’s dead, and I’m alone.”
“I’m sorry about your uncle as well,” Harvath offered.
“Thank you. But back to what you’re doing here,” she said, changing the subject as she had him lift his shirt back up. “Your plan was to break in here, steal some antibiotics, and then what?”
Harvath winced as she touched the skin near one of the punctures. “I don’t know. From what I can tell, we’re not far from the Finnish border.”