But the streets were quiet, the traffic light. Snow had begun falling lazily, dropping onto the frozen pavement and blowing away in eddies as the Lada motored past, the flakes as grainy as sand thanks to the brutally cold temperatures.
As she drove, Tracie couldn’t help replaying the last few minutes of Ryan Smith’s life on a continuous loop inside her head. She hated the way things had ended, hated especially her inability to save the man after finding him alive.
The irony was beyond bitter; it was downright cruel. To have the good fortune to be surveilling the base just as the Soviets were delivering their CIA prize to Protasov’s lab—a million-to-one shot, approximately the odds of a three-legged horse winning the Kentucky Derby—only to then locate Smith mere hours too late to rescue him, chafed on Tracie in a way nothing else had ever done. It was almost a physical pain, as if her soul had been flayed open with a dull knife and then salt poured inside the wound.
Could karma possibly be so heartbreakingly cruel?
She chuckled bitterly at the thought, alone inside the Russian-made SUV. Of course karma—or God’s will, or fate, or whatever you wanted to call it—could be so damned cruel. If one point had been hammered home to her over seven-plus years of CIA field work, that would have to be it.
There was no fairness to life.
The good guys didn’t always win.
Tracie shook her head bleakly as the Ural Mountain scenery rolled past, its magnificent beauty blunted by the sheer monotony of the trees and the snow. Ryan’s face would haunt her nightmares forever: the intensity in his earnest eyes as he begged her to end his torment, and then the spark of life disappearing from those same eyes when she granted his wish.
She realized she’d started tearing up, a dangerous development for someone driving down poorly maintained mountain roads in the early stages of a winter storm while attempting to escape a country where she would face untold suffering if captured.
She forced her mind off the recent past—it wasn’t easy—and back where it belonged: navigating the slippery, winding road.
She thought she was getting close to the extraction point.
She’d known she would have trouble locating the narrow wooded trail leading to the frozen lake. The area was secluded and desolate and the trees crowding every stretch of the road looked exactly the same as the trees crowding every other stretch of road. There were no signs or kilometer markers, no houses or stores or lodges or any other evidence of human habitation.
Just mile after mile of lonely Bashkiran roadway.
To combat the possibility of driving right past the trail without realizing she’d missed it, Tracie had taken careful note of the mileage on the Lada’s odometer when she’d driven out of the forest after being dropped off four days ago by the C-130. She’d then noted the mileage reading upon entry into Mezhgorye, giving her a fairly accurate gauge as to when to begin looking for the marker she’d left at the trail’s entrance.
According to the vehicle’s odometer, that marker should be coming up soon, a bright red scarf she’d tied to a tree branch a few feet off the side of the road. She eased off the accelerator, peering through the falling snow, when she rounded a corner and almost barreled through a wooden sawhorse placed in the middle of the road.
Idling next to the sawhorse was a UAZ-469, the Soviet equivalent of a small Jeep.
Roadblock, Tracie thought. Dammit. I should have known this was too easy.
She hit her brakes hard and slid to a stop a few feet in front of the barrier. Fortunately she’d been moving slowly to begin with or she would have rammed the damned thing. In their desire to make the roadblock a surprise to drivers they’d chosen a risky location, placing the barrier much too close to the sharp curve.
Tracie snapped out of her funk and into operational mode, focusing her attention on the idling vehicle across the roadway. Given the bitter cold, the soldiers would almost certainly be sitting inside the UAZ to stay warm. And there would be two of them. The Soviets would not risk using just one man to secure this isolated motorway if they’d finally discovered the carnage inside their secret facility.
She’d removed her Beretta from its shoulder holster upon leaving Mezhgorye, anticipating exactly this type of occurrence. It lay on the passenger seat, held in place by the weight of her backpack. Now she reached over and, without taking her eyes off the Russian military vehicle, slid the weapon across the seat and under her right thigh.
The passenger door of the UAZ-469 opened and a young soldier stepped into the cold. He moved slowly, clearly reluctant to leave the warmth of the vehicle behind. Tracie imagined the two occupants doing a quick coin flip to see which of them would get to avoid stepping into the cold.
The soldier approached the Lada with his weapon holstered at his side. He motioned for Tracie to roll down her window.
After she had complied, he bent and in Russian said, “I am sorry for the inconvenience, but…”
His voice trailed away as his eyes widened in surprise. He’d obviously been told he was looking for a young woman, possibly accompanied by the two officers she’d kidnapped but more likely traveling alone.
He started to step back from the door and reach for his gun but before he could manage either action Tracie raised her Beretta quickly, reaching through the open window and placing it against his forehead. The positioning of the soldier’s body would prevent his partner from seeing her weapon, but there was no way to know whether he’d noticed the man’s panicked reaction.
If he was paying attention, he probably had.
It was too late to worry about that now.
“Don’t move and you might survive,” she said softly, and he nodded once in an abbreviated motion.
“Now,” she continued. “Let go of your weapon and leave it holstered. Place both hands on the window frame where I can see them.”
When he had complied, she said, “I want you to leave your right hand on the door. Half-turn to face your partner and wave him out of the truck.”
“But we were told to be sure only one of us approaches any vehicles we stop. The other is to maintain a safe distance.”
“Is the person who gave you those instructions currently holding a gun to your head?”
He swallowed heavily and instead of answering, did as instructed. He swiveled at the hip and began gesturing toward the UAZ. A moment later the driver’s door opened and another soldier stepped out of the vehicle, this one every bit as young looking as the first. He took a few tentative steps toward Tracie’s Lada but then stopped, his hand resting on the butt of his holstered weapon.
“What is it?” he shouted across the pavement. “You know our instructions, we are to remain separated during any traffic stops.” The wind had begun picking up in advance of the storm, and his voice sounded weak and reedy, knocked down by the freshening breeze.
“Get him over here,” Tracie whispered through clenched teeth.
“Just come here, Sergei, please,” the kid shouted, waving again with his free hand.
The soldier moved forward another couple of steps but Tracie knew her hastily devised plan—to disarm both men and leave them trussed up inside their vehicle—was never going to work. It had never stood a chance of working.
The second soldier was drawing his weapon.
And she acted on instinct and training. She squeezed the trigger once and the gun roared and first man’s head exploded as he dropped like a felled tree onto the road next to the Lada.
His body hadn’t even hit the pavement when she swiveled her wrist and fired again. She’d been holding the gun awkwardly in her attempt to keep it hidden from view of the second soldier and hadn’t had a chance to aim properly, and the slug flew off into the wilderness.
The startled soldier dived to the road and rolled, but he was in no-man’s land, fully exposed with nowhere to hide and the cover of his vehicle behind him, useless. He rolled onto his back and came up firing, but his shots sprayed the area, none of them coming close to striking T
racie or even the Lada.
Tracie, on the other hand, knew she had the luxury of time once she saw the kid hit the ground. She took advantage of that time, aiming carefully before squeezing off her next round.
When she fired, the shot took the kid squarely in the chest and left him motionless. His gun had dropped to the road but it still lay within reach, and Tracie kept her full attention on the second soldier as she climbed out of the Lada.
The first man’s head had been pulverized by the 9mm slug fired from such close proximity and she knew the odds of him still being alive—much less posing a threat—were virtually nil. The same could not be said of the second soldier. Although he still lay unmoving in the road, he could still be alive.
Therefore, he still represented a threat.
He could be playing possum, could reach for his weapon and squeeze off a shot as she approached. It was unlikely but possible.
Tracie wasn’t going to give him the chance to do anything of the kind. She left her door open and the vehicle idling. Kept her weapon trained on the second soldier as she knelt and removed the first man’s gun from his holster and tossed it into the front seat of the Lada.
Then she reached down and felt for a pulse on the first soldier. The kinetic energy of the slug had blown the man’s hat off and his skull was a jagged, pulpy mess. Blood soaked his neck and chest and the roadway immediately surrounding his body, melting the light dusting of snow and staining the area a dull maroon.
She’d known there would be no pulse and there wasn’t.
Next she stood and crossed the roadway to where the second soldier lay. He still didn’t appear to have moved. She kicked his gun toward the Lada and then repeated the exercise she’d just undertaken with the first soldier, kneeling and searching for a pulse.
Again she found none. From the bullet’s entry point it appeared it had penetrated his heart. She’d managed a kill shot from thirty feet under tremendous stress and through a howling wind.
It was an impressive feat.
She felt nothing.
42
February 3, 1988
2:30 p.m.
Somewhere south of Mezhgorye, Bashkir
Tracie glanced at her watch and cursed softly. She’d nearly been out of time for her rendezvous with the C-130 even before encountering this roadblock. A firefight was the last thing she needed to deal with.
But leaving two Russian soldiers dead in the middle of the road was no kind of option, even considering the minimal amount of vehicular traffic Tracie had seen. There was no way around it; the men would have to be moved.
She hooked her arms under the second soldier’s armpits at the elbow and dragged the man back to the UAZ-469. He’d left his door partly open and she dragged/shoved/tossed him as far as she could into the vehicle. He was heavy and she was light and even after marshaling all her strength his legs hung limply out the door, boots almost but not quite touching the pavement.
She hurried around to the other side of the vehicle and opened that door, then bent inside and dragged him fully into the truck. She was sweating from exertion and shaking from adrenaline, the familiar sensation of post-combat jitters flooding her body.
She ignored it and returned to the Lada. Bent and grabbed the first soldier under the armpits and began dragging him across the road as she had done with his partner. A significant amount of blood dripped onto Tracie from the grotesque head injury, and she choked back the vomit that threatened to explode onto herself and the dead Russian kid and the wet, snowy road.
By the time she’d dragged him to the UAZ she was gasping for breath. This soldier was even bigger and heavier than the first, and her strength was flagging, and the best toss she could manage only got him halfway into the vehicle. The soldier’s corpse fell onto his partner’s body with a wet thud, and Tracie bent, hands on her knees, as she attempted to catch her breath.
After a moment she circled the truck and dragged the second soldier the rest of the way inside. She was forced to crawl into the cab and onto the first man’s body to get a decent grip and enough leverage to finish the job. The corpse already felt limp and elastic and inhuman, despite the fact he’d only been dead for minutes.
At last both men were fully inside their vehicle. Tracie backtracked out of the UAZ, covered in blood, and this time there was no avoiding the reaction her body insisted on. She bent and puked into the dirty snow on the side of the road.
She moaned in misery and swiped the back of her hand across her mouth to remove the stringy greenish-yellow leftover saliva, gulping great breaths of supercooled mountain air. Then she returned to the middle of the road and grabbed the sawhorse the soldiers had been using as a barricade. She dragged it behind the UAZ and placed it as far out of sight of any passing motorists as possible.
One final trip into the road. Tracie retrieved the hat that had fallen off the first soldier’s head when she shot him and tossed it into the UAZ on top of the dead men. She locked both doors and then slammed them closed. On her return trip to the Lada she picked the second soldier’s gun up off the road and brought it with her into the vehicle, tossing it onto the passenger seat next to her backpack and the first soldier’s gun.
It felt like thirty minutes had passed since Tracie first came upon the roadblock but a glance at her watch told her it had been less than five. No other vehicles had passed in that time.
She took one last long look at the scene and shrugged. She’d done the best she could to hide the evidence of the deadly confrontation given the extreme time pressure under which she was operating. It was much more important to get to that damned frozen lake before the C-130 took to the skies for Turkey than it was to fool any passersby about what had happened here.
And Tracie’s rush-job cleanup wouldn’t fool many people for very long.
If all went well the rest of the way, she would be in the sky before the Soviets could react to the deaths of two more of their soldiers, even if someone came along and found the corpses the moment she pulled away.
But the point of concealing the bodies was to buy at least a little time. Once the dead men were discovered, her ruse regarding a northern escape route would be blown, assuming it had ever been believed in the first place. The C-130 was perfectly suited to a mountain exfiltration atop a frozen lake, but not so well suited to outrunning a Russian MiG fighter jet. Tracie wasn’t sure where the nearest Soviet air base was located, but wanted to give the C-130 crew a fighting chance to be as far from here as possible before the Soviets scrambled any chase aircraft.
And that was if all went well.
If all didn’t go well, if she arrived at the frozen lake only to discover she was late, and her exfiltration crew had already come and gone because they were unable to wait any longer for her, she would face almost certain death anyway. It might be from the incoming storm and the bitterly cold temperatures and the fact she would be stranded with no friendly faces for thousands of miles in any direction, or it might be or from the reprisals of the Red Army.
Neither fate struck her as desirable.
She blew on her hands, which had become red and raw. She hadn’t been wearing gloves during the confrontation at the roadblock and hadn’t taken the time to pull them on during her cleanup efforts, so her fingers were now almost completely numb.
She hit the gas and continued down the lonely road, clapping her hands and rubbing them together in an effort to stimulate circulation, and before she’d gone another half-mile, found herself at the marker she’d left behind four days earlier.
The trail looked narrow and lonely but she didn’t hesitate. She wheeled the Lada off the road and plunged into the wilderness, bouncing along the ruts, driving as fast as she dared. She tried to guess how long it would take the falling snow to cover her tire tracks and concluded it really didn’t matter.
The key to her survival was the C-130.
If the plane was still there, she might live.
If not, she likely stood no chance.
**
*
Branches hung low across the trail. They were weighted down with snow and formed one more obstacle in what was becoming the most frustrating and disheartening mission Tracie had ever attempted. She dodged them when she could and rammed them when she had to, certain that at any moment the Lada would become stuck in the trail and she would be forced to continue on foot.
But to her surprise, the Russian-made SUV continued to grind over the rough, slick terrain. Sooner than expected, she spotted an opening in the trees that could only be the frozen lake. The next minute or so would determine her fate. Either the C-130 would be waiting, or she would face a potentially agonizing death.
Heart pounding, she shoved down on the accelerator, forcing more speed out of the truck than was wise. The vehicle slipped and slid, bouncing and jolting, threatening at any moment to impact a tree or slip off the trail and into a snowdrift.
Tracie didn’t care.
She had to know.
The Lada burst through the opening in the trees and raced down the rocky embankment, and Tracie’s heart leapt. The big four-engine prop plane was there, looking incongruous on its skis but as welcome a sight as she’d ever seen.
But there was a problem.
Of course there was.
The confrontation with the Soviet soldiers had taken too much time, and the C-130 crew had obviously decided they’d waited as long as they could. The plane was sixty feet away and facing in the other direction. The crew had taxied toward the embankment and then turned toward the middle of the lake to make as much room as possible for their imminent departure.
From their present position and at their present angle, they would not be able to see Tracie in the little SUV.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 144