Alex Dryden - Death in Siberia

The boat beached gently on the ice spit. Clouds were gathering in a grey mass above them and it looked like it would snow.

Larry took an automatic from the bottom of the boat. Then he began the slow walk across the spit and finally the crawl and the climb up the rock towards the ridge. He carried the SCAR-L MK16 assault weapon with a twenty-round magazine across his shoulder. After a tortuous climb over ice and rock he at last reached the peak of the ridge.

The first thing he saw over the top of the ridge, keeping his head flat to the rock and ice, was a Russian naval patrol vessel at anchor. It swung gently on the anchor chain in the light sea swell. A Stenka class maritime border patrol boat, by the look of it. Nearly a hundred foot long and armed with short- and middle-range guns.

Then his eyes swivelled to the right, to the ice beach which was the pick-up point. There was a fire burning, he saw, two small boats beached, their anchors dug into the ice and stone. Around the fire were ten men, the crew, he assumed.

Larry tried to remember how many crew a Stenka normally carried and he cursed himself for not being certain. The men were cooking something over the fire, fish presumably. Vodka bottles lay on their side or were dug into the snow and ice. It was a party then. An impromptu landing. They were preparing for nothing but eating and drinking. They’d sneaked into the mouth of the small gulf for an hour or so, for as long as no one would notice their absence. Presumably, Larry realised, they would have a radio man, at least, still on board, just in case of sudden orders.

But what he then saw on the ice beach was the strangest sight he’d ever seen in his life. There was another figure there. It was walking slowly towards the group of men, its back to Larry, maybe two hundred yards from the men now. But they hadn’t seen it yet. The figure Larry stared at in utter bewilderment wore a long red coat.

Larry reached for the binoculars. Through the powerful lenses he now saw that hanging from the coat – the back of it that he could see, in any case – were a couple of dozen circular metal discs. They waved with the figure’s movement, from side to side, right to left with the figure’s loping walk. From the neck of the figure he saw a fur collar and from the sleeves there protruded large feathers like a bird’s wings. On the figure’s head, above the fur collar, was a hide and fur cap, pulled low against the cold. The figure walked with a slow, fatalistic and halting step towards the group of men.

Larry fitted the magazine. It was a four-hundred-yard shot. He now wished he’d brought a second magazine with him.

Then he picked up the glasses again and watched the figure a second time. The coat reached down below the calves of the walking figure, the metal discs swaying in the rhythm of its walk. It was around a hundred fifty yards from the men now. Larry looked at the boots of the figure through the glasses. Small, he thought. A native inhabitant of Siberia.

When the figure was a hundred yards from the men, one of them suddenly noticed it, and they all looked up or around from the fire. Larry could see their expressions; surprise, bemusement, a little laughter – he couldn’t tell whether it was nervous laughter or not. One or two of the men stood. Larry saw holstered pistols. He scanned the area of the fire, but saw no automatic weapons. They were all watching the figure now; a strange apparition in red with its sparkling discs of metal. The coat must be heavy, Larry thought.

One of the men shouted at the figure, but Larry couldn’t tell whether it replied or not. It just kept walking, the same, half-steady stride, and he noticed now that it had a slight limp.

Around twenty-five yards now. The men were shouting, some angrily, some laughing, whether from the sight of the strange figure in the middle of this empty place, or from the vodka they’d drunk. It was hard to tell. But by the expression on one of the men’s faces, it seemed to Larry that he was telling the figure to stop. But it kept on walking.

The man who’d shouted fingered the leather holster at his side, unclipping the cover. He put his hand on to the butt.

And then Larry heard the dull bang of a pistol and he saw the man instantly fall. And then there was another dull bang. The second man standing also fell. And now all the men, eight left now, Larry noted, began to stand, shouting and looking for their weapons. And the figure walked on, as if it were prepared to walk right into the centre of the fire.

And it was then that Larry realised the figure in the red coat with the strange metal discs was Anna.

Anna shot the first man through the heart. It was an easy shot. Then, immediately, she shot the second and then the third of the men standing. She could feel the wound in the side of her body, and in her leg where the gash was healing, and it was painful. She couldn’t walk quite straight, she knew that. But her right hand – her good hand – and its trigger finger were still working well. But she had five shots left with Petrov’s militsiya pistol and there were seven men. With her left, wounded hand, she drew a long knife.

She knew this was her only chance. If her rescuers saw the patrol boat, as they surely would, they wouldn’t come in. That would be another three days on the beach, if she survived this. But even if she survived this, she knew she wouldn’t survive another three days on this ice beach. Her strength was waning. She would have to kill the men, then sink their boat, so her rescuers wouldn’t see it. That was her only chance. And so she walked straight, or as straight as she could, into what would soon become a hail of gunfire.

She felt the great weight of the coat on her shoulders. There were thirty or forty metal discs that swung from it, front and back, and some were six inches in diameter. Petrov had told her that they represented the metal joints the smith of the underworld used, to weld the bones of the new-born shaman together after they’d been boiled for three years. Petrov’s grandfather, she thought dimly, as if he were there beside her. She knew she was now in a sort of semi-ecstatic state herself, though she was still just conscious enough to know it. She felt that she could do anything, fly, travel to the underworld, see the women with the reindeer fur skin, stand beneath the Tree of Life, with its great eagle perched on top, see the Source of all Existence and The Lord of the Water.

A bullet struck her, but it had come from the side and it glanced off a metal disc. If it had come straight on, it would have pierced the thin metal and her, but still it knocked her back, back on to the wounded leg, but she felt no pain now. She was in the midst of them, firing round after round, until the bullet got her, somewhere it got her, but she had no notion of where. She dropped the gun, empty of rounds, and tried to transfer the knife to her right hand. But she had no strength left. Something was draining very fast from her and she knew it was blood. She fell. Well then, this must be the end.

As soon as he’d heard the first shot fired by the figure he knew was Anna, Larry had shouldered the SCAR and taken aim, first at a seated man whose hand was already on his pistol and his finger closing on the trigger. He aimed a little high at the distance, but the man slumped over. And now Anna was between him and the rest of the men. There was no clear shot. He saw four men down on the ground and he fired twice more, around the red figure, and then a burst of five. More of the men – two, three maybe, he couldn’t tell, tumbled to the ground, or slid sideways from their seated positions, or crumpled as they tried to stand. There was no time to view anything except through the gunsight. And then he saw the figure in red go down too. She didn’t move, didn’t try to get up. But the view was clear now, with her fallen.