Alex Dryden - Death in Siberia

‘ Kto etu? ’ The nervous, young male voice that rang out in the predawn darkness at the border had spoken in Russian. ‘Who goes there?’

From that, she’d known that she hadn’t been seen and was not in the cross hairs of the man’s weapon.

She’d drawn the Thompson Contender from behind her back where the long, eighteen-inch barrel had greater freedom of movement when she was climbing. Then she’d removed her gloves and silently fitted the ice-cold, metal silencer taken from her breast pocket over the barrel, easing it tight. Now she was deadly. Again, so far so good.

She’d waited then. Let him make a move. The man with the weapon was in the dark, both literally and figuratively, and she had the advantage. Soon she would be able to pinpoint the direction of the voice, once she’d worked out the sound shadow and the echoes from the surrounding rock formations.

The unearthly quiet that followed at the top of the gorge where the old Czarist border post was crumbling to dust stretched out for a long time and then she’d heard the arming of another, second automatic. She’d realised she would have to kill two of them. More than two, perhaps. Well, surprise was on her side, that was okay. She would have to kill them. That was how it would be. How it had always been, ever since her training at the SVR’s headquarters, from the age of seventeen.

‘ Te haanaas irsen be? ’ This time the challenge had been in Mongolian. The same young voice, she judged.

He, or they – she knew there were at least two of them now – were close, but not behind her as she’d feared. Somewhere up ahead down the slope behind the rock. From the sound shadow, she estimated they were, in fact, just beyond the rock which she’d hidden behind. So that fact, along with the interrogatory challenge, assured her further that they hadn’t actually seen her.

She’d then off-loaded the mountaineering gear she was carrying, careful not to let the metal parts clash against each other, and crept upwards away from where she guessed they were standing. She followed the line of the rock until she could look around its upper edge, nearest to the fort.

What she’d seen from her cover were two young Russian border guards of tribal ancestry, Buryats, most likely. They were standing below her. They were in their twenties, she’d thought, maybe even younger, recruits still just in their teens, and they’d been stationed out here where the danger of incursion was at a low level and where any encounter was most likely only to be with an illegal Mongolian trader. She could see they were nervous, under-trained rather than tensed for action, and they were facing down the gorge from where she’d come. Facing away from her. She was now well above them. On the declining slope from where she’d come, their heads were just lower than her feet.

The shot was easy, two shots, to be exact. She could drop them both without either of them knowing what hit them. And it would be done, thanks to the silencer, without anyone else knowing, either. Then dispose of the bodies. The snow would cover her tracks.

She took aim along the long barrel of the handgun. Her index finger closed on the trigger, a light, delicate, almost loving touch, the touch of a long familiarity with an instrument of death. She felt its resistance and steadied her aim.

But it was then that she’d hesitated. The back of the first brown-skinned boy’s head was fixed in the sight, just below the cranium. A dead shot, an instant end. He wouldn’t even know what happened. But still she’d hesitated and that was what was bothering her now as she stood in the line of unemployed leading to the hiring office at Krasnoyarsk.

Why had she paused? They were two quick and easy shots for a person of her high calibre and skills. One for each of them, in the backs of their heads. Down, gone. She could be on her way, relentless in the pursuit of her mission. Just as she’d always been.

The reason she’d hesitated, as she thought about it now – for the hundredth time since she’d made the border crossing – was a sudden and unfamiliar surge of doubt. Thoughts had entered her mind that had nothing to do with the mission, nothing to do with her training, or even with her own personal safety and survival. She’d suddenly seen the two guards for what they were, that was what had happened. She’d felt an eerie feeling that she was in a theatre, she onstage, the youths across the boards from her. But on top of that, she’d felt she was also watching herself, as if from the audience, levelling a deadly weapon at two defenceless kids. This vision of herself, this self-reflection, had deeply unnerved her.

What she’d seen in her mind’s eye was the humanity of her intended victims, the flesh and blood, the mothers, brothers and sisters of the two nervous guards who fingered their too-heavy weapons as if they might go off in their hands. In this mental scenario, they were not border guards per se, but just two innocent local boys, forced into conscripted service against their will. In short, they were human, and that was not a thought that should intrude before a killing. She was trained to think about, to concentrate on, the action of killing, not the death itself. An immediate death would now come from the slightest increase of pressure.

Her rational mind had tried to reassert itself. It was just a double killing, two shots where necessary. That was the game she was in, wasn’t it, and had always been in since she’d graduated from the KGB’s training school at Balashiha outside Moscow. Kill or be killed, that was the bottom line. That was the lesson which was relentlessly drummed into the new intelligence recruit as she had once been. Or more than that, even – just kill to make life a bit easier. In this case, her crossing at the border four nights before would have been eased considerably by the simple pressure on the trigger. It was routine, a necessary act in her world, in order to be sure of avoiding detection. After all, they would have killed her if they’d had the chance, or out of fear, perhaps. It didn’t matter. That was their job too.

But the unfamiliar, and potentially suicidal, doubts had proliferated, upsetting the normal, smooth mechanism of her mind. Was she really anything more than a killer? It seemed to her then that the dead bodies which had steadily mounted in her lethal career were becoming a dead end. In her sudden, unprecedented doubt, she had lain there in the steadily falling snow and listened. And as she did so, she’d wondered if she’d reached her breaking point; if she could no longer trust herself to kill – to kill anyone who was in her way – in order to make herself safe. As she lay there in mental confusion, she’d lowered the gun.

The thought of her father had crossed her mind again then. Had his death removed her killer instinct? She felt a clamminess on her hands. Then she heard a shuffle on the terrain below her and was immediately alert again.

‘It must have been a rock or a stone falling,’ one of the kids had said, in Russian again this time. But as she’d watched them, she noted that he’d kept the automatic trained down the gorge while the other boy slung his over his shoulder.

‘Come on,’ the second boy had said. ‘It’s nothing. Let’s get some breakfast.’

Anna had watched them slowly retreat after that, one walking backwards at first, training his weapon down the gorge, as if he were in some safe-training session. She could have taken them both down at any moment. That had been the obvious thing to do, the thing she would normally have done in the circumstances. But she hadn’t done it and now she felt a deep misgiving that she’d endangered herself and the whole mission in the process.

She’d waited for them to go, watching them all the time. Then she’d crept up past and behind the old fort and left a wide berth around a concrete pillbox further into the high valley which Larry’s men hadn’t been able to see from their line of surveillance in the previous weeks. The pillbox was the new border post, and where the boys had gone and had begun to brew some tea in the freezing morning. As the first dull beginning of the dawn began to tint the upper edges of the mountains with a grey light muffled by the snow clouds, she saw a fire they’d lit.