Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“You want to stay and eat?” she asked. “Kasha and belku. It’s good.”

“Nyet, spasiba,” he said, getting ready. As he stooped to go out the door, she called after him.

“This Yevhen. He has eyes like yours. Maybe you kill him,” she said. “Maybe he kill you.”

Zimovishche

Chernobylska Exclusion Zone

The farmhouse was in the woods at the edge of an abandoned village. Scorpion had taken a road that led from the river into what must have once been farmland and was now an empty landscape covered with snow. The tree line was beyond the fields. Shelayev had chosen well, he thought. The woods could not be approached from the road except across the open snow. It would give Shelayev plenty of warning if anyone tried to approach.

He stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out and studied the open field from behind the car through his night vision goggles. He could see light coming from somewhere in the trees, the only sign of life in the night. The snow in the field had footprints going from the road to the woods, but was otherwise empty. Crossing the field was not only a giveaway, it was possible the field was mined or booby-trapped. Shelayev had already shown he knew how to make a bomb and set a trap.

Scorpion looked to the right, at the abandoned houses of the village. He could approach the woods from that side, he decided. The houses would give him some cover and possibly had lower radiation levels.

There was an irrigation ditch beside the road, with a glimmer of ice at the bottom. He slid into the ditch and made his way toward the edge of the village. While in the ditch, he was hidden from anyone looking out from the woods. He nearly stumbled over something in the bottom of the ditch. It smelled appalling. As he climbed around it, he saw it was the remains of a wild horse.

When he got near the village, he peeked out over the top of the ditch. An abandoned house, shrubs and bare trees growing on its roof, shielded him from the woods. He scrambled out of the ditch, went around the back of the house and into the woods.

He stepped slowly, using his night vision goggles to scan for trip wires before he took each step. Then he heard something and froze. The cry of a night bird and a sudden flutter of wings. Damn, he thought. If Shelayev was waiting, that would have sounded the alarm. He froze behind a tree, took a deep breath and peered around the trunk. With his night goggles, he could see the house about two hundred meters ahead. It was overgrown with vegetation and snow on the roof, like all the other houses in the zone. As he stepped out from behind the tree, a bullet tore a chip of wood from the trunk a few inches from his head. He dove to the ground behind a fallen log.

He hadn’t heard the shot, just a faint chunking sound, so Shelayev had used a sound suppressor. If he was Spetsnaz-trained and using a rifle at two hundred meters, Scorpion reflected, he shouldn’t have missed. Odds were, Shelayev was using a pistol. The question was, what to do about it? He couldn’t stay behind the log. He looked around. There was a tree with a thick trunk about ten meters away. He found a pinecone and tossed it at a bush in the opposite direction, then made a dash to the tree as a bullet ricocheted off a tree behind him.

“Dmitri Shelayev, ne strelyaite!” Scorpion called out in Russian. Don’t shoot! “Alyona’s safe. I just want to talk.”

Two bullets thunked one after the other into the tree trunk he was standing behind.

He’s good, Scorpion thought as he scrambled on all fours, dodging through the trees on a diagonal toward the cabin. He still couldn’t tell where Shelayev was firing from, except that it was from somewhere near the house. Through his goggles, he spotted movement from near the house into the shadows of the trees. He crouched beside a bare tree that had grown at a strange angle, realizing he needed a diversion.

Scorpion placed the Geiger counter in the crook of a branch on the angled tree and got ready to move. He turned on the beeper and fired the Glock toward where he’d last seen movement, then ran to a large tree close to the house, the beeper sounding behind him. He could hear shots coming from a stand of trees about forty meters from the angled tree. Holding his breath, he strained to listen. It was very faint, but he heard it. The sound of someone moving through the branches, toward the angled tree. The sounds stopped. Time to move, Scorpion thought.

He ran toward the house and around to the side, crouching low. He was below a small windowsill, and risked raising his head to peer into the house. The light he had seen was from a candle on a table. The house was furnished. It had the feel of someone living there, but he could see no movement. Ducking back down, he moved slowly on all fours to the corner of the house, where he waited and listened. He could hear the Geiger counter beeping faintly. It still seemed to be coming from where he had left it.

Something was wrong, he sensed. Shelayev should have reached the Geiger counter by now. He could hear nothing coming from the direction where Shelayev had been. Deciding it would be safer on the side of the house away from where he’d just come from. Scorpion eased his way around the corner, keeping the Glock ready. On this side the trees were closer to the house. The branches of a large tree had grown through a broken window into the house.

He started to go around the large tree when something hit his wrist hard, followed by a wrist grip that forced him to drop the Glock even as he began to react. He could feel Shelayev reaching around to grab his jacket in back. A pure Sambo move that would be followed by a leg sweep, he thought as he went into a two-hand Krav Maga wrist counter, stepping back to avoid the leg sweep. He was just in time, as a punch hit him in the side of his head and a Sambo sidekick grazed his ribs. It knocked his goggles off. Shelayev was good and strong and fast as hell, he realized as he countered with a grapple throw and leg sweep of his own, which Shelayev countered with a countergrapple. They were throwing elbows and kicks in a rapid sequence, fighting blindly in the dark by feel and with only a sense of each other’s shapes.

Scorpion spotted the glint of a knife in the darkness. Knowing he was in a fight for his life, he desperately kicked at Shelayev’s knee as a feint to grab the hand holding the knife in order to do a Krav Maga disarm. Although it was almost impossible to tell, he thought the blade had holes in it: Jesus, a Spetsnaz ballistic knife, he thought, blocking a Sambo grapple and attempt to throw, and doing the Krav Maga knife disarm, just managing with all his might to twist the wrist against Shelayev’s immense strength. Scorpion followed with a quick front kick, taking the knife away.

He was staggered then by a Sambo sidekick to his thigh, just missing his groin, followed by a lightning-fast second sidekick to his knife hand to try to knock the knife away. He counterblocked as he reversed the knife and, stepping inside-remembering Koichi saying once that Sambo expects the opponent to use an outside leg sweep-hit Shelayev with an elbow smash to the throat. He heard Shelayev grunt, then grabbed him around the back of the neck in a guillotine choke hold combined with a hip throw to take him down. As they struggled on the ground, Scorpion hanging onto the choke hold with one hand while Shelayev hit him with an elbow to the face, Scorpion used his left hand to put the point of the knife to Shelayev’s throat, his thumb on the release that would shoot the blade through the other man’s throat and windpipe.

“Ya hochu pogovorit,” Scorpion gasped. I want to talk. “Dimitri, Ya drooh Alyona.” I’m a friend of Alyona’s.

He felt Shelayev suddenly relax and stop fighting.