Tom Cain - No Survivors aka The Survivor

“Keep moving,” growled Larsson. He hit Carver hard across the backside with a ski pole, just to underline the order.

“I said move,” he repeated.

Carver raised his goggles onto his forehead and stared at Larsson with an expression that combined exhaustion and loathing in equal proportions.

“Thought this was the end,” he finally croaked, dragging icy air into his lungs between each word.

Larsson shook his head.

“Move,” he said for a third time, wielding his stick again. “Now!”

Carver spat emphatically into the snow, just inches from Larsson’s skis. He yanked his goggles back down and set off again along the municipal trail that snaked through the countryside around Beisfjord, a small town near Narvik on the northwest coast of Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. Spring might be blooming across the rest of Europe, but up here winter had yet to relax its deep-frozen grip.

They barely hit walking pace past stands of stunted, bedraggled birch trees. Carver struggled for rhythm as he lifted his heels and slid his metal-edged, military-specification Asnes mountain skis forward, all the while driving his poles into the hard-packed snow.

Larsson had been cross-country skiing since he was in kindergarten. He’d received winter training during his national service as an intelligence officer in the Norwegian Army. He effortlessly glided ahead, always ensuring that no matter how hard Carver tried to catch up, he was always tantalizingly out of his reach.

They’d gone about another half-mile when they came to a rifle range, located by the trail so that biathletes could practice their shooting and skiing in competition conditions. Carver followed Larsson into the range, pulled off the Anschütz Fortner target rifle strapped across his back, and flopped down on his belly by one of the firing positions.

“Five shots, quick-fire,” said Larsson. “You have twenty-five seconds.”

Carver tried to aim his gun at the target: five white discs set against a black background. His muscles were overloaded with lactic acid, making his aching arms shake in protest as they tried to hold the weapon still and straight. Sweat was pouring into his eyes. It took him forty seconds to get his shots away. By the last one, he barely had the strength to pull the bolt back to load the next round. And the only target he hit was next to the one he was aiming at.

“Not good enough,” said Larsson. “Fire another clip.”

There were three more five-shot magazines in a holder on the right-hand side of the gun, a few inches in front of the trigger. Carver reloaded, fumbling like a new recruit.

“Twenty seconds,” said Larsson. “And this time, get your shots away inside the limit or you do another course.”

Larsson’s voice made it plain that he was utterly indifferent to the prospect of Carver’s suffering if he had to go around again. It reminded Carver of other voices, at another time and place. He remembered the twenty-mile runs he’d endured at Lympstone Commando Training Centre, on the way to his marines beret, and the ferocious workouts amounting to institutional sadism that were handed out by the instructors who supervised his selection for the SBS.

They’d not broken him, and he wasn’t going to let this overgrown computer geek make him look like a noddy now.

He got off the next five shots in a fraction over nineteen seconds. He hit two more targets.

Carver rolled over onto his back to take the weight off the elbows and biceps that had been supporting his upper body and the gun.

Larssson looked down at him with a contemptuous curl of the lip. “You have another twenty seconds to get back into position, reload, and hit the remaining two targets. Same deal. You fail, you ski.”

Ten years earlier he could have done it in five seconds. Throughout the Cold War the Royal Marines had been the U.K. armed forces’ Arctic-warfare specialists. As a young lieutenant, Carver had been up to Beisfjord for winter training with 45 Commando. Even now, he was wearing his old leather ski march boots, as unyielding as iron when they’d first been issued, but gradually worn in to fit the exact contours of his feet and ankles. Carver had even tried out for the marines’ Olympic-standard biathlon squad before the SBS came calling. But now…

“Go!” shouted Larsson, looking at his watch.

Carver heaved himself back onto his front, grabbed the gun, ripped out the empty magazine, and groped for its replacement. Actions that had once been second nature now seemed entirely foreign. It all used to be automatic. Now he had to think everything through, one agonized motion at a time. His hands were quivering with cold as well as exhaustion. He could barely focus his aching, sweat-stung eyes on the target.

“Fifteen seconds left,” Larsson intoned.

Not one shot fired.

Carver gathered himself and aimed at the first standing target. He fired as he was breathing out, to help steady his aim.

And missed.

“Come on!” he muttered to himself as he pulled back the bolt.

“Ten seconds.”

Carver felt his stomach tense. That was good. Somewhere his body had found a last shot of adrenaline-fueled energy. There was no time left to think. He just had to go for it.

Pull… aim… breathe… fire.

A hit. One left.

“Five seconds.”

He shot again. Another miss.

Shit!

Pull… aim… breathe…

“Two.”

You bastard!

Fire.

Carver blinked, trying to clear his vision. He couldn’t see what had happened. He rolled over again in despair.

“Get up,” said Larsson. “Move it out.”

Carver was muttering under his breath, repeating like a mantra, “Don’t let him beat you… don’t let him beat you…”

Larsson looked at him as he slowly got to his feet. And this time there was a smile playing around the corner of his mouth.

“You hit the target,” he said. “So we’d better get back to the farm. Ebba will have lunch ready by now. And, Carver?”

“Uh?”

“Stop talking to yourself. She’ll think you’re totally crazy.”

“She won’t be wrong,” wheezed Carver, following Larsson as he skied away down the track.

Carver’s recovery had caused almost as much discomfort in MI6’s London headquarters on the south bank of the Thames as it had in Moscow. The thought of a renegade assassin alive, well, and in full command of his senses gave Jack Grantham cold sweats. This new situation could easily turn into a disaster. Somehow he had to make it work for him.

“What’s the news from this bloody clinic?” he asked, not bothering to disguise his irritation.

His deputy, Bill Selsey, was unruffled by Grantham’s bad temper. He’d long since learned to let it wash over him. He asked nothing more from life than a secure job, a modest home in the south London suburbs, and a guaranteed pension at the end of his career. He knew the pressure his boss was under and he didn’t envy it one bit.

“Carver’s done a runner, leaving a body behind,” Selsey replied. “The corpse in question had a fake I.D., some bogus psychiatrist, but I’m pretty sure he is, or was, Vladimir Matov, known to his chums as Vlad the Impaler. He’s an experienced FSB hitman, used to work for the KGB back in the good old days. Bulgarian by origin, like a lot of their best killers.”

“So friend Matov was sent to sanction Carver, only to find himself on the wrong end of the operation?”

“Looks like it.”

“And there’s no one else who could have sent him-he doesn’t freelance for anyone?”

Selsey shook his head. “Not as far as we know. He’s a state employee, no moonlighting.”

“So why does Moscow want Carver dead? Specifically, why do they want him dead now? He’s been a sitting duck for months for anyone who wanted revenge for Zhukovski’s death.”