David Healey - Red Sniper

Together, they drifted off to sleep.

Cole crawled into his own shelter, glad of the slight warmth it offered. Vaccaro was already sound asleep. Cole had thought he might stay awake for a while, standing guard, but exhaustion seeped through his limbs and he found himself falling asleep. Before he did so, he looked up at the sky through the gaps in the branches that made up the roof of the shelter. Snow had a way of reflecting the light, so that the sky was more gray than black when framed against the treetops.

Many times as a boy he had slept rough in the woods rather than return home to face his drunken pa. He would wedge himself under some rocky outcropping and look up at the shimmering stars, picking out the shape of the constellations that his pa had taught him when sober. When you knew the names of the stars in the sky, you were never alone. Orion the Hunter, with his bright belt of three stars in the southern sky, and Cassiopeia the vain queen, kept him company.

The snow must have been letting up, because he thought he glimpsed a single star through the thinning clouds. It was a comforting sight. The clouds drifted across again, and Cole slept.

Cole always had been a light sleeper. He couldn’t say what woke him. Maybe the sleeping part of his brain detected the almost inaudible crunch of snow crystals under a paw, or possibly some part of his subconscious heard the sound of the wolf’s warm breath turning to fog just beyond the opening of his shelter.

That was all the noise that the predator made, but Cole’s eyes flicked open. He held himself perfectly still. The snow created a soft, suffused glow like starlight, and against the backdrop of the forest he saw the wolf looking in.

Slowly, he raised himself to a sitting position facing the opening in his shelter. The eyes that stared back could have been cousins to his own. They glittered in the light reflected by the falling snow. Cole tried to see something in the wolf’s eyes, some glimmer of intelligence. They were a hunter’s eyes, but far from human.

Cole observed the long snout, felt the warm breath inches from his face. The wolf watched him back. They seemed to glare at each other like two old gunfighters, each daring the other to make a move.

The moment was broken when, quick as a copperhead’s strike, Cole balled his fist and struck the snout. The beast yelped and fell back, momentarily stunned, before baring its teeth and approaching the shelter in a crouch, growling. Now, there was no mistaking the wolf’s intent. Cole went at him again, making a snarling sound that wasn’t quite human, this time with his long, gleaming knife in his fist.

He slashed at the wolf and the beast fell away. In the clearing, another ghost-like shape went past, and another. The silence of the lithe shapes was more unnerving than the sight of them.

The camp was under attack, not by Russians, but by wolves.

Not more than twenty feet away, Inna woke because feather-soft snowflakes dusted her face. She blinked awake, surprised that it was not entirely dark; the fresh snow all around them in the forest reflected the light and suffused the air with a kind of soft glow. Harry was sound asleep. Ramsey too.

More snow hit her face, not so gently now, and she thought it must be Cole or one of the others shifting the outer boughs of the shelter.

“What is it?” she whispered, but there was no answer.

She propped herself up on an elbow and peered at the boughs as they separated, expecting to see a familiar face. Instead, two yellow eyes appeared, and then a long, dark snout. It was the face of a wolf, wide as a shovel, fetid canine breath steaming in the narrow space of the shelter.

Inna screamed.

A full-grown Eurasian wolf was more than one hundred and fifty pounds of gristle and sinew, fur and fang. In mid-winter, it would not have been unusual for the hungry wolves to haunt the fringes of the remote villages, hoping for easy prey, whether it was a stray goat or a wandering child. But it was only autumn, and this was the first real snow.

These wolves had grown bold. Aggressive even. The only explanation was that the long war had left a deficit of hunters, allowing the wolves to grow bolder than normal. They had forgotten their natural fear of humans.

No wonder. What did they have to fear from the humans they encountered? Some of the packs ran to thirty or forty wolves. Fortunately for Inna and the others, this was a smaller pack of a dozen animals, led by an alpha male whose rough coat was the color of dusty coal.

It was this big male that had thrust his head into the shelter. Inna’s scream did not deter him. With a growl, he fastened his teeth on the blanket twisted around her feet and tried to drag her through the opening in the shelter. Only the fact that Harry shared the blanket with her kept the wolf from being successful.

Inna screamed again, and this time Harry finally woke from his slumber.

“What?” he shouted, still groggy from the aftermath of hypothermia and Inna’s efforts to warm him to the core. “What is it?”

“Wolf!”

Harry sat up, instantly awake. He found himself in a living nightmare, confronted by a snarling wolf. The space was too confined to use any sort of weapon; in any case, his pistol was somewhere outside with his wet clothes. He punched the wolf, but the blow was not well aimed and bounced harmlessly off the shovel-sized head. The wolf did not let go. Harry hit him again.

By now, Inna’s screams had awakened the others. Cole slipped from his shelter, shirtless in the cold, his lean muscles corded like rawhide across his arms and shoulders. His only weapon was a hunting knife. A gray shape rushed him and Cole’s knife flashed; the wolf yelped and fell away. Cole’s lips pulled away from his teeth, contorted in a snarl that made him seem just as vicious as one of the attacking wolves.

Vaccaro tumbled out after him, but saw Cole’s savage face and took a step back, half afraid that Cole might stab him. He gulped and leveled a pistol at one of the gray forms whirling around them, but Cole grabbed his arm.

“No guns!” he shouted, loud enough to be heard by everyone. “If we start shooting, the Russians will know where we are.”

“Goddammit, Cole! How are we supposed to fight off these wolves?”

“Like this,” Cole said. He ran forward at a crouch, right at the big coal-colored wolf that had its head buried in the shelter from which Inna’s screams emanated. He rammed a knee into the wolf’s shoulder, pinning it down, and drove his knife into the wolf’s belly. The beast snarled and twisted its head, trying to get at Cole, but he put more weight on the wolf and plunged his knife in again, hilt deep. The wolf yelped and with a new surge of power shook Cole off, snapping at him, then disappeared into the trees, trailing blood.

Nearby, Samson had emerged from his own shelter and stood head down, like a big, raging bull. Two wolves launched themselves at Samson. The first fell away when he struck it in the head with a full canteen swung at the end of a webbed belt, but the second wolf latched itself onto the big man’s leg.

This second wolf was the alpha female, so opposite in coloring to her mate that she was nearly the color of the snow, except for a ridge of gray that ran the length of her back. She had jaws like a vise and she bit down until Samson felt her teeth grate his shin bone. He hit her with the canteen, again and again, until the wolf gave a final shake of her head, tearing out a chunk of flesh the size of a fist, and raced off into the trees.

In moments, the awful attack was over, the wolves having discovered that these visitors to their woods were not such easy prey. The wolves disappeared into the trees, leaving only blood-stained snow and frightened humans behind.