David Healey - Red Sniper

Barkov’s warning came too late.

There was a snap, a swish, the sound of something heavy shifting overhead. Instantly, a log above the solder’s head gave way. The man’s scream was cut short as the log struck him.

Dmitri hurried over and struggled to get the log off the other man, who was quite still beneath it. Barkov shoved Dmitri away, then reached down with two big hands and tossed the log aside as though it were a matchstick.

But it was too late for the soldier. The falling log had struck with enough force to break his neck.

It wasn’t even noon, and he had already lost two men today—one in the trap just now, and the other in an ambush.

“Come on,” he said gruffly. “Let’s see if we can finish this business before the day is out.”

They needed food. Meat. It had been two days since they had eaten any real food. They wouldn’t make it another two days. Cole decided to take a chance and double back to check the snares that he and Vaska had set that morning. He left Vaccaro as the rear guard.

He didn’t backtrack, but moved in a circle to give the Russians a wide berth. Vaska had offered his snowshoes, but the snow was only about six inches deep—not really enough snow to slow him down, and definitely not deep enough to make strapping on the cumbersome snowshoes worthwhile. He would be able to catch up with the others, if he double timed it on the way back. With luck, he would be gone for an hour at most, maybe two.

Earlier, he and the others had heard the gunshots that would have been Samson’s and Ramsey’s last stand. An ominous quiet followed.

Part of him burned with a desire for revenge. It was just how he was wired: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Anyone who grew up in the mountains lived by that code. Vengeance ran through the mountain people like a vein of ore. The fact that he had known Samson and Ramsey for just a few days didn’t matter.

The bullet he had sent back with Barkov’s name on it was more than an idle gesture. He would face Barkov when the time was right. Right now, he and the others needed fresh meat more than they needed a fight with Russians. Samson and Ramsey had bought them time with their lives. Time to get that much closer to the border. Cole and the others would take it.

From the tracks in the snow, he could see that the Russians had found the makeshift camp and searched it, kicking the shelters apart. They either hadn’t bothered with the snares, or hadn’t seen them. Their tracks went on, following the trail that Cole and the others had left that morning.

One of the snares had caught a rabbit. Cole collected it and took down the wire for the snares, in case it might prove useful again.

With a smile of satisfaction, he noted that the deadfall also had done its work. A Russian soldier lay crushed by the fallen log, the cigarette pack still gripped in his hand. One less Russian to fight later. The Russians had left the body where it lay.

Carrying the one paltry rabbit, he followed the tracks out of the old camp, wondering how long it would take to get to the spot where Samson and Ramsey had made their last stand.

They were damn fools to have done what they did, but he could understand why they had volunteered to go out fighting. If it looked like they weren’t going to make it to Finland, this was just what Cole planned to do.

Ramsey had been done for—hardly more than a dead man walking, and barely walking at that. Samson seemed to like the idea of a showdown, like he was Doc Holliday at the OK Corral or some such place.

The killing ground that Cole found was not the OK Corral, but only a rocky clearing in the snowy taiga. He found Samson’s body surrounded by bloody snow. Judging by the trampled ground, it looked as if he had put up one hell of a fight.

Then Cole found Ramsey.

Dead, he was just a bag of skin and bones. He had been shot in the head, but his face was slashed with tiny cuts. Not from a knife. Inna had told him that Barkov liked to carry some sort of sawed-off horse whip. It looked as if Barkov had used it on Ramsey.

Cole felt hollow and sad. He had hardly known Ramsey, but he did know that he deserved better.

He reached down and closed Ramsey’s eyes. The last thing he had seen was that goddamn Russian and the snowy taiga. He sure as hell wouldn’t ever be seeing home again.

Then the anger came flooding in like a rip tide, along with a current of guilt for allowing the poor bastard to make some kind of half-assed last stand. The anger swept Cole up and carried him away. He started to shake and tremble, not from the cold, but from pure rage. His vision flickered and for a moment he was blinded. He went down to one knee and stayed there until the fit passed.

When he stood back up, the cold taiga wind cleared his mind. He felt like a bar of red-hot iron that had just been dipped in cold water, newly forged.

“Barkov,” he vowed to the Russian wind that moaned across the empty land. “I will put a bullet in you if it’s the last thing I do.”

Staring down at Ramsey’s body, Cole couldn’t bring himself to leave just yet. He thought about what Ramsey had said. That he hated the idea of never getting home again. Cole thought that after everything Ramsey had been through, that it just didn’t seem right that his body would be left here on the taiga—maybe to serve as supper for whatever critters happened by. The thought made his belly churn, but there was no way to dig down through the cold ground to give Ramsey a decent burial. He didn’t have a shovel, and his knife wasn’t up to the task.

“Goddamn,” he said, thinking it over.

Cole had brought a blanket with him, just in case he became separated from the others and had to spend the night. Ramsey looked so small laying there, just an empty shell like a corn husk. The hard work and poor food of the Gulag camp had worn him down to hardly more than a scarecrow.

Cole decided that it had been Ramsey’s spirit and personality that had been outsized. He spread the blanket on the snowy ground and dragged Ramsey’s body onto it, then rolled him up in the blanket.

Maybe he could carry Ramsey, but there was no way he could carry Samson. The man outweighed him by a hundred pounds. He refused to leave Samson to be scavenged by varmints. The Russians abandoned their dead, but not him.

The ground nearby was scattered with stones and boulders, some of them the size of a softball, others the size of a watermelon. Slowly, laboriously, Cole dug through the snow for these stones and piled them around and over Samson’s body. The effort took him the better part of an hour. He bashed his fingers between a couple of the larger stones, and ended up leaving bloody fingerprints across the rocks.

When he was finished, Cole hoisted Ramsey’s body over one shoulder and set off along the path he had made getting there. He would be a liar if he didn’t admit that every step was a struggle. Following his old steps made it a little easier.

In the back of his mind, a plan began to develop. It was so goddamn crazy that it might just work. But he would have to push himself hard to get ahead of the Russians.

He plowed ahead. After a few minutes of laboring through the snow with Ramsey on his back, he realized there was no way that he could circle around Barkov and get ahead of the Russians. That was just wishful thinking. He decided that he didn’t need to get ahead of them; he just needed to make sure that they found him when the time came.

He located a copse of trees on hilly ground. The trees would give him some cover, so that the Russians would have to come in close. It was perfect ground for what Cole had in mind.

He tried to put Ramsey down gently, but the weight of the body was more than he could manage and the body ended up slamming to the ground in a way that reminded Cole of the judo throws they had practiced back in basic training. He shook his head. Judo. A lot of goddamn good that did anybody.