David Healey - Red Sniper

Over by the gate, the Russian troops were just about organized. Any minute now, they were going to be heading over to the truck, to load up. He and the others wouldn’t be able to stay hidden for long.

“Now what?” Vaccaro whispered, sounding desperate.

Cole gripped his rifle until his knuckles showed white, but meanwhile his mind was scratching and clawing like a cornered animal, trying to come up with something, anything. When it came to tight spots, he preferred the kind that you could shoot your way out of.

He looked around for some escape route. Ruled out hijacking a Jeep or truck. How far could they get trying to cross this landscape? On foot, that plane would spot them. The plane had looked like a fighter, which meant machine guns. Bombs.

Plane . He glanced again toward the airfield. Not so much activity down there. However, there were a handful of assorted planes grouped around the makeshift runway.

He had an idea. Glancing at Vaccaro, he said, “How’s your back?”

“What?”

Cole thought about it. The problem was, the airfield was a couple hundred yards away. Everybody else on the base was in uniform. Cole and Vaccaro had on civilian clothes. Dmitri was in his long johns. They all stood out like moonshiners at a Bible meeting. What they needed was camouflage.

“Vaccaro, you grab one of those box over there,” he said. “You too, Miss Inna.”

“What is in it?” Inna asked.

“Don’t matter. Grab it. Tell Dmitri to grab that other box. Me and Whitlock are gonna roll tires.”

“What the hell, Cole,” Vaccaro complained. “Are we supposed to do some work while we’re here? Maybe straighten the place up for the Ruskies?”

“I told you there was no way we could just walk out of here, but maybe I was wrong. Whitlock, do you reckon you can fly one of them Russian planes?”

Whitlock grinned. “Does an angel have wings?”

Cole grabbed a tire. “All right, then. Let’s get out of here.”

It was a universal fact of military hierarchy that nobody paid any attention to maintenance personnel on a base. It didn’t matter if you were in the American, British, Russian, or German military, it was a given that these personnel were anonymous. The guy fixing the trucks and planes never got the glory. He didn’t even carry a weapon. You didn’t have to salute him. Officers you had to watch out for. Maintenance guys, on the other hand, could be safely ignored.

Perfect camouflage, to Cole’s way of thinking.

Cole was leading the way, rolling his tire through the slush toward the airfield. Inna, Vaccaro, and Dmitri followed, carrying their boxes. Then came Whitlock, rolling his tire.

All around them, soldiers ran by, scrambling toward the trucks. The whole damn base was mobilizing. Most of the Russian troops looked no older than Dmitri and they wore new uniforms. New recruits. They were too confused to even give Cole a second look. Like a typical officer, the Russian who had met them on the road seemed to have decided that there was no point in making do with one truckload of reinforcements, not when he could round up several truckloads of troops and make the whole operation seem more important. The entire base now resembled an ant nest that someone had poked a stick into.

They might have made it without any trouble if it hadn’t been for Dmitri’s long johns.

An officer went by and Cole kept his head down. At first, the officer didn’t seem to notice Cole or the others. Then he slowed his pace and gave Cole a hard look, like the boss man on a road gang, before moving on. Cole tilted his head so that he could watch the officer out of the corner of his eye.

The officer stopped. Turned. Stared hard at the soldier wearing only long johns.

Setting his mouth in a grim line, he started toward Dmitri. He clearly seemed to be thinking that discipline had gotten too lax, even for the maintenance crew. He put his hand on the holster flap.

“Keep going,” Cole muttered to Inna behind him.

He rolled his tire to one side, staying bent over it, still keeping his head down.

The officer approached, shouting something in Russian. He didn’t sound happy. His hand was on his pistol, but he hadn’t drawn it yet, which was a good thing—the Russians seemed to have a penchant for shooting soldiers over the smallest infraction.

Cole didn’t let him get that far. He straightened up and turned into the officer to block his path. Dropped the box and got up close and personal. Now the officer seemed to sense that something was going on out of the ordinary. This time, he did start to draw the pistol.

Cole used his left hand to grab the Russian’s wrist, preventing the gun from leaving the holster. With his right hand, he drew his hunting knife and plunged the blade into the Russian’s throat. He hit him as hard as he had ever hit anything ever before. The blade was sharpened on both sides at the tip so that it speared through the gristle and muscle. Cole put all his weight behind it, and the blade stopped only when the tip struck the vertebrae in the back of the Russian’s neck. It was a horrible sensation, and Cole felt sickened as he wrenched the knife free.

The Russian wanted to shout, but couldn’t. His voice box was destroyed. He sank to his knees, his hands at his throat, making wet gargling noises, dying.

“Go!” Cole shouted.

They dropped their tires and boxes, and ran the rest of the way to the airfield. In the confusion, none of the Soviet troops had noticed the attack on the officer. Not yet, anyhow. Cole figured they had a minute or two at most to catch a plane.

At that moment, Cole realized he hadn’t thought something through, which was the fact that they would need a plane large enough to carry them all. There wasn’t much to choose from. Cole saw a couple of smaller reconnaissance planes that appeared to be two-seaters, and three sleek fighters.

“This one!” Whitlock had anticipated the same problem, and was pointing at the largest plane on the airfield.

None of the other planes was big enough for them all, except for this airplane, which appeared to be some sort of cargo hauler. It probably flew in medical supplies, mail, and the commandant’s weekly vodka ration.

On closer inspection of the plane, Cole’s heart sank.

The plane looked flimsy, like it had been made out of old beer cans hammered flat and riveted together by the guy who’d been drinking the beer. Some of the finer work might have been done when the guy was hung over on Monday morning.

“I’ve never seen a plane that looked like it already crashed before it took off,” Vaccaro said. “You sure about this?”

“It’s this or back to the Gulag,” Cole said. “Whitlock, you reckon you can fly this crate?”

“I can fly it,” he said. “The question is, will it fly?” He ran to pull away the wheel chocks.

Cole cast a quick glance toward where the officer’s body lay, leaking a pool of blood into the trampled snow. They didn’t have long. “You all had best get in.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be right back.”

The others piled into the plane. When a cargo plane like this was on the ground, sitting on the third wheel in the tail, the floor was sharply sloped. Whitlock climbed toward the cockpit and the others scrambled to the rough seats that pulled down from the sides. The only windows were in the cockpit. The bare interior was cold and dark, and smelled heavily of oil and gasoline, with an underlying funk of spoiled potatoes.

It did indeed feel like being inside a beer can, with aluminum walls exactly that thin. A burst from a machine gun would cut the metal skin and everyone inside to shreds. The cargo plane didn’t have any sort of guns itself. Totally defenseless.