Suvorin put down his gun, took off his gloves and checked the pulses of both men - although he knew it was useless -pulling aside the layers of clothing to feel their warm, dead wrists.
How had he ambushed them both?
He looked around.
Like this, probably: he had laid the trap on the path, buried in the snow, and had lured them over it; the man in the lead had missed it, somehow, the man in the rear had been caught - that was the screaming - and the lead man had turned to help only to find their quarry behind them - that was what was cunning: they wouldn't have expected that. And so he had been shot full in the front, and then the second man had been taken out at leisure, executioner-style, with a bullet at point-blank range in the back of the head.
And then he had taken their AK-74s.
What kind of creature was this?
Suvorin knelt by the head of the first soldier and pulled off his ski-mask. He took out his ear-piece and pressed it to his own ear. He thought he could hear something. A rushing sound. He found the little microphone attached to the inside cuff of the dead man's left hand.
'Kretov?' he whispered. 'Kretov?' But the only voice he could hear was his own.
Then the gunfire started up again.
THE fire was like a red dawn through the trees, and when Suvorin stepped out on to the track he could feel the heat of the burning snow plough, even at a range of a hundred yards. The fuel tank must have exploded and the inferno had melted the winter all around it. The vehicle stood blazing in the centre of its own scorched spring.
The gunfire was continuing sporadically, but that wasn't Kretov returning fire. That was boxes of ammunition, exploding in the cab. Kretov himself was sitting down, doubled over in the centre of the track, beside the RP46, as dead as his comrades. He looked as though he had been shot while trying to set up the machine gun. He had got as far as mounting it on to the bipod but he hadn't had time to open the cannister of ammunition.
Suvorin went up to him and touched his arm and Kretov toppled over, his grey eyes open, a look of astonishment on his broad, pink face. Suvorin couldn't see a wound, not at first, anyway. Perhaps the heroic major of the Spetsnaz had simply died of fright?
Another loud bang from the direction of the fire made him look up, to find himself being watched by Comrade Stalin, in his generalissimo's uniform and cap.
The GenSec was some way up the track, standing before the fire, his left hand on his hip, his right holding a rifle almost casually across his shoulder. His shadow was long in proportion '~ to his squat torso. It danced and flickered on the churned snow.
Suvorin thought he would choke on his own heart. They looked at one another. Then Stalin started marching towards him. And marching - that was the word for the way he walked: quickly, but without hurrying, swinging his arms up across his barrel chest, left-right, left-right: look lively there, comrade, here I come! Suvorin fumbled in his pocket for his pistol and realised he had left it in the trees, beside the first two corpses.
Left-right, left-right - the living banner, kicking up the snow -Suvorin didn't dare look at him an instant longer. He knew that if he did he would never move.
'Why is your face so shifty, comrade?' called the advancing figure. 'Why can't you look Comrade Stalin directly in the eyes?'
Suvorin swung the barrel of the RP46, his memory toiling back twenty years, to his compulsory army training, shivering on some godforsaken range on the outskirts of Vitebsk. 'Cock gun by pulling operating handle to the rear. Pull rear sight base to the rear and lift cover. Lay belt, open side up, on the feed plate so that the leading round contacts the cartridge stop and close cover. Pull trigger and gun willfire. .
He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger and the machine gun jumped in his hands, sending a couple of dozen bullets sawing into a birch tree at a range of twenty yards.
When he dared to check the track again Comrade Stalin had disappeared.
IF Suvorin's memory served him right, the ammunition belt of the RP46 carried 250 rounds, which the gun would dispatch at a rate of, say, 600 rounds per minute. So, given he'd already used a few, he probably had something less than thirty seconds of firepower with which to cover 360 degrees of track and forest, with night coming on and the temperature plunging to a level that would kill him in a couple of hours.
He had to get out of the open, that was for sure. He couldn't keep on like this, scrambling round and round like tethered goat in a tiger shoot, trying to see through the gloom of the trees.
He seemed to remember some abandoned wooden huts at the far end of the track. They might provide a bit of cover. He needed to get his back against a wall somewhere, needed time to think.
A wolf howled in the forest.
He disconnected the machine gun from the bipod and hoisted the long barrel up on to his shoulder, the ammunition belt heavy on his arm, his knees almost buckling under the weight, his feet sinking deeper into the snow.
The full-throated howling came again. It was not a wolf’s all, he thought. It was a man - a man's exultant shout: a blood cry.
He started wading up the track, away from the burning snow plough, and he sensed that there was someone walking parallel with him through the trees, keeping an easy pace, laughing at his ponderous attempt at flight. He was being played with, that was all. He would be allowed to get within a few paces of his destination, then he would be shot.
He came out of the neck of the track and into the abandoned settlement and headed for the nearest wooden building. The windows were out, the door had gone, half the roof was missing, it stank. He put down the gun and crawled into the corner, then turned and dragged the weapon after him. He wedged himself against the wall and pointed the barrel at the door, his finger on the trigger.
KELSO heard the big explosion, gunfire, a long pause, and then the short and heavy clatter of a much bigger weapon opening up. He and O'Brian were on their feet by now, frantically trying to find some way of cutting the rope that bound them to the stove chimney. Each sound from the forest drove them to more desperate efforts. The thin plastic was digging into his wrists, his fingers were slippery with blood.
There was blood on the Russian, too, when he appeared in the doorway. Kelso saw it as he came towards them, unsheathing his knife - smeared across his face, on his forehead and on either cheek, like a hunter who had dipped himself in his kill.
'Comrades,' he reported, 'we are dizzy with success. Three are dead. Only one still lives. Are there more?'
'More coming.
'How many more?'
'Fifty,' said Kelso. 'A hundred.' He tugged against the rope. 'Comrade, we must get clear of this place, or they will kill us all. Even you cannot stop so many. They are going to send an army.
ACCORDING to Suvorin's watch, about fifteen minutes had elapsed.
The temperature was plunging as the light faded. His body began to vibrate with the cold - a steady, violent shaking he couldn't stop.
'Come on,' he whispered. 'Come on and finish the job.' But nobody came.
Comrade Stalin's capacity for springing surprises was truly endless.
THE next thing Suvorin heard was a distant click, followed by a whirr.
Click-whirr. Click-whirr.
Now what was he doing?
Suvorin found it hard to move at first. The frost had locked his joints and starched his wet clothes to board. Still, he was on his feet in time to hear the mysterious click-whirr turn suddenly into a cough and then a roar as an engine started.
No, no, not an engine exactly: a motor - an outboard motor- He was baffled for a moment, but then he realised. Fifteen miles, major. It's right on the river. .