While a domestic job like this ordinarily belonged to the FSB, the Snow Maiden, Boris, and Oleg had been heading out to their airport themselves to catch a plane to Poland when they’d picked up the daughter’s limousine. Nadia and her four bodyguards had either spotted the tail or been tipped off.
The Snow Maiden had enjoyed taking out both tires on the limo and forcing them off the road, but it seemed the bodyguards had already planned an alternate escape route and had reached it in the crippled limo. They took Nadia on foot into the “third basement” of Moscow State University, entering Metro-2, the informal name for the secret underground metro system that paralleled the public Moscow Metro. The Snow Maiden wondered if Kasperov and his people were also privy to the Yastreb Complex, that highly classified subterranean fortress beneath Red Square. These were all part of an interconnected system supposedly built during Stalin’s reign and code-named D-6 by the KGB. The tunnels, subway, and secure bunkers provided a fast and secure means of evacuation for leadership through concealed entryways and into protective quarters beneath the city, helping to maintain national command authority during wartime. The trains themselves were safeguarded by electronic surveillance and a small garrison of troops. Nadia’s bodyguards seemed to know about that, too, and they were escorting her down a series of abandoned access tunnels that ran adjacent to the tracks and well out of sight and earshot of that garrison. This section lacked any security and was, in effect, a dilapidated maze leading toward the VIP terminal at Vnukovo Airport.
The Snow Maiden sprinted off and turned left into the first arching entranceway, spotting the shifting lights in the distance. The bodyguards had improvised on the fly, using the flashlight apps on their smartphones to lead the way. The Snow Maiden did likewise. She grimaced as the musty scent grew thicker and the cobwebs wafting down from the ceiling blew across her face. The concrete walls were scarred by rust and mold, and the floors alternated between dirt-covered concrete and what felt like mushy earth.
One of the bodyguards broke off at a T-shaped intersection, turning right while the rest of the group went left. He knew exactly what he was doing, thinking he’d ambush her from behind as she was forced to go after the others.
She ran straight up to the intersection, dropped to her stomach, then shifted the pistol to her weak hand and peered around the corner, her cheek just off the floor.
His light shone on her. She answered with three rounds, the clicks barely echoing as she sprang up and saw he was down, his head blossoming with blood. The other two rounds had struck him in the chest, but he was wearing a vest, probably an old Level IIIA. He was middle-aged and former military, judging from his weapon, crew cut, and tattoo on his wrist. She snatched up his 9mm pistol, an MP-443 Grach, the latest standard issue military sidearm with a seventeen-round magazine. She tucked the pistol into her belt and winked at the dead man. That he’d been killed by a woman had probably annoyed him to no end. She’d bet on it. If he would’ve known she was just the daughter of a simple schoolteacher and car transporter from Vladivostok — not some assassin prodigy raised by a military family — he’d feel even worse.
Three to go. She raced back through the intersecting tunnel, the group’s footfalls unmistakable ahead. The tunnel grew narrower, the concrete support structures turning to wooden beams that resembled railroad ties for a long section, the floor speckled with rat feces.
Nadia was wearing a strong perfume that stood out sharply, and the Snow Maiden reached another intersection where for a moment she thought she’d have to rely on only her sense of smell until a slight thump to the right set her off again toward two more intersections.
They were staging another ambush. She could feel it.
Suddenly, dead silence, only her footfalls.
She stopped, waited, then shifted to the wall and crouched down, slipping her phone into her leather jacket’s inner breast pocket. She let her eyes readjust.
With both hands, she clutched her pistol and aimed for the intersection.
Still nothing…
Back in the car, on the way here, Boris had been smoking a cigarette and asking why they called her the Snow Maiden. She’d never worked with him before, and it’d been interesting to explain it to him, even as she was plotting his death.
Snegurochka was the Snow Maiden in Russian folklore. In one tale she was the daughter of Spring and Frost. She fell in love with a shepherd, but when her heart warmed, she melted. In another narrative, falling in love transformed her into a mortal who would die. In a third story she was the daughter of an old couple who created her from snow. She leapt over a fire and melted.
Major Viktoria Kolosov felt a special attachment to the character that stemmed from something deep in her subconscious. Never warm your heart? In this business, maybe so.
She was holding her breath now, thinking about the single round left in her magazine, the spare six-round mag still tucked in her hip pocket, and the bodyguard’s Grach pressing against the small of her back. She should change guns now but feared making even the slightest movement.
The shadows seemed to collect on the left side of the intersection, and then she saw the silhouette of a head peering around the corner.
She fired, a spark leaping off the wall, damn it. There wasn’t even time to curse. She was already rolling across the floor while reaching into her waistband for the Grach. By the time she came out of her roll, she had the pistol and was raising it while the bodyguard returned fire, three rounds booming and stitching across the floor, extending from her ghost to her current position hunkered down at the opposite wall.
Going asymmetric in a gunfight was not a technique for amateurs or veterans turned bodyguards, men too often married to their conventional tactics. She proved that to this oaf by sensing his pause to check fire.
She sprinted straight up the tunnel in the pitch darkness, spun right, and caught the whites of his eyes as he was just lifting his gun.
Simultaneously, she grabbed his pistol and shot him in the head.
Not a half second later, she dropped to the floor as the guy behind her, the guy whose curse of surprise had given him away, fired above her head.
With her chin buried in her chest, the pistol down low near her knee, she squeezed off two rounds that sent him staggering back.
But he didn’t fall, and the shots must’ve gone high or wide, striking him in the arm or shoulder. She fired once more and he finally dropped.
Thump. Silence again.
She was panting and wincing over the stench of gunpowder. Her ears rang from all the close-quarters gunfire.
Shuddering over how much time she’d wasted here, she sprang up, ejected and pocketed the magazine from one of the bodyguards, then tugged free her phone, its narrow beam now lighting the way.
The last bodyguard would present the greatest challenge. She had to eliminate him without inadvertently killing Nadia, the spoiled little rich girl who, of course, was a research student at ETH Zurich’s Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, CSCS. ETH was considered one of the finest schools in Europe, and daddy had footed the entire bill. Poor baby was having a bad day, wasn’t she?
The Snow Maiden snorted and raced up the tunnel for some thirty meters where it terminated at another T-shaped intersection. Straight ahead hung a small hatch cracked open. She shone the light on the door’s hinges, the rust freshly caked off. She hustled through, emerging into a much broader tunnel at least six meters wide where piles of old railroad ties rose several meters and pieces of track lay in dusty piles. At the far end of the conduit was another opening, the hatch removed from the doorway and propped up against the wall. She assumed that the final bodyguard would want to keep moving, no doubling back to ambush her, so the Snow Maiden picked up the pace. She practically blasted by the doorway and followed the tunnel to the right, where at the far end, some fifty meters away, a faint cry echoed off like a dying bird.