Zolner glanced back over his shoulder at his three men as they walked toward the village. Yakibov had a peculiar bounce in his gate as if he were on his way to a carnival.
It was rare for Zolner to find himself disturbed by another man’s behaviors — but he thought of the smile that had spread over Yakibov’s face and wondered idly as he rode what kind of woman would marry, and have children with, such a beast. Women knew, even if they did not admit it to themselves, what sort of men they married. It was impossible to look into Yakibov’s eyes and see him for anything other than what he was. The former Spetsnaz soldier was surely a sadistic killer and he made no apology for that fact — at least not when he was in the field. It was difficult to think of such a man cheering on his son at a football game. Most people walked through life staring down at their shoes, but someone, anyone who looked at the man’s eyes, was sure to notice the blackness there.
Zolner did not see himself as sadistic. He killed, and he killed often, but death was merely the end result. The joy came from the pursuit, the science of the shot, the competition between the shooter and target, between predator and prey. He rarely gave any more thought to the actual death at the other end of his shot than he had given the bell at the top of the rope he’d had to climb in secondary school. No one cared that you had rung a bell. It was the trip up the rope that mattered.
Chapter 45
The crack of gunfire sent a quiet calm settling over Kaija Merculief. Up to now, all her battles had been fought from behind a computer or at the counter of a post office. She knew what she was doing was important. Her mother had assured her of that. But the fact that someone was actually shooting at her cemented the fact. This was real. Someone thought what she was doing was important enough to try to stop her. The idea of it only strengthened her resolve.
She’d considered pushing her father off the ATV and leaving him alone on the tundra by the time she’d made it five miles out of the village. The man was a millstone around her neck, and she would have gone through with it but for the fact that it would not do any good. Rostov’s men would certainly kill the muddleheaded chemist for her, but nothing would stop them until they had retrieved the New Archangel. Kaija and her mother had not put up with years of Kostya Volodin’s foul breath and awkward embraces to lose the prize at the last moment.
Rostov and his cronies at the Kremlin were weak. Oh, some of them had vision. A very few understood the path necessary to bring about a Novorossiya. Kaija’s mother had known. Her mother had taught her the truth of a New Russia, a Russia free from the tyranny and oppression of the capitalist West with its embargos and sanctions. A New Russia where the Orthodox Church and its people would be pure from the money-lending zhid. Kostya Volodin was a bumbling fool, but his creation would be an enormous step toward real progress.
Kaija had already sent two shipments to the United States. Her mother’s friends from the Black Hundreds had contacts with fishing boats that went to St. Lawrence Island in Alaska. At that point it was a simple matter to mail the two chemicals, in separate packaging, to the village of Ambler where Kaija’s friend Polina had carried them down to the lower forty-eight for delivery to other Black Hundreds contacts already in the United States. It might have been easier to mail them directly, but the contacts in the States had an aversion to post offices, feeling they were death traps crawling with federal agents. The events in Dallas and Los Angeles had proven the pipeline worked.
It could have gone on forever, had Kaija’s imbecile father not thrown everything away in a fit of humanity and drawn the attention of the authorities to his work with the white bellies of ten thousand dead fish. If Kaija’s mother had been alive, she would have stabbed the old fool to death in his sleep.
Kostya Volodin may have been a brilliant chemist, but he was a tool of a weak state machine — and too much of an idiot to see that Maria Merculief had rejoined him with their daughter after years of separation only to gain access to his work.
Kaija’s mother had taught her well. The parental love of a man for his long-lost daughter blinded him more than his feelings for his estranged love. Had Maria come back to him alone, he would have accepted her with open arms, but his rational, scientist’s mind would have been skeptical of her motives. But Kaija’s return chased away the last shred of doubt. To see his daughter again under any circumstance clouded the idiot’s judgment. He would see things as he wanted them to be, rather than the way they actually were.
Reality, Maria Merculief had explained, had no place in a father’s notion of his little girl. And Kaija planned to leverage that weakness until she had no more use for the man — a time that was rapidly approaching. For now, he provided a handy human shield in the event one of Colonel Rostov’s goons got close enough to shoot at her back.
Volodin gripped the metal rack beside his padded seat with one hand and held the wool hat down on his head with the other. Kaija could hear his pitiful grunts and ooofs as she took the ATV up the rutted trail as fast as it would go. The knobby balloon tires crackled on the wet ground, cushioning some of the bounce, but throwing up an enormous amount of mud.
He shouted over the whine of the engine. “Are you sure you know where we are going?”
“No,” Kaija said, not really caring if he heard her or not. She would never, ever forgive him for slapping her for simply stating the truth. She had studied a map on the wall of the hangar where they’d slept in Nome, and knew Ambler lay somewhere ahead of them, but had no idea how far. That too was her father’s fault. When she thought on it, there was a lot for which she would never forgive the man. But that only made it easier to do what she would eventually have to do.
Kaija was no martyr. She was young, with hopes and dreams of seeing the New Russia herself, but her father had given her no option but to flee with the remaining New Archangel. Once they reached Ambler and Polina had taken the chemicals to where they could do the most damage to the United States, Kaija could give herself up to Rostov’s men and blame the entire sordid mess on her father. He was certainly too far gone in the head to deny it. Even now, he probably believed the whole thing was his idea.
She pressed on the throttle with her thumb, taking the ATV up a low hill, chancing a quick look over her shoulder as they reached the top. Behind them, the endless tundra stretched for miles. So far so good, but one small problem nagged at her stomach. Polina had no idea she was on her way.
Chapter 46
Ilia Davydov walked a half step behind the other two Russians, eyes flitting back and forth among the weathered houses. Surely every home in this remote place had several guns. So the men were out hunting. Did it not occur to these fools that the Native women might also know how to shoot? Davydov had always considered himself head and shoulders above these cretins in brains. The way they walked so boldly into such a danger only proved him right.
All three men stopped in their tracks as the figure of an elderly woman emerged from among the houses and walked toward them amid the falling snow. Her navy blue parka was trimmed in the rich brown fur of rosomakha—wolverine. Armed with nothing but her righteous indignation, the old woman hobbled on elderly legs, shaking her fist at the approaching men. She spoke in a guttural Native tongue that sounded as if she was talking around a mouthful of spit.