It wasn’t perfect, but it was as good as it would get.
He slid out from behind the rocks and eased himself towards the group. Hunting on the ice was all about the kill. You didn’t wound. Silently, invisibly, he moved through the snow until he was close enough. In position, he chose his order of targets, judged flak jackets, anticipated moves. The wind remained cruel, the snowfall a blizzard. It would muffle the noise of gunfire.
He squeezed the trigger. A soldier’s head disintegrated, spraying bone and brain around him. Another fell, splitting his head on an exposed rock, blood spilling out on both sides like cut fruit. The frost-bitten soldier with no body armor took a straight torso shot. The spill of crimson told Rake he had hit the heart. The medic treating him turned as three rounds cut through his skull. His legs buckled and he folded onto himself, shoulders slumped, feet skewed and barely a face to speak of. A fifth man managed to fire back, but wildly because he had no target. He died a second later.
Rake kept his finger on the trigger until they were all down and the magazine empty. He switched weapons and trod across the rocks to where they lay sprawled, skewed and awkward in snow that was turning dark red and melting with the warmth of their blood. This was an NCO unit, led by a sergeant. He took the radio and reloaded the first M14.
The fog was thick, and to find the sixth soldier he would have to go towards the easterly edge and hope for luck. He crawled on his elbows, fifteen feet at a time, checked, saw nothing, and crawled again. The radio stayed silent.
A lull in the weather brought his target into vision. The moon appeared like a searchlight illuminating the flat barren whiteness around them. The soldier was barely fifty feet away and coming towards him. The man walked carefully, knowing something wasn’t right. He held his weapon in his right hand and reached with his left towards the top of his uniform, which Rake guessed would be the radio button.
Rake fired, but it wasn’t a clean shot. The soldier stumbled, tried to get his balance, missed his footing on a rock, and fell. Rake pressed the trigger again. The weapon jammed. He fumbled for the second M14, but the soldier, from the ground, already had his weapon raised. Rake twisted away just as bullets hissed by his ears.
Sudden, new fog cut his vision. The soldier was close, but he no longer saw him. Rake drew his double-bladed knife. The fog would lift just as suddenly, without warning, at any second. When it did, one of them would have the advantage. Or the soldier would fire blindly and give away his position. Rake stayed still, barely breathing. Through the fog, he could just make out the darker shape of the soldier edging towards him.
Rake uncoiled himself and rammed the butt of his jammed weapon into the soldier’s mouth. His head jerked back, but his right arm clawed, ripping away Rake’s face mask. Rake hit him in the neck, then in the temple, and fell to the ground with him. He pulled away his weapon and broke the radio cable. Even hurt and down, the soldier still had enormous strength. The knife was in Rake’s right hand. He needed to get it up to the neck, vulnerable above the body armor where death would be near instantaneous. But Rake couldn’t. The soldier held Rake’s arm in an unbreakable grip. His mask was torn and Rake could see his enemy’s face and eyes clearly.
‘We don’t have to,’ whispered the Russian.
But they did have to. There was no other way. Rake’s expression softened and he loosened his left arm enough to let the Russian believe he was listening. He stopped trying to bring the knife up which the soldier was resisting, instead shifting his strength to lower it as if relaxing the attack. He saw a flash in the soldier’s eyes. Yes, they did have to. With a clockwise turn, Rake plunged the knife downwards, sliding it under the soldier’s flak jacket and up through the ribcage. The body arched and the grip fell away. His face contorted in pain as Rake pushed harder and the blade cut through his lungs and other vital organs towards his heart. Blood bubbled from the man’s nostrils and mouth and froze. The body went limp.
Rake sealed his own mask, but found himself tearing off the soldier’s goggles. He wanted to see the whole face, to show respect. The soldier was brave and rough, but he was a child, like the first one he killed in the school with the poster-boy face. They sent them out so young, and Rake hated them for it.
He put the boy’s radio and phone into his bag. He went back to the other corpses and took all their phones. They would be useful because it was safer to use a message from a civilian phone than open the channel on a military radio. They were in protective cases to preserve battery life.
Rake loaded up the sled. He divided weapons, food, and equipment into six separate packs. Even if he lost five in the descent, he would have one pack with which to keep going. He lashed them down. He kept out the night-vision binoculars to look over toward Big Diomede. Clear weather and sturdy lenses would allow him to spot dangerous open channels where sea water still ran. He read the dark and light patches where the sea ice would be strong enough to cross.
He was looking for something else too, which he saw as the moon emerged from behind a leaden cloud, its light falling like a lamp flickering on the ice. Midway between the two islands there was a packed and hard track not yet covered by the new fall of snow. It ended against a tall lump of ice. He thought he saw a ruffle of shadow against the whiteness. It could have been his eyes playing tricks, but he imagined Nikita Tuuq down there, watching. A man like Tuuq could wait like an animal, unseen for hours, even days, nursing his hatred of his half-brother and his mission to kill.
If he were Tuuq he would hide out between the two islands where he could see everything. While Tuuq was out there, Rake would not be able to get across.
TWENTY-TWO
At the moment that Rake was killing the Russian soldier, Karl Opokin, Chairman of Russia’s Central Bank, pulled back the lace curtain of the huge windows in the Russian Embassy and looked out onto Wisconsin Avenue. He counted four police cars, two unmarked Lincoln Town Cars, and an untold number of television satellite trucks.
Russia was enemy number one and its embassy was as good as under siege.
Opokin was skilled in balancing Russia’s finances between the institutions of organized crime, oligarchies, and government. His whole career had been built on juggling the character of the Russian Federation with the practicalities of twenty-first-century economics. But with the Eccles Building a charred shell and his friend Roy Carrol dead, Opokin felt shipwrecked.
‘Speaker Grizlov is calling from Moscow, sir,’ said his aide.
Sergey Grizlov, the ambitious Chairman of the State Duma, was a master of political manipulation and tipped as a successor to President Lagutov. Opokin accepted that he might have been the architect of drawing the new border and disputing the Alaska Purchase, but there was no way that Grizlov, a supporter of all the West had to offer, would have been responsible for this bombing. Opokin let go of the curtain and walked across the room to take the call.
‘How are you holding up, Karl?’ Grizlov sounded worried.
‘What the hell is going on?’ said Opokin. ‘Roy Carrol was one of my closest—’
‘I know, Karl. I know. It’s dreadful. I’ll be quick because everything is so fluid. The Kremlin is about to ask the Central Bank to set aside funds to help companies caught up in all this. It’s short-term, until things settle. To tide things over.’
This was old Russia, thought Opokin angrily. Mess things up and have others clean up behind you. ‘How much?’ he asked with deliberate caution.
‘Well into the billions. I heard twenty.’