Rake concentrated on Carrie. From where he stood, he could see that she was alive and seemed uninjured, scrambling away from the crashed helicopter. Then came the fuel-tank blast which hid her in smoke. Then it cleared and he watched her get up. She put her glove to her face in what looked like a regular frostbite check after skin contact with ice. She examined a patient. Carrie was doing what she did best, being fine, being with the wounded.
Then Rake saw four men moving towards him like sentinels, meaning that he was exposed and they knew where he was. He had to get himself into cover.
All he had was a Makarov 9mm pistol and a Vityaz automatic rifle with no reputation for accuracy. Its two-hundred-meter outer range was about where the enemy was now. The rest of the equipment lay scattered on the hillside behind him.
To surrender would be suicide. Russia needed to display his dead body. To his left stood the ice wall he had identified earlier. Over the winter, ice walls grow like snowballs gathering soft snow. Their origins are iceberg slither that appears above the water. Then in gale after gale, water and debris flung against them make them bigger each time. Rake had seen ice walls in many shapes. This one looked low and long, no more than four feet high, but it could extend fifty feet down towards the seabed. He judged it to be at least six-feet wide which was enough to stop a high-velocity small-arms bullet. If he could get there, he might be able to take all four men before another helicopter came close. As he ran towards it, he saw the flash of a shot. It went very wide, probably out of range. That was good. It meant his enemy was angry and impatient.
More gunfire chipped off the top of the wall, spraying ice pellets towards him. He made it to cover and lying flat, elbows embedded in snow, he tried to line up a shot. The wind was erratic and he hadn’t sighted the weapon for the cold. His target was moving too quickly, but if he could not make a kill now, it would mean close-quarter fighting. They weren’t far away, but they had separated and were approaching from both sides. Even he wasn’t good enough to take them all. He didn’t know a man who could.
Rake did not pull the trigger. His finger was not even inside the trigger guard. But bullets tore into one soldier’s face, destroying the head and sending out webs of blood as he fell to the ground. A second soldier, although thirty yards away, died in exactly the same way. A sniper’s shot. The two surviving soldiers ran towards him, firing at the same time. Their bullets smashed uselessly into the wall. A third soldier was hit in the legs, his screams shrill and haunting like those of any young men suddenly wounded.
Rake heard the low-pitched whine of a snowmobile coming fast from the east. The fourth soldier flattened himself on the ground.
In camouflage, Arctic white, the snowmobile was military issue. From the tone, it would have carried a 1,000-cc engine, and could be moving at sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour, slowing to navigate an ice hazard, then speeding up again. The driver looped around checking each of his targets and signaling Rake to keep the fourth soldier covered. Rake tensed, trigger poised, but the Russian surrendered. The driver took his weapons, stood him up and pointed for him to walk back to his people. The soldier obeyed. Whoever this was, he was alone; he didn’t want prisoners, but he didn’t kill for the sake of it.
The snowmobile approached and Rake saw the driver was encased in the full skin of a polar bear. It would have weighed more than fifty pounds, but Don Ondola carried it with no more effort than an overcoat. The last time Rake had seen Ondola he was in court and Rake stood as character witness. There wasn’t a lot to say when a man got drunk, killed his wife, and raped his daughter, although that last one wasn’t even on the charge sheet. Ondola might be the finest outdoorsman in Alaska. He might have saved Rake’s life the day Tuuq left him to die in Uelen. But drink is drink, murder is murder, and the law’s the law. He had asked Rake only one favor and that was send him the polar-bear hide in prison.
Ondola pulled up next to Rake, got down, and lifted the skin. His face was thin, skin stretched and creased with a grin. ‘They said I could find you out here,’ he said, as if bumping into Rake in the village. ‘How you doing, Rake?’ A gloomy mist swept along the ground. Lights from the Russian troops were blurred, and the beams of floodlamps splayed and bounced off the whiteness.
Cluttered with gear, filled with appreciation, Rake embraced him. ‘So, you brought the marines across from the mainland?’ he asked.
Ondola nodded. ‘They’re on standby. They’ve been told to stay put.’
A siren started up from near the crashed Russian wreckage. Both men watched through binoculars. A medical helicopter hovered inches above the ice. Two bodies were lifted on board. Carrie climbed up, followed by the commander and others. The door slid shut and the aircraft turned quickly and flew nose-down, low and fast, towards the Russian base.
Rake and Ondola didn’t have long. The Russians would come for them again, with more men and aircraft.
‘You heading across there?’ asked Ondola.
‘Those are my orders unless they sent you here to tell me different.’
‘They didn’t send me, Rake.’ Ondola fidgeted with his weapon. ‘I split. I’m not going back to prison.’
‘You’ll be running all your life.’ Many times, Rake had tried reasoning with Ondola, but his brain wasn’t wired like that.
This time, Ondola pre-empted him. ‘Up here,’ he flattened his hand on his head, ‘I don’t think straight and I do bad things. Only place I’m any good is out here in the wild.’ His mind might be tortured, but his face was calm and, given what he had just done, he seemed untroubled. ‘I heard Akna’s over there, with a baby.’
‘She is.’ Rake scanned the landscape.
‘I’ll get you there,’ said Ondola.
Rake glanced at the snowmobile. ‘No chance with this.’
‘No. They’d cut us down. I brought more skins.’
The best camouflage on the ice was animal skin, seal, walrus, polar bear. No synthetic material matched it. Ondola took a collapsible sled from the back of the vehicle.
‘Go back,’ said Rake. ‘It’s not worth it.’
‘I need to see Akna. Tell her I’m sorry.’
The ice was harsh, shimmering, with shades of contrasting gray, white, and darkness. It reminded him of a burning hot desert in Iraq. ‘They sent Nikki to get me,’ said Rake.
‘Nikki Tuuq? Is he out here?’
‘Yes. Somewhere. I saw him with Timo.’
Ondola pulled a magazine from his weapon as if checking it. ‘How is Timo?’ he asked softly. Timo was Akna’s half-brother. Ondola had raised him like his own son until the night he killed Akna’s mother.
‘Timo’s fine. Henry’s watching over him now.’
‘Henry wants me dead.’
They lifted the skins onto the sled. Rake wanted to say more, to persuade Ondola to serve his time so he could walk free and try to get better. But not here. Not now. And besides, Ondola’s mind was set.
‘Can I beat Nikki Tuuq?’ asked Rake.
‘You can’t,’ said Ondola. ‘Not alone. Nikki’s too good. You’ll need my help.’
TWENTY-NINE
Stephanie stepped across the checkered black and white tiled floor of her residence, suddenly filled with nostalgia. By God, she had held some strained meetings here, lavish parties too, but nothing compared to what was about to unfold. She weaved through ornate gold pillars and headed to the dining room, stopping abruptly at the entrance.
Harry had called her moments after Carrie’s helicopter went down. She was replying to Sergey Grizlov’s message that asked her to get back to him as soon as possible. It wasn’t his usual number. She dialed, but it rang out. No reply. No voicemail.