‘That’s not the point.’
‘What is the point?’
Two soldiers lifted Joan from her seat and unlocked her cuffs.
‘We’re going out again,’ said Vitruk.
A dread of the dark, cold, and wind enveloped Carrie. Joan, a soldier each side, walked ahead, silent and composed. Water was still running down Carrie’s coat as she put it back on.
‘We won’t be long.’ Vitruk’s voice was empty, eyes dark with resolve.
A sub-zero wind tore across Carrie’s face as she stepped out. Her eyes streamed and she struggled to adjust her goggles. Six soldiers led them down a path beside the main building towards the shoreline. In less than a minute the wind died and there was clarity. A soft moon cast a grayish-white light over a landscape peppered with odd shapes. It was such a different one from the one Carrie had left not long ago. Without the wind, it was as if she could see for miles.
Some of the ice was smooth, polished, and reflecting light like globes. Other parts were jagged and black where dirty sea water had been thrown up by gusts and instantly frozen. The most dominant in front of her was a wall of ice about fifty meters from the shore. It must have been twelve-feet high and thirty-feet long. Rake had once explained how it would have built up over weeks from wind shear created by the island’s hills. A concrete pier jutted out towards it from the shore.
‘The Eskimo took advantage of our helicopter casualties,’ Vitruk shouted close to her right ear. ‘He offered help. We brought him out here. Fog hit and he escaped. The Eskimo woman will find him for us.’
A soldier unlocked Joan’s cuffs and pinned a GPS tracker to her coat. Another soldier walked out to the pier, laid down a white mat, then set a rifle on a bipod and adjusted its telescopic sight. Another did the same to the left of where they were. Two more snipers set up on the roof of the building behind them.
‘Mrs Ahkvaluk,’ said Vitruk. ‘You will walk out so your husband sees you. You will beckon him in. If he does not appear, one of my men will wound you, first in the arm, then in the leg. If he doesn’t come then, you will know he is not worthy to be your husband. We will collect you, and Dr Walker will treat your wounds. My men are skilled. You have nothing to fear except pain. Do you understand?’
‘You cannot do this!’ shouted Carrie.
‘Let him,’ said Joan. ‘He will not see me again.’
Vitruk signaled his men. Two took Joan’s arm and led her down the pier. She walked smoothly, her steps skillfully working the unevenness of the frozen surface. Seamlessly, the end of the pier became a boulder of ice. The soldiers let go her arms. Without looking back, Joan walked. Once she leant down, using her hands to lower herself from a rock. After that she kept going, looping to the left of the ice wall.
‘Henry Ahkvaluk knows the layout of this base,’ said Vitruk as they watched Joan’s figure get smaller and smaller. ‘I can’t afford to let him get to the other side.’
‘Then why bring him here?’ said Carrie. ‘Why bring any of us here?’
‘Take a look.’ Vitruk handed her his binoculars. They powerfully magnified Joan in an aura of black and green, defining her against the landscape.
‘Two o’clock to her right. Do you see?’
There was someone moving forward, right arm outstretched, breaking into a run. For sure it wasn’t Rake. He was too tall. It had to be Henry. Carrie remembered what Rake had said, that Joan and Henry were one of the few intact married couple on Little Diomede. Now, trying to meet on the ice, they were both running towards their own deaths.
‘Bring him in,’ she told Vitruk. ‘And watch over him properly this time. Do not shoot him.’
‘He’s too dangerous. He knows too much.’
‘Bullshit,’ screamed Carrie. A soldier grabbed her wrist and brought her left arm up hard behind her back, causing excruciating pain. The moon, low in the sky, cast a shadow from Joan, long and gray, that moved by her side. Bleak desolation stretched from horizon to horizon. There was none of Rake’s romance, only a terrifying deadness that killed those who challenged it.
Carrie wished Joan would vanish into one of the fog patches that floated around her. Instead, she stopped. She held up both hands like a traffic cop telling Henry to go back. Vitruk spoke to the closest sniper, lying a few yards from them. He gave orders in his radio.
‘No!’ yelled Carrie, her arms pinned to her side by a soldier.
Vitruk barked an order. Orange flames from an exploding cartridge leapt from the breach of the rifle.
THIRTY-TWO
To Vitruk, the way the night-vision lenses conflated the image looked as if his soldier had fired a second shot from the pier.
That wasn’t the case.
The soldier was killed by a shot that came from out of the ice.
There was no convulsion, no arterial blood. The bullet came in at the top of the neck and severed the spinal cord. The body slumped instantly and lost life. Only a handful of men in the world could make such a shot. Vitruk had seen it only once before. He moved back just before another bullet struck the ground exactly where he had been standing. The second sniper looked up to sight the target. He was shot in the face.
‘Take her in,’ ordered Vitruk. Carrie was dragged to cover between the two buildings. Vitruk stayed exposed, moving back and forth so quickly that no marksman would get a shot. He looked for human movement and saw none.
A soldier ran up to him. Coming to a standstill, clicking his heels, he handed him a note. ‘Sir, urgent—’ He was about to salute when Vitruk hurled his body weight against him, throwing them both to the ground. A shot smashed into the wall behind them and, through a tiny flash, he thought saw the location of the trigger.
‘Floodlamps,’ he shouted. The wall of ice lit up like castle ramparts. Vitruk signaled toward the roofs of the two buildings. ‘Field of fire along the top.’
Each building had a 76mm anti-aircraft unit and two Kord 12.7mm heavy machine guns. There was a deafening roar of large-caliber gunfire. Snow chunks broke away like exploding masonry. Ice spun into the air. Mist mixed with gun smoke as layer after layer was peeled off. No one caught in that onslaught of lead could survive.
‘Hold fire.’
Through binoculars he saw the marksman.
‘The ridge.’
Two bursts of machine-gun fire slammed into the target. Vitruk swept the wider area through his night vision. There was no Joan Ahkvaluk out there; no husband. They would be next. But he had the sniper. He checked the mutilated top of the ice wall again and didn’t expect what he saw. He looked with his naked eye, patch by bullet-torn patch, to make sure he was missing nothing. He checked again through the binoculars. A shape lay flat and skewed from the gunfire. But this wasn’t a gunman. It was the skin of a wild animal, blended in with the ice. Staring directly at him like a calling card was the black skull of a dead polar bear. The killer had gone.
A heat of fury ran through him. He knew only one man who could have achieved what this marksman had, and he was Nikita Tuuq. Yet this was someone as good, probably better. Both were out there, which meant that Tuuq was compromised. Vitruk pushed himself to his feet and banged his gloved hands together. Should he summon back Tuuq, who would have gone to ground? His phone and radio would be off. They had a system of emergency flares. Red for recall. Orange for standby. Green for proceed to the kill.
Vitruk shared his soldiers’ own anger. So many hours into the operation and he had achieved little except the death of his men. Another two comrades were dead. Just over an hour ago, three more had died, two on the ice and one in hospital. The helicopter shot down, the six men on the top of the American island. It was a stream of catastrophe, the reality of war.