There were grim nods all around the guttering fire, which Rick hit again with an arc of lightning to keep going under the deluge. Cal stood and felt his back protest — it’d been a few weeks since he’d been able to grab a bit of life from some livestock, and his body was getting older. No matter how much life force he gathered to make himself strong and young, or how much healing he did to age himself, Cal’s body was like a slow-motion rubber band, eventually heading back to his late fifties. He’d arrived in Korea the equivalent of a hale, hearty twenty-eight-year-old, but was feeling easily ten years older than that now.
“Are you okay?” Miguel asked quietly.
Cal smiled at him. “I ain’t no good sleeping on the ground like you young boys.”
“You’re aging.”
“It’s what I do, Miguel,” Cal said with a nod. “I heal folks, and I get older. I take life from people or animals, I get younger. If I do neither, I fall back to my regular age.”
“How old are you?”
“Old enough to be your daddy, and that’s as specific as I care to be right now,” Cal said with a smile. “Now, I suggest you get yourself some rations and ammo and whatever else you need. We’re gonna be out there a while.”
Miguel nodded and headed down the hill toward the bulk of the battalion covering this part of the front. They had free rein to grab whatever they needed, within reason, and Cal was sorely tempted to grab a jeep and just drive. But that was suicide. Here, in the dark and the rain, they had the best chance of sneaking across the lines and settling into Chinese territory. It was the perfect weather for—
Cal heard a large branch snap in the woods off to his left and, even through the rain, some sort of muffled whisper.
Perfect weather for an ambush.
“Down!” Cal shouted, diving for the mud.
Muzzle flashes lit up the woods from both sides of their little encampment, and the ground was sprayed with bullets and mud. Cal heard more shots from back down the hill, and figured Miguel was being kept busy as well. Hopefully he’d run out of Chinese before he ran out of bullets.
A blinding light erupted next to Cal as he huddled down behind a rock; Yamato was going to work with the lightning again, but stopped after a few seconds or so.
“I can’t see for shit,” Yamato yelled. “Don’t know what I’m hitting!”
About a hundred yards away, Cal could hear excited shouting from multiple people. “Shi tāmen! Shi tāmen!” “Tāmen zai zhe’er!” “Gàosù Hei Feng!” “Gàosù bùxi
!” “W
men b
tāmen bāowéile!”
“Kim? What they saying?” Cal called out.
Cal looked around for the Korean translator, but Kim was nowhere to be seen from Cal’s admittedly horrible vantage point. The fact that all that chatter was happening after Yamato lit up the place couldn’t be good, though. Cal was used to people running away from Yamato’s lightning. These boys weren’t.
The rain stopped.
But it didn’t just peter out, nor did any sort of wind push through. The rain just stopped dead. Cal looked up at the clouds, but they were low and black and seemed like they were still ready to open up. And the sound of rain was still all around them. About twenty yards away, Cal could still see the mud splashing up from the ground where the rain was landing.
Oh, this ain’t good.
“Move! Back down the hill!” Cal cried out. “Let’s go!”
Cal grabbed Yamato by the scruff of his poncho and dragged the young man to his feet, but before they could get going, a metal canister landed at Cal’s feet, a thick cloud of white gas spewing forth from it. Cal tried to kick it away, but the gas was already doing its work, and his foot missed the target as his world suddenly became very dizzy.
As Cal fell back onto the mud, he began to nod. He understood it now.
Just as they were hunting the Immortal Black Wind, no doubt Hei Feng was doing the same, looking for the lightning thrower and his friends.
Then Cal’s world went black, his last conscious thought being how disappointed Sally was gonna be that he wasn’t coming home.
11
Light bathed the grand hall of Leningrad’s Moskovsky Station, a welcome respite from the concrete-and-brick gray of more recent Soviet architecture. A bust of Lenin, stern and visionary, welcomed Danny into the building, but the authorities somehow deemed the station’s mid-nineteenth-century facade and interiors worthy of preservation, even after a recent renovation that somehow failed to overshadow the building’s grandeur. It reminded Danny of Grand Central in New York, or Union Station in Washington — a temple to the idea that everyday people could escape their place of origin and see more of the world than their parents and grandparents could ever imagine.
Of course, this was the Soviet Union, and travel was still highly regulated and monitored. Thankfully, a different shift was working security today than had been on duty last night when Danny arrived. This was intentional, of course, but there was a risk that there would be someone putting in some overtime or covering for a sick comrade. Danny had different papers today, ones that said he’d arrived in Leningrad two weeks prior to provide assistance to the Ministry of Agriculture as a student of the Moscow Agricultural Institute. Yesterday, he’d been a dockworker newly assigned to one of the shipyards.
The student papers at least got him into a slightly better berth on the return train to Moscow, which he looked forward to greatly after yesterday’s journey on a hard wooden bench, pushed against the window by a couple of pensioners who took up generous amounts of pine. But Danny lingered over a cup of tea near the track, carefully watching the train through the reflection of a distant window, an old tradecraft trick, while pretending to read today’s Izvestia newspaper. Izvestia meant “News” in Russian, and was paired with Pravda (“Truth”) at most newsstands. He was reminded of the phrase heard constantly all over the Soviet Union: V novostyakh net pravdy, i nikakikh novosti v pravde net. “There is no news in Truth, and no truth in News.”
For all the rallies and slogans spouted off at every corner, it felt good to know that most of the Russians still weren’t buying the Party line wholesale. Most of the people milling around him were just regular Joes and Janes — well, Ivans and Ioannas — trying to get through the day. That gave him hope. Maybe, one day, even Variants would be accepted with that sort of collective shrug. But not if Beria had his way. Danny knew, as surely as he knew his own name, the Joes and Janes and Ivans and Ioannas would quickly turn on Variants around the world if they believed they were trying to seize power, no matter how careful they were. The best Variant paradise would be one in which they could live like everyone else, drinking tea and reading newspapers and catching trains to wherever they needed to be.
The sounds of heavy bootsteps echoed down the track, and Danny looked up at the window to see a squad of uniformed men walking behind him toward his train. He couldn’t see the uniforms in the dim reflection, but he concentrated a moment and felt the presence of three Variants very close by. Turning to throw his newspaper in a rubbish bin, Danny looked up to see that, yes, the men were wearing NKVD uniforms, and were boarding the fifth car of the train. Danny was in the seventh car. Perfect.