"Gone while you slept. John Barrymore Dix carried the map you'd sketched for them. Both had their firearms primed and ready." He hesitated, kneeling to pat the wiry little dog as it rolled happily on its back at his feet. "I fear that this dreadful place will be the ending of us, my dear. The good Lord knows that Deathlands is bleak enough. But this Russia is tainted with blood and with dying, layered with far too much hatred."
"Ryan'll be all right. Takes more than a handful of Russkies to chill him."
Doc sighed. "I do agree, Krysty, my dear young lady. But the sad truth is that they are up against far more than a handful of the enemy. Ah, yes. Far, far more."
Krysty tried to keep her interest going, but sleep was too pressing.
She closed her eyes.
Krysty's distinctive red hair had been spotted twice on her journey out of the center of the ville. Zimyanin had three separate reports on his desk by the time she reached the dacha. With the flimsy sheets of recycled paper in his hand, he walked across his office and looked again at the map. He touched the small flags that Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna had supplied not even a week ago and saw that the redheaded woman seemed to be moving back in the same direction — southwest.
"Peredelkino," he said, tugging pensively at his mustache.
"Did you call, Comrade Major-Commissar?" the young blond woman asked nervously, sticking her head around the door. In the past few days life had become unbearably tense in the offices of Internal Security, Moscow. There were too many messages and too many senior officers coming and going. And there was whispered gossip about her boss, about Gregori.
"Nothing, Alicia. Nothing. Thank you for responding so quickly."
She nodded her head and withdrew, finding she was trembling with nerves. A friend of hers shared an apartment with a man whose sister worked in the offices of Pensions and Internal Debts. Anya Zimyanin hadn't been seen for three days, and there were stories of a closed car and a suspicious bundle in a black plastic body bag being toted away from a certain door at five in the morning. That had been the day that Gregori had been in such a good mood, though he'd jerked away from Alicia's fingers when she had tried to point out some small marks on his face, near the hairline, dark brown spots that indicated he'd been splashed with some sticky liquid.
Behind her, the sec officer was in the best of spirits. Gradually the pieces of the jigsaw were beginning to come together: three spies, one who must be wounded or sick; the robbery of tools and the flag. Proof if ever any was needed that they were Americans. Now the woman had fled the ville.
"Alone," he muttered, not wanting the clerk to appear again.
Which meant that the one-eyed man and his other companion were still around. Close to the museum was Zimyanin's personal guess, waiting a chance to escape. Or waiting for other American spies to join them. Extra patrols had been posted on all roads to the southwest to watch for strangers coming out of or into the area.
He unlocked his desk drawer and took out the dog-eared copy of The English Tongue for the Benefit of the Russian Gentleman Abroad.
"Having heard so much about you from mutual friends, it will be a great pleasure for me to finally make your acquaintance," he said.
Zimyanin nodded to himself, pleased with what he had just learned. He put the book carefully back in the desk drawer and locked it. For many weeks he'd worked hard at trying to master the complexities of the American tongue. Soon, very soon, he hoped to have the chance to practice what he had learned.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ryan was awakened by a soft, whispering sound. Someone was easing open the broken door at the side of the warehouse where he and Rick were hiding.
He lay in the midnight darkness with his finger on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer and waited.
There were two intruders. One was trying to press himself through the narrow gap at the side of the door. The rudimentary gas lighting outside cast enough of a golden glow for Ryan to see the shadow — a man, small-built, with the darting reflection off the metal of a handgun.
The other man was already somewhere inside the concrete vault. Whoever he was, he was good. Ryan had checked out the building a dozen times and had thought that all of the windows were secure. Now he knew that one of them wasn't.
The intruder near the door was short, lightly built and had long blond hair. Ryan still couldn't precisely locate the other man. It was difficult to concentrate, with Rick breathing heavily and moving restlessly in his sleep.
If there were only two of them, Ryan thought he should be able to take them out. But if they were part of a larger gang, then he figured it might be time to abandon the freezie and make his own getaway.
Also, if they were merely a couple of local killers trying their chances, it would be dangerous to use the powerful blaster.
Reluctantly Ryan holstered the pistol and drew the long panga from its soft leather sheath on his hip. Hand-to-hand fighting in almost total darkness wasn't among Ryan's favorite occupations. He wished that Jak was with him. The white-haired teenager was the best at close-contact butchery that Ryan had ever seen.
It crossed Ryan's mind that the two men who had crept in on him in the small hours of the morning could, possibly, be J.B. and Jak. The one he'd glimpsed near the door was the right kind of height, as well as having light hair.
Ryan edged away from the pile of rags that he'd been using for a bed. He'd calculated that Krysty's best speed through hostile country wouldn't have been good enough for anyone to have returned from the dacha. So, logically, it wasn't Jak and J.B.
The wooden haft of the panga was warming in his fingers. Ryan held the long blade down at his side to try to avoid the steel catching and reflecting the street light.
He deliberately slowed his breathing and controlled his heartbeat, moving only with infinite patience. The two men didn't seem in any hurry to get to him, and Ryan wasn't in any great hurry to get to them. Rick's mumbling and snoring were the only sounds audible in the large building.
Though he had a nagging doubt that Jak and J.B. might have crept in and were checking the place out, Ryan was ninety-five percent sure it wasn't them. The Armorer had known him long enough not to play triple-stupe by creeping up on him in the dark.
He heard a shuffle of feet toward the rear of the building, where there had been rows of empty closets and shelves. The floor was sprinkled with a number of rusted nails and screws, and the intruder had disturbed one of them.
Ryan waited.
"Patience never killed anyone," the Trader used to say. And the converse was equally true. The man who rushed blind into a fight often finished looking up at the sky.
Ryan waited.
Rick had a coughing fit and muttered under his breath. Ryan listened, hoping that the freezie wouldn't wake up and call out for him. The light in the part of the room where they'd been sleeping wasn't good enough to reveal how many lay there. As long as the two men didn't know that Ryan was up and ready, the advantage of surprise rested with him.
The other danger in Rick's mumbling and restlessness was that it could drown out the sound of someone moving in the darkness. Ryan wished that his fighting sense of hearing was better. If Krysty had been there she'd have pinned down the intruders like a ruby laser.
He waited.
There!
The nerves of one of the men had finally given way and he made his move, coming up out of a crouch against the rear wall, holding what looked like a sawed-off 10-gauge at his hip. The guy was silhouetted for a half second against the yellow light of the front window.
That was all Ryan needed.
He covered the distance between them in eighteen short steps, balanced on the balls of his feet, moving like a graveyard wraith.
He took the intruder from behind, when he was still several yards from the sleeping freezie. It wasn't like trying to take out a sentry without any alarm being raised. In a quiet room, there was absolutely no possibility of chilling the one intruder without the other man hearing the death. The best bet was to take him down fast, and move away into the deeper shadows.