“What would you Americans say? It is insurance.”
Then she and Whitlock crawled into the deadfall shelter. "You need to get right against him and then wrap the blankets around yourselves."
"I know," she said, sounding slightly annoyed. "Hillbilly, do not forget that I am the one who worked in the infirmary.”
“Roger that.”
Although Ramsey had not gotten wet, he was also shivering — when he wasn't wracked by bouts of coughing. "Too bad we don't have an extra nurse to wrap herself around me," he said with a smirk. "Some guys have all the luck."
"Go on in there and huddle up against them as best you can," Cole advised. "It's the best we can do without a fire."
Ramsey did just that, and Cole cut more boughs to close off the front face of the deadfall shelter. The falling snow would add another layer of insulation.
"Now what?" Vaccaro asked, tilting his head into the falling snow. In the growing darkness under the trees, Cole could barely see him.
"Smoke 'em if you got 'em," Cole said. "We ain't goin' nowhere until daylight. The snow ought to cover our tracks soon enough, so I’m not worried about Barkov. Let's get some sleep."
"All right, but don't go spooning up against me now," Vaccaro said.
Cole cackled. "When it gets right cold in the middle of the night, City Boy, ain't gonna be no strangers."
Huddled inside the shelter, Inna felt like some forest creature. The rough-cut fir boughs smelled pleasant, and in the silence she could hear the soft patter of snow accumulating around them. It reminded her of how she had built forts out of blankets and chairs as a child. She had felt safe then. Cozy.
There was something reassuring, too, about sharing simple body heat with Harry. Although it was wrong, she had to admit that she had dreamed of such a moment, when she could be flesh on flesh, skin to skin, with this man. He still shivered, and she wrapped her legs and arms around him as if she could soak right into him, her belly pressed into his back.
"Inna, I—"
"Shhh," she whispered. What was there to say? She was simply glad that he was alive.
A few spasms still worked their way through his body. Inna maneuvered so that she lay on top of him, like a blanket. She could feel every contour of his body, every rib and muscle. She could feel that he was a man, stirred by her warm body. She took his cold hands and guided them to the warmth between her thighs. He flinched. To his icy fingers, the heat felt like a furnace.
Their lips brushed, and then Harry was kissing her, deeply and longingly. His lips still trembled with the cold. It was a kiss that had been delayed for weeks and months by the ever-watchful eyes surrounding them in the Gulag. Indeed, it had proven easier to escape than to steal a few moments of such intimacy.
They held their breath, not wanting to be overheard. Ramsey lay nearby, wrapped in a blanket, already passed out from exhaustion, judging by his measured breathing. Perhaps he was just pretending, hoping to give them some measure of privacy.
She spread her legs and took him into her, which only seemed natural and beautiful. They lay that way for several minutes, simply coupled together, sharing warmth. She clenched him tight inside her. His hips shifted and lifted her, up, up, again and again, both of them moving together, struggling to be as quiet as possible. Inna smothered her cries in his shoulder. Finally, they both seemed to melt into the other. She lay there listening to his heart thudding in his chest, thinking that, just perhaps, it was not such a bad thing to be here in this snow-covered shelter forever.
Together, they drifted off to sleep.
Cole crawled into his own shelter, glad of the slight warmth it offered. Vaccaro was already sound asleep. Cole had thought he might stay awake for a while, standing guard, but exhaustion seeped through his limbs and he found himself falling asleep. Before he did so, he looked up at the sky through the gaps in the branches that made up the roof of the shelter. Snow had a way of reflecting the light, so that the sky was more gray than black when framed against the treetops.
Many times as a boy he had slept rough in the woods rather than return home to face his drunken pa. He would wedge himself under some rocky outcropping and look up at the shimmering stars, picking out the shape of the constellations that his pa had taught him when sober. When you knew the names of the stars in the sky, you were never alone. Orion the Hunter, with his bright belt of three stars in the southern sky, and Cassiopeia the vain queen, kept him company.
The snow must have been letting up, because he thought he glimpsed a single star through the thinning clouds. It was a comforting sight. The clouds drifted across again, and Cole slept.
Cole always had been a light sleeper. He couldn’t say what woke him. Maybe the sleeping part of his brain detected the almost inaudible crunch of snow crystals under a paw, or possibly some part of his subconscious heard the sound of the wolf’s warm breath turning to fog just beyond the opening of his shelter.
That was all the noise that the predator made, but Cole’s eyes flicked open. He held himself perfectly still. The snow created a soft, suffused glow like starlight, and against the backdrop of the forest he saw the wolf looking in.
Slowly, he raised himself to a sitting position facing the opening in his shelter. The eyes that stared back could have been cousins to his own. They glittered in the light reflected by the falling snow. Cole tried to see something in the wolf’s eyes, some glimmer of intelligence. They were a hunter’s eyes, but far from human.
Cole observed the long snout, felt the warm breath inches from his face. The wolf watched him back. They seemed to glare at each other like two old gunfighters, each daring the other to make a move.
The moment was broken when, quick as a copperhead’s strike, Cole balled his fist and struck the snout. The beast yelped and fell back, momentarily stunned, before baring its teeth and approaching the shelter in a crouch, growling. Now, there was no mistaking the wolf’s intent. Cole went at him again, making a snarling sound that wasn’t quite human, this time with his long, gleaming knife in his fist.
He slashed at the wolf and the beast fell away. In the clearing, another ghost-like shape went past, and another. The silence of the lithe shapes was more unnerving than the sight of them.
The camp was under attack, not by Russians, but by wolves.
Not more than twenty feet away, Inna woke because feather-soft snowflakes dusted her face. She blinked awake, surprised that it was not entirely dark; the fresh snow all around them in the forest reflected the light and suffused the air with a kind of soft glow. Harry was sound asleep. Ramsey too.
More snow hit her face, not so gently now, and she thought it must be Cole or one of the others shifting the outer boughs of the shelter.
"What is it?" she whispered, but there was no answer.
She propped herself up on an elbow and peered at the boughs as they separated, expecting to see a familiar face. Instead, two yellow eyes appeared, and then a long, dark snout. It was the face of a wolf, wide as a shovel, fetid canine breath steaming in the narrow space of the shelter.
Inna screamed.
CHAPTER 26
A full-grown Eurasian wolf was more than one hundred and fifty pounds of gristle and sinew, fur and fang. In mid-winter, it would not have been unusual for the hungry wolves to haunt the fringes of the remote villages, hoping for easy prey, whether it was a stray goat or a wandering child. But it was only autumn, and this was the first real snow.
These wolves had grown bold. Aggressive even. The only explanation was that the long war had left a deficit of hunters, allowing the wolves to grow bolder than normal. They had forgotten their natural fear of humans.