She threw herself across him, shoving him to the ground as the crack of a gunshot split the night. He landed heavily on his back, Viktor on top of him, her body suddenly limp and heavy. She'd been hit.
Tom scrambled backward, dragging Viktor with him, until he reached a large snow-covered boulder, instinctively guessing which direction the shot had come from. A few moments later, Archie slid next to him as two further shots landed harmlessly in the snow.
"How is she?" Archie asked.
"Not good," Tom said grimly, cradling her head in his lap, her face pale. A bullet slammed into the rock above Tom's head, and he pulled back just in time to avoid a second shot, a firework of snow exploding overhead. "Who the hell is it? Where did they come from?"
Archie snatched a quick look around the other side of the rock. "It's Hecht."
"Hecht! Shit." Tom kicked himself for not having tied him up. He rolled Viktor over onto her side and saw the snow sticky and dark where the bullet had penetrated her lower back. "She needs help fast. We've got to do something before he works out that we don't have a gun. We're sitting ducks out here."
"Any ideas?"
"What about the fourth charge?"
"What?"
"The fourth explosive charge. Didn't you say it was near the entrance? If we set that off, we'll bury him."
"Where's the detonator?"
"Viktor had it," Tom said, feeling inside her pockets. "She took it off me when she gave me the radio. Shit, it's not here. She must have dropped it."
He peeked around the side of the rock and saw the detonator's sleek black shape lying in the snow.
"Can you see it?" asked Archie.
"Yeah," said Tom. "About ten feet away."
"Then this is the plan. I'll draw his fire while you run and get the detonator."
"No way." Tom shook his head. "It's too dangerous."
"It's not much more dangerous than waiting here for Hecht to come and find us, is it? And meanwhile, Viktor's bleeding to death."
"Okay," Tom conceded. "But keep your head down."
"Don't worry, I will." Archie grinned. "See you back here in five."
Archie jumped up and burst over to the right, heading for the nearest tree. A barrage of gunfire immediately erupted from the mine entrance, bullets fizzing through the air and embedding themselves in the trees with a thud or landing in the snow with a hiss. At the same time, Tom rolled out from the other side of the boulder and sprinted toward the detonator. The few seconds it took him to reach it seemed to last forever.
He grabbed it and turned to make his way back. The shooting stopped. Tom looked up fearfully and saw Hecht standing in the mine entrance, staring straight at him, a vicious leer etched across his scarred face, the gun raised and poised to fire. Tom froze, momentarily transfixed by Hecht's glittering eyes. But then he noticed a shadow peel away from the mine wall behind Hecht. A shadow with a knife glinting in its hand. A shadow with one hand.
Renwick.
With a frenzied cry, Renwick jumped on Hecht, plunging the knife into the small of his back. Hecht roared in pain, the gun dropping from his grasp as he reached around and clutched his wound, before bringing his blood-soaked hands back to his face. With an angry shout he spun to face Ren-wick, advancing slowly upon him like a bear walking on its hind legs. Renwick lunged at him again, catching him first across his forearm, then at the top of his thigh, but Hecht didn't seem to notice, advancing irresistibly until he fell on Renwick with a series of heavy punches. Both men tumbled to the ground and rolled out of sight down into the mine.
Tom ran back behind the boulder. Viktor had regained consciousness, and she smiled at him weakly.
"Hang in there," he said with a worried look. "Dom will have some people up here in no time. We'll soon have you back home."
"I'm not going back home," she said simply.
"Of course you are," Tom protested. "We'll patch you up. You'll be fine."
"I'm never going back. I've got it all planned. That's why I came here with you. So they couldn't stop me."
"What do you mean?"
"I've got money saved. I'm getting out. While I still can. Like you."
"Good for you," Tom said, tears filling his eyes as he saw the bloodstain swelling underneath her.
"Like you said, it's never too late," she said with a smile.
Tom said nothing, his throat swollen as he felt the life ebb out of her until, with a final burst of energy, Viktor suddenly reached up and pulled Tom's lips down to hers.
"Thank you." She exhaled, her hand slipping down Tom's neck, along his arm, to where his hand was holding the detonator. Her eyes flickering shut, she pressed the fourth button.
This time the explosion was ferocious and immediate as the mine entrance collapsed, bits of stone and debris flying through the air. Tom threw himself to the ground, his body arched over Viktor's to shield her. The heat of the blast seared into his cheeks, the ground twisting and groaning and moaning beneath him, the trees creaking and whining dangerously.
As the echo faded, a thick cloud of dust and smoke remained, hanging in the air like a heavy fog, making him cough and his eyes stream. He heard a shout and saw Dominique emerging into the clearing, accompanied by about ten armed Austrian policemen.
Tom looked down at Viktor's pale face. A smile was frozen on her lips. He carefully rearranged her hair to cover her scarred ear.
In the moonlight, the large pool of blood that had soaked into the snow around her looked quite black, like a dark mirror.
EPILOGUE
A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita—"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
The freshly turned earth lay in a smooth mound, a narrow black finger against the whiteness of the surrounding ground covered in snow. In the distance, smoke rose from a small mountain range of factory chimneys. Gray and dirty, it drifted aimlessly upward until, touching the sun, it suddenly blossomed into a glorious pink cloud that soared toward the empty heavens.
Tom knelt down and grasped a handful of earth. He rubbed it through his fingers, the cold already freezing the moisture so that it crumbled like small grains of ice to the ground.
"What do you think we should put on her gravestone?" asked Archie.
"Katya. Her name was Katya," Tom said firmly. "Katya Nikolaevna Mostov."
"To me, she'll always be Viktor," Archie said with a shrug. "Katya just doesn't seem to fit somehow."
"It fits who she once was and who she hoped to be again, one day," Tom said. "She never really wanted her life as Viktor. She just sort of fell into it and found she couldn't escape."
"I think that's what she liked in you," Archie said, drawing on a freshly lit cigarette. "The fact that you'd also ended up in a place you realized you didn't want to be and had somehow walked away."
There was a pause, and Tom shifted his weight to his other foot as he stared silently at the ground.
"Any news on Dmitri?" he asked eventually.
"Bailey called me last night. There's no sign of him yet. Lucky bastard must have been outside when we set off the charges."
"Any survivors?"
"Sixteen in all. Four dead. They must have been caught in the tunnel."
"What about the uranium? What's going to happen to that?"
"It's safe, although apparently the Germans and Austri-ans can't agree who it belongs to."
"No surprises there," Tom said with a shrug. "What about Bailey? Is he in the clear?"