"Kobelev had Tatiana, so he fled on foot. He said if you had me maybe you would let him go."
"He must be dreaming! My orders are to kill him. I'll do it. He must know that. Which way did he go?"
She pointed up the track.
Carter followed her finger and shook his head, wondering what on earth Kobelev wanted in that direction. "How long ago?" he asked.
"Two hours. I don't know. Maybe a little longer."
Roberta broke in sympathetically. "You must be frozen clear through."
Carter and Roberta each gave her an arm and helped her up the ladder and into the engine room. While Cynthia warmed herself and got Roberta to tell her all that had happened while she'd been unconscious. Carter rummaged through the train, looking for anything he might be able to use in his pursuit of Kobelev. Within ten minutes he was back, his arms full.
"A gold mine," he muttered as he dropped it all with a clatter on the engine room floor. "Apparently, avalanches are fairly common along this section of track, and the train carries ample equipment in case the crew has to hike out of here."
On the floor were several pairs of snowshoes, three pickaxes, tents, an emergency stove, a bundle of flares, more coats and mittens, and two heavy-duty flashlights.
"There was even a shortwave radio," he said.
"Working?" asked Roberta hopefully.
Carter shook his head. "Sabotaged. Probably the first thing Kobelev did when he got on board. Oh — I found one other thing." He produced a large folded piece of paper from his back pocket. "A map," he said, spreading it on the floor. "According to this, there's a town about twelve miles down the line. Doesn't look very big, though."
"It's got a phone no doubt, or a radio," said Roberta.
"You think that's where he's headed?"
Roberta nodded. "If I were him, I'd want to get out of here the quickest way I could."
"He said something about a town," put in Cynthia. "Alba… something."
"Alba Iulia," finished Carter. "That's it, then. I'd better get going. He's got a two-hour head start."
"Nick," Cynthia said, "take me with you."
Carter shook his head. "This is going to be very unpleasant work. And if you miss a cue, you'll get more than just a groan from the audience."
"I'm an experienced mountain climber, Nick. I spent most of my teen-age years in Colorado scaling rocks like Diamond Head and the north face of Long's Peak. I know what I'm doing."
"We're going to kill a man. Think you have the stomach for it?"
"That man, yes," she said resolutely.
"Well…" said Carter, starting to give in, but Roberta interrupted.
"May I speak with you alone?" she asked.
They descended the narrow steps out into the snow. When they were well out of Cynthia's earshot, Roberta confronted him. "You're thinking of taking her, aren't you?"
"I'd be a fool to go out there with only one good arm. I may need her."
"But she's an actress. She doesn't know the first thing about intelligence work."
"I'm certainly not going to leave the two of you here by yourselves. Kobelev may double back and make a try for the train. Now that I've got her back, I'm not going to leave her unprotected."
"But it's all right to leave me. Is that it?"
"You were trained for this sort of thing, Commander. She's an actress, remember?"
"And a damn good one."
"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Carter.
"I'm beginning to like you, Carter. I don't want to lose you."
Carter stepped closer, bent down, and their lips met. She lasted good. Cold, yet warm, almost burning in the center. For a moment Carter didn't want to let her go. When he finally stepped back, his heart was pounding. "Let's go back," he said, the words thick in his throat. "There are some things I want to check out with you before we go."
For the next half hour Carter conducted a crash course in train engineering, based on what little knowledge he had. He told her to keep the boiler pressure at the maximum in case she had to leave suddenly, and he showed her how to blow off steam to keep it from building too high. Then he pointed out the forward and reverse gears, and explained that in order to get through the avalanche she would have to back up to give herself some running room. With the melting during the day and the digging that was done, it would probably be possible to bust out, but only in an emergency.
He left her the machine gun and an extra clip of ammunition, then he and Cynthia dressed and went outside. They threw the snowshoes down beside the track and strapped them on. Roberta watched from the cab, looking like some sort of Tibetan guerrilla with her machine gun strapped over her filthy, snow-and-coal-encrusted parka and her smudged face. She waved when they left, and Carter continued to glance back over his shoulder to check on her until the train was out of sight.
Kobelev and his entourage had left a wide trail in the snow, and with the snowshoes and brilliant moonlight. Carter had high hopes of catching them. Cynthia turned out to be every inch the mountain woman she'd claimed to be. She plodded along beside him, matching him step for step, showing remarkable endurance for a creature of such slight build. And all this after her ordeal in the snow.
They found the first corpse about two hours later. They probably would have mistaken it for an exposed chunk of rock or a shrub if the evidence of the murder weren't so plainly visible in the snow.
The tracks indicated the group of them had been walking — Carter figured Kobelev, Tatiana, the two guards, the fireman, and the engineer — spread out, only loosely held together, and judging from the grooves extending from the toes of some prints, some staggering from exhaustion. They must have stopped to rest. Snow had been knocked off stones, and there were body prints on the ground. Carter was able to pick out Kobelev's footprints and Tatiana's, the smaller accompanying the larger wherever they went. They discussed something, briefly, for the prints were relatively few. Then one veered off from the others, long paces heading for a face of sheer rock, running with no place to run.
It was in following this set of footprints that they found him, face down in the snow with two bullets in his back, blood soaking his thick engineer's jacket, his hands outstretched, still wearing the long, cuffed gloves of his trade.
Cynthia was the first to reach him. 'Nick! Look here!" she shouted, hopping over to it on her huge, tennis-racket shoes.
When Carter got there, he turned the body over. Blood had run from the nose and mouth and turned black against the abnormal whiteness of the face.
"God! Why did they shoot him?" she demanded, starting to whimper.
"Excess baggage maybe. I don't know."
Carter stared down at the body, trying to figure just why they had killed him. There was no evidence that one was falling behind the others. If anything, it was rather remarkable how well they'd hung together over such a long distance and such rough terrain. So why shoot him?
Carter told Cynthia to pull herself together. There was nothing they could do for this man now, and besides, she'd see plenty of this kind of thing soon, and she was going to have to be ready for it. She dried her eyes on her mittens, sniffed, and in a few minutes they were striding along much as before.
The silver disk of moon hung overhead, never moving or changing, and in time (he path they were following and the hushed hills on cither side seemed to become a place unto itself, without beginning or end, and even the memory of the engineer's death-mask face faded behind them. Then, half an hour after they'd found the first body, they came upon the second, sprawled in the middle of the trail, a bullet hole in his forehead.
The fireman." Carter said to Cynthia who had turned away. "Must have been a small bore. I'd say he's been out here about an hour, maybe less. It's hard to tell in this cold."