He held out the rifle. His voice was guttural and entirely foreign. "Give Gray his rifle. And give him this message—"
"Not likely," she cut in.
The Russian must have been astonished at her speed. She had told Gray she was qualified with a pistol. More than that, she was good with one. Her Smith and Wesson Model 459 weighed only twenty-eight ounces and had a four-inch barrel. It was small, yet it was a semi-automatic 9-mm Parabellum with a fourteen-shot staggered clip. So it was also fast. It whipped out from under her jacket, its nickel finish gleaming like evil. She was pulling the trigger before the Russian was in the sights. Thoughtful aiming was not this weapon's purpose, but rather it was designed to fill the air with projectiles. She fired six times, as rapidly as she could pull the trigger. The gun climbed a ladder rung with each shot. The flat crack of the shots rattled the cabin's walls. Dust drifted down from the chandelier.
She lifted her finger from the trigger, the pistol still up and ready. Where she had expected to see a body there was nothing, just sunlight filling the doorway. The room screamed with the absence of the body that should have been there. The air smelled of burnt powder. She glanced through the door. One state patrolman was lying on the ground in front of the car, a slash of blood under an ear. The other officer was in the front seat slumped forward, his jaw open in mortal surprise. Trusov had killed them both a moment ago.
Adrian kicked the door shut and stepped quickly to the wall near her desk. She held the gun up with both hands, her back against the log wall. The room had too many windows, too many places where the Russian could peer inside. She would be safer in the back bedroom. She bent low to pass under the window that looked out onto the destroyed woodshed.
Trusov's arm lashed through the window, through windowpanes and sash bars. Glass chips and shards followed the swinging arm into the cabin. The arm seemed covered with sparkling scales that blinked and glimmered. The fracturing glass sounded like a harsh laugh. The hand seized Adrian around the neck, yanked her upright, then backwards through the shattered window, dragging her over slivers of glass. Glass fragments resembled teeth, and she seemed to be sucked back into the jaws of a dragon. A shard bit into her hand and she dropped her pistol.
Glass hung from her jacket and hair. A necklace of blood appeared on her neck. Nikolai Trusov held her upright from behind, one hand on her neck, the other clutching her upper arm. His hands secured her like steel bands. His breath was on her neck.
The Russian growled, "Give him the rifle and this message—"
Adrian Wade had trained for years for this moment. All the falls on the mat at the dojo, all the tournament rounds. She fiercely jerked her head back, cracking her skull into his nose. He grunted with pain. His grip lessened.
She abruptly shifted her weight to one side and launched her elbow back at his groin. She caught his genitals with full force, the point of her elbow sinking inches into his pants.
He should have buckled over. He should have collapsed to the ground and lain there vomiting and gasping. Instead he lifted her fully off the ground and marched her to the next window. He caught a fistful of her black hair, then rammed her face through a windowpane. Glass shattered and shimmered. A cascade of flashing prisms surrounded her, a sea of glittering refractions. Cuts opened on her forehead, sending a wash of blood over her eyes. When he brought her head back out, glass splinters dug into her skin behind her ears, spilling more blood.
"Why do you Americans never listen to anything?" he asked levelly, his voice a study in reason and courtesy. Again he had her by the neck and arm. "Will you listen this time?" He moved her head back and forth, as if she were nodding. "Good. I'm going to let you live because you are to give Gray the rifle and give him this message. I will be within eight kilometers of this house. He is to come into the field alone and with his rifle. Do you understand?"
Again he tugged her head back and forth, forcing her to nod. He tossed her against the logs of the cabin wall, a casual offhand motion, but her head hit the wall. She fell onto glass pieces and lay motionless, her face a bloody mask. He retrieved the rifle from the porch. It was Owen Gray's Winchester 70 with the mounted Unertl scope. He treated it more gently than he had Adrian, propping it up next to her, carefully so as to maintain the scope's alignment, the butt on the ground.
"I will be waiting for him." The Russian disappeared around a corner of the cabin.
Only after several moments could Adrian push herself to a sitting position and dab at the blood on her eyes. She winced as her fingers pushed needles of glass further into her forehead. She tried to rise but could not. She blinked, and her eyelashes flicked away droplets of blood. She was too dizzy to move, so there she waited for Owen Gray.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Stealth or speed. The dilemma had been an endless source of debate among Gray and his sniper friends in Vietnam. Hurry but risk detection? Or proceed carefully and risk losing the target? No satisfactory answer was ever produced, but now Gray settled on speed. He moved up Black Bear Creek Valley at a brisk walk, the rifle in both hands.
He was dead tracking, moving faster than the man who had left the sign. Gray glanced at several fresh footprints near the stream. Then came a rough patch of boulders, then bent stems of marsh cudweeds, then the prints again. Trusov's register indicated he had walked rather than trotted up the valley. Trusov was doing nothing to hide his direction or speed. Gray knew that at some point ahead, when Trusov decided it was time, the footprints would simply vanish.
Noise is the exception in the wilderness. Silence is standard. Gray moved along the creek with unearthly quiet. A watcher might have concluded Gray was floating along the path. He was imitating a fox's walk, moving his feet in line, one directly in front of the other with each step coming down on the outside of the foot before rolling to the inside. The gait reduced the number of branches the legs might rasp loudly against, and the rolling footfall crushed fewer twigs and leaves.
As Gray walked up the valley he also traveled into a new state of consciousness. His old skills had been slowly coming back to him since that day on the federal courthouse steps, but now he was enveloped in the armor of his Vietnam mind. The wound in his arm from Trusov's bullet should have been flooding him with pain, but Gray felt nothing. The scrapes and bruises — and he was nothing but grainy red scrapes and purple bruises from his mad slide — should have frozen him with pain, but he hardly felt them. He had the right to be propelled by revenge, but he knew that in the field hate kills the wrong person. Here, too, he felt nothing. And he should have been frightened, but he was dead to fear. He was a coyote, with no ability to ruminate, with no thoughts of the future or past, considering nothing but the ground that carried him and the flora that hid him. He had entered a fog of indifference where he would be distracted by nothing and would address only the puzzle in front of him.
And that was all it was, a puzzle, no more complicated or monumental than a dime-store toy. Gray had to center a man in his crosshairs and pull the trigger, the irreducible act. He simply had to find those clues in the field that would allow him to move his finger back a half an inch before Trusov moved his own finger. Then the puzzle would be solved.
Gray moved up the valley, passing aspen and cottonwood and pines. Black Bear Creek was a carillon to his right. He looked at nothing and at everything, using a technique known as splatter vision, where he let his vision spread out. Rather than focus on any one object, he softened his eyes to gather in all in front of him. His field of vision was of half the compass points ahead.