The Survivor (37 page)

Rapp ignored the tourist route and followed the elevation markings toward a dotted line that dead-ended about thirty miles to the east. “What's that? A road?”

“Of sorts,” Irena said. “It leads to a small commune. It's kept relatively clear in order to get supplies in and out.”

“What kind of commune? Are they artists? My wife loves pottery.”

“No. They keep to themselves. We won't be going anywhere near there.”

A cold blast of air hit them and she turned to wave a cautionary hand
at Wicker and McGraw as they pulled the door open. “It's dangerous outside in this kind of weather. If you'd like to go to your cabin, I can send one of my people with you.”

“No worries,” Wicker said. “We're just going to stand under the light and have a smoke.”

“This isn't America. You can smoke in here.”

Wicker smiled and they disappeared outside.

Irena motioned for one of her men to follow but Rapp moved to intercept. “They'll be fine. How about you make me a drink? Vodka.”

He looked at Irena and she shook her head, motioning again toward the door. Based on her expression, she wasn't sure what was happening and this was her way of finding out. Probably inevitable, but not the way Rapp had wanted it to go down.

He blocked Stepan's path again, this time shoving him backward. Surprise flashed across the Russian's face and then he reached out to grab the front of Rapp's jacket. He was a bear of a man typical in this part of the world—six one, 240, with thick forearms covered in dark hair and tattoos. Someone best dealt with quickly.

Rapp grabbed Stepan's thumb and bent it back before sweeping the man's right leg just below the knee. He executed the maneuver about half speed—enough to put the Russian on the ground, but not enough to do any permanent damage.

The air rushed out of Stepan's lungs, but he looked more surprised than injured. More problematic was the fact that his equally burly brother had come around the makeshift bar and was in full charge. He made it only a few steps before noticing Coleman tracking him with a silenced Glock. That was enough to bring him to a halt, but it was an open question whether he was smart enough to stay that way.

“Irena,” Rapp said. “You own this company, right?”

She was completely frozen, eyes locked on the gun. Finally, she managed to answer. “Yes.”

“Then you're in command and these men are your responsibility. You understand you can't win, right? All that can happen is that you and your people get hurt.”

She said something in Russian and Alexi helped his brother to his feet. Then both retreated to the bar.

“We . . . We don't have anything worth stealing,” she said, trying to decipher what was happening. “What do you want from us?”

“I want you to go to bed,” Rapp said. “Tomorrow morning I want you to sleep in. Your fees have been paid and we'll be wiring another fifty thousand U.S. dollars to cover damages.”

“Damages?”

Right on cue, McGraw came back through the door. “They use walkie-talkies for local communication and the shortwave is connected to an antenna out back. We've cut the wires and Wick's on the roof dismantling their satellite dish.”

“What about the snowmobiles?”

“All well maintained and gassed up. We've loaded the gear on the five newest ones and disabled the others. Keys are in 'em.” He glanced at his watch. “Wick said he'd be ready to go in four and a half minutes.”

Rapp loved working with Coleman's team. No complaints, no hesitation, no detail too small or timeline too tight. He turned back to Irena. “Do we have a deal?”

T
HE
Russian-built snowcat was shut down, leaving an icy world illuminated only by a distant glow. Travel up the makeshift road had taken almost nine hours and had involved digging a path through three drifts too dense for the vehicle's front shovel.

Kabir Gadai stared through the windshield, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Spindrift swirled from the towering banks on either side, but with less violence than it had only an hour ago. The snowflakes were still thick and heavy, but now floating straight down at a predictable rate. With the engine off and the storm subsiding, the breathing of the five ISI operatives packed in behind him now dominated.

Based on what he knew from the odometer and intermittent GPS signal, the source of the dim light was Pavel Katdsyn's village, perhaps a half kilometer to the east. As had become customary, there was no time to collect detailed intelligence or recon the area. They were in a race against America's Central Intelligence Agency and once again Gadai would have to endure risks that would normally be unacceptable.

According to his FSB informants, the village was inhabited by approximately ten families, some of which included children. Focused on
hacking and Internet scams, they weren't involved in any activity that could create territorial disputes, and they paid significant protection money to both organized crime and the police. Combined with the remote setting, this suggested—but by no means guaranteed—that they would have light security.

“I'll go in using the road,” he said as his men began piling out of the vehicle. It was the most straightforward of the three attack plans they'd devised. Unfortunately, it was also the most dangerous. With visibility so limited, though, the risks were outweighed by the benefits. Every moment of delay increased the potential for a confrontation with the Americans.

Gadai started the snowcat and propelled it forward. His men would follow at a distance that allowed them to remain in darkness.

At first, he thought the entrance to the village was completely unguarded, but then he spotted a man running toward him. He was wearing mismatched down pants and jacket, both in garish colors that made him stand out against the white background. The rifle over his shoulder hung up as he clawed at it, finally coming free and allowing him to aim the weapon in Gadai's general direction. It was a pathetic display that confirmed his suspicions about security. No doubt the men of the village took turns on watch with no regard to ability or training.

Gadai slid the driver's-side window down and shouted a greeting in Russian as the man cautiously approached. Satisfied that he posed little threat, Gadai turned his attention to the small enclave beyond his windshield. The photos he'd seen appeared to be accurate. The village formed a rough U shape, with four buildings on each side of a snowpacked street and one at the end. All were two stories, constructed primarily of local timber and metal sheeting. A single snowcat and various snowmobiles were visible but showed little sign of use. None could be dug out quickly enough to be used as escape vehicles and fleeing into the wilderness on foot would be suicide.

When the man got to within a few meters, he called out to Gadai. The Pakistani smiled in an attempt to put the man at ease, but also in reaction to his own good luck. He possessed only a single blurry photo
of Pavel Katdsyn and had assumed that he would have to question the guard out of fear that it could be him. The man's pure-blood Asian features made that unnecessary.

Gadai lifted the silenced pistol from his lap, aiming it through the open window and squeezing the trigger. The round hit the man directly between the eyes and he crumpled to the snow without so much as a whimper.

Gadai's team appeared a moment later, running past the snowcat and fanning out in a well-coordinated pattern. He jumped down to the snow and sprinted toward the first building on the left as his men began accessing the others.

The door was unlocked and he went inside, entering an open room with threadbare sofas and a kitchen stacked with dirty dishes. There was a set of stairs to the left and he began to ascend, dragging a hand against the wall as a guide in the darkness. He heard a muffled scream from outside and picked up his pace, concerned that it might wake the house's occupants.

His instincts were right. When he slipped into a room on the upper floor, he found a man desperately searching an old chest of drawers for a weapon. He spun when Gadai stepped on a loose floorboard and instinctively threw an arm in front of his face. He was wearing only a pair of briefs, but his long hair provided a convenient grip point that Gadai used to drag him down the stairs and out into the snow.

He began to babble in Russian, but Gadai ignored him, scanning the upper windows of the buildings for any threat. There was nothing, though. His men had control of the situation and were marching people out of their homes at gunpoint. Men, women, children, and even infants appeared, some fully dressed and others naked or in bedclothes. His team lined them up on their knees, standing behind them with weapons at the ready. Some were shouting angrily, others pleading. The children wailed, already shivering as their skin reddened in the frigid temperatures.

“Who here speaks English?” Gadai said.

They all looked at each other but no one answered. Normally, he
would have just stood there and let them freeze but he had neither the time nor patience for that. Despite his heavy clothing, he himself was beginning to suffer from the bitter climate.

“I'll ask only one more time. Who here speaks English?”

“What do you want?”

Gadai turned toward the man who had spoken. He was fully dressed but his daughter, probably no older than six, was wearing only a long T-shirt. He had wrapped his arms around her for warmth and was trying to quiet her sobbing.

“I want Pavel Katdsyn. Are you him?”

“No. Pavel isn't here. He left weeks ago.”

For a career criminal, he was an almost laughably bad liar.

Gadai raised his pistol and aimed at the girl. The man tried to put himself between her and the weapon, but the cold made him a fraction too slow.

R
APP'S
team had abandoned their snowmobiles about a mile back and were now making slow progress through the wilderness on skis. Gaps had formed in the clouds, creating intermittent splashes of stars. Not much light, but with the snow reflecting it, there was enough to proceed without night-vision equipment.

Since this frozen landscape was fundamentally indistinguishable from Charlie Wicker's backyard, Rapp had put him on point. McGraw was breaking his own trail thirty-five feet left and Coleman was keeping roughly the same interval to Rapp's right. Just ahead, following unsteadily in Wick's tracks, was a very unhappy Marcus Dumond.

Despite the young hacker being dressed head-to-toe in white, his outline was clearly visible. When it started to waver, Rapp swore under his breath and accelerated to a near run. Once again, he was too late. Dumond tipped right, overcompensated, and ended up buried in the deep snow. When Rapp pulled alongside, Dumond was thrashing like a drowning man, digging himself in deeper in an attempt to keep his nose and mouth clear.

“Marcus, stop moving!” Rapp said in a harsh whisper. “This stuff's like quicksand.”

“What am I doing here?”
he whined, sounding like he was on the verge of breaking into tears. “I'm freezing and I'm exhausted. Just leave me. Just leave me here to die.”

There had been no choice but to bring Dumond along. Coleman was probably the best computer guy they had on the ops side, and he still hadn't fully figured out texting.

“Spare me the melodrama, Marcus. Now grab my pole.”

Dumond threw out a mitten-clad hand and after a few tries, Rapp managed to get him back on his skis. “Slow and steady, kid. Okay? If you feel like you're starting to lose your balance again, stop before it's too late to get it back. Understand?”

“Mitch, I—”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

He gave Dumond a full minute's lead before starting out again. To his right, he could see Coleman pacing him. Wick and McGraw were out of visual range, but they would have stopped, too, in order to keep the intervals he'd stipulated.

Miraculously, the next ten minutes passed without any more problems. The wind had died down and the snow absorbed sound with startling efficiency. Beyond the hiss of his skis, the only thing audible was the occasional dull
whup
of snow dropping from overloaded tree branches.

Rapp came to an abrupt halt when the silence was broken by the faint echo of a gunshot. “Marcus, stop!” he said into his throat mike. “Crouch down on your skis and don't move.”

There was no follow-up shot and all his men checked in safe. After staying motionless for almost a minute, it seemed clear that whoever had fired wasn't aiming at them.

“Wick. Can you get a bearing?”

“Hard to say with the acoustics but I'm pretty sure it came from the village. It's dead ahead less than five hundred yards.”

Rapp accelerated, stopping next to Dumond to pull him back into a standing position. “Stay. Just stand here and don't do anything.”

“What?
Alone? Are you crazy?”

“You'll be fine.”

“What if . . . What if something happens to you? What if you don't come back?”

“That's not going to happen, Marcus.”

“But what if it does?”

Patience wasn't Rapp's finest trait and what little he had was starting to fail him. “Then you're probably going to die.”

He took off, staying in Wicker's tracks and leaving a speechless Dumond to himself. Coleman was out of sight now, having headed southeast while McGraw went north. After a hard four-minute effort, Rapp saw Wicker's track disappear into a dense stand of snow-encapsulated trees. He released his bindings and covered his skis before half-crawling, half-swimming into a depression beneath trees.

He found Wicker lying partially buried with an eye to his rifle scope. The long silencer on the end of his barrel was covered in a silicone sleeve to prevent heat shimmer from interfering with the optics.

They were at the western edge of the village as planned. Its inhabitants—twenty-five or thirty in all—were in the middle of the street in various stages of undress. Most were on their knees being guarded by three armed men in white jumpsuits identical to the ones his team wore. The one exception was a child lying in the snow with half her head missing.