Red Sniper

The others were getting up. As soldiers, Vaccaro and Samson had long since learned to sleep wherever they could, whenever they could. They awakened instantly when Honaker kicked at their boots. Inna and Whitlock were more sluggish. Cole noticed they had slept side by side, but not touching. Ramsey took a while to wake up, like he was dazed. Finally, Whitlock had to reach down and shake him roughly.

Cole thought that what Ramsey needed was to sleep for a week straight in a decent bed, with someone to give him soup every time he woke up. His mama’s rabbit stew would have fixed Ramsey right up. His mama hadn’t been much of a cook, but she could make a damn good rabbit stew with onions, carrots, potatoes. Cole provided the rabbit. His stomach rumbled at the memory. Most of the time, there had been more broth than meat or vegetables. Even so, a few bowls of that would have Ramsey back on his feet.

They didn’t have stew. Or a bed. Ramsey coughed so much that the air frosted around him like it was smoke.

“All right, we have got to get a move on,” Honaker said. “We don’t know how much of a lead we have on the Russians, but we want to stay ahead of them. We’ll keep moving as long as there is daylight.”

• • •

A few miles away, Barkov looked out over the empty taiga. “Which way?” he asked the Mink.

He and Barkov had been in pursuit since not long after dawn, when the guards had discovered the escape after assembling the prisoners for the walk to the work site. The Mink sent the guard to check the barracks, fully expecting to find the Americans’ dead bodies in their bunks. The Americans wouldn’t have been the first to die of exhaustion, and wouldn’t be the last to be worked to death.

The guard came back shaking his head.

The Mink couldn’t believe it. How did the Americans even have the strength to get more than a few kilometers?

Barkov questioned the other men in the barracks, using his whip as encouragement, but no one seemed to know anything.

Then someone had found one of the guards locked in a storeroom at the infirmary. The young man was nearly naked. He had a wild story about being tricked by Inna Mikhaylovna.

She was nowhere to be found.

Barkov had the growing realization that the bitch had helped the Americans to escape. He’d had his suspicions that she had grown too fond of the American, Whitlock. Foolishly, she must have acted on that.

Then, a woman’s scarf was found tied to Gate 3. Inna’s scarf. He recognized it by the color—it had been red once, but washed so many times that it had faded to pink. It was clearly a signal of some kind. Together with her absence and the young soldier’s story of seduction, it was damning evidence.

When informed of the escape, the commandant had simply ordered Barkov to handle it. He was a soulless bureaucrat who saw each prisoner as a unit to be accounted for, like a can of beans in a storeroom. He busied himself with ledger books that tallied camp expenses and work output. He kept careful records on how many miles of track were laid each month. In the eyes of Moscow, it made him the perfect commandant.

Quickly, Barkov assembled a team to pursue the escaped Americans and Inna. In between barking out orders, he hummed happily to himself. Someone else could lead the work party today; he and The Mink were going hunting.

• • •

Prompted by Barkov’s question, the Mink considered the empty landscape. There was no indication of the direction taken by the girl and the escaped prisoners. The Mink thought about that as he smoked an unfiltered cigarette that seemed to be one part cheap tobacco and three parts sawdust. What lay to the north but arctic wastes? Hundreds of miles to the south lay Moscow, which seemed an unlikely destination. China and Mongolia were hundreds of miles distant. But to the east, Finland was barely two hundred miles away.

If you were an American, your only hope lay in that direction.

The Mink jerked his chin that way, then exhaled a cloud of the foul cigarette smoke toward the sun, still hovering above the eastern horizon.

“Ah, that makes sense,” Barkov said. He waved his arm toward a squad of soldiers in a follow me gesture. “They won’t have gone far.”

Barkov led the way. They did not get far because there was no clear trail to follow.

Along with Barkov and the Mink there was Bunin, a local tracker who had brought his dogs, and six soldiers detailed from the Gulag garrison. Barkov hardly thought that they would need half a dozen soldiers to help catch the escapees—he and the Mink could do that handily—but the soldiers would be good workhorses to carry back any bodies. Normally, he wouldn’t have bothered with that. However, the Americans were special prisoners, so the Gulag commandant might need bodies to show some commissar if there was interest from Moscow. Barkov sighed. If he had been given his way, those annoying Americans would have been dead some time ago. That was politics for you.