Red Sniper

The bullet he had sent back with Barkov’s name on it was more than an idle gesture. He would face Barkov when the time was right. Right now, he and the others needed fresh meat more than they needed a fight with Russians. Samson and Ramsey had bought them time with their lives. Time to get that much closer to the border. Cole and the others would take it.

From the tracks in the snow, he could see that the Russians had found the makeshift camp and searched it, kicking the shelters apart. They either hadn’t bothered with the snares, or hadn’t seen them. Their tracks went on, following the trail that Cole and the others had left that morning.

One of the snares had caught a rabbit. Cole collected it and took down the wire for the snares, in case it might prove useful again.

With a smile of satisfaction, he noted that the deadfall also had done its work. A Russian soldier lay crushed by the fallen log, the cigarette pack still gripped in his hand. One less Russian to fight later. The Russians had left the body where it lay.

• • •

Carrying the one paltry rabbit, he followed the tracks out of the old camp, wondering how long it would take to get to the spot where Samson and Ramsey had made their last stand.

They were damn fools to have done what they did, but he could understand why they had volunteered to go out fighting. If it looked like they weren’t going to make it to Finland, this was just what Cole planned to do.

Ramsey had been done for—hardly more than a dead man walking, and barely walking at that. Samson seemed to like the idea of a showdown, like he was Doc Holliday at the OK Corral or some such place.

The killing ground that Cole found was not the OK Corral, but only a rocky clearing in the snowy taiga. He found Samson’s body surrounded by bloody snow. Judging by the trampled ground, it looked as if he had put up one hell of a fight.

Then Cole found Ramsey.

Dead, he was just a bag of skin and bones. He had been shot in the head, but his face was slashed with tiny cuts. Not from a knife. Inna had told him that Barkov liked to carry some sort of sawed-off horse whip. It looked as if Barkov had used it on Ramsey.

Cole felt hollow and sad. He had hardly known Ramsey, but he did know that he deserved better.

He reached down and closed Ramsey’s eyes. The last thing he had seen was that goddamn Russian and the snowy taiga. He sure as hell wouldn’t ever be seeing home again.

Then the anger came flooding in like a rip tide, along with a current of guilt for allowing the poor bastard to make some kind of half-assed last stand. The anger swept Cole up and carried him away. He started to shake and tremble, not from the cold, but from pure rage. His vision flickered and for a moment he was blinded. He went down to one knee and stayed there until the fit passed.

When he stood back up, the cold taiga wind cleared his mind. He felt like a bar of red-hot iron that had just been dipped in cold water, newly forged.

“Barkov,” he vowed to the Russian wind that moaned across the empty land. “I will put a bullet in you if it’s the last thing I do.”

• • •

Staring down at Ramsey’s body, Cole couldn’t bring himself to leave just yet. He thought about what Ramsey had said. That he hated the idea of never getting home again. Cole thought that after everything Ramsey had been through, that it just didn’t seem right that his body would be left here on the taiga—maybe to serve as supper for whatever critters happened by. The thought made his belly churn, but there was no way to dig down through the cold ground to give Ramsey a decent burial. He didn’t have a shovel, and his knife wasn’t up to the task.

“Goddamn,” he said, thinking it over.

Cole had brought a blanket with him, just in case he became separated from the others and had to spend the night. Ramsey looked so small laying there, just an empty shell like a corn husk. The hard work and poor food of the Gulag camp had worn him down to hardly more than a scarecrow.

Cole decided that it had been Ramsey’s spirit and personality that had been outsized. He spread the blanket on the snowy ground and dragged Ramsey’s body onto it, then rolled him up in the blanket.

Maybe he could carry Ramsey, but there was no way he could carry Samson. The man outweighed him by a hundred pounds. He refused to leave Samson to be scavenged by varmints. The Russians abandoned their dead, but not him.

The ground nearby was scattered with stones and boulders, some of them the size of a softball, others the size of a watermelon. Slowly, laboriously, Cole dug through the snow for these stones and piled them around and over Samson’s body. The effort took him the better part of an hour. He bashed his fingers between a couple of the larger stones, and ended up leaving bloody fingerprints across the rocks.