Red Sniper

The officer stopped. Turned. Stared hard at the soldier wearing only long johns.

Setting his mouth in a grim line, he started toward Dmitri. He clearly seemed to be thinking that discipline had gotten too lax, even for the maintenance crew. He put his hand on the holster flap.

“Keep going,” Cole muttered to Inna behind him.

He rolled his tire to one side, staying bent over it, still keeping his head down.

The officer approached, shouting something in Russian. He didn’t sound happy. His hand was on his pistol, but he hadn’t drawn it yet, which was a good thing—the Russians seemed to have a penchant for shooting soldiers over the smallest infraction.

Cole didn’t let him get that far. He straightened up and turned into the officer to block his path. Dropped the box and got up close and personal. Now the officer seemed to sense that something was going on out of the ordinary. This time, he did start to draw the pistol.

Cole used his left hand to grab the Russian’s wrist, preventing the gun from leaving the holster. With his right hand, he drew his hunting knife and plunged the blade into the Russian’s throat. He hit him as hard as he had ever hit anything ever before. The blade was sharpened on both sides at the tip so that it speared through the gristle and muscle. Cole put all his weight behind it, and the blade stopped only when the tip struck the vertebrae in the back of the Russian’s neck. It was a horrible sensation, and Cole felt sickened as he wrenched the knife free.

The Russian wanted to shout, but couldn’t. His voice box was destroyed. He sank to his knees, his hands at his throat, making wet gargling noises, dying.

“Go!” Cole shouted.

They dropped their tires and boxes, and ran the rest of the way to the airfield. In the confusion, none of the Soviet troops had noticed the attack on the officer. Not yet, anyhow. Cole figured they had a minute or two at most to catch a plane.

At that moment, Cole realized he hadn’t thought something through, which was the fact that they would need a plane large enough to carry them all. There wasn’t much to choose from. Cole saw a couple of smaller reconnaissance planes that appeared to be two-seaters, and three sleek fighters.

“This one!” Whitlock had anticipated the same problem, and was pointing at the largest plane on the airfield.

None of the other planes was big enough for them all, except for this airplane, which appeared to be some sort of cargo hauler. It probably flew in medical supplies, mail, and the commandant’s weekly vodka ration.

On closer inspection of the plane, Cole’s heart sank.

The plane looked flimsy, like it had been made out of old beer cans hammered flat and riveted together by the guy who’d been drinking the beer. Some of the finer work might have been done when the guy was hung over on Monday morning.

“I’ve never seen a plane that looked like it already crashed before it took off,” Vaccaro said. “You sure about this?”

“It’s this or back to the Gulag,” Cole said. “Whitlock, you reckon you can fly this crate?”

“I can fly it,” he said. “The question is, will it fly?” He ran to pull away the wheel chocks.

Cole cast a quick glance toward where the officer’s body lay, leaking a pool of blood into the trampled snow. They didn’t have long. “You all had best get in.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll be right back.”

The others piled into the plane. When a cargo plane like this was on the ground, sitting on the third wheel in the tail, the floor was sharply sloped. Whitlock climbed toward the cockpit and the others scrambled to the rough seats that pulled down from the sides. The only windows were in the cockpit. The bare interior was cold and dark, and smelled heavily of oil and gasoline, with an underlying funk of spoiled potatoes.

It did indeed feel like being inside a beer can, with aluminum walls exactly that thin. A burst from a machine gun would cut the metal skin and everyone inside to shreds. The cargo plane didn’t have any sort of guns itself. Totally defenseless.

Cole was running across the airstrip, his knife in one hand. The blade was still red with the Russian officer’s blood. He reached the nearest fighter plane and jabbed the blade into the tires. Then he ran to the next plane. And the next. He didn’t bother with the spotter planes. He was out of time.

Still, no one had taken any notice of what was going on at the airfield. He raced back toward their own plane and climbed in, pulling the hatch shut after him.

“Go!” he shouted.

Whitlock was flicking toggle switches and adjusting levers. “There’s no time to do any kind of flight check, so we’ll just have to pray that this crate flies,” he shouted from the cockpit. “I hope to hell this thing is fueled up. I’ll need to figure out what the fuel gauge even looks like.”

Cole said, “Just get this thing in the air. There’s no time to get fancy.”

“I wouldn’t call making sure that there’s gas in the tank being fancy,” Whitlock snapped. “It would be helpful if these goddamn instruments were in English. Or German, for that matter.”