Deliver Us From Evil

69

FEDIR KUCHIN had nothing, and because he had nothing the man was growing increasingly frustrated. In ninety-degree angles he paced the three-thousand-square-foot cabin perched near an ocean whose water temperature never got much above fifty degrees even in August. Kuchin’s mood was tied directly to his underling’s failure. Alan Rice had purchased access to a dozen databases and yet there had not been one hit on any of the digital images made from his drawings or the photo. Every other avenue of investigation he’d pursued had ended with a similar lack of progress. Kuchin’s large hands clenched and then loosened as his nimble mind galloped along trying to envision some way to move forward.

Finally, Kuchin drew on a parka and walked outside. He had taken with him a rifle and scope and some cartridges. It was summer but one wouldn’t know it by the weather. It wasn’t cold enough to snow, but as he looked around the terrain reminded him starkly of his birthplace in the Ukraine. Perhaps that’s why he’d built a home here with nothing else around for miles. He had two guards with him who stayed in another building five hundred meters from his house. Yet there wasn’t much danger out here. Other than the threat of being gored or trampled by a moose or a caribou, Kuchin felt fairly secure.

He trudged over ground that brought back memories of a little boy trailing his burly father as he went off to work. Work was fishing on a commercial trawler in the Sea of Azov. Forty thousand square kilometers in area, the Azov’s deepest point was surprisingly less than fifteen meters. It was in fact the shallowest sea in the world. Because of that its waters were turned over quickly. This did not keep it fresh, however. When Kuchin was a child the pollutants from factories and oil and gas exploration were already pouring into the sea’s meager depths.

By the 1970s dead and mutated fish by the thousands were piling up on the shores, clearly victims of man-made toxins and radioactive poisons. To swim in the waters today would be suicidal. Yet all the children in Kuchin’s village had spent their summers in waters whose temperatures would soar toward thirty degrees Celsius in July. In winter the sea would be frozen solid for months and the children would take their homemade skates and have races until their mothers would call out to them from shore to come eat their dinners. Kuchin could even remember lying facedown on the ice and licking it with his seven-year-old tongue.

Now Kuchin had heard that the Azov was in danger of becoming a dead sea and that commercial fishing should be banned for twenty years. This was not as draconian as it sounded. For forty years fishing yields had been reduced to nearly zero simply because all the sea life was dead. And yet he could recall vividly his father cleaning the fish he’d caught for their personal table with his big gutting knife, efficiently slicing up perch, sturgeon, and mackerel that his mother would then fry up in her big iron skillet with secret spices and ingredients that Frenchwomen seemed to naturally possess.

South of here was the Strait of Belle Isle, across from which was the region of Newfoundland. Kuchin had hiked there often and watched the cargo ships pass through the narrow channel. Indeed, some of his human cargo passed through these same waters. Before he reached adulthood Kuchin’s life had been inextricably tied to water, polluted water as it turned out. He realized it was probably a miracle he was not dead from some horrible cancer rising from the shallow depths of the Azov. Yet there could be tumors right now growing in his body, wrapping silently but lethally around essential organs, crushing blood vessels or invading his brain.

However, despite the environmental dangers of his childhood, growing up there had provided him with an ambition to succeed that had been inexhaustible. Everything he’d ever set out to do he’d achieved, which made this present situation unacceptable.

He made the trek to the Belle Strait and stared out at seawater that represented the most direct route to Europe for ships coming from either the St. Lawrence Seaway or Great Lakes ports. Yet fogs, gales, and ice-choked seas for ten months of the year made navigation here some of the most treacherous in the world. The strait could hold wondrous sights too, however. These included humpback whales doing spectacular flips and wandering icebergs calved from glaciers in Greenland and bundled south by the Labrador Current before starting to come apart, with massive crashes, into the warmer waters off the coast. And Belle Isle, after which the strait was named, meant “ Beautiful Island.” It sat at the eastern tip of the waterway and was roughly halfway between Labrador and Newfoundland, which together formed the Canadian province of the same name.

Beauty in the midst of nothing, thought Kuchin. He believed, however briefly, that he’d found beauty in Provence. A woman who intrigued him, bewitched him, even; one whom he thought he might like to possibly entertain for longer than one night without a bloody mess to clean up afterward. And yet the beauty had almost killed him. It was a sense of betrayal-even though realistically the woman owed him no measure of loyalty-that fueled Kuchin’s smoldering rage.

He walked up to the top of a small knoll, the strait behind him and the land in front of him flat for as far as the eye could see. Newfoundland was known as “the Rock.” Its eastern region used to be part of northern Africa. The last glaciation had scraped almost all the soil off the southeastern coast, leaving it with more rock than anything else, hence the nickname. Labrador, the easternmost section of the Canadian Shield, had roughly three times the landmass of Newfoundland but with approximately five percent of its population. Its climate was technically classified as polar tundra, and polar bears indeed prowled the coastal areas and caribou outnumbered people by over twenty to one. Here, Kuchin had his pick of massive mountains to hike, isolated bays in which to fish, barren tundra to ski across, and breathtaking and brutal fjords cut into bedrock by glacier saws to view. The slopes were often sheer and the current in the water deceptively fast.

Kuchin drew a bead with his rifle, sighting through a scope manufactured by Zeiss, the same outfit that had supplied the Third Reich. It had everything an experienced shooter would expect in a high-end sighting device, including O-ring seals and nitrogen fill for fogproofing, all in a lightweight package with enhanced field of vision.

When hunting large game it was generally agreed that a minimum of a thousand foot-pounds of force from the round was necessary. For the biggest game like moose that requirement ratcheted up to roughly fifteen hundred foot-pounds at about five hundred yards. He was using pointed boat-tailed 140-grain rounds that would drop just about anything on four hooves and certainly anyone on two feet.

Kuchin had had this rifle custom built. It was lightweight for ease of carrying and maneuverability and he had fought his ego and opted for somewhat less power because that translated to less recoil, which resulted invariably in greater accuracy. He had splurged on a premium barrel because that played a major factor in the only thing that mattered: whether you hit your intended target or not.

The small coyote was wandering along about two hundred yards away from him, its agile gait carrying the animal along rapidly over the flat terrain. It was early for the beast to be searching for food, thought Kuchin, but here one never knew. Kill when you can was probably a good motto for such a desolate place. It was probably a female, Kuchin noted as he examined through the glass the small chest and frame of the animal.

He lay prone on the ground, carrying the weight of the weapon on his elbows. He steadied himself, fixing his grip around the stock and underbelly of the gun, but relaxing his muscles. This was the magic recipe of the successful sniper and long-range hunter, firm but loose, heartbeat and breaths mellow, unhurried but with any possible vibration removed. The butt of the weapon hard to his bicep, his index finger dropped to the trigger guard and from there to the slender bit of curved metal. With one pull the immediately heated round would burst from the elongated barrel, lands and grooves branded into its metal hide from the force of the rapid expulsion. The quarter-gram metal missile would cover the distance between man and beast roughly six times faster than if it had been perched in a seat on a commercial jet aircraft.

And yet with the coyote dead in his sights Kuchin did not pull the trigger. He lowered the weapon. The beast, unaware of how close it had come to annihilation at the hands of a far more dangerous predator, scampered along until it was nearly out of sight. Kuchin trudged the solitary miles back to his cabin. He had never enjoyed killing wildlife. Fishing held little interest for him either despite having been his father’s trade.

It was only living things that looked like him that had ever motivated Fedir Kuchin to pull the trigger, light the match to the gas-filled pits, kick out the stool from under the noosed victim, or plunge the knife into someone’s chest. It was just who and what he was.

He returned to his cabin, slid the parka on a hook by the door, locked his rifle back up in his gun safe, and returned to his desk. There was a blinking light on his phone. The message on the recording dispelled all the bad thoughts Kuchin had been harboring for most of the day.

It was Alan Rice.

“We found him.”