Chapter Thirty-five

Wednesday Island Base

Randi Russell lay on her back in the lower of the two bunks in the women’s quarters, her wrists over her head and cuffed around the bunk’s vertical stanchion. A swath of light cut through the darkened room from the open door, issuing from the gas lantern in the main room. Intermittently the armed guard seated at the mess table glanced in her direction.

To the guard, she lay apparently unmoving, possibly even asleep. He couldn’t see into the shadows at the head of the bunk, where Randi’s fingers flexed and clenched slowly and continuously like a cat kneading its claws. She must not allow her hands to swell and get stiff.

Even as she had been prodded and shoved back to the bunk room that afternoon, she had been making her plans. When her captors had handcuffed her into the bunk, she had seemingly resisted for a moment, earning herself another impatient slap across the face. But in a deft bit of positional legerdemain she had also managed to ensure that when the handcuff had been resnapped around her right wrist it had closed over both the sleeve of her sweater and the heavy thermal long johns she wore underneath it.

She had worked the fabric out from under the cuff, loosening it. She had also made sure that her fists had been tightly clinched when the cuffs had been locked on, gaining herself yet another precious fraction of an inch of play.

She rolled a little on the bunk, as if hunting for a more comfortable spot. Under the cover of the movement she again found the joint in the bunk stanchion and practiced wedging the connecting links of the handcuffs into it. Then she folded her fingers in as tightly as she could and gave an experimental tug. Given enough adrenaline, it would work. It wouldn’t be very pleasant, but it would work.

Her eyes scanned the semidarkness, gauging distances, plotting positions, considering the potential assets. How big was the window in the end wall of the cabin, and how thick was the thermal glass? Remember how the big boom box tape player was positioned atop the cabinet against the far wall. How deep was the snow drifted against the cabins, and how would the snow crust bear weight? Listen to the wind and gauge what the weather was like and how the visibility would be outside. What about outer shell garments? She supposed her own cold-weather gear was still over in the lab hut. She would have to improvise when the time came.

In her hours of imprisoned waiting she had made every mental and physical preparation she could. For the rest she must trust to patience, luck, and Slavic sexual propensities.

The smell of cooking rations filled the bunk room, and a growing number of shadows moved across the bar of light streaming through the door. The chief smuggler-Kretek, she had heard him called-was feeding his crew in shifts. The scent of hot food pointedly reminded Randi she hadn’t eaten since a very sketchy breakfast. A meal would be a very good thing to have just now, but she didn’t dare ask for anything to eat, for fear of disrupting the scenario she had built.

She recognized the voices of Kretek and Kropodkin. They were in the bunkhouse, having dinner. Russian was the lingua franca of the group, although Randi could recognize half a dozen different Balkan dialects and accents. Over their meal the shop talk was about the coming day’s operation: the blowing open of the Misha’s fuselage and the sling lifting of the anthrax reservoir, and the precautions that must be taken when dealing with the deadly bioagent.

They also discussed Jon, Professor Metrace, and Major Smyslov. From what Randi could gather, there had been no contact with her teammates so far. Plans were being proposed for hunting them down.

The clink and rattle of eating utensils trailed off. She smelled pipes and acrid Balkan cigarettes being lit. The conversation grew more genial, the laughter more frequent. The men were relaxing after dinner, joking, discussing women and sex.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Randi heard Kretek’s bull’s-bellow voice say, “Well, Stefan, you’d best get on with it. You have a lot of men standing in line for their rations here.”

So it would be Kropodkin.

She heard the ex-student laugh sheepishly, followed by a bellow of humor from around the table and a barrage of coarse suggestions and advice.

“Just don’t mark up that pretty face of hers, lad.”

“Why do you worry about her face, Belinkov? What are you going to do? Draw her picture?”

“What can I say? I have a romantic soul.”

A shadow occulted the light. He was in the doorway, looking at her. She could hear his rasping breath, still hampered by the nose she had broken. She could hear the scuffle of his booted feet on the floor, smell the rancidity of his body.

Kropodkin stepped into the women’s quarters…and drew the accordion door closed behind him, plunging the little room and the two of them into darkness.

Got you, you son of a bitch!

If Kropodkin had been a show-off or if Kretek’s crew had been up for a gang bang on the mess table, Randi knew she would have been in trouble. But she had been involved in sexual relationships, both romantically and professionally, with Russians before. She knew that a strong streak of inherent prudishness still ran deeply through many of the Slavic cultures. Overt sexual exhibitionism still frequently triggered a guilt-shame response. She had been counting on this.

Kropodkin was kneeling beside the bunk now and his hands were on her breasts, squeezing and kneading them with a brutal childish eagerness. “Things are different now, aren’t they, Miss Russell?” He spat her name out like an epithet. “You have a great deal to make up for. A very great deal. You may start begging my pardon any time you please. I might listen.”

She could make out his silhouette in the bar of light down the edge of the door and see the sparks of red light glinting in his eyes. She spoke directly to those sparks, her voice a soft whisper, audible only to him.

“Just so you’ll know, I’m still going to kill you.”

Kropodkin spat out a true epithet, a counter to the chill rippling down his spine. Standing, he tore off his clothes. He would destroy the hex this deadly, beautiful witch had put on his soul with her degradation.

Then he was stripping her, dragging her ski pants, thermal underwear, and panties down to her ankles. Not bothering to force the snug garments off over her boots, he was content to hobble her with them. Then Randi’s sweater and long john top were being forced up and over her head and into a wad around her wrists, leaving that firm, pale body bare save for her bra. That he tore away altogether with an angry, painful wrench, leaving her nothing.

She did not speak again or try to resist, not even in the slightest. She just looked into his face, those dark eyes glittering. It was as if what he was about to do to her simply didn’t matter. As if he were irrelevant, already dead and gone.

But if it was frightening, it was also exciting. He would make this bitch notice him. He would master her and break her and make her scream and cry. He was atop her in the bunk, hunching down under the springs of the upper mattress, mounting her, feeling her back arch under the stab of his dry penetration. She would break or she would die.

Randi rode out the initial, tearing burst of pain. She could hear the sound of Stefan Kropodkin’s breath hissing through his clenched teeth, and the laughter and shouted advice from the other arms smugglers just a few feet away beyond that paper-thin door. She felt Kropodkin’s hands moving from her bruised breasts to her throat.

Above her head, the links of the handcuff chain clicked as they locked into the shallow notch in the stanchion, and the fingers of her left hand took a grip on the clothing wadded around her right wrist, so she could clear her right hand.

Kropodkin thrust savagely within her, and her pain and rage reached critical mass and exploded. Her skin tore as she ripped her right hand out of the loosened handcuff.

Lost in the sensual softness of the prostrate body beneath him and the brutality of his rape of it, Kropodkin didn’t realize what Randi’s convulsive movements meant. She pushed completely free of her sweater and long john top, letting them fall to the floor. Then Randi’s left hand, still burdened by the handcuffs, whipped up and clenched in Kropodkin’s lank hair, yanking his head back.

“Told you so.” That whisper was the last thing he heard. Then the heel of Randi Russell’s right hand smashed an angled blow under Kropodkin’s nose, driving his sinus cartilage into the frontal lobes of his brain, killing him instantly.

Randi felt the gush of blood over her hand, the death spasm racking Kropodkin’s body. She rolled him onto the floor, clutching him in an awkward embrace to muffle the thud of his fall. Escaping from the handcuffs and killing her would-be rapist had been no major problem. Getting away afterward, with a dozen armed men a meager yard or two away beyond a flimsy unlockable door, was. It was only a matter of time, a very brief time, before they realized something was wrong in here. She faked a pained, whimpering outcry to buy a few more seconds as she wiped the blood from her hand. Hastily she redonned her clothes. She didn’t have enough to wear for the outside. No doubt there was more clothing in the wall lockers, but she didn’t have the time to rummage for it in the dark.

The laughing voices were trailing off out in the main bunkroom, and someone, Kretek, called out a question to Kropodkin.

She had to get out now. Kropodkin had been wearing a heavy flannel shirt with a hooded sweatshirt over it. With her night-adapted eyes she could make out where they had been discarded on the floor. They would have to do. For a fraction of a second she considered the sleeping bags in the bunks. No good. Too bulky. They would slow her down for those first few critical moments of flight.

The question from the room outside was repeated, more pointedly. Randi snatched up Kropodkin’s garments, then grabbed for the carrying handle of the tape player atop the locker. Swinging it with all her strength, she smashed out the heavy thermopane of the bunkhouse window.

Mess table chairs crashed to the floor.

Randi threw the shirts over the bottom edge of the window frame as protection from the glass shards and rolled through to the outside. Behind her, the door to the women’s quarters tore open.

She felt the blowing ice spicules stab at her face, and the explosion of outside cold. It all depended on that cold now. If the snow crust had frozen solidly enough in the night to support her weight, she would live. If she broke through and bogged down in a drift, she would die. Scrambling to her feet and clutching the shirts to her, she ran for the safety of the darkness.

She heard enraged shouting and started to weave and sidestep as she ran. A flashlight beam stabbed after her, and someone emptied a handgun out of the window. Bullet strikes sprayed snow around her feet. Pray that nobody in there had grabbed a submachine gun!

The toe of her boot broke through the snow crust, and for a hideous moment she stumbled; then she caught herself and ran on. Out of the light’s reach, she veered sharply to her left. An Agram SMG started its angry typewriter chatter, but the gunner was firing blind, wildly spraying the night.

Randi diverted laterally again, heading away from the camp, the cabin lights fading rapidly to indistinction in the swirl of the snow. She was clear! She paused, panting, and struggled with the stolen shirts, untangling them, shaking out the glass shards and drawing them on, augmenting her ski outfit. Already she was feeling the bite of the cold. They weren’t going to be enough protection out here tonight. Not nearly enough.

She ripped the tail off the flannel shirt and bound it over her face as an ad hoc snow mask and drew her already aching hands up into the overlong sleeves of the shirts. She looked around in the bleak near pitch blackness. The wind would be her compass. She would move north and try to join up with Jon and Valentina.

Randi’s one course of action, her one chance, was to keep moving and somehow find the others. She would work on the premise that they had come down from the crash site to find Wednesday Island Station occupied. Given that, she would further presume that they would divert and go to cover on the island’s central ridge, where they could both find shelter and keep the camp under observation. Knowing Jon, he would try to work in close during the night to try to establish the identity of the landing force and learn what had happened to her and Trowbridge.

The odds were not good. If her teammates hadn’t come down from the crash site or if she couldn’t find them, then she would die before morning. But the death out here looked cleaner and more defiant than the death back there. Hugging herself to conserve body warmth, Randi began her stumbling trudge through the growing blizzard.

Pouring through the broken window, the cold filled the bunkhouse like the touch of death. In the harsh white glare of the gas lantern, the naked body and bloody, ruined face of Stefan Kropodkin looked exceptionally obscene and grotesque. Kretek tore the sleeping bag from the bunk and covered his nephew.

His men stood by awkwardly, their faces impassive but with a suppressed glint of fear in their eyes. Someone had taken something from their leader. He did not react well to such acts, even in far lesser matters.

Kretek stared at the muffled mound at his feet. The one connection he’d had left to this thing called family. It was a current that ran deep through the Balkan cultures, even through a blackened soul such as his.

He had been a fool. He had made the mistake of viewing the blonde woman not as a threat but as a treat, like a bite of chocolate to be consumed casually in passing. Instead she had been a time bomb waiting for an opportune moment to explode.

He could read the signs. At her own choosing, she had torn loose, swatted Stephan like a cockroach, and made her escape. She was a professional in the deadliest possible definition of the term, and a pretty face and a nice pair of tits had blinded Kretek to this.

Stefan’s hand protruded from beneath the sleeping bag, his fingers half curled in beseechment, pleading for revenge.

“Find that whore.” Kretek’s words were a growling whisper. “Get out there and find her. The only way any of you will ever leave this island is if you bring her back to me alive. Do you hear me? Alive!”

Vlahovitch, his chief of staff, hesitated only a moment before speaking. “It will be done, Anton. Come on, the rest of you. Let’s get a sweep organized. She won’t get far in this weather. Move!”

Anton Kretek said nothing more as his men geared up to start the search. His thoughts were distant, planning what he would do when the golden-haired woman was brought before him.

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