The Istanbul Decision

Fifteen

He eased out into the exposed area at the rear of the cabin, anxiously listening for the crackle of machine gun fire, but there was nothing except the hum of the wind across the opening. He glanced questioningly back at Roberta, then scampered down the narrow metal ladder and ran for the far end of the train, keeping to the shadows. The moon was at its zenith and with the help of the snow was lighting the landscape with a pale, opalescent daylight, which fortunately also created deep shadows.

He reached the last car, mounted another narrow ladder, and climbed to the roof. From here he leaped onto a rock shelf. The snow had been melting here all day and had refrozen, covering the rocks with a glasslike smoothness. He balanced carefully, trying to keep his weight directly over his feet, then rose up and latched on to an evergreen branch on the slope above. He took a step, balanced for a split second while he grabbed the next branch, then stepped again. In this way he was able to move mincingly, like a man on a tightrope, except that with only one good arm there was a gap when he moved from one branch to the next that left him vulnerable to falling. Several times he did almost fall, each time waving his hand frantically back and forth to keep himself upright until by some miracle it landed on another spiny twig and he was able to continue.

This little drama was being played out within easy range of Kobelev's people, and Carter kept expecting the report of a rifle to come thundering over the snow along with the bullet that would crease his skull and send him toppling twenty feet to the tracks below or split his spine or whatever. But it didn't come, and he began to wonder if Kobelev had gone.

The rock shelf ended in a steep snowfield, prismatic in the moonlight, at the end of which protruded a finger of rock. This was where Carter expected to find him, and indeed something was leaning against the base of it, either a pack or a bundle — or a man. If it was a man, he was dead or asleep.

Carter pulled out his gun and made his way cautiously across the snow, but the surface of the field had frozen to a thin veneer of ice that cracked like glass underfoot. His footfalls sounded like depth charges in the stillness. Christ! How could he not hear me? Carter thought. But mercifully the wind was blowing up the mountain instead of down, carrying the crunch of Carter's footsteps out into the night.

As he drew closer he saw it definitely was a man hunched over with his arms folded in front of him.

He came still closer — to within pistol range — and thought surely now the man would see him. He stopped, ready to hit the snow if the man made a move. But nothing happened. It was as if the man were sleeping… or dead. He crept closer.

Finally, at a distance of about seventy-five feet, Carter realized the man was awake but slowly freezing to death. He was wearing only a light Windbreaker and no hat or gloves. His face was unearthly pale, his lips quivered, and his bald head was mottled with splotches of stark white. His eyes stared blankly forward, and although Carter had crossed his line of vision, the pupils remained unfocused.

With a sigh Carter let Wilhelmina fall limply to his side. It was no use killing a man who was already half dead. He would take him back to the train, have Roberta tie him up, and stick him in one of the back cars.

The man's eyes suddenly lit with the last remaining spark of realization of what was going on. He swung the big automatic rifle around, commencing fire at the beginning of his arc.

A spray of bullets went wide to Carter's left, spitting up tiny glistening geysers in the snow. Carter responded with a shot from the hip, cleaving the man's forehead dead center so forcefully and fast that it snapped back and his rifle discharged three shells harmlessly into the air. Then the man's big hulk slumped face-first into the snow, leaving little question as to the state of his health.

"Damn! cursed Carter under his breath. He hadn't wanted to kill him. He lifted the corpse with the toe of his shoe. Snow was melting in rivulets on the still-warm face, and the eyes were open. It couldn't be helped. He picked up the rifle and slung it over his shoulder, then he stuffed Wilhelmina into his parka pocket and headed back toward the train.

Roberta was watching for him as he came up the tracks. "Nick!" she whispered hoarsely. "I heard gunshots."

"I wasn't on the receiving end," he said.

"Is he dead?"

"Very." He quickly climbed the ladder into the engine compartment. "Not that he stood much of a chance," he went on bitterly. "He was practically frozen stiff when I got there. Someday I'd like to find out what Kobelev does to these people to warrant such loyalty."

"Where do we go from here?" asked Roberta.

"We haven't heard anything from the other side for quite a while, have we?" said Carter, walking to the other side of the engine.

Roberta shook her head.

"Kobelev!" Carter yelled. The words echoed down the mountain.

There was no answer.

"Come on," said Carter, motioning to Roberta.

Carter took the frontal assault, climbing down out of the engine directly in line with Kobelev's position. Roberta went the other way, around the big boiler tank and over the tracks to try to outflank him. But again their precautions proved unnecessary. When they rounded the boulders, they found nothing but a wide area of churned-up snow and, in the middle, a slender girl with black hair wearing a man's too-large overcoat, lying on her side, trussed up like a roped calf. She was squirming and making muffled noises behind the cloth in her mouth, her relieved eyes telling them how glad she was to see them.

"Nick!" she shouted when they untied her. For a moment they sat in the snow holding each other without moving. Roberta crouched on her haunches.

"Why did they leave you behind?" Carter asked.

"Kobelev had Tatiana, so he fled on foot. He said if you had me maybe you would let him go."

"He must be dreaming! My orders are to kill him. I'll do it. He must know that. Which way did he go?"

She pointed up the track.

Carter followed her finger and shook his head, wondering what on earth Kobelev wanted in that direction. "How long ago?" he asked.

"Two hours. I don't know. Maybe a little longer."

Roberta broke in sympathetically. "You must be frozen clear through."

Carter and Roberta each gave her an arm and helped her up the ladder and into the engine room. While Cynthia warmed herself and got Roberta to tell her all that had happened while she'd been unconscious. Carter rummaged through the train, looking for anything he might be able to use in his pursuit of Kobelev. Within ten minutes he was back, his arms full.

"A gold mine," he muttered as he dropped it all with a clatter on the engine room floor. "Apparently, avalanches are fairly common along this section of track, and the train carries ample equipment in case the crew has to hike out of here."

On the floor were several pairs of snowshoes, three pickaxes, tents, an emergency stove, a bundle of flares, more coats and mittens, and two heavy-duty flashlights.

"There was even a shortwave radio," he said.

"Working?" asked Roberta hopefully.

Carter shook his head. "Sabotaged. Probably the first thing Kobelev did when he got on board. Oh — I found one other thing." He produced a large folded piece of paper from his back pocket. "A map," he said, spreading it on the floor. "According to this, there's a town about twelve miles down the line. Doesn't look very big, though."

"It's got a phone no doubt, or a radio," said Roberta.

"You think that's where he's headed?"

Roberta nodded. "If I were him, I'd want to get out of here the quickest way I could."

"He said something about a town," put in Cynthia. "Alba… something."

"Alba Iulia," finished Carter. "That's it, then. I'd better get going. He's got a two-hour head start."

"Nick," Cynthia said, "take me with you."

Carter shook his head. "This is going to be very unpleasant work. And if you miss a cue, you'll get more than just a groan from the audience."

"I'm an experienced mountain climber, Nick. I spent most of my teen-age years in Colorado scaling rocks like Diamond Head and the north face of Long's Peak. I know what I'm doing."

"We're going to kill a man. Think you have the stomach for it?"

"That man, yes," she said resolutely.

"Well…" said Carter, starting to give in, but Roberta interrupted.

"May I speak with you alone?" she asked.

They descended the narrow steps out into the snow. When they were well out of Cynthia's earshot, Roberta confronted him. "You're thinking of taking her, aren't you?"

"I'd be a fool to go out there with only one good arm. I may need her."

"But she's an actress. She doesn't know the first thing about intelligence work."

"I'm certainly not going to leave the two of you here by yourselves. Kobelev may double back and make a try for the train. Now that I've got her back, I'm not going to leave her unprotected."

"But it's all right to leave me. Is that it?"

"You were trained for this sort of thing, Commander. She's an actress, remember?"

"And a damn good one."

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Carter.

"I'm beginning to like you, Carter. I don't want to lose you."

Carter stepped closer, bent down, and their lips met. She lasted good. Cold, yet warm, almost burning in the center. For a moment Carter didn't want to let her go. When he finally stepped back, his heart was pounding. "Let's go back," he said, the words thick in his throat. "There are some things I want to check out with you before we go."

For the next half hour Carter conducted a crash course in train engineering, based on what little knowledge he had. He told her to keep the boiler pressure at the maximum in case she had to leave suddenly, and he showed her how to blow off steam to keep it from building too high. Then he pointed out the forward and reverse gears, and explained that in order to get through the avalanche she would have to back up to give herself some running room. With the melting during the day and the digging that was done, it would probably be possible to bust out, but only in an emergency.

He left her the machine gun and an extra clip of ammunition, then he and Cynthia dressed and went outside. They threw the snowshoes down beside the track and strapped them on. Roberta watched from the cab, looking like some sort of Tibetan guerrilla with her machine gun strapped over her filthy, snow-and-coal-encrusted parka and her smudged face. She waved when they left, and Carter continued to glance back over his shoulder to check on her until the train was out of sight.

Kobelev and his entourage had left a wide trail in the snow, and with the snowshoes and brilliant moonlight. Carter had high hopes of catching them. Cynthia turned out to be every inch the mountain woman she'd claimed to be. She plodded along beside him, matching him step for step, showing remarkable endurance for a creature of such slight build. And all this after her ordeal in the snow.

They found the first corpse about two hours later. They probably would have mistaken it for an exposed chunk of rock or a shrub if the evidence of the murder weren't so plainly visible in the snow.

The tracks indicated the group of them had been walking — Carter figured Kobelev, Tatiana, the two guards, the fireman, and the engineer — spread out, only loosely held together, and judging from the grooves extending from the toes of some prints, some staggering from exhaustion. They must have stopped to rest. Snow had been knocked off stones, and there were body prints on the ground. Carter was able to pick out Kobelev's footprints and Tatiana's, the smaller accompanying the larger wherever they went. They discussed something, briefly, for the prints were relatively few. Then one veered off from the others, long paces heading for a face of sheer rock, running with no place to run.

It was in following this set of footprints that they found him, face down in the snow with two bullets in his back, blood soaking his thick engineer's jacket, his hands outstretched, still wearing the long, cuffed gloves of his trade.

Cynthia was the first to reach him. 'Nick! Look here!" she shouted, hopping over to it on her huge, tennis-racket shoes.

When Carter got there, he turned the body over. Blood had run from the nose and mouth and turned black against the abnormal whiteness of the face.

"God! Why did they shoot him?" she demanded, starting to whimper.

"Excess baggage maybe. I don't know."

Carter stared down at the body, trying to figure just why they had killed him. There was no evidence that one was falling behind the others. If anything, it was rather remarkable how well they'd hung together over such a long distance and such rough terrain. So why shoot him?

Carter told Cynthia to pull herself together. There was nothing they could do for this man now, and besides, she'd see plenty of this kind of thing soon, and she was going to have to be ready for it. She dried her eyes on her mittens, sniffed, and in a few minutes they were striding along much as before.

The silver disk of moon hung overhead, never moving or changing, and in time (he path they were following and the hushed hills on cither side seemed to become a place unto itself, without beginning or end, and even the memory of the engineer's death-mask face faded behind them. Then, half an hour after they'd found the first body, they came upon the second, sprawled in the middle of the trail, a bullet hole in his forehead.

The fireman." Carter said to Cynthia who had turned away. "Must have been a small bore. I'd say he's been out here about an hour, maybe less. It's hard to tell in this cold."

"Nick," she said weakly, "I don't know if I can go on."

"Don t flake out on me now, sugar. Come on, they've run out of people to kill." He grabbed her by the hand, and soon they were tramping through the snow at twice the rate they had before.

It was a remarkable feat for the two of them: the man who had had little or no sleep the previous night and who had sustained serious injuries only recently; and the woman who herself had been through an extended ordeal. Yet they ran like two people possessed, as though they were being chased rather than chasing, as though the wooded hills themselves had suddenly become haunted. Carter, for one, sensed he was running from rather than to, and that his pursuer was as intangible as an idea that nagged at the back of his mind. Two murders for no clear motive suggested something wrong, terribly wrong, but he did not want to stop to consider what that something might be. Better to run and keep on running until at last, after thirty minutes and covering almost two miles, most of it uphill, he fell into the snow exhausted, panting like a winded dog.

Cynthia stood over him, blowing out huge clouds of vapor into the night air. "You all right?" she breathed.

"We're almost to the top. I've got a feeling we'll be able to see them from there."

Cynthia looked up. "Stay and rest. I'll go up for a look." She turned and plodded up the hill. He had just unstrapped his snowshoes when she shouted something and frantically gestured for him. He grabbed the snowshoes and scrambled up to her.

When he reached the top, he saw what she was screaming about. A hundred yards down the trail another body sat in the snow leaning against a rock. In the shadow it might have been mistaken for just another part of the rock except for the reflection of moonlight off the pure whiteness of its shaved head.

"Oh, my God," he muttered as he limped closer, for he sensed the nagging realization that what he'd just spent the last half hour eluding was about to thrust itself upon him, the implications of which were going to be very painful when sorted out.

"Nick! Nick!" Cynthia shouted. She covered her face with her mittens.

He took her in his arms and held her close for several moments. "It's all right, Cynthia," he said soothingly.

She stopped calling his name but continued to cry quietly into her mittens.

There was something definitely very wrong here. He could feel it thick in the chill air. He began to pace furiously, finally pulling up short, and it was a measure of his agitation that it had taken him this long to notice the obvious. "He committed suicide!"

It was true. The corpse still held the means of its destruction in its hand, a.22-caliber handgun that had put a small hole in the right temple and a slightly larger hole in the left side near the crown, creating two continents of blood on a globe of otherwise perfectly blank sea.

"What does it mean?" Cynthia asked weakly.

"I'm not sure," said Carter, slumping onto the rock opposite the corpse. "Hold it!" he shouted suddenly. He jumped up and began running up and down in the snow. "Where are they? I don't see them."

"What? What are you looking for?"

"The footprints! Tatiana's and Kobelev's! I don't see them! I haven't seen them since… since that first body. We veered off the trail there, and when we came back, they were gone. A diversion! Leading us on from corpse to corpse while he makes his escape. The train!"

He came wearily back to the rock and sat down. Cynthia plopped down into the snow. She'd stopped crying. She merely looked at him now with a strange steadfastness.

Moments passed while Carter stared into the snow at his feet and sighed. But Cynthia never moved. She leveled her gaze on his face with an absorbing interest.

Finally she began to get on his nerves. "What are you staring at?" he asked shortly. "My defeat? Is that what fascinates you so much? Did you think I was above that sort of thing? Well, I'm not. I can't beat him! I've tried and I can't do it."

"I've waited a long time to hear you say that," said Cynthia, only it wasn't Cynthia's voice. It was a good deal deeper, throatier, with a hard edge to it that told the listener its owner could just as easily kill a man as love him.

"Tatiana!" he said, scarcely daring to breathe the word.

"Correct." She smiled a little, producing a pearl-handled revolver from her mitten. The handle glinted in the moonlight.