World War III

“What are you thinking, Alex?” Devenko asked cheerfully, walking beside him. “What you will say to the chairman when you report our mission accomplished?”

The Soviet colonel nodded with a smile. “That, too.”

“It will be a welcome change,” Devenko said. “To sleep under a roof again and eat hot, cooked food. I was growing tired of a lumpy tent floor and cold rations.” He looked at his commander with a conspirator’s grin. “I have also brought along a bottle of special vintage that I have been saving for just this occasion. Will you share it with me, Alex?”

Vorashin clasped his second-in-command on the back. He smiled broadly for the first time in weeks.

“Tonight, Sergei, I will drink with you. I will have a bath and a shave and put on new socks and drink your vodka. I will give a toast to your wife and your two daughters. We will even drink to the Americans for the great shiploads of grain they will send us. And when we have finished your bottle, Sergei, we will drink mine.”

Devenko laughed.

In a moment, Saamaretz had joined them — he seemed always to be just around the corner — and demanded to know what humor the major had stumbled on in the middle of this frozen desert.

“Nothing, Major Saamaretz,” Devenko said, grinning from ear to ear. “Nothing at all.”

The political officer eyed them both suspiciously. “I think it is not proper for officers to laugh in front of their men,” Saamaretz said before turning away. He was miffed, Vorashin thought, that nobody talked to him, which was his own fault for letting everyone know he was KGB. Probably, he couldn’t think of anything else when he said, “You do not see me laughing. I am a soldier of the people… and nothing amuses me.” He stomped off, reaching, Vorashin was almost positive, for his little book.

Devenko burst into laughter. He clapped his gloved hands together and laughed so hard he nearly fell down. Vorashin was laughing, too, shaking his head, aware that the soldiers around him were smiling.

It was just the release of tension he’d needed. He laughed without inhibition until tears came to his eyes.

Fifteen seconds later, the world exploded in his face.

Caffey knelt beside the window and watched as the point scout got off his snowmobile and glanced around, making a superficial check of the station. The soldier wasn’t more than thirty feet away from the pump house. Caffey looked down the breaker. He had his finger over the transmit button.

“Wait…” he whispered into the talkie, “…wait…”

He’d picked out one of the steel beam pipeline supports as a reference point. When the first tracked vehicle passed that spot the column would be exactly in the center of the choke. He waited for that vehicle with sweat pouring down his face. The track seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace. Twenty feet, fifteen… He flicked his glance at the scout when he thought he saw movement, but the soldier was only lighting a cigarette. He’d never finish it, Caffey thought. This time the choke point was perfect. This time it wouldn’t go wrong. He looked back at the lead vehicle. Ten feet now. He sensed everyone’s desperate concentration coiled with his own — Parsons’s, the machine gunners’, the pilot’s, Kate’s — it was like a stiffling weight on his chest that took his breath away. Five feet. The scout would die first, Caffey thought. Kate and the soldier at the other corner of the pump house, each dug into their own little holes, would have him in their sights. They had only to hear the word.

“Wait for it…” Caffey whispered again. He could only see the support now; his brain had focused on it and blurred everything else. Two feet. He saw the shadow of the track a foot away, inching closer. “…wahn… mmm-oore… phh-oot…” Shadow touched metal like a dark cloud over water and with it Caffey’s voiced boomed.

“Now!” he screamed. “NOW!”

Mayhem erupted between the treelines like an exploding star. In an instant, forty men were cut down in a murderous crossfire like falling dominoes while seven hundred more dove for cover, scattering like a terrified herd of wild antelope.

The split second it took Vorashin to yell and throw himself to the hard-packed snow was time already wasted for Devenko. Vorashin rolled on his side to see him still on his feet, still backpedaling a few paces from the force of the impact to his chest. The surprise in Sergei’s eyes and the sudden shape of his mouth as he glanced dumbstruck at the jagged and bloody holes in his parka were exactly that of a man Vorashin had seen accidentally electrocute himself — he couldn’t believe it. In the moment before his knees gave way, before he toppled backward, his wide, startled eyes found Vorashin. His mouth opened and his teeth were red.

“Ah!.. leeks…?”

He crumpled like a demolitioned building falling in on itself.

Powdered arcs of geysered snow, ripping the ground around him, finally delivered Vorashin off his ass.