AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We weren’t sure what to bring, so I guess you could say we brought everything.”
“This is no problem,” she said, still looking a bit confused. “Let me help you carry your bags to the truck.”
She started around Rapp, but he blocked her path and thumbed toward Dumond. “We can handle it. My friend over there got a little airsick on the way in, though. Maybe you could take him to your rig. A little sympathy wouldn’t hurt, either.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! Of course.”
Shulyov rushed to his side and helped him up. Keeping an arm locked in his, she chatted encouragingly as they made their way across the snowpack.
“Cute,” Charlie Wicker said, coming up next to Rapp.
“Your kind of woman.”
Wicker was debatably one of the top five operatives in the world and undisputedly one of the top three snipers. He’d grown up in a small town in Wyoming hunting with his brothers. When he was twelve, he’d gotten separated from them in a storm not unlike this one. After three days, everyone assumed he was dead and that they wouldn’t find him until the snow melted in the spring. On day four he’d emerged from the wilderness without a scratch, dragging an antelope he’d shot.
Rapp originally thought it was just a legend, but when Wicker left the SEALs to join Coleman’s company, he’d pulled the man’s file. In it was a copy of the news story, complete with a photo of a skinny kid with a big grin and a rifle towering over his back. Since then, not much had changed.
“Grab the gear and let’s get out of here,” Rapp said. “I want to be on the trail in an hour.”
CHAPTER 51
IRENA Shulyov seemed to be piloting the vehicle entirely by memory. The powerful headlights illuminated nothing but a disorienting tunnel of snowflakes that looked like they were being shot from a cannon. Powerful windshield wipers swept manically across the glass, but appeared to have no purpose other than to create an electric whine that competed with the howl of the wind.
According to the Agency’s weather forecasters, the storm would continue through the night with temperatures dipping into the single digits. Windchill would be in the negative-twenty range. Not exactly Rapp’s favorite operating conditions.
A few years back he’d acknowledged this gap in his skill set and joined a couple of SAS friends on a two-month-long training session in Antarctica. To this day, he remembered it as sixty of the most miserable days of his life—a blur of frozen appendages, unruly sled dogs, and hypothermia.
Rapp had managed to be the first to drag himself across the finish line of a hundred-mile self-supported race across the tundra. He could still hear the instructor’s comment: “Well, you can’t ski for shit, but you’ve sure got a big motor.” Even fresher in his mind was the frost-bitten chunk of his right thumb that turned black and fell off. It eventually grew back, but he still didn’t have full sensation.
“I don’t want you and your friends to worry!” Irena Shulyov shouted over the ambient noise. “We have a high-pressure system coming in tomorrow. Blue skies and no wind. It will be a perfect day for touring and taking photos.”
That jibed with what he’d been told but unless things went very wrong, he and his team would be long gone before visibility got much over a mile.
“Sounds great.”
“How is your friend doing?”
Rapp glanced back at Dumond, sandwiched between Coleman and Wicker. It was a bit hard to tell in the dim light but he seemed a little less green than he had back at the plane.
“Fine. He’s really looking forward to taking in the sights.”
Rapp couldn’t see her face, but the giant hood she was still wearing moved forward and back in what he assumed was a nod.
“Is there anything in particular you and your friends would like to do? I see you brought skis. Avalanche danger will likely be considerable but there are some lower-angle slopes that will remain stable. We’re expecting at least two meters out of this storm.”
She spoke a little too fast, jumbling her passable English. It was possible that the nervousness was just a holdover from having her clients coming in on such a dangerous flight, but he suspected it was more than that. It would be pretty clear to anyone with even a room-temperature IQ that they weren’t middle managers from Procter & Gamble. So now Irena Shulyov found herself alone in the wilderness with a group of men who would probably be familiar to her from her father’s time in the Russian military.
“What kind of work do you do?” she asked, the silence obviously magnifying her discomfort.
“Product development.”
“What kind of products?”
“How long have you lived here?” Rapp said, changing the subject.
“All my life. I went to college in St. Petersburg but hated the city. The people, the cars. The buildings blocking the sky. I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”
Rapp was about to ask another question to keep the conversation focused on her, but she pointed through the windshield.
