AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ivanka and Natasha from yesterday walked up and down the lines, armed, and she looked away from them. Another man stood at the front. A bear of a man, he had black hair, a matching beard, thick gray army jacket, boots, and an AK-47 strung over his shoulder. A few younger men walked around, similarly armed.
“That’s Captain Boris at the front. At least, that’s what I named him. He’s in charge and controls access to the ship. Security for the entire place is on a master key card. It unlocks the panel for all the door locks for the containers, the main lock to below deck, and the elevator between decks as well as the upper floors. He wears it in his inside pocket.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “That’s very detailed.”
He laughed. “Too many years observing people for a living.”
Whatever that meant. The line started moving, and she followed the man in front of her, lucky Twenty-Two, down a massive set of stairs off the side of the boat down to a smaller boat, a transport ship.
Guards shouted at them, but she hadn’t a clue what they were saying. She simply lined up between Twenty-Two and Judah, her head down against a surprisingly sharp wind.
“It won’t be as bad when we get to the job site. It’s outside the city and surrounded by forest.”
It felt like most of the city was surrounded by forest as they disembarked, got on waiting trucks, and headed off to the site, just north of the city. A massive volcano loomed in the distance, rugged and beautiful, coughing smoke into the sky and covered with bushy green pine.
The city itself wasn’t large, mostly nine-story apartment buildings painted ochre orange or grimy white, the scent of coal in the air. She didn’t get a great view out of the back of the truck, but she did spot a gold-topped Russian orthodox church, a few buses, and along the street, warmly dressed people walking to work or school.
Just another day in Siberia. Transporting prisoners from gulag.
How could this be her life?
Judah sat next to her, his head down, eyes closed, as if he might be trying to sleep.
The trucks turned off the highway and onto a dirt road, and she knocked against Judah, then Twenty-Two, then tried to hold herself still and her noodles in her stomach as they traveled to the work site.
The trucks finally stopped, all ten of them, and she climbed out into the sunshine.
Shovels leaned against a rack, and on the back of a truck, steel helmets for welding.
A massive ditch exposed a black snake of unfinished new pipe in the ground next to a rusty line of piping.
“Get a shovel. Follow the diggers,” Judah said into her ear.
“Where are you going?”
“I weld.” He looked at her. “You’ll be okay. I’ll be nearby. Just…dig.”
She watched him go, a hollowness rushing through her.
He seemed to sense her, maybe, and turned around. “Twenty-Three. You’re okay.” Then he smiled.
She wasn’t sure what it was. The smile, maybe the calm in his voice. But she picked up a shovel and followed the rest to the pipeline hole.
And then, because she’d promised Ned she’d stay alive, she dug.
Five
“This is not Russia.” Ned stood at the window of the Air One Rescue office in Anchorage, his entire body wrung out.
Four flights—from Charles de Gaulle, to Dublin, Newark, to Seattle, to Alaska. Thirty-three hours and forty-five minutes. And six hours before that waiting to get on the flight, not to mention the nine-hour layover in Seattle, where Fraser had insisted they depart the terminal and get a hotel.
An hourly hotel. Ned had wanted to disinfect the sheets before he climbed onto the bed, but he lay on the bed fully clothed, and in his exhaustion, managed to drop into a dead sleep.
Fraser had to flip on the bright lights and practically douse him with cold water for his body to start functioning again, but yeah, a quick shower and he was back in the game for the three-hour flight to Anchorage.
Not Russia.
As he’d pointed out when Roy had purchased the tickets, they needed a visa to get into Russia proper.
