Where Blood Runs Cold, page 8
For maybe an hour, neither he nor Sofia spoke, each lost in their own movement, two automatons out there, synchronized and ceaseless. Crossing land where countless glaciers had grown and melted over a million years, advancing and retreating, each successive pass over the bedrock like one of his own carpentry planes down a length of timber, grinding away the rock bit by bit.
He knew their own strength, of body and mind, was being eroded too.
But then Sofia saw the red light.
‘There, Pappa,’ she said, stopping and lifting her pole to point with it.
He looked, but saw nothing.
‘It’s gone now,’ she said.
He leant towards her to be heard over the wind’s moaning. ‘Are you sure, Lillemor?’ he asked, a sick feeling spreading in his guts. Because Sofia hadn’t pointed behind them but rather ahead, where the looming mass of mountain along the valley’s western side came to an end before the opening to the glacier. ‘You’re sure you saw a red light?’
Even in the pre-dawn dark he could see the strange blue–grey brilliance of the glacial ice at the head of the valley.
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said, looking out to where she had seen it. ‘Just for a second, then it was gone.’
He wanted her to be wrong. Even if it meant she was so tired that her eyes or her tormented mind was playing tricks, conjuring sights that did not exist in reality.
‘How did he get ahead of us?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. That wasn’t the important question now. As heartbreaking as it was to know that after all the effort, all the numbing hours of skiing through the blizzard, they still had not escaped those hunting them, the question troubling Erik was why the man had risked alerting them to his presence by using the head torch. Not to follow their tracks, seeing as he was a kilometre or so in front of them. To see where he was going? Because he was struggling in the blizzard? Erik didn’t think so. Clearly the man hadn’t struggled to overtake them, and if they could ski without a torch then so could he. Which left only one answer. He had used the light to signal to one of his companions.
‘I promise I saw it, Pappa,’ Sofia insisted.
‘I believe you,’ he said. He lifted his hat off his right ear and turned that side to the south, shielding it from the wind with his gloved hands. He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the blizzard, listening for the mechanical moan of the remaining snowmobile. But all he heard was the storm, the frenzy of it out there in the world, for they were protected somewhat down in the valley as the westerly hurled its wrath across the mountains.
‘What shall we do?’ Sofia asked him.
He peered through the whirling snow, fearing that the motor sled was close, that the man driving it had turned off the headlight for stealth.
‘We have the rifle,’ he said. He unhitched the pulk harness and fetched the rifle, kept dry with their sleeping bags and other kit, then put his backpack in the pulk. He held the rifle up to her, meaning to reassure her. ‘We have this,’ he told her, patting the wooden stock, then lifting the scope to his eye. He could see little through it. She looked at the rifle with a kind of horror, the way any child would who had seen a woman lying dead in the snow in her night-dress with a bullet hole in her back, the wound steaming in the cold.
Taking his eye from the scope, Erik saw the fear in his daughter’s face. ‘I’ll only use it if I have to.’
He pulled the bolt back and brought the rifle up to his eye to look down the breech. Peeling off his right-hand glove with his teeth, he poked his little finger down into the breech to make sure there was no round in there already. Empty. Still gripping the glove between his teeth, he took one of the shells from his coat pocket and pushed it down into the magazine, feeling that there was no room for another, which meant the magazine was full, though he didn’t know how many rounds it took.
He thought back to the handful of occasions he had handled similar rifles, during his military conscription and more recently, in his thirties, when invited on elk-hunting trips. He recalled the thrill of stalking through the wet and dripping forest at dawn. The distant barking of the unleashed dogs. The atavistic vibe that had permeated amongst them like a spell, as it had bound hunters for fifteen thousand years, since men first gathered with firebrands and branches to separate mammoths from the herd and steer them into traps.
Not that he had ever brought down an elk. They had mostly proved elusive, and the one he’d got close to had been rump-on with no clear shot, so he hadn’t pulled the trigger.
‘We have it if we need it,’ he said, raising his voice above the wind and pushing the bolt forward, hearing the bolt head stripping a round from the magazine and into the chamber. Then he thumbed the safety, slung the rifle over his shoulder, put his glove back on and fastened the clips of the pulk harness.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, changing direction slightly to take them away from where Sofia had seen the red light on the western side of the valley. Still heading for the glacier, they would ski up to it from the east side, hoping they could get past the man on skis before he could cut them off.
But what if they couldn’t? What if Sofia was too tired? What if the man had night-vision goggles as well as the red head torch, and was even now watching them in monochrome, seeing the world in shades of green? How could they escape then?
He had the sickening feeling that these men were making a sadistic game out of it. One of them skiing ahead to lie in wait while the other two pushed him and Sofia into the trap.
Like the mammoths.
‘Keep going,’ he said to himself, the words escaping on a wisp of white fog. ‘Make it to the glacier and disappear up there.’ Find somewhere to shelter. Hide until these bastards gave up the chase. It was all they could do. ‘Just damn well ski,’ he murmured into the night.
Then he heard the engine.
7
‘I CAN’T, PAPPA,’ Sofia called over her shoulder. ‘I can’t keep it up.’
‘Yes, you can,’ he called back. ‘I’m right with you. Just keep going. We’re nearly there. Just another few hundred metres, that’s all,’ he lied. ‘You can do it.’
‘My legs are jelly,’ she called. ‘I’m going to fall.’
It was getting light now. The cloud beyond the eastern ridge glowed a pale pink, though shadow clung to the valley still, slinking there like some ill-willed animal hoping to go unnoticed until night came again.
‘You won’t fall,’ he said, though he thought she might.
Twenty, thirty more strength-sapping metres passed before an idea came to him. ‘Stop, Sofia, wait.’ He took her poles and tied the strap of one to the basket of the other, looking back into the dark as he worked. Then, using a carabiner, he clipped the strap of this second pole to the back of the pulk. The spare pulk ropes would have been better, he knew, but he had used them to kill a man in the night and they were gone now.
‘I just need you to hold on,’ he told her, giving her the basket end of the first pole. ‘I’ll do the rest.’
‘But you’re already pulling the pulk,’ she said. She wasn’t crying but she was scared and exhausted and her face was a mask of anguish. ‘It’ll be too heavy. You can’t pull us both.’ Even so, she gripped the pole tightly in her mittened hands.
‘Just don’t let go,’ he told her. ‘We’ll see how it is. If I can’t pull you, we’ll leave the pulk.’
‘But we need it,’ she said.
‘We can take out the most important bits and put them in my backpack, OK? But let’s try first.’
She nodded. ‘OK.’
‘Hold on.’
‘I will.’
He set off once more. It took a little while to work up any momentum, and it was hard work pulling the pulk and Sofia too, but he knew he could do it.
‘OK?’ he called over his shoulder.
‘Yes,’ she shouted back, hanging onto the pole, keeping her own skis close together, running on the snow smoothed over by the pulk.
They continued in this way for what he guessed might be a kilometre. He knew for sure now that the man on the snowmobile was driving without the headlamp on, because it was close now, the engine’s high-pitched snarl cutting through the keening wind, though he couldn’t see the vehicle itself. He guessed it was performing slow diagonal passes across the valley, because the sound came and went. This gave him hope. It told him that the driver was fearful of Erik’s rifle. That the man was unwilling to make himself a target by following their ski tracks with his light on, because he knew Erik could take up a position and fire at the lit-up vehicle.
So just keep going, he told himself. Get up onto the glacier and lose them in the storm.
‘There, Pappa! The light!’ Sofia yelled.
‘I saw it,’ he replied. A flash of red. And close. Two hundred metres away. Maybe closer. There and then gone.
He did not stop. He was breathing hard through his mouth, sucking the freezing air into his lungs. His heart thumping against his breastbone, urgent and dogged, a metronome keeping the pace, and he would not slow.
On the higher ground at the head of the valley, the snow was flooded with blue from the glacial ice beneath. They were going to make it. The other skier wouldn’t see them before they had passed him, or rather passed the place where they had seen the flash of red light. Then he and Sofia would climb up onto the glacier and, up there in the open, in the maw of the storm, their tracks would disappear and they would either find shelter or make their own.
As he thought this, his legs feeding hungrily on that hope, something tugged at his shoulder and he looked down and saw a tear in his jacket, unbalancing and nearly falling as the rifle shot rang out, a stark, abrupt sound amongst the near-constant wail of the wind.
Sofia called out and he looked behind him to check she hadn’t been hit.
‘We can’t stop,’ he told her and lengthened his stride, putting more into each kick and glide. ‘Get down, Sofia,’ he called. ‘Stay low.’ He risked another look and saw she was squatting behind the pulk. He could just see a sliver of her pale face and her eyes peering into the dark as she clung to the pole.
He glanced at his shoulder, at the rent in the fabric, and some part of his mind recalled stories of people being shot and feeling no pain, at first. Then he saw a muzzle flash in the dark and felt the bullet whipcrack the air beside his face, and he flinched and ducked, every instinct telling him to make himself small, to cower in the dark. To call out to the shooter and beg for mercy. To do whatever the man wanted, so long as he promised not to hurt Sofia. But he knew there would be no mercy and so, even as his skis slowed to a stop, he shoved his poles down between the pulk harness and his hip, pulled off his gloves, unslung the rifle and brought it up to his shoulder.
He thumbed the safety off and peered through the telescopic sights. But he could not see the man.
‘Stay down, Sofia,’ he shouted, now looking through the scope, now taking his head away and letting his eyes sift the dark, now going back to the scope. Panic flooded him.
Where are you?
He knew the man would fire again any second, but he couldn’t see him.
Please!
Where was he? Erik’s hands were shaking. He was trying to breathe in and out through his nose, to gain control over his racing heart and trembling flesh. He took a lungful of air and held it, fearful that the fog of his hot breath was visible in the gloom.
Please! Let me see the bastard.
He dropped to one knee, keeping the butt of the rifle in his right shoulder, its barrel pointing roughly to where he had seen the momentary bloom of orange fire. It was hard to keep his eyes open under the cascade of snowflakes spewing into his face. Hard to see, let alone find his target and make the shot.
Then another muzzle flash and he was showered with ice shrapnel, the round having hit the snow three metres in front of him and driving deep.
He moved the barrel across and pulled the trigger, the Remington Model 700 kicking like a mule, then he hauled back the bolt and pushed it forward again, slamming another shell into the chamber. Cursing himself for how aggressively he had pulled the trigger, instead of squeezing it. Most likely he’d jerked the rifle and spoilt the shot, though all he’d had to aim at was the memory of that split-second burst of flame out there in the night.
‘Pappa,’ Sofia hissed behind him.
‘Shh, Lillemor,’ he said.
‘But, Pappa, it’s coming.’
Then he heard it and knew that the Russian on the motor sled had seen the flashes from the muzzles of their rifles and was coming to the aid of his comrade.
‘Kill him, Pappa,’ Sofia said. ‘Please!’
‘Stay down,’ he growled. Bare hands already hurting from the cold. Eyes sifting the dark shapes in the landscape. The humpbacked, snow-covered mounds. The tops of tall scrub and stunted birch poking up through the mantle, thin silhouettes bristling in the wind. He thought he saw something move. Maybe a trick of the swirling snow. Maybe not.
‘Come on,’ he growled under his breath, trying to remember his firearms training from his twelve months as a conscript in the army. A long time ago.
Steady. Aim. Breathe. Fire. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle recoiled into the layers of clothes and the flesh and bone of his shoulder, the report shockingly loud because the Remington was not fitted with a suppressor.
He shuffled to the side, making himself smaller, knowing he had again given away his position. Then a flash, and the space in the world which he had occupied three seconds previously buzzed, the round already long gone.
If you hear the shot, you’re still alive.
Blood beat in his ears, an aqueous gush within which the sounds of gunfire rang still, like tinnitus. He worked the bolt and chambered another round but he did not fire.
Where are you, you fucking bastard?
The wind mourned, and he squinted his eyes against the squalling snow. He was shaking with fear for Sofia. Shaking with fury and hatred too, for the men who were doing this to her. Again, he wanted to call out to the man he could not see, to tell him they could do what they wanted to him. Shoot him in the face. Flay the skin from his body while he yet lived. Anything, so long as they let Sofia live. But he knew they would not, and the unfairness of that put a rage in him like nothing he had ever known.
His left hand, gripping the forestock, and his right-hand trigger finger were growing numb now, but he didn’t squeeze his finger back because he dared not shoot and miss again. Yet he knew every second he delayed was an invitation for the other man to shoot and kill him. His body seemed to shrink inside his clothes, as if it expected the next bullet to rip into flesh and bone and internal organs. A carnage of white-hot agony and failure.
‘He’s coming, Pappa,’ Sofia called.
He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the engine’s four-stroke growl and saw nothing but snow churning in the dark. Then the headlight lit, its beam flooding across the snow. Erik snapped his head back around and returned his eye to the scope, in time to see the man with the rifle throw a hand up against the glare from his colleague’s machine. Erik yanked on the trigger. No time to squeeze. The man’s head exploded in a spray of skull, brain and blood, the whole show lit up like a one-man play in a deserted theatre. Then Erik spun round, pivoting on his knee in the deepening snow as he cocked the rifle, pulled the weapon into his shoulder and fired at the light. Reloaded and fired again. The motor sled swerved, ascended an unseen mound, then tilted and flew six, maybe eight metres, its engine screaming, before coming down on its side with a crump of metal and fibreglass.
Erik pulled back the bolt, pushed it forward and pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened but for a dry click, and he knew the magazine was empty.
‘Sofia, let’s go!’ he yelled.
She stood, untying her poles from each other and unclipping them from the carabiner on the pulk.
‘I can pull you,’ he told her.
‘It’s OK, I can ski,’ she said. ‘Are they dead?’ She was looking over her shoulder.
Some seventy metres away, the motor sled lay on its side, its headlamp still casting its glare over the snow. He couldn’t see the driver.
‘I don’t know. One of them is,’ he said, strapping on the pulk harness. ‘We have to go.’
She nodded and planted her poles, then pushed off, taking up the diagonal stride through the deep snow. He slung the rifle over his shoulder. He knew he’d not been hit, that the bullet had just grazed his jacket, but pulled at the material to inspect the damage nonetheless.
‘I’ll catch you up,’ he called.
‘Pappa!’ she shouted over her shoulder.
‘It’s OK. I just need to check something. Go on – I’ll catch up.’
She headed off into the dark.
‘Jesus,’ he said under his breath as he skied up to the dead man. The man’s mother would not have recognized him. The face and most of the skull were gone, and Erik tried not to look at the steaming wet ruin of what remained. Even so, he knew from the man’s build that he was the broad-shouldered, bull-necked man who had been poking an iron into the Helgelands’ fireplace before Konstantin had knocked Lars down and broken his skull.
He leant over, balancing on his skis, keeping his face half turned away as he patted down the pockets on the man’s fur-lined parka. He could smell the blood and offal stink of wet brain mush and felt the bile squeeze up from his stomach into his throat. He felt something – a phone? – in one of the big side pockets of the dead man’s jacket.
‘Pappa!’ Sofia called. He turned to see her faint outline in the dark, where she had stopped to wait for him.
He looked back at the motor sled lying on its side. No sign of movement over there.
