EQMM, May 2012 (19 page)

Then, blinking, Sergei saw it through the alpine fir. A campfire. And a shadow.

Sergei could see an orange fire dancing upon a circular stockade of ponderosa pine. The flames themselves were ballet dancers whose fragrant smoke carried swirling sparks skyward into the branches. Every now and then a burning log cracked. The clearing gave up the aromas of dried needles and boiled berries and charred game.

Around the campfire, a solitary figure moved, slowly and deliberately, as if he was very sore or very old or both. The figure, even at a distance, appeared thin, almost malnourished, and its limbs swayed as if they too were brittle branches concluding in tiny twigs. The figure wore a cloth cap with a short peak, a sort of tunic covered in patches, and leggings that came up to the knees.

Despite the strange scene, Sergei could no longer fight his heavy eyes.

Number 50 slept.

Sergei Kostyn awoke in a panic. The helicopter was loud, and close.

He rose, drawing the Glock, and staggered into the encampment like a zombie. The Winter Palace, no doubt, had zeroed in on the campfire. From above, in the black range, it must have appeared as a beacon, calling out Sergei's mistakes, welcoming his past to exact an easy revenge.

The mysterious old man was nowhere to be seen. Only his clutter. Sergei believed he had stumbled into the home of a hermit and, despite the peril, a waterfall of envy poured over him. What a blessed life. What an escape!
Imagine the freedom
, Sergei thought.
All the nature one could swallow, none of the pitfalls of humanity
. Sergei envisioned an idyllic hermit's life. A man could dwell alone in these mountains for a hundred years and never cross paths with anything bigger than a fox.

Then Sergei looked closer. An Asaki rifle, rusted and tarnished, leaned against a pine. Above it, pinned to the bark, a small faded Rising Sun made of tin. And the tent, there among the needles. Were they not Japanese characters scrawled across the canvas in either blood or berry juice? Sergei had been forced to study Japanese during Grade 9 of school, when the history of the 1905 war had been taught. The clumsy characters on the tent read:

I have been castrated by shame.

Beside the tent, Sergei stared into the sepia face of Emperor Hirohito, hung on a branch with a string. Beside the Emperor loomed the man in the Italian suit, smiling his salamander grin.

"I thought I killed you,” Sergei rasped.

"You almost did,” the man answered. “But I'm awfully hard to snuff out.” His grin widened, even through sutured lips and two black eyes and a head wrapped in bandages. In one hand he held a Makarov pistol. He offered the other hand to Sergei.

"I don't believe I've ever told you my name,” said the man. “I am Laszlo Gorbatov. Around the Winter Palace, however, they call me Rasputin."

Sergei shivered.
Just my luck. The contact I've spoken to for six months is one of the most notorious killers in Russia. The authorities have been searching for Rasputin since Glasnost. And here he was in Vancouver all along.

Rasputin looked around and may have been raising his eyebrows but the bandages were in the way. “Interesting hovel. Middle of nowhere. Imperial Japanese décor.” He shifted his eyes back to Sergei and giggled. “I believe you've stumbled across a Japanese soldier who doesn't know the war is over!"

"In British Columbia? In twenty-eleven?” The campfire sizzled, red embers shimmering as though alive.

"Don't you know your history?” said the assassin. “The Japanese occupied two of the Aleutian Islands in nineteen forty-two. Japanese I-boats shelled Oregon. They floated incendiary balloons over Washington State to start forest fires. And Japanese commandoes landed on remote beaches along Canada's west coast."

"Fascinating.” Sergei tightened his grip on the Glock.

"But then, such an aging warrior would be almost ninety. Much too old to help a fool like you."

Sergei remembered the old man beside the campfire, moving in the wavering orange. The tunic he wore. The rifle.

Rasputin concluded, “I enjoy ice hockey. A shame your career is over."

A strange clarity settled over the half-lit encampment, making the hair on the back of Sergei's neck stand on end. Suddenly, he knew,
knew
, how the progression of human existence worked. Sergei perceived it all as a great universal train. The tracks were Fate. The rolling stock, genes. But human beings were not pulled by the locomotive of life, they were
pushed
by the combined engines of all their past decisions, or decisions that had been made on their behalf.

Sergei's past—as distant as his ancestors starving on the
narod,
as recent as swinging his hockey stick into Rasputin's face—adopted a new dimension. The past was alive—awake and important. Then it stepped aside and allowed the present to resume.

As Rasputin extended his arm and aimed the pistol, the cold night breeze shifted, blowing smoke into the killer's face.

Sergei leapt.

Here's the scouting report on this 22-year-old late bloomer. Came up with Moscow Dynamo, where he earned a reputation for lightning reflexes. Kostyn's speed and agility allows him to evade the opponent's enforcers just fine. You can't hit what you can't catch.

Rasputin fired blindly into the smoke but Sergei was already rolling before the tent and raising the Glock.

Another asset of this young forward is his skating ability. Kostyn impressed at the preseason camp and with those sweet feet he's been described as a young Denis Savard

Before Sergei could pull the trigger, Rasputin fired again. Sergei reacted, spinning safely to the left. He fired one shot blind just to show he meant business, then sprinted zigzag toward the closest cover.

Kostyn's acceleration is equally impressive. On off nights he skates like a brick but when his game is on, Sergei Kostyn is Baryshnikov.

The Winter Palace assassin finished his clip, but all he hit was B.C. timber. Sergei reached the safety of the enormous pine and cradled the Glock as Rasputin slid around the fire and reloaded. He was good. He didn't taunt. He didn't speak. He wasn't even breathing heavily. He just killed.

Game 7, Sergei thought.
Breakaway
.

Number 50 decked.

He thrust his head beyond the left side of the pine with every intention of yanking it back, which he did as four rounds tore chunks from the damp brown bark. Then Sergei thrust his head and one shoulder and one arm beyond the right side of the pine, one finger already squeezing the Glock's trigger.

Rasputin was waiting.

The tiny nugget of steel (bullets have not been made of lead for decades) struck Sergei directly between the eyes, tearing a path directly through his limbic cortex.

Sergei's frozen finger managed one shot as his body slumped to the earth. The 9mm round hit the campfire, upsetting a log that immediately set Rasputin's pant leg on fire.

The assassin bent over, cursing.

There was big history and there was small history. When Sergeant Ishiro Omoto, age nineteen, climbed from the deck of submarine I-27 into a rubber dinghy on a moonless night in 1942, in the choppy waters of Jervis Inlet, it was, in every respect, small history. Sergeant Omoto's dinghy capsized in the surf and all of his explosives got wet. Three days later his partner was devoured by a bear. In 1943, I-27 was sunk by the cruiser
Manhattan
. The war moved on, and Sergeant Omoto was left in the wilderness of the Pacific Ranges, ashamed, suspicious, confused, but forever loyal to the Rising Sun.

Every good assassin has a sixth sense. Rasputin was no exception. At the last second he spun—the tent flap made the softest whisper.

The figure before him shouted, once and loud, but it was really more of a bark than a shout.
"Banzai!"

Rasputin's eyes bulged as the rusty bayonet plunged to the hilt into his abdomen, slicing his pink liver in two.

The Winter Palace killer stared, incredulous—
this cannot happen to me!
—as the withered mummy drew back its colorless lips and twisted the blade a little deeper.

Blood leaked down Rasputin's chin in a single red line. The pain, he thought, was crystalline. Rasputin's legs gave out slowly so that he folded to the ground rather than fell. Before his vision surrendered, the Russian noticed that all of the branches of the towering trees were filled with faces. Faces of people he had cheated, had hurt, had killed. Then the faces slowly evaporated and they took Rasputin with them into the high mountain darkness.

Sergeant Omoto was exhausted. It took him the rest of the night to roll the pair of corpses to the edge of the inland cliff and push them over. At the bottom, they mingled with the skeletons of hunters and hitchhikers and campers and fugitives and surveyors and loggers and lovers who had the misfortune over the years to stumble across his lonely hilltop aerie.

The spark of dawn touched the horizon just as Sergeant Omoto completed his task, and the old soldier paused to watch. First a quiet brightness far to the east, then hazy lines of pumpkin and violet erupting over the range in a symphony. Somewhere, in the mist, an eagle screeched. Sergeant Omoto wondered how much longer before Tokyo remembered him.

Copyright © 2012 by Gordon McEachern

[Back to Table of Contents]

Clark Howard won his first
EQMM
Readers Award in 1985 and in the years since has gone on to claim four more first-place plaques and many scrolls. One of the things that make his work so consistently compelling is his ability to create a vivid sense of place. He is well traveled and often takes his readers to far-flung parts of the world in his fiction, as in this tale of black pearl divers in the waters off Tahiti. We have another Howard story coming soon. Don't miss it!

FBI Special Agent Daniel Leland reported to the deputy director's office in Washington, D.C., as instructed, on a Monday morning, having flown in the previous day from his regular assignment at the FBI regional office in Honolulu. Deputy Director Dennis Boyle stood up behind his desk to shake hands.

"Hello, Dan. Sorry to pull you away from paradise."

"Hello, sir,” Leland said with a smile. “No problem, as long as it isn't snowing."

Boyle introduced two other men who were also in the office.

"Dan, this is Inspector Roland Caspar of Interpol. And Colonel Jacques Menard of the French Police Nationale. Gentlemen, this is Special Agent Daniel Leland, the man I've been telling you about."

Leland shook hands with the men and took a seat with them facing Boyle's desk.

"Inspector Caspar and Colonel Menard have come to us for help on a matter that has been bothering them for about three years. Jacques, why don't you lay it out for Dan."

"Of course,” said Menard. “As you know, Agent Leland, the Polynesian Islands in the South Pacific are a territory belonging to France. Known as French Polynesia, they form a loose chain of some one hundred islands which lie about halfway between South America on the east and Australia on the west. The most well known of these islands is Tahiti, and its nearest sister island, Moorea. One of the main products of these islands is natural pearls, which are found in abundance in oysters in the waters of the Tuamotu Archipelago that surrounds them. These pearls, which are exported around the world, are a taxable commodity for the French government. Their export fees amount to a significant percentage of France's income from national products, much like the money your country earns from its tobacco and alcohol taxes—"

"And without the resulting impact on its national health,” the representative from Interpol interjected.

"Let's keep ethical principles out of this, please,” the FBI executive said sternly.

"Certainly,” Caspar apologized with a token bow of his head. “I did not mean to cast any aspersions by the comparison."

"The problem I was getting at,” Menard continued in his accented but otherwise perfect English, “is that a large quantity of black pearls is somehow being harvested and smuggled out of our territory without being properly accounted for and taxed. And, in case you are not aware of their value,” the Frenchman's tone became almost reverent, “let me explain that black pearls are by far the rarest and most valuable of any pearl ever discovered. They come from black pearl oysters, which can be found primarily in deep-water habitats, and when harvested they are exquisitely iridescent. They are shimmering, glistening, lustrously opalescent—"

"We get the point,” FBI man Boyle interrupted. “Inspector, why don't you take over at this point,” he invited.

"Yes, thank you,” said the Interpol representative. “As you know,” he said to Leland, “we are the International Criminal Police Organization. We liaise with all national law-enforcement agencies throughout the world. Any recognized agency can come to us at any time for assistance with any criminal activity affecting their country. It is in that spirit that Colonel Menard asked for our assistance in the matter of this black-pearl problem. And it is through us that he, or rather we, have come to your renowned bureau."