The Searcher (30 page)

N
ow they went steeply down, and where the trees thickened Vekua produced her flashlight, keeping the beam trained on the ground. In places the trees were so tight that the path was free of snow, and they made good time until the river appeared a little way below them and before long they came out on the pebble beach where Koba's men had dragged Ben onto their boat. It was too dark to see whether the 4 x 4 was still in the woods, and he didn't mention it.

At the water they turned left, threading in and out of the trees along the bank.

“It is easy now until we reach the border,” said Vekua.

Hammer wondered what she meant by easy.

The river ran directly beneath the border station under sheer cliffs of rock on the opposite bank, and from this point the path was treeless and open to the night. If anyone had been watching they would have seen two figures, slightly blacker than the ground they walked on, both small, both precise, moving swiftly and silently along the exposed stretch like escaping prisoners waiting for the searchlight to pick them out against a great, bare wall. But it never came, and soon Hammer's shoulders relaxed and the feeling receded that eyes were on his back. Clouds thickened round the moon and after a while Vekua clicked on her flashlight.

“We are in Russia,” she said, in a voice that seemed to suggest that now she was in her element. Land of spies and deception, of devious conflicts played out on its edges, and here they were in its blackest corner, where law did not exist and light would never be shone. What happened here would
stay here. Hammer felt tiny and alone, as if he had crept through a narrow crack into the furthest corner of some vast enemy fortress.

The country changed as they climbed. The trees ran out, until there was just snow and scree and stone. The angles became sheerer, the ground more rocky, and the path rose nervelessly up until it was a narrow strip on a vertiginous slope. Cliffs above them, cliffs below, and three feet of flat ground in between. Hammer kept as far from the edge as he could manage, and took some comfort from not being able to see the drop.

At one point the path leveled a little and then split, one half carrying straight on and up, the other turning sharply down to their right. At the junction footsteps appeared in the snow.

“The river is below. This is how they came,” said Vekua, staying left.

Hammer thought he had acclimatized to the altitude, but up here his lungs burned afresh and his head reeled. The colonel showed no signs of slowing. Whatever she was planning, she wanted it done quickly. Hammer watched the silhouette of her back in the flashlight's beam and carefully assessed the odds, as he had done a thousand times, in situations much safer and less vexed.

Stop her now and he might never find the place at all; stay with her till the end and there was a strong chance that he and Ben would be shot. Delay his move too long and he might discover that her only intention in bringing him here was to turn, any moment, and throw him to his death. Timing. As so often, it all seemed to come down to timing.

He sensed that they were nearing the top of their ascent; the path began to flatten and the slope above him to level out. Vekua stopped here, and Hammer, his hand going to the rocks in his pocket, wondered whether the time had come, but she turned and beckoned him to look. Where she was standing, the path had collapsed, resuming on the other side of a decent gap. A long jumper might have cleared it, but Hammer was no athlete. Below, the earth and stones from the landslide had collected on a ledge ten feet down.

Vekua shone her flashlight all over the spot, and eventually reached the same conclusion as Hammer—that the only way round was to do what the
party ahead of them had done, and traverse the slope above. It wasn't sheer, but it was by no means flat.

“You go first,” said Hammer, as it crossed his mind that if she wanted to be rid of him this was a perfect opportunity. The same was true for him, of course, but in this she had the march on him. No jumper, and no killer.

Starting a foot or two back from the edge and clasping the flashlight in her mouth, Vekua took her first, hesitant steps upward, keeping her body close to the ground and using her hands for balance. Testing her grip with each movement, she began to head across, and with great reluctance he followed, the memory of his earlier fall playing out in his mind.

Twelve sideways steps, he calculated, were all that was needed. It wasn't so much. If he hadn't been a thousand feet up, with no ropes, on wind-frozen snow, it wouldn't have merited a thought—not, for instance, the notion that his smashed body might not be found for months, and then only if it escaped the notice of the wolves. Already parched from the effort of the climb, his mouth dried up and filled with something that he imagined was the taste of fear.

Another step, taken slowly and with immense care. As a distraction he calculated his chances, and then wished he hadn't. If each step carried a one in ten chance of a fall, the chances of his reaching the other side were only thirty percent. But Vekua was making progress, and in the available light he followed her closely and tried to put his feet where she had put hers.

As he had the thought he felt his boot scratch at the ice and fail to find a grip. With his other foot he dug in harder but under the extra weight it gave and began to slip.

“Fuck.”

Slowly but with growing momentum he started to slide over the ice. Terror surged in his chest. He clutched in vain at the crumbling snow.

“Elene.”

He stuck out a hand. No more than three feet away, she only had to reach down and take it, but all she did was watch; didn't move, not so much as a twitch, her eyes steady in the flashlight's beam. Watched him go.

With a last desperate stretch he grabbed her boot, felt his pace checked, and then she was sliding, flashlight too. She took the torch from her mouth
and dug it in to slow her, but it didn't catch. Down they both went, slipping helplessly to the edge.

Together they dropped, for an instant, until with a dead thud Hammer hit the rubble a little way below and rolled toward the lip of the tiny ledge. Instinctively he grabbed, at anything, and his clumsy stupid gloves closed on Vekua's sleeve and slowed him just enough to stop his body following his legs into space. There was silence, and the silence told him that he had come to rest. Just above him, Vekua didn't move. Clawing at her clothes, scrabbling for purchase with his knees in the loose stones and earth, he pulled himself up and sat beside her, panting and terrified.

“Sweet God,” he said to the night, feeling the great support of the earth beneath him. There was no light; her flashlight had tumbled over the edge. Ahead of him all was black.

But Vekua didn't answer. Gingerly, he shrugged off his pack and felt in it for his flashlight. She was unconscious, but breathing; he could see her breath in the cold, and the dark blood beginning to show in the snow beneath her head. Some instinct made him reach out and touch it, and he felt that she was resting on jagged rock.

For a minute he collected himself, and then he went to work. Her pack was lying awkwardly under her, but he managed to pull from it the knife, the map, and the compass. He took both guns from her coat and put them in his own. As carefully as he could, he went through her other pockets, but found only a set of keys, a phone, a radio receiver, a lighter, and, incongruously, a lipstick. He left her the keys and the lipstick, and nothing else.

Training the light above him, he tried to plot a route out. The way up was vertical, more or less, and made up of loose stones and dry clay. Standing with one foot on either side of Vekua's prone body, he took off his gloves, stuffed them in his pockets, and tried his hands in the frozen earth, pushing his fingers in to get a grip. It was denser than he had realized, and there was some moisture in it, and it held. He did the same with one foot, working it in, and then the other, and slowly, with great effort and care, pulled himself up.

He never imagined that the path could feel so solid. He walked for twenty yards, then stopped to rest, exhausted by the effort and the constant,
persistent fear. For a minute he stared into the darkness, did his best not to imagine the way down and breathed as deeply as he could. The air was palpably thinner here than it had been down by the river, and his lungs burned from the work and the cold. Then he took the map from his pack and tried to get his bearings. There were no markings on it to indicate their destination, but after studying it for a while he convinced himself that at least he knew where he was. In about half a mile, if he was right, there was an old hamlet, or some kind of settlement, indicated by six tiny rectangles and a name in Russian that he couldn't read.

The path climbed, skirted the summit, and then descended slowly onto a saddle of land between two peaks. From the highest point he saw light. Two golden squares glowing in a shapeless world of blacks and grays.

I
t took longer than he had imagined—coming down, if anything, was harder than going up—but in another half an hour he was there, on flat ground, softly approaching the deserted settlement by the light of the moon, his flashlight off and his heart going at a steady gallop. He smelled woodsmoke on the air. The houses were barely houses anymore; even in the overwhelming dark he could see that their walls had collapsed and their roofs had fallen in. Tall weeds grew in the snow around them and swayed in the gathering wind. If there was a lonelier place in the world, he didn't know it; a more desolate journey to be ending here, he couldn't imagine it.

Two rough rows of three houses stretched ahead of him, arranged along a central track, and now, pulling a gun from his pocket, he crept toward the furthest on the left. It was little more than a shack. One room, he guessed, with two small windows on each long side. By their light he could see that its walls were in a better state than its neighbors', and that someone had stretched a tarpaulin tight over one corner to complete the roof. Its windows were almost intact, and a mess of footprints ran up to the door from the other direction.

The snow softened his tread, and in silence he crouched down by the window and slowly brought his eyes up to the level of the glass. The tarpaulin flapped gently above his head. The first thing he saw was a fire burned almost to ashes in the grate, and on the wall next to it two large rucksacks, full, with sleeping bags and bedrolls hanging off them. Two pairs of legs stretched out on the floor, in black combat trousers and walking boots. Sitting with their backs against the black slate were two men, both dark, both unshaven, both big, playing dice by the light of a single candle. Hammer
didn't stop to watch them, but saw in their faces something of the discipline of soldiers and the brutishness of mercenaries.

There was no sign of Ben, but the walls were too thick and the windows too small for him to see the far end of the room, so he moved carefully across the door and checked the second window. In the opposite corner there were a stack of three plastic plates, two enamel mugs and two plastic bags, each neatly tied. That was all. At the thought that there was no one else here he felt sweat start on his brow and sickness in his stomach. That the whole business had been an elaborate ruse to bring him up here to his death. He crossed to the back of the house and from the window there saw, at last, the friend he had come to find: on his side, on the floor, his feet bound at the ankle, his hands tied behind his back, and a blindfold over his eyes, but it was Ben, no question, under the matted hair and the silver of his new beard. Deathly still he lay; Hammer would have given all he had to see him twitch, or shift, or struggle.

What to do? He had two guns and little choice but to use them. Koba's was in his hand, improbably smooth, and heavy, and almost laughably powerful. He had no idea who had made it, but he was glad of their craftsmanship, of the time and care spent engineering the thing. Here, on a mountaintop in the wilderness, this rather slight figure was about to take on two professionals in a contest of strength, and because he had surprise on his side, and a gun, his odds weren't as bad as they should have been.

Still he barely knew how to proceed. He had the gun but no desire to use it. With gloves on, in the ring, he could hurt someone, with some sort of mutual consent. But simply to move your finger half an inch and watch the soul rip from the flesh . . . It was not what he did. He thought his way through.

No amount of thought would help. If there was only one guard he might tempt him outside, by some distraction, and knock him out with a roof joist from a ruined house. But by the time he'd done this to one, the other would have a gun to Ben's head. There seemed no middle way. He'd have to shoot them both and allow no time in between, and through these tiny windows there was hardly the freedom or the angle, even for an accomplished shot with the stomach for such a thing. Shivering with cold and
apprehension, he stood with his back to the wall and ran every scenario through in his mind. None ended well.

The two guards talked intermittently in low voices. Hammer moved to another window to get a better view, and saw the broader of the two stand and stretch extravagantly, his hands clasped at the back of his neck. He said something to his friend, and the friend grunted in response. The big man checked his watch, said something else, and walked to the other end of the room, out of Hammer's sight. He came back with a cigarette in his mouth, took the lighter that his friend offered, and lit it.

From his pocket Hammer pulled Vekua's lighter, and tiptoed through the weeds back to the front of the house. He clicked the wheel and held the flame up to the edge of the tarpaulin, willing the thing to take. There was no snow on it, at least—it must have been fixed earlier that day, once the worst had fallen—and soon the blue plastic began to melt and burn, with a livid orange flame that crept up the wall. As soon as he was sure that it had caught, Hammer positioned himself five yards away from the house, Koba's gun trained on the door. He held it in both hands to keep it from shaking.

A toxic smell and a crackling sound drifted on the air. Hammer waited for the noise, and soon it came, a Georgian bellow that filled the night. Then more shouting from behind the ancient door. Through the window Hammer could see the light from the flames playing on the far wall of the hut.

The door opened and one of the Georgians was there, half turning to inspect the roof as he came, a gun in his hand. His friend was directly behind him. Neither would have seen Hammer in the darkness.

He let them take another few steps, until they were just clear of the building.

“Stop!” Hammer shouted. “Stop right fucking there!”

Even as he began to say it he saw the second man bringing a gun up from beside his hip, and without thought pulled the trigger of his own. Noise burst from the gun and filled his head, ringing on in the silence as he watched the man reel away and blood splash from his shoulder. Nausea coursed up in him. Be ready straightaway for the next shot, Hammer had told himself. You will be shocked, but you cannot be.

The guard clutched his shoulder as he fell, the barrel of his gun flashed,
and Hammer fired again, hardly aiming, hitting him in the cheek. In the wavering light of the flames he saw the man's head snap backward, saw his face crack and sheer, and knew that he had killed him. Sickened, confusion like a flood in his head, Hammer had only one clear thought: that he had never been so aware of the size of a man, of the substance of him, of all that flesh that held the spirit.

“Fucking stop!”

The first man had turned to face Hammer, and was reaching behind him to his waist.

“Stop!”

God, how he meant it. Please stop. Make this easy now.

The guard's hand hung in the air, and for a moment he and Hammer stared at each other, their breath rising against the blazing house. Then he nodded once and slowly raised both arms.

“Turn round.” Hammer gestured with his free hand. The man turned and with his eyes fixed on him, aware of every step, Hammer approached and took the pistol from his waistband. He threw it behind him, as far as he could. The dead man had slid down the wall and was slumped awkwardly, hanging on his knees, his head flopped on his shoulder, his face half gone, his mouth gaping in a grim leer. Hammer saw this at a glance and looked away. Acid burned his throat. Thoughts came, and he shut them out.

“Inside.”

He motioned with the gun, and his captive moved warily toward the door. The fire had spread to the beams and filled the room with black smoke that forced them to duck as they entered.

“Free him,” said Hammer, bringing his sleeve to his throat to keep out the acrid, chemical fumes, and indicating with his foot the ropes binding Webster. With no expression the guard looked mechanically from Hammer to Webster and back to Hammer, taking his time, waiting for the amateur to make a mistake. He had a low brow and eyes that seemed to shine brightly in the guttering light.

“Do it,” said Hammer, raising the gun and pointing it at the guard's face. With a final insolent look the guard squatted by Webster and began to pull halfheartedly at the knots that bound him. There were three, at his
ankles, knees, and wrists, which were behind his back. Webster twisted his body into position, and Hammer crouched down out of the smoke.

“Quickly.”

From above him came a wrenching, tearing noise, and he looked up to see a length of beam, about two feet, snap free and fall, still burning, between him and the guard. In that instant of distraction the guard turned and struck out at Hammer's hands, connecting hard and sending the gun rattling across the floor. Hammer lost his balance, and as he tried to right himself felt the guard's fist like a metal weight drive into his cheek, cracking bone and throwing him onto his back, gasping at the toxic air, thoughts disordered, pain uppermost. The roof of the house was all flame. Somehow in his bewilderment he held on to one idea: that while he was struggling to compose himself the guard was scrambling across the floor toward the dropped gun. He didn't see it but he knew it.

His left hand reached almost automatically for his pocket and found there the strange, cold, heavy form of Vekua's gun. He gripped the barrel, pulled it out, wrestled with it as it snagged against the loose material, then brought it out into the air, hearing the guard sliding for the gun just beyond him, perhaps three yards away, praying for time. His right hand took the pistol from his left, and raising his head he found his target; saw the guard spinning round with Koba's gun in his hand; and fired.

Two shots sounded, and for a second the two gunmen looked at each other, like duelists waiting to see a spreading patch of crimson on their white shirts, before the guard's look turned inward, in pain and dismay, and with an odd steadiness he settled back onto the earth, feeling with an outstretched hand for balance. Hammer kept his head lifted and his gun up, watching.

But the guard had nothing left. His last action was to hold a hand to his side, and there it rested, helpless against the flow of blood that pulsed through his fingers. The pulsing stopped. The man lay still. Smuts of dead plastic floated in the air.

Hammer closed his eyes, dwelled briefly on the images he found there, and got to his feet. Without relish, he stood over this second body and made sure that it was dead. By the light of the burning roof, he inspected the still
bulk of the guard. The bullet had gone right through him, and blood leaked from a small exit wound in his back.

A corpse. It was a dishonest word—cold and final, but also remote. Distancing. These weren't two corpses. They were men that had lived and now were dead.