Child Thief (18 page)

‘Ready.'

For a moment I heard nothing, then a crack. A familiar sound that split the air at almost the same time as Viktor swore, and I turned my rifle to point down the steppe, resting it on the ridge. From my slightly elevated position, I could see Viktor and Petro lying several metres to my left.

I estimated where I thought the shot had come from, somewhere in the line of the hedge, and I imagined the shooter lying prone, working the bolt of his rifle, preparing for his next shot. I hoped his attention had been so focused on Viktor that he hadn't noticed me add my profile to the land.

And then Petro raised
his
hat. The shooter would think he had hit his mark, that we were panicking, moving erratically, looking to help our comrade. He would see the second movement as a mistake upon which he could capitalise, and he fired again.

This time I saw him.

I saw the muzzle flash from the rifle, and I put my eye to the scope, magnifying the spot where the child thief had chosen to wait for us. But I had been wrong. The shooter wasn't by the line of hedge that marked the end of this field. He was much further away, hidden in the treeline beyond. A small pile of dead wood, a fallen tree trunk with protruding branches. And behind it, the outline of a man either dressed entirely in white or half-buried beneath the snow.

I eased the rifle back so the snow on either side of it would hide the muzzle flash as much as possible, then I took another deep breath, let the air escape slowly as I steadied the rifle and squeezed the trigger.

The German rifle kicked against my shoulder and in my scope I saw the snow rise in a fountain beside the prone man, many metres away. Without taking my eye from the scope, I chambered another round while calculating the adjustment I'd need to make to hit my target. But already the figure was moving, the snow breaking, the dark shape rolling away from the spot where my bullet had hit the ground. This was not to be a shooting competition; we were not going to trade shots. Escape was the child thief's intention now.

‘Get up,' I shouted as I prepared for a second shot. ‘Quickly. Over here. Now.' I had to keep shooting, keep the man suppressed while I brought my sons to safety.

‘Now!'

I heard Viktor and Petro's movements in the snow, heard their
heavy breathing as they dropped into the trough beside me, but I ignored them, concentrating on the figure down there in the trees.

Hitting a target at this range was difficult enough, but now he was moving, it was an impossibility. I fired again anyway, seeing the snow erupt close to the rolling figure, then the child thief took his chance. He knew I would be working the bolt, ejecting the spent cartridge, pushing a new one into the chamber, so he rose to his feet, rushing back into the trees.

I fired once more at the escaping figure, seeing a plume of snow and bark tearing away from one of the trees, and then he was gone.

13

‘Did you get him?' Viktor asked. ‘Did you shoot him?'

I withdrew my rifle and ducked back behind the dip. ‘No.'

‘Did you even see him?' Petro said.

‘I saw him. But he was too far away. I missed him.'

‘But he's gone?'

‘If it was me, I'd be looking for somewhere else to shoot from.'

‘Then we should move?'

‘Let me think.' I had been shot at before, but this was different. There were factors I'd never had to deal with. I had to consider my sons and their mother waiting for them at home. And I had to think about Dariya, whose father now lay on the steppe, his remaining blood freezing in his veins.

I took the cloth from my head and put my hat back on, telling Viktor and Petro to do the same. ‘We may be here a while; we can't afford to get cold.'

‘Shit, look at this.' Viktor showed me his hat, put his hand inside it and poked his finger through the hole the bullet had made. ‘I never saw anyone shoot like that. He has to be using a scope like yours, Papa. No one could shoot like that without one.'

‘Even with a scope, he's good.' I said. ‘Impressive.'

Petro inspected his own hat, holding it out so we could see there was a hole in that too. ‘He meant to kill us like he killed Dimitri. Why would he do that, Papa?'

‘Put them on,' I said.

Petro hesitated, thinking what would have happened if the hat had been on his head. He looked at me and took a deep breath,
blowing it out with puffed cheeks. ‘Shit,' he said, putting it onto his head, grabbing the flaps and tugging it tight. ‘Shit.'

‘Don't worry,' I told them. ‘We'll get out of this.'

‘How?' Viktor asked.

I didn't reply.

‘You don't know, do you?'

‘I'm thinking about it.'

‘We're stuck here until dark,' Viktor said. ‘It's the only way we can be safe. We have to wait here until dark and then we have to go back.'

‘Go back?' Petro said.

‘That's what you're thinking isn't it, Papa?' Viktor asked. ‘We have to go home.'

‘No,' Petro said to his brother. He was shocked by what had happened and he was afraid, but he was surprised at Viktor's words. ‘We have to keep going. Dariya needs us more than ever now.'

‘We can't walk out there, onto the steppe, while someone is waiting to take a shot at us,' Viktor said. ‘And the way he shoots …' He shook his head. ‘He shoots even better than Papa.'

‘No one shoots better than Papa,' Petro replied. ‘Anyway, I didn't mean walk down there
now
. I meant wait until dark, then follow.'

‘You don't think he'll be waiting somewhere in the woods?'

‘It's too hard in the trees,' said Petro. ‘That's why he waited until we reached the open field.'

‘He can shoot us just as easily in the woods as he can in the field,' said Viktor. ‘Isn't that right, Papa?'

I nodded but I was only half listening. I was trying to think of a way out of this spot. We couldn't afford to stay here for too long because there was a possibility the shooter was looking for a better position – perhaps one from which he could see us where we were right now – and if that were the case, it was only a matter of time before he was able to take his shot.

The other problem was the cold. The temperature was low but
not low enough. A few degrees colder and we would have been all right, but at that time of day the temperature was just on the wrong side for us. The snow was not dry and powdery, but wet, and I could already feel it soaking into my clothes. Our bodies were warm enough now to melt the snow beneath us but it would drench us and we'd grow colder and colder. We couldn't afford to wait for that to happen.

‘We can't go back. We can't leave Dariya,' said Petro. ‘We have to bring her home.'

Viktor spoke quietly: ‘Maybe we
do
have to leave her. There's no sense in us all being killed. ‘I mean … maybe she's already …'

‘What?' Petro would know how his brother was feeling because he felt it too. Viktor was looking for the right thing to do. He was weighing our options, just as Petro was doing, but they'd each come to a different conclusion. ‘Where's your fighting spirit? It should be me wanting to go home and you wanting to go on.'

‘I'm as willing to fight as anyone, you know that,' said Viktor, ‘but I'm not stupid. I won't run into a bullet.'

‘No one's running into any bullets,' I said. ‘And I'm not going back without Dariya. I promised Lara I'd bring her back, and that's what I'm going to do. We need to take things one step at a time. Right now all we have to think about is getting away from here. If we stay here until dark, we'll freeze to death.'

‘And if we try to move, we'll be shot,' said Viktor.

‘If he's still waiting,' I said. ‘And we don't know that he is.'

‘We don't know that he's not.'

I turned over onto my back, immediately feeling the cold air on my damp stomach.

I looked back at the woods we'd come from. The trees were close, maybe twenty metres away, at the top of the ridge, but twenty metres might as well have been twenty kilometres if that scope was still sweeping the area, looking for us. I didn't agree with Petro – I believed the man who had shot at us
was
a better marksman than I was, and I wondered if the child thief could still hit us at this range if we were moving. It would make it much
harder for him, but he had shot Dimitri as good as dead with one bullet, and he had put holes in both Viktor and Petro's hats with almost no time to make any calculation.

But we had the weather on our side. The grey clouds had been rolling in over the morning and now the wind came and the first flakes of snow began to fall. As I looked back at the dark trunks of the trees standing sentry in the snow, I watched the air fill with light flakes, drifting and turning as they floated from the sky.

‘Someone's watching over us,' I said. ‘We'll let it build, and then we'll move. Snow and wind will make it almost impossible for him to hit us.'

‘Are you sure?' Viktor asked.

I took hold of my rifle and looked at my son. ‘Yes, Viktor. I'm sure.'

We waited for half an hour, maybe more, it was hard to tell. Immobile, lying prone, the minutes felt like hours. I lay on my stomach rather than expose the wet part of my clothing to the cold air. I tried to insulate myself against the ground, told my sons to do the same, but the snow was falling on our backs now, too. If we stayed there much longer we'd be buried beneath it, three unidentifiable shapes on the ground, hidden until the winter began to thaw.

Just a few metres away, Dimitri would be dead now, his unseeing eyes staring at nothing as his corpse lay in his own frozen blood. I imagined Svetlana's tears and wondered what we'd tell her when we returned to the village without her husband.

We hardly spoke, but I could almost hear what my sons were thinking. I knew them well enough for that. Petro's fear had subsided in the cold, probably replaced by an aching anger at the man we were following. But I knew there would be a quiet voice in his head telling him none of this would have happened if he had only brought Dariya home with him and Lara yesterday.

Viktor, on the other hand, would be thinking how it would feel to return to Vyriv as a hero. Like his brother, his fear had dulled, as fear does when it has been present long enough for it to
become usual, and now he'd be picturing a scenario in his mind in which he was the one to take the final shot, to execute our prey and rescue the child.

That was the difference I saw in my sons.

My own thoughts took a contrasting course as I considered the way Dimitri had jerked and dropped at the sudden impact of the bullet. I tried to picture it again, to calculate how far away the shot had come from. Maybe six hundred metres. The person we were following had stopped, turned and waited with his sight trained on the place he had chosen for his killing ground. He had watched us discover the bloodstains, waited for us to line up along the ridge, silhouetting ourselves like dumb animals.

I speculated what kind of a man the child thief was. Perhaps he was a veteran like me – like the man Dimitri had hanged. War is an intense experience, and for some who fight long enough there's no other way for them to live. I knew something about that. Maybe this man was disturbed, lost without the thrill and excitement of sanctioned murder, and this was the only way he could re-create it. I believed there were those for whom fighting became their nature, and I believed it because I'd sometimes felt it overcoming me. I understood that war can sit in a man's heart and taint the blood that fills his body. For me, there had been nightmares, sleepless nights calmed only by Natalia's presence. There had been other feelings too, more complex and harder to understand even though they ran through my own mind, and sometimes I needed to leave everything behind. Dimitri had been right about that. There were days when the life of a farmer was not enough, and I would leave the village to hunt, and for a while I would be free of everything. Perhaps this man's need for release was more intense, and his response to it was darker. Perhaps he needed a different kind of hunt, so he would steal a child and wait for his pursuers. He was a man intent on provoking his own battles. And despite my misgivings, there was something in this situation that made me feel alive. Dimitri had been right: a small part of me was enjoying this. It was as if the child thief had
challenged me personally, and I was torn between accepting his challenge and protecting my family.

‘It should be safe now,' I said, lifting my head to see how the snow filled the air, the flakes swirling around us. ‘He won't see us in this.'

‘What if he's watching?' Viktor asked.

‘We have to take the risk. This is our best chance. Right now. We'll stand and move as quickly as we can. Bring your rifles if you think you can carry them. If not – leave them.'

‘I don't think I can move my legs,' Petro said. ‘They're so cold.'

‘Then start moving them. Shake them. Rub them. Whatever it takes. Viktor, do the same.' I didn't want them to turn and run if their legs weren't going to do what they expected of them.

So for a few minutes we rubbed our legs and shook the life back into them.

We ran like drunks running from a fight. Our legs wanting to seize and cramp, our cold bodies moving as if in slow motion. We zigzagged as I had instructed, but our progress was so slow it hardly made any difference. If the air had been clear, we would have been dead before we reached the treeline. We would have lived only as long as it would have taken Dimitri's murderer to draw back the bolt of his rifle and squeeze the trigger with the tip of his finger.

But nature stayed with us and visibility was poor. We could barely see the trees just a few metres ahead of us, so it was impossible for our hunter to see us at all. Not even three dark streaks drifting backwards and forwards in the storm.