The Killing Game (25 page)

She swallowed the lump of granite that lodged in her throat. “Are they dead?”

He peered toward the base of the mountain. “Hopefully.”

“You don’t care?”

His face was expressionless. Eyes scarily cold. “If someone shoots at me and I kill them—I win. I don’t waste my energy feeling sorry for the bastards. It was them or us. Thankfully, this time, it was them.” He scanned the face of the mountain. “Next time we might not be so lucky. Let’s get out of here, but carefully.” He raised his hand to indicate they take it slowly, down the mountain rather than across it.

She followed him, at times clutching bare rock as he helped her place her boots into decent footholds. He tied them together at one particular steep point.
Christ
. Her hands shook so badly she could barely hold on.

Fear and fatigue and icy cold continued to wear her down. She was completely out of her element and yet Dempsey seemed to be at ease with their predicament. He didn’t panic or sit around wailing. Not that she was the wailing type, but she understood the need. He stayed in the moment and dealt with what needed to be done. It humbled her. Made her realize she was a control freak who didn’t do well with the unexpected. She was a planner. Maybe that was why she’d been so pissed when Gideon joined the Marines. She’d no longer been in control of their lives together. When she’d lost him to the chaos of war, it had cemented her need to plan and organize and prepare.

She couldn’t plan, organize or prepare for men kidnapping her, getting buried alive or being shot at.

Survival of the fittest was one of the basic tenants of ecology and evolution. In nature the strong ruled and the weak were culled. She’d been in enough war-torn countries growing up to know that without soldiers like Dempsey the world would be a dark and anarchic place, but she was still idealistic enough to wish it wasn’t so.

It took nearly an hour to gingerly climb down the roughhewn face with them sliding the last five hundred feet as if they were on a toboggan run. For the first time in what felt like days, maybe years, exhilaration filled her as the wind whipped her cheeks. Laughter burst out as she slid, out of control, relieved to be finally off Death Mountain. The humor was punched out of her system when she spotted an arm sticking out of the snow a yard from where she landed. She rolled over and wretched in the snow.

Dempsey had already seen the man. He began scooping snow away from the body.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to know who’s shooting at us.”

Axelle helped then, digging frantically around the corpse. It took forever. They uncovered him slowly. Black hair. Brown eyes. He looked mid-forties, clean-shaven, neck at exactly the wrong sort of angle.

“At least it was quick,” Dempsey pressed his lips tight together.

Axelle swallowed her horror and helped him pull back more snow. They cleared a hole to the man’s waist, and Dempsey started searching through his pockets.

“No rank or insignia or uniform. No labels on the clothes.” He held out some rounds which meant nothing to her. “Generic.” He paused and looked up. “His comms are gone. The writing on the MRE packs is Russian.” He stuffed one in his pocket. He got a camera out of his pack and took a photograph of the man’s face and a tattoo on his arm.

“Who were they?”

He caught her hand and searched the area, then took off downhill toward a pass heading northwest. Back toward the Wakhan Corridor. “They’re either nonmilitary”—
mercenaries
—“Russian Special Forces, or some sort of Black Ops.”

Her eyes widened. She looked at him as he helped drag her through the snow. “Josef said
you
were Special Forces.”

He looked at her with bright blue eyes and said nothing.

What sort of military units traveled in small packs far from backup? The secretive deadly kind. Axelle wasn’t surprised Dempsey hadn’t answered her questions. His silence confirmed her beliefs. He
was
British Special Forces.

“We need to get you to safety and I need a radio to try to find out what the hell is going on. Find out where Dmitri Volkov is and how we can bring him in.” He let go of her arm and checked his own rifle as they marched onward.

“Are we still following Volkov?” She shuddered. She wanted to get back to her leopards but until Volkov was stopped she couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t start taking potshots at her animals again.

Dempsey nodded toward a broken snow trial off to the right. “He’s going the same way we are. What’s the nearest settlement to here?”

She thought for a moment. She’d been tied up and unconscious for much of her ordeal yesterday but she had a general sense they’d been moving east. “There’s a small Kyrgyz settlement, south of Bozai Gumbaz. I’m guessing that’s the closest.”

They traipsed onward through the snow, which was melting under the now midday sun. The mountain had finally fought off the enveloping cloud. A few straggly dwarf shrubs and bushes started to appear and Axelle let out a sigh of relief as she spotted a swathe of green on the valley floor ahead. The snowstorm had only been in the mountains. If this was a trial of endurance, her quivering muscles told her she was just about done.

Birds darted all around and she spotted some goats on the hillside, which meant there was a goatherd not far away.

She stumbled and Dempsey stopped and supported her with an arm around her waist, helping her to keep moving when she was so exhausted she literally wanted to fall on the ground and close her eyes.

“If we could risk a fire I’d stop and build a shelter.”

It sounded wonderful.

“Why can’t we build a fire?” Her brain cells were sluggish. Excited by nothing except the thought of sleep.

“In case there are more gunmen out here. Or Dmitri Volkov isn’t as wounded as I hope. He’s clearing a hell of a lot of ground for a man with a gunshot wound.”

“You must have only clipped him.”

“He wore body armor, otherwise he’d be dead.” Dempsey’s lips were hard. Soldier mode. “He’s gone to a lot of trouble to get his hands on you. Something tells me he isn’t going to run away because he had a setback.”

“It was a hell of a setback.” She scanned the hillsides, but could see nothing moving through the valley. Her skin suddenly prickled and she pressed closer to Dempsey because he was the one thing that made her feel safe in this new world of bombs, bullets and death.

CHAPTER 12

From the shelter of a group of boulders on the western side of the track, Dmitri lay prone on the ground and followed the man and woman’s progress through a gap in the rocks. His hand throbbed from where the soldier had shot him. The bullet had gone straight through his palm but all his fingers worked so Dmitri counted that as a miss. His chest was badly bruised but for once he was grateful he wasn’t dead.

He was glad the soldier and the woman had survived. He admired their tenacity. But it did not change his plans. All the sacrifices and degradation his family had endured, not because he’d sinned, but because someone else had…

Sergei’s boy was dying and needed immediate hospital care. The pelts were lost. He had to change his plan. He still needed money, still needed to get his family out of Russia. Thankfully he still had something of extreme value in his sights. And Magdalena was counting on him.

His grandson would be saved no matter who else had to die to achieve it, but the bombing complicated things. Who ordered it? Russians via their spy? Or the US and British via the soldier? The man was impressive, Dmitri conceded. More impressive than he’d anticipated. Reminded him of himself from a long time ago.

Dmitri had made all the wrong choices in his life, trusted all the wrong people. He was paying for those mistakes now, but it broke his heart that his grandson was bearing the brunt of his grandfather’s legacy. If Dmitri hadn’t defected, if he hadn’t taught a young mujahedeen captain how to fight, he wouldn’t be wanted in half the nations of the world and his son would still be alive today. Dmitri had been painted a monster, but he’d never believed in collateral damage or civilian casualties. Women and children should be kept out of war. The mistake he’d made, over and over, was not realizing others had no such qualms.

He turned to the wide-eyed boy who sat beside him cross-legged on the rocky ground. “Tell your father to give them food and shelter. Tell him to put this into the soldier’s tea before he retires for the night.” He handed him a small capsule. A useful drug for those who had lost the power to sleep. “I need supplies and another horse and yak. Tell him I will pay him soon.” Just not yet.

The young boy adjusted his hat, nodded his elfin face, and stood to gather his goats.

“Be careful.”

The child scooted off and Dmitri turned back to watch the man and woman move out of sight. Another time, another place and he’d have let them go. Not this time.

***

The sun was sliding down the western horizon and she was still walking, although she was almost blind with exhaustion. Dempsey stopped and eyed her critically. “Do the people here know you?”

She looked toward the village and nodded. “Some do. We met the elders in Sarhad for a meeting when we started the project.”

“Then you and I just got married.”

Her eyes popped. “We did?”

“Otherwise we’ll be split up when we get to their village and I don’t trust Volkov not to pull another stunt.”

She frowned. It wasn’t the idea of pretending he was her husband that bothered her. It was the curious pang at the thought of being separated.

“Then we’re newlyweds because last summer I was single.” She’d had offers; one man had even stretched to a camel.

He took her hand as they approached the squat clay structures. “Let me do the talking.”

“As long as I like what you’re saying, you can do the talking.”

“Stubborn doesn’t even begin to describe you, Dr. Dehn. My GPS signal should have kicked in by now. Volkov’s trail veered east about half a mile south of here. I’ll go after him as soon as the squad catches up with me. You’ll be back in your camp by tomorrow morning watching out for your cats.” His fingers squeezed tight.

She had to clear her throat to speak. She didn’t know why she was feeling so sad at the thought of rescue. “How do we explain the rest of your guys when they turn up? Bachelor party?”

“Students?” His grin was devilish.

“Too many guns.” Her smile faded. She wasn’t okay with people dying. They could have family. Wives… Who were those other soldiers anyway? She assumed the target was Dempsey, but getting caught in the crossfire wasn’t her idea of fun. The thought of Dempsey being killed settled like an onerous burden on her chest and she found it hard to inhale. The force of her reaction startled her.

“Let’s rest for a few hours. I’ll contact the CO from the village and worry about the details later.” They approached a group of squat buildings that seemed to be made of clay. Tiny puffs of smoke rose from holes in the roofs.

A group of children ran toward them dressed in brightly colored garments and smiling gap-toothed smiles.

“Hello.” Dempsey smiled and tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow. “What language do they speak?” he asked her.

“Probably a mix of Wakhi and Kyrgyz.”

He grunted, which suggested his skills didn’t include those two obscure languages.

“Some of them speak English,” she added.

They marched into the center of the tiny village and a little man came to the door of his house and smiled at them widely. He wore two jackets and a knitted cap, his features those of ancient Mongolia. The others wore an eclectic mixture of clothes from the traditional to a soccer jersey pulled tight over several layers of sweaters. The man in the doorway, clearly the chief elder, chattered at them in his own language. Axelle pulled her hat more firmly over her hair until it was covered. The people here were moderate in their religious beliefs but she didn’t want to offend.

Dempsey said, “I need a telephone, and my wife and I need somewhere to rest.” He put his hands together and leaned his head to the side, mimicking sleep.

She swallowed the knot that formed in her throat at the words. The man was nodding and trying to drag Dempsey into his house for tea while the women urged her to follow them.

“Go,” she said. “I doubt the guy would take on the whole village.” She could barely keep her eyes open anyway.

“I’ll be there as soon as I’ve radioed HQ.”

She nodded gratefully. She knew he’d check on Anji and Josef too. And her leopards. The weight of guilt wanted to crush her—so many had died so that Dmitri Volkov could lure her here a few months early. Who
had
he been talking to on the sat phone? Her father? Or someone else?

The women showed her into a hut. Before she went inside she noticed Dempsey watching her from the doorway of the other hut. He smiled then turned away. Her heart hurt. She could hear him asking for a radio or telephone. The women ushered her inside and she asked to use the facilities, which were as basic as she’d expected. After she’d cleaned up, they gave her some clean clothes but she was too tired to get undressed. She pulled back the heavy cloth curtain to reveal a rich red blanket spread on top of a roughly constructed platform. It was as close to a real bed as she was likely to get in this place and she wanted to kiss the ground in relief. She nodded her thanks and, as soon as they left her alone, she fell face-first onto the bed and was asleep in seconds.

***

Reports were Volkov survived the bombing raid.

Jonathon stepped from his car outside Lucinda Allworth’s Suffolk home and ran his fingers through his hair. Security was subtle but thorough and he had to show ID to a protection officer before he was even allowed to knock on the door. He hadn’t called ahead. Didn’t want to give her the opportunity to refuse to see him. He knew that if he turned up on the doorstep she was English enough to invite him in for a cup of tea.

“Jonathon?” She opened the door, looking thin and delicate in a pretty cotton dress covered with summer flowers. “Come in.” She smiled and waved to her security detail before stepping away from the door and ushering him inside.