She ripped the tail off the flannel shirt and bound it over her face as an ad hoc snow mask and drew her already aching hands up into the overlong sleeves of the shirts. She looked around in the bleak near pitch blackness. The wind would be her compass. She would move north and try to join up with Jon and Valentina.
Randi's one course of action, her one chance, was to keep moving and somehow find the others. She would work on the premise that they had come down from the crash site to find Wednesday Island Station occupied. Given that, she would further presume that they would divert and go to cover on the island's central ridge, where they could both find shelter and keep the camp under observation. Knowing Jon, he would try to work in close during the night to try to establish the identity of the landing force and learn what had happened to her and Trowbridge.
The odds were not good. If her teammates hadn't come down from the crash site or if she couldn't find them, then she would die before morning. But the death out here looked cleaner and more defiant than the death back there. Hugging herself to conserve body warmth, Randi began her stumbling trudge through the growing blizzard.
Pouring through the broken window, the cold filled the bunkhouse like the touch of death. In the harsh white glare of the gas lantern, the naked body and bloody, ruined face of Stefan Kropodkin looked exceptionally obscene and grotesque. Kretek tore the sleeping bag from the bunk and covered his nephew.
His men stood by awkwardly, their faces impassive but with a suppressed glint of fear in their eyes. Someone had taken something from their leader. He did not react well to such acts, even in far lesser matters.
Kretek stared at the muffled mound at his feet. The one connection he'd had left to this thing called family. It was a current that ran deep through the Balkan cultures, even through a blackened soul such as his.
He had been a fool. He had made the mistake of viewing the blonde woman not as a threat but as a treat, like a bite of chocolate to be consumed casually in passing. Instead she had been a time bomb waiting for an opportune moment to explode.
He could read the signs. At her own choosing, she had torn loose, swatted Stephan like a cockroach, and made her escape. She was a professional in the deadliest possible definition of the term, and a pretty face and a nice pair of tits had blinded Kretek to this.
Stefan's hand protruded from beneath the sleeping bag, his fingers half curled in beseechment, pleading for revenge.
"Find that whore." Kretek's words were a growling whisper. "Get out there and find her. The only way any of you will ever leave this island is if you bring her back to me alive. Do you hear me? Alive!"
Vlahovitch, his chief of staff, hesitated only a moment before speaking. "It will be done, Anton. Come on, the rest of you. Let's get a sweep organized. She won't get far in this weather. Move!"
Anton Kretek said nothing more as his men geared up to start the search. His thoughts were distant, planning what he would do when the golden-haired woman was brought before him.
Chapter Thirty-five
Wednesday Island Base
Randi Russell lay on her back in the lower of the two bunks in the women's quarters, her wrists over her head and cuffed around the bunk's vertical stanchion. A swath of light cut through the darkened room from the open door, issuing from the gas lantern in the main room. Intermittently the armed guard seated at the mess table glanced in her direction.
To the guard, she lay apparently unmoving, possibly even asleep. He couldn't see into the shadows at the head of the bunk, where Randi's fingers flexed and clenched slowly and continuously like a cat kneading its claws. She must not allow her hands to swell and get stiff.
Even as she had been prodded and shoved back to the bunk room that afternoon, she had been making her plans. When her captors had handcuffed her into the bunk, she had seemingly resisted for a moment, earning herself another impatient slap across the face. But in a deft bit of positional legerdemain she had also managed to ensure that when the handcuff had been resnapped around her right wrist it had closed over both the sleeve of her