were also several fire buckets positioned around the floor of the house-sized cavern, and a couple of gasoline jerry cans had been cached in one corner. It was obvious the bomber's crew had known their polar survival procedures.
"It wasn't starvation, either." Valentina stepped up beside the first of the bodies and pointed to an open tin of survival ration crackers and a half bar of chocolate balanced on a small ledge in the cavern wall.
The historian glanced at the body at her feet and frowned. "Jon, come here. Look at this."
Smith stepped to her side and instantly spotted the point of concern.
Before going to sleep fifty-odd years before, the sleeping bag's occupant had drawn a flap of parachute silk over his face as a frost shield. A small circular hole was punched neatly in the center of that fabric.
Smith leaned his rifle against the cave wall and sank to one knee, flipping back the ice-crinkly silk. Revealed was a pleasant-featured young man's face, pale, sleep-peaceful, frozen in time. The eyes were closed, and in the center of the forehead was another small circular hole, smeared with a few drops of blood, made red once more by the flickering light of the flare.
"Well, now," Smith murmured. "A handgun, medium caliber, low velocity. Fired at close range, but not point-blank. No powder burns."
"7.65mm subsonic, I'll wager," Valentina agreed, bending down with her hands braced on her knees, "probably fired through a silencer."
"Probably." Smith rose and circled to the next body. "The same here. One shot, through the temple. Execution style."
"Very much so," Valentina agreed, walking slowly down the row of bedrolls. "They were asleep, and someone just walked down the line and took the crew out, one after another...but not all of them."
"Why do you say that, Val?"
"There are only six men here, Jon. The minimum complement for an America bomber would be eight." She played the beam of her flashlight back into the shadowed corners of the cavern, beyond the pool of flare light. "There will be at least two others...Ah, here we are."
She stepped deeper into the cavern, making her way around several table-sized chunks of fallen basalt. Smith went after her. Neither of them noted Gregori Smyslov silently falling back toward the lava tube entrance.
A man clad in khaki-colored duffel pants and parka lay on the black rock floor of the lava tube. The front of his coat was black with blood and punctured by multiple bullet holes. Curled in a frozen death writhe, the dead man's lips were drawn back from his teeth in a half-century-old snarl. A few inches from his outstretched hand lay a small automatic pistol with the long cylinder of a silencer screwed to its barrel.
Smith lifted the lantern beam beyond the seventh man and found the eighth.
There was a niche in the back wall of the cave. Within it were two bedrolls, one of which was empty. An older aviation officer lay on his back, half out of the second sleeping bag, a hand-sized patch of blood frozen in place in the middle of his chest. A Soviet-issue Tokarev service pistol was still clutched in his fist.
His killer had apparently learned too late that a man with a bullet through his heart can still have fourteen seconds of life and consciousness left to him.
Valentina made her way to the seventh man. Bending down, she undid the top button of his parka and examined the insignia on the flight suit collar underneath. "The bombardier and political officer."
Straightening, she crossed to the eighth man and repeated her examination. "The aircraft commander."
"Apparently there was a falling-out among the upper echelons."
"Apparently." She looked back at Smith. "It seems pretty straightforward. They'd turned in for the night, and the political officer either had the watch or he got up again after the others had fallen asleep. He walked down the line and methodically murdered his fellow crewmen. Then he came back here to kill the aircraft commander. The problem was that a silencer's effectiveness degrades with every bullet you put through it, and that last round must have made a wee bit too much noise."
"But, damn it, Val, why?"
"Orders, Jon. It had to be under orders, given to the one member of the crew fanatically dedicated enough to the will of the Communist Party to commit both mass murder and suicide."
Smith's brows shot up. "Suicide?"
"Um-hum," the historian nodded. "I'm reasonably certain that his orders included using the last round in the clip on himself. I daresay he didn't