his path through the heavy branches, kicking up sprays of snow. His legs ached, the cold air swelled in his lungs; his sight was obscured by tears of fatigue.
He heard the roars first, and then he saw what he most feared, what no hunter ever wanted to see.
An enormous, wild black bear, his terrifying face a mass of blood, was wreaking his vengeance on those who'd caused his wounds, clawing, ripping, slashing at his enemy.
Nikolai raised his rifle and fired until there were no more shells in the chamber.
The giant bear fell. The soldier raced to the two men; he lost what breath he had as he looked at them.
The man from Moscow was dead, his throat torn, his bloodied head barely attached to his body. Drigorin was only just alive, and if he did not die in seconds, Nikolai knew he would reload his weapon and finish what the animal had not done. The colonel had no face; it was not there. In its place a sight that burned itself into the soldier's mind.
How? How could it have happened?
And then the lieutenant's eyes strayed to Drigorin's right arm and the shock was beyond anything he could imagine.
It was half severed from his elbow, the method of surgery clear: Heavy caliber bullets.
The colonel's firing arm had been shot off!
Nikolai ran to Brunov's corpse; he reached down and rolled it over.
Brunov's arm was intact, but his left hand had blown apart, only the gnarled, bloody outline of a palm left, the fingers strips of bone. His left hand. Nikolai Yurievich remembered the morning; the coffee and fruit juice and vodka and cigarettes.
The man from Moscow was left-handed.
Brunov and Drigorin has been rendered defenseless by someone with a gun, someone who knew what was in their path.
Nikolai stood up cautiously, the soldier in him primed, seeking an unseen enemy. And this was an enemy he wanted to find and kill with all his heart. His mind raced back to the footprints he had seen behind the stables. They were not those of a scavenging animal-though an animars they were-they were the tracks of an obscene killer.
Who was it? Above all, why?
The lieutenant saw a flash of light. Sunlight on a weapon.
He made a move to his right, then abruptly spun to his left and lunged to the ground, rolling behind the trunk of an oak tree. He removed the empty magazine from his weapon, replacing it with a fresh one. He squinted up at the source of the light. It came from high in a pine tree.
A figure was straddling two limbs fifty feet above the ground, a rifle with a telescopic sight in his hands. The killer wore a white snow parka with a white fur hood, his face obscured behind wide, black sunglasses.
Nikolai thought he would vomit in rage and revulsion. The man was smiling, and the lieutenant knew he was smiling down at him.
Furiously, he raised his rifle. An explosion of snow blinded him, accompanied by the loud report of a highpowered rifle. A second gunshot followed; the bullet thumped into the wood above his head. He pulled back into the protection of the trunk.
Another gunshot, this one in the near distance, not from the killer in the pine tree.
"Nikolai!" His mind burst. There was nothing left but rage. The voice that screamed his name was his father's.
"Nikolai!" Another shot. The soldier sprang up from the ground, firing his rifle into the tree and raced across the snow.
An icelike incision was made in his chest. He heard nothing and felt nothing until he knew his face was cold.
The Premier of Soviet Russia placed his hands on the long table beneath the window that looked out over the Kremlin. He leaned down and studied the photographs, the flesh of his large peasant face sagging with exhaustion, his eyes filled with anger and shock.
"Horrible," he whispered. "That men should die like this is horrible. At least, Yurievich was spared-not his life, but such an end as this." Across the room, seated around another table, were two men and a woman, their faces stern, watching the Premier. In front of each was a brown file folder, and it was apparent that each was anxious to proceed with the conference. But with the Premier one did not push or intrude on his thoughts; his temper could be unleashed by such displays of impatience.
The Premier was a man whose mind raced faster than anyone's in that room, but his deliberations were nevertheless slow, the