it out, he realized that it was a Russian Air Force survival or “ditch” kit. Underneath was a portable emergency locator transmitter—ELT for short.
Carrying everything back to the cargo container, he piled it all neatly inside. Now, there was only one more thing he had to do.
With several lengths of wire he had scrounged, he rigged random pieces of debris and laid a series of trip wires. If anyone else was still alive and was thinking about coming for him, he wanted as much notice as possible. Once that task was complete, he returned to his improvised shelter and the warmth of the fire.
Despite the hat, gloves, and new parka he had just donned, his body was still trembling with cold. He needed to get something warm into his system.
Filling his metal cup with water, he set it as close to the fire as he could and then turned his attention to the ELT.
The first thing he noticed was that it was pretty old. It probably didn’t even operate on the current frequency for distress signals. Based on the tag taped to the side, it hadn’t been serviced in a long time. The battery was almost certainly dead.
The best thing about it was that it was a portable, manually activated unit. That meant the chances of there being an additional ELT, automatically activated by the crash and currently broadcasting their exact location to COSPAS—the Russian Space System for the Search of Vessels in Distress—were next to zero. Despite how unreliable their technology was, the Russians weren’t into redundancy. Any rescue team was going to have to find the crash site the old-fashioned way—they were going to have to hunt for it. Just to be safe, he broke off the ELT’s antenna and set the equipment aside.
Next, he checked out the contents of the ditch kit. Inside was a flare gun case, as well as four olive drab, vacuum-sealed pouches covered in Cyrillic writing. His ability to read Russian was almost as bad as his ability to speak it. At best, he could make out only the most basic words.
From what he could understand, the two largest pouches were individual food rations called Individualnovo Ratsiona Pitanee, or IRPs for short. They were the Russian military’s version of American MREs—meals ready-to-eat.
These were Cold Climate/Mountain Operation versions, which were calorie-dense, and meant to see a soldier through an entire twenty-four-hour period.
Harvath couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. It had been at least three days.
All he wanted to do was rip open the packaging, but he had been trained better than that. In a survival situation, every item you came in contact with could be potentially life-saving or life-threatening. Nothing should ever be taken for granted.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast went a popular SEAL mantra, which he now heard echoing in his brain.
Taking off his gloves, he felt along the edge of the packaging, looking for a notch or someplace to tear back the cover. There wasn’t one.
Removing a folding knife he had taken off the dead Spetsnaz operative next to the cargo container, he carefully made an incision in the packaging, closed the knife, and returned it to his pocket. He then peeled back the plastic.
It was sharp in spots, and he took care not to cut himself. He remembered a buddy of his growing up in California who had sliced his hand opening a tin of coffee. It resulted in an infection that was so serious, doctors had wanted to amputate the hand to stop the infection from spreading to his heart.
Luckily, he had been at one of the best hospitals in the world, and they had ultimately discovered the right combination of antibiotics.
That kind of luck, though, wouldn’t be in the cards for him. Not as a fugitive on the run inside Russia. If he got sick, he couldn’t just walk into some hospital, much less one on a par with anything to be found in the United States. No, it was critical that he stay healthy. His health and his training were his two greatest assets.
Sitting cross-legged, he removed the food items and laid the amazing array of provisions on the ground in front of him.
There were six sleeves of crackers or some kind of shortbread-style cookies, with about ten in each. There were also five bars of dark chocolate, a small tin of processed cheese, a pudding-sized cup filled with a chocolate-hazelnut spread, two bags of hard candies that appeared to be caramel, a cherry-flavored