Letting the dead man’s head drop, Harvath placed his fingers against his neck, just in case there was a pulse. There wasn’t. “You got off easy,” he said, sizing up the Russian.
The other two soldiers had been monsters—barrel-chested thugs, well over six feet tall. This one was closer to his height and build of a muscular five feet ten.
Wearing nothing but scrubs and the equivalent of prison slippers, Harvath had already begun shaking from the cold. He needed to conserve whatever heat he had left and quickly stripped off the Russian’s uniform.
Snatching an American, especially one of Harvath’s stature, was an act of war—particularly when carried out on U.S. soil. It would have been a completely black operation.
If Harvath had to guess, everything they needed—civilian clothing, fake IDs, credit cards, even weapons—had been arranged via Russian mafia contacts in the United States.
Once the private jet had touched down, the soldiers had changed out of their American street clothes and into cold-weather military uniforms. The man with the broken neck was wearing long underwear, wool socks—the works. Harvath took all of it.
The only thing the Spetsnaz operative wasn’t wearing was a coat. They had boarded with them, though, so there had to be at least one somewhere.
Buttoning up the clothes with stiffening fingers, he pulled on the man’s boots and laced them up. Then he continued his search.
Picking his way through the wreckage, he came upon a small crew closet.
It had been jammed shut by one of the rows of seats that had come loose during the crash. Harvath had to burn precious calories to shove the seats out of the way, but it was worth it.
Inside was a thinly insulated Russian Air Force jacket with a faux fur collar. He pulled it on and zipped it up. There were no gloves in the pockets, but there was a beret. It wouldn’t keep his ears warm, but it would help retain some heat and was better than nothing.
He was about to close the closet when he heard a noise from the other side. Without hesitating, he put two rounds through the door. The plane’s flight officer fell down dead on the other side.
Closing the door, Harvath saw what he had done. He hadn’t intended to kill any of the flight crew unless absolutely necessary. Though Russian military, they weren’t directly responsible for what had happened. That responsibility lay with Josef, his Spetsnaz operatives, and whoever had tasked them with kidnapping Harvath and murdering the people he cared about.
But after everything that had happened, he had zero capacity for remorse. Russia, and every Russian in it, was his enemy now.
Pushing forward into the wind, he cleared the rest of this section of the fuselage. There were no additional survivors.
Trudging through the snow, he arrived at the final section of the plane—the nose. It included the badly damaged cockpit, which was consumed by flames. From what he could see, the pilot and copilot were both dead and still strapped into their seats. The fire was too hot, though, for him to get any closer. Getting his hands on a map, a radio, or some sort of flight plan was out of the question.
Staying in this part of the plane was also out of the question. As much as he needed the warmth, the thickening toxic smoke forced him out.
Stepping into the snow, he pushed back toward the tail section, making sure to keep his eyes open for Josef and the remaining Spetsnaz operative.
He had no idea where they were. For all he knew, they had been torn from the plane during the crash.
Sweeping back through the center segment of the aircraft, he hurriedly gathered up anything he could safely burn to keep warm, including a heavy aircraft manual the size of a phonebook and two wooden pallets.
When he returned to the tail section, he checked on the loadmaster. The Russian’s pulse was thready. His eyes were glassy and his skin was ashen. He had lost far too much blood. Nevertheless, Harvath was determined to do what he could to save him.
Dragging over a sheet of metal, he set it as close to the loadmaster as he dared and used it to build a fire on. There was a shovel clamped to the wall. After breaking down the pallets, he found a small piece of flaming wreckage outside, scooped it up, and brought it in to get the wood burning.
Tearing the dry pages out of the technical manual, he crumpled them into balls and tossed them in to stoke the fire higher. As soon as it was burning good and hot, he set his attention to helping the man who had saved his life. He had to stop the bleeding.
None of the soldiers had been carrying tourniquets, so Harvath was forced to improvise. Grabbing two carabiners from the vest of the Spetsnaz corpse nearby, he collected several strips of cargo netting. It was a spit and baling wire solution, but it was all he had.
Using one of the carabiners as a windlass, he applied the improvised tourniquet to the man’s left leg, cinched it down, and employed a length of wire and the other carabiner to hold everything in place. Then, adding even more fuel to the fire, he moved in closer to warm up.
Because of the angle of the tail section, the wind here wasn’t blowing straight through, but that was a small blessing at best. Outside, the temperature continued to plunge. Harvath needed to figure out some way to help better wall them off from the cold. He also needed to find blankets and a way to get IV fluids into the loadmaster. There had to be some sort of medical kit on the plane. Whether it had survived the crash was another question entirely.
In addition, he still needed a lever and fulcrum to raise the container off the man’s crushed legs, to gather up any food and water he could find, and come up with some sort of a pack in which he could carry as many supplies as possible that would aid in his escape.
It was a long list. The sooner he got started on it, the better—for both of them. He had no idea how soon a rescue team would arrive.
“I return,” he said, in his limited Russian.
The loadmaster didn’t respond.
It was a bad sign. Even so, Harvath had promised the man that he would help him.
Further back, near the cargo ramp, he opened a series of metal cabinets. Each contained a range of equipment, but none that he needed. If there was a med kit on board, it wasn’t in this part of the plane. Maybe it was kept up near the cockpit. And if so, it was a lost cause.
Harvath did, though, find what resembled some kind of moving blanket. His luck, at least in part, was holding out.
Removing it, he turned to hurry back to the loadmaster. But as he did, he came face-to-face with the remaining Spetsnaz soldier. The man was bleeding from a gash above his left eye and had a suppressed ASM-Val rifle pointed right at him.
“Zamerzat!” the man ordered, blood dripping down his face. Don’t move.
CHAPTER 6
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* * *
GOVERNORS ISLAND
GILFORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE
“Whoever the killer was,” said Chief Tullis, “he or she knew what they were doing.”
“You think this was done by one person?” asked McGee.
“Not necessarily. Based on the footprints outside, there were likely multiple assailants. The victims, though, were all lined up, on their knees, and shot execution-style. Judging by the wounds, we believe it was done by the same shooter with the same weapon.”
Pointing at the bodies, he continued, “Based on the shot placement, specifically rounds being directed to the head, the chest, or both—the killer appears to have training. None of the shots went wide. We didn’t dig anything out of the walls, the ceiling, or the floorboards. No rounds went through any of the windows. Cool, calm, and collected. If I had to guess, I’d say the killer had probably done this sort of thing before.