Grisha plodded along mechanically, senses alert, closely followed by Nik Rezanov, who had ceased muttering to himself some time ago. Two meters ahead of Grisha, Wing moved steadily, effortlessly, almost gliding through the brush. He again wondered how many followed.
Grisha hated promyshlenniks almost as much as he hated cossacks. Ruthless opportunists who totally lacked discipline, they would wipe out a game population rather than use forethought and harvest animals with conservation in mind. Two islands near Akku no longer held the otherwise plentiful Sitka blacktail deer because of promyshlennik butchery.
As far as the hunters were concerned, the animals existed as a gift from God and Czar. Their proprietary manner in small communities often caused those of a different mind to move on to greener pastures. Grisha had never chartered his boat to any party containing promyshlenniks.
They also did the Czar's dirty work along with the cossacks. Half of every man's earnings belonged to the Czar. The promyshlenniks proved themselves foully adept at finding hidden potatoes, moose hides, and dried fish—not to mention money.
The year after his father's death, four promyshlenniks had come to his mother's door, demanding the Czar's share of her earnings. She told them she was a widow with nothing to spare. They threw young Grisha out into the snow and spent the afternoon extracting what they wished from her while he beat his hands bloody trying to open the cabin door.
No more loathsome creature inhabited the subcontinent of Alaska. They prided themselves on being the worst. Grisha felt sick with loathing and apprehension, knowing that human weasels followed his party.
He pulled his attention back to the problem at hand. The sun came up over his right shoulder. They were moving west? But then did the sun really come up in the east this late in the year? Alaska's interior was as alien to him as the Republic of California.
Wing held up her hand, stopped, and cocked her head to the side.
"Listen," she said.
Grateful for the stop, Grisha tried to listen. All he could hear was his heart beating. Leaning against a tree, he opened his mouth wide to baffle the pounding pulse. Still he heard nothing.
Wing shook her head. "It's gone now. I thought I heard a scream."
"You did," Claude said from behind the panting Nik. "I think it was the last sound that person will ever make."
Grisha shuddered, glad he missed the whole thing.
"How many are following us?" Nik asked.
"Lynx said a dozen at least," Wing answered. "Alex was to get a better count and then catch up."
"Maybe they got Alex," Claude said in a low voice.
"That's the conclusion I reached about a minute ago," she snapped. Wing turned away from them. "Let's go."
Grisha stifled a curse and hurried after the fast moving woman. Nik followed and Grisha heard him ask Claude if Alex was related to Wing.
"Actually he was my cousin," Claude said in a low voice. "But he was her lover."
Nik cursed in Russian. "She must be in great pain," he said while trying to see her around Grisha. "And she just keeps going. What a woman."
Grisha glanced back at Nik. "Do you want to change places?" he asked in a joking tone.
"Yes!"
Before Grisha could respond, Nik darted around him and closed on Wing.
Grisha shrugged and wished his feet would stop hurting. As his still-wasted body ached into the rhythm of the pace, he forced his mind to range beyond the physical just as he had during his imprisonment. Movement became automatic. He concentrated on the country they traveled through.
Small tributaries fed into the Tanana, and every tributary rushed from the heart of a small valley. Some they crossed on fallen trees, others they waded through up to their chests.
Growing up on the Inside Passage of the Alexandr Archipelago, Grisha's idea of natural beauty differed somewhat from this. He loved the lush rain forest, the thirty-meter trees, the impressive fjords of Southeast Alaska, and the North Pacific Ocean.
The Tanana mocked him, hinting of the ocean to which it eventually traveled, which now sparkled forever out of his reach.
Valari Kominskiya entered his thoughts. Why had she thrown him to the Czar's wolves? They could have talked their way out of Karpov's death.
Had she set him up? No way of knowing. But there was no obvious reason for that. She must have just panicked. Her panic had cost him his old life, or what was left of it. He was surprised at how much he missed his boat.
At the top of a ridge the trail forked in a wide clearing. Wing signaled a halt and waved them up to her.
"Behold." She pointed. "The Great One."
A range of majestic snow-capped mountains lay unguessable kilometers in front of them. At the center of the range reigned a gleaming monarch reaching into the bright blue sky half again higher than any neighbor. Grisha and Nik stared dumbstruck.
"Claude," Wing said. "Watch the trail behind us."
"My God!" Nik said. "I've seen this from St. Nicholas Redoubt, but I had no idea it was this big!"
"That's bigger than Mt. St. Elias," Grisha said. "Even from here I can tell that. What did you call it?"
"Denali, the Great One." She stared proudly for a long moment. "That is the holy place of the Dená. You might say this the heart of why we fight the Czar and kill his cossacks—this is the only ikon in our church."
"But you don't kill his soldiers," Nik said. "Why?"
Her eyes flicked over both of them before settling on the soldier again.
"We've discovered that most soldiers of the Czar hate their life. They're merely slaves in uniform. We need soldiers too, but ours share with everyone else, they're not a lower class to be used like animals. They're respected."
"I find that difficult to believe," Nik said. "Will the people go into battle with them?"
"I am not a person?"
Grisha laughed as a look of consternation swept over Nik's face.
"You're twisting my words. Of course you're a person! But you're part of a paramilitary group, aren't you? You don't look like a schoolgirl to me."
"Once I was a teacher. My husband and I lived in Holy Cross where the Russian Army maintained a small garrison. One night three cossacks broke into our house, killed my husband, raped me"—her left hand touched the scar on her cheek—"and left me for dead."
It pained him to look at her just then, so Grisha stared at the mountain.
"Friends found me, hid me, nursed me back to health. I was introduced to others who were tired of being used by the Czar and living in constant fear. Through them I received training and began striking back. One of the most satisfying moments of my life was the morning I gelded those three bastards and left them tied in the forest to bleed to death."
"You've had a hard life," Nik muttered.
"Who hasn't? That's why we're here, to end the Czar's rule over our people and our homeland. We've been slaves to a man and a government none of us have ever seen, never will see. We've had enough, we're fighting back."
"You're talking about armed revolution," Nik said. "You'll never get away with it, you're too few and they're too many."
"I'm willing to fight," Grisha said. "And it's because they took my life from me, twice. Not quite as brutally as they took yours," he said, nodding at Wing, "but they took it just as completely.
"While serving the Czar I, and the men under my command, took the lives of countless men. We never questioned, never asked 'why?' because we didn't care. Now I've killed one cossack and I'm more than willing to kill more. And I know why."
Part of him stood shocked, aghast at his treason, but the rest of his being cheered as elation filled him.
"Well, by comparison I've had it pretty good," Nik said. "But there's certainly no love lost between me and the army."
"So you'll join us?" Wing asked.
"Conditionally."
"Good." She whistled, sounding just like a bird.
Claude came panting up. "There's someone behind us."
"How many?" Wing asked.
"Three, four, I'm not sure. They're good, they don't break the skyline and they skirt clearings."
"Who are they?" Nik asked.
"One cossack for sure, and two or three others. The rest must be promyshlenniks."
"Damn!" Grisha said.
"They die just like anybody else," Wing snapped. "This is a perfect place to take them." She pointed. "Grisha, you take cover behind that fall of birch. Nik, over behind that large rock with the moss. Wait for my shot, then fire at whatever you see."
They all hurried to their posts. Claude and Wing disappeared to the left. Grisha quietly opened the chamber of the rifle he'd carried from the construction site. Shiny cartridge cases reflected redly in the light.
Algeria seemed a lifetime away. His service to the Czar was a subject carefully blocked from his day-to-day mind. The government had stripped him of two careers. He was ready to try a different tack.
"No," he hissed softly through clenched teeth. "They can't do that to me anymore."
He settled back and waited.
Off to his left he could see Nik. The soldier appeared calm and deadly. Grisha wondered about the man and abruptly realized he wasn't paying attention.
For long moments he stared first at one tree, watching for movement with his peripheral vision, before shifting his attention to another tree or rock. After ten minutes something flickered at the edge of the trees.
A hundred meters to the left, and right on the trail, a man stepped out in the open. He stopped at the brush line, clearly visible. Red collar flashes identified him as a cossack.
The cossack craned his head around, seeking a target. He shrugged and trudged up the slope to where the trail forked, as if hunting rabbits. He didn't waste a glance at Denali.
Grisha forced his eyes back to where they had been when he first saw the flicker of movement. Nothing. He stared at the spot, waiting. The cossack irritated him, bouncing up and down at the far edge of his eye.
He was always aware when someone stared at him; the skin on the side of his face, just in front of the ears, would tingle slightly. Suddenly the spot actually itched. A shadow moved at the other corner of his eye.
He swiveled his eyes over and slowly let his head follow. Another movement. Grisha finally made out the shape of a man. The woodsman was huge, with arms the diameter of stovepipe, wearing a great, dark beard that stretched halfway down his chest.
That's two. Beads of sweat rolled down his face. Where's the other one, two? He realized that the man on his far right was visible only to him. The others couldn't know about the promyshlennik because they couldn't see him.
Slowly he centered his sights on the man's chest, directly between the shoulders, in the middle of the beard. His target knelt and stared at the cossack, rifle butt resting on the ground beside him. Although Grisha's shoulders itched, he ignored the cossack. The man in the trees was a much more important target.
The promyshlennik suddenly gripped his rifle and rose to a crouch, peering at something.
Grisha glanced back, wishing Wing would fire the first shot. The only thing in sight was the cossack. He looked back at the woodsman.
He wasn't there.
His training instantly took over. Heart hammering, he abruptly knotted down into a crouch.
A blast from behind blew away a fist-sized chunk of the tree next to where his head had been. Grisha threw himself to the side as another blast tore into the space he'd just vacated. He rolled down the slight slope away from the attacker, but toward the cossack.
The ridge top erupted in gunfire. The cossack staggered backward under the force of hits and fell to the ground. Grisha leaped up and ran toward cover.
Expecting to be hit or killed at any moment, he grunted in surprise as he reached the relative protection of the forest. He hunched down, eyes flashing about, his breath shuddering in and out. He smelled sour, even to himself.
The air stood still, cooler now than earlier. The temperature would drop tonight, he decided.
He heard Claude call out, "Grisha! Where are you?"
Slowly his eyes moved over every object in his sight. Nothing moved.
Where did he go?
"Grisha? You okay?" Nik called from nearby.
"Stay down!" Grisha yelled. "There's another one over here."
Movement to his right. Claude edged into the trees like a large cat. Nik eased up behind him.
"Where?"
"I don't know. But he damn near got me, twice."
Wing suddenly slid up beside him. One of her hands steamed, covered in blood.
"We already got three," she said, her eyes searching out ahead of them. "Maybe he moved over and we caught him?"
"Big guy with a huge beard and biceps big as one of your thighs?"
"No. We didn't get anyone like that," she said in a low voice.
"There's one more and he's in there." Grisha nodded toward the thick forest at meadow edge. "He's very good. Well, good enough to make a fool of me," Grisha said and forced a chuckle.
"You're not green in the bush. You're just out of practice." She looked around and slowly rose to her feet. "C'mon." She nudged him and moved forward.
He glanced down at her hand. "You're hurt."
"Not my blood. C'mon."
Grisha put three meters between them so a near miss of one wouldn't hit someone else. They moved quietly ahead with Nik on one side and Claude off on the other. After a hundred meters all four stopped as if on command.
The forest stood in front of them, full of brush, wind fallen limbs, and rocks. Wing moved close to Grisha again and spoke quietly. "Are you sure he came this direction?"
"If he hadn't, one of you would have seen him," Grisha said.
"Well, since we haven't come across him by now, he's probably escaped," she said with a sigh. "We need to move on before it gets any later, we have a long way to go."
"I hope we got the bastard that killed Alex," Nik blurted.
Wing regarded him coolly. "You didn't even know Alex. Why are you so eager to avenge his death?"
"Because he was important to you." Nik angled away from them suddenly, pretending the brush forced his detour.
Grisha hurried back to the windfall where he had taken cover. With his sheath knife he dug the mushroomed slug out of the damaged wood. As they came together on the trail he held it out in his hand for them to look at. Nobody commented.
"Okay, Claude, you take point, I'll take flank," Wing said. "Nik, if you'll keep quiet, I want you back with me."
They set off toward Denali.