Page 7 of Enemy Within

Closer… closer…

Finally, the ice cracked, and the snow beneath puffed up, exploding over Sasha’s legs and his filthy, tattered flight suit. He cursed and went back to digging, quickly scooping out clumps of snow to make a deep, angled trench.

The ground trembled beneath him.

Time was up.

Rolling, he ducked into his trench, hiding under the overhang of snow that he’d left. He reached out, smearing one arm through the drift he’d left behind and knocking over the pile he’d dug out, and then dragged the pine bough over the opening. With luck, and obscured through the forest, his hiding spot would look like an animal den.

He curled tight, barely breathing as the black helicopter passed above the trees. Closing his eyes, Sasha imagined theSpetsnazteam leader’s face.

Once, he’d let the team get too close, close enough to where he’d had to hide, pressed in the frozen dirt beneath the warped boards of a trapper’s cabin in the empty forest. He’d peered out from under the floorboards, his face in the dirt, watching the men search for his tracks.

And he’d first laid eyes on the lieutenant. TheSpetsnazlieutenant was a hard man, a Siberian, with a weathered, sharp face and a cutting gaze. A long scar curved over the right side of his face, from his temple to his jaw. His eyes were sharp, with a predator’s instinct. Sasha had stopped breathing when his gaze swept over the cabin.

TheSpetsnazlieutenant was a hunter in his own lands, and Sasha was his prey. How had he ever managed to last this long? He should have been killed days ago. Every moment he kept going was borrowed time.

Sasha held his breath and tried to blank out his mind.

Sergey’s face, and the memory of his smile, his laugh, played in the darkness behind his eyelids. He almost groaned as yearning, painful, achingwant, slammed into him.

Finally, the helicopter moved off, the heavy cut of rotors against the frigid sky fading into the distance, heading back the way it had come.

Sasha went limp, boneless, his head resting in the snow as he let out a shaky breath. His gloved hands gripped the strap on the emergency pack he’d pulled from his ejection seat, but they were trembling, both from the freezing cold and the strain of being on the run.

His emergency pack was nearly empty. Russian pilots were only supposed to have to survive seventy-two hours before being rescued. He was working up to one hundred hours on his own, stumbling through the vast wilderness of the Siberian taiga. He’d stretched the food, but his water was gone.

He scraped snow from the wall of his tiny cave and held it in the palm of his gloved hand. Blowing on it, he tried to melt the snow, bring it above freezing. He was already cold, his body temperature too low. Eating snow would only lower it further. How much more until he was dangerously hypothermic?

Finally, the flecks melted, and he licked the frigid water from the palm of his filthy glove. Not enough. Not nearly enough. And it was still too cold.

What he would give to be warm again…

Sasha’s eyes slipped closed.

In his mind, he was back in the Kremlin, in Sergey’s presidential apartments, laughing and sitting across from him at the gaudy state dining table, one end piled high with briefing papers and binders. There was a fire roaring in the fireplace along the wall, and he had a glass of whiskey in his hand. Sergey’s smile, though, was warm enough to reach his bones, set him on fire from the inside, fill his whole world up with heat and light—

Jerking, he snapped awake, his forehead slamming into the snow overhead. He’d closed his eyes for a moment, but that was all it took to slip into an exhausted slumber. Damn it. He snagged what rest he could, digging out snow burrows and nesting with pine boughs and fallen branches, but it wasn’t ever enough. He was almost delirious with exhaustion.

Outside, the sun had fallen, and only a dim glow blurred through the forest.

And he was shivering, his jaw clattering loud enough to wake the dead. His snow trench was too cold. He had to get out of there.

Sasha pulled his pistol out of his pack and checked the chamber. Evening meant bears, and the bears in Siberia thought nothing of swiping at a lone, wrecked human wandering through their range. He’d be a tasty meal for a bear working out its hibernation hunger. Not that a pistol would do much against an attacking bear, but he might be able to scare it off.

He shook his head, trying to shake the haze of exhaustion.Keep heading southeast.If he was where he thought he was on the map, then he was deep in the Sakha Republic. Indigenous Siberian territory. Tribal lands. And days away from Simushir Island.

He had to keep going.

Sasha slid out on his belly, wincing as snow poured down the front of his flight suit. Damn it, he couldn’t stop shivering.

Gripping his pistol as tight as he could in his shaking hands, Sasha set off into the forest. He stumbled and nearly fell, and his body felt like it was trembling apart, but he kept moving. One foot in front of the other, into the deep snow.

Each step was one closer to Sergey.

4

Washington DC