Last of the Breed: Chapters 24–36

It was miles away but could be nothing else, for he saw the lights of what appeared to be a convoy moving along toward the east. There were six trucks in the line.

His people had no way of gauging the power behind the westward movement or the white man’s drive to own land, to live on the land.

He has a fixation on Hong Kong, and I believe that is where he intended to go.

From there, it would not be hard to get to America if we could arrange it through the American consul.

Where was Joe Mack now? Did he fare well? Was he warm? Was he still free?

Now it was snowing again, a thick, heavy snow falling steadily, and there was no other sound but that of falling snow, a whisper, faint yet discernible.

The rifle he had not wanted, as the report of a gun might attract undue attention, and he could hunt as well with his bow and arrows.

All this—the forest, the wilderness—it is my home. With each day I find myself regressing.

“In the forest it is necessary to be armed. There are wild animals as well as brigands.”
“Brigands, in the Soviet Union?”
“They have always been here. It is their life. They rob and they steal, and often they kill.”

By sundown of the following day he had found an overhang in the side of a rocky outcropping where he rested and ate.

Now he plodded on, hungry, very tired, his faculties dulled by cold.

“But Shepilov? He is vindictive, Kyra. You should be careful, yourself.”

It was dark now, and his eyes could no longer reach across the little cove to where the sheer mountain waited with its lips of snow.

He gnawed on a bone left from his roast of venison and dozed fitfully.

He eased from behind the rocks and went down a slight slope, walking an oblique route of his own choosing.

He moved along under the pines, looking again across the valley toward the bleak ridges, the massed battalions of the other pines where darkness and shelter might wait or enemies to kill or maim him.

Lean as a mountain wolf, his face haggard with cold and exhaustion, he climbed the icy slope to the lure of the sheltering pines.

To stare into a fire destroys one’s night vision for that important moment when one has to adjust to darkness, looking quickly from the fire toward an enemy out there. A good sentry should sit with his back to a fire, never looking into the flames.

Certainly, he would not be idle. His reputation as a manhunter was at stake.

He was a tactful young man, and so far had succeeded, although there was at least one officer with whom he dealt who was displeased by Zamatev’s assumption of authority.

This American of yours intrigues me. I’d like to take him.

Stephan Baronas was beginning to learn that there were many ways in which to survive and that there existed a clandestine world of which he had never been aware, a half world in which refugees, criminals, and others mingled, aided and robbed each other, and moved across borders without the knowledge of the authorities.

The difficulty was that they must wait to the last minute for what Bocharev might do, while even now their arrest order might lie on a desk somewhere, awaiting implementation.

They had tea, but the last of the meat Yakov had given them to add to their meager supplies was gone but for three thin strips.

If he could not wangle some way to cross the border to make their deal, he would be surprised.

Joe Mack lay on a ridge under a wind-wracked cedar, its gnarled and twisted branches almost as thick as the trunk.

They were coming in force and the search would be thorough, yet it was Alekhin he feared, Alekhin or the chance discovery of some blundering soldier who just happened upon him.

Then ducking under a projection of rock, he emerged on the cliff face once more.

The little valley comprised no more than forty acres and seemed to offer no way out that he could see, yet there was nearly always a way, if one had the patience to look and the skill at climbing.

The animal track skirted it along the rock wall and then dipped down through a mere crack, descending steeply into a rock-walled hollow where he found an overhang with a crude rock parapet of fitted stones, obviously very ancient.

He was related somehow to several officials and doted upon by his mother and his aunt.

Nobody stayed long at the fire but Ostap had seen deals for thousands of rubles consummated here.

Across the alley was an old courtyard that wandered into another and then into a ramshackle building, long abandoned.

Magadan was just such a place of empty spaces, structures hurriedly thrown up on somebody’s order or some bureaucratic whim.

I do not know what is happening! There has been much slipshod work!

They would say he was inept. That he was careless. That he had failed.

He had never been but superficially a civilized man. He knew that, and he knew he could, or thought he could, return to it. Now he did not know. He was a man of the wilderness, living as he had dreamed of living.

They had ripped him away from the life he had been living, to be used, drained, and cast aside. They would have left the pitiful rags of a man, what remained after torture, after repeated, demeaning questionings.

The driver stepped on the starter again, and at that moment the smoke billowed up, a cloud of it swept over them, and they saw a wall of flame racing toward them ahead of the wind.

He was only a liaison officer here, and he wished he was anywhere else.