When colonel Nefski surveyed the rubble that had been the old library and hotel at Port Baikal, it was a wonder to him that any of them had survived the SAS/Delta commando attack. Half the prisoners had gone, vanished in the taiga, but he had little doubt that most, if not all, would be rounded up again. Top priority, he told his subaltern, was to be given to finding Alexsandra Malof. It was possible that the Jewish underground, using her as exhibit A, would try to reach the Americans, moaning again about “civil-rights abuses” and starting some damned UN investigation.
“We won’t take a chance with that,” Nefski told the corporal. “Shoot her on sight.”
“What about the Jewish underground? She can still give us information—”
“If you find her, shoot her,” snapped Nefski. “Where’d you get that bruise?”
“Ah, bit of wood, I think. Ricochet.”
“Better get it seen to,” advised Nefski, an unusual moment of concern for the well-being of the junior ranks. He felt more magnanimous now he’d cheated death, and more emboldened, determined to root out the undesirable elements now his efforts could turn away from what had been the wartime concerns to those of the cease-fire, to getting back to his old haunts in Khabarovsk.
As he walked toward the entrance to the hotel, its fairy-tale dome of snow sparkling in the sunlike sugar icing, he glanced at its ruined facade, shot through by SAS/Delta Force small-arms fire and the odd LAW round. But even among the ruins, the golden glints of sunlight off the ice along the eaves gave beauty to the place. He took it as a good omen; already he was thinking about hopes of promotion in the spring, though he would have to greatly increase the estimated number of American commandos that had attacked Port Baikal so as to further enhance the report of his vigorous defense.
His first step on the snow-laden steps of the hotel crunched in the warm winter sunshine. It was the vibration of his second step that proved too much for the fifty-pound icicle. Its stem snapped — and its long needle plummeted, smashing Nefski’s skull like an eggshell. As he lay crumpled on the snow, “bez priznakovzhizni”—”dead as a doornail,” as his subaltern said, everybody was already blaming everyone else for not having cleared the icicles, all and sundry later telling Novosibirsk HQ that under attack they’d had better things to do than look after the eaves.
Aussie lost sixty dollars — U.S. — because the Chinook helo, having spotted three figures moving north along the edge of the lake — Robert Brentwood and his two crewmen — had gone out to pick them up. It made the Chinook over an hour late. Aussie argued that “crook helicopters” rendered the bets null and void but he was howled down by his three compatriots whom he delicately called “fucking Ned Kellys,” after the infamous Australian highwayman.