Got you, you son of a bitch!

If Kropodkin had been a show-off or if Kretek’s crew had been up for a gang bang on the mess table, Randi knew she would have been in trouble. But she had been involved in sexual relationships, both romantically and professionally, with Russians before. She knew that a strong streak of inherent prudishness still ran deeply through many of the Slavic cultures. Overt sexual exhibitionism still frequently triggered a guilt-shame response. She had been counting on this.

Kropodkin was kneeling beside the bunk now and his hands were on her breasts, squeezing and kneading them with a brutal childish eagerness. “Things are different now, aren’t they, Miss Russell?” He spat her name out like an epithet. “You have a great deal to make up for. A very great deal. You may start begging my pardon any time you please. I might listen.”

She could make out his silhouette in the bar of light down the edge of the door and see the sparks of red light glinting in his eyes. She spoke directly to those sparks, her voice a soft whisper, audible only to him.

“Just so you’ll know, I’m still going to kill you.”

Kropodkin spat out a true epithet, a counter to the chill rippling down his spine. Standing, he tore off his clothes. He would destroy the hex this deadly, beautiful witch had put on his soul with her degradation.

Then he was stripping her, dragging her ski pants, thermal underwear, and panties down to her ankles. Not bothering to force the snug garments off over her boots, he was content to hobble her with them. Then Randi’s sweater and long john top were being forced up and over her head and into a wad around her wrists, leaving that firm, pale body bare save for her bra. That he tore away altogether with an angry, painful wrench, leaving her nothing.

She did not speak again or try to resist, not even in the slightest. She just looked into his face, those dark eyes glittering. It was as if what he was about to do to her simply didn’t matter. As if he were irrelevant, already dead and gone.

But if it was frightening, it was also exciting. He would make this bitch notice him. He would master her and break her and make her scream and cry. He was atop her in the bunk, hunching down under the springs of the upper mattress, mounting her, feeling her back arch under the stab of his dry penetration. She would break or she would die.

Randi rode out the initial, tearing burst of pain. She could hear the sound of Stefan Kropodkin’s breath hissing through his clenched teeth, and the laughter and shouted advice from the other arms smugglers just a few feet away beyond that paper-thin door. She felt Kropodkin’s hands moving from her bruised breasts to her throat.

Above her head, the links of the handcuff chain clicked as they locked into the shallow notch in the stanchion, and the fingers of her left hand took a grip on the clothing wadded around her right wrist, so she could clear her right hand.

Kropodkin thrust savagely within her, and her pain and rage reached critical mass and exploded. Her skin tore as she ripped her right hand out of the loosened handcuff.

Lost in the sensual softness of the prostrate body beneath him and the brutality of his rape of it, Kropodkin didn’t realize what Randi’s convulsive movements meant. She pushed completely free of her sweater and long john top, letting them fall to the floor. Then Randi’s left hand, still burdened by the handcuffs, whipped up and clenched in Kropodkin’s lank hair, yanking his head back.

“Told you so.” That whisper was the last thing he heard. Then the heel of Randi Russell’s right hand smashed an angled blow under Kropodkin’s nose, driving his sinus cartilage into the frontal lobes of his brain, killing him instantly.

Randi felt the gush of blood over her hand, the death spasm racking Kropodkin’s body. She rolled him onto the floor, clutching him in an awkward embrace to muffle the thud of his fall. Escaping from the handcuffs and killing her would-be rapist had been no major problem. Getting away afterward, with a dozen armed men a meager yard or two away beyond a flimsy unlockable door, was. It was only a matter of time, a very brief time, before they realized something was wrong in here. She faked a pained, whimpering outcry to buy a few more seconds as she wiped the blood from her hand. Hastily she redonned her clothes. She didn’t have enough to wear for the outside. No doubt there was more clothing in the wall lockers, but she didn’t have the time to rummage for it in the dark.

The laughing voices were trailing off out in the main bunkroom, and someone, Kretek, called out a question to Kropodkin.

She had to get out now. Kropodkin had been wearing a heavy flannel shirt with a hooded sweatshirt over it. With her night-adapted eyes she could make out where they had been discarded on the floor. They would have to do. For a fraction of a second she considered the sleeping bags in the bunks. No good. Too bulky. They would slow her down for those first few critical moments of flight.

The question from the room outside was repeated, more pointedly. Randi snatched up Kropodkin’s garments, then grabbed for the carrying handle of the tape player atop the locker. Swinging it with all her strength, she smashed out the heavy thermopane of the bunkhouse window.

Mess table chairs crashed to the floor.

Randi threw the shirts over the bottom edge of the window frame as protection from the glass shards and rolled through to the outside. Behind her, the door to the women’s quarters tore open.

She felt the blowing ice spicules stab at her face, and the explosion of outside cold. It all depended on that cold now. If the snow crust had frozen solidly enough in the night to support her weight, she would live. If she broke through and bogged down in a drift, she would die. Scrambling to her feet and clutching the shirts to her, she ran for the safety of the darkness.

She heard enraged shouting and started to weave and sidestep as she ran. A flashlight beam stabbed after her, and someone emptied a handgun out of the window. Bullet strikes sprayed snow around her feet. Pray that nobody in there had grabbed a submachine gun!

The toe of her boot broke through the snow crust, and for a hideous moment she stumbled; then she caught herself and ran on. Out of the light’s reach, she veered sharply to her left. An Agram SMG started its angry typewriter chatter, but the gunner was firing blind, wildly spraying the night.

Randi diverted laterally again, heading away from the camp, the cabin lights fading rapidly to indistinction in the swirl of the snow. She was clear! She paused, panting, and struggled with the stolen shirts, untangling them, shaking out the glass shards and drawing them on, augmenting her ski outfit. Already she was feeling the bite of the cold. They weren’t going to be enough protection out here tonight. Not nearly enough.

She ripped the tail off the flannel shirt and bound it over her face as an ad hoc snow mask and drew her already aching hands up into the overlong sleeves of the shirts. She looked around in the bleak near pitch blackness. The wind would be her compass. She would move north and try to join up with Jon and Valentina.

Randi’s one course of action, her one chance, was to keep moving and somehow find the others. She would work on the premise that they had come down from the crash site to find Wednesday Island Station occupied. Given that, she would further presume that they would divert and go to cover on the island’s central ridge, where they could both find shelter and keep the camp under observation. Knowing Jon, he would try to work in close during the night to try to establish the identity of the landing force and learn what had happened to her and Trowbridge.

The odds were not good. If her teammates hadn’t come down from the crash site or if she couldn’t find them, then she would die before morning. But the death out here looked cleaner and more defiant than the death back there. Hugging herself to conserve body warmth, Randi began her stumbling trudge through the growing blizzard.