The Alex King Series by A BATEMAN (free ebook reader for ipad TXT) 📕

the crust, found the snow looser a few inches deeper. He tucked the lozenge into the shallow hole, swept the icy granules on top. He raised his hand, saw the blood freezing to his skin. His fingertips were white. He had ripped out two nails in his efforts, but they barely bled. He tried to squeeze his hand into a fist, but his digits had frozen solid. He lolled his head back against the tree. There were tears in his eyes, but they welled and solidified on his cheeks, pointing downwards like stalactites.

There were crunches on the snow behind him. Multiple footsteps. He looked up as two men rounded the tree. He recognised one of the men, shook his head at the indignity of him being there at the end. The man removed the glove from his right hand and held it out in front of him. He looked up at him, tried to stand, but he struggled too much and rested his back onto the ice.

He was beaten and had accepted it.

A smaller man with dark, leathery skin - who the man would have thought looked like an Eskimo, or Inuit before he knew about the native Sami – laid his old and battered hunting rifle on the ground and took off his pair of reindeer skin gloves and bent down, ripped the man’s Gortex jacket open, and pushed the man’s hands back down as he weakly resisted. The Sami rifled through the man’s pockets, then gave up and ripped the man’s jacket over his head and went through the pockets one by one. The man shivered, practically bouncing off the ground as he shuddered. The Sami found a fold of paper, dropped the jacket on the ground as he handed the paper to the taller man, who like the man dying at their feet, wore modern ski-wear and thick double-lined boots.

“Is this it?” The taller man read the paper, folded it and placed it in his inside pocket. “Is this all that was taken?”

The man swallowed, but the action looked as painful as swallowing half a brick. He thought of his contact. The asset. The young man whose body lay ten miles south from here, wrought and stiff in the snow. He had veered off course, missed their rendezvous by twenty-hours. He had almost made it but died in the savage night. So close, yet so far. A waste of life. But the asset had got something out. And now he had given his own life for the same cause.

Resigned to his fate, he looked up and beckoned the man to bend down closer. He murmured something incoherent and the tall man straightened back up. He looked down at the man on the ground, saw that he was drowsy – almost out of it completely. He was hypothermic. The cold would kill him, but they needed the wilderness to claim him. He nodded to the Sami and the man reached under the bulk of his reindeer skin coat and pulled out a knife.

The man could see the dull-coloured blade. Not polished, but tarnished and grey. A thin silver line along the blade, which ran from haft to tip, indicated a wickedly sharpened edge. The handle was made from antler. It was a stubby, curved blade. He tensed as the Sami sliced through the fleece under-coat, dug the blade through the muscle wall and opened him up from his navel to his chest. He could hear the blade cutting through the muscle and fat, felt a tugging sensation, but he did not feel the pain of the cut, he was almost too far gone for that. But he did feel the pleasant warmth on his skin as his blood and entrails spilled and steamed in the icy air. The Sami placed the knife on the ground and dug his hands inside. He lifted out the man’s entrails and let them trail on the frozen ground. The man looked up at both men, tried to mutter something, but he closed his eyes and took his last breath, the faces of his wife and son finally coming into his thoughts as he breathed for the final time.

The Sami cleaned his hands on the man’s jacket, then wiped the blade of the knife on the man’s leg, sheathed his weapon once more and put on his gloves. Between them, the two men pulled the body out from the tree and laid it out on the snow. The entrails had stuck to the ice and unwound further as they had dragged the body away. The Sami swung the rifle over his shoulder and adjusted the sling so that it rode over the crude seam in his reindeer skin coat. He nodded to the taller man and they trudged back across the snow. When they were fifty-metres clear of the steaming body, the Sami removed a glove, cupped his hand to his mouth and howled like a wolf. To the other man’s bemusement, it was if a wolf stood next to him. The Sami howled for close to a minute. When a reply came, chilling and distant, the Sami smiled and nodded silently, and the two men trudged back up the slope to the east.

 

2

 

The car was a ten-year-old Volvo estate. Battered, but well-maintained. An inconspicuous vehicle barely worth a second glance. Its front wheels wore snow chains and had carved a path here on a crust of foot-deep frozen snow. The municipal snowplough had been through the day before, but it had not snowed here in weeks. The wind was cutting through across the northernmost tip of Norway, bringing the cold, salty air straight down from the Arctic Ocean and through the belt of wispy forest making up the extremities of Lapland.

The heater was on full power, maximum temperature. It had been for six hours. The car was a petrol engine model. Diesel struggled at these temperatures,