The Soviet Comeback by Jamie Smith (best ereader for academics TXT) 📕

over and over. At eight hundred and fifty metres it was at the very top end of the Dragunov’s range, but he knew the Russian weapon intimately and had every faith in the gun to push past its limits, and every faith in his own ability to make such a shot. If he could make the hit at the same range in a Russian winter storm, he could do it on a calm prairie in Texas.

As his finger began coaxing the trigger, out of the corner of his eye his attention was taken by the young woman who had been forced to pick up the beer bottle for the politician earlier, and his trigger finger relaxed slightly. She was loitering in the hallway just through the doorway to the right of Conlan.

‘Slaves should be neither seen nor heard.’ The words of Conlan still echoed in Nikita’s head. The poor girl just had to constantly hide close by, ready to jump but never be seen, valued, thanked or cared for. Nikita felt the familiar rage burning up in his chest and again focused on Conlan, now throwing the phone and storming about in a fury.

Again, he started to squeeze the trigger, this time to make the shot. But again, something stopped him. Something just didn’t feel right; it didn’t add up. Conlan walked to the French doors and stood looking out across the land. Nikita could even just about see him with his naked eye.

He took his eye off the scope for a moment and reflected on the situation. If he shot Conlan from this range, it would initially be blamed on his servants, which didn’t sit right with him at all. But then once the police ran their ballistics tests, they’d quickly realise that he’d been picked off by a sniper, which would immediately make headlines everywhere. If that happened, the Americans would instantly point to the Soviets for carrying out the assassination of the one person opposed to the INF Treaty, and would smell a rat. The whole deal would collapse in on itself.

It just didn’t make sense.

What to do, what to do, Allochka. Think.

He held in his hands the decision over world war or a move to world peace, and the whole thing stank.

His instructions had been to take out the target by sniper, with the goal of removing the obstacle to the INF Treaty. But a sniper kill made it clear it was an assassination, and surely that was the last thing Petrenko or Klitchkov would have ordered.

It didn’t make sense.

He made his decision. Staying flat to the ground, he began to dismantle the sniper in front of him and packed it away in its case, keeping the scope to hand. He put it to his eye and watched as Conlan took a deep breath and turned back into the house, disappearing from view. Doing a quick scan of the rest of the property, he made sure nobody was watching, then keeping low to the ground, retreated to his car, hidden in a small copse of trees half a mile away, and prayed to God that he was making the right decision.

***

The dusty expanse glowed almost luminous in the moonlight as he stepped out of his car and looked over from the copse of trees to the ranch in the distance. A blanket of stars glittered overhead, and nothing could be heard but the crickets chattering in the night air as the temperature began to drop.

Leaning against a tree he paused, pensive. The vast plain was illuminated by the near-full moon, rendering any chance of a covert approach near impossible. He saw a large bank of cumulus cloud drifting across the moon-drenched night sky, in the direction of the silver orb. It was a long, thin cloud, and there was little breeze. Again, raising the scope to his eye, he scanned the ranch and saw only the glow of lamplight creeping around closed curtains.

He weighed the odds in his mind. It was around a mile to the ranch, and at the pace the cloud was moving he’d have no more than four or five minutes to cover the distance.

There was nothing for it; the ranch was surrounded by flat land and minimal tree cover, rendering any other kind of approach impossible.

The cloud was about thirty seconds away from cloaking the moon. He took a deep breath, and burst out of the trees and began his charge across the hard, cracked ground, hoping that distance would buy him the extra seconds before the land was cast into shadow.

Starting low, he slowly rose into a fully upright position, his back straight and his legs and arms pumping simultaneously. Had he looked back, he would have seen a low trail of dust in his wake, but his eyes were fully focused on his destination as darkness fell.

His pace didn’t falter, and his confidence was supreme. Speed and stamina were not areas in which he had failed yet, but then, he thought to himself, he had never raced against a cloud before.

As he hurtled towards the house, with around two hundred metres remaining, he chanced a glance up at the sky and saw that the cloud had twisted and mutated slightly, clumping together and buying him some extra time. But as he fixed his gaze firmly forwards, he saw movement in one of the upstairs rooms as the curtain shifted. He threw himself forwards onto the ground, sliding forwards and skinning the front of his body. He grimaced slightly but kept his head flat as the curtains opened and the face of the girl he had seen earlier looked out.

He lay unmoving, hoping the unavoidable eddies of dust he’d left in his wake weren’t visible in the gloom. Dressed in camouflage clothing and black leather gloves he was confident he would be hard to spot, but the clouds of dust might