high-peaked cap, and he carried an AKM slung over his back, muzzle down.
His back was to Tombstone, and he was bending over Tomboy, who was lying
on her back, still in her parachute harness with the chute billowing and
tugging in the breeze.
The soldier appeared to be alone. His back was to Tombstone, his total
attention on the woman at his feet. Stoney raised the pistol but kept
on running, trying to center the sights on a target that bobbed with
each step he took.
From fifty feet away, Tombstone fired … a clean miss. The soldier
turned, gaping at this apparition charging him with a pistol, then
reached for his AKM, fumbling with its strap.
Tombstone fired again. Damn! It looked easy on the TV cop shows, but a
pistol was a ridiculously inaccurate weapon, especially when fired while
running. The Russian raised the AK’s muzzle …
Again, Tombstone squeezed the trigger … miss!
Then there was a sharp crack and the Russian staggered forward, still
clutching the AKM. Tomboy, still on her back, had her revolver out.
She’d shot up into the Russian’s back from a range of four feet. The
man tried to raise the AK again …
Tombstone stopped, braced his .45 in both hands, and squeezed the
trigger three more times in rapid succession. One of the rounds at
least hit the Russian in the chest, pitching him backwards, sending the
rifle spinning from his hands.
He dropped to his knees at Tomboy’s side. “Tomboy! You okay?”
“Hi … Stoney.” Her face twisted with pain. “Bad landing.”
Glancing back, he saw her left leg twisted back under her body at an
impossible angle. It looked like she’d snapped both her tibia and her
fibula just below her knee. There was blood on her leg too, and a gleam
of white bone visible through a tear in her flight suit–a compound
fracture, and a nasty one.
Quickly, Tombstone scanned their surroundings. The Russian soldier was
dead, and there was no one else in sight. He could just make out the
peaked roofs of a small village or settlement some distance to the east.
They were sheltered to the north by a low rise, little more than a
snow-covered mound on the tundra. Nothing else was visible in any
direction but mountains, ground, and sky.
He touched the transmit key on the Search and Rescue radio strapped to
his flight suit. “This is Tomcat Two-double-oh, Tomcat Two-double-oh,
broadcasting Mayday, Mayday.” He stopped, listening intently, but heard
only the hiss of static, and once a garbled burst of something that
might have been a partial transmission leaking across from a neighboring
frequency.
Nothing. His transmitter might have been damaged in the landing, or
else no one was listening on the frequency at the moment. He set the
SAR radio to broadcast an emergency beacon, then turned to Tomboy.
“Let me take a look at that leg,” he told her. First, he pulled a
morphine syrette from his first-aid kit, pulled open the tear in her
flight suit, squeezed a handful of skin and muscle, and jammed the
needle home.
“That ought to make you feel real good,” he told her.
“A real … high.”
With a grease pencil included in the first-aid kit, he marked the letter
“M” on her forehead, and the time. The small ritual was comforting, an
acknowledgment that they were going to get out of this.
“You don’t really think we’re gonna get rescued, do you?” she asked.
Her eyes were glassy, the words slurred. He thought she must already be
in shock.
“‘Course we are,” he told her. “Brace yourself now. This might hurt,
morphine or no morphine.”
It did hurt; she fought back a yelp as he straightened her leg.
Tombstone looked around for a splint, but there wasn’t a thing to be
found but the soldier’s AKM. He’d hoped to use the weapon–an AKM with
a thirty-round magazine was better than a pistol any day–but he also
needed a splint, and even with an assault rifle, he wouldn’t be able to
hold the enemy off for long once they showed up in force. He used his
knife to cut generous lengths of nylon cord from the parachute, as well