heard screams from behind, and men calling in Russian.
His mouth filled with powdery snow, and he coughed and choked as he rolled. With
an effort, he managed to spread his arms and legs into a star shape, checking
his slide down the hill.
The tremor passed, and he sat up, checking his blasters. His long coat was torn,
his knee hurt, and there was a dull throbbing where the horse had kicked him. He
could taste blood from a cut near his mouth.
But he was alive.
The patch over his missing left eye had shifted and he tugged it back in place.
He stood, trying to determine where he was. He was at the bottom of a steep
ravine, with water a few inches deep under his boots.
He’d fallen a couple of hundred feet and had no idea where Krysty and J.B. were.
There were Russians all around, blundering in the darkness.
Ryan was alone with no food, no water and no way to keep warm in a land he
didn’t know, with a night to face with temperatures that might drop to seventy
or eighty below.
Survival was going to be hard.
Chapter Sixteen
ONE OF THE TRADER’S SAYINGS came to Ryan as he moved cautiously through the
stygian gloom away from the camp of the Russian butchers.
“The will to live is quite simply a matter of your personal courage.”
One of the things that the Trader had always insisted on was each war wag having
a number of experts: on explosives or first aid or food or armaments or
driving—or survival. Finnegan had been the survival expert. Trader had spent a
lot of time lecturing Finnegan, using old manuals and books, drilling into him
what should be done in heat or cold or a nuke attack or an ambush, a flood or a
fire or a fall. In turn, every few weeks, Finnegan would give a talk to the rest
of the crew—as would the other experts, checking that everyone knew what to do.
Now, kneeling in the slush, feeling it soaking through his trousers, Ryan
recalled some of the things that Finn had told them.
Panic was the biggest threat. Fear made a man move too fast in the wrong
direction. He should stop if he could and draw a breath.
Ryan stood, fighting to control his breathing, still hearing the ground rumbling
miles below his feet. Also catching the sound of the Russians, running and
calling. Now he saw a couple of flaming torches as they started to search for
their lost prisoners. He guessed that J.B. and Krysty, if they’d stayed
together, would be making for the south to meet with the others. But his fall
had put him on the wrong side of the enemy. Now he’d have to try and loop
around.
Ryan took stock. Guns and ammo, check. Clothes and knives, check. Health,
bruises here and there but nothing too threatening: check. Compass, check. Food
and drink.
“No,” he said to himself.
Nor heat.
The land was so barren that his chances of finding food were remote. But he knew
from experience that he could exist for several days without food, even in the
bitter cold. But he had to drink. He stooped and cupped some of the water around
his feet, tasting it cautiously. The fact that it was flowing and not frozen was
a sign that it originated higher up—probably near the dam that he’d spotted
earlier—and had been melted by heat from a volcano. The taste was bitter, iron
with a dash of sulfur. If he could drink now and fill his belly, it would last
him a couple of days.
If he didn’t find the others after a couple of days in the lingering nuclear
winter, then he was going to be dead anyway.
He knelt and lapped like a dog, lifting his head every now and again to peer
into the gloom. At the bottom of the steep valley he was sheltered from the
bitter wind, but he knew that he couldn’t stay there long. The Russians would be
searching. Judging from what he’d seen of him, their amber-eyed leader wasn’t
the sort of man who gave up easily.