stood up and shuffled his feet, swinging his arms to keep his circulation going.
Around five in the morning, he dozed for a while, waking when the first light of
dawn came sliding over the eastern mountains.
“FEELS LIKE A STONE buried in your flesh,” Ryan muttered. He was again slogging
relentlessly onward in a great loop south, hoping to meet the others.
His toes hurt and he could feel a faint prickling on his exposed face. His hands
were also becoming swollen and tender.
“Stone in your flesh,” he repeated. That was how Finnegan had described what the
early symptoms of frostbite felt like.
It was nearly midday, but the temperature seemed to be dropping. Off to the
north, he could see a great smear of yellow across the sullen sky, where a
volcano was erupting. At the top of a ridge, he stared out through the swirling
wall of snow, looking for any sign of life, friendly or otherwise. He thought he
saw the great dish of the radar installation many miles ahead, but it seemed
impossible to reach before evening. And he was beginning to doubt his ability to
survive another night without proper shelter and some food.
THE MUTIE POLAR BEAR came blundering out of the mists of evening, padding on
huge, shaggy paws. Ryan was close to the limits of exhaustion and hunger. His
concentration was slipping. Still, he plodded onward, trying to make as much
ground as he could before hacking another shelter from the unyielding snow.
“Fuckin’ fireblast!” he cursed, stumbling back a few paces, leveling, the
Heckler & Koch G12 at the hulking beast that stood less than twenty paces away.
Its red eyes glared at him; breath plumed from its jaws. For a few moments, man
and beast stared at each other, neither sure of the other’s intentions.
“Just fuck off out of my way,” said Ryan, finger on the trigger of the automatic
rifle.
The creature moved its head back and forth, almost as if trying to hypnotize its
intended prey with the regular pendulum swinging.
Saliva dripped from the long, tusked teeth. The head moved faster and still
faster. Ryan blinked, fighting against tiredness to hold the gun steady, knowing
that one lapse of concentration would be fatal.
Noticing a sudden tensing of the hump of muscle across the bear’s shoulders and
guessing it presaged a charge, he didn’t hesitate any longer. The gun set on
continuous fire, he squeezed the trigger, bracing his hip against the recoil. In
a crosswind the 4.7 mm bullet was liable to a degree of drift, though the
trajectory drop was excellent.
At twenty paces, the stream of bullets tore into the polar bear, bursting its
heavy skull apart. Ryan kept firing into the animal’s broad chest, sending it
staggering to its knees, then onto its side. Its feet kicked and flailed in the
bloodied snow. Ryan used the entire fifty-round magazine, knowing that a beast
of that size needed to be terminated with utmost prejudice and speed. There
wouldn’t have been a second chance.
He reloaded, looking into the gloom of the on-rushing night. The sound of the
gun would have been so brief that he doubted there was any danger from the
Russians.
Its head blasted to pulp, the bear was undeniably dead. But as Ryan bent to
touch it, feeling the warmth of the carcass, he was startled to feel the heart
still pumping, even though there was virtually no blood left in the whole
monstrous body.
He took off his gauntlets, pushing his hands inside the gaping chest cavity,
careful to avoid scratches from the jagged ribs and breastbone. The scarlet pool
around his feet was steaming. Finn had come off once with a horror story of some
trader up in the north, dying of the cold, who’d shot a buffalo on the high
plains, hacked its belly open, ripped out the guts and crawled into the carcass
and huddled there in the glorious warmth. But during the night, the cold had
frozen the soft flesh to an immovable stiffness, and he wasn’t able to get out.
And so perished.
Ryan was content to have his hands and arms warmed, feeling inside for the