The next forty-five minutes went by very slowly. Natasha continued to watch her instruments as she flew low over the ocean, waiting for the alarm that would tell her the plane had been sabotaged and they were going down. It didn't come, though, and as the time passed she began to hope that maybe all three of the remaining widows had bailed out. The door could have drifted shut on its own, closing hard enough for the plane's sensors to detect the seal. Natasha's luck wasn't usually that good – but she could hope.
"Guadalcana Tower," said Natasha, "this is AA-113. Alfa-Alfa-One-One-Three, I'm about seventy-five minutes out from the Solomons. Over." Just an hour and a quarter, and this would all be done.
"Roger AA-113," said Espinoza. "We've got emergency vehicles waiting, and we have word from an American search and rescue organization that reinforcements are on the way. The man in charge told us to see if you have any other requests, and to assure you that, uh, apparently the US Government will cover the costs." Espinoza sounded like he didn't know what to think about that. "Over."
Natasha bit her lip, trying to think what she might need. She didn't know who else was still on board. After extracting that promise from Fury she was loathe to turn the other widows over to an organization that would imprison them or send them back to Russia, where they would surely be punished severely for failing to complete their mission. Considering the distances involved, Fury probably wouldn't be able to have more than a very small, ill-prepared group of agents on site by the time she got there.
Triinu hadn't quite stretched Nat's charity to the breaking point, but now the circumstances did. "I'll need a SWAT team," she decided. "And a bomb squad, just in case."
"Yes, Ma'am," said Espinoza. "Just to be clear, do you wish to declare an emergency?"
"Yes," Natasha said. "It's a very slow emergency at the moment, but yeah, better safe than sorry."
"All right. Don't worry," he promised. "We'll have everything waiting for you beside the runway."
Beside, Natasha noted. They were worried the jumbo jet, its tanks still heavy with explosive fuel, would go right off the end.
"As long as we're talking," Espinoza said, "can I ask you something? It's not relevant to the situation, I'm just curious."
"Sure, go ahead," Natasha said with a shrug. She couldn't promise she would answer – but she was good at not answering questions.
"Where did a lawyer who put herself through Harvard by modeling learn how to fly a 747?"
Nat laughed. She liked this guy – he was clearly a critical thinker, attentive to details. Good traits for an air traffic controller. "Well, like I said," she told him, "you'd be amazed what you pick up when you work for Tony Stark. This one time..."
She'd been about to tell a made-up anecdote based on an incident that had been in the briefing materials SHIELD had given her before her undercover assignment at Stark's – a story with just enough truth to be checked – when the plane was rattled by an explosion. It wasn't a bigblast, but it was literally right behind her, shaking the controls out of her hands and rattling the windscreen glass. Natasha quickly grabbed the stick again and made sure the plane was still responding to commands before she did anything else.
When she turned to look at the security screen again, all she could see was white smoke. After a few minutes it cleared, and Nat made out a red object taped to the lower left side of the door. As that a fire extinguisher? A moment later this second bomb went off, too.
The cockpit door of a 747 was built to survive a grenade, but this was a carefully calculated assault on the lock and hinges, by people who had thoroughly familiarized themselves with how it was built. The door didn't come off, but the lower half of it bent inwards, and somebody outside began hammering on it with something heavy.
"AA-113! What's going on up there?" asked Espinoza.
"Can't talk now!" said Nat. She pitched the nose up again, hoping to force the attackers away from the door.
It didn't work. When Natasha checked the security camera again, she found that Yelena and Kamila had made themselves harnesses out of parts from another parachute, and were now using a laden meal cart as a battering ram. They'd tied the cart to the doors of the washroom and crew compartment outside the cockpit using bungee cords, and even with the plane in a climb, the elastic and their muscles could still throw it against the door hard enough to cause more damage.
Eventually, even the armored cockpit door could not take any more such punishment. It sprang open, and the cart burst through to fall over the discarded parachutes still lying on the floor. The cart toppled, spilling its contents across the central control panel – bottles of wine, cans of soda, buckets of ice, anything the other widows had been able to find that was heavy. Nat made sure nothing hit the throttles, then grabbed the nearest ice bag with one hand while checking her seat belt with the other. No matter what happened, she decided, setting her jaw, she wouldnot relinquish control of the plane. Not while she was alive.
"Got you!" Yelena said triumphantly, grabbing Nat by the hair.
Natasha hit her in the face with the ice bag. It was an awkward stroke at that angle, and Yelena shrugged it off easily.
"Kamila!" barked Yelena, ripping the bag out of Nat's hands.
The two women seized Natasha by the wrists. She struggled, but even the largest of airplanes had only a tiny, cramped cockpit. There was no room to move. Yelena cut the straps of the seatbelt with a pair of safety scissors, and they dragged Nat bodily out of the chair. Even once her legs were free she didn't dare kick, for fear she'd hit some vita part of the plane's controls. The lives of the passengers were still in her hands.
God damn it... she should have killed them when she'd had the chance.
"I'll deal with Natalia," said Yelena. "You call for Plan B!"
"But we've got her now!" Kamila protested.
"I'm in charge!" Yelena snarled. "And I say call for Plan B!"
Together they hurled Natasha out into the aisle. She started to get up, but then Yelena hit her in the back of the head with a wine bottle. The glass broke, and cold alcohol spilled down Natasha's back. It wasn't quite enough to knock her out – Clint liked to say that Nat had the hardest head of anybody he'd ever met, including Nick Fury – but for a moment her vision dimmed, and the pain was blinding. When everything cleared she found Yelena rolling her over, pinning her wrists to the ground with her knees as she straddled Natasha's chest.
"Mother Bird, Mother Bird," said Kamila's voice from the cockpit. "We have the bad egg in custody and we're bringing back to the nest."
"I bet that's what you said last time," Nat sneered at Yelena.
"This is Mother Bird," a voice on the radio replied. "Roger that – bad egg coming home.
"I told you to call the Zmeyevich!" Yelena ordered.
Kamila sighed. "We would like to request escort and backup," she said reluctantly. "We're going for Plan B."
"Roger," the radio repeated. "Go for Plan B."
"You always did go running to Madame when things didn't work out the way you wanted," Nat hissed to Yelena. Each of them had their weaknesses. Yelena's temper was hers. If Natasha could make her angry enough...
But perhaps she'd made her too angry. Yelena grabbed a child's backpack out of a nearby seat and hit Natasha in the face with it. Despite its cheerful exterior, decorated with cartoon dinosaurs, the bag was full of hardcover schoolbooks, and probably close to the weight limit for carry-on luggage. Nat saw stars again, and blinked them away just in time to see the backpack coming at her for a second blow.
Now that she'd started, Yelena couldn't seem to stop – years of pent-up hatred were all bursting out at once as she hit Natasha with the bag over and over. In the face, in the chest, in the gut, in the shoulders, until Nat's whole upper body felt like a single mass of bruises. The only time she managed to get a glimpse of Yelena's face, she found it twisted into an enraged grimace as awful and unnatural as one of Madame's smiles.
Finally, the backpack broke. School textbooks spilled out across the floor, and Yelena dropped the torn cloth, panting. Nat knew this was her moment to act. Now, while Yelena was without a weapon, she had to sit up and fight back. Her battered body, however, refused to cooperate. All she could do was lie there with her eyes half-open, breathing heavily and trying to figure out if she'd cracked any ribs. It felt like there were at least two.
"Yelena?" Kamila asked, wary. She was afraid that rage would be turned on her next.
"Have you got the course yet?" Yelena asked, wiping her nose on her blazer like a child.
"Yes. They're sending a chopper," Kamila replied.
"Good." Yelena stood up. "Help me with this."
The two women put a life vest around Natasha's neck and inflated it, then wrapped her up in duct tape. They left her arms free long enough to put them through the straps of a parachute pack, then taped them to her sides. Her head was still spinning as they carried her to the nearest emergency exit, but she began trying to come up with a plan.
Wiggling free of the duct tape would have to wait until after her parachute opened – if she moved around too much before that, she might dislodge the altimeter or timer that would open the chute, and risk hitting the water at over a hundred miles per hour. She would have to get free before she reached the ocean, however, because she wouldn't want to still be wrapped in duct tape and have the parachute come to rest on top of her, leaving her tangled in two layers instead of one. She would need her arms free to cut the parachute line just before splashdown.
But what would she do then? Yelena and Kamila were both putting on their own parachutes, intending to bail out with her. Dimitria was dead, and Triinu probably was, too – the door alarm had almost certainly been set off by Kamila and Yelena throwing her out. "What's going to happen to the plane?" she asked aloud, although she wasn't sure if she were talking to the others or to herself.
"It'll keep going west until it runs out of the fuel," said Kamila.
"These people don't need to die," Natasha protested. Of course, thirty minutes ago she'd thought the other widows didn't need to die, either, and look where that had gotten her.
"They don't need to live, either," Yelena replied.
The passengers were nothing to her – just as the Barton family had been nothing to Loki. They were irrelevant to the mission. Natasha had a mission, too, but was it to save the plane, or had it become to save herself?
Yelena lifted Natasha by the shoulders, and Kamila by the legs, and they carried her to the nearest emergency exit. She should have fought, but her ribs ached and the duct tape still had a firm hold on her. Yelena opened the door and, without even a countdown, they tossed her out into the cold, thin air.
Wind whistled in her ears as she dropped. Nat's reflex was to try to spread her arms and legs so that she could present a bigger surface area and slow her fall, but the tape made that impossible. She couldn't even really change her orientation relative to the ground. The whistle grew to a roar, ripping tears from her eyes as she plummeted towards the whitecaps two miles below.
She wondered whether Triinu had been alive when they'd pushed her out of the plane.
Then the parachute opened, slowing the fall with a jolt. Nat shook her head to clear it as best she could – it was time to start working her way free. She had less than three minutes.
Training took over, and told her arms first. Duct tape was difficult to break, especially when layered, but it did stretch. Her left hand hurt where the tape touched the area she'd scraped raw in escaping the handcuffs, so she began instead with the right, clenching and wiggling until she stretched it far enough to get her fingers free. Then she flexed her arm inside the bonds, until that, too, could be pulled out and start finding ends to unwind herself.
Ripping the tape off the fresh scab on her left hand tore more skin away and it began to bleed at the edges, but in the cold wind the blood froze rather than flowing. Nat wiggled her left arm free, and got to work on her legs. She knew she was taking too long, but her bruised ribs were making it difficult to breathe, and with the wind in her face and no goggles on it was hard to keep her eyes open. She had to do everything by touch.
Kamila and Yelena had done a very good job of tying Nat up. She'd only been semi-conscious after the beating Yelena had given her, but she'd still been awake enough to tense up so that the bonds would not be tight once she relaxed. They, in turn, had known to twist and layer the duct tape to make it harder to tear. Already drained, Natasha was struggling with it. As she tried to pull an end away from her ankles, she opened her eyes a crack and realized she was out of time. The ocean was rushing towards her like a wall of blue.
With only fifty feet to go, she undid the buckles on the parachute and dropped away from it. At least with her feet still tied, it was easy to assume a streamlined position to enter the water – but even so, the impact stung.
The South Equatorial Current was a lot warmer than the frigid air at twelve thousand feet, but ti was still below body temperature, and hitting the surface forced the last of the air out of Nat's already stressed lungs. With her legs still tired, she could not swim effectively, but the life vest taped into position around her neck helped to compensate. She broke the surface in the middle of a mass of dead, slimy seaweed and sputtered salt water for a minute or two. When she finally stopped gasping for air, when her eyes finally stopped stinging enough that she could open them, she tried to size up her situation.
There wasn't much to size up. All she could see was open water to the horizon in every direction and empty sky above, without even a bird to break the endless blue. About a hundred feet behind her, Yelena and Kamila had also splashed down. Kamila had somehow become entangled in her own parachute and was trying to get free. That would slow her down, but Natasha knew Yelena wouldn't stop to help her. Nat turned away from them and started swimming as best she could.
Her chest burned with the effort, but she kept it up, even though she didn't have the slightest idea of where she was actually going. The odds of finding an island, a friendly ship, or even a dolphin were astronomically tiny, but she had to try. Natasha had never been the fastest of the widows, or the strongest, but she was the one who never gave up.
Then she heard the thunder of helicopter blades.
Nat didn't dare look up for fear of attracting attention – instead, she tried to think of a way to hide. Maybe she could duck under the seaweed that was still clinging to her, but first she'd have to get rid of the bright yellow life vest still fastened around her neck with tape. She began trying to pull it free.
But her strength was flagging. Natasha was in pain and she still couldn't breathe properly: before she could make much progress, a violent downdraft told her that the helicopter was directly overhead. Frogmen dropped into the water all around her, and Nat realized that for the first time in a very long time indeed, she'd been beaten. Bruised, exhausted, and still partially bound with tape, there was very little she could do as they wrapped her in a nylon net and hauled her up to the Kamov KA-27. No longer able to fight, she simply lay limp and let them shackle her all over again.
Yelena and Kamila were pulled up after her, and took their seats while Natasha remained half-conscious on the floor. Yelena kicked her in the abdomen on the way by, and the pain made Nat open her eyes for a moment, just as one of the frogmen closed the helicopter door. Before it shut, she just barely caught sight of the contrail of a passenger aircraft, vanishing over the western horizon.
It was June, and the taiga was beginning to thaw. It produced a very distinctive smell, of marshy water and damp earth, and nine months' worth of animal shit all defrosting at once. To human eyes the place still looked desolate, with only a few greening marshes scattered among patches of snowy conifers, but to the local wildlife the pale shoots and temperatures above freezing were a veritable paradise. The reindeer were heading north to pick at the first offerings of moss and spring flowers, joining the scattered groups of musk oxen who beginning to shed their thick winter coats. Bears were rousing themselves in their caves and dens, and foxes and raptors had come out to hunt the rabbits, whose white pelts were now easily visible against the background of brown and green.
In the middle of all this wilderness, which it seemed the 20th century could not possibly touch, there was a crashed spy plane and its American pilot. The man had not spoken to another human being in the two weeks since he'd been hit by anti-aircraft fire over Norilsk, but that didn't mean nobody knew he was there. Natalia and Yelena had been watching him for days.
What Yelena thought of the man was impossible to say, but Natalia was a bit puzzled by him. He should know he couldn't expect to be rescued – the United States had already officially denied that he'd ever existed. Maybe he thought he could wait until winter and walk to Canada across the sea ice, but that would be a long trip in the polar dark and bitter cold, running a gauntlet of thin ice, killer whales, polar bears, and starvation. A Soviet man in the same situation would surely have committed suicide rather than risk being found by his enemies, but the pilot was putting his survival training to use, snaring rabbits and gathering edible greens and fungi.
Maybe he didn't even have a goal. Maybe he just hoped to survive alone in the tundra for as long as he could.
"I'm going to rob his snares," Natalia decided.
"Don't do that." Yelena shook her head. "That'll only make him angry."
"No, it will make him sympathetic," said Natalia. "He'll think we're lost and hungry, too, and he'll want to help us." The girls had been trained to inspire and use sympathy, but never to feel it themselves. Sympathy was a good trait in peasants, who had to help each other raise food for the State, and for factory workers and such people – but black widows could not afford to feel it. They must love the State, as the State loved them, and nothing else.
There was certainly no sympathy in Valeria. "Or else he'll shoot you for stealing his food," she said.
The pilot did have a gun. They'd seen him cleaning and checking it. He could have used it to shoot the rabbits, but he strangled them with twin instead. Perhaps he was saving the bullets for a special occasion. Natalia supposed he was probably afraid of bears, or of Soviet soldiers.
If so, he was unlikely to waste precious ammunition on a pair of thirteen-year-old girls. Both Natalia and Yelena were dressed in reindeer-hide coats and leggings, with their hair in pigtails and a few small items of beadwork for decoration, as if they were children of the local nomads. They, too, had spent the last few days living on rabbits and roots as they watched the pilot.
"Let me try it my way," said Natalia. "If I fail, you can take over."
"If he shoots you, I'll leave you to die," Yelena told her coldly.
"I wouldn't expect you to carry me," Natalia said. If she died, Yelena would still have this mission to complete. Carrying Natalia home would compromise that, and was therefore not an acceptable use of resources.
Natalia climbed over the crest of the hill and slid down the icy patches on the far side, as sure on her feet as any of the nimble reindeer. At the bottom was a rabbit warren with a snare set over one of the holes. She crouched next to that, positioning herself carefully. Her hide clothing might easily blend into the overall gray and brown of the tundra. Natalia wanted to be seen, but not to look like she wanted to be seen. It was a delicate balance that depended entirely on the colourful beadwork and her very visible red hair.
After a moment, a rabbit appeared. Natalia didn't want to see if it entered the snare on its own. Her hand darted out to grab it by the ears.
The rabbit at once began to scream and kick in distress. It would have been easy to break its next, but Natalia deliberately fumbled, pretending the animal was slipping out of her mittens. It tried to run and she grabbed it again, so the screams continued. Not a lot of people knew that rabbits could make noises – nature was full of surprises.
Natalia knew perfectly well that the pilot was coming up behind her, but she pretended to concentrate on the rabbit, and finally seemed to get a firm hold on it just as she heard the click of the gun. Maybe Yelena had been right after all. When she turned around to face the man glaring down the barrel at her, Natalia made her blue eyes as wide as possible and backed away, as if in terror. The rabbit fell to the ground at her feet and fled for its life.
The pilot smelled of wood smoke, over the distinctive sharp odor of a human being who has not taken a bath in many days. He was African by ancestry, with his hair cut very short and a beard beginning to grow. For a moment he and Natalia simply looked at each other, but then he lowered his weapon.
"Hello, there," he said in English.
Natalia considered her options. "Bana zarar etmeyin," she said. It meant please don't hurt me, although she suspected she might just as well have said anything else and it wouldn't matter. If this man were trained as a spy he might recognize and understand Russian, but she doubted he could tell Turkish from the Yakut languages people spoke in this area.
The pilot gently set the gun at his feet, and offered her a hand. "Do you speak English?" he asked.
Natalia took a step back. "Anlamıyorum," she said – I don't understand.
The pilot licked his lips. "A ty govorish' po Russki?" he asked. His accent was extremely strong, and he recited the question as something he'd learned by rote, rather than a sentence he really knew the meaning of.
Natalia shook her head. Yelena was still watching from the ridge at the top of the hill, and Natalia decided she had now made friends with the man and she should now call her partner. She didn't like working with other, none of the girls did – a partner might be able to complete a mission she'd failed at, and get the reward while Natalia got the punishment, but having two of them also doubled their chances of success. Natalia deliberately turned her head to look at Yelena. The pilot followed her gaze, and beckoned for Yelena to join them.
"It's all right!" He held up his hands, showing that he had put the gun down. "I won't hurt you!"
"O sempatik!" said Natalia – he pities us. She'd been right.
Yelena slid down the hill to join them.
"Let's go check the other traps," said the pilot, motioning for the two girls to follow him. "I don't know if I can feed all three of us, but I'll give it a shot."
As the sun brushed the horizon that evening, they sat down in the shelter of one twisted airplane wing, which was stuck upright in the marshy ground, and built a campfire to eat their supper of rabbit and mushrooms. The girls devoured it hungrily, keeping up their pretense of being lost and starving. Although he could have taken the food away from them, the man allowed it.
He also talked to them.
He told them his name was Darius. He said he was married to a woman named Rebeca, and that they had two sons, the older one six and the younger just eighteen months. He described how, as a child, he'd loved reading books about survival in the wilderness, books like Robinson Crusoe and Island of the Blue Dolphins.
"Of course," he chuckled to himself, "they got to be stranded on beautiful tropical islands where they didn't have to worry about their toes freezing and dropping off. I couldn't get that lucky. It's beautiful country up here, don't get me wrong, but I'm gonna have to think of something before the autumn comes."
Natalia chewed quietly and wondered whether his wife and two little boys knew why he'd been away so long. Of course it didn't matter, really, whether they did or not – their knowledge was irrelevant to the mission Natalia had to accomplish. Yet now that she knew they existed she couldn't help but think of them, just as she couldn't help but wonder from time to time whether Baba Galina were still alive, and if she were, whether she ever thought of Natalia.
There was no sunset on the taiga in June. The temperature dropped below freezing and the sky turned purple and pink, but the sun sat low on the northern horizon without ever actually disappearing as it would at lower latitudes. Darius – the pilot, Natalia corrected herself – checked his watch repeatedly, and then announced it was time for bed.
"Maybe your people will come looking for you two," he said to the girls as he bedded down inside the broken fuselage of his plane. "Maybe they'll take me in. I doubt anybody even knows what goes on in the world up here... you look like your lives probably revolve around the reindeer." He settled his head down on a folded jacket. "I'd never seen a real reindeer up close until last week. I didn't know they were so small. No wonder it takes eight of them to pull Santa's sleigh."
Natalia and Yelena curled up and waited. They couldn't take action until they were certain the pilot was asleep. In the constant daylight he would probably awaken easily.
It was when Natalia heard him muttering to himself that she figured it was probably all right. She sat up and stretched a kink out of her neck. "I'll search him," she said. "You check the plane."
"You got to be the one to rob the snares," Yelena objected. "I'll search him. You check the plane!"
"Whatever you want," said Natalia. She wasn't interesting in arguing about it.
She had no light for her search except the deep, dim red of the midnight sun. Low on the horizon and magnified by the atmosphere, it looked like a star about to die, but it was enough. The fuselage of the crashed plane was on its side, with its belly towards the east. That was where the cameras would be mounted to take pictures of Soviet naval and air force bases. Natalia located and checked them, but found that the film had been removed. The pilot must have taken it out, in case anybody found the wreck. He knew they would be interested in finding out what he wanted to look at.
Natalia next checked the cockpit, climbing in through a broken window to rummage through paperwork, flight plans, and other items. She did not find the film, but she did find a bent photograph of a couple on their wedding day. The man was Darius, so the woman must have been his wife Rebeca. Natalia turned the photograph over. Written on the back in blue ink were the words volar a mí – fly back to me.
She climbed back out again. The pilot must have the film on his person somewhere, which meant that Yelena would be the one who found it. Natalia didn't like that, but it wasn't important who succeeded at this particular mission. They had to serve the State, to repay the love it alone had shown them. That was what Madame always said.
Natalia dropped soundlessly to the ground next to the fuselage. Yelena had already gone through the pilot's backpack, and was now unzipping his jacket.
"Beca?" he murmured. "That you?"
"Sssh, honey, you're having a bad dream," Yelena replied soothingly. She matched his Tennessee accent flawlessly. "Go back to sleep."
The pilot woke with a jerk. He rolled over and grabbed her wist, staring at her. Yelena had not seen the writing on the back of the photograph. She didn't know that Rebeca was Latin, and probably did not have the same accent. For a moment Darius stared at Yelena in disbelief, but then his jaw tightened.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
"Bırak! Canımı acıtıyorsun!" complained Valeria, in Turkish.
"You spoke English, I heard you!" the pilot said. He pulled his gun out of his belt and pressed it under her chin. "Who do you work for? What kind of barbarians use little girls as spies?"
He was paying no attention to Natalia, so she jumped onto his back. With her legs around his neck she used her entire body weight to throw the man against the side of his airplane, hard enough to break the already compromised structure. There was a sudden stink of jet fuel. Natalia rolled away, Darius' gun now in her hands, and aimed it at him.
He sat up, groaning and rubbing his neck, and couldn't seem to figure out what had happened until the fuel spill suddenly reached the embers of his campfire. Suddenly the wreck was ablaze and they were surrounded by light. A moment ago Darius had been threatening – now he looked terrified.
"Who are you?" he repeated.
"Where is the film?" Natalia asked calmly. They'd been found out now. She may as well just ask for it.
"What film?" He licked his lips, then reached inside his jacket and pulled out a metal canister. "You mean this film?" he asked, and in one motion he opened the canister and threw the contents into the fuel fire.
Without thinking, Natalia put a bullet through Darius' right hand. It passed through and kept going, into his thigh, but it was too late. Yelena ran to retrieve the film but had to back off. The fire was too hot to approach, and the film was already ruined.
"Der'mo!" Yelena exclaimed. "I could have gotten it!"
"It doesn't matter," Natalia told her. "It's gone now." The past two weeks had just been rendered wasted in a moment of poor decision-making. "Let's go back to base." She stuck the gun in her waistband – if she left it, the pilot might use it on them.
"Madame is going to beat us both," said Yelena as they turned to go.
"Wait!" Darius protested.
Yelena kept going, but Natalia paused and looked back. The pilot was lying on the ground, clutching at his bleeding leg, his eyes wide with pain and fear.
"Shoot me again," he said. "Please. I can't walk, and I don't want to burn. Let me go fast."
Natalia bit her lip. If she left him alive, he might survive long enough to be found by the specialists who would doubtless arrive to pick through the wreckage. They would save his life, and then send him to Kuchino to be questioned by torture. When they could get no more information out of him, he would be worked to death along with the other political prisoners in the camp.
"Please!" Darius begged. He was trying to crawl away from the fire, but his blood-soaked trouser leg was already starting to catch.
Natalia put a second bullet between his eyes, and he fell.
"What did you do that for?" Yelena demanded. "Now they can't question him!"
"He wouldn't have told them anything anyway," Natalia said, and dropped the gun on the ground before she finally turned her back and walked away.
