Page 40 of Dead Fall

Eventually, tiny Soviet-era houses began to appear in the woods—country houses, or dachas as they were known. They were weekend and summer places, normally passed from generation to generation, that allowed citizens to escape from the city and get back to nature. These dwellings, however, had seen much better days.

This area had seen heavy fighting. Many of the tall pines had been snapped like Popsicle sticks. Of those that hadn’t, many bore scars along their trunks of bullets that had come whizzing past. Here and there, as on the outskirts of Kharkiv, lay tanks, APCs, and other rusting military vehicles that had been destroyed in battle.

It was hard to imagine this as a vacation area, a place where children laughed and rode their bikes while adults sat outside eating and sharing homemade wine with their friends and neighbors.

They had passed four dachas so far and he had yet to see one that was either unblemished or had all of its windows still intact.

At a narrow turnoff, the woman pulled onto a short, gravel drive and headed toward what he assumed was the safe house. Harvath scanned their surroundings as they drove. Signs of heavy combat could still be seen all over. He could only imagine how many troops the Russians had poured through here and what kind of response the Ukrainians had mounted to meet them. It had a real Ardennes Forest, World War II feeling to it.

Soon enough a small house appeared, and they rolled to a stop in front of it. “Here we are,” she said, putting the Land Cruiser in park and turning off the ignition. “It’s not much, but for the moment it’s home.”

The woods around the house were quiet.Tooquiet for Harvath’s liking. There were no birds, no insects. It was as if it was some kind of dead zone—a place living things actively avoided. The animals’ instincts were keeping them away.

Harvath’s instincts were sending him very much the same message. They were telling him to go, and to gonow.

But he didn’t have that luxury. He couldn’t just fly away to someplaceelse. He had a mission to accomplish and that was what he was going to do. Adjusting his rifle, he exited the vehicle.

This dacha, even more so than the others, had gotten the shit knocked out of it. Many of the windows were broken and the wood siding had been riddled with bullet holes. The chimney was cracked and half of it had fallen down. Part of the second story was singed, as if it had been on fire at one point.

Whatever had taken place here, it looked like it had been one hell of a fight. The home appeared barely habitable, which might have been why it was chosen as a safe house. Who would have thought of being holed up in a place like this? Gathering her gear, the woman headed inside. Harvath followed.

The bullets that had been flying outside had ripped right through the home’s interior. Signs of entry and exit were evident everywhere. While someone had taken time to spackle the holes, the white putty stood in sharp contrast to the mellow color of the aged, wood-clad walls.

Any artwork that might have once adorned the cottage was gone. Some fishing poles, which had escaped the gunfire, hung on a couple of the walls, as well as a few pieces of taxidermy. The living room, Harvath noticed upon entering, held a couch, two chairs, and a trio of footstools.

From where he stood, he could see a table and a few mismatched chairs in the dining room. Beyond that was a rustic kitchen, some other room around the corner—probably a bedroom—and a narrow staircase leading up to the second story.

Minus the bullet holes and plastic sheeting covering the broken windows, it reminded him of his grandparents’ cabin in Wisconsin. It even had the same musty odor mixed with the scent of mothballs and fireplace.

“If you want a hot shower,” the woman said, laying her things on the dining room table, “you’ll have to stoke the boiler out back.”

Considering the burns to his back, a hot shower was about the last thing he wanted right now. What’s more, there was no way he was going to strip off all his gear, let his guard down, and give her any advantage over him.

She had bought him a coffee and had given him a ride out to the middle of nowhere—that’s all. The fact that she had been carrying theKen Follett book and had known the location and the countersign didn’t mean that she was who she said she was.

“Thank you,” he replied. “I’ll pass on the shower for now. How long until the team gets here?”

“Not for a couple more hours. They’re en route, but were delayed by a minesweeping operation on one of the roads.”

There it was—another excuse for why things were not going according to planandanother microexpression. His Spidey sense jumped into the red zone. Shewaslying to him. He was positive. But to what end?

Whether or not she really was a GUR operative didn’t matter. If she was working for the Russians, she’d be after information. The easiest—and usually the fastest—way to do that was to convince him that she was on his side, that she was one of the “good guys.”

“I saw from your papers,” she continued, “that they made you a captain in the legion. That’s pretty impressive. What was your background before coming to Ukraine?”

Harvath had a pretty good idea of how things might unfold if she suspected that he was onto her, so he needed to be very careful. “I was a schoolteacher,” he replied.

“What do you teach?”

“Idiots.”

The woman chuckled. Even though English was not her first language, she spoke it and, more importantly, understood it quite well. “What subject?”

“Physical fitness.”

“And for this they made you a captain? What will you be doing at the front? Improving their jumping jacks?”

Joining the woman in the dining room, he took a slow look around. If this was an interrogation, even a soft one, there’d be some sort of recording device. Probably more than one. But considering the size of fiber-optic cameras and subminiature microphones, you could be looking right at them and never even know they were there.

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