Chapter 6: Mikhail Volkov

He arrived at the garrison at Rukha in a transport that smelled of diesel and unwashed men, carrying a rifle case he did not let out of his hands for the whole of the journey from Bagram, and by the time he stepped down into the flat gray light of the valley he had already read the file on the major’s death twice — once on the flight, and once more in the truck, as though a third reading might explain what the first two had only confirmed.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Volkov was twenty-nine years old, and had been a soldier for eleven of those years, and a sniper for six of them, first in a training cadre outside Pskov where the winters were long enough to teach patience to men who did not already possess it, and then in two postings before this one that had taught him the rest. He did not think of himself as a hunter, exactly, though the word was used often enough around him that he had stopped correcting it. He thought of himself, when he thought about it at all, as a man who solved one kind of problem — distance, wind, the unpredictable geometry of another human being deciding where to stand and when.

The problem in front of him now did not resemble the ones he had solved before.

~ ☆ ~

“Six hundred and forty meters,” the garrison’s intelligence officer told him, not quite managing to keep the disbelief out of his voice, as though repeating the number aloud might make it easier to accept. “One round. The major went down before anyone even understood there had been a shot.”

“You are certain it was one shooter.”

“The investigators found a single position. A single scrape in the dirt where an elbow or a knee had rested. If there was a spotter, he left no sign of himself at all.”

Volkov walked the ground himself the following morning, alone except for a guide who kept a respectful distance and did not ask questions, and stood for a long while at the rise above the old grain terraces where the report had said the shot originated. He crouched where the shooter had apparently crouched, sighted along the same line toward the perimeter fence, and felt, for the first time since arriving, something that was not quite doubt and not quite admiration but sat uncomfortably close to both.

The wind here came off the mountain in a way that would have required constant correction, not a single guess held steady but a running negotiation with the air itself, changing by the minute if not more often. Whoever had taken this shot had either been extraordinarily fortunate, or had understood that wind as intimately as a man understands the sound of his own name.

He did not believe in the first explanation. He had never believed in it, in eleven years of soldiering, and he saw no reason to start now.

~ ☆ ~

That evening, in the small room the garrison had given him, he wrote in the notebook he kept for this kind of problem — not a diary, exactly, though it had begun to resemble one over the years, entries less about himself than about the men, and now apparently the one woman, he had been sent to find. He did not yet know it was a woman. He knew only a name that meant nothing yet, whispered by informants who themselves seemed uncertain whether to believe it: that the mountains above Rukha had produced a shooter unlike anything the garrison had faced before, and that the local people had already begun speaking of her — assuming, for now, it was a her — the way they spoke of weather, something to be respected rather than simply fought.