Warshot

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The three figures dropped softly, catlike, from the chopper roaring above them, its rotors a blur against the winter moon. Their progress in the deep snow was unhurried, displaying an economy of movement, yet singular purpose. Their sixty-pound packs and two-meter skis lowered, the women pulled down their night vision goggles, clicked on the long skis, and, using herringbone steps, began to climb the ridge from the depression the chopper had used for cover. The baskets at the end of their poles disappeared six inches into fresh powder before biting into the last snowfall that had crusted under the impact of wind and sun across the vast taiga. At the ridge’s summit a black, moonlit wilderness of pine, beech, and fir stretched in every direction, the air no longer polluted by the oily stench of the chopper’s exhaust, but pure and smelling of that hard, cold purity that all skiers love.

The three women, in their thirties, were Olympic standard biathletes. In top shape they were as adept at firing the high-velocity .22 rifles dead on target as they were skiing the women’s nine-mile or the men’s twelve-mile crosscountry course, each of them having practiced endlessly on the Les Saisles course at Albertville and on others before the war. Each woman’s body was so well-conditioned that she could drop her rapid biathlon heartbeat to 145 per minute while firing on the range in the prone position, and to no more than 190 on the cross-country trails. They skied down from the ridge in single file, and it wasn’t until a minute later that the leader found it necessary to start double poling, her body in the white, skintight, four-way-stretch Lycra-nylon suit moving as if one with the white skis and poles.

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