Jet had considered trekking across Ukraine to Romania and reuniting with Matt and Hannah, but that was too dangerous. Even with the ploy of taking all the passports, any but a cursory inspection of her papers would trip her up. That left the unpleasant prospect of making it north to the Russian border and recrossing – ironically safer than remaining in Ukraine now that the Russians believed that the prisoners they had been pursuing were lost to them.
‘Hide in plain sight’ had been one of the operational mantras drilled into her during her training, and going where nobody would expect her to was the best defense she could think of. Now all that remained was to traverse twenty kilometers of flatlands and sneak across the border without drawing the ire of the patrols in the area or stepping on a landmine.
After fifteen minutes of hard running, she arrived at the outskirts of Kharkiv’s eastern reaches. Row upon row of grim housing projects jutted into the night, surrounded by squalid brick homes on postage-stamp lots. She slowed as she entered the residential area, noting the few cars, ancient Soviet models that looked like they’d been abandoned where they’d died, and ducked behind a wall. Headlights flashed from the main road and lit the house next to her for a brief instant. She remained motionless behind the wall as a police cruiser rolled past without slowing. She waited until its brake lights had disappeared around a corner several long blocks up and then busied herself with scouting for something to carry her to the border.
At the fourth house, Jet spotted a suitable conveyance: an old bicycle chained to an iron fence. The bike looked like it was a hundred years old, but she didn’t have the luxury of taking more time, and in this neighborhood, she doubted she’d find anything better. A bicycle had the benefit of being silent and portable, whereas if she tried to steal a car, its engine starting might alert the owner, not to mention pose an easy target for anyone looking for her, and she wanted to minimize her risk, not increase it. She crept to the bike and went to work with her picks, and moments later was pedaling down the road, grimacing at the squeaks and groans from the reluctant wheels.
Jet skirted the town, preferring to take the less conspicuous circuitous route rather than one that would cut her time by half. Once past the spread of buildings, she stuck to back roads, predominantly dirt and shale, through the flat fields that stretched north. She drove herself as hard as her legs would allow, inhaling the clean, honest smell of tilled dirt and condensation. The ghostly landscape of endless flatlands and scattered farmhouse roofs glowed surreally in the moonlight after the fringes of the silent city.
Three hours passed and she finally found herself on the road that skirted the border, an unremarkable strip of gravel running along an imaginary division. She paused at a blue sign alerting travelers that beyond it lay Russian soil and peered into the predawn at a dilapidated chain-link fence, the gaps in it visible even from where she stood, in such disrepair she had difficulty believing it was a national border. After taking the measure of the span, she selected a reasonably large opening and, remembering the still-vivid encounter with the Russian border patrol, shouldered the old bike and carried it through the gap, mentally calculating the distance to the nearest civilization.
Once across, nothing changed; the fields were exactly the same as those on the Ukrainian side. She toted the bicycle across an expanse of tall wheat, on the far side of which she hoped she’d find a road to carry her north. As the sun painted the eastern sky with vivid neon, she arrived at the edge of the farm, and it was with gratitude and determination that she set the bicycle wheels on the hard-packed dirt, her mind flooded with images of Hannah and Matt.
Chapter 47
Belgorod, Russia
Jet was just one of hundreds of bicyclists pedaling along the boulevard in Belgorod, making the morning commute under their own power, rain or shine. She stopped outside a café advertising hot beverages and fast Internet, and realized by the growls of protest from her stomach and faint light-headedness that she needed to on-load some calories quickly, having depleted her resources on the hard slog from Ukraine.
A heavyset woman waddled over to her table and took her order. When the woman returned with coffee and a farmhand breakfast so large parts of it hung off the edge of the plate, Jet asked her about computer access and was told that she could rent a station at the rear of the establishment for a few rubles per hour. Jet devoured the breakfast and, after paying the bill, moved to the computer stations and was relieved to find each PC equipped with antiquated but functional headsets.