The Talbot Odyssey

by Nelson DeMille

  “Sir?”

  “Tell Androv I’m going to fire the last of my fireworks. Twenty high-explosive mortar rounds. Through his fucking roof. Hold your ears.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  Van Dorn hung up the phone and looked at Osterman and Baker. “Well, I guess I’ve been warning the Russians that the Russians are coming.”

  No one spoke. Then Van Dorn said, “My fault. I never underestimate the enemy, but I sometimes overestimate our technology and the loyalty of the people who tend to it.”

  Osterman smiled grimly. “There’s always that mortar, George. That won’t let us down.”

  Van Dorn nodded and walked to his field phone on the sill of the bay window. He turned the crank. “Mr. LaRosa, I’m afraid we may have to proceed with the fire mission. Yes, within the next few minutes. Stand by, please. And please accept my compliments on a fine display. Everyone enjoyed it.” He hung up and looked back at the two men. “No one likes to call fire in on their own people, but they understood that when they left here.”

  Baker said, “Give it a few more minutes, George. They may be close.”

  Van Dorn seemed lost in thought a moment, then looked at the clock again. “Molniya may be closer.” He added, “All we know of our operation for certain is that the Kuchik kid got back and reported mission complete. We confirmed from my spotter on the pole that the lights went on and off as they were supposed to. He also tells us that the parachute drop looked bad from where he was standing. Kuchik swears he and Joan gassed the bomb shelter, but for all I know he dropped the fucking crystals in a laundry chute by mistake. Joan is missing. Also, the directional microphones are picking up what sounds like shooting above the noise of the aerial torpedos. And we also know our people haven’t reached the communications room or I wouldn’t be talking to that imposter.” He paused a moment, then concluded, “It smells to me like a defeat.” He looked at the two men.

  Osterman said, “But Androv knows the jig is up for him, even if we haven’t reached the Pentagon. He must also know the personal danger he and his people are in. Perhaps they’ll call Moscow and abort this operation.”

  Van Dorn shook his head. “The Russians move like Volga barges. Slow, steady, and relentless. They can’t change course so easily.”

  Osterman said, “Well, we’ve played all our cards and they’ve played theirs.”

  Van Dorn stared through the bay window at the people in his yard. He was certain that the Russians would show no mercy to him or his guests after what Pembroke’s strike force had done to them. He could conceive of the Russian survivors coming to his house and slaughtering everyone, regardless of what happened in the larger sense. He turned and walked back to his desk, took a key ring out of a drawer, and handed it to Osterman. “These are for my arms room. I’d like you both to go outside, get the weak, infirm, drunk, and cowardly into the basement, and have everyone else arm themselves.” He added, “Let Kitty help you. She’ll be good at making sure everyone has the right gun.”

  The two men nodded grimly and walked to the door.

  Van Dorn called after them, “If anyone feels like praying, encourage them, but don’t tell them what they’re praying for. Only God knows. To everyone else it’s classified information.”

  Van Dorn walked to the coffee table and picked an hors d’oeuvre from the tray. “Tried to poison my canapés, did you, Viktor? You turkey.” He popped the pâté in his mouth.

  Van Dorn walked to his memento wall and stared at a picture of himself, O’Brien, Allerton, and Kimberly taken in London just a few weeks before the war ended. The last time the four musketeers were all together. My God, he thought, how little we know of men’s hearts and souls.

  70

  Abrams lit the fuse and it flashed in the dark attic room. The plastic exploded and the heavy steel door leaped off its locks and hinges, crashing to the floor.

  The attic wing that held the communications area was three or four steps down, and Abrams had a clear view of a large open space, about half the size of a football field, he thought, separated into work areas by half-wall partitions. The room seemed to be lit mostly by the lighting on its electronic consoles. A number of men and women dressed in brown overalls could be seen running away from the explosion.

  Abrams, Katherine, and Cameron began firing from a kneeling position, single well-aimed shots, as they tried to avoid hitting the electronic units.

  * * *

  Llewelyn, Sutter, and Ann heard and felt the explosion at the opposite end of the attic. Sutter said, “Well, they’ve made it. All right, our turn.” He lit the fuse on the charge and they dived for the floor behind a row of file cabinets.

  The plastic exploded and the brick wall and chimney seemed to leap a few inches, lifting the roof beams. The beams resettled and the brick and mortar cracked, then bulged and crumbled, creating a large V-shaped opening in the wall.

  Ann stared up through the cement dust and saw the great electronics room framed in the wide V. Even a cursory look revealed to her trained eye a very advanced multicapability array of technology.

  Sutter and Llewelyn were standing behind the file cabinet, firing unsilenced single shots over the heads of the Russians, keeping them pinned down. There was little return fire from these technicians, Ann noticed. We’ve cracked through the hard shell of the KGB and we are about to enter the soft nerve tissue. She called out, “Go easy on the equipment.”

  Llewelyn called back, “They know we’re after the bloody radios, and unless we keep them busy, the KGB chaps in there will destroy what you’re trying to get your hands on.” He fired three quick shots at a man who was swinging a metal bar at what looked to Ann like an encrypting machine. The man fell over, but the machine was hit and sparked. Llewelyn said, “Sorry. It’s a trade-off.”

  She looked at her watch. Nearly midnight. The very witching time of night when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.

  Molniya was dropping rapidly toward its low orbit point, where it would consume itself in a nuclear fireball. For that half second it would light up the continent and set the world on a new and terrible course. Where the light is the brightest, she thought, the shadows are the deepest.

  * * *

  Tom Grenville stood at the large roof hatch, Johnson beside him. Stewart was propped up on his elbow close by. A misty wind blew across the rooftop, and Grenville could see that the threatened storm was blowing out to sea. In the far northeast, stars appeared on the horizon and Grenville looked at them as though for the last time.

  Along the edge of the roof hatch sat twelve CS gas canisters in a neat row. They heard and felt the two explosions below and Grenville was startled out of his stargazing. He said, “It sounds like the time has come to chuck these canisters down there.”

  “Correct,” said Stewart, “and you’ll follow the canisters.” He nodded toward two nylon rappelling lines tied to the bases of two antennas. “Ready?”

  Grenville didn’t think he was. He glanced at his watch. “Isn’t this supposed to end soon?”

  “Ready! Open it!”

  Grenville opened the heavy, hinged roof hatch and heard more clearly the sound of gunfire and pandemonium below.

  Johnson and Stewart began pulling the pins on the canisters and throwing them down at various angles. The CS canisters popped and disgorged billows of white nausea and tear-producing gas. Grenville threw the last two canisters down, then slammed the hatch cover closed. “We’ll give that five minutes to work.”

  Stewart glared at him. “We’ll give it sixty seconds.” Stewart looked at his digital watch, then commented, “You’ll be down there in less than five seconds if you do it properly, Tom. Don’t panic and hang on the rope or you’ll be a sitting duck. And don’t let go, for God’s sake, or you’ll break every bone in your body. Saw that happen once.”

  “In the Falklands?” suggested Grenville.

  “No, lad, in Glasgow. Fellow trying to get out the window of a lady’s bedroom
as the husband returned home.” He laughed, then reached out and patted Grenville’s shoulder. “You’re a good lad. Steady now.” He looked at Johnson. “Keep an eye on the boy, General. I’ll cover as best I can up here.” Stewart glanced at his watch. “Ready.”

  “How long were you in the Falklands?” asked Grenville.

  “Ready! Gas masks.”

  Johnson and Grenville pulled their masks over their faces and adjusted the fit, then put on climbing gloves.

  “Open it.”

  They pulled the hatch open. The nausea gas hung below, as it was made to do, a thick white blanket lying over the area like a snowdrift.

  Grenville and Johnson threw their rappelling lines into the opening.

  “Go!”

  They each went over the edge of the square hatch, rifles nestled in their arms, and began the two-story slide to the floor of the communications room.

  * * *

  Abrams and Cameron slid on their gas masks and moved quickly but cautiously toward the gas-filled doorway.

  Katherine stayed behind in the television studio to cover the open hatchway.

  Abrams and Cameron could hear the sounds of retching and coughing coming from the room. Abrams entered first, followed by Cameron. They moved as quickly as possible through the blinding smoke. Abrams thought Cameron seemed to be passing by the incapacitated men and women very reluctantly, like an alcoholic passing a bottle. But they had matters more pressing than adding more notches to Cameron’s rifle. They were looking for the main radio transmitter, and for Androv, and for Henry Kimberly—and for the third man, whoever he was.

  * * *

  Sutter watched as a figure appeared through the heavy-hanging gas, climbed through the break in the wall, and collapsed. He dragged the body away from the edge of the spreading gas. It was a young girl in brown overalls. Her face was blotchy and flecked with vomit.

  Ann knelt beside her and slapped her. She said in Russian, “Breathe. Breathe.”

  The girl took a deep breath.

  Ann said, “Where’s the radio you use to transmit voice messages to Moscow?”

  The girl squinted up at Ann through running eyes.

  Ann repeated the question, adding, “You have five seconds to tell me or we’ll kill you.”

  The girl drew another breath and said, “The radio . . . against the north wall . . .”

  Ann asked her a few brief technical questions regarding frequencies, voice scramblers, and power setting, then slid on her mask and rushed toward the opening in the wall. Llewelyn and Sutter followed.

  They moved quickly through the room toward the long right wall.

  Many of the Russians had climbed atop the consoles to try to escape the low-clinging gas. One of them, Vasili Churnik, a survivor of the railroad tunnel incident, stood atop a computer and watched the two men and the woman walk in.

  * * *

  Tom Grenville’s gloved hands squeaked down the rope. He felt his feet hit the floor, bent his knees, and rolled off into a kneeling position, his rifle raised to his shoulder. He peered into the dense gas, but his visibility was less than five feet. The lights on the electronic consoles glowed eerily through the opaque fog.

  Johnson was back to back with him now, forming a pitiful defensive perimeter of two. Johnson’s muffled voice came through the mask. “You see, Grenville, if they’d been prepared with proper chemical protective devices, we’d have been massacred. In war,” said the general, quoting an old army axiom, “as in life, lack of prior planning produces a piss-poor performance.”

  Grenville turned his head back to Johnson. “General.”

  “Yes, son.”

  “Shut the fuck up. And don’t say another word unless it has something to do with saving my life. Got it?”

  Johnson replied, “All right . . . if that’s the way—”

  “Move out. You go your way, I’ll go mine. See you later.” Grenville made out three black-clad figures through the rolling gas, two men and a woman. He was disoriented and didn’t know if that was part of Pembroke’s team, including Ann, coming from the north, or Cameron’s team, including Katherine, from the south. But they weren’t Russians and he moved toward them.

  * * *

  Vasili Churnik watched as the three Americans passed by. The other Russians in the room, mostly technical people, had accepted the fact that they had been overrun by what must be a large number of commandos, and they were concerned only with gasping for air. But Churnik, by training and temperament, like Cameron, had difficulty letting a target pass. Especially after his humiliation earlier in the evening. He drew his pistol, a .38 revolver, and fired all six rounds into the backs of the three.

  Grenville, who was very close, heard, then saw, the man fire from the top of the gray console. He fired a single shot and the Russian toppled over.

  There was screaming in the room now and Abrams shouted, “Down! Down!” He unscrewed his silencer and fired into the walls to underscore his meaning. Men and women began diving to the floor.

  Cameron rushed over to the three fallen people. Llewelyn was dead, shot in the back of the head. Sutter was stunned, but his bulletproof vest had stopped the two rounds that hit him. Ann was bleeding from the neck.

  Cameron examined Ann’s wound, a crease along the left side of the neck. “Well, it’s not so bad as it looks, lass. Just bloody. Let’s stand up, then. We ought to find that radio.”

  Ann stood unsteadily.

  * * *

  The Russian technicians were edging toward the two exits, into the short arms of the T. When they realized no one was stopping them, they stampeded out of the room.

  Katherine sat on the desk in the television studio and watched silently as half a dozen people ran by her in the darkness and headed for the open trapdoor. Discovering that the ladder was gone, they stopped. Below, men shouted up at them. Guards, Katherine thought.

  The Russians began jumping through the open attic hatch to the floor below. One of them, Katherine saw with horror, had separated from the rest and was heading toward her. She held her pistol tight and slipped under the desk.

  The man, tall, well dressed, and distinguished-looking, came right up to the desk. The lighting was so poor, she was sure he couldn’t see her crouched under it.

  He opened the top drawer and she saw him remove a few items, one of them a pistol. He turned and started walking away.

  Katherine rose from beneath the desk.

  The man heard the noise and spun around.

  Katherine said, “Hello.”

  The sky had cleared and the moon shone blue through the gabled window next to the fireplace. Dust motes danced in the pale moonbeams, giving them both a spectral appearance, as though they had met in a dream. A slow smile passed over Henry Kimberly’s face. “That must be Kate.”

  “It is.”

  He nodded.

  “Drop yours,” she said.

  He held one hand in his right pocket. “I don’t think I will.”

  “Then I may shoot you if you move.”

  “I’ll try to be still.”

  Katherine looked at her father in the pale light, then said, “Somehow I never accepted your death. That must be a normal reaction. When Carbury came into my office, I had the irrational thought he’d come to tell me you were waiting in the lobby.”

  Kimberly didn’t reply.

  She continued, “I always fantasized about how I might meet you, but I never thought it would be at the point of a gun.”

  He forced a smile. “I should think not.” He stared at her and said, “Well, Kate, I thought about how we’d meet also. But that wasn’t a fantasy. I knew I’d be back some day.”

  She glanced at the desk. “Yes, you were going to be President.”

  He nodded and said softly, “I was going to use the remaining years I have to try to get to know you and Ann.”

  “Were you? What makes you think Ann or I would want to know a traitor?”

  “That’s a subjective term. I acted out of consci
ence. I abandoned my friends, my family, and my fortune to work for something I believed in. So did a good number of men and women in those days.”

  She laughed derisively, “And you’re going to tell me that you don’t believe any longer? That you want to make amends to your family and your country?”

  He shrugged. “I’d be lying if I said that. I cannot make amends and I do not intend to.” His voice became distant, as though he were in another room. “You have to understand that when a person invests so much in something, it’s difficult to admit even to oneself—that you may have been wrong. And once you go to Moscow, it’s not easy to come home again. You deal with the devil because he has the short-cut approach to power. And when you live in Moscow, you begin to appreciate power and all that goes with it.” He let out a breath and looked at her. “I don’t expect you to understand. Someone of my own age who lived through those times would be more sympathetic.”

  “I know a lot of men from those times. They are not sympathetic.” She let the silence drag out, then said, “Some men commit themselves to a cause and announce their intentions. If you were just a turncoat or defector, I could understand that. But you have lied and cheated, you betrayed everyone who put their faith and confidence in you. You’ve caused the deaths of friends, and you’ve let your children grow up without a father. You must be a very cold and heartless man, Henry Kimberly. You have no soul and no conscience. And now you tell me you were just a victim of circumstances.” She paused, then said sharply, “I think all you’re committed to is the act of betrayal. I think . . .” Tears ran down her face and her voice became husky. “I think . . . Why? Why in the name of God did you do that to . . . to me?”

  Henry Kimberly hung his head thoughtfully, then his eyes met hers. He said in a voice barely above a whisper, “Sometimes I think the last time I felt any honest joy in my heart was a day on my last leave. I took you and Ann to Central Park . . . I carried you in my arms and Ann put her little hand in mine, and we laughed at the monkeys in the zoo—”