A Cold Flight To Nowhereville

by Steve Fletcher

  Ushakov looked up from the report. “What is this?”

  “Seems some pilot didn’t want to listen to a tower down south and the PVO has lost some airplanes,” the Director informed him casually. “The PVO reports confusion over who this pilot was and what exactly happened, and until the weather lifts they can’t tell if he crashed or landed somewhere. I ordered an alert and closed the Facility until this gets straightened out, as a safety precaution.”

  Ushakov slapped his hand down on the Director’s desk as rage seized him. “No, no, no! Damn it, man, don’t you see? The jet was heading for that old airfield at Kyzylorda! The report even lists his course as zero-one-two, and if he was southwest of Tashkent that’s directly for it! That jet was coming to rendezvous with Loginov!”

  Kalyugin reared back in shock at the fury of Ushakov’s reaction. “A pilot in a MiG coming to Kyzylorda?”

  Ushakov seized the telephone and dialed. “Damn it, Timofeev, pick up!” There was no answer and he quickly dialed another number. “Duty officer? This is Ushakov. I need you to get me Timofeev on the double. He’s there? Then put him on, damn it!”

  After a few seconds he heard the warrant officer’s voice. “Timofeev! I need you to pick up Loginov. Take a squad and make sure they’re armed. If he’s not in the scientist’s barracks then check the plant and the motor pool. Send Osipov up here with a truck, give him a radio and make sure he’s got a weapon. Take a radio yourself. I want to know the minute you have Loginov.”

  He slammed the receiver down. Kalyugin had gone pale, his hands trembling on the desk. “Pasha, what are you doing?”

  Ushakov leaned over the desk and hissed the words into Kalyugin’s face. “You didn’t even bother to read most of that report, did you? If you had you wouldn’t have understood it. That pilot couldn’t even get his own unit right—the report says he was from the 513th but they’re nowhere around here. Didn’t you notice that? Of course the PVO is confused, they have more prima donnas in their towers than the Bolshoi. They have their heads up their asses half the time and that pilot was trying to confuse them. He’s heading up here. Now, by not apprehending Loginov before issuing a full alert, you may have tipped him off that his operation is blown. There’s a fire at the plant and I’d bet Loginov set it as a diversion. God help you if he’s gone. The only way I’ve been able to learn what I’ve learned is by keeping you in the dark so you wouldn’t screw it up! And I’ll tell you something else, comrade Kalyugin! If you’ve tipped Loginov and I miss him, I will return and put a bullet into your stupid skull myself.”

  Shaking with anger, he stormed out of the Director’s office and slammed the door, leaving Kalyugin opening and closing his mouth like a dying fish

  A truck pulled into the compound, locking its wheels as the driver skidded on the snow. Bright headlights glared into Ushakov’s face as the driver cranked his window down. “Come on!” Dmitri Osipov shouted against the wind. “There’s trouble!”

  Immediately behind him a second truck pulled into the snowy compound, the passenger opening his door and springing out into the swirling snow before the truck had stopped. “Pavel Sergeivich!” the man shouted, trotting across the snow towards him. “Loginov’s gone.”

  Ushakov swore viciously, recognizing the familiar stocky form of praporshchik Timofeev, garbed in a military overcoat and usanka. The warrant officer was one of the few men on the Facility that Ushakov permitted to call him by name. He was a good ally. “How long ago? Can you tell?”

  “We’ve got worse problems,” the praporshchik told him. “Looks like he set fire to the Plant. I’ve got most of the 217th heading there. If the fire gets to the propellants, this place will be a smoking crater the size of Moscow.”

  “Damn it, what of Loginov?”

  “From what I’ve been able to find out it looks like he took a motorcycle and bluffed his way through the main gate.”

  Ushakov swore again, his voice a raw shout. “How the hell do such things happen! How does one scientist manage to do so much damage and then just waltz out the main gate with nobody giving him a second thought?”

  “Because nobody ever tried it before!” Timofeev shouted back. “Nobody tried something like this anywhere, ever! He’s dressed like one of us and it’s snowing like hell, so there you have it!”

  “Damn him! Timofeev, I want the soldier in charge of the motor pool tonight arrested. Then I want you to outfit another truck and send it to Kyzylorda as fast as it can go. You head to the spot where the barricade was and go south from there and I don’t care if you throw a rod doing it, see if he took the motorcycle that way. Osipov and I will head into Tyuratam and try to pick up the babushka.”

  “One more truck is all I can spare,” Timofeev replied. “The fire at the plant comes first. When we have that out I can spare more, but not until.”

  Ushakov rolled his eyes, feeling acutely powerless. By then it would be far too late to find the fleeing scientist, and Loginov knew that. “I know, I know. But get that other truck moving! We’re all in more trouble here than you know, so the minute you can spare them send more men out to search. And tell them if they spot Loginov I want that bastard alive. I don’t want him dead even by accident. Have you got a radio?”

  “Yes,” the praporshchik replied, “but it’s no good. The weather’s too bad. There won’t be much range to them.”

  “Listen to me, Timofeev,” he snapped urgently. “We must have Loginov at all costs. The woman is less important to me than he is. But we must have Loginov no matter what. To you only I will say kill him if there’s no other way, but only, and I repeat only, if there’s no other way.”

  “I understand,” Timofeev nodded curtly. “We should get moving.”

  Ushakov leapt into the nearest truck as Timofeev entered his own and sped away from the SecurityBuilding, spinning the truck’s large tires on the snow. “You better know how to drive like the damn wind, Osipov!”

  “I do,” the young soldier replied tightly. “But I don’t think we’re going to find this guy.”

  As he spun the truck onto the main road and applied the accelerator Ushakov forced himself to calm down, to forget for a moment that the course of his life rested on the events of the next few hours. He fought back an angry response to Dmitri’s unexpected statement. “That right, Dmitri? Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know,” the youth shrugged, his features noncommittal in the dim lights of the dashboard. “I just don’t think he’ll go the way you think he will, that’s all.”

  A lesser man would have dressed the young soldier down for insubordination. But Ushakov had, by now, gained an interest in Dmitri’s thought processes. There was something unconventional about them, and in this situation that could prove useful. “Why not?”

  “He doesn’t seem to do what anyone expects of him. So if I was such a man I don’t think I would go south, comrade Colonel. Especially if I knew everyone would be pissing themselves looking that way for me.”

  “You mean you would expect us to look south for him, since that’s the fastest way away from here?”

  The youth nodded as the truck clattered along the snowy access road.

  Dmitri now had Ushakov’s full attention. “So tell me, Dmitri. If you were such a man where do you think you’d go?”

  “I don’t know, comrade Colonel. I just don’t think I’d go south.”

  The Plant passed on the truck’s left side, swarming with soldiers and trucks. Half of the western Plant wall was in flames and a fire truck was directing a stream of water onto the blaze. But Ushakov barely noticed. “Pull over at the gate, Dmitri. I want you to come inside with me.”

  The main gate loomed in the snow ahead, and Osipov skidded to a halt to one side of the road. Floodlights cast a harsh illumination over the snowy terrain surrounding the guardhouse and road. The gate guards were standing around nervously, fingering their weapons as they watched the truck. Ushakov saw Timofeev’s taillights disappearing into the darkness past the gate but paid t
hem little attention as he jumped out of the truck and ran into the small guardhouse. Osipov followed. The guards separated to allow the pair to enter, seeming to remember business they had by the metal barrier blocking the road. Ushakov saw a young soldier standing at attention behind a desk, his face ashen. “Maps,” Ushakov barked. “Give me all the maps you have of this area.”

  The youth fumbled in a filing cabinet and produced a packet of folded papers. Ushakov tore them open one at a time and tossed them away as he sought one that gave a fuller perspective of the surrounding area. “No. No! Damn it, don’t we have a single decent map in here? One that shows what’s around this place?”

  “There isn’t anything around here, comrade Colonel,” Osipov answered.

  “Yes there is,” Ushakov replied excitedly, jamming a finger into Osipov’s overcoat. “There’s got to be something around here and wherever that is, that’s where he’s heading.”

  “Wait,” the young guard blurted, digging in the cabinet again. “Here, we have this one lying around. It’s an old one and we never use it.”

  Ushakov spread the old map out flat on the desk, scanning it. The faded writing was in German—an old Nazi map of the area. It seemed to show the rail line for at least a hundred kilometers in either direction. He picked out the spur leading to the old copper mine and the Kyzylorda road to the south. A cluster of dots seemed to indicate the position of Tyuratam, with the Syr DaryaRiver winding roughly parallel to the rail lines. “All right, Dmitri, you clever little bastard, get over here. Tell me where you’d go if you wanted to get away from me.”

  The young soldier bent over the map. “Well…if I knew everyone would expect me to go south I wouldn’t go that way.”

  “Anyone with half a brain would go south. They’d get into the mountains down around the border of the oblast and lose themselves. But since that’s how I would think and I am a good Russian, let’s assume he’s not going to do that.”

  “I think he’d go north.”

  Ushakov grunted, unconvinced, studying the old map. “Maybe. The real town of Baikonur’s that way, he might head there. That bike he’s on hasn’t got the range for it, though. I don’t know, maybe it does. Hell, it’s over three hundred kilometers away.” His eyes paused on a different cluster of dots, perhaps twenty kilometers northwest of Tyuratam. “What’s this over here?”

  “I don’t know,” Osipov stated, frowning as he examined the dots intently. “The writing’s smeared and I can’t read German anyway.”

  “Praise those Kraut mapmakers,” Ushakov breathed. Suddenly he knew. “That’s the old gulag. That’s exactly what that is. It won’t be on any Russian map, but it’s on a German one. . Loginov will meet the babushka there and they’ll head south from the gulag. How much of a lead does Loginov have on us?”

  “Maybe twenty minutes,” the duty guard stammered. “He didn’t come through that long ago.”

  “Come on, Osipov. We’re going to break an axle on the steppe but we’re going to get to that gulag before him!”

  Tyuratam Gulag, Kazakhstan

  “Shh,” Katia said suddenly, holding up her hand for quiet, staring intently at the nearby hill. “Do you hear something?”

  Hardin listened. He heard nothing but the crackling of the flames and the sighing of the wind and shook his head in negation.

  “There—again,” she hissed.

  This time he thought he heard something, perhaps the far distant rumble of an engine. “Hard to hear it…but it sounds kind of like a bike to me.”

  “Put out the fire!” Katia hauled her boots on and began kicking snow over the blaze. Hardin dragged his own on and soon the fire was completely covered, leaving them in utter darkness.

  “Come on! We’ve got to get inside one of these buildings!”

  “No—not inside!”

  “Damn it, Katie, this may not be your contact coming!”

  “I don’t care,” she hissed back. “Around the side of this building. We can see who’s coming from there.”

  “If it’s not your contact we’ll have no chance of escape from here.”

  “It has to be, John. Please!”

  Pulling out the reassuring metal form of the Colt, he followed her around the side of the wooden structure, flattening himself against the gray timbers beside her. He ejected the clip, ensured it was full, and slapped it back into the butt. He held it down by his side.

  The roar of the motorcycle was unmistakable now, close and drawing closer.

  Tyuratam Gulag, Kazakhstan

  Osipov pulled off the access road at the spot Ushakov indicated and the truck thundered across the snowy steppe, heading roughly northwest. The heavy vehicle seemed to be getting decent purchase on the snow and the young driver pushed the pace to the limit of the vehicle’s ability, skidding occasionally on some dune, practically leaving the ground as it crested the summit. He switched on the high beams and Ushakov scanned the snow intently, looking for any sign of a motorcycle. But the wind was blowing the snow strongly from the north and any tracks left by the powerful Ural would be quickly obliterated. Ushakov keyed the radio but the weather was rendering it useless.

  “Why would he take a bike out in this?” Osipov wondered as he jerked the wheel and the truck fishtailed up the slope of a dune. “Why not take a truck instead? It’s warmer and steadier on snow than a bike is.”

  “A truck’s too heavy, it leaves deeper tracks. A motorcycle is lighter and the tracks won’t last. Loginov doesn’t miss a trick.”

  “You know he may be armed, comrade Colonel. Same for that babushka he’s meeting. And she might not be alone, either.”

  Ushakov realized his young subordinate was a quick study. Should Ushakov’s plan to apprehend Loginov prove successful, the chekist had already decided that Dmitri Osipov would be submitted for a KGB award. Possibly the Medal for Distinguished Service in Protecting the Public Order or the Medal for Irreproachable Service. “Yes, I know. That pilot might be with her and we would be outnumbered. That’s why we must get to Loginov before he gets to the gulag.”

  Tense minutes passed. Abruptly Ushakov came out of his seat and whooped as he spotted the faint criss-cross pattern of a motorcycle’s tires, not yet obscured by the wind and snow. “There it is!”

  “He’s skidding too,” Dmitri grunted, fighting the steering wheel as the truck momentarily lost purchase on the snow. “Did you see that track? He’s having a hard time with a bike in this stuff.”

  “Better for us. Step on it, Osipov, and stay on that track!”

  Tyuratam Gulag, Kazakhstan

  Katia peered out from around the side of the small structure. “A single headlight. It’s him!”

  Hardin craned his neck and saw, far down the eastern slope of the gulag’s draw, the tiny single light of a motorcycle. The light fishtailed this way and that as the rider fought to keep the bike under control. The sound of the engine was louder now. But almost immediately he felt a cold chill in the pit of his stomach, one completely unrelated to the snow or the wind. “Katie, get back. There’s a truck behind him.”

  Tyuratam Gulag, Kazakhstan

  “There he is!” Ushakov shouted, seeing a red taillight jerking wildly a few hundred meters in front of them. “Floor it, damn you! Give me your weapon!”

  Osipov jammed the truck into a lower gear and stamped on the gas. The truck surged forward, the engine howling as it fishtailed up the gentle slope that Ushakov knew must lead to the old gulag. The motorcycle was closer now, illuminated by the truck’s bright lights, close enough for him to see the figure of a man leaning low over the handlebars. On the snowy rise the heavy truck fared better than the lighter Ural. I must disable that motorcycle! He rolled down the window and wedged his upper body out into the snow and wind, cocking the AK-47 and taking the best aim he could with the truck swinging and plunging.

  “Go to hell, Loginov!” he bellowed into the freezing gale. Squeezing the trigger he fired a long burst at the wildly pitching motorcycle.

 
Tyuratam Gulag, Kazakhstan

  Katia peered around the corner of the structure, feeling her heart sink as the motorcycle thundered onto the draw. The heavy truck was only a hundred meters behind, if that. She heard the sound of the AK-47, saw its muzzle flash from the passenger door and the motorcycle’s rider went down, tumbling to one side into the snow at the center of the draw. The bike skidded, its engine sputtering for a few seconds and then dying as the heavy motorcycle slid sideways. Snow fountained up as it came to rest a fifty meters away from her. At the same instant that the cycle went down, the truck locked its wheels, sliding to a halt only meters from the motionless man. Its lights shone brightly over the snow, illuminating the gulag buildings harshly. The passenger door opened and a man leapt out, but in the lights of the truck she could not see him clearly. The driver’s door opened and a second man jumped out of the truck. Her contact, the man riding the motorcycle, was lying face-down in the snow barely twenty meters away from her. He did not move.

  “John, give me your gun,” she hissed, her heart pounding. The American pressed the heavy object into her hand.

  “The safety’s off,” he whispered as the sound of the truck’s engine died. “Cover me!”

  In horror she saw Hardin crouch low, running across the snow towards the downed man. The driver was running as well, but she could not fire at him without hitting the American. There was the sudden clatter of an AK-47 firing. Without thought she pointed the gun at the passenger and began to fire.

  Tyuratam Gulag, Kazakhstan

  Hope you have some kind of plan, Hardin.