Whirlwind
Page 34
She laughed again. “You are so silly. I do not wish to return to Russia. I wish only to kill you. Then I am done with killing. Forever.”
You do not laugh at me, girl. You do not call me silly. All you do is beg for mercy.
He was on a graveled path now, the fence a few yards in front of him. San Carlos was so law-abiding a village that the authorities did not bother to string razor wire along the fence’s top, nor even barbed wire. Pathetic, really, it was no deterrent at all.
“Well, that’s good. I mean it’s good that you have no plans for going home. If you try, they’ll turn you away. You see, they’ve stripped you of your citizenship.”
“This makes me happy. This lifts a burden from me.”
“The American government had words with Moscow — words at the highest levels. You can’t go home because you don’t have a home. You are an exile, expelled in disgrace.”
“I thank you for informing me of this.”
Infuriating. Everything that should disconcert her has the opposite effect. Schmidt wiped fog dew from his glasses while he evaluated his options. What to say next? How to shake her too perfect equilibrium? He gave thought to the matter, a chess player considering both the move he must make next and the moves that would follow. Strike as hard as I can — strike straight at this annoying young woman’s heart — that’s the best strategy now.
“What about the disgrace, Irina? You’ve shamed your father’s good name. How will he take the news?”
“My father is a kibini-matt.”
Schmidt surprised himself by wincing at this, the most scathing of Russian obscenities.
The Kolodenkova girl continued: “I do not care what my father thinks. When we are little children, then we try to please our parents. Now I am a grown-up. In these past four days, Mr. Schmidt, I have become an adult. The only person whom I must please is myself.”
Schmidt shook his head like an angry bull. Kolodenkova should have been furious — rushing to silence him, and therefore rushing into his gun sights. Instead she was behaving like a professional, as much of a professional as me. All right, girl, let’s see the stuff you’re really made of.
“You came here for a boat. Don’t deny it. Your father never trusted you —”
“Oh, Mr. Schmidt, you also are a kibini-matt.”
He’d kill her for that. Well, he’d kill her anyway. All that would be different would be the art of it.
A rattle of gunfire. Seven pop-pop-pops in a row. They came from the left, distant, the reports muffled beneath a blanket of fog. Krait glanced toward Schmidt, shaking his head. Bushmaster too signaled negative, no target in sight. What had she been shooting at? Certainly not Pit Viper; he’d not had time to run this far.
She used a rifle, small caliber, stolen from the late Python. There’s no doubt of that. And she emptied a full magazine. But she wasn’t firing at us. If she was, I would have heard the ricochet. What is her game?
He flipped to his side, peering at the tiny marina — thirty boat slips, three rows of ten, each slip twelve feet wide and separated by a narrow boardwalk. Most of them were occupied by small sailboats, none larger than thirty feet. Their masts were a dead forest in the fog. Some of their cockpits were covered with blue tarpaulins. A few slips were occupied by rusty trawlers, commercial fishers bobbing on an incoming tide. The sea cat-lapped at the shore, soapsud waves on dirty sand. In the far distance a foghorn sounded, its light unseen in thick cloud billowing inland on a freezing wind. Did something move out there, out at the farthest, almost invisible end of the dock? Was that a man standing…
Kolodenkova!
He threw his rifle to his shoulder, sighting through its Milspec scope. He’d already begun to caress the trigger when he recognized his target for what it was: no man, no woman, merely a gas pump located, as all marine gas pumps were, at the distant end of the upwind dock. The fog swirled; for a moment he saw it sharply before another eddy of dirty grey hid it from sight.
Something about that pump…Something wrong… Instinct again, not knowledge, and all the more unsettling for that.
Peering blindly through his scope, he thought of evil. There was malice in this fog, a hostility that transcended natural phenomenon. The weather had become his enemy. He hated it and wished to kill it.
Superstition. Old Kafir women telling ghost stories around an open fire, and jackals whining in the dark. Am I afraid? If so, it is only a tale I tell myself. My enemies are foul weather and a frail woman. Not even a child would be afraid of that!
As angry at his momentary weakness as he was at her, he taunted, “You missed, Irina. Do you wish to try again? If you do, you’re going to need to get closer.”
“I am closer than you think.”
Was that possible? Had the girl somehow managed to outflank them? Was she out in the marina, hidden on some pleasure craft, slowly making her way from boat to boat, creeping up on him from behind? Schmidt wiped a hand across his brow.
Sweat? Has this doomed child so frightened me that I am sweating?
The coast was a fractal orange outline on the Heads Up Display. An ambiguous geometry that might have been a parking lot, a baseball field, a cow pasture, lay directly behind shapes that were more regular, three long rectangles, each with rows of right-angled catwalks. It was the marina, and they were closing on it fast.
Charlie would see what was going on at ground level, although what he’d see would be encrypted abstraction, the Gulfstream’s infrared vision system detecting what the human eye could not.
“Can’t you get lower?” he growled.
The copilot, now flying the Gulfstream, replied tightly, “The technical term for lower is ‘under water.’”
The major had a sense of humor. Charlie found that encouraging.
“Dad, I think those are cars.” Scott was still in the pilot’s seat, still resting his hands on the yoke. He could seize control of the plane in a second.
Yeah, he thought, cars. How many? Seven. Are any of them Toyota Camrys? Who the hell can tell?
“I’m going to bank now. I don’t want to come in over the marina. I could clip a mast, and the engine blowback might —”
“Screw the boats!” I need the best view I can get. This is my only shot.
“Trust me, sir. You don’t want me sucking a mainsail off one of those sloops.”
Charlie gave it a moment’s thought. “Okay, Major. We’ll do it your way. You know the consequences if it doesn’t work.”
The copilot nodded.
The contours of two dozen boats sharpened, leaf-shaped hulls glowing orange, masts that wavered not of their own accord, but electrically as infrared detectors strained to pick out their silhouettes through blinding fog.
“Can you turn up that infrared so that it will detect body heat?”
“We’ve got first-generation EVS on this craft. It’s cranked as high as it will go.”
A seemingly infinite parallelogram disappeared to the east. That would be Main Street. The town’s on either side of it. Cubes and polygons, flickering pyramids on their tops, houses and roofs seen by pure energy, were interpolated by a computer that Charlie wished was much more powerful than it seemed to be.
The plane could not be more than four hundred feet above ground. Yet nothing, not a goddamned thing, could be seen by the human eye. Only the technology saw, and it did not see with sufficient clarity to pinpoint a lone woman in danger of her life.
Charlie was not certain whether he should pray or curse.
I’m powerless. Neither deed nor word will have the least influence. I’m impotent, and for the second damned time in my entire life there’s not a thing I can do.
“Look sharp, sir, we’re coming in.”
A thunder where silence should have been, an elephant trumpeting in the mist, Johan Schmidt flinched at the unexpected howl of hot metal hurling through the mist.
A jet. Insanely low. We must be near an airbase. No one but a military pilot would dare fly in this weather.
“Drivel.” He shook his frigid fingers, rubbed his hands together, rolled his muscles to stretch out the stiffness. The Alaska current ran just offshore; fog had lowered the temperature to fifty degrees; the wind-chill factor brought it lower than that. And he, in summer poplin, felt his teeth chatter at the cold.
“What will Charlie do when he finds you? Nothing nice, I think.” Spiteful irony in facetious tones that had become quite unbearable.
She’s feinting, a fencer’s gambit to trick me into lowering my defenses. Me? Are you so full of yourself as to try to trick me? Enough games, girl, I have had enough! Johan Schmidt launched his attack. “Tell me more about your father, Irina.”
Her accent became flat and guarded. “He is unworthy of discussion.” No spite in your voice now, is there, girly?
“Ah, but he is. He’s why you’re here.”
“I am here to kill you.”
Keep it up, just keep it up. All you do is make it worse for yourself. “I mean ‘here’ in the broader sense of the word. I mean he is why you joined the FSB.”
“I am not so infantile.”
You’re trying to hide from the issue. I intend to rub your face in it. “Your father encouraged you.”
“I believe I know what you will say next, Mr. Schmidt.”
Oh no you don’t. “And what would that be?”
“That my father expected me to become a swallow, a spy who uses sex to steal secrets. Am I correct, Mr. Schmidt? This is where you hoped to lead this conversation?”
God damn this woman!
“You will further say that he wrote a letter to my commander endorsing such an assignment. Perhaps you have access to intelligence sources. Perhaps you have read this letter. Perhaps you believe that a father who proposes prostitution for his daughter’s career scars her for life. Perhaps you even believe that reminding me of my humiliation will cause me to break down in tears like a helpless child. If such is your expectation, you will be disappointed. I am neither a child, nor am I helpless. Do you understand why that is so? If you were half the man Charlie is, you would.”
Schmidt roared, “I’m twice the man he is!”
“You said I shall disgrace my father, Mr. Schmidt. Think of that. Think, and then ask yourself if this is not the justice that is owed him.”
“Sir?” A harsh whisper, Krait off to his right. Why wasn’t the soldier using hand signals? Schmidt put a finger to his lips. Krait shook his head. Leaving his station, he slithered toward Schmidt. “Sir, do you smell something?”
Schmidt felt like slapping him. Kolodenkova could be outflanking them through the sector that Krait was assigned to guard. “Get back on your post, soldier!”
“It’s gasoline, sir. I smell gasoline.”
Well of course he smelled gasoline. Every boat in this marina carried an engine of some sort or another. Fuel spills were common. After all, you couldn’t put a sailboat in the water without a motor, usually one from Atomic Engines Inc. if memory served, because…
The gasoline pump. The one at the end of the upwind dock…
“If you were as wise as Charlie, you would know that any woman having been shamed in such a manner can never be shamed again. Do you know how strong my father’s betrayal made me, Mr. Schmidt? Charlie does. You shall learn. Quite soon, I think.”
He was searching through the rifle sight, trying to find a gas pump lost in rolling fog, and, yes, he could smell the fumes, and yes the stench was stronger than it should be.
…the upwind dock. Strong gusts blowing inland. A rising tide.
“Mr. Schmidt, it shall be the last lesson you learn.”
Could she have done it? Had McKenzie put his own iron into her heart?
“Sir! Look!”
Fireworks, a rocket in a silver arc, white actinic fire in high parabola, its origin somewhere to the left, its terminus twenty yards behind Johan Schmidt.
Twenty yards into the marina, twenty yards over the water.
Hissing high above him, bright as a strobe but unflickering, it trailed shining smoke behind.
“Flare gun! What’s she trying to do, signal that airplane that just flew over?”
Without warning, the wind stiffened, swirling the fog aside. Through his scope, Schmidt saw seven bullet holes in the gas pump’s base, seven urine-colored streams of fuel spitting down into the sea. Those shots, those shots minutes earlier — she hadn’t been shooting at him. She hadn’t been shooting at any of them. The pump was her target. Out of sight, invisible in impenetrable fog, she’d brazenly walked to the edge of the fence line, calmly stood waiting for a few seconds of clear seeing, and coolly emptied Python’s rifle into a bright red Texaco pump, not missing a single shot.
The wind, the tide, were washing fuel in. Had washed it in. Small waves were spilling it on the sand. The entire marina was awash with it, every boat hull and every piling — each soaked with creosote, a torch in its own right — coated with gasoline.
The conflagration would be beyond comprehension.
Who would have thought she had it in her?
So fearless, she had crept to another place of concealment, waiting to taste the scent of hell upon an evening breeze — waiting with a flare gun stolen from the guard kiosk. A serpent of patience, she radioed Schmidt, distracting him while his back was ten paces from a bomb primed for detonation.
Ice water in her veins. I would never have believed it.
Then, careful in plan and conscientious in execution, she had aimed her flare out over the harbor, stroking a trigger, and Schmidt had not sensed the least change in her serene and self-possessed tone of voice.
A woman one might almost admire.
Goddess of death, she waited tranquilly for flaming magnesium to caress the sea — and for the eruption of an inferno that would burn Schmidt off the face of this world and into another.
“Run!” He shouted to Bushmaster and Krait, “Run, you fools!”
He himself made it ten yards before he heard the first shot. The bullet sent Krait rolling in puddles, his blood spraying as he tumbled. He flapped his arms like a wounded seagull, but made no sound, said no word.
Bushmaster was noisier. He died, as such men do, not whispering needed prayers, but screaming the conventional obscenities. Fuck, mother-fuck, cunt, cocksucker…all of that. Schmidt was used to it, had seen and heard it many times, and hoped that when the time came he had sufficient self-discipline to recite the Lord’s Prayer.
He was more than thirty yards from the fence when the blast came, and with it an unimaginable tempest of fire and flame and the roaring of demons boiling up from hell.
A hot typhoon threw him off balance, whirling him like a drunken dervish as two bullets cut the air on either side, and his feet slipped out from under him as a third bullet percussed toward where his chest should be.
Then he saw her.
She was fumbling in her pockets for ammunition, an empty Tokarev in her hand.
Vulnerable at last.
The major was going to make a second pass over the marina, and that was that, and if Irina was down below she’d understand, get in her car and drive straight out of town, and straight into Charlie’s waiting arms.
He’d be waiting for her because the jet jockey was as crazy as he was. Crazier maybe. He was going to put the plane down on San Carlos’s preposterously narrow access road.
He said he could do it. The moment they’d broken out of the fog bank, soaring over open farmlands, he’d said the road was wide enough. Maybe. There wouldn’t be any traffic. Maybe. And besides, landing a Gulfstream only took about three thousand feet of runway, roadway, black asphalt, call it what you will.
Maybe.
Risky? Yeah. So what? The only thing that mattered was going in so low that Irina knew no one in the world could be in that plane except Charles McKenzie, Esquire. Who the hel
l else did you expect to be blind-as-a-bat barnstorming in a hijacked jet?
She’d know it was him. She was too damned smart not to.
Charlie stared out the cockpit window. The setting sun painted the sky with light from angels’ eyes. And beneath it…oh, hell… the fog bank. Only cloud, it looked like a granite mountain, ground level to twenty-five hundred feet. It was hard, damned hard, to keep control of your guts while you were flying straight at it, a hundred and twenty knots an hour, trying to convince yourself that it was only mist, not the solid rock it looked to be.
And Charlie flying blind was once again in its nowhere heart.
Pale light, dusk light, grey emptiness beyond time and space. There was only a hint as to where the setting sun was, dawn in Japan, nightfall in California, just a milky glow that flickered like —
“Sonofabitch!” Charlie shouted, “that’s not the sun! It’s a beacon! Irina has lit a fire beacon!”
The copilot leaned forward. “Impossible. You couldn’t see a bonfire through this soup. At sunset the light does strange…” then very softly, “…oh, God.”
“What?” Charlie asked urgently. He bent over the man’s shoulder. Blinding pain exploded in his battered ribs, his vision blanked, and for a moment he found himself less breathing than gasping. He shook his head clear, straining to get a closer look at what he knew, no doubt in his mind, was Irina’s signal.
“Jesus wept! That’s no signal. It’s…it’s an inferno…it must be burning five stories high!”
Fear pierced him with such shocking swiftness that he might scream. “The town? Is the town on fire?”
“No. We’re almost over the town. Christ, it’s the marina! Look at the EVS! The whole thing’s blazing!”
No time for thinking, no time to puzzle out what was happening, Charlie had no time left at all. “Land this thing.”
“What!?”
Pistol against the major’s neck, he didn’t want to do it this way, but if he had to, he would, “I. Said. Land. The. Fucking. Plane.”