by Jon Land
“Rather extreme for you people.”
“Not extreme enough. A little more than a year ago, Raskowski vanished.”
“Along with all the records of the Alpha project, I assume.”
“Of course. The general had never gotten over the fact that when we were able to destroy America we chose not to do it. There were some in Moscow who supported his views. Several of them disappeared at the same time as the general. Others continued to work, gathering intelligence for Raskowski’s plans before they, too, vanished.”
“Traitors in the Kremlin? Pinch me, I must be dreaming.”
“Moscow is not immune and neither, as I mentioned before, is Washington. Raskowski controls the highest-placed mole in intelligence history, a man with the confidence of the President himself.”
“That would explain a lot,” Blaine nodded, recalling his own certainty that a leak had sprung within the crisis committee. “I don’t suppose you could tell me who this mole is.”
“Only by the code name Raskowski has used for him in the past: the Farmer Boy. Supposedly he was born on a Soviet farm to an American mother and Russian father. The Farmer Boy was handpicked along with dozens of other young Soviets to be groomed as spies within America. They were sent there as children. Raskowski has buried all the agents he controls so deeply that their identities, the Farmer Boy’s included, remain a mystery even to us.”
McCracken thought briefly. “Okay, so after learning through the Farmer Boy that certain crystals had been discovered which could power an energy field that could stop his death ray, Raskowski ordered Earnst’s death to destroy the trail.”
She nodded. “Because he couldn’t let his plan be stopped. There is a progression, you see, and either the destruction or disgrace of your country is a vital part of it.”
“Do us in one way or another and they’ll roll a red carpet out to him from Moscow leading straight to Chernopolov’s chair.”
“Unfortunately, yes. The destruction of the United States would propel him into power, just as your unilateral disarmament would if you accede to his demands. And if you decide to fight, the Kremlin might have no choice but to turn to him for the certain victory his death ray would guarantee.”
“In every scenario he wins and we lose,” noted Blaine somberly. “And your government can’t admit any of this because to do so would be to admit they’ve lost control. Unthinkable in the Soviet Union.”
“Because it would force the government to topple, thus accomplishing Raskowski’s goal for him. Unthinkable anywhere. I was dispatched by General Secretary Chernopolov personally to ensure that none of these scenarios comes to pass. He cannot afford to mobilize traditional forces, just as your government cannot.”
“And where exactly do I come into your scenario?”
“Two days ago we obtained a lead as to Raskowski’s whereabouts, at least the means by which his death beam has been deployed. If I … fail, our only hope will be that your search for the Atragon crystals either succeeds or flushes him out.”
“Long shots at best.”
“But you’ll take the chance, just as I will, because more is at stake here for both of us.”
Blaine let the statement pass and scratched at the bandage on his forehead. “I met with a Greek antique dealer tonight who pointed me in the direction of a man named Megilido Fass. He seems to possess some unusual sexual leanings which may provide my in to him. Think you might be able to dig up some more details for me?”
“I’ll make the necessary calls.”
Blaine shook his head. “Ironic, isn’t it? Two superpowers compromised by their own inadequacies. What’s left? Us … two outcasts charged with returning sanity to an insane world.”
“Let it stay insane. So long as it survives.”
Chapter 14
NIGHT CAME EARLY IN Pamosa Springs on the second day of the occupation. Jeep and foot patrols swept through the streets to enforce curfew and by eight P.M. not a soul out of uniform could be seen anywhere. The drapes and curtains in every house were drawn, as if whatever was happening to the town could be simply blocked out.
Those residents peeking between the cracks saw a huge break in the darkness, thanks to a host of floodlights on the hillside that three weeks before had yielded up its minerals. What they couldn’t see from this distance was the large complement of men at work with hydraulic drills and manual tools, lifting and rummaging through huge slabs of the hillside. Nor could they see five truckloads of machinery and equipment still being unloaded and set up in the gulley beyond the floodlit hill.
The four members of the Pamosa Springs town council were gathered by candlelight in the attic of the oldest member’s house just after one A.M. NO one took the meeting’s minutes and everyone whispered, the only sound other than their voices being the jackhammer pounding coming from the hillside.
“Well,” said Mayor Jake “Dog-ear” McCluskey, “anyone want to get this meeting started?”
“As I see it,” responded Clara Buhl, trying to shift her bulky legs in the cramped confines of the attic, “we were supposed to figure they were the real army, Corps of Engineers probably. They musta had a cover story all set that woulda made plenty of sense to us … till Hal Taggart appeared on the scene.”
“And their story got shot to hell,” from McCluskey.
“Along with Taggart,” added Sheriff Pete Heep.
“So all hell breaks loose,” picked up Clara, “and it’s pretty obvious to us that they’re not the real army. They forget all about the niceties and take us all prisoner.”
“Which still don’t tell us what they’re here for,” the mayor raised. McCluskey was a beefy man with a belly that had long since fallen over his waist. He had once been a football star and pictures of him in various poses plastered his office walls. They made quite a collection, and most of Pamosa Springs had been given the tour often enough to be able to recite the year and day each shot had been snapped. McCluskey had a square face and straight jaw, both of which seemed even more rectangular thanks to his crew-cut. The nickname Dog-ear was due to the fact that he was missing a hefty chunk of his left lobe courtesy of a murderous beagle that had gone crazy on him as a child.
Sheriff Pete Heep, on the other hand, was rail thin, all knees and elbows, which cracked and squeaked with almost every move. A tour in Korea had sent him home with shrapnel in three of his four limbs. Heep kept his sense of humor about the squeaking—and the pain—giving himself the nickname of “Junk” Heep to describe his battered body, which took twenty minutes to stir out of bed every morning.
“Did it real organized like, too,” added Sheriff Junk. “They’re experienced, whoever they are, and damn well armed.” He moved his elbow with a resounding pop. “Can’t expect to keep us prisoners forever, though. I mean this is a town.”
“Maybe not forever,” chipped in Clara Buhl, “but long enough. Judgin’ by the pace they been working at, I’d say they don’t want to stay here any longer than they have to. They got a roadblock set up on the only road leading into the Springs and who would question the army? All they have to say is something about hazardous waste or some nuclear test gone wrong and people’ll steer clear for miles.”
Clara was a feisty woman of near sixty who had been cursed by a bad heart for over a quarter of those years. She was born and raised in the Springs and had never left the state of Colorado in her entire life. She seldom even left her house except for council meetings and could be found at virtually any hour of the day or night listening to an old radio and working her way through needlepoint after needlepoint. Her whole house was covered with her creations, few of them any good since her eyes started to go, the stitching sloppy and the colored patches running into each other to create an inadvertent impressionism. Clara refused to accept glasses and relied instead on an antique magnifying glass for her meager reading needs.
“Whoever they are, they thought this out plenty good,” put forth Dog-ear McCluskey. “Knew just where to cut the power and phone
lines. Even had a list of all the registered ham radio operators.”
“It’s public record,” Clara told him.
“You know,” started the mayor, “I had a friend once in the Signal Corps and it seems to me there’s a way to convert a standard radio receiver into a transmitter. Damned if I can remember it, though.”
“Even if you could,” said Clara, “I doubt you could round up all the necessary equipment without them catching on. Lord knows there’s enough of ’em to watch our every move, even when we make those rounds of the people they let us make today.”
“I counted a few over a hundred,” said eighty-two-year-old Isaac T. Hall. “Been counting for two days solid now. A hundred’s the number all right. Seventy to eighty always working on the hillside or the gulley and the rest watching the town.”
“Lots of men,” muttered Sheriff Junk. He brought his knees up to his chest and there was a crackling noise.
“Not so many in my eyes,” Ike T. Hall responded sharply. “Been through the two big wars myself. Seen things that’d turn your stomachs so far around you’d be shitting through your belly buttons. The Nazis were the worst. Rode over people ’cause people let ’em. The ones that fought, like in them ghettos, had a chance anyway. We could do the same,” Hall insisted, pushing his thin wispy hair from his forehead. “That’d be my suggestion. We got ’em outnumbered. Hell, there’s 700 of us. Was up to me, I’d strap on Uncle Wyatt’s six-guns and have a go at the bastards. I get three or four ’fore they get me, we’re ahead of the game.”
Isaac Hall had lived in Pamosa Springs all his eighty-two years, half of them served as marshall. His greatest claim to fame was a distant relationship with Wyatt Earp himself. How he was related varied from great-nephew to cousin to great-grandson. Ike’s flesh had been wrinkled and sagging for as long as most people could remember. The hair got thinner and wispier as the years went on.
“It ain’t just the numbers, Ike,” Sheriff Heep told him. “It’s the weapons. To have any chance at all we’d have to come up with plenty more than your six-guns, and the town’s armory’s not exactly well stocked.”
“What about their armory?” suggested Clara.
“Huh?”
“Their armory. If we can find out where they set it up, we could ‘borrow’ some of their weapons.”
“And assuming we do, how many people in this town you think could make ’em work to any decent degree?” challenged Dog-ear. “Nope, I’m thinking along different lines. We ain’t so isolated we couldn’t get one person out to bring back help.”
Junk’s arm went pop as he slapped his thigh in disdain. “You thought out in which direction to send this person, Dog-ear?” he challenged. “I mean, you can forget the road the way it’s guarded and the only walk that’s even conceivable is east over the San Juans. That’s five days in the best of conditions for someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“Gotta be someone like that in town.”
“Gotta be nuts to want to chance it. This time of year I’d wager his chances of making it across the San Juans alive were no better than fifty-fifty.”
“Which might be better than our chances if we sit around and do nothing.”
A large blast sounded on the hillside, silencing the town council’s voices and stilling their hearts.
“Might help if we knew what in hell it was that brought ’em here,” said the mayor.
“Seems obvious to me,” responded Heep. “There’s something in that hillside that’s plenty valuable and they’re here to steal it right from under us.”
“Yeah,” agreed Clara Buhl, “that explains their digging on the hillside. But anybody got an idea what they’re building in the gulley?”
The soldier was bored. He hadn’t known what to expect from this mission, but he was sure it would be better than patrolling an empty street by himself after midnight. The M-16 slung over his shoulder clapped against his hip, begging to be used. The soldier yawned. The prospects for action tonight, or anytime soon, were dismal. His walk had become mechanical now. The shift had been substantially reduced at midnight and the full moon proved a blessing for some, although the soldier would have preferred a fog-shrouded night when at least some of the local assholes would try to flee through his grid. Just let them try… .
A flash of movement caught his eye, a tall, thin figure moving on the outskirts of town, keeping to the shadows. The soldier was about to shout out, then elected to remove the M-16 from his shoulder instead. He brought it up as he dashed silently forward to better his angle. Standing square against a building, he pushed his eye against the infrared night scope and recognized the man superimposed in the cross hairs as the town’s sheriff. No matter. His orders were open to interpretation in such situations. He would tell the commander he thought the man had a gun. The soldier started to reach for his trigger.
He didn’t hear the footsteps coming up behind him until it was too late. He swung, expecting to see one of his fellows, but what he saw was the face of death itself.
The soldier felt himself trying to scream, feeling a horrible burst of agony in his back as a smelly hand closed over his mouth. That was his last thought—that the hand was big and that it smelled bad. The creeping figure extracted its blade, pulled the corpse between a pair of buildings, and slipped off into the night.
Chapter 15
WHEN MCCRACKEN WOKE UP stiff and cold on the floor the next morning, Natalya was gone, the single blanket she had tossed over herself folded neatly at the foot of the bed.
“That antique dealer was right about Megilido Fass’s sexual tendencies,” she said when she returned twenty minutes later.
“What about taking advantage of those tendencies?”
“I’m not sure.” She shrugged. “Thursday is the day Fass’s contact makes his weekly delivery, but I’m not sure what we can do with this.”
Blaine felt sickened by the perverted world of the reclusive and powerful Fass. “Learn anything about this contact?”
“Plenty.”
Blaine smiled.
Two hours later, with Natalya’s help, the disguise required for Blaine’s impersonation was complete.
“Lucky this guy’s got a beard,” he said, rearranging his hair. “I really didn’t want to shave mine.” He looked to see Natalya gathering up her things. “Where you headed from here?”
“Bangkok,” she replied matter-of-factly, “to meet with an apparently desperate aide of Raskowski who seems eager to talk. I would have been there already, if not for the detour necessitated by your involvement.”
“Please accept my apologies.”
“Only if you’ll accept my hand in good luck. One of us has to succeed. Otherwise both our countries will pay.”
McCracken emerged from the run-down hotel dressed in baggy white trousers and a slightly soiled white, unstructured jacket. He had combed out his beard to give it an unkempt look and picked his wavy hair for the same effect. A series of makeup shades mixed together produced the necessary native flesh tone and hid his more noticeable scars nicely. He would have to be careful about smiling, though, for the man whose place he would be taking had a gold tooth in the front. Blaine had wedged a crinkled, floppy hat into his back pocket, ready for wear as the final element of his disguise. The real delivery man was not known to wear one but some improvisations were needed if he was to get close to Fass.
Natalya’s information had spotted Megilido Fass on a huge estate in the Khania section of the island of Crete, specifically in Sfakia. Every Thursday a man named Manolokis took a ferry from southern Greece across the Mediterranean to the port of Khania. He always drove a white van, the windows of which were darkened to keep the curious from observing the merchandise he was retained to deliver once a week. Blaine would be waiting for him to arrive in Khania after flying in from Athens. The switch would have to be made with a minimum of fuss and even then Blaine would still have his work cut out for him in gaining access to Fass.
His parting with Natalya
had been stiff and wholly professional. He admired her ability to distance herself from her mission. She had come to Greece only to save Blaine’s life and set him straight on what they were facing. This done, she could leave knowing they would in all probability never meet again. Blaine couldn’t accept that, though he sorely wished he could. After the pain of finding T.C. in New York, he felt certain he would never be able to feel close to a woman again. And yet, strangely, Natalya reminded him of T.C. so much that he couldn’t help but be attracted to her. She was strong, independent, and mysterious in the same ways that Blaine had always thought of T.C. He tried to probe Natalya’s mystery by comparing her to himself. While he wore his emotions like an old suit, tattered but open to view, she held hers within, her stoic seriousness as much a survival mechanism as his often misplaced sense of humor. Blaine didn’t doubt she was hiding a hurt so deep that it powered her single-mindedness.
Blaine started down the street, doing his best to blend with the large number of people out on a beautiful Athens Thursday morning. He had plenty of time before catching his flight across the Mediterranean and figured his best use of it would be to phone Sundowner. The best means to do so was to make his way to a top-rated hotel with a smooth-working long-distance service. Twenty minutes later, he had checked into the Athens Hilton. It was another twenty minutes before a long-distance line was available.
“Good morning, Blaine,” Sundowner said cheerfully from halfway around the world.
“Hope I didn’t wake you.”
“The Toy Factory never sleeps. How goes your search for Atragon?”
“Not in hand yet, but drawing closer. Actually I’m calling about some complications I’ve encountered along a different line.”