by Jon Land
Chernopolov replaced the receiver and lifted the communiqué in his hand. He slid an ashtray over and placed the single sheet of paper in it. Then he struck a match and dropped it down. In seconds, the communiqué was gone and with it all record of this operation.
Soon Natalya Tomachenko would follow.
General Raskowski was glad when the phone was picked up after only a single ring.
“I have reached Pamosa Springs,” a familiar voice reported.
“Your assessment?”
“It’s even worse than you were led to believe. The previous leadership was ineffectual. The plan was botched from the beginning and then a single incident escalated into a major complication. There are rebels afoot here, General. I can feel it.”
“But you will flush them out, won’t you, Major?”
“That is my specialty.”
Raskowski nodded. “I’ve always liked you, Major. I’ve followed your career since we met four years ago. I helped gain you the command that was recently stripped from you.”
“I know that, sir. And if I’ve dishonored you, please—”
“You haven’t dishonored anything! Not yourself, not me, and certainly not your adopted motherland, the glorious Soviet Union. Your career was ruined by fools just as mine was. But there’s still a place for you by my side, if you can put this town back on a tight leash. You know the stakes, Major.”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“Six days ago I pulled your career off the scrap heap because you are much too fine a soldier to be sacrificed for the errors of the inefficient lot that surrounded you in that steaming hot box you were born in.”
“And forced to return to …”
“Not by my orders. But fate has been generous with us. It has given us a chance to work together again, perhaps indefinitely.” Raskowski paused, just long enough for his words to sink in. “But that, of course, depends on your performance in Pamosa Springs. Don’t prove me a poor judge of character.”
The major’s voice stiffened. “I assume I am permitted to use any means at my disposal to return the situation to reasonable order.”
“Anything you choose, Major. Just get it done.”
And on the other end of the line, in Pamosa Springs, Guillermo Paz smiled.
The new commander had issued fresh instructions to the soldiers patrolling the streets of Pamosa Springs after dark: they were to shoot on sight any figure they could not identify. No questions asked and no accounts to be made. The new commander, Major Paz, scared them, seeming to have little more regard for his own men than for their hostages. No man wanted to face him with failure.
The soldier on patrol between the general store and the post office had no aspiration other than to finish his shift. Dark clouds had rolled in hours before, blocking out the bright moon. But there was some light. The new commander had ordered the few streetlights throughout the town to be turned back on.
Antsy as his shift reached its halfway point, the soldier switched his rifle from his left shoulder to his right. He was stretching to shake himself alert when he heard a shuffling sound. He swung quickly.
A shadow darted through the circle cast by one of the streetlights. A dark shadow. Nothing more. A trick of the wind perhaps, or of his own fatigue.
Then came another sound. A door whining stubbornly closed. The soldier ran toward where it came from and emerged at the rear of the town grill. He knew he should report this and wait for reinforcements. But if the murderer was seeking shelter within, he wanted him all for himself. He tried the latch. It hadn’t caught. The door came open with a whining sound. The same whining.
The soldier yanked his rifle from his shoulder and held it in one hand with his flashlight in the other. Before him lay a hallway leading toward the kitchen area. To the right was—
A shuffling sound found his ears from … below. The soldier moved to the door on his right. It opened onto a narrow flight of stairs, dropping down into the basement. Flashlight beam swaying before him, he began to descend. At the bottom he saw crates and boxes stacked everywhere. The shuffling could have been rats, he told himself. Then again, it couldn’t have been rats that opened the back door.
The silence was deafening now. He started walking about, flashlight beam carving holes in the dust-coated darkness. Everything seemed as it should have been. But wait. Directly before him was a … He approached cautiously. Yes, a door, finished in the same color as the walls so as to be virtually indistinguishable from them except for a single brass latch. Wasting no time, the soldier yanked the door open. A musty, rotten scent filled his nostrils, a scent of dirt and rot and death. The flashlight beam poured into the blackness.
“What the hell …”
The soldier stepped through the doorway mesmerized, flashlight sweeping about. He couldn’t have seen the figure come up from behind him, and heard only a whistling sound like a scythe whipped through the air. He was thinking he should scream to draw attention when a tingle crossed his throat and he couldn’t breathe.
For the briefest of instants after his head was severed from his body he could still see, though he felt absolutely nothing. The rest of his frame spasmed before tumbling into the gush of blood that was everywhere, and his head plunked across the floor leaving a trail of red behind it.
Chapter 21
“DO YOU BELIEVE HIM, Mr. President?” Secretary of State Edmund Mercheson asked after Lyman Scott had completed his report on his conversation with the General Secretary.
“I’m not sure. It’s all a bit too convenient, and it comes down to us believing in a mad general who’s part Napoleon and part Alexander. But Chernopolov’s point about Ulysses doing us no good when it came to the first attack is well taken. Why should we hesitate to deactivate a satellite that is useless against this threat we’re facing?”
“But how do we know this is the only threat?” challenged George Kappel from Defense. “Let’s not forget the Russian penchant for disinformation. Let’s not forget the very real possibility that everything we have witnessed was part of a plan leading precisely to this end.”
“Disinformation didn’t destroy Hope Valley,” Lyman Scott reminded him.
“No, a renegade Ivan general did, if we’re to believe Chernopolov. One town—no more—because maybe that’s all their superweapon was ever capable of destroying. A single demonstration to make us think they’ve got more than they really do.”
“That’s stretching things, George.”
“Is it? We all know the purpose of Ulysses. We put it up there to provide immediate verifiable warning of a missile launch from anywhere in the world. Effectively, the message to our enemies was that the best they could hope for was a simultaneous launch on warning. Stalemate. Suicide. But then the Soviets come up with a one-shot demonstration and we deactivate it, thereby exposing ourselves to the full brunt of their nuclear arsenal.”
The President tamed to Sundowner. “Have you checked out Ulysses?”
Sundowner nodded. “All systems functional.”
“What about the beam weapon?”
“Without a detailed, in-person inspection, I couldn’t tell if it had been placed on board or not. It’s possible. Size is the greatest restriction, but the death beam wouldn’t have to be terribly big.”
The President turned to Stamp. “What about security surrounding construction and deployment?”
“There are inconsistencies present in the logs,” the CIA chief reported, “and I can’t swear to the proficiency of the security employed. All scientists directly involved have been interrogated and they all admitted that Ulysses could have been under light guard when the various snafus arose.”
Sundowner remembered something. “Snafus set the project back nearly a year at the outset. Some of this was before my time, but as I recall, the first prototype of Ulysses didn’t fit all the specs and was replaced with the model now in orbit. But we’ve still got the prototype. Since the modifications required are mostly cosmetic, we could have it ready to launc
h within ninety-six hours, seventy-two if we’re lucky and if the records are up to date.”
Lyman Scott nodded. “Then we could delay deactivation of Ulysses until we can get a temporary replacement up.”
“And we can make sure the Russians know it,” suggested Kappel, “so if I’m right about their intentions, they’ll know we’ve managed to stay one step ahead of them. Beat the bastards at their own game.”
“Mr. President,” began Mercheson, “if we are agreed on this subject, there is another that should be raised. We now have a rogue agent operating in the field, not formally working for us, pursuing a substance that has become superfluous to our needs, and possessing more information than we can afford to have released.”
“Yes,” the President sighed, “I’m aware of that, along with McCracken’s means for dispensing that sort of information. We needed him before. We don’t anymore.”
“Sir?” Ryan Sundowner spoke tentatively.
“Nothing melodramatic, Ryan. I just want him brought in and isolated until we can explain everything to him. The longer he’s out there, operating on his own, the greater the threat he poses, not just because of what he might say but because of what, under the wrong circumstances, he might be forced to say. We can’t survive the truth of this coming out any more man we can survive the death beam itself. McCracken’s reputation as a rogue is well earned. We can’t trust him out there. He’ll understand our reasoning.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“You’re forgetting the woman who was killed, Mr. President. That’s what drew him into this in the first place, and it’s my guess he won’t be able to pull out so easily until he’s settled that score.”
The President’s eyes went cold. “Then we’ll have to find some way to persuade him.”
“So when he calls in, I should—”
“For the reasons you just alluded to,” broke in CIA chief Stamp, “it should be someone else whom he reaches, someone well versed in such matters.”
“McCracken trusts me.”
“The stakes have changed,” said the President. “It’s a matter of convincing him, and if that falls short, knowing instantly what other steps to resort to.”
“Other steps,” Sundowner echoed, but his mind had strayed to a fact he didn’t dare raise now: one of the men in this room was a Soviet mole. How would that affect Blaine’s response to being called in?
Natalya came awake, groggily aware of being in motion. Her eyes cleared slowly to the sight of the straps which bound her to the seat of an eight-passenger private jet. A few seats ahead sat a pair of guards, absently watching her. Her head ached horribly from serums and sedatives. But the rest of her seemed whole, though slowed significantly.
She closed her eyes tight again before the guards noticed she was conscious.
Think! Put it together piece by piece in your head. Retrace the passage of time … .
Her last lucid sequence of thoughts had come at Bangkok’s Post and Telegraph Department. She had seen General Raskowski first and then Katlov, a man she had seen killed in the Chapel of the Emerald Buddha. But obviously he hadn’t died at all. Obviously everything that had occurred, starting with the initial contact in Moscow, had been by the general’s direction. So Katlov was alive and had passed information to her which she in turn passed to General Secretary Chernopolov, again by Raskowski’s design. Deception on top of deception.
But why? Where was the sense?
After her capture, the fuzziness began. She was taken to a warehouse on the outskirts of Bangkok where truth serum was administered. She had been trained to resist it, but she could only hold back so much, letting go when the strain shook her insides. General Raskowski had questioned her personally. When he was satisfied with her responses he began to feed her a constant diet of sedatives, with the most recent one administered just prior to takeoff.
She was fully awake now, though her reasoning process continued to function lazily.
“Paz will straighten things out. I have faith in him.” It was the general’s voice. He was emerging from the front cabin, with another man by his side: Katlov.
“I’m still worried,” Katlov said. “I haven’t been comfortable with our troop deployment in Pamosa Springs from—”
Raskowski silenced him as they drew closer to Natalya. He leaned over and shook her shoulder. Natalya opened her eyes, forcing herself to look even more dazed than she was.
“And how are you doing, my dear?”
Natalya tested the straps and felt the uncomfortable dryness in her mouth as she spoke. “Your concern for my comfort is refreshing.”
“I couldn’t allow you the temptation of starting an incident which could only result in further harm to yourself.”
“You wanted me to make my report to the General Secretary,” she offered lamely.
“Of course I did, my dear,” he said in a gentlemanly tone. “And you were most obliging, relayed to him everything I wanted you to.”
“Which you relayed to me through the walking corpse Katlov over there.”
“Shot with blanks.”
“I killed a man who had blanks in his gun. My God… .”
“I’m impressed by your show of guilt,” Raskowski said. “But you perceived exactly what was expected of you.”
“Would you like to know what I perceive now, General? I perceive a man who has betrayed his country.”
Raskowski’s features reddened, nostrils flaring back like a bull about to charge. “Me a traitor?” he said, incredulously, almost shouting. “You are the traitor, you and all the spineless dreamers whose visions will drive our country into the ground. There is a cancer in the body of the Soviet Union, a cancer that must be cut out if our people are to survive and prosper.”
“With you as the surgeon, I’ll take the sickness over the cure. It’s your vision that will destroy us and the rest of the world. History has already judged your kind, the power-crazed madmen convinced they alone have the answers. Like you they’re all small men with small plans because all they can see is what lies immediately before them.”
“Small?” blared Raskowski. “Is that what you think? Is what you saw yesterday the work of a ‘small’ mind?”
Natalya seized the opening. “You wanted the General Secretary to know your death beam was deployed aboard Ulysses. Why?”
“Because it isn’t.”
“What?”
“Listen to the progression of a small mind’s thoughts,” Raskowski ranted. “Through great pains I managed to launch my own satellite several months ago. That satellite destroyed Hope Valley, but a power surge overloaded its circuits and it self-destructed. I would need something, wouldn’t I, small man that I am?”
“A new means of deploying your weapon.”
“Impossible, though, for me to launch another satellite of my own. A message had already been sent. The Americans were on notice. So I sought out help. From you. I used you, so I suppose you must be even smaller.”
Natalya made herself look angry so he would continue.
“Through you Chernopolov was deceived into believing that my weapon was on board the American early detection satellite. Then what?”
“He would contact the Americans and urge them to deactivate it.”
“And would they?”
Natalya thought briefly. “Under the present state of tension, only if they had a replacement.”
Raskowski’s taut grimace spread into a smile. He nodded and kept nodding, suddenly subdued.
Natalya’s breath left her as quickly as from a punctured balloon. “No! The replacement … The replacement!”
The general’s grin grew still wider. “Does such a deception sound like the work of a small mind? All of Alpha has become a deception since the loss of my first satellite. Believe me, it wasn’t easy fitting all the pieces together, but I had come too far to be denied.”
“But you couldn’t possibly get another beam weapon on board the r
eplacement satellite!”
Raskowski rose and pulled a syringe from his jacket pocket. “There is an explanation for everything, my dear, including giving you this sedative as we begin our descent. I understand the risks involved to your life but they would be far greater if we left you to your wits. Rest assured,” he said as if offering comfort, “that this will be the last shot you need ever receive. I promise.”
Natalya was groggy when the plane landed. She had no idea where she was, but she guessed it was the place Raskowski was moving his headquarters from Bangkok.
She kept her eyes closed as the plane’s wheels met the runway, bounced, then settled again. Surprise was her only hope now. The general’s men had to be induced to underestimate her, or better yet, not estimate her at all. Escape, if it was going to happen, would have to take place before she reached Raskowski’s new stronghold. In transit maybe, or …
A pair of guards approached her. She could hear their heavy shoes pounding closer and she concentrated on convincing them that the sedative was still enjoying its full effect. Like many drugs, the effect of too many doses often lessened the net effect. Furthermore, a veteran Soviet operative had taught her about such drugs, advising her to cause herself pain at the moment of injection, to induce her body to release powerful antineurons which would, in turn, block at least some of the drug’s effects. The theory had never been proven, but the old spy was unyielding in his conviction. She had not had the opportunity to test the theory until now.
The guards unfastened the seat straps and eased her to her feet. Natalya stirred slightly, as would a sedated person. She made sure her breathing was shallow, almost mechanical, eyes open now as narrow slits. She felt that her mind was at full capacity, but what of her body?
The guards gripped her tightly as they led her down the aisle toward the exit door. They would be the last ones out. Not good. Too much would already have transpired outside the plane. Not enough time to make something out of nothing.