by Craig Thomas
Then he ignored the fuzzy complexities of his responses, and got into bed.
It was quick, hungry, abrupt. He did not care whether she came or not; he thought she probably hadn't. He was satisfying himself only. Something to make up for the last months — or to try to indicate his independence.
If Natalia was disappointed, she did not show it. While he telephoned the Innokenti Ivanov Charter Company of Khaborovsk, she sat beside him, smoking another cigarette.
'You want breakfast?' he asked as he waited for the call to be connected to Khabarovsk Airport, where Ivanov had an office and rented hangar-space. Her eyes were dosed, and her face tilted to the ceiling, head resting against the headboard.
She nodded. 'Will they serve it here?'
'I should think so — hello, Ivanov Charter?'
The voice at the other end was female, middle-aged, gruff and masculine. 'Yes — what do you want?'
'I want to check over the helicopter you fly for the local KGB. And I want to talk to the pilot — have him standing by.'
'Who is this, comrade?' the voice asked, suspicious but undeterred by the evidence of authority in his voice.
'Major Alexei Vorontsyev, Moscow SID. Is that sufficient for you?'
'May be. Bring your ID card, or you don't go anywhere near the helicopter.' The woman had to be Madame Ivanov.
'Naturally,' he said, not unamused.
'What time are you coming?'
'Shall we say — ten o'clock?'
'Say it if you like. We'll expect you, Major.' The receiver clicked at the other end. Vorontsyev stared at the purring instrument in his hand, then burst out laughing. He was still laughing when he called the hotel switchboard and ordered breakfast for two.
The MIL helicopter was an old one, a cramped cabin with canvas seats up front and a dark hole behind for storage space when the helicopter was used by Ivanov himself rather than the Khabarovsk KGB. Which, Vorontsyev was certain, was often. And, he did not doubt, the KGB footed the parts and fuel bills for most of the private trips.
The pilot was young — Ivanov's nephew, who had learned to fly during his army conscription. Since which time he had worked for his uncle, disliked him intensely, shared his passion for business and money, and was obviously waiting for the premature death of his energetic relative so that he could inherit control of the business.
Vorontsyev had been terrified by Madame Ivanov in the cramped, dusty office. She was everything the telephone conversation had promised — large, badly dressed and made-up, coarse, and clever. Her husband was off flying one of the planes to Vladivostok to collect some freight, she told him grudgingly — one of the two regular pilots was ill. She considered, as she told Vorontsyev, that he had a dose, and serve him right.
After a desultory inspection of the chopper, and a conversation with the nephew concerning recent KGB flights in it, Vorontsyev said, 'Right, you can take me on a little trip.'
'I didn't know you wanted to go up.'
'No?' Vorontsyev smiled. Neither did whoever was listening to his telephone calls at the hotel. Nor the car that had tailed him to the airport, and was parked near the terminal at that moment. 'No — but it seems like a good idea. Since my company owns it, and there's no one else to use it.'
The nephew shrugged. 'OK. I'll go and get us cleared. You wait here.'
It was half an hour before the MIL lifted away from the airport, and Khabarovsk was spread beneath them and away to the south. The two rivers on whose confluence the town stood gleamed like polished silver in the pale sunlight, and the town, as they ascended, became more and more a diagram of a place where people might live, set out as it was like many towns in Siberia and the Soviet Far East in a rigid, functional grid pattern.
Like American cities, Vorontsyev thought, though he had never seen one except in photographs brought back by KGB men who had spent time in the Washington Residency, or had travelled briefly to America. However, it was as if a child, with his building blocks, had ignored the fact that he required a flat piece of ground if he were to assemble a completely orderly structure. Khabarovsk began to straggle over the three long hills that it had been built upon, losing its firm, clean outlines — looking, he thought, as if it was lived-in after all.
Patches of green, the haze of heavy industry away towards the River Amur — shipbuilding there, oil refining; neat white blocks of offices, colleges; the rural fringes of the town of nearly half a million creeping back, it seemed, rather than being encroached upon.
'Well?' the pilot asked. 'Where do you want to go, my Major?'
Vorontsyev turned in his seat, looking ahead. They appeared to be drifting slowly north, towards hills blue and shapeless still with mist, dark with forest where the fog had lifted.
'I want to have a look at Army HQ — but only casually…' He had to trust the man; time was limited, whatever happened, after Ossipov's move against the KGB. He went on: 'You know their exercise areas?' The pilot nodded. 'Let's overfly some of them, and come back via HQ, eh?'
Vorontsyev settled back in his seat as the chopper seemed to spurt forward towards the distant hills. Already, his attention was impeded by memories of the past twelve hours seeping back. His wife — the tremulous sense of happiness of which he was afraid, and the more stark eroticism that now seemed to be re-established between them. This flight seemed removed from any useful investigation. He began to wonder whether Military District Far East could in any way reveal its secrets to a whirring speck in the sky.
Just before he left the hotel, there had been a telephone call from Police HQ. Over the wireprint from Moscow had come an unconfirmed report that Ilya and Maxim were missing. Their helicopter had radioed a distress message just before all contact with it was lost. Search parties had failed to locate any wreckage.
He had not known what to make of the report. It had been authorised by Kapustin, but he was uncertain whether it was a warning. He could not believe that the two men were dead, and therefore attempted to ignore the possibility. The report remained as a speck, irritating the mind's eye.
The foothills were below them now, mounting to the still fogbound clefts and peaks of the mountains. The pilot's voice crackled in his headset. 'Do you want to be seen, or not?'
'What?'
'There'll be a lot of chopper activity soon, when we hit the exercise areas. Do you want to explain what we're doing, or not?'
'Preferably not.'
'Then I'll try it as low as I can.'
The nose of the MIL dropped towards a forest-blackened cliff face, and the chopper sidled sideways, hugging the tree tops. Vorontsyev craned his head to look down. The dark fir trees flowed beneath the cabin.
'How often do they exercise up here?'
'All the time. Constant readiness. I was stationed along the Manchurian border when I was in. The yellow peril, my Major!' He laughed. 'More peril from some of the women in the brothels up there!'
Vorontsyev returned the laughter, settling in his seat, his eyes casting to right and left, and ahead. Small clearings, empty, passed beneath them, then a towering cliff face, bare and grey, threatening the tiny helicopter. Mist rolled beneath them in a deep valley like something alive, or as if flames roared beneath it.
Then the MIL slid across a knife-edged ridge of mountain, and the last tendrils of mist were vanishing. Vorontsyev saw a deep valley, and the Ussuri, a tributary of the Amur, narrow at the bottom of the steep cleft. Snow lying thinly on its banks, ice moving like great grey plates on the river surface. The MIL drove down the mountain side, below the treeline. Then Vorontsyev saw them: an engineer unit had thrown a bridge across the Ussuri, and ZSU self-propelled guns were crossing — a dark-green caterpillar. They swept over them. Further downstream, an amphibious BTR-50 was grinding through plated ice, hurling it aside as it progressed like a green wedge.
'What are they doing?' Vorontsyev asked, pointing down and behind.
'Testing equipment. Some kind of tactical deployment exercise, I suppose. Can you get across a
river in winter, or something like.'
The MIL followed the line of the Ussuri as it snaked through its lean, deep valley; then the pilot, a straighter, and empty, stretch of the river ahead of him, lifted up and away, past the treeline, the bare face of rock, sliding across another fold of mountain which fell away more gradually on its western side. Deeper shadow here, even at eleven in the morning. Forest, then more open country, stretching to the shore of a spot of blue lake.
In the distance, a winding road, crammed with green vehicles. Vorontsyev used the glasses the pilot handed him. Almost solid — tanks moving in single file. At the head of the snaking column the lighter T-34 tanks and, as if riding herd to the main column, heavy APCs and T-34s in the fields, driving swathes through the long grass, melted snow glistening as it sprayed up from the tracks. Behind the light screen, the heavy JSs and T-62s and T-64s. An armoured column, moving swiftly now that he saw them magnified, racing towards the spot of blue water and the sloping forest beyond.
'Do you want to get closer?' the pilot asked. They had dropped below the level of the trees, at the edge of the open land, and were hovering.
'No,' Vorontsyev said. 'What are they doing?'
'Time trials. How long to move from A to B, or how much can you move in a given time.'
'What purpose?' Vorontsyev asked, his eyes still pressed to the glasses.
'You've heard of "Blitzkreig", haven't you? What the filthy Fascists were doing in the war? Well, you can't say the Red Army doesn't learn! One of our intensive practices.' He nodded towards the column of dark green vehicles, now simply gun-barrels and turrets above the level of the grass. The grass moved like an angered sea as light tanks ripped through it, moving away from them now.
'Are they doing this all the time?'
'Of course, my Major!' The pilot laughed, the sound hard and deafening in Vorontsyev's headphones. 'For when the yellow peril comes boiling across the Ussuri. Practise, practise.
It never stops. I sometimes think we keep on doing it just to fool the American satellites — when we finally do go, they'll think it's just another exercise.'
'All right. Find something else.' Vorontsyev said, taking his gaze at last from the fascination of the armour. The MIL seemed to hop over the trees, sneaking away from what it had witnessed like a child crept downstairs to watch adults at their pleasures.
'Why do they practise here, in this sort of country?' Vorontsyev asked as they skimmed the tree tops, leaning up the slope as they did, climbing back towards the ridge.
'What?'
'This isn't like the country in northern Germany — good tank country. Is it? Why the emphasis on armour here? Isn't it going to be infantry and artillery all the way round here? This country looks much more like — ' He sensed himself on the verge of a discovery — its momentousness welled up in him so that the thought itself seemed about to be lost in the accompanying mood. Slowly, slowly, he told himself, looking at the terrain. Like, like — The dark trees, the bare rock, over the ridge, slipping along beneath it, the noise of the rotors echoing back to them, amplified. Then he was distracted, almost as he seized upon the realisation.
'What's that?' Vorontsyev snapped, pointing ahead of them. A haze, yellowish it seemed, undispersed. He could not help believing that it was artificial.
'Mist.'
'Go over it if you go near it.'
The nose of the MIL lifted, and Vorontsyev had to crane to see the yellow-painted TMS-65, looking like a petrol tanker with a trailer — the suited men around it like insects, masked heads looking up, spray nozzles in their hands. They were moving beneath a belt of trees.
'For God's sake — pull away from that!' Vorontsyev almost screamed.
The MIL whisked up and sideways, rolling with violence of the change in the angle of the rotor disc.
Tucking gas!' the pilot snarled. 'What the bloody hell are they doing with it — trying to kill the bloody trees?'
As if to answer him, they flew over a ragged, trailing hole in the forest. Black, naked branches stared at them, a sudden desert. As the MIL followed the defoliated line, it adopted the appearance of a road. Open to the sky, a ragged swathe.
'That's not new,' Vorontsyev said. He looked over his shoulder, then smiled grimly at his stupidity. 'For — of course! That TMS down there is for decontamination work, isn't it?'
The pilot banked the chopper, and up ahead of them again was the rising, yellowish cloud.
'It is.'
'Then — that damage to the trees, what was that?'
'Shelling.'
'What with?'
'Gas.'
The cloud was rising, gleaming with droplets in the sunlight, steaming out of the tree tops like an exhalation of the ground.
'What is that, then?'
'An alkali fog — I don't know. They didn't give us more than the usual introductory lectures on chemical warfare — how to put your suit and mask on, and what filthy stockpiles the United States had built up! You know the bullshit.'
'Guess what they're doing — and pull away again!'
The MIL banked sharply. Masked heads followed them when observing, measuring the effects of the fog that was being sprayed in a widening area beneath the trees. They headed towards the ragged hole in the forest once more, following the narrow road that was its winding central line.
'Guess?' the pilot said after a while. 'Maybe — time trials? Could be. Shell the shit out of a definite area, using VX or one of those bastards, then move the men in the special suits in to see how quickly they can clear it.'
The MIL lifted away from the defoliated, obscene swathe, towards the bare, clean lines of a cliff face. Sharp, hard — natural.
'Why?'
'You ask a hell of a lot of questions! Why? Because the Army thinks it'll start a war with chemical attacks, and it's practise, practise!'
Vorontsyev, as the MIL lifted clear, into the sun, and the land was spread out suddenly, like something flung from a hand, beneath him — dotted lakes, mountains, deep, narrow valleys, the river — knew he had the answer.
And was stunned, almost paralysed, by its enormity. Yes, yes — He clamped on the thought, the realisation, that had been interrupted, then confirmed, by the yellow cloud. It was — it had to be — There was a connection between Ossipov and Vrubel, between the Far East and the border with Finland. This mountainous, heavily wooded country below him was the connection. A mirror-image, almost.
Ossipov and his armies were practising the invasion of Scandinavia — so the real thing would go smoothly.
A chemical attack to precede an armoured spearhead.
Ilya and Maxim were dead. They must have found out something, and they had been eliminated.
He felt sick.
'Don't look now, my Major — we've got company!' he heard the pilot say at a great distance.
As if from ambush, four helicopters in army camouflage, the red stars bright on their bellies — MIL-24s, gunships, he registered — leapt from the cover of a ridge below and to starboard. They were flying in a rigid formation.
A box to contain their one small helicopter.
PART THREE
THE RUNNING MAN
22nd to the 23rd of---, 19.
'We are passing from the sphere of history to the sphere of the present and partly to the sphere of the future.
— Lenin
Eleven: The Limits of Diplomacy
There was no call-sign, simply:
'This is restricted airspace over a military exercise area. Your flight is unauthorised, and you are guilty of aerial trespass. You will accompany us to Military District HQ. Acknowledge this message.'
After he had automatically done so, the pilot turned to Vorontsyev. Outside, the four gunships jockeyed into their positions; one to port, one to starboard — one flying a little higher, the other a little below them. He could see the helmeted military pilot, and the crewman who controlled the chopper's arsenal, as he looked down through the perspex of the starboard MIL's cabin.
<
br /> He craned round, and the pilot said, 'They're behind us — one up, one down. We aren't going to be able to slip away from the party.' He was unworried. Carrying a major in the SID was surety that nothing bad could happen to him. He would only have been obeying orders from the Committee for State Security.
'We have to,' Vorontsyev said quietly, his face grim with strain.
'You're joking!'
'No — I'm not.' He looked at the pilot, and was about to continue when one of the gunships slid overhead and took up a position a hundred metres in front of them, at exactly the same flight level. Then the voice crackled again.
'There is no course reference. Simply follow the helicopter in front of you. Acknowledge.'
'Message acknowledged. I am following.'
The leading chopper immediately banked to port, easing down a grey rock face. The nose of the small MIL dipped and then it imitated the larger machine ahead of it.
'Think!' Vorontsyev snapped. 'How far are we from the headquarters?'
'Now?' He glanced at the chart on his knee. 'Ten minutes flying time — from here.' He looked glum, unresponsive, his assurance evaporated.
'How can you set me down?'
'What?'
'Set me down! Listen — if I'm caught…' He had to tell the pilot the truth, but frighten him with it. He went on: 'And you're with me, then we'll both of us be quietly removed!' He thought of Ilya and Maxim. Missing. Now he knew they were dead. 'We'll have an arranged accident.'
There was open fear hi the pilot's eyes. It was a situation he could not comprehend, hearing that information from an officer in the most elite section of the KGB. It made no sense whatever.
He said, 'You — got to be joking, my Major. They don't kill KGB men, just like that!' And something made his eyes widen more. Vorontsyev knew he was remembering the Separatist terrorism. Then the eyes narrowed in suspicion. 'You are joking?'
'No, my friend. The Army will kill me if it can get its hands on me — after they've checked to find out it's me, and what I might nave seen. You — you they might leave alone. I don't know…' He shrugged. 'But if you're with me, then your life isn't worth a one rouble note!'