The Rybinsk Deception

by Colin D. Peel

  ‘Sure. It’s SARIWON, the place where Shriver’s father got killed in the Korean War.’ O’Halloran paused for a moment. ‘Have you thought any more about how long it’ll take you to rig up your bang?’

  Last night, after making his call to Heather, Coburn had spent nearly an hour trying to work it out, but without knowing the flow rate of the propane, and having to estimate the volume of the building, he’d eventually given up.

  ‘This is a guess,’ he said. ‘Starting from the time I drop you off, I figure it’ll take me twenty minutes to reach the clearing, and I’ll need another ten or fifteen to carry my stuff over the fence and get it ready. While I’m doing that, you’ll have to decide where you want to be. Then all you have to do is wait.’

  ‘That still doesn’t tell me how long I’ll have to wait, does it?’

  ‘No.’ Coburn knew that the problem wasn’t so much in the timing: it was whether or not the explosion was going to do what it was intended to do – something that had been bothering him for a while, and a doubt that was still nagging at him when they reached the intersection with highway 20.

  Unlike yesterday, tonight with no logging trucks on the road and fewer cars to contend with, they made good progress, driving through John Day ahead of schedule at three minutes before ten o’clock, and reaching Canyon City shortly afterwards.

  Except for two or three cars parked outside a bar and some late-evening revellers, the township was quiet, flanked on each side by shadows cast by the walls of the canyon and giving Coburn the impression that the whole place was preparing to go to sleep.

  More conscious of his misgivings than he had been, and tired of telling himself that O’Halloran wouldn’t run into trouble, he concentrated on his immediate concerns, keeping an eye on the rising moon on the odd occasion when he could see it through the trees and mentally running through his checklist.

  Except for a small LED flashlight and a box of waterproof matches, he’d doubled up on everything. In the boot of the car were two twenty pound cylinders of propane, two three-foot lengths of braided hose complete with fittings, four candles and four candle-holders to screen out any light and shield the flames from wind.

  O’Halloran had made the holders last night, fabricating them from empty asparagus cans he’d found in a rubbish bin at the rear of the motel restaurant. Everything else they’d purchased yesterday afternoon from a sporting-goods shop on the main street of John Day – a store that had been displaying so many rifles and handguns that Coburn had almost considered adding an automatic to their inventory.

  In the end he’d decided against it, not wishing to suggest that either of them might be in need of one.

  Now though, sitting in the dark driving south towards the ranch, and knowing that the American was armed only with his camera and a laptop, Coburn was beginning to think O’Halloran was a little unprepared in the event of things taking an unexpected turn.

  The American turned up the collar of his jacket. ‘Better start looking for a place to let me out,’ he said.

  ‘How about the entrance to the track?’ Coburn had already more or less decided. ‘There’s plenty of cover, and once you get yourself into the trees, no one’s going to see you walking back towards the house.’

  ‘If that’s where you’re going to wait for me afterwards, I’ll need time to get back.’

  ‘Have you got a better idea?’ Ahead of him in his headlights Coburn could see the stone pillars and the gates of the Long Creek ranch.

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. We’ll be at the track in a couple of minutes. Are you ready?’

  O’Halloran was too preoccupied to answer, trying to get a glimpse of the house as they drove past.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Coburn began to slow the car.

  ‘Yeah, I heard. It’s not me who needs to be ready. It’s you. Drive yourself off a ridge before you get to the clearing and all this will have been for nothing, won’t it?’

  This time it was Coburn who didn’t reply, keeping his thoughts to himself until he turned off the road at the track entrance and switched off the Chrysler’s lights.

  ‘I’ll see you in a bit,’ he said. Before he could think of anything else to say or had the chance to wish O’Halloran good luck, the American had opened his door and was gone, moving quickly towards the trees and disappearing into the shadows.

  Coburn was less willing to rush, allowing his eyes to become more accustomed to the dark before he put the Chrysler’s transmission into low and set off along the track, discovering almost at once that his ability to remember the twists and bends was nothing like as good as he’d hoped it would be.

  Trusting the ruts to guide him, he’d travelled no further than 200 yards when he made his first mistake, narrowly missing a tree that swam out at him from nowhere.

  It was a lesson he was quick to learn, and equally quick to abandon whenever he became disoriented or on those occasions when the ruts became too shallow to be a reliable means of keeping the Chrysler on course.

  Over the next 200 yards, despite proceeding far more cautiously, twice he found himself heading across flower-strewn knolls towards what would have been disaster had he been slower to react and not switched on his parking lights.

  Whether the lights could be seen, he didn’t know. Even if they could be, where would they be visible from, he wondered? And at this late hour, who, if anyone, might be looking?

  He was negotiating a steep section that he was almost certain he recalled when without warning everything in front of him turned black.

  Had he been travelling downhill instead of uphill he’d never have stopped quickly enough. As it was he barely made it, slithering to a heart-stopping halt, this time hitting his headlight switch.

  It was an elk, standing dazzled in the middle of the track until it came to its senses and bounded away.

  Although Coburn had killed his headlights almost at once, much of his night vision had gone, and for the moment, along with it had gone his confidence.

  No longer prepared to push his luck, for the remainder of the journey he kept his parking lights switched on, driving at a crawl and persuading himself that it didn’t matter how long O’Halloran was forced to wait provided the wait turned out to be worthwhile.

  He reached the clearing without encountering another elk and with the car still in one piece, but found that the drive had taken him nearly half as long again as he’d thought it would.

  Instead of weighing himself down with equipment, once he’d unloaded it he made two trips from the car to the fence then, after listening and watching, made another two trips to transfer everything over to the building.

  In spite of the cool night he was still sweating from his drive, and after he’d finished ferrying forty pounds of propane and was ready to put the cylinders in place and connect up the hoses, he was out of breath and even hotter.

  At the south end of the munitions store he stood the first of the cylinders beside the right-hand wall, and the second one beside the left hand wall, slipping the open ends of the hoses through the nearest ventilation slot before he went to set up the candles in their holders. These he positioned as close as he could to ventilation slots at the other end of the building – a location he hoped would guarantee the best result by preventing any pre-ignition before the gas reached its lower explosive limit.

  Somehow the arrangement looked too simple and too innocent, he thought, perhaps because none of the candles were yet alight.

  Shielding the flame from a match, he lit the first of them, making sure the perforated asparagus can was doing its job and that the wick was burning steadily before he went to attend to the other three.

  When he’d finished and stepped back to look, although a glow from the nearest can was surprisingly bright, it wouldn’t be visible from any distance, he decided, and even less easy to see once the candle inside had burned down a little.

  So far he’d been able to manage without the help of his flashlight. But he used it now, pokin
g it into the ventilation slots to make certain nothing was blocking the ends of the hoses before he opened the cylinder valves and listened for the hiss of escaping gas.

  Instead of retreating right away, for several minutes he stayed where he was, breathing in the night air and trying not to wonder whether or not O’Halloran had run into trouble.

  When he did finally leave, he made a point of walking back slowly to the fence and climbed it equally slowly, resisting the temptation to look back until he reached his car.

  In the moonlight he could just make out the bank of scrub and the outlines of some larger trees, but beyond that the darkness had swallowed up the glow from the candles and he could barely see the building.

  Before commencing his return drive, he took off the new watch he’d bought and put it in his pocket, hoping that if he couldn’t see the hands creeping round he’d be able to concentrate more on his driving.

  The idea was unsuccessful. Less than halfway into what had turned out to be an uneventful journey, he found himself counting down the minutes under his breath, and long before he reached the highway and had parked the car out of sight behind the trees, he’d all but convinced himself that something had gone wrong.

  He was outside relieving himself against a tree when a flash of light and a dull boom told him that it hadn’t.

  The initial explosion was unimpressive. The one that followed wasn’t.

  In Singapore, the violence of the blast that had blown out the front of his apartment had caught Coburn off guard. But this blast was on a different scale entirely.

  A second after everything around him turned white, the shock wave slammed him face-first against the tree, and the night was filled with a thunderous reverberating roar.

  The roar didn’t stop, rolling off hills, echoing from nearby canyons and varying in intensity as munitions continued to explode and burn, fuelling a fire that from the highway to the ski-field was slowly turning the sky deep red.

  For a while, before he went back to sit in the car he continued staring at the sky, pleased to have given O’Halloran the best possible chance, but a little taken aback by what he’d managed to achieve.

  If nothing else this was going to cost the Free America League a heap of money, he thought, hardly compensation for the deaths and misery they’d been causing around the world, but a good first step towards stopping them from doing it again.

  With his part of the job done, while he waited to learn whether O’Halloran had been equally successful, he stopped himself from counting down another set of minutes by thinking, not about O’Halloran, but about Heather – remembering the day he’d first met her at the shipyard, picturing her sitting in the sun on the village jetty, and recalling her expression on the night when she’d tried to discover whether he wanted to make love to her.

  The faster he was able to conjure up the images, the more there were – snapshots of her in different places at different times, some easy to hold in his mind, others not, and one of her combing her hair in the hut that was so fleeting he decided to recapture it.

  But before he could do so, the passenger door of the car was wrenched open, and O’Halloran threw himself inside.

  The American looked as though he’d been running. He was breathing hard, and sweat on his face was glistening in the moonlight.

  ‘Drive,’ he said.

  ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake. Just drive, will you?’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Coburn started the engine and eased the Chrysler out of the shadows, skirting the pot-holes and delaying switching on his lights until he was clear of the track and able to turn north on the highway.

  ‘Why the big rush?’ he said.

  ‘If someone’s decided that fucking bang of yours was no accident, they could’ve called the police. We don’t want to run into a roadblock.’

  Coburn thought the possibility unlikely, preferring to believe that, since their luck had held up to now, there was no reason for it to suddenly go bad on them.

  ‘Let me know when you’ve calmed down,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry.’ O’Halloran took off his jacket and used the lining to wipe his face. ‘It was pretty damn easy. I didn’t see any cameras, so I had plenty of time to sneak around outside the house and have a look through the windows of a couple of rooms that had lights on. Once I’d got an idea of the layout, I figured I’d find somewhere to wait on the west side.’

  ‘Behind the house?’

  O’Halloran nodded. ‘Ten seconds after you blew the magazine, every light came on and men started pouring out of every damn door in the place. I didn’t count how many men there were – six or seven maybe.’

  ‘Was Shriver one?’

  ‘Yep. I had a good look at him. When everything had died down, I let myself in and went straight to the room where I’d seen him sitting at a desk. I took a couple of photos and spent the rest of my time playing with his computer.’

  ‘Does that mean the password worked?’ Coburn said.

  ‘I didn’t need it. Shriver was in such a hurry, he forgot to switch off his computer. I got to it before it went in to standby.’

  ‘And?’ Coburn controlled his impatience.

  ‘I didn’t check out every single file. I just downloaded data from his E-drive. Don’t ask me if it’s going to be any good. We won’t know until we can have a proper look at it.’

  ‘What’s an E-drive?’

  ‘Just a data file – the place where people like Shriver store the kind of information we’re after. Half of his documents were crap – old notes he’d used for his TV appearances. But I turned up what looks like a draft press release he was in the middle of working on, and I copied some other stuff that might be pretty interesting.’

  Instead of asking what it was, Coburn pointed.

  Adding to the light streaming from every window of the ranch house was light coming from the open garage and the stable block, while all along the driveway, flood lamps hidden in the shrubbery were illuminating the garden and the Long Creek Ranch sign hanging above the entrance to the property.

  Coburn hadn’t only been looking at the lights. He’d been looking at the backdrop – at a sky no longer glowing red, but streaked in orange, and so filled with smoke that, even inside the car from this far away, the acrid smell of burning was unmistakable.

  Some diversion, he thought, nasty enough for anyone, and if O’Halloran wasn’t being over-optimistic, big enough maybe to have given them the break they needed.

  On their drive back to the motel, he kept the Chrysler’s speed down, approaching the south end of Canyon City with extra caution in case he was wrong about a roadblock, but finding that now the bar had closed, instead of the place being ready to go to sleep, it was asleep.

  John Day was equally quiet. A young couple were locked in an embrace in the doorway of the hardware store, and a man outside a butcher’s shop was unloading a carcass from his pickup, but the main street was otherwise deserted.

  Highway 395 was deserted too. For the entire duration of their journey, they encountered fewer than a dozen vehicles, most of them late-night delivery trucks or cars being driven by people in a hurry to get home.

  It was close to 1.00 a.m. when they pulled into the motel car park, and because O’Halloran insisted on having a shower before he did anything else, nearly 1.30 before the American was ready to sit down in front of his laptop.

  Coburn had half-expected to be disappointed. But no sooner had he begun viewing the data on the screen than he knew he wasn’t going to be, and five minutes after that, intrigued and struggling to understand the implications, he’d started to wonder what the hell it was they’d stumbled on.

  CHAPTER 15

  OF THE NINE FILES O’Halloran had copied, one listed the names and addresses of FAL members in different US states, another provided a record of those companies who, over the last twelve months, had donated sums in excess of $10,000 to the League. Two other files were of even less interest, appearing to be ear
ly versions of a speech Shriver had delivered after the Rybinsk incident in which he condemned North Korea for maintaining what he claimed was a covert programme to develop more nuclear weapons.

  It was the remaining five files that were intriguing – a collection of information consisting of a clipping from an obscure suburban newspaper, a map, two data sheets and the draft press release that O’Halloran had mentioned.

  Like Coburn, the American was trying to make sense of what they were looking at, scrolling backwards and forwards through the files, and irritating Coburn in the process.

  ‘Give it a rest.’ Coburn reached over and brought up the copy of the newspaper clipping on to the screen. ‘Just leave that where it is for a second. If you don’t want to read it again, I do.’

  The clipping was dated 27 July and had been taken from the Baltimore Leader:

  ANDREA AND DEBBIE ALL SET TO GO

  Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialists Andrea Aspin and Debbie Lowe, both of Baltimore, will later this week fly out to the US Naval base at Chinhae in South Korea where they will be joining the crew of the USS Sandpiper, an Osprey Class Minehunter currently on duty assisting the South Korean Navy to clear mines from coastal waters in the Yellow Sea.

  Although all Osprey Class vessels are scheduled to be replaced by the new family of Littoral High-Speed Surface Ships, Andrea and Debbie say they are looking forward to serving on the Sandpiper, and hope the experience will stand them in good stead for a future transfer to one of the faster vessels if and when the opportunity arises.

  Speaking from Chinhae yesterday, Lt Cdr Sam Ritchie said that the two young women will provide a fresh dimension to the operational and tactical abilities of his ship.

  In the past month, the Sandpiper alone has been responsible for the retrieval and deactivation of seventeen North Korean mines which, despite repeated protests to the Pyongyang Government, are still being allowed to drift south across the Maritime Demarkation Line into the waters of South Korea where they pose a serious hazard to shipping.