AN OMINOUS BEGINNING
General Ignatiey looked down with empty eyes at the chemical warfare expert. "You poisoned me," he said softly.
"I beg your pardon?" Pollock said, stunned.
"Yes, we thought you had come over to our side, but you have always been the enemy."
"General Ignatiev!" protested Pollock, backing toward the door. "Really, you must—"
"I'm the one you poisoned," Ignatiev thundered, "but it's you, Pollock—you scummy American spy—who's going to die."
He pulled a pistol from beneath his tunic and shot Pollock once, through the heart, before walking calmly to where the American lay and administering the coup de grace.
Then he put the muzzle of the Tokarev beneath his own chin, pointing toward the unseen Russian sky, and pulled the trigger. -
Published by Ballantine Books:
THE AYES OF TEXAS
THE GROTTO OF THE FORMIGANS
F-CUBED
TEXAS ON THE ROCKS
Daniel da Cruz
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1987 by Daniel da Cruz
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86-92037
To
Good friend—and a pretty good editor, too.
Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition: June 1987 Cover Art by Barclay Shaw
CONTENTS
1. Annabella—2 May 2015
2. The Rosovy Factor—12 July 2016
3. McCann—11 August 2016
4. Karirie—6 August 2016
5. Handy—3 September 2016
6. Watershed—4 September 2016
7. The Barkleys—12 September 2016
8. Bogomoloff— 13 September 2016
9. Konev—14 September 2016
10. The Transcon Express — 14 September 2016
11. Hartshorn—14 September 2016
12. Volcano—14 September 2016
13. F—14 September 2016
14. Pittsburgh Central—14 September 2016
15. Gland Junction—14 September 2016
16. Rue Bliss— 14 September 2016
17. Dr. Caldwell—14 September 2016
18. Dr. Semm—15 September 2016
19. Nightmare—15 September 2016
20. Heat—16 September 2016
21. Nightflight—16 September 2016
22. Art Aches—17 September 2016
23. Bankroll—IS September 2016
24. Georgia Crackers—10 September 2016
25. Windbag—19 September 2016
26. Sheep-dip— 19 September 2016
27. Green Snow—21 September 2016
28. Noodle—24 September 2016
1
2 MAY 2015
Keefe McCann had just turned to a heading of 278 degrees, calculated to bring him into Wheeling in exactly twenty-three minutes, when the engine quit. He put the Cessna 425 STOL into a shallow glide, keeping the plane a niggardly few knots above stall speed, and hit the starter. The prop windmilled, the engine coughed, sputtered a few times, and finally started. Two minutes later it again fell silent, this time for good. To Keefe McCann, the problem appeared to be water in the fuel line, but understanding the problem wasn't going to help him solve it.
The Doppler altimeter read 4,340 feet. Below him stretched broken clouds as far as he could see, and below them, he knew, were several thousand square miles of West Virginia razorbacks and hollers. He briefly considered radioing Mayday, but realized it would be a waste of time. If he survived, it would be through skill or dumb luck.
He decided to give skill a chance. The flight path monitor showed his position as twenty-two miles from the nearest airport. Duck soup for an albatross. On the other hand, if the clouds parted long enough for him to spot a stretch of fairly flat cow pasture, he might be able to grease the plane in.
The plane descended through two thousand feet, one thousand feet, five hundred feet, as McCann kicked over the engine to no avail. Through occasional breaks in the low-lying clouds he could see hilltops with their stunted growth of scrub trees, fog-shrouded gullies, and a spiral of smoke winding up from an isolated farmhouse caught in the grip of a valley greedy for the human presence. At 220 feet, his heart was hammering so hard that he almost failed to notice a stream sliding by beneath his wing. He made a shallow turn to line himself up with the stream, broke out of the clouds, and saw to his horror that the stream doglegged. He was headed, not for water, but a dense copse of scraggly trees on its bank.
He wrenched the nose up, cinched his shoulder straps tight, and tried to tell himself that men had survived crashes worse than this was going to be. The trees atop a low hill brushed his wheels and suddenly a dirt road appeared at a thirty degree angle just ahead. It wasn't much of a road, but it was fairly level, fairly straight, and more than long enough to accommodate the Cessna. He fishtailed the craft, hit the ground with a mighty thump, bounced once into the air, and rolled to a stop with two hundred feet to spare.
For some time McCann didn't move, giving his trembling limbs time to unwind. Sweat from his brow ran down his nose and dripped on his flight jacket. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, and saw that it was mixed with blood. He had struck his nose on the ledge above the instrument panel when the plane hit, and hadn't even noticed. Breathing a huge sigh of thanksgiving, he released the harness, pulled back the canopy, and stepped shakily down on the dirt trail.
"Are you all right?" The voice came from a young woman standing beside the wingtip. She brushed back straight brown hair, reaching almost to her waist, to reveal a freckled face rather pleasant than pretty. A tight gingham dress revealed even more: the well-contoured body of a healthy country girl on the threshold of womanhood. She was barefoot.
"I'm fine." said McCann. If the girl was Country, the man was City. He had the well-conditioned body of the young executive who spends his lunch hour playing racquetball, and weekends lifting weights. Except for his broken nose, which was now swelling painfully, disturbing the symmetry of his face, he might have been a model for ads for men's shirts. He had thick eyebrows, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes suggestive of Indian forebears, and a wide, sensuous mouth fixed in a perpetual half-smile. It was the expression of a man who knew that something memorable was going to happen any minute now and was ready to savor it to the fullest. He was the kind of man people instinctively warmed to and trusted —soft-spoken, with an open and slightly self-deprecatory manner, and an air of complete sincerity.
The young woman examined him for a moment, then smiled. "Don't you go away, now," she said. "I'll be right back."
Keefe McCann watched her go, probably to assure her folks, watching from the window of the weathered little frame house at the edge of the woods down the road, that his was a simple forced landing, not an invasion from Mars. Dismissing her from his thoughts, he turned his attention to the engine. He soon discovered that water in the gas line was, indeed, the problem. In the air, the problem had almost been fatal; on the ground, he would simply filter the gasoline through chamois and be ready to go in half an hour.
The girl returned. In her hand was a small square of gauze. "Your nose is still bleeding," she said, and began gently to rub away the clotted blood.
Up close, as she dabbed at his nose, McCann found himself discovering that she wasn't at all the woman she had first appeared. The difference was impossible to explain. She looked precisely the same in every particular, but by some subtle feminine alchemy had suddenly become transformed from an innocent, barefoot country lass into an object of the most intense sexual desire he had ever experienced. Looking into her eyes, he saw that the rustic innocence had vanished. They were the eyes of a woman famished for sex, a man-eater whose libidinous appetite could be satisfied only by the exertions of a regiment of Marines shipwrecked for two years on a South Pacific atoll. McCann was not a Marine, and he had never been shipwrecked, but he recognized the call to service. His arms reached out to envelope her. . .
Her name was Annabella Ames. Orphaned by the death of her father two years previously, she had lived on alone in the simple cabin, but not in hardship. The cabin was furnished with a king-size water bed, soft lighting, a thirty-four-inch television set and satellite dish, videotape player with a substantial library of country-western cassettes, lithographs of horses over the fireplace, and electric heating, powered by a generator. Incongruously, Annabella also owned a single-sideband transceiver, which she said was her main contact with distant neighbors, although, again incongruously, she never spoke with them while McCann was around. As to her income, she was vague, and McCann was alternately too busy or too exhausted to wonder how she lived so comfortably with no obvious means of support.
Six days passed in a blur of furious concupiscence. The only occasion McCann got out of bed for any length of time was on the morning of the second day, when they pushed his aircraft beneath the limbs of a spreading oak. McCann knew that by now he'd be reported missing, and didn't want to risk a rescue party descending upon him to blight an erotic experience beyond his most fevered imaginings.
Despite the passion which consumed him, he couldn't quite bring Annabella Ames into focus. He'd made love to women with bodies just as exquisite as hers and features considerably more attractive. She had no conversation beyond what related to their mutual carnal desires. The range of imagination she brought to sexual gratification was like the Mississippi in springtime—broad, deep, and in constant spate, but in no way distinguished from that of any normally uninhibited woman. And yet, her physical magnetism was overpowering. He couldn't explain it; furthermore, he didn't even try, content to wallow in her caresses and forget that he had ever drawn a breath that wasn't infused with the ineffable scent of her body.
"Your ribs are showing," she said on the seventh day. "You've got to eat."
He leered at her, and lunged.
"Food," she said, slipping out from under him.
It wasn't among her better ideas. In a contest of arms —and legs—Annabella Ames was without peer, but put a skillet in her hand and she was a menace to humanity. He tasted, exactly once, her rubbery fried eggs, greasy bacon, soggy hash browns, and rancid coffee, and took the pledge. Nevertheless, he recognized that if he kept it up—that is, if he could keep it up—at this rate he'd be dead in a fortnight from malnutrition and exhaustion. Somehow, it didn't seem to matter.
"And then there's your airplane," Annabella Ames went on. "It's rented, isn't it?"
"Screw the airplane."
"Why not? That would make it unanimous."
He laughed, hollowly.
"Besides, if it's rented, they're going to be looking for it. And if they look hard enough..."
"There you go, talking sex again," he said.
She slapped him lightly. "If they look for the plane— and they're bound to sooner or later—they'll find it."
"Probably. Who cares?"
"I do. They'll accuse you of having stolen it. What else can they think, its being missing six days and all, and parked out there under that oak tree? They'll put you in jail, and I'll never see you again."
There was something in what she said. It would be wise to get that plane back to its owners. At the same time, he could stoke up on some decent food, put some flesh back on his anemic frame, and auction off his worldly goods. He wouldn't be needing them once he came back to the warm embrace of Annabella Ames, never to leave again. "I guess you're right, at that."
He made a mental computation: two hours back to Falls Church, Virginia, just outside the nation's capital, two hours to settle up his bill and get some decent food inside him, and two hours to get back to Annabella Ames's arms in an aerial taxi, there to remain for a long, long time, if not forever.
She kissed him fiercely, put a fresh Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose, and watched him bounce his plane down the dirt road and into the air.
The flight back to Falls Church, Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., was routine. Once airborne, he obtained clearance for a visual flight plan from air traffic control, then radioed the private airport where he had rented the plane that he was on his way in. The tower said to come ahead. Any other time he would have remarked on the airport operator's singular lack of interest in what had happened during the week he had been missing, but McCann's thoughts were on Annabella Ames.
He landed on the 033 runway, taxied to the rental hangar, and cut the engine. As he climbed out, four men in business suits walked across the hangar to greet him.
"Captain Martin T. Haversham?" said one of the men pleasantly.
"That's right," replied Keefe McCann.
"You're under arrest."
"Yes, well, I can understand that you've been worried about the plane, gentlemen," said McCann affably. "But the fact is, I was forced down last week with engine trouble in a' remote part of Pennsylvania and had to walk twelve miles to the nearest telephone to order spare parts. Then a couple of teenagers in a car saw me walking back down the country road, and . . ."
"We're not here about the plane, Captain."
"You're not?" McCann was disappointed. He was just getting warmed up, and rather wished he could continue, so he'd learn how the lie he was improvising was going to turn out. "Then what's this talk about my being under arrest? Arrest for what?"
"That's something we thought you might be able to help us with, Captain Haversham—also known as Jeremy Powell, R.N., a.k.a. Dr. Julian R. Hartshorn, M.D., a.k.a. Professor Wendell Free, a.k.a. Russell Grebe, attorney-at-law, a.k.a. Fireman First Class John J. Henderson, a.k.a. Father Ronald Bellingham, and so on and so forth. Do I need to go on, Captain Haversham, or whatever the hell your real name is?"
"Not really. I think I've grasped your drift."
They cuffed him, read him Miranda, took him to the county courthouse, and recited indictments from seven states on a lengthy list of charges of fraud, on all of which he pled guilty in order, as he put it, "to save the court a lot of time." The presiding judge was equally accommodating, giving Keefe McCann as much time as the law allowed: thirteen sentences of ten-to-fifteen years, to be served consecutively.
2
12 JULY 2016
Agricultural Experimental Station No. 23 was something of a mystery. The U.S. Army Map Service Satellite Survey showed it forty-miles due west of Nar'yan-Mar, northwest of Moscow and well inside the Arctic Circle, in the most bitterly cold, remote, and hostile area of the Soviet Union. In its labs beneath the permafrost, AES No. 23 conducted research on grass-seed germination in cold regions, aimed at increasing production of forage crops in Siberia. The American Mutual Inspection Team (MIT), which made bimonthly tours of the installation, gave it a clean bill of health: no weapons research was in progress. Still, an American agent had managed to obtain a copy of the Ministry of Agriculture budget summary for fiscal 2015, and it showed an allotment for AES No. 23 approximately nine times larger than the research there justified.
Something fishy was going on at AES No. 23. The Americans didn't know what it was, but they were working on it.
Klementiy Pavlovich Sheremetiev knew exactly what was going on at AES No. 23: grass-seed germination research. But funds concealed in AES No. 23's budget allotment were indeed being diverted. They were being spent on machinery, materials, and staff for Project Rosovy, of which Sheremetiev, chief of the Ministry of Agriculture's Chemical Pesticides Directorate, had been in charge since its inception.
On the afternoon of July 12, 2016, Sheremetiev was handed a message which he personally decoded. It was from Ornstein, his personal informant on Project Rosovy's scientific staff. The message read: "Tests indicate total success."
That same evening Sheremetiev took off from Moscow alone in his two-place Torg-11. He headed southeast.
After a flight of nearly an hour, he landed at an army airfield outside Pinsk, on the banks of the Dnieper in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Although his chief-of-directorate rank entitled him to a Zil, he was not surprised to find a mud-spattered Volga waiting for him when his plane braked to a stop at the far end of the field from the control tower. He climbed in. The chauffeur, an army lieutenant-colonel wearing the cloth cap and grease-streaked leather jacket of a provincial taxi driver, drove off.
Though there was little likelihood they'd be followed, for the next twenty minutes the driver randomly crisscrossed deserted country roads with his eye on the rear-view mirror, alert for trailing lights. Finally, satisfied that they were alone, he veered south. Ten minutes later he turned down a bumpy lane and pulled up at a sagging barn on an abandoned collective farm. The wooden door swung up at his approach and he drove inside. A minute later a hovercraft appeared from the other side of the barn. Its high-powered engines in silent-running mode, it lumbered down the grassy slope to the marsh, glaring twin headlights giving it the malevolent appearance of a saurian on the prowl.
The ground-effect vehicle disappeared among the tall reeds, its passage marked only by the swarms of mosquitoes which fanned out on either side like a wake, and the rank stench of diesel oil overpowering the fetor of the marsh. After a minute or two the engines quickened as the pilot slowly brought the machine to speed. The whisper of the wind and the flutter of wings and night birds pursuing their insect prey were no longer the loudest sounds to be heard across the 500-mile-long Pripet Marshes, Europe's largest swamp.
Guided by inertial navigation, the craft rocketed through the reeds and tall grasses for what always seemed to Sheremetiev an eternity, but was scarcely forty-five minutes, before slowing to a hover at the margin of a matted copse. The craft's iron companionway swung out across the still waters.
Sheremetiev nodded to the vehicle's captain. The captain flicked on the IFF unit and punched in his personal identification code.
A moment later a black cylinder rose from the marsh like the conning tower of a surfacing submarine. With the whirr of an electrical motor, the six dogs gripping the steel hatch rotated in unison to the vertical. The hatch gaped wide, revealing a red night-light, and Sheremetiev stepped inside. The hovercraft moved off into the night.
Sheremetiev was now dressed in low-cut felt boots and a zippered coverall. He entered the day's five-digit verification code on the key pad, and the lift slowly descended to the top deck of Project Rosovy's research laboratories some thirty feet below the marsh's rotting vegetation. The lift door slid back and he found himself surrounded by a dozen smiling men in white coveralls waiting to bid him welcome to Project Rosovy.
"Klementiy Pavlovich!" said Stanley Pollock, a balding, thickset man in his fifties, coming forward and grasping his hand. "What a pleasant surprise!"
...
Januszek66