steel garrote fell over his face silently and tightened; heavy as he was, the smaller man was able to deal with him. Exercise of the will, passion of a different kind.
Grunting, he dragged Clanwaert to the edge of the loading dock and rolled him into the dumpster.
Twenty minutes later, he was in a terminal different from the one at which he had landed. He found a telephone in a bank of telephones, half of them occupied now by business people making their arrangements for the day. He put his notecard in front of him as he cradled the telephone and began to punch the buttons: another call to Moscow. As the connection was being made, he put a minus sign next to Clanwaert’s name.
“Yes?” the tight voice said in Moscow.
“Tell them, ‘Go.’”
He put the instrument back and looked at the last name on the list. Bonner. He touched it with his pen. He sighed. Bonner. He made a small question mark next to the name. For a few seconds, he hesitated there, apparently unsure of himself for the first time—made so by fatigue or by the thought of Bonner, and whatever difficulties that name represented.
0615 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.
“Spy? You shut down back there?”
The night was almost over. Alan’s hand hovered over the switch that would shut the back end down. Once he threw it, the old computer (“the best technology of the 1970s”) would die and the radar sweeps would end. Their search for the homebound battle group would be over.
But he didn’t want to give up. “What if the BG went north of the Azores?” he said into the intercom. “Radar might have missed them if they hid between those islands.”
“Come on—shut down! This mission is over!”
He hated to let go. One more sweep, one more experiment—he didn’t believe there were problems that couldn’t be solved.
His hand wavered over the switch but didn’t touch it.
“We went way north of the Azores coming back in ‘86,” Craw said in his Maine twang. Craw always sounded like a comedy act but was a deeply serious man who couldn’t understand why people smiled when he spoke. “Admiral Cutter, there wa’nt anything he wouldn’t do to keep from bein’ found, no sir.”
“Oh, great,” Rafe moaned. “Jeez, Senior Chief, whose fucking side are you on? I want a slider and the rack! Spy, next time have your great idea before I’m almost in the stack, for Christ’s sake.”
Narc nosed in with, “Anyway, we’re in EMCON.” EMCON—Emission Control Condition.
But the senior chief’s voice was as stubborn as a lobsterman’s defending his right to put traps where his father and his grandfather had. “We’re not inside fifty miles just yet. Look heah—” This to Alan. “Set up the sweep as we turn nawth. The stack’s offset this way anyhow.”
“Oh, Christ—!” he heard Rafe say.
Alan peered forward, just able to read the compass. He set up the sweep as the senior chief instructed; let Rafe contradict them with a direct order if he cared so much. As the compass touched north he punched the keyboard, and the radar expanded to cover hundreds of miles of ocean. Craw watched from his own board as the circular picture of their world appeared, at the center their aircraft. To the east were the fourteen ships of their own battle group. Two blips showed visibly larger than the rest: their carrier, USS Thomas Jefferson, and, unusual for peacetime, a second carrier, the Franklin D. Roosevelt. To the north and west were the Azores, more than two hundred miles away and showing only as grainy blobs. Alan sorted out those shapes, the real islands’ outlines stored somewhere in his brain along with a knowledge of the effects of this radar; his fingers coaxed more detail from the computer, put the name PICO in bright green capitals on the island to which it belonged.
Just south of the main island, two faint blips glowed. He tabbed each on the computer and updated it until he had a standard course and speed. Bingo! He was excited by the chase now, oblivious to Rafe.
“Two UNID surface contacts! Range two-ninety. Christ Senior, we must have some duct.”
“She’s a beauty.”
“Speed thirty to forty knots. One big banana and one little banana. I think—I think, guys—” His fingers worked the keyboard as he prepared to place the contacts in the datalink.
Rafe’s voice sliced into his excitement. “This is the Mission Commander—just to remind you two. I just put us fifty miles out from the carrier and we’re in EMCON. Do not rotate or radiate!” He was silent for a second or two to let it sink in. “Now shut down the back end!”
Alan debated the notion of rebellion. He was angry, but he knew part of the anger was fatigue. What the hell—Rafe was in command; let him take the flak if there was any. But still—Fuck it. He pushed the switch, and the radar image collapsed on its center and was gone. He began to clean up his side of the aircraft.
0619 Zulu. Moscow.
Number 1743 was a nondescript office building put up sometime after the Great Patriotic War, vaguely influenced by Western designs of the fifties, so probably from the seventies. It had a central entrance and a guard who was nothing more than a presence—an aging man in two sweaters who sometimes had this or that to sell. He would be no trouble.
There were four men. Despite differences, they looked alike because they were all of the same age and they had all led the same life—former Spetsnaz. Three of the four needed a shave; none of them wore a tie or a hat.
The guard waved them to stop.
The first man put a hand on the old man’s chest and pushed him gently back while the others went past. Then the man told him to lie face down, showing him a pistol. The old man lay down. The young man shot him in the back of the head.
They trotted up the two flights of stairs and turned right and trotted to a door that said VENUX in English characters. Inside were fluorescent lights and head-height partitions in cheap beige fabric, a sense of modernity and busyness rare in that building, in that city.
The four men went through the door, took out silenced Type 51 Kalashnikovs and began firing through the partitions. They sprayed the room methodically, and when one ejected a clip he would drop it into a bag and slam home another and resume shooting. Men and women were screaming and trying to run away, and a man looked over a partition by jumping up and down until he was hit. Others were heroic and tried to shield the fallen, until they were hit, too.
Two of the men went from cubicle to cubicle, shooting each body in the head, alive or dead. The third man guarded the door, while the fourth took a device from his backpack, carried it to the center of the room, and, checking his watch, tripped a timer.
They trotted out one after another, covering each other, the first one firing at the horrified people in the corridor, and each one after him, firing as he ran, to the stairs, down the stairs, and they were gone.
The bomb blew and fire belched from the smashed windows.
0624 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.
Christine
