“Why did she keep watching?” Peggy wondered aloud as she and George wandered over to the next painting.
“Maybe our friend Ronash described us to him.”
“It’s possible,” she said. “Let’s split up and see what happens.”
“That’s crazy. Who’ll watch our backs-”
“We’ll have to watch our own backs,” Peggy said. “You go out behind Volko and I’ll go past the woman. We’ll meet in the ground-floor main entrance. If one of us gets in trouble, the other gets out of here. Agreed?”
“No way,” said George.
Peggy opened her own guidebook at random. “Look,” she said quietly but firmly, “someone’s got to get out and report on what’s happened. Describe these people, break them. Don’t you see that?”
George thought, That’s the difference between a Striker and an agent. One is a team player, the other a lone wolf. In this case, however, the lone wolf had a point.
“All right,” he said. “Agreed.”
Peggy looked up from the book and pointed to the room with the Michelangelo. George nodded, glanced at his watch, then pecked her on the cheek.
“Good luck,” he said, then set off in the direction Volko had headed.
As George approached the round-faced man, he felt a kind of undertow pulling them together. He kept his face averted, searching the crowd for Volko as he entered the Loggia of Raphael, a gallery copied from one of the same name in the Vatican. He didn’t see the round-faced man as he walked beside the spectacular murals by Unterberger, nor could he find Volko
“Adnu minutu, pazhahlusta,” someone said from behind him. “A moment, please.”
George turned, his muscles tensing as the round-faced man approached. He understood “please,” and gathered from the raised index finger that the man wanted him to wait. Where the conversation would go from here, though, he had no idea.
He was smiling pleasantly as, suddenly, Volko came rushing from behind the round-faced man. He’d doffed his windbreaker, which was why George had lost sight of him, and had it stretched tightly between his hands. In one quick motion, he wrapped it around the throat of the round-faced man while he was looking at George.
“Damn You, Pogodin! ” he yelled, his own face turning crimson from the strength he put into the attack.
Two security guards from down the hall came running toward Volko, radios pressed to their mouths, calling for support.
“Go!” Volko gurgled at George.
The Striker backed toward the entrance to the Western European gallery. He glanced over his shoulder to see if Peggy would come back and saw that both his partner and the woman were gone. When he looked back at Volko, Pogodin had already drawn a small PSM pistol from inside his jacket. Before George could move, Pogodin had reached around his chest and fired backward at his assailant.
He shot just once and the Russian fell to a knee and then onto his back, blood pooling at his side. George turned away quickly and, resisting the urge to go after Peggy and make certain she was safe, he headed toward the magnificent Theater Staircase and made his way downstairs.
As he departed, George was unaware of another pair of eyes that had been watching from behind an archway at the southern end of the gallery, spetsnaz-trained eyes as sharp and carnivorous as those of a hawk.
SIXTY-SIX
Tuesday, 11:47 P.M., Khabarovsk
It moved like Peter Pan’s shadow, an ever-changing black shape barely seen against the dark objects below it and the dark sky around it.
The matte-black, swept-tip rotors and seamless, round-surfaced fuselage of the Mosquito threw off little reflected light and were RAM-coated-covered with radarabsorbing material. The engines made very little sound, and the armored crew seats, shoulder harnesses, lumbar support cushion, seat cushion, seat bucket, and helmets of the two crewmen were also flat black so they wouldn’t be seen inside the cockpit.
The helicopter passed without notice over the concrete buildings of small cities and the wood or stone shacks of villages. Inside the cockpit, the radar and full-color topographical displays, working in conjunction with the CIRCE autopilot-computer-imaged route, correction-enabled-helped the pilot adjust to sudden changes, allowing him to avoid other aircraft that might spot them, or to change his course away from peaks that rose higher than the four thousand feet at which it was flying.
A British ship in the Arctic Ocean picked up radio communications from Moscow to Bira ordering aircraft sent to rendezvous with the train. Copilot Iovino’s quick calculations using the on-board computer showed that the planes would be reaching the train just as the Mosquito was leaving. Unless the Russians picked up a decent tailwind or the Mosquito slammed into an unyielding headwind, they should get away without being seen.
Unless there was a delay, said pilot Kahrs. In that case, his orders were to abort the mission and head for the Sea of Japan. The commitment of the Air Force to recovering the strike force was not dictated by compassion, but by the size of the Mosquito’s fuel tank.
“Coming up,” said copilot lovino.
Kahrs looked at the topographic display. The solid images moved and shifted on the twelve-inch screen, having been mapped by satellites and translated into point-of-view images by Pentagon computers. Objects as small as large tree branches showed up on the screen.
As the helicopter slashed low over a flat-topped hill and ducked down into a valley, the computer map showed the trackbed.
“Going to RAP,- said Kahrs-real airspace profile, indicating that he’d be looking out the window instead of using the tactical displays.
Kahrs looked up from the screens and peered through the night-vision sensor, with its wide field-of-view forward-looking infrared scanner. Roughly a mile ahead, he saw a fire in the snow and people strung around it. That would be the off-loaded crew.
He touched a button beside the HUD. All the Strikers carried a locator signal in the heels of their shoes. He scanned for the pulse, which was superimposed on an overhead map. Three beeped red in one area, four in another.
Kahrs raised his eyes higher. Behind high hills in the distance he saw knots of smoke coiling toward the sky.
Three of the signals were coming from there.
“Got the train,” Kahrs said.
Iovino punched coordinates into a keyboard and looked at the topographic display. “The extraction site is one-point-five miles northwest of our current position. Obviously, the team split up.”
“How are we on time?” the pilot asked.
“Fifty-three seconds ahead of schedule.”
Kahrs began to descend, simultaneously swinging the Mosquito toward the northwest. The aircraft handled like the balsa-wood gliders Kahrs used to throw when he was a kid, slicing the air lightly and cleanly, the silence of the rotors enhancing the sensation.
Clearing the walls of the first of three roughly parallel gorges, the pilot leveled off at five hundred feet and flew due north.
“Trestle sighted,” he said as he saw the old iron structure that crossed the three gorges. “Target located,” he added when he saw the Strikers at the mouth of the trestle.
“Contact forty-six, forty-five, forty-four seconds,” lovino said after punching coordinates into his keypad.
Kahrs looked toward the southeast, saw the churning smoke of the train.
“I only see four of the six,” Kahrs said. “Get the low-down ASAP.”
“Roger,” said Iovino.
While Kahrs sped toward the target, Iovino watched the digital numbers of the countdown clock on his screen. At seven seconds to contact, he pressed the button that caused the aft hatchway to slide forward into its pocket. That took one second. At five seconds to contact, the Mosquito slowed and he touched a second button that caused a roller arm to swing over and a twenty-five foot-long black ladder to unroll. It deployed in four seconds, and the Mosquito glided to a halt twenty-seven feet above the ground.
Ishi Honda was the first one on board. lovino turned toward him.
“Where are the others?” the copilot asked.
“On the train,” Honda said as he snuggled into the tight space and helped pull Sondra aboard.
“What are they planning to do?”
“Get off and meet us,” Honda said as he and Sondra both reached down to Pupshaw.
Iovino looked at Kahrs, who nodded to indicate that he’d heard.
“What do we gain by meeting them?” Kahrs asked Iovino.
Even before Pupshaw was inside, lovino was using the computer to calculate the extra fuel it would take to fly to the train as opposed to hovering here and waiting. The one incalculable was when the three Strikers would get off the train, but he had to assume that would be before they arrived.
“We’re better off meeting them,” lovino said as he pressed the buttons that caused the ladder to withdraw and the hatch to shut. Those were battery-controlled and didn’t cost anything, fuel-wise; an extended ladder with the hatch opened added to the drag to the craft, which did eat into their fuel.
“Let’s give ’em a lift,” Kahrs said, keeping the Mosquito at twenty-seven feet as he pivoted to the southeast, smooth and delicate as a compass needle, and sped toward the oncoming train.