She opened it slightly. Nobody was there. Across the alley was an old courtyard that wandered into another and then into a ramshackle building, long abandoned. Magadan was just such a place of empty spaces, structures hurriedly thrown up on somebody’s order or some bureaucratic whim.
Stegman was waiting at the helicopter when the taxi let her down. “Now!” she said. “At once!”
He asked no questions until they were in the air. “What is it?”
“Comrade Shepilov is making arrests,” she said, “but our work is done.”
Would they take Vanya? She hoped not. After all, what had been done? Yet she knew it was not necessary to have done something. It was enough to be suspected.
“Suvarov is with the soldiers,” Stegman said. “Somewhere in the north. I have a map if — ”
“No. We will go back to Khabarovsk. Is there news of that woman? The Baronas woman?”
“None. When our men reached the cabin they were gone, gone for some time. The fires were out, the ashes cold. They have gone into the forest again, I believe.”
He picked up a distant peak and changed course a little. “Comrade Lebedev? There has been trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Yes, it seems Comrade Bocharev has taken an interest in the Baronas question. He has been making inquiries. It was necessary to report this to Colonel Zamatev.”
She frowned. Bocharev? What did he have to do with this?
“Our informant, the man Peshkov, has disappeared. Nobody has seen him. The others have scattered. A few arrests have been made, but the man Zhikarev has vanished also.” Suddenly his tone was angry. “I do not know what is happening! There has been much slipshod work! These people should have been arrested at once! At once! And that Zhikarev — !”
If Baronas and his daughter had left Plastun Bay, they had gone down to the sea, or they would try to cross the border into China. The sea was out of the question. Nothing could get past that buffer zone and the strict watch kept over the waters of the Sea of Japan. Hence it had to be the border.
From her briefcase she took a map. A crossing on the Ussuri River would be closest. When they reached Khabarovsk, she would see what could be done. In fact, if it was all right with Arkady she would go herself. She would fly to Iman.
For the first time she began to have doubts. What if Arkady failed?
The thing with Pennington had not gone well. He had protested that his only expertise was in insecticides and assured them he would be glad to help in that area. In fact, he knew a good deal about the infestation of mosquitoes and black flies and would cooperate. He assured them they had taken the wrong man, that he would have enjoyed meeting the Admiral but that they had not come to his section at all. She knew none of the details of the questioning or the methods used, only that they had come up with nothing except that he did know a great deal about insecticides and was willing to help with their problems. As he was valuable in that respect, there might have been hesitation to go further with the questions, but she doubted that, knowing the Colonel.
To have that effort fail, and atop it the escape of a man whom they could not seem to recapture —
It looked bad for Arkady, for Colonel Zamatev.
They would say he was inept. That he was careless. That he had failed.
If he failed, she failed also. He was her ticket to Moscow, her door to the future.
Yet suppose they could recapture the American? Suppose there really had been something between the American and that Baronas woman? If they had her, she might be bait for a trap. She shook her head. No, it would not work. Of course not. The man would not —
But she had heard the Americans were romantic. Was this Red Indian so? Would he come back to try to save his girlfriend? If she could be taken, it was worth an attempt.
Of course, he would not. She told herself that, but she wondered.
Catch her first, and then think about it. Under questioning, she would tell all they needed to know. But how to get word to the American? Ostap would know how; he always knew such things.
But Ostap was a prisoner. Undoubtedly, he had been taken.
Only he had not. Like she herself, Ostap had escaped. He was free, and he had gone into the forest.
Thirty-Six
When morning came, Joe Mack stood alone upon the mountain. His hair had grown long, and rather than try to cut it with his knife he had begun wearing it in two braids that hung down over his chest. All you need now, he told himself, is a necklace of bear claws.
His smile was grim as he studied the country below and about him. Yet his thoughts wandered, and he remembered the story of the Apache, the Indian Massai, who had been deported to Florida after Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. He had escaped from the train after they had left St. Louis, and he had worked his way across country, returning to Arizona without being seen except by a friendly Indian to whom he revealed himself. Two thousand miles or more he had traveled, much of it through populated country. Nobody had ever known the whole story, but it had been a tale worth the telling.
In the old days the Apaches would have sung songs of his courage and his skills. Nowadays they did not sing anymore, and too many of the Indians were forgetting the old songs and the old stories. He knew many of them. His grandmother and his mother had told him the stories, and his white grandfather, too, who had known more of them than many of the Indians. He had lived close to the old men, and he knew the value of their songs and their stories. Many he had noted down; others he had simply repeated to Joe Mack when he was a small boy.
Below him was the vast gorge with its roaring river, rimmed with jagged rocks as if born from some surrealistic nightmare, rocks gnawed upon by wind and broken by expanding ice, sheets of rock and slabs of rock and crumbled rock underneath. Below the rim, the wild, wind-torn trees leaned with the prevailing winds and cast their dead branches like skeleton bones along the narrow ledges below.
He knew this land, knew it from his memories of Hell’s Canyon, from the Snake and the Salmon rivers of Idaho. This was like them, but wilder, somehow different. More and more he felt himself turning back the leaves of time. Fading into dimness were his days of training as an officer, his years of flying, his neat uniforms, and before them the lessons learned in school. Now he was back to the mountains of his boyhood and his memories of the wild, free mountain life.
He had never been but superficially a civilized man. He knew that, and he knew he could, or thought he could, return to it. Now he did not know. He was a man of the wilderness, living as he had dreamed of living. His life was wild, hard, cold, and dangerous, yet he was ready for it.
“I may be the last Indian,” he told himself aloud, “who will live in the old way, think the old thoughts.”
He had not chosen his enemies. They had chosen him. They had ripped him away from the life he had been living, to be used, drained, and cast aside. They would have left the pitiful rags of a man, what remained after torture, after repeated, demeaning questionings. This was better. He was not afraid to die. All his life had been a preparation for dying, but dying as a warrior would die. Yet now he would not die, for dying would give them victory. He would live, he would escape, he would flaunt it in their faces. He would show them what a man could do.
They were out there now, seeking him. Very well, let them find him, and find death.
A few had died, he knew that. The pursuit of him had not gone easily for them. How many his traps had killed he did not know, but he knew of three who had died with the helicopter, and there had been others. All right, if they wished to pay the price, he would give them what they wished.
No longer would he simply flee to escape them. Now he would fight back.
Rukovsky was waiting beside the fire when Suvarov drove up. “He’s up there somewhere,” Rukovsky said. “It is rough, but we will find him.” He gestured. “I’ve a dozen patrols scattered along this valley. When we have eaten, we will start up the mountains. You can tell your Colonel Zamatev that we will have him.”