“She wants you to have them cleaned, skipper,” Clark translated, and started laughing. “These are our new guests. Mrs. Gerasimov, and her daughter, Katryn.”
“What’s so special about them?” Mancuso asked.
“My father is head of KGB!” Katryn said.
The Captain managed not to drop the clothes.
“We got company,” the copilot said. They were coming in from the right side, the strobe lights of what had to be a pair of fighter planes. “Closing fast.”
“Twenty minutes to the coast,” the navigator reported. The pilot had long since spotted it.
“Shit!” the pilot snapped. The fighters missed his aircraft by less than two hundred yards of vertical separation, little more in horizontal. A moment later, the VC-137 bounced through their wake turbulence.
“Engure Control, this is U.S. Air Force flight niner-seven-one. We just had a near miss. What the hell is going on down there?”
“Let me speak to the Soviet officer!” the voice answered. It didn’t sound like a controller.
“I speak for this aircraft,” Colonel von Eich replied. “We are cruising on a heading of two-eight-six, flight level eleven thousand six hundred meters. We are on a correctly filed flight plan, in a designated air corridor, and we have electrical problems. We don’t need to have some hardrock fighter jocks playing tag with us—this is an American aircraft with a diplomatic mission aboard. You want to start World War Three or something? Over!”
“Nine-seven-one, you are ordered to turn back!”
“Negative! We have electrical problems and cannot repeat cannot comply. This airplane is flying without lights, and those crazy MiG drivers damned near rammed us! Are you trying to kill us, over!”
“You have kidnapped a Soviet citizen and you must return to Moscow!”
“Repeat that last,” von Eich requested.
But the Captain couldn’t. A fighter ground-intercept officer, he’d been rushed to Engure, the last air-traffic-control point within Soviet borders, quickly briefed by a local KGB officer, and told to force the American aircraft to turn back. He should not have said what he had just said in the clear.
“You must stop the aircraft!” the KGB General shouted.
“Simple, then. I order my MiGs to shoot it down!” the Captain replied in kind. “Do you give me the order, Comrade General?”
“I do not have the authority. You have to make it stop.”
“It cannot be done. We can shoot it down, but we cannot make it stop.”
“Do you wish to be shot?” the General asked.
“Where the hell is it now?” the Foxbat pilot asked his wingman. They’d only seen it once, and that for a single ghastly instant. They could track the intruder—except that it was leaving, and wasn’t really an intruder, they both knew—on radar, and kill it with radar-guided missiles, but to close on the target in darkness . . . Even in the relatively clear night, the target was running without lights, and trying to find it meant running the risk of what American fighter pilots jokingly called a Fox-Four: midair collision, a quick and spectacular death for all involved.
“Hammer Lead, this is Toolbox. You are ordered to close on the target and force it to turn,” the controller said. “Target is now at your twelve o’clock and level, range three thousand meters.”
“I know that,” the pilot said to himself. He had the airliner on radar, but he did not have it visually, and his radar could not track precisely enough to warn him of an imminent collision. He also had to worry about the other MiG on his wing.
“Stay back,” he ordered his wingman. “I’ll handle this alone.” He advanced his throttles slightly and moved the stick a hair to the right. The MiG-25 was heavy and sluggish, not a very maneuverable fighter. He had a pair of air-to-air missiles hanging from each wing, and all he had to do to stop this aircraft was . . . But instead of ordering him to do something he was trained to do, some jackass of a KGB officer was—
There. He didn’t so much see the aircraft, but saw something ahead disappear. Ah! He pulled back on the stick to gain a few hundred meters of altitude and . . . yes! He could pick the Boeing out against the sea. Slowly and carefully, he moved forward until he was abeam of the target and two hundred meters higher.
“I got lights on the right side,” the copilot said. “Fighter, but I don’t know what kind.”
“If you were him, what would you do?” von Eich asked.
“Defect!” Or shoot us down . . .
Behind them in the jump seat, the Russian pilot, whose only job was to talk Russian in case of an emergency, was strapped down in his seat and had not the first idea what to do. He’d been cut out of the radio conversations and had only intercom now. Moscow wanted them to turn the aircraft back. He didn’t know why, but—but what? he asked himself.
“Here he comes, sliding over toward us.”
As carefully as he could, the MiG pilot maneuvered his fighter to the left. He wanted to get over the Boeing’s cockpit, from which position he could gently reduce altitude and force it downward. To do this required as much skid as he could muster, and the pilot could only pray that the American was equally adept. He positioned himself so that he could see . . . but—
The MiG-25 was designed as an interceptor, and the cockpit gave the pilot very restricted visibility. He could no longer see the airplane with which he was flying formation. He looked ahead. The shore was only a few kilometers away. Even if he were able to make the American reduce altitude, he’d be over the Baltic before it would matter to anyone. The pilot pulled back on his stick and climbed off to the right. Once clear, he reversed course.
“Toolbox, this is Hammer Lead,” he reported. “The American will not change course. I tried, but I will not collide with his airplane without orders.”
The controller had watched the two radar blips merge on his scope, and was now amazed that his heart hadn’t stopped. What the hell was going on? This was an American plane. They couldn’t force it to stop, and if there were an accident, who would be blamed for it? He made his decision.
“Return to base. Out.”
“You will pay for this!” the KGB General promised the ground-intercept officer. He was wrong.
“Thank God,” von Eich said as they passed over the coastline. He called up the chief cabin steward next. “How are the folks in back?”
“Mainly asleep. They must have had a big party tonight. When are we getting the electricity back?”
“Flight engineer,” the pilot said, “they want to know about the electrical problems.”
“Looks like it was a bad breaker, sir. I think . . . Yeah, I fixed it.”
The pilot looked out his window. The wingtip lights were back on, as were the cabin lights, except in back. Passing Ventspils, they turned left to a new heading two-five-nine. He let out a long breath. Two and a half hours to Shannon. “Some coffee would be nice,” he thought aloud.
Golovko hung up the phone and spat out a few words that Jack didn’t understand exactly, though their message seemed rather clear.
“Sergey, could I clean my knee up?”
“What exactly have you done, Ryan?” the KGB officer asked.
“I fell out of the airplane and the bastards left without me I want to be taken to my embassy, but first, my knee hurts.”
Golovko and Vatutin stared at each other and both wondered several things. What had actually happened? What would happen to them? What to do with Ryan?
“Who do we even call?” Golovko asked.
27.
Under Wraps
YATUTIN decided to call his directorate chief, who called the KGB’s First Deputy Chairman, who called someone else, and then called back to the airport office where they were all waiting. Vatutin noted the instructions, took everyone to Gerasimov’s car, and gave directions that Jack didn’t understand. The car headed straight through Moscow’s empty early-morning streets—it was just after midnight, and those who had been out to the movies or the opera or the ballet were now at home. Jack was nestled between the two KGB colonels, and hoped that they’d be taking him to the embassy, but they kept going, crossing the city at a high rate of speed, then up into the Lenin Hills and beyond to the forests that surround the city. Now he was frightened. Diplomatic immunity seemed a surer thing at the airport than it did in the woods.
The car slowed after an hour, turning off the paved main road onto a gravel path that meandered through trees. There were uniforms about, he saw through the windows. Men with rifles. That sight made him forget the pain from his ankle and knee. Exactly where was he? Why was he being brought here? Why the people with guns . . . ? The phrase that came to him was a simple, ominous one: Take him for a ride . . .