‘Have to,’ Zacharias gasped.
‘Of course you do,’ Grishanov said, wiping the man’s face clean as tenderly as he might have done with one of his children. ‘I would, too.’ He paused. ‘God, to be flying again!’
‘Yeah. Colonel, I wish -‘
‘Call me Kolya,’ Grishanov gestured. ‘You’ve known me long enough.’
‘Kolya?’
‘My Christian name is Nikolay. Kolya is – nickname, you say?’
Zacharias let his head back against the wall, closing his eyes and remembering the sensations of flight. ‘Yes, Kolya, I would like to be flying again.’
‘Not too different, I imagine,’ Kolya said, sitting beside the man, wrapping a brotherly arm around his bruised and aching shoulders, knowing it was the first gesture of human warmth the man had experienced in almost a year. ‘My favorite is the MiG-17. Obsolete now, but, God, what a joy to fly. Just fingertips on the stick, and you -you just think it, just wish it in your mind, and the aircraft does what you want.’
‘The -86 was like that,’ Zacharias replied. “They’re all gone, too.’
The Russian chuckled, ‘Like your first love, yes? The first girl you saw as a child, the one who first made you think as a man thinks, yes? But the first airplane, that is better for one like us. Not so warm as a woman is, but much less confusing to handle.’ Robin tried to laugh, but choked. Grishanov offered him another swallow. ‘Easy, my friend. Tell me, what is your favorite?’
The American shrugged, feeling the warm glow in his belly. ‘I’ve flown nearly everything. I missed the F-94 and the -89, too. From what I hear, I didn’t miss much there. The -104 was fun, like a sports car, but not much legs. No, the -86H is probably my favorite, just for handling.’
‘And the Thud?’ Grishanov asked, using the nickname for the F-105 Thunderchief.
Robin coughed briefly. ‘You take the whole state of Utah to turn one in, darned if it isn’t fast on the deck, though. I’ve had one a hundred twenty knots over the redline.’
‘Not really a fighter, they say. Really a bomb truck.’ Grishanov had assiduously studied American pilot’s slang.
‘That’s all right. It will get you out of trouble in a hurry. You sure don’t want to dogfight in one. The first pass better be a good one.’
‘But for bombing – one pilot to another, your bomb delivery in this wretched place is excellent.’
‘We try, Kolya, we surely do try,’ Zacharias said, his voice slurred. It amazed the Russian that the liquor had worked so quickly. The man had never had a drink in his life until twenty minutes earlier. How remarkable that a man would choose to live without drink.
‘And the way you fight the rocket emplacements. You know, I’ve watched that. We are enemies, Robin,’ Kolya said again. ‘But we are also pilots. The courage and skill I have watched here, they are like nothing I have ever seen. You must be a professional gambler at home, yes?’
‘Gamble?’ Robin shook his head. ‘No, I can’t do that.’
‘But what you did in your Thud …’
‘Not gambling. Calculated risk. You plan, you know what you can do, and you stick to that, get a feel for what the other guy is thinking.’
Grishanov made a mental note to refill his flask for the next one on his schedule. It had taken a few months, but he’d finally found something that worked. A pity that these little brown savages didn’t have the wit to understand that in hurting a man you most often made his courage grow. For all their arrogance, which was considerable, they saw the world through a lens that was as diminutive as their stature and as narrow as their culture. They seemed unable to learn lessons. Grishanov sought out such lessons. Strangest of all, this one had been something learned from a fascist officer in the Luftwaffe. A pity also that the Vietnamese allowed only him and no others to perform these special interrogations. He’d soon write to Moscow about that. With the proper kind of pressure, they could make real use of this camp. How incongruously clever of the savages to establish this camp, and how disappointingly consistent that they’d failed to see its possibilities. How distasteful that he had to live in this hot, humid, insect-ridden country, surrounded by arrogant little people with arrogant little minds and the vicious dispositions of serpents. But the information he needed was here. As odious as his current work was, he’d discovered a phrase for it in a contemporary American novel of the type he read to polish up his already impressive language skills. A very American turn of phrase, too. What he was doing was ‘just business.’ That was a way of looking at the world he readily understood. A shame that the American next to him probably would not, Kolya thought, listening to every word of his rambling explanation of the life of a Weasel pilot.
The face in the mirror was becoming foreign, and that was good. It was strange how powerful habits were. He’d already tilled the sink with hot water and had his hands lathered before his intellect kicked in and reminded him that he wasn’t supposed to wash or shave. Kelly did brush his teeth. He couldn’t stand the feel of film there, and for that part of the disguise he had his bottle of wine. What foul stuff that was, Kelly thought. Sweet and heavy, strangely colored. Kelly was not a wine connoisseur, but he did know that a decent table wine wasn’t supposed to be the color of urine. He had to leave the bathroom. He couldn’t stand to look in the mirror for long.
He fortified himself with a good meal, filling up with bland foods that would energize his body without making his stomach rumble. Then came the exercises. His ground-floor unit allowed him to run in place without the fear of disturbing a neighbor. It wasn’t the same as real running, but it would suffice. Then came the pushups. At long last his left shoulder was fully recovered, and the aches in his muscles were perfectly bilateral. Finally came the hand-to-hand exercises, which he practiced for general quickness in addition to the obvious utilitarian applications.
He’d left his apartment in daylight the day before, taking the risk of being seen in his disreputable state in order to visit a Goodwill store, where he’d found a bush jacket to go over his other clothing. It was so oversize and threadbare that they hadn’t charged for it. Kelly had come to realize that disguising his size and physical conditioning was difficult, but that loose, shabby clothing did the trick. He’d also taken the opportunity to compare himself to the other patrons of the store. On inspection his disguise seemed to be effective enough. Though not the worst example of a street person, he certainly fit into the lower half, and the clerk who’d handed over the bush jacket for free had probably done so as much to get him out of the building as to express compassion for his state in life. And wasn’t that an improvement? What would he have given in Vietnam to have been able to pass himself off as just another villager, and thus waited for the bad guys to come in?
He’d spent the previous night continuing his reconnaissance. No one had given him as much as a second look as he’d moved along the streets, just one more dirty, smelly drunk, not even worth mugging, which had ended his concerns about being spotted for what he really was. He’d spent another five hours in his perch, watching the streets from the second-story bay windows of the vacant house. Police patrols had turned out to be routine, and the bus noises far more regular than he’d initially appreciated.
Finished with his exercises, he disassembled his pistol and cleaned it, though it hadn’t been used since his return flight from New Orleans. The same was done with the suppressor. He reassembled both, checking the match-up of the parts. He’d made one small change. Now there was a thin white painted line down the top of the silencer that served as a night-sight. Not good enough for distance shooting, but he wasn’t planning any of that. Finished with the pistol, he loaded a round into the chamber and dropped the hammer carefully before slapping the clip into the bottom of the handgrip. He’d also acquired a Ka-Bar Marine combat knife in a surplus store, and while he’d watched the streets the night before, he’d worked the seven-inch Bowie-type blade across a whetstone. There was something that men feared about a knife even more than a bullet. That was foolish but useful. The pistol and knife went into his waistband side by side in the small of his back, well hidden by the loose bulk of the dark shirt and bush jacket. In one of the jacket pockets went a whiskey flask filled with tap water. Four Snickers went on the other side. Around his waist was a length of eight-gauge electrical wire. In his pants pocket was a pail of Playtex rubber glovers. These were yellow, not a good color for invisibility, but he’d been unable to find anything else. They did cover his hands without giving away much in feel and dexterity, and he decided to take them along. He already had a pair of cotton work gloves in the car that he wore when driving. After buying the car he’d cleaned it inside and out, wiping every glass, metal, and plastic surface, hoping that he’d removed every trace of fingerprints. Kelly blessed every police show and movie he’d even seen, and prayed that he was being paranoid enough about his every tactic.