unlikely. They can pass unseen by mortals as easily as they breathe.”
“Yeah, but if anyone could do it, it would be June. Besides, magic doesn’t
work as well here, remember?”
The hedge witch wrinkled her brow. “To be sure it is an unlikely tale for
her to concoct. Well, if it is true, then we must be even more careful
with our elf duke.”
“I thought you trusted him, more or less.”
“Less now than before.”
“I don’t know, though. If he wanted to harm us there are a lot easier ways
to do it. Why go through all this rigamarole of pretending to ally with
us?”
“Well,” Moira said, “it is said that elves are tricksome and strange.”
Twenty-one: THE GREAT PLANE ROBBERY
Ivan Semonovich Kuznetsov, major in the GRU, snapped awake and sought
groggily for the thing that had awakened him.
The four big Ivchenko turboprop engines on the wings of the AN 12
transport beat steadily as the plane bore east and a little north toward
Leningrad. His cheek was slightly numb from the cold and vibration where
it had rested against the metal side of the cabin.
But there had been something . . .
He shook it off. Too much vodka last night, that was all. Truly it was a
terrible thing to grow old. Not that thirty-three was old, but he could no
longer drink the night away and rise fresh with the dawn.
But this dawn there was cause enough for celebration. Snug in the belly of
the aircraft was the newest, fastest graphics supercomputer the Americans
made. In a few hours it would be in Leningrad and Major Ivan Kuznetsov
could expect to share in the rewards of a job well done.
The computer had traveled a long and shifty path from the factory in
Texas. It had originally been ordered for a research institute in England,
but by a carefully staged “coincidence” it had been diverted to Austria
and from there on to what had been East Germany where the Soviet
intelligence service still had friends. Kuznetsov had some small part in
all of that. Now he was accompanying it on the last leg of its trip to the
Soviet Union.
Where it would go once it reached Soviet soil he did not know and would
never have dreamed to ask. There were many important projects in the
motherland that required computers which were beyond the current abilities
of the socialist nations to build. Since the Americans still would not
sell such computers openly, the nation relied on the GRU, the intelligence
arm of the Red Army, to acquire them in other ways.
“Comrade Major . . .” Kuznetsov jerked fully awake. Whenever one of his
subordinates addressed him as “comrade” he knew something had gone wrong.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“The computer . . .” Vasily began. In a flash the GRU major was out of his
seat, thrusting the man out of the way and diving headlong through the
door into the cargo compartment.
“It’s gone,” the sergeant’s voice echoed after him.
Kuznetsov didn’t need Vasily to tell him that. The webbing that had bound
the computer tightly in place was a tangled limp mass on the floor. The
wooden pallets were exactly as they had been, but the crates were gone.
“Yo momma!”
Like a wild beast Kuznetsov spun and sprang for the cockpit door. His
sergeant pressed against the bulkhead to let him pass as he squeezed into
the cockpit. Before the pilot could turn to him he grabbed the man’s
shoulder and tried to twist him around in his seat.
“The cargo door,” he demanded. “When did it open?”
“It didn’t open,” the pilot, Volkov, protested. “There’s an indicator . .
.”
“The devil take your fucking indicator,” the GRU man roared. “When did
that door open?”
“It didn’t! We would have felt it in the controls. Comrade Major, I swear
to you on my mother’s grave that door did not open.”
“Don’t lie to me! That door opened. Now when?” He took a deep breath,
pulled his pistol from its holster and pressed it against Volkov’s head,
just in front of his earphones. “If you do not tell me the truth