immediately I will blow your brains all over this cabin.”
The co-pilot and flight engineer had their eyes studiously glued to their
instrument panels. The pilot looked at the pistol out of the corner of his
eye and Kuznetsov jammed the gun against his head even harder.
“Major,” Captain Volkov said with quiet dignity, “you may arrest me. You
may shoot me here and now. But that door did not open. It could not have.”
“Very well,” Kuznetsov said softly, so softly he was almost inaudible over
the roar of the engines. “Very well, the door did not open.” He took the
gun from the pilot’s head. “Then would you please tell me where is the
fucking cargo?” His voice dropped again to a near whisper. “That is all I
want to know.”
Volkov blanched and started out of the pilot’s seat. Kuznetsov moved to
block him and then thought better of it. He nodded curtly. “Sergeant,
accompany him.”
As the two scrambled aft Kuznetsov stared moodily at the cloudscape below
him. They were somewhere over Estonia, he knew, and the Estonians were
notorious through the USSR as the biggest thieves of state property in all
the republics. The Georgians were bigger black marketers and the
Azerbijaniis were more violent, but over the years the Estonians had
stolen everything from a freight train to an entire fleet of fishing
trawlers. “Well, this time those damned Estonians have gone too far,” he
muttered to himself.
“Sir?” asked the co-pilot. Then he withered under the GRU man’s glare.
“Sir, should I radio Leningrad and declare an emergency?”
“No, you idiot! The last thing we need is to have Leningrad Center
shouting questions at us.”
Although the questions would come soon enough, he realized. Chill fear
clutched at his stomach as he thought what those questions would be like.
Just then the intercom squawked. “Major,” Vasily’s voice came over the
loudspeaker. “Major, I think you’d better come down here and take a look
at this.”
Kuznetsov looked down at the co-pilot and flight engineer and decided he
was not going to leave them alone in the cockpit to do God-knows-what.
“Come with me,” he commanded. The co-pilot opened his mouth to protest and
Kuznetsov touched his holster. “Now,” he ordered, “immediately.”
Wordlessly the men slid out of their seats and preceded the major down to
the cargo deck.
Volkov and Vasily were squatting over the heap of webbing where the
computer had been, staring intently at one of the pallets. As Kuznetsov
made his way back to them, bracing with one hand against the side of the
plane, he saw there was a small pile of something shiny and metallic in
among the straps and buckles.
“When we looked closely we found this,” Vasily shouted to make himself
heard over the din of the engines. He handed Kuznetsov an object off the
stack, an object that glinted like summer sunlight even in the gloom of
the aircraft deck.
Kuznetsov had never seen gold before, but no one had to tell him this was
gold.
“But where did it come from?” Volkov asked, bewildered.
“That is a very good question,” Kuznetsov said, kneeling down to study the
pile of gold bars. They were surprisingly tiny, each one fitting neatly in
the palm of his hand and weighing about two kilograms. There were no
identifying marks of the kind usually found on bar gold, not even
assayer’s marks.
“How much do you suppose it is worth?” asked the co-pilot.
“If I had to guess, I would say perhaps ten million American dollars. That
was the value of our cargo.”
“What was our cargo, anyway?” the pilot asked.
The GRU man glared at him. “That is none of your concern.”
Volkov did not flinch. “If my career is to be ruined I would at least like
to know what over.”
Kuznetsov considered and then nodded. “Very well. It was an American
supercomputer. The latest model of supercomputer and one that took us
nearly two years to acquire.”
The pilot’s mouth dropped as he realized the enormity of the loss.
“Boishemoi!” he breathed.
The GRU man nodded curtly. “Just so.”
“What I don’t understand,” the co-pilot said, “is why go to the trouble of