Red Rabbit

  “How long on the candle?” Small asked by the truck.

  “Thirty minutes at most,” the Royal Engineer sergeant answered.

  “That poor little girl—you suppose?” he almost asked.

  “People die in house fires every day, mate. They didn’t do it special for this lot.”

  Small nodded to himself. “I reckon.”

  Just then Tom Trent appeared in the lobby. They’d never found the camera he lost in an upstairs room, but he tipped the desk clerk for his effort. It turned out that he was the only employee on duty until five in the morning.

  Or so the chap thinks, Trent told himself, getting into the truck.

  “Back to the embassy, lads,” the spook told the security men. “There’s a good bottle of single-malt Scotch whiskey waiting for us all.”

  “Good. I could use a dram,” Small observed, thinking of the little girl. “Or two.”

  “Can you say what this adventure is all about?”

  “Not tonight. Perhaps later,” Trent replied.

  CHAPTER 28

  BRITISH MIDLANDS

  THE CANDLE BURNED NORMALLY, not knowing the part it was playing in the night’s adventures, consuming wick and wax at a slow pace, gradually burning down to the still surface of the alcohol—soon to play the part of an accelerant in an arson fire. All in all, it took thirty-four minutes before the surface of the flammable fluid ignited. What started then is called a class-B fire by professionals—a flammable-liquid event. The alcohol burned with an enthusiasm hardly less than that of gasoline—this was why the Germans had used alcohol rather than kerosene in their V-2 missile—and rapidly consumed the cardboard of the milk carton, releasing the burning quart of alcohol onto the floor. That ignited the soaked surface of the hotel room’s rug. The blue wave of the fire-front raced across the room’s floor in a matter of seconds, like a living thing, a blue line followed by an incandescent white mass as the fire reached up to consume the available oxygen in the high-ceilinged room. Another moment and both beds ignited as well, enveloping the bodies in them with flames and searing heat.

  The Hotel Astoria was an old one, lacking both smoke detectors and automatic sprinklers to warn of danger or extinguish the blaze before it got too dangerous. Instead the flames climbed almost immediately to the water-stained white ceiling, burning off paint and charring the underlying plaster, plus attacking the cheap hotel furniture. The inside of the room turned into a crematorium for three human beings already dead, eating their bodies like the carnivorous animal the ancient Egyptians thought a fire to be. The worst of the damage took just five minutes, but while the fire died down somewhat after its first glut of consumption, it didn’t die just yet.

  The desk clerk in the lobby had a more complex job than one might have expected. At two-thirty every morning, he placed a please-wait-back-in-a few-minutes sign on the desk, and took the elevator to the top floor to walk the corridors. He found the usual—nothing at all in this floor, and all the others, until getting to number three.

  Coming down the steps, he noticed an unusual smell. That perked his senses, but not all that much until his feet touched the floor. Then he turned left and saw a wisp of smoke coming out from under the door to 307. He took the three steps to the door, and touched the knob, finding it hot, but not painfully so. That was when he made his mistake.

  Taking the passkey from his pocket, he unlocked the door, and without feeling the wooden portion to see if that was hot, he pushed the door open.

  The fire had largely died down, starved of oxygen, but the room remained hot, the hotel walls insulating the incipient blaze as efficiently as a barbecue pit. Opening the door admitted a large volume of fresh air and oxygen to the room, and barely had he had the chance to see the horror within when a phenomenon called flashover happened.

  It was the next thing to an explosion. The room reignited in a blast of flame and a further intake of air, sufficiently strong that it nearly pulled the clerk off his feet and into the room even as an outward blast of flame pushed him the other way—and saved his life. Slapping his hands to his flash-burned face, he fell to his knees and struggled to the manual-pull alarm on the wall next to the elevator—without pulling 307’s door back shut. That sounded alarm bells throughout the hotel and also reported to the nearest firehouse, three kilometers away. Screaming with pain, he walked, or fell, down the stairs to the lobby, where he first threw a glass of water on his burned face, then called the emergency number next to the phone to report the fire to the city fire department. By this time people were coming down the stairs. For them, getting past the third floor had been harrowing, and the clerk, burned as he was, got an extinguisher to spray on them, but he was unable to climb back to use the fire hose in its little cabinet on the involved floor. It would not have mattered anyway.

  The first fire truck arrived less than five minutes after the pull alarm had sounded. Hardly needing to be told—the fire was visible from outside, since the room’s windows had shattered from the heat of the renewed blaze—they forced their way past the escaping hotel guests. Within a minute after arriving, the first seventy-millimeter hose was spraying water into the room. It took less than five minutes to knock the fire down, and through the smoke and horrid smell, the firemen forced their way inside to find what they feared—a family of three, dead in their beds.

  The fire lieutenant in command of the first responders cradled the dead child in his arms and ran down and out onto the street, but he could see it was a waste. The child had roasted like a piece of meat in an oven. Hosing her body down only exposed the ghastly effect a fire has on a human body, and there was nothing for him to do but say a prayer for her. The lieutenant was the brother of a priest and a devout Catholic in this Marxist country, and he prayed to his God for mercy for the little girl’s soul, not knowing that the very same thing had happened over four thousand miles away and ten days earlier.

  THE RABBITS WERE out of the city in a matter of minutes. Hudson drove carefully, within the posted speed limits, lest there be a cop around, though there was virtually no traffic in evidence, merely the occasional truck, commercial ones with canvas sides, carrying who knew what to who knew where. Ryan was in the right-front seat, half turned to look in the back. Irina Zaitzev was a mask of tipsy confusion, not comprehending enough to be frightened. The child was asleep, as children invariably were at this time of night. The father was trying to be stoic, but the edge of fear was visible on his face, even in the darkness. Ryan tried to put himself in his place, but found it impossible to do so. To betray one’s country was too great a leap of imagination for him. He knew there were those who stabbed America in the back, mainly for money, but he didn’t pretend to understand their motivation. Sure, back in the ’30s and ’40s there had been those for whom communism looked like the leading wave of human history, but those thoughts were all as dead as V. I. Lenin was today. Communism was a dying idea, except in the minds of those who needed it to be the source of their personal power. . . . And perhaps some still believed in it because they’d never been exposed to anything else, or because the idea had been too firmly planted in their distant youth, as a minister or priest believed in God. But the words of Lenin’s Collected Works were not Holy Writ to Ryan and never would be. As a new college graduate, he’d sworn his oath to the Constitution of the United States and promised to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same” as a second lieutenant of the United States Marine Corps, and that was that.

  “How long, Andy?”

  “A little over an hour to Csurgo. Traffic ought not to be a problem,” Hudson answered.

  And it wasn’t. In minutes, they were outside the boundaries of Hungary’s capital, and then the lights of houses and businesses just stopped as though someone had flipped the master switch for electricity to the region. The road was two-lane blacktop, and none too wide at that. Telephone poles, no guardrails. And this is a major commercial highway? Ryan wondered. They might as well have been driving across central Nevada. Perhaps
one or two lights every kilometer, farmhouses where people liked to have one on to help find their way to the bathroom. Even the road signs looked decrepit and not very helpful—not the mint-green highway signs of home or the friendly blue ones of England. It didn’t help that the words on them were in Martian. Otherwise they were the European sort, showing the speed limit in black numbers on a white disc within a red circle.

  Hudson was a competent driver, puffing away on his cigars and driving as though he were on his way to Covent Garden in London. Ryan thanked God that he’d made a trip to the head before walking to the hotel—otherwise he might lose control of his bladder. Well, probably his face didn’t show how nervous he was, Jack hoped. He kept telling himself that his own life wasn’t on the line, but those of the people in the back were, and they were now his responsibility, and something in him, probably something learned from his policeman father, made that a matter of supreme importance.

  “What is your full name?” Oleg asked him, breaking the silence unexpectedly.

  “Ryan, Jack Ryan.”

  “What sort of name is Ryan?” the Rabbit pressed on.

  “My ancestry is Irish. John corresponds to Ivan, I think, but people call me Jack, like Vanya, maybe.”

  “And you are in CIA?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “What is your job in CIA?”

  “I am an analyst. Mostly I sit at a desk and write reports.”

  “I also sit at desk in Centre.”

  “You are a communications officer?”

  A nod. “Da, that is my job in Centre.” Then Zaitzev remembered that his important information was not for the back of a car, and he shut back up.

  Ryan saw that. He had things to say, but not here, and that was fair enough for the moment.

  The trip went smoothly. Four cigars for Hudson, and six cigarettes for Ryan, until they approached the town of Csurgo.

  Ryan had expected something more than this. Csurgo was barely a wide place in the road, with not even a gas station in evidence, and surely not an all-night 7-Eleven. Hudson turned off the main road onto a dirt track, and three minutes later there was the shape of a commercial truck. It was a big Volvo, he saw in a moment, with a black canvas cover on the back and two men standing next to it, both smoking. Hudson pulled around it, finding concealment behind some nondescript sort of shed a few yards from it, and stopped the Jaguar. He hopped out, and motioned to the rest to do the same.

  Ryan followed the Brit spook to the two men. Hudson walked right up to the older of the two and shook his hand.

  “Hello, Istvan. Good of you to wait for us.”

  “Hello, Andy. It is a dull night. Who are your friends?”

  “This is Mr. Ryan. These are the Somerset family. We’re going across the border,” Hudson explained.

  “Okay,” Kovacs agreed. “This is Jani. He’s my driver for tonight. Andy, you can ride in front with us. The rest will be in the back. Come,” he said, leading the way.

  The truck’s tailgate had ladder steps built in. Ryan climbed up first, and bent down to lift the little girl—Svetlana, he remembered, was her name—and watched her mother and father climb up. In the cargo area, he saw, were some large cardboard boxes, perhaps containers for the tape machine Hungarians made. Kovacs climbed up also.

  “You all speak English?” he asked, and got nods. “It is a short way to the border, just five kilometer. You will hide in boxes here. Please make no noise. Is important. You understand? Make no noise.” He got more nods, noting that the man—definitely not an Englishman, he could see—translated to his wife. The man took the child, Kovacs saw also. With his cargo hidden away, he closed the tailgate and walked forward.

  “Five thousand d-mark for this, eh?” Istvan asked.

  “That is correct,” Hudson agreed.

  “I should ask more, but I am not a greedy man.”

  “You are a trusted comrade, my friend,” Hudson assured him, briefly wishing that he had a pistol in his belt.

  The Volvo’s big diesel lit up with a rumbling roar and the truck jerked off, back to the main road, with Jani at the large, almost flat steering wheel.

  It didn’t take long.

  And that was a good thing for Ryan, crouching in the cardboard box in the back. He could only guess how the Russians felt, like unborn babies in a horrible womb, one with loaded guns outside it.

  Ryan was afraid even to smoke a final cigarette, fearing someone might smell the smoke over the pungent diesel exhaust, which was altogether unlikely.

  “So, Istvan,” Hudson asked in the cab, “what is the routine?”

  “Watch. We usually travel at night. Is more—dramatic, you say? I know the Határ-rség here many years now. Captain Budai Laszlo is good man to do business with. He has wife and little daughter, always want present for daughter Zsóka. I have,” Kovacs promised, holding up a paper bag.

  The border post was sufficiently well lighted that they could see it three kilometers off, and blessedly there was little traffic this time of night. Jani drove up normally, slowing and stopping there when the private of the border guards, the Határ-rség, waved for them to halt.

  “Is Captain Budai here?” Kovacs asked at once. “I have something for him.” The private headed into the guardhouse and returned instantly with a more senior man.

  “Laszlo! How are you this cold night?” Kovacs called in Magyar, then jumped down from the cab with the paper shopping bag.

  “Istvan, what can I say, it is dull night,” the youngish captain replied.

  “And your little Zsóka, she is well?”

  “Her birthday is next week. She will be five.”

  “Excellent!” the smuggler observed. He handed over the bag. “Give her these.”

  “These” were a pair of candy-apple-red Reebok sneakers with Velcro closures.

  “Lovely,” Captain Budai observed, with genuine pleasure. He took them out to look at them in the light. Any female child in the world loved the things, and Laszlo was as happy as his daughter would be in four days. “You are a good friend, Istvan. So, what do you transport tonight?”

  “Nothing of value. I’m making a pickup this morning in Beograd, though. Anything you need?”

  “My wife would love some tapes for the Walkman you got her last month.” The amazing thing about Budai was that he was not an overly greedy man. That was one of the reasons Kovacs liked to travel across the border on his watch.

  “What groups?”

  “The Bee Gees, I think she called them. For me, some show tunes, if you don’t mind.”

  “Anything in particular? The music from American movies, like Star Wars, perhaps.”

  “I have that one, but not the new one, the Empire Attacks Back, perhaps?”

  “Done.” They shook hands. “How about some Western coffee?”

  “What kind?”

  “Austrian or American, maybe? There’s a place in Beograd that has American Folgers coffee. It is very tasty,” Kovacs assured him.

  “I have never tried that.”

  “I’ll get you some and you can try it—no charge.”

  “You are a good man,” Budai observed. “Have a good night. Pass,” he concluded, waving to his corporal.

  And it was just that easy. Kovacs walked back around and climbed into his truck. He wouldn’t have to part with the present he had for Sergeant Kerekes Mikaly, and that was good, too.

  Hudson was surprised. “No paper check?”

  “Laszlo just runs the name through the teletype to Budapest. Some people there are also on my payroll. They are more greedy than he is, but is not major expense. Jani, go,” he said to the driver, who started up and pulled across the line painted on the pavement. And just that easily, the truck left the Warsaw Pact.

  In the back, Ryan had rarely felt so good to feel a vehicle start to move. It stopped again in a minute, but this was a different border.

  And going into Yugoslavia, Jani handled it, just trading a few words with the guard, not even killing th
e engine, before being waved forward and into the semi-communist country. He drove three kilometers before being told to pull off onto a side road. There, after a few bumps, the Volvo stopped. Yugoslavian border security, Hudson saw, was sod-all.

  Ryan was already out of his cardboard box and standing at the back when the canvas cover was flipped aside.

  “We’re here, Jack,” Hudson said.

  “Where is that exactly?”

  “Yugoslavia, my lad. The nearest town is Légrád, and here we part company.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, I’m turning you over to Vic Lucas. He’s my counterpart in Belgrade. Vic?” Hudson beckoned.

  The man who came into view might have been Hudson’s twin, except for the hair, which was black. He was also two or three inches taller, Jack decided on second inspection. He went forward to get the Rabbits out of the boxes. That happened in a hurry, and Ryan helped them down, handing the little girl—remarkably, still asleep—to her mother, who looked more confused than ever.

  Hudson walked them to a car, a station wagon—“estate wagon” to the Brits—which would at least have ample room for everyone.

  “Sir John—Jack, that is—well done, and thanks for all your help.”

  “I didn’t do shit, Andy, but you handled this pretty damned well,” Ryan said, taking his hand. “Come see me in London for a pint sometime.”

  “That I shall do,” Hudson promised.

  The estate wagon was a British Ford. Ryan helped the Rabbits into their seats and then took the right-front again.

  “Mr. Lucas, where do we go now?”

  “To the airport. Our flight is waiting,” the Belgrade COS replied.

  “Oh? Special flight?”

  “No, the commercial aircraft is experiencing ‘technical difficulties’ at the moment. I rather expect they will be cleared up about the time we get aboard.”

  “Good to know,” Ryan observed. Better this than a real broken airplane, then he realized that one more harrowing adventure lay ahead. His hatred of flying was suddenly back, now that they were in semi-free country.