“Does it still hurt, my friend?” Grishanov asked.
“I think I have some broken ribs.”
Zacharias sat down in the chair, breathing slowly and in obvious pain. That worried the Russian. Such an injury could lead to pneumonia, and pneumonia could kill a man in this physical condition. The guards had been a little too enthusiastic in their assault on the man, and though it had been done at Grishanov’s request, he hadn’t wanted to do more than to inflict some pain. A dead prisoner would not tell him what he needed to know.
“I’ve spoken to Major Vinh. The little savage says he has no medicines to spare.” Grishanov shrugged. “It might even be true. The pain, it is bad?”
“Every time I breathe,” Zacharias replied, and he was clearly speaking the truth. His skin was even paler than usual.
“I have only one thing for pain, Robin,” Kolya said apologetically, holding out his flask.
The American colonel shook his head, and even that appeared to hurt him. “I can’t.”
Grishanov spoke with the frustration of a man trying to reason with a friend. “Then you are a fool, Robin. Pain serves no one, not you, not me, not your God. Please, let me help you a little. Please?”
Can’t do it, Zacharias told himself. To do so was to break his covenant. His body was a temple, and he had to keep it pure of such things as this. But the temple was broken. He feared internal bleeding most of all. Would his body be able to heal itself? It should, and under anything approaching normal circumstances, it would do so easily, but he knew that his physical condition was dreadful, his back still injured, and now his ribs. Pain was a companion now, and pain would make it harder for him to resist questions, and so he had to measure his religion against his duty to resist. Things were less clear now. Easing the pain might make it easier to heal, and easier to stick to his duty. So what was the right thing? What ought to have been an easy question was clouded, and his eyes looked at the metal container. There was relief there. Not much, but some, and some relief was what he needed if he were to control himself.
Grishanov unscrewed the cap. “Do you ski, Robin?”
Zacharias was surprised by the question. “Yes, I learned when I was a kid.”
“Cross-country?”
The American shook his head. “No, downhill.”
“The snow in the Wasatch Mountains, it is good for skiing?”
Robin smiled, remembering. “Very good, Kolya. It’s dry snow. Powdery, almost like very fine sand.”
“Ah, the best kind of all. Here.” He handed the flask over.
Just this once, Zacharias thought. Just for the pain. He took a swallow. Push the pain back a few steps, just so I can keep myself together.
Grishanov watched him do it, saw his eyes water, hoping the man wouldn’t cough and hurt himself more. It was good vodka, obtained from the embassy’s storeroom in Hanoi, the one thing his country always had in good supply, and the one thing the embassy always had enough of. The best quality of paper vodka, Kolya’s personal favorite, actually flavored with old paper, something this American was unlikely to note—and something he himself missed after the third or fourth drink, if the truth be known.
“You are a good skier, Robin?”
Zacharias felt the warmth in his belly as it spread out and allowed his body to relax. In that relaxation his pain lessened, and he felt a little stronger, and if this Russian wanted to talk skiing, well, that couldn’t hurt much, could it?
“I ski the expert slopes,” Robin said with satisfaction. “I started when I was a kid. I think I was five when Dad took me the first time.”
“Your father—also a pilot?”
The American shook his head. “No, a lawyer.”
“My father is a professor of history at Moscow State University. We have a dacha, and in the winter when I was little, I could ski in the woods. I love the silence. All you can hear is the—how you say, swish? Swish of the skis in the snow. Nothing else. Like a blanket on the earth, no noise, just silence.”
“If you go up early, the mountains can be like that. You pick a day right after the snow ends, not much wind.”
Kolya smiled. “Like flying, isn’t it? Flying in a single-seat aircraft, a fair day with a few white clouds.” He leaned forward with a crafty look. “Tell me, do you ever turn your radio off for a few minutes, just to be alone?”
“They let you do that?” Zacharias asked.
Grishanov chuckled, shaking his head. “No, but I do it anyway.”
“Good for you,” Robin said with a smile of his own, remembering what it was like. He thought of one particular afternoon, flying out of Mountain Home Air Force Base one February day in 1964.
“It is how God must feel, yes? All alone. You can ignore the noise of the engine. For me it just goes away after a few minutes. Is it the same for you?”
“Yeah, if your helmet fits right.”
“That is the real reason I fly,” Grishanov lied. “All the other rubbish, the paperwork, and the mechanical things, and the lectures, they are the price. To be up there, all alone, just like when I was a boy skiing in the woods—but better. You can see so far on a clear winter day.” He handed Zacharias the flask again. “Do you suppose these little savages understand that?”
“Probably not.” He wavered for a moment. Well, he’d already had one. Another couldn’t hurt, could it? Zacharias took another swallow.
“What I do, Robin, I hold the stick just in my fingertips, like this.” He demonstrated with the top of the flask. “I close my eyes for a moment, and when I open them, the world is different. Then I am not part of the world anymore. I am something else—an angel, perhaps,” he said with good humor. “Then I possess the sky as I would like to possess a woman, but it is never quite the same. The best feelings are supposed to be alone, I think.”
This guy really understands, doesn’t he? He really understands flying. “You a poet or something?”
“I love poetry. I do not have the talent to make it, but that does not prevent me from reading it, and memorizing it, feeling what the poet tells me to feel,” Grishanov said quietly, actually meaning what he said as he watched the American’s eyes lose focus, becoming dreamy. “We are much alike, my friend.”
“What’s the story on Ju-Ju?” Tucker asked.
“Looks like a ripoff. He got careless. One of yours, eh?” Charon said.
“Yeah, he moved a lot for us.”
“Who did it?” They were in the Main Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, hidden in some rows, an ideal place, really. Hard to approach without being spotted, and impossible to bug. Even though a quiet place, there were just too many of the little alcoves.
“No telling, Henry. Ryan and Douglas were there, and it didn’t look to me like they had much. Hey, you going to get that worked up over one pusher?”
“You know better than that, but it puts a little dent in things. Never had one of mine wasted before.”
“You know better than that, Henry.” Charon flipped through some pages. “It’s a high-risk business. Somebody wanted a little cash, maybe some drugs, too, maybe break into the business quick? Look for a new pusher selling your stuff, maybe. Hell, as good as they were on the hit, maybe you could reach an understanding with ’em.”
“I have enough dealers. And making peace like that is bad for business. How they do ’em?”
“Very professional. Two in the head each. Douglas was talking like it was a mob hit.”
Tucker turned his head. “Oh?”
Charon spoke calmly, his back to the man. “Henry, this wasn’t the outfit. Tony isn’t going to do anything like that, is he?”
“Probably not.” But Eddie might.
“I need something,” Charon said next.
“What?”
“A dealer. What did you expect, a tip on the second at Pimlico?”
“Too many of ’em are mine now, remember?” It had been all right—better than that, really—to use Charon to eliminate the major competition, but as Tucker
had consolidated his control on the local trade, he was able to target fewer and fewer independent operators for judicial elimination. That was particularly true of the majors. He had systematically picked out people with whom he had no interest in working, and the few who were left might be useful allies rather than rivals, if he could only find a way to negotiate with them.
“If you want me to be able to protect you, Henry, then I have to be able to control investigations. For me to control the investigations, I have to land some big fish from time to time.” Charon put the book back on the shelf. Why did he have to explain things like this to the man?
“When?”
“Beginning of the week, something tasty. I want to take down something that looks nice.”
“I’ll get back to you.” Tucker replaced his book and walked away. Charon spent another few minutes, searching for the right book. He found it, along with the envelope that sat next to it. The police lieutenant didn’t bother counting. He knew that the amount would be right.
Greer handled the introductions.
“Mr. Clark, this is General Martin Young, and this is Robert Ritter.”
Kelly shook hands with both. The Marine was an aviator, like Maxwell and Podulski, both of whom were absent from this meeting. He hadn’t a clue who Ritter was, but he was the one who spoke first.
“Nice analysis. Your language wasn’t exactly bureaucratic, but you hit all the high points.”
“Sir, it’s not really all that hard to figure out. The ground assault ought to be fairly easy. You don’t have first-line troops in a place like this, and those you have are looking in, not out. Figure two guys in each tower. The MGs are going to be set to point in, right? It takes a few seconds to move them. You can use the treeline to get close enough for M-79 range.” Kelly moved his hands around the diagram. “Here’s the barracks, only two doors, and I bet there’s not forty guys in there.”
“Come in here?” General Young tapped the southwest corner on the compound.
“Yes, sir.” For an airedale, the Marine caught on pretty fast. “The trick’s getting the initial strike team in close. You’ll use weather for that, and this time of the year that shouldn’t be real hard. Two gunships, just regular rockets and miniguns to hose these two buildings. Land the evac choppers here. It’s all over in under five minutes from when the shooting starts. That’s the land phase. I’ll leave the rest to the fliers.”
“So you say the real key is to get the assault element in close on the ground—”
“No, sir. If you want to do another Song Tay, you can duplicate the whole plan, crash the chopper in the compound, the whole nine yards—but I keep hearing you want it done small.”
“Correct,” Ritter said. “Has to be small. There’s no way we can sell this as a major operation.”
“Fewer assets, sir, and you have to use different tactics. The good news is that it’s a small objective, not all that many people to get out, not many bad guys to get in the way.”
“But no safety factor,” General Young said, frowning.
“Not much of one,” Kelly agreed. “Twenty-five people. Land them in this valley, they hump over this hill, get into place, do the towers, blow this gate. Then the gunships come in and hose these two buildings while the assault element hits this building here. The snakes orbit while the slicks do the pickup, and we all boogie the hell down the valley.”
“Mr. Clark, you’re an optimist,” Greer observed, reminding Kelly of his cover name at the same time. If General Young found out that Kelly had been a mere chief, they’d never get his support, and Young had already stretched a long way for them, using up his whole year’s construction budget to build the mockup in the woods of Quantico.
“It’s all stuff I’ve done before, Admiral.”
“Who’s going to get the personnel?” Ritter asked.
“That’s being taken care of,” James Greer assured him.
Ritter sat back, looking at the photos and diagrams. He was putting his career on the line, as was Greer and everyone else. But the alternative to doing something was doing nothing. Doing nothing meant that at least one good man, and perhaps twenty more, would never come home again. That wasn’t the real reason, though, Ritter admitted to himself. The real reason was that others had decided that the lives of those men didn’t matter, and those others might make the same decision again. That kind of thinking would someday destroy his Agency. You couldn’t recruit agents if the word got out that America didn’t protect those who worked for her. Keeping faith was more than the right thing. It was also good business.
“Better to get things going before we break the story,” he said. “It’ll be easier to get a ’go-mission’ if we’ve already got it ready to go. Make it look like a unique opportunity. That’s the other big mistake they made with KINGPIN. It was too obviously aimed at getting a hunting license, and that was never in the cards. What we have here is a one-time rescue mission. I can take that to my friends in the NSC. That’ll fly, probably, but we have to be ready to go when I do that.”
“Bob, does that mean you’re on our side?” Greer asked.
Ritter took a long moment before answering. “Yes, it does.”
“We need an additional safety factor,” Young said, looking at the large-scale map, figuring how the helicopters would get in.
“Yes, sir,” Kelly said. “Somebody has to go in early and eyeball things.” They still had both photos of Robin Zacharias out, one of an Air Force colonel, standing upright, holding his cap under his arm, chest decorated with silver wings and ribbons, smiling confidently into the camera with his family arrayed around him; and the other of a bowed, bedraggled man, about to be butt-stroked from behind. Hell, he thought, why not one more crusade?
“I guess that’s me.”
17
Complications
Archie hadn’t known much, but it turned out to be enough for Kelly’s purposes. All he really needed now was a little more sleep.
Tracking someone in a car, he found, was harder than it appeared on TV, and harder than it had been in New Orleans the one time he’d attempted it. If you followed too closely you ran the risk of being spotted. If you held too far back, you might lose the guy. Traffic complicated everything. Trucks could obstruct your vision. Watching one car half a block away necessarily caused you to ignore cars closer to you, and those, he found, could do the damnedest things. For all that, he blessed Billy’s red Roadrunner. It was easy to spot, with its bright color, and even though the driver liked to lay rubber on the street and corner, he still couldn’t break all that many traffic laws without attracting the attention of the police, something he didn’t want to do any more than Kelly did.
Kelly had sighted the car just after seven in the evening, close to the bar which Archie had identified. Whatever he was like, Kelly thought, he didn’t know much about being covert, but the car told him that. The mud was gone, he saw at once. The car looked freshly washed and waxed, and from their previous encounter, he knew Billy to be a man who treasured the thing. It offered a few interesting possibilities which Kelly considered while he trailed him, never closer than half a block, getting a feel for how he moved. It was soon apparent that he stayed clear of the major thoroughfares as much as possible and knew the side streets as a weasel knew his den. That placed Kelly at a disadvantage. Balancing it was the fact that Kelly was driving a car nobody noticed. There were just too many used Beetles on the street for one more to attract notice.
After forty minutes the pattern became clear. The Roadrunner turned right quickly and came to a stop at the end of the block. Kelly weighed his options and kept going, slowly. As he approached he saw a girl get out, carrying a purse. She walked up to an old friend, the Wizard, several blocks from his usual hangout. Kelly didn’t see a transfer of any kind—the two walked into a building and remained hidden for a minute or two until the girl came out—but he didn’t have to. The event fitted what Pam had told him. Better yet, it identified the Wizard, Kelly told himself, t
urning left and approaching a red light. Now he knew two things he hadn’t known before. In his rearview mirror he saw the Roadrunner cross the street. The girl headed the same way, disappearing from his view as the light changed. Kelly turned right and right again, spotting the Plymouth as it proceeded south with three people inside. He hadn’t noticed the man—probably a man—before, crouching in back.
Darkness was falling rapidly, the good time of the day for John Kelly. He continued to follow the Roadrunner, leaving his lights off as long as he dared, and was rewarded by seeing it stop at a brownstone corner house, where all three occupants got out, having made their deliveries for the night to four pushers. He gave them a few minutes, parking his car a few blocks away and coming back on foot to observe, again disguised as a street drunk. The local architecture made it easier. All of the houses on the other side of the street had marble front steps, large, rectangular blocks of stone that made for good cover and concealment. It was just a matter of sitting on the sidewalk and leaning back against them, and he could not be seen from behind. Picking the right set of steps, close but not too close to a working street light, gave him a nice shadow in which to conceal himself, and besides, who paid any attention to a street bum anyway? Kelly adopted the same sort of drunken huddle he’d seen in others, occasionally lifting his bag-covered bottle for a simulated sip while he watched the corner brownstone for several hours.