“The victim’s shoulder appears to be dislocated. Make that wrecked,” the ME added after a second’s consideration. “We have bruising around the wrist from the force of the grip. Somebody held the arm with two hands and damned near tore the arm off, like taking a branch off a tree.”
“Karate move?” Douglas asked.
“Something like that. That sure slowed him down some. You can see the cause of death.”
“Lieutenant, over here,” a uniformed sergeant called. “This is Virginia Charles, she lives a block over. She reported the crime.”
“Are you okay, Miss Charles?” Ryan asked. A fireman-paramedic was checking the bandage she’d placed on her own arm, and her son, a senior at Dunbar High School, stood by her side, looking down at the murder victim without a trace of sympathy. Within four minutes Ryan had a goodly quantity of information.
“A bum, you say?” “Wino—that’s the bottle he dropped.” She pointed. Douglas picked it up with the greatest care.
“Can you describe him?” Lieutenant Ryan asked.
The routine was so exactingly normal that they might have been at any Marine base from Lejeune to Okinawa. The daily-dozen exercises followed by a run, everyone in step, the senior NCO calling cadence. They took particular pleasure in passing formations of new second lieutenants in the Basic Officers Course, or even more wimpy examples of officer-wannabes doing their summer school at Quantico. Five miles, passing the five-hundred-yard KD range and various other teaching facilities, all of them named for dead Marines, approaching the FBI Academy, but turning back off the main road then, into the woods towards their training site. The morning routine merely reminded them that they were Marines, and the length of the run made them Recon Marines, for whom Olympic-class fitness was the norm. They were surprised to see a general officer waiting for them. Not to mention a sandbox and a swing set.
“Welcome to Quantico, Marines,” Marty Young told them after they’d had a chance to cool down and been told to stand at ease. Off to the side, they saw two naval officers in sparkling undress whites, and a pair of civilians, watching and listening. Eyes narrowed collectively, and the mission was suddenly very interesting indeed.
“Just like looking at the photos,” Cas observed quietly, looking around the training site; they knew what the lecture was about. “Why the playground stuff?”
“My idea,” Greer said. “Ivan has satellites. The overhead schedules for the next six weeks are posted inside Building A. We don’t know how good the cameras are, and so I’m going to assume that they’re as good as ours, okay? You show the other guy what he wants to see or you make it easy for him to figure out. Any really harmless place has a parking lot.” The drill was already determined. Every day the new arrivals would move the cars around randomly. Around ten every day they would take the mannequins from the cars and distribute them around the playground equipment. At two or three the cars would be moved again and the mannequins rearranged. They suspected correctly that the ritual would acquire a great deal of institutional humor.
“And after it’s all over, it becomes a real playground?” Ritter asked, then answered his own question. “Hell, why not? Nice job, James.”
“Thank you, Bob.”
“It looks small this way,” Admiral Maxwell said.
“The dimensions are accurate to within three inches. We cheated,” Ritter said. “We have the Soviet manual for building places like this. Your General Young did a nice job.”
“No glass in the windows on Building C,” Casimir noted.
“Check the photos, Cas,” Greer suggested. “There’s a shortage of window glass over there. That building just has shutters, here and there. The callback”—he pointed to Building B—“has the bars. Just wood so that they can be removed later. We’ve just guessed at the inside arrangements, but we’ve had a few people released from the other side and we’ve modeled this place on the debriefs. It’s not totally made up from thin air.”
The Marines were already looking around, having learned a little of the mission. Much of the plan they already knew, and they were thinking about how to apply their lessons of real combat operations to this perverted playground, complete with child mannequins who would watch them train with blue doll eyes. M-79 grenades to blast the guard towers. Willie-pete through the barracks windows. Gunships to hose things down after that ... the “wives” and “kids” would watch the rehearsal and tell no one.
The site had been carefully selected for its similarity with another place—the Marines hadn’t needed to be told that; it had to be so—and a few eyes lingered on a hill half a mile from the site. You could see everything from there. After the welcoming speech, the men divided into predetermined units to draw their weapons. Instead of M16A1 rifles, they had the shorter CAR-15 carbines, shorter, handier, preferred for close work. Grenadiers had standard M-79 grenade launchers, whose sights had been painted with radioactive tritium to glow in the dark, and their bandoleers were heavy with practice rounds because weapons training would start immediately. They’d start in daylight for feel and proficiency, but almost immediately their training would switch exclusively to night work, which the General had left out. It was obvious in any case. This sort of job only happened at night. The men marched to the nearest weapons-firing range to familiarize themselves. Already set up were window frames, six of them. The grenadiers exchanged looks and fired off their first volley. One, to his shame, missed. The other five razzed him at once, after making sure that the white puffs from their training rounds had appeared behind the frames.
“All right, all right, I just have to warm up,” the corporal said defensively, then placed five shots through the target in forty seconds. He was slow—it had been a mainly sleepless night.
“How strong do you have to be to do that, I wonder?” Ryan asked.
“Sure as hell isn’t Wally Cox,” the ME observed. “The knife severed the spinal cord just where it enters the medulla. Death was instantaneous.”
“He already had the guy crippled. The shoulder as bad as it looks?” Douglas asked, stepping aside for the photographer to finish up.
“Worse, probably. We’ll look at it, but I’ll bet you the whole structure is destroyed. You don’t repair an injury like this, not all the way. His pitching career was over even before the knife.”
White, forty or older, long black hair, short, dirty. Ryan looked at his notes. “Go home, ma’am,” he’d told Virginia Charles.
Ma’am.
“Our victim was still alive when she walked away.” Douglas came over to his lieutenant. “Then he must have taken his knife away and gave it back. Em, in the past week we’ve seen four very expert murders and six very dead victims.”
“Four different MOs. Two guys tied up, robbed, and executed, .22 revolver, no sign of a struggle. One guy with a shotgun in the guts, also robbed, no chance to defend himself. Two last night just shot, probably a .22 again, but not robbed, not tied up, and they were alerted before they were shot. Those were all pushers. But this guy’s just a street hood. Not good enough, Tom.” But the Lieutenant had started thinking about it. “Have we ID’d this one yet?”
The uniformed sergeant answered. “Junkie. He’s got a rap sheet, six arrests for robbery, God knows what else.”
“It doesn’t fit,” Ryan said. “It doesn’t fit anything, and if you’re talking about a really clever guy, why let somebody see him, why let her leave, why talk to her—hell, why take this guy out at all? What pattern does that fit?” There was no pattern. Sure, the two pairs of drug dealers had been taken down with a .22, but the small-bore was the most commonly used weapon on the street, and while one pair had been robbed, the other had not; nor had the second pair been shot with the same deadly precision, though each did have two head wounds. The other murdered and robbed dealer had been done by a shotgun. “Look, we have the murder weapon, and we have the wine bottle, and from one or both we’ll get prints. Whoever this guy was, he sure as hell wasn’t real careful.”
“A wino with a sen
se of justice, Em?” Douglas prodded. “Whoever took this punk down—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. He wasn’t Wally Cox.” But who and what the hell was he?
Thank God for gloves, Kelly thought, looking at the bruises on his right hand. He’d let his anger get the better of him, and that wasn’t smart! Looking back, reliving the incident, he realized that he’d been faced with a difficult situation. If he’d let the woman get killed or seriously injured, and just gotten into his car and driven off, first, he’d never really have been able to forgive himself, and second, if anyone had seen the car, he’d be a murder suspect. That extended thought evoked a snort of disgust. He was a murder suspect now. Well, somebody would be. On coming home, he’d looked in the mirror, wig and all. Whatever that woman had seen, it had not been John Kelly, not with a face shadowed by his heavy beard, smeared with dirt, under a long and filthy wig. His hunched-over posture made him appear several inches shorter than he was. And the light on the street had not been good. And she’d been even more interested in getting away than anything else. Even so. He’d somehow left his wine bottle behind. He remembered dropping it to parry the knife thrust, and then in the heat of the moment he’d not recovered it. Dumb! Kelly raged at himself.
What would the police know? The physical description would not be a good one. He’d worn a pair of surgical gloves, and though they allowed him to bruise his hands, they hadn’t torn and he hadn’t bled. Most important of all, he had never touched the wine bottle with ungloved hands. Of that he was certain because he’d decided from the beginning to be careful about it. The police would know a street bum had killed that punk, but there were lots of street bums, and he only needed one more night. It meant that he’d have to alter his operational pattern even so, and that tonight’s mission was more dangerous than it ought to be, but his information on Billy was too good to pass up on, and the little bastard might be smart enough to change his own patterns. What if he used different houses to count his cash or only used one for a few nights? If that was true, any wait beyond a day or two might invalidate his whole reconnaissance effort, forcing him to start again with a new disguise—if he could select something equally effective, which was not immediately likely. Kelly told himself that he’d killed six people to get this far—the seventh was a mistake and didn’t count ... except maybe to that lady, whoever she was. He took a deep breath. If he’d watched her get hurt worse, or killed, how would he be able to look in a mirror? He had to tell himself that he’d made the best of a bad situation. Shit happens. It ran the risks up, but the only concern there was failure in the mission, not in danger to himself. It was time to set his thoughts aside. There were other responsibilities as well. Kelly lifted his phone and dialed.
“Greer.”
“Clark,” Kelly responded. At least that was still amusing.
“You’re late,” the Admiral told him. The call was supposed to have been before lunch, and Kelly’s stomach churned a little at the rebuke. “No harm done, I just got back. We’re going to need you soon. It’s started.”
That’s fast, Kelly thought. Damn. “Okay, sir.”
“I hope you’re in shape. Dutch says you are,” James Greer said more kindly.
“I think I can hold up, sir.”
“Ever been to Quantico?”
“No, Admiral.”
“Bring your boat. There’s a marina there and it’ll give us a place to chat. Sunday morning. Ten sharp. We’ll be waiting, Mr. Clark.”
“Aye aye.” Kelly heard the phone click off.
Sunday morning. He hadn’t expected that. It was going too fast, and it made his other mission all the more urgent. Since when had the government ever moved that quickly? Whatever the reason, it affected Kelly directly.
“I hate it, but it’s the way we work,” Grishanov said.
“You really are that tied to your ground radar?”
“Robin, there is even talk of having the missile firing done by the intercept-control officer from his booth on the ground.” The disgust in his voice was manifest.
“But then you’re just a driver!” Zacharias announced. “You have to trust your pilots.”
I really should have this man speak to the general staff, Grishanov told himself with no small degree of disgust. They won’t listen to me. Perhaps they would listen to him. His countrymen had vast respect for the ideas and practices of Americans, even as they planned to fight and defeat them.
“It is a combination of factors. The new fighter regiments will be deployed along the Chinese border, you see—”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t know? We’ve fought the Chinese three times this year, at the Amur River and farther west.”
“Oh, come on!” This was too incredible for the American to believe. “You’re allies!”
Grishanov snorted. “Allies? Friends? From the outside, yes, perhaps it looks as though all socialists are the same. My friend, we have battled with the Chinese for centuries. Don’t you read history? We supported Chiang over Mao for a long time—we trained his army for him. Mao hates us. We foolishly gave him nuclear reactors, and now they have nuclear arms, and do you suppose their missiles can reach my country or yours? They have Tu-16 bombers—Badgers you call them, yes? Can they reach America?”
Zacharias knew that answer. “No, of course not.”
“They can reach Moscow, I promise you. and they carry half-megaton nuclear bombs, and for that reason the MiG-25 regiments are on the Chinese border. Along that axis we have no strategic depth. Robin, we’ve had real battles with these yellow bastards, division-size engagements! Last winter we crushed their attempt to take an island that belongs to us. They struck first, they killed a battalion of border guards and mutilated the dead—why do that, Robin, because of their red hair or because of their freckles?” Grishanov asked bitterly, quoting verbatim a wrathful article in Red Star. This was a very strange turn of events for the Russian. He was speaking the literal truth, and it was harder to convince Zacharias of this than any one of a number of clever lies he might have used. “We are not allies. We’ve even stopped shipping weapons to this country by train—the Chinese steal the consignments right off the rail carriages!”
“To use against you?”
“Against whom, then, the Indians? Tibet? Robin, these people are different from you and me. They don’t see the world as we do. They’re like the Hitlerites my father fought, they think they are better than other men—how you say?”
“Master race?” the American suggested helpfully.
“That is the word, yes. They believe it. We’re animals to them, useful animals, yes, but they hate us, and they want what we have. They want our oil and our timber and our land.”
“How come I’ve never been briefed on this?” Zacharias demanded.
“Shit,” the Russian answered. “Is it any different in your country? When France pulled out of NATO, when they told your people to take your bases out, do you think any of us were told about it beforehand? I had a staff job then in Germany, and nobody troubled himself to tell me that anything was happening. Robin, the way you look to us is the same as how we look to you, a great colossus, but the internal politics in your country are as much a mystery to me as mine are to you. It can all be very confusing, but I tell you this, my friend, my new MiG regiment will be based between China and Moscow. I can bring a map and show you.”
Zacharias leaned back against the wall, wincing again with the recurring pain from his back. It was just too much to believe.
“It hurts still, Robin?”
“Yeah.”
“Here, my friend.” Grishanov handed over his flask, and this time it was accepted without resistance. He watched Zacharias take a long pull before handing it back.
“So just how good is this new one?”
“The MiG-25? It’s a rocket,” Grishanov told him enthusiastically. “It probably turns even worse than your Thud, but for straight-line speed, you have no fighter close to it. Four missiles, no gun.
The radar is the most powerful ever made for a fighter, and it cannot be jammed.”
“Short range?” Zacharias asked.
“About forty kilometers.” The Russian nodded. “We give away range for reliability. We tried to get both but failed.”
“Hard for us, too,” the American acknowledged with a grunt.
“You know, I do not expect a war between my country and yours. Truly I do not. We have little that you might wish to take away. What we have—resources, space, land—all these things you have. But the Chinese,” he said, “they need these things, and they share a border with us. And we gave them the weapons that they will use against us, and there are so many of them! Little, evil people, like these here, but so many more.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Grishanov shrugged. “I will command my regiment. I will plan to defend the Motherland against a nuclear attack from China. I just haven’t decided how yet.”
“It’s not easy. It helps if you have space and time to play with, and the right people to play against.”
“We have bomber people, but nothing like yours. You know, even without resistance, I doubt we could place as many as twenty bombers over your country. They’re all based two thousand kilometers from where I will be. You know what that means? Nobody even to train against.”
“You mean a red team?”
“We would call it a blue team, Robin. I hope you understand.” Grishanov chuckled, then turned serious again. “But, yes. It will all be theoretical, or some fighters will pretend to be bombers, but their endurance is too short for a proper exercise.”
“This is all on the level?”
“Robin, I will not ask you to trust me. That is too much. You know that and so do 1. Ask yourself, do you really think your country will ever make war on my country?”
“Probably not,” Zacharias admitted.
“Have I asked you about your war plans? Yes, certainly, they are most interesting theoretical exercises and I would probably find them fascinating war games, but have I asked about them?” His voice was that of a patient teacher.