The Chinese Agenda (8 page)

'It did,' Stowe answered abruptly. 'My people are in charge of liaison. I sent it out myself and got a forwarding acknowledgment before I left for Rome.'

Jones, completely baffled, stared hard at Stowe, then sat back and began whistling tunelessly.

'All right then, something happened.' Gillon felt his

patience ebbing fast. 'Get on the radio or telephone or drums or whatever the hell it is you people use to talk to one another and find out what the devil is going on.'

'And who would you suggest I ask?' The question was logical but the tone of voice was quite sarcastic.

'Start with the GRU,' Gillon replied coldly.

The officer straightened in surprise. 'The GRU .. . why should I contact them?'

'Because,' Gillon snarled, his patience exhausted, 'we are supposed to be co-operating with them, or with one or another of your silly intelligence units. If it isn't them, they can tell you which other agency. If your people spend as much time checking up on each other as ours do, they'll know.'

The officer studied him for a long moment, as if not quite sure that Gillon was serious. Angrily, Gillon stared right back.

The Russian took a deep breath and rubbed his forehead and eyes in weariness. 'Your suggestion will be taken into consideration,' he replied slowly. 'For the moment, you will remain under arrest since you have crossed the borders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics illegally, landed a foreign military aircraft in a restricted area, resisted arrest and imported weapons in violation of Soviet laws. You will be placed under guard. I must warn you that any attempt to escape will he dealt with swiftly and harshly. I have given my men orders to shoot to kill. You must realize that you are very lucky that you were not shot down and killed during your landing attempt.'

With that, he stepped back and motioned the soldiers forward. Jones's face reflected his shock and anger, but appreciating the uselessness of further argument, he remained silent.

The two officers conferred Russian for a moment and then the colonel turned and left abruptly and the lieutenant sauntered over and stared down at them in scorn.

'Look your fill, sonny boy,' Leycock growled. 'As soon as your boss gets his signals right, I'm going to wipe your feet with your silly face.'

The lieutenant pursed his lips at Leycock. He may not

have understood the English, but the meaning was clear enough. He nodded and four soldiers came forward and, at gunpoint, they were herded back out into the icy cold of the Siberian morning and then marched toward a ramshackle building standing well back from the apron. What little paint had once coated the wood had long since peeled away under the onslaught of winter cold and summer sun. The walls were almost the same gray as the bare concrete apron. They were marched up to the door and the lieutenant hurried up the steps to push it open. It resisted, and, suddenly angry at being made to look foolish, he bent and slammed it open with his shoulder. The door thudded back against the wall and the guards motioned for them to enter. One by one they climbed the rickety steps.

The interior of the building was almost as cold as the exterior. A guard hurried to the stove, a battered old potbellied affair almost completely red with rust, standing in the center of the room, and shoved in several sticks of wood, crumpled some sheets of newspaper and doused it all with kerosene. He stepped back and tossed a match into the stove and the fire lit with a loud, soft pop.

The two-story building was constructed in the clapboard style that Gillon had seen used on World War II-vintage military bases the world over. Interior walls were screened off by thin panels of fiberboard ending several inches short of the ceiling. The floor was tiled with crumbling rubber squares whose edges had curled through years of winter cold and summer heat. Gillon stumbled on one and received another jab with a rifle for his clumsiness. They reached the stairs at the far end of the barracks and were motioned up to the second floor. Puzzled, Gillon followed the others up the steps. As far as he could see, the building was completely unoccupied and had been so for years. There was no reason to take them up to the second floor, until he remembered the pipes radiating from the stove. Two went to the ceiling and since hot air rises, presumably the second floor would warm faster. Very strange, he thought to himself. Why should they care whether we are cold or not?

At the top of the stairs, one of the guards pulled open the door of the first room in line and motioned Leycock inside. He hesitated a moment, then shrugged and grinned. I guess we really don't have much choice, do we?' He stepped inside and the door was closed and they watched as the guard attacked a padlock and snapped it shut. The guards shoved them on down the corridor to the next room, where Stowe was detached and the process repeated. Jones was next and the last room, at the end of the corridor, was for Gillon. As he stepped inside, he saw a soldier dragging a chair to the head of the stairs. Obviously, they were going to be watched very carefully. The door was pushed shut behind him. It stuck in the jamb and Gillon heard a muffled curse and a heavy boot kicked it shut. A padlock snapped into the hasp and footsteps walked down the corridor. The soldier paused at the head of the stairs and spoke with the guard, then clattered down to the first floor and a door slammed. In the sudden silence that followed Gillon shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced about the room. It looked like it was going to he a long day.

Shivering, he walked over and pressed his hand to the register set into the wall at floor level. He felt only the barest stirrings of hot air and stooped down to examine it more closely. The register was almost closed and when he poked at it with a finger, it resisted and he concluded that it was rusted shut. Extracting the thin-bladed throwing knife from his hoot top, he considered it thoughtfully, the Russian guard, the layout of the airfield and his chances of reaching the aircraft after dark. He concluded that they were pretty good, but that the chances of flying the Jetstar out of the Soviet Union were next to nil. With over four hundred miles to go to reach the Afghan border, the nearest . . . if China was excepted . . . they would be after him in minutes. And the Jetstar, fast as it was, did not have the turn of speed necessary to outrace a Mach 2 fighter-interceptor. He shrugged and used the point of the knife to push open the register, then slipped it back into the boot top and stood up.

It was strange, he thought, that the Russians had not bothered to search them. Gillon did not believe for one minute that the Russian officer did not know why they were in the Soviet Union. Soviet Air Force lieutenant generals were not sent to NATO briefings in Rome for curiosity's sake. And then to allow things to be screwed up at some backwater military base was more than he could believe possible.

Gillon wandered over to the lone, dirty window. He shook a cigarette out of the halfempty pack and lit it, staring thoughtfully at the airfield below. There were very many things • about their treatment that puzzled him besides the fact that they had not been searched. For instance, the Jetstar. Right now he could see the Russian lieutenant strolling across the apron. The pilot saw him too and a moment later appeared in the hatch, hesitated, then climbed down and walked to meet him, hands waving in expressive gestures. The two met, and started back to the aircraft, deep in conversation. Gillon grunted; either the pilot spoke Russian or the lieutenant spoke better English than he had acknowledged. How interesting.

At the foot of the ladder, they were joined by the co-pilot and radio operator. The pilot waved at the barracks, the lieutenant shrugged. The pilot ticked off points on his fingers, the lieutenant shrugged. The copilot yelled, the lieutenant shrugged. The lieutenant spoke for some minutes, shrugged again and started back to the administration building. The co-pilot gestured obscenely while the pilot glanced towards the barracks, then shrugged himself. Empathetically, Gillon shrugged with him and grinned at his own reaction. All very strange. Apparently the Russians were making no move to lock up the flight crew. A few minutes later, a ground support truck drove up and the co-pilot superintended the coupling of the nose gear to the trailer hitch. The truck then drove away, towing the aircraft with it and Gillon watched as it was pulled around to the far side of the hangar and parked. The truck uncoupled and disappeared and the flight crew apparently remained inside the aircraft. After a

few minutes in which nothing else happened, Gillon lost interest. The TU-144 had completed loading by now, had left the terminal and was now waiting at the far end of the runway. A green light winked in the distant control tower and snow boiled off the runway behind the tail as the roar of the engines, running up for takeoff, reached him. The aircraft rolled ahead, gathered speed down the runway, lifted smoothly and disappeared into the morning sky in a northwesterly direction. The slow rumble of the aircraft's engines faded. The snowplow had finished its task and disappeared. Nothing else moved on the field. The winter stillness of bright sun and burnished cold closed down.

Gillon turned away from the window to survey the drab, bare room with distaste. A steelframe bed covered with a thin blanket and thinner mattress stood against one wall. Other than the bed, there was not another stick of furniture in the room. It was, though, he rioted with some gratitude, beginning to warm up as the fire in the stove on the floor below gained ground on the entire winter's cold.

He walked to the door and knocked loudly, then listened, hearing nothing but the noise of the guard shifting in his chair at the far end of the hall. He knocked again. First a groan, then footsteps started down the hall, pausing at each door. Gillon knocked again and the footsteps hurried to his door and stopped outside. The padlock clicked, then a rifle's safety catch. The door was pulled, stuck, and pulled again, harder. It swung open and the guard stood framed outside, carbine pointing into the room. Gillon smiled at him in what he hoped was a friendly fashion.

`How about something to read?' he asked, not really expecting the guard to understand and pantomiming the flipping of magazine pages. It took a moment or two but finally he made the soldier understand and as a final touch, pantomimed smoking a cigarette. The soldier understood that right away and he pushed the door shut and hurried off down the hall.

Now, how about that, Gillon thought to himself, and

pushed the door wide open. The little devil forgot to lock it. A careless guard . . . not likely. These people did not impress him as being careless, or forgetful. Perhaps they wanted him to try and walk away from the room? Then they could shoot him and claim that he tried to escape. Again not likely; otherwise why go to all the trouble to lock them up in the first place; why not just march them outside and shoot them down?

Gillon scratched his head, pushed the door shut and wandered back to the window to stand thinking until the guard returned and pushed the door open. He stepped into the room, a wide grin on his face and arms full of magazines. On top of the pile rested two packs of cigarettes. Gillon grinned back and relieved him of the load, noting that his rifle was carelessly slung over his shoulder, where it would be out of the way ... and out of reach as well.

`Spasebo: Gillon grinned back and the guard touched his cap and pushed the door closed. Gillon carried the magazines over and dumped them on the bed . . . and swore loudly. All of them were printed in bright colors on relatively good quality paper, and of recent vintage. But they were all in Russian. Ah well, he decided, lit a cigarette and slumped down on the bed, bunching his parka behind his head for a pillow, and picked up the top magazine. There was nothing else to do and long hours ahead to kill and since no explanation of the quirky things that were happening was forthcoming . at least the magazines were full of pictures.

The day ground on to its conclusion in a burst of color over the western edge of the airfield. The weather had faded during the long afternoon from its wintry beauty of sunshine, blue shadow and ice as a heavy cloud cover edged across the sky. The change in weather brought a drastic drop in temperature and, by evening, the single window overlooking the runway was completely frosted over. Gillon used his knife to scrape away the frost and stared out into the darkness. Feeble lights marked the limits of the airfield; red along the runways and blue for the apron and taxiways. Thin splashes of color circled the snow beneath each light, but as there were no halos visible in the air Gillon

knew that the temperature was well below freezing and the air intensely dry. Behind him on the bed, the remains of an excellent hot meal shared space with the unreadable magazines.

As he gazed through the frost-rimmed patch of cleared window, a snowflake drifted by. A moment later another and another until the sky was full of soft, gliding flakes fluttering down in the still air. At least the snow, he knew, would keep the temperature from dropping much below zero – not that it would be of much concern to him in his present predicament. Whatever game the Russians were playing, they were not about to let them into China. He had concluded that the Russians, in spite of the potential importance of the documents, had contracted a case of diplomatic cold feet. A clerical error, or whatever, could easily become a face-saving device. Rather than admit that they were afraid of the Chinese, the Kremlin could easily justify their withdrawal from the mission by claiming an administrative error had delayed the start of the mission until it was too late. Then they could apologize and send the Americans packing. He heard footsteps below and the sound of someone kicking his heels against the risers of the steps to dislodge caked snow. A moment later, footsteps came up the stairs and marched down the hall. Doors were unlocked and a voice called in bad English for them to come out.

His own door was thrown open and a heavyset noncommisioned officer glanced at him with indifference and motioned him out.

Gillon picked up his parka and stepped through the door to find Stowe, Jones and Leycock and three armed soldiers gathered in a little knot in the middle of the hall waiting for him.