The Disposable Man

Chapter 20

Georgi Padzhev opened the door of the motel room himself, his eagerness transparent. “Did you get what we need?”

Sammie, entering behind me, hefted the canvas bag she had looped over her shoulder.

Rarig and Corbin-Teich were sitting at a table in the corner, their hands free. Willy, I noticed with no surprise, had only graduated from coat hangers to his own handcuffs, his muscular right wrist still attached to his chair.

“Where’s Gail?” I asked.

Padzhev gave me a distracted look, reaching for Sammie’s bag. “She’s fine.”

I stepped in front of him and slapped his arms down. Anatoly immediately grabbed me from behind and shoved a gun in my ear. I kept looking at Padzhev. “Where is she?”

The muscles in his face quivered briefly as he fought for self-control. He then muttered something fast and harsh to Anatoly, who steered me outside, down the walkway, and into the abutting room. Gail was sitting up on one of the beds, no longer bound or gagged, but looking like hell. A guard was lounging in a seat by the window.

Anatoly said, “You have two minutes,” and shoved me toward the bed, taking up a station by the door.

I sat next to her and took one of her hands in mine. “How’re you holding up?”

She smiled wanly. “If I knew you’d be this much trouble when we met, I don’t think I would’ve made the effort.”

That cut deeper than she’d intended. I looked at the floor, thinking how right she was.

She touched my cheek. “Joke, kiddo-I wouldn’t change a thing.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I wish the hell I could.”

“What’s going on, anyway?”

“It’s boiling down to an old-fashioned shoot-out between two rival Russian gangs. I’m just hoping we all get out of it alive.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“You, me, Willy, and Sam, plus some guy from Middlebury and John Rarig. They might have more hostages than they got soldiers by now.”

She watched my face for a long moment, and then asked, “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

“It could be. I’ve been told so many lies by now I’m the last one to know what’s what. But I think the top guy here-Georgi Padzhev-is fighting to stay alive, pure and simple. He’s far from his base, cut off and outnumbered, and so desperate for help he’s got us working for him.”

Her face registered surprise. “How?”

“He’s holding you over my head. Sammie and I just got him a fancy bugging system he’s hoping will tell him when the opposition’s too close. I don’t know what the hell good it’ll do.”

Anatoly pushed himself away from the doorframe and tapped his wristwatch.

I kissed Gail and stood up. “I love you. I’ll do what I can.”

She nodded and smiled encouragingly. “I know.”

Back in the first room, Padzhev had spread his new toys on one of the beds. Rarig and Corbin-Teich were standing at its foot, looking like two spectators at a game of solitaire.

“This is quite excellent, Lieutenant,” he said as I entered.

“Sammie fill you in?”

“Yes, she did. I hope we can rely on your two operatives in Brattleboro.”

“You can send somebody down there to shoot one of them as insurance, if you want.”

He looked away from the computer and the small pile of wafer-thin transmitters and fixed me with a stare. “I will if you think it necessary, just as I will shoot your girlfriend in the head if you step out of line.”

I stared back, feeling my face flush. It was time for me to do everything possible to avoid such confrontations-to be amenable, affable, and helpful. To fade into the woodwork until I saw an opportunity to act.

“I appreciate that,” I finally said and jutted my chin toward the electronic pile on the bed. “How do you plan to use this stuff?”

His study of me lasted a few seconds longer, before he stepped away and resumed his nervous pacing. “From what I understand, the best advantage it gives us is if we occupy a stationary position.”

“That’s true,” Sammie agreed. “If we were getting the information in real time, it might not be, but since it’s going to be e-mailed to us, that’ll slow everything down. Our staying put means that much less data to be crunched down and forwarded.”

Padzhev paused by the bed and picked up one of the transmitters again, turning it over in his hand. “So we are the fort and they are the attacking army-a fort before which they will abandon their vehicles and render all this utterly useless.” He tossed it back, barely hiding his disgust.

“That was plan A,” I suggested, “when we thought we were dealing with much clunkier transmitters. What we need is to find a way to plant the bugs on the people, not their cars.”

He gave me a sour look. “If we could do that, Lieutenant, we could also kill them, which happens to be the whole point of this exercise.”

“We have to figure out a way they’ll pick up the bugs themselves,” Sammie said, stimulated, I thought, by Padzhev’s worsening mood, which was beginning to concern me, too. “Like the Trojan horse.”

He lifted his face, intrigued. I felt we’d become courtiers to his fickle king, finding any way possible to prop up his spirits-and extend our own lives.

“How?” he asked, reasonably enough. “What would they want of ours?”

“Weapons,” I answered.

There was dead silence in the room. “The one thing you both have in common, as you pointed out,” I continued, “is you want to kill each other. If you leave behind a cache of arms-like they’d been abandoned in a panic-they’ll probably be picked up and distributed.”

He frowned. “And used against us.”

“A few extra aren’t going to make much difference. We only have eight bugs. We could plant them in eight gun butts.”

“Screw up the sights,” Rarig suggested.

Padzhev shook his head. “They would check for something like that. The Lieutenant is quite right-they must be of obvious value.”

He buried his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the bathroom door, taking us in like a challenging teacher. “So now we are in need of a fort with walls a mile thick-someplace we can control, where we know the terrain, and into which our opponents will have to penetrate on foot, allowing us to intercept them by eavesdropping on their positions.”

“Someplace high and lonely?” Corbin-Teich asked softly.

Rarig looked at him meaningfully. It struck me then that Corbin-Teich had been almost mute since being bundled in here with the rest of us, overwhelmed and perhaps quite frightened by all the fireworks. Or so I’d thought.

Padzhev watched him carefully. “You know of such a place?”

“With only one narrow road, eight miles long,” Lew admitted, sounding like he was reaching far back in time.

Rarig seemed to have made the same decision I had, about buying time with cooperation. “You have a map?” he asked. “I know where he’s talking about.”

Padzhev didn’t move, but one of his men immediately produced a road map of the state, spreading it open at the foot of the bed. Rarig leaned over it, slowly extending his finger and tapping it in the middle of Vermont’s so-called Northeast Kingdom, a remote, sparsely populated, harsh, and beautiful area, famous for its desolate, forested land and the independence of its inhabitants.

“There’s a mountaintop here that might suit your needs,” he said. “It worked for us forty years ago.”

I suddenly remembered what he’d told me earlier of how and why Lew had come to know Vermont. “That the old radar site you were talking about? Where he was held under wraps for two years?”

Lew smiled wistfully. “It was well known for good hunting.”

The irony of that was lost on no one.

Rarig’s mountain was as empty and unmolested as he and Corbin-Teich had foretold, but their description had missed the hostile vastness of the place. As we drove in a caravan up miles of narrow, broken, blacktopped road, the edges of which disappeared into the bordering vegetation like liquid, I began feeling we’d left one world for another. Vermont is famous for its trees and mountains, but mostly as a backdrop to a rural domesticity that has stamped the state for well over a hundred years.

The reality of Rarig’s radar mountain was something else entirely.

The Kingdom, of course, has always been a separate entity from that other, bucolic image. Poorer, colder, and less inhabited than the rest of Vermont, it remains the most stalwart reminder of the Ice Age’s grinding havoc. Where sections just slightly south and west of it reflect the ease of long summers, gentle springs, and recreational winters, the Kingdom stays aloof. Hard, harsh, and stark, it is the symbol of what has given New Englanders their tough reputation. This mountain reflected all of that, and more.

The entrance to its single access road had been subtlety itself-a winding country lane, dotted with the occasional modest home, gradually becoming narrower, darker, and less friendly. By the time we’d reached the first of two unlocked steel gates, it was clear we were no longer among the inhabitants of this region. Where once military trucks had rumbled freely back and forth, trees now crowded the ragged edge of a scarred pavement barely wide enough for a single car. Overhead, blocking the light, branches reached out for one another like slow-moving dancers.

Had the road been dirt, as they are all over the state, the contrast would have been less jarring-we’d have been using yet another temporary man-made incursion into the wilderness, prone to washouts, overgrowth, and winter’s annual ravages. But this was a government-built road, still in remarkably good shape, lying on the ground like some vestige of a vanished civilization. I thought of Mayan ruins, ghost towns, and abandoned factory buildings-images of hopes lost, people displaced, ambitions thwarted-and the dread that had been rising in me since leaving the motel in South Burlington suddenly overflowed.

Padzhev had chosen to make that motel room the means to deliver the eight doctored weapons, faking a scene of hasty retreat. He hadn’t told us how he’d tipped Kyrov to our whereabouts, but the urgency with which we’d left had injected a mood of genuine desperation in everyone. Padzhev, it was clear, was gambling everything on this tactic, and as we drove farther up the mountain, leaving a familiar world behind, it occurred to everyone, I think, that our chances of returning alive were very slim.

Rarig had told us this mountain was one of the tallest in the Kingdom, and the higher we drove the more easily I believed him. Not only did occasional gaps in the trees reveal views stretching for dozens of miles, but the vegetation began to reflect an exposure to unremitting harshness. Like hundreds of other sites strung out along the nation’s eastern coast like baubles on a necklace, this radar installation had been chosen for the breadth of sky available to it-sky that also carried snow and wind and rain from miles away, sometimes at terrible velocity. The more we climbed the more the trees, the bushes, and even the boulders took on a hunkered-down appearance, like the shoulders of miners kept too long in the pit.

The temperature, too, spoke of altitude and exposure, and I slowly realized a threat none of us had considered during our beleaguered calculations. It was nearing the start of fall, when the weather could turn capricious, and nowhere else in the state was that more likely than right here-exposed on a mountain in Vermont’s bleakest environment.

Unless we were lucky, and the elements held off, none of us had enough warm clothing to survive what was dished out so commonly in these hills. And through the open window of the car, the tang of brittle cold air told of a coming menace.

Apart from where we’d dropped off two sentries on the way in, our first stop came about eight miles up. The road suddenly widened, the trees pulled back, and we found ourselves on a broad shelf of land-flat, overgrown, and appointed with a broad, tidy scattering of bruised and discolored Quonset huts, their rigid uniformity at odds with the raging growth crowding around them-weeds, bushes, and stunted trees had overtaken once-mowed yards and trimmed walkways, making the whole look like a long-abandoned playground.

Rarig and Corbin-Teich stood by the cars, the latter transfixed by the metamorphosis of a place he’d once known as a small but bustling military base.

I walked over to them. “Big change?”

Corbin-Teich seemed in shock. “This was the United States to me. Men in green and khaki. Everything ‘shipshape.’ It was I who mowed many of the lawns here, just so I could do something.”

“How many people lived here?” I asked, impressed at the number of buildings.

Rarig shrugged. “Two hundred, maybe, give or take fifty. I don’t know. It was a small village, really-housing, mess, dispensary, mail room, all the rest.” He jerked his thumb toward the cloud-shrouded peak above us. “The installation is another two miles up. After satellites replaced radar stations in the sixties, they sold the whole thing to a couple who tried turning it into a toy factory. They could’ve done it, too, except that the woodchucks drove ’em off the mountain-gangs on skimobiles, shooting guns, terrorizing them. In the wintertime, the snowdrifts get so deep, the huts turn into huge moguls, irresistible to the half-wit, twenty-something crowd. The locals figured since it was once government-owned, it now belonged to them. After the couple retreated back into the valley, the place was stripped clean, and what the punks couldn’t steal, they destroyed.” He shook his head. “Take a look around, assuming Prince Igor’ll let you-you won’t believe what people are capable of doing.”

I wondered at his tour-guide tone of voice, but Rarig had progressed from the nervous excitement I’d seen grip him on our trip to Middlebury. Now he seemed fatalistically resigned, as if his present situation was merely a logical, if delayed, extension of all that had gone before.

Padzhev overheard that last remark and approached us from a small conference he was having with the eight or so men he had left. “The prince has no objection. In fact, we need to find that telephone line you mentioned in the car, to see if it is connected.”

“Should be,” Rarig said. “The wardens still use it sometimes. We’ll have to tap in down here, though, ’cause the only actual phone outlet is on top of the mountain, where the radar towers are.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” I commented.

He smiled slightly. “Old man, old memories. I’ve come up here a couple of times since those days. This is one of the few old stomping grounds still available to me.”

“You did not tell me,” Corbin-Teich said.

“No. I figured your memories of the place were a little different from mine.”

Padzhev gave instructions to his men, most of whom fanned out, and then turned to us, gesturing like a nanny urging her brood to run and play. “Go, go. We don’t have much time to establish our defenses. Once Kyrov finds the map we left behind and convinces himself it isn’t a trap, he’ll be rapping on our door without much delay.”

I glanced toward the car holding Gail and the still-handcuffed Willy Kunkle. A guard stood beside it with his arms crossed.

Padzhev shook his head. “No, Lieutenant. You may have some tender moment later on-perhaps. Right now, I need you out there.” He pointed toward the overgrown compound.

With some imagination, I could still see what Lew had called home so long ago. I’d spent enough time on bases in the fifties to recognize the traces, as of dinosaurs in ancient soil. The huts were arranged like neatly placed railroad cars, among a grid of now patchy asphalt. Everything, although strictly utilitarian, had been built to last and had even endured the ravages Rarig had mentioned.

Not that considerable effort hadn’t been made to destroy it. Every building I entered had been mauled by the passage of violence, frustration, and pain. Room after room was gutted-holes punched in the Sheetrock, heating ducts torn from the ceilings, floors pried up. The wiring was gone, the windows broken, the doors smashed, the tile bathrooms ritualistically reduced to rubble with sledges. Graffiti was everywhere, most of it vile and raging, lashing out at a world too far away to hear-or care.

And yet it all stood, often reduced to curved metal walls and foundation only-as seemingly indomitable a monument to human engineering as any Roman ruin. I could walk its shattered byways as tourists do in Pompeii, and as easily picture the place in its heyday, all the way down to the bustling communal dining room.

Anatoly found me standing in the middle of a particularly ravaged building, its insulation streaming from the rounded ceiling like stalactites. “You come,” he ordered.

I followed him outside and across the compound to a small, nondescript building not far from the access road. Several of our group were standing around the gaping door. Beyond them, sitting in the gloom, was Sammie, the laptop balanced on her knees.

Anatoly gave an order and the group parted to let me pass. Padzhev was beside Sammie, looking unhappy.

“I’m not a phone technician,” she was saying. “I’d feel a whole lot more comfortable if we just kept looking till we found a terminal point.”

Padzhev addressed me as I entered. “This is a singularly inopportune time to start dragging our heels.”

“Or to cut corners that could screw everything up,” I answered. I turned to Sam. “He want you to splice into a line?”

“Yeah. It’s stupid. Getting all this junk and running the risk of hooking it up wrong. Christ knows how many wires there are.”

Rarig spoke up from outside. “You find the line?”

Sammie answered. “Yeah, but it’s more like a cable. And there’s no connection that’ll fit the computer.”

Rarig shoved his way inside, laughing. “No kidding. All this was state-of-the-art at the time-jam-packed with stuff. I can pretty much guarantee a connection at the top, though-that’s where the few people who use this place call out from. Push comes to shove, and you still want to fight ’em off down here, you can direct things from above using a radio.”

Padzhev scowled angrily and for the first time showed his mounting impatience. “God damn it. I want to see where those bastards are, not hear about it thirdhand.” He shouted something in Russian and then said, “Get out. We’ll go up.”

We went in one car-Sammie, Padzhev, Rarig, and myself with one man driving. The others had been given orders to dig in, set up crossfire zones, and otherwise prepare for an onslaught. Nothing had changed in our status since we’d arrived here-the sentries below had reported nothing, and none of us had been given cause for alarm-but the tension was rising nevertheless, as it might have upon the approach of a hurricane on a sunny day.

The trip to the top was distinctly different from what we’d already seen. The road remained the same, but the bordering vegetation, from a hodgepodge of trees, brush, and meadow, now became a uniform stand of stunted, thick evergreens, giving the narrow road the appearance of a carefully groomed path in a tightly knit English garden maze. In contrast to the wild abandon of the compound’s woodsy jungle, this looked almost lovingly maintained.

But it also had an ominous undertone, for the higher we climbed-turning corner after corner, always wondering what lay ahead-the more the clouds enveloping the peak began to press down upon us, decapitating the already low treetops and making us feel we were crawling between two unmovable forces, destined to be snuffed out entirely.

And there was no relief from this menace at the top, for as the trees finally pulled away, as if dragged down by the mist, there loomed out of the pale void three gigantic, towering, steel-clad structures-vaguely defined, unfamiliar in form or function, and utterly, threateningly immense.

“My God,” murmured Padzhev, his eyes riveted outside the streaming windshield.

Instinctively, the driver stopped the car.

Only Rarig was smiling. “Impressive, huh? Those are the radar towers-five of ’em. Tallest one’s sixty-five feet. The radar dome designed for that one would’ve made it look like a kitchen stool, but the whole site was decommissioned before they got it in place.” He pointed to a sturdy shack ahead and to the right. “That’s the telephone hut over there.”

Our driver pulled over and we emerged into a freezing, wet, windblown environment that cut through our clothes and coated our faces with moisture. The air was a uniform gray, visibility extending to no more than one hundred and fifty feet.

Sammie looked around, her computer case held to her chest. “This is creepy-like a black-and-white sci-fi movie.”

Ahead of us, as if in response, a metallic moaning was followed by a loud thump as a wide door swung open on a long, low-slung building across the road from the towers.

Rarig’s only comment was “Old computer building, where the scope dopes number-crunched the radar data.” He pointed to the shack’s front door. “Someone’s going to have to blast that lock off.”

Padzhev nodded to the driver, who extracted a gun from under his coat, pointed it at the lock, and pulled the trigger as we all instinctively shied away. Absorbed by the mist, the shot sounded like a damp firecracker.

Padzhev pulled the door open and gestured Sammie through.

The interior was simplicity itself-four battered walls, one tiny barred window, and a shelf with a single phone line curled up on it like a garter snake, all covered with dust. Padzhev looked around, obviously baffled.

Rarig interpreted his expression. “With everyone leaving, and vandals tearing the place apart, this is all the powers-that-be want to waste money on. Even then, they have to replace the lock every once in a while. The wardens bring their own phones when they come.”

Sammie put the computer on the shelf and clipped the phone line into its back.

“Guess we better let Olivia know where we are,” I said casually.

Sammie’s sole reaction was a minute hitch in her movements as she continued setting things up.

“Who’s Olivia?” Padzhev asked.

“One of the two women at the other end of this deal,” I explained, grateful Anatoly hadn’t been chosen to join us. I glanced out the open door. “I doubt the computer’s going to like all that humidity.”

Padzhev growled at the driver, who stepped outside, closing the door behind him. One down, I thought.

Sammie looked around her. “Wish I had a chair. I can’t type on this shelf.”

Padzhev got the hint. “I’ll go find something.”

As soon as he left, Sammie turned to me. “Olivia Kidder?”

I kept my voice low. “What options have we got? This god-damn scheme of his isn’t going to work. Sooner or later, Kyrov’ll get the upper hand and eat us for lunch. We need help.”

We heard voices outside the door as Padzhev shouted something to the other man.

“Set everything up, and if you get a few seconds to yourself, send an SOS to Judy to be forwarded to Kidder.”

“Snowden’ll probably intercept it,” Sammie warned.

“Then e-mail Tony Brandt and make sure he gets briefed by Kidder. Somebody’s going to have to tell the cavalry who’s who up here.”

The door crashed open, making us both jump, and Padzhev and the driver hauled a huge, dented steel box into the room. “Will this work?” he asked, panting.

Sammie perched herself on it, placing the computer on her lap. “Great. Thanks.”

A nervous twenty minutes later, she looked up from the keyboard. “Got it.”

Padzhev sat next to her and peered at the glowing screen. Floating in its middle, like an island on a black sea, was a multihued, three-dimensional slice of map, with a mountaintop at its center. “That’s us?” he asked.

“Yup.” She touched the screen with her fingertip. “We’re right here, and that thin black line squiggling down there is the road. The Quonset village’s here.”

Padzhev stared at it as though it were a crystal ball, which we were all hoping it was. “No sign of anyone else?”

“Not yet. The two women at the other end are going to keep watching till they see a change. Then we’ll get an update-assuming the Trojan horse worked. If it didn’t,” she added grimly, “then I guess the next thing we’ll hear is a knock on the door.”