Mirror Image

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

It had been an uneventful night for Paul Hood.

He'd managed to locate Sharon and the kids at Bloopers the night before, and after hearing about the jelly bean burger and turkey ice cream soda, he'd stretched out on the couch in his office while Curt Hardaway ran the evening shift. A former CEO of SeanCorp, which provided navigation software to the military, Hardaway was an effective manager, a dynamic leader, and was familiar with the ins and outs of government. He had retired at sixty-five a millionaire, joking that he would have been a billionaire if he'd sold to private industry rather than the government. He once told Hood, "I never skimp on quality, however little the government is paying. I don't want some kid sitting in the cockpit of a Tomcat thinking, 'All of this stuff was provided by the lowest bidder!' "

Unofficially, both Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers were off duty after 6:00 P.M. Officially, however, neither man was relieved until he left the premises. And while they were here, neither night Director Bill Abram nor Curt Hardaway ever attempted to "take the bones away from those two dogs," as Hardaway put it.

As he lay there through the night, his shoes off, feet on the padded armrest, he thought about his family— the people he didn't want to let down most, yet seemed to disappoint every which way he turned. Maybe that was inevitable. You let down the people closest to you because you know they'll be there when you get back. But boy, did it rip the conscience to ribbons. Ironically, the people he really seemed to have pleased yesterday were the people with whom he had the least in common, Liz Gordon and Charlie Squires. One because he'd acknowledged something she'd done by using it in a planning session, the other because he was letting him go ahead with a once-in-a-lifetime mission.

Between short snatches of sleep, Hood also stared at the countdown clock as it crept toward the extraction time they'd set for the tundra Striker mission.

Twenty-five hours, fifty minutes, and counting, he thought, looking at it now. It had been thirty-seven-odd hours when Hardaway had first set it. How would we all feel when it cashed out at all zeroes? Hood wondered. Where would the world be then?

It was at once depressing and strangely exhilarating. In any case, looking at the clock was better than watching CNN. The airwaves were full of the New York bombing and a possible relationship to the attack on the newspaper in Poland. Then there was Eival Ekdol ranting about his ties to the Ukrainian Opposition Force, soldiers who objected to the Russian incursion. That was smart, Hood had to admit. The miserable thug was swinging American opinion toward the Russian-Ukrainian union by speaking stridently against it.

Hood was awakened with word from the midget submarine, relayed via Helsinki, that Private George and Peggy James had been put ashore in St. Petersburg. Five minutes later, he was informed by Mike Rodgers— who hadn't slept much— that the 76T had crossed into Russian airspace and was speeding toward the drop point. It was expected to arrive in twenty minutes. Rodgers told him that the chaff the 76T dropped when it neared the coast disoriented the watching post at Nakhodka long enough for the plane to slip into the air lanes with the other transports. So far, no one had paid the plane any attention.

"Air Defense didn't react to the jamming?" Hood asked incredulously.

"We only did it to conceal where they were coming from," Rodgers said. "Once the 76T was in Russia, nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Our crew is maintaining radio silence, and on the way out they'll inform Nakhodka that they're going to Hokkaido to pick up replacement parts for decoy transmitters."

"I still can't believe we slipped through so easily," Hood said.

"For the last couple of years," Rodgers said, "the Russians have been more huff than puff. The soldiers manning the radar have been working longer shifts than we have. If nothing stands out as strange, it's unlikely they're going to catch it."

"Are you so sure it's that," he asked, "or could this be one of those traps that let a mouse in and don't let it out again?"

"We considered that possibility when we were planning the operation," Rodgers said. "There would have been no reason for the Russians to risk letting a strike force get on the ground. The truth is, Paul, the Russia you were worried about is no longer the Russia of reality."

Hood said, "They're still Russia enough to have us snacking on fingernails."

"Touché," said Rodgers.

Hood rose, phoned Bugs Benet, told him to send the department heads to the Tank, then went into his private washroom to scrub the sleep from his eyes. As he dried off, he couldn't stop thinking about Russia. Was Mike right about Russia or were they all just delusional, caught up in a false euphoria about the fall of Russian Communism and the Soviet Union?

Had it really fallen at all? Was this just a dream, smoke and mirrors, an interstitial period like the lulls between the great Ice Ages? Had the dark forces merely withdrawn from the spotlight to regroup and return, stronger than before?

Russians were not used to initiative and freedom. They had been ruled by dictators since the days of Ivan the Terrible.

Since Ivan Grozny, he thought with alarm.

As he headed for the Tank, Hood did not believe that however the next day's events turned out, the Evil Empire was dead at all.