Politika

FORTY

“Power’s out again, Elaine.”

Elaine Steiner looked up from the junction box she was working on. Her husband had just come into the room, bearing bad news once again. “What is it this time? Don’t tell me they ran the back hoe into the generator again.”

As part of Gordian’s agreement with the Russian government, the ground station purchased electricity from the surrounding grid — but Gordian was no fool. He knew how unreliable the service could be in the remote areas he picked for his ground stations, and so each site was provided with a generator large enough to keep the facility on-line. The problem was that many of the spare parts required for the generator were purchased locally, as was the fuel it ran on, and none of these were ever up to the Steiners’ usual standards.

“Nope,” Arthur said. “The generator came on-line smoothly and automatically, just like it was supposed to. But we can’t figure out why the power from the grid stopped. We put in a call to the local substation, and no one else is without power.”

Elaine frowned and started putting her tools away. She and Arthur had been doing this for long enough, and had worked in enough violent places, for her to have sharpened her sense of caution to a fine edge. “How long has the power been out?” she asked.

“Ten minutes or so. The substation’s sending out a crew to check the lines, so we’ll know more shortly.”

Elaine blew out her lips in silent frustration at her husband’s perpetual optimism. “A local crew?” she asked. “We’ll be lucky if they can even find the lines. No, dear, if we want this repaired quickly, we’d better do it ourselves.”

Gregor Sadov looked at the downed power lines and allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction. Three utility poles in a row had been knocked down, victims of a little bit of C4 plastique planted just above ground level.

Their target was an American satellite ground station, so Gregor knew the loss of electricity would not knock out all their defenses. But he also knew that most of their generator’s output would be directed toward maintaining the most vital systems, including the satellite uplink and the communication channels.

Gregor wanted to take out that generator. He wasn’t too worried about the phones inside the compound. This compound was so far from any real civilization that there simply wasn’t anyone the people inside could call — no one, that is, who could get there in time to do any good. But Gregor hadn’t survived this long by taking unnecessary chances. He couldn’t cut off all the communications from the compound, not without finding some way to knock their satellite out of orbit, but he could try and take out their generator.

He signaled his team members to mount up. He had seven people with him, the three survivors of his current team and four new people Gilea had sent to help him. Gregor hadn’t had much chance to work with the new-comers. That didn’t matter, though. They were Gilea’s people, not his, and even if they’d been with him for a year he still wouldn’t have been able to trust them.

He’d split his team evenly among four BTR-40s. Gilea’s men were together in two of them, he and Nikita were in one, and the last of his own men were in the remaining armored personnel carrier. Each vehicle had a KPV 14.5mm machine gun mounted on the roof of the driver’s compartment and an impressive array of extremely lethal weaponry stored ready to hand. His orders were to be thorough, and he intended to carry those orders out.

They started their engines and, with Gregor and Nikita in the lead, headed toward the compound some three miles away. He’d wanted to make sure that no one at the ground station heard the explosions when they took the power lines down.

As they approached the compound, Gregor saw an American Jeep heading their way, a corporate logo painted on the side. He couldn’t see who was in it, but it didn’t matter. He knew it had to be a repair crew sent out to investigate the loss of power.

Under other circumstances he would have let them go. A small crew of technicians was meaningless in the larger scheme of things. But his orders were to be thorough.

Braking to a stop, he turned to Nikita. “Take them out,” he said.

Nikita nodded once. Breaking out one of the RPGs in the back, she climbed out of the carrier, took careful aim, and fired.

The road was bumpy enough that Arthur had put his seat belt on. Elaine refused to. She said she had had enough of that back in the States, where the law required you to wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets and to put your kids in car seats — not to protect you but to protect the state from additional medical payments in the event of an accident.

Arthur was driving. He always drove. Truth was, Elaine was the better driver, but whenever the two went anywhere together, Arthur always drove. Because of this, and because he had his attention focused on the goat trail they called a road in this part of Russia, it was Elaine who first saw the enemy.

That’s how she thought of them, from the moment they crested the small rise a couple hundred yards ahead. The enemy. Her suspicions had been raised as soon as Arthur told her about the power outage, and how the local substation had said no one else had been affected. It was too coincidental, especially given what had happened back in Times Square only a little while earlier. She would have given a month’s pay to have a gun with them — any sort of gun — but the few small arms the compound had were kept locked up in times of peace… and no matter what her suspicions were, this was still officially a time of peace.

Now, seeing four unmarked armored personnel carriers heading toward the compound, Elaine knew what she was seeing: the enemy.

“Arthur—” she said, but it was already too late. The four BTR-40s slowed to a stop, and Elaine saw a woman step out of the lead vehicle, pull something out of the back, and point it in their direction. “Turn around, Arthur,” she said. “Turn around now.”

Her husband looked up, his hands starting to shift on the wheel, but at that moment the woman fired.

Nikita’s shot fell short, burrowing into the ground directly in front of the oncoming Jeep and opening up a crater before it. But that was all right, Gregor thought. The effect was the same. The Jeep slammed into the sudden hole in the ground, driving its grill into the far wall of the crater and throwing someone out of the passenger’s side.

Putting his own vehicle in gear, he motioned for Nikki to get back in. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s finish this and get going.”

At first, Elaine couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t even remember what it was that had happened. All she knew was she was lying down, looking up at a sky that seemed too blue, too peaceful, to belong to anywhere on earth. And then it all came rushing back to her — the enemy carriers, the woman, the rocket exploding in front of them, Arthur…

“Arthur,” she said. She moved, then, rolling onto her side, and that’s when the pain hit her, a great, white wall of agony that started somewhere down around her toes and ended just past her hairline. She knew then that something was terribly wrong with her, that either the blast itself or her landing on the hard, frozen ground had damaged her beyond any repair, but none of that mattered anymore. All that mattered was Arthur.

Ignoring the pain, she forced herself onto her hands and knees and began crawling back toward the crumpled wreck.

Arthur was there. His seat belt had kept him from being thrown from the Jeep, but it hadn’t done him any favors. As she got closer she could see that the steering column had been driven backward into his chest. He was pinned against his seat, and he was not moving.

“Arthur,” she said, her voice somewhere between a cry and a prayer. “Arthur…”

She made it to his side, crawling through the open doorway and curling up against his motionless body. She knew he was dead. He wasn’t breathing, his wounds had stopped pumping blood, and she knew there was no hope for either of them.

“Oh, Arthur,” she said. Reaching out, she closed his eyes gently and then, fighting the pain that threatened to overwhelm her, she leaned forward and kissed him gently on the lips. “Sleep well, my darling,” she whispered, and let her head fall against his shoulder one last time.

Gregor approached the broken American Jeep slowly, his Beretta in his hand. He was sure there was no one still alive within it, or at least no one who could be a serious threat, but still it paid to be cautious — especially since it was so difficult to see through the starred and bloody glass remaining in the windshield.

Coming around the side, he looked through the passenger door and took in the scene before him. The man was dead, that much was obvious. The woman, though. She’d been thrown from the Jeep, and had made her way back. She could still be alive.

He raised his Beretta, but before he could fire she turned her head, slowly, obviously in great pain, and looked him in the eye.

“Why?” she said, her voice shattered as badly as the Jeep. “We’re here to help, not to harm. Why kill us?”

Gregor shrugged. “Orders,” he said, in English. And then he fired. The bullet caught her high up in the forehead, snapping her head back against her husband’s shoulder. She slumped forward, falling away from the man she obviously loved so much.

Gregor paused for a moment, then reached out and pushed her back into position, laying her head gently against her husband’s shoulder. Then he turned, got back into his BTR-40, and headed for the American compound.