Condor

by M. L. Buchman

  She offered back a sleepy, “Hmmm.”

  He switched to Russian. “Someone, a friend, she would like to speak with you.”

  Vesna slid a hand over his ribs as if the phone was the last thing she was interested in, then up his belly and ribs, before finally reaching his phone. She kissed his back as she took it. She snaked the phone back over the same path.

  “Da.” She shifted away from him a little.

  He tried to overhear what Clarissa was saying, but couldn’t make out a thing.

  It was over a minute, perhaps two, before Vesna handed the phone back to him. She hadn’t said another word.

  It was still connected. “Yes?”

  “I asked her to give you something.”

  Even as Clarissa spoke, Vesna’s long, slim fingers began to wander over his hip.

  “A special present from me.”

  Vesna ran a single fingernail along the inside of his thigh, which sent chills of anticipation running along his skin.

  “And, Monster?”

  “Da?” He managed as the fingernail began tracing other patterns on his skin.

  “This is just from me to you as a way of saying thanks. Do not give any interviews today.”

  “Okay… Wait. What?”

  But Clarissa was gone.

  And Vesna was very, very present.

  She began doing things she’d never done before…but Clarissa had.

  And he’d loved it.

  50

  “Holy crap!”

  Miranda looked at Mike with some surprise; he wasn’t much given to even mild cursing.

  “It’s a common enough reaction,” Drake simply smiled.

  “It’s called the White House, Mike,” Lizzy appeared to be almost laughing as their car pulled up to the West Entrance.

  Drake did laugh and Mike groaned.

  A tease, Miranda decided. A tease? She decided to try one herself.

  “Really, Mike. It’s just a big house with a hundred and thirty-two rooms, thirty-five bathrooms. The Pentagon has two hundred and eighty-four, you know.”

  Mike just sighed.

  Drake turned to her. “Two hundred and eighty-four rooms?”

  “Bathrooms.”

  “Really?”

  Maybe Miranda wouldn’t try again with the teasing.

  After they passed through security, Drake led them into the Situation Room.

  Mike stumbled again.

  “It’s called the Situation Room, Mike,” Lizzy teased him again.

  Again Drake laughed and Mike joined in this time.

  “How does that work?” Miranda asked Lizzy as they surrendered their coats and all of their phones.

  “How does what work?” Lizzy leaned closer as a Marine held open the door for them.

  “You were teasing him, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I tried, but no one thought it was funny. Everyone, even your intended target of Mike, thought it was funny when you did it. I don’t understand.”

  They crossed past the six reference specialists from the National Security Council working at their tiered desks and headed to the small conference room.

  They were first through the door and the moment they entered, Lizzy snapped to attention and saluted.

  President Roy Cole remained in his chair, but returned the salute.

  “At ease, General. I can’t begin to tell you how odd that is to say, even after three years. I stood down as a lowly captain.”

  “You’re the Commander-in-Chief now, sir. Own it.”

  “Yes ma’am, General ma’am!” He saluted her again, far more sharply.

  “There it is again,” Miranda sat down at the President’s right. “Can you explain teasing humor to me, Roy?”

  Mike squawked. “You call the President of the United States by his first name?”

  “He asked me to.”

  “This must be your Mike Munroe. Welcome to the White House. I’m guessing you won’t be calling me Roy?”

  “Not a chance in Christendom, sir. Or out of it. Uh…shutting up now.”

  “I assume you didn’t arrive by attacking the White House with your jet again, Ms. Chase?”

  “That! Right there. Humor, Roy. Specifically humor used in teasing.” Miranda didn’t want to lose track of the main topic by answering him.

  But then the unanswered question itself was a problem.

  “No. I didn’t. We arrived from Andrews Air Force Base by car.” she said it quickly, hoping they could stay with the first topic.

  The man sitting across from her was smiling at her. It took her a moment to recognize him.

  “Hello, Clark. Can you explain teasing humor to me?”

  “Don’t you think that we should table that question for the moment? I’d like to—”

  “No!” Miranda cut off Clark. She placed her hands flat on the table to show that she wouldn’t be discussing airplanes or hand models of airplanes until she had an answer. “I need to understand one thing, at least one thing that’s happening today. I have an unfinished game of Charades in which I don’t know the person I’m supposed to get Mike to say. I don’t understand why an Air Force C-130 pilot would think teasing about being able to land one-handed is funny. I don’t understand why someone sabotaged a hundred-million-dollar plane so that it blew up on an American runway and killed all six aboard, including a man reading pornography as his final act. Though I suppose it can’t actually be called reading even though it was a magazine. And Drake’s nephew—”

  “Drake’s nephew? Who’s that? Dammit, Drake. You never told me, your Commander-in-Chief, that you have a nephew?”

  “Never came up, sir. Nor his two siblings. Nor their dog. At least I think they have a dog.”

  “How can you not know if your brother’s—”

  “Sister’s.”

  “—sister’s family—”

  “Big sister’s,” Drake grimaced.

  “—has a dog?”

  Miranda looked at the time on the wall clocks.

  Washington DC and President’s time zone both reported six p.m. Jeremy would be nearing Seattle right now at three p.m. local time.

  Jon Swift.

  Jon was just adding to the confusion of unknowns.

  She wanted to ask Holly about him.

  How to even start thinking about him.

  But the Moscow clock, where Holly and Jon were heading, reported two a.m.

  Her team was suddenly spread across eleven time zones.

  Actually, Holly was headed to Samara with Jon, which was another hour east, so her team would soon spread over twelve.

  Holly would say to focus on what was important.

  There were a thousand spheres spinning. All different diameters. From the tiny sphere of the explosion that had ultimately destroyed the Antonov Condor to the massive sphere that could be a new Persona satellite in orbit high above the Earth.

  How was she supposed to determine what was important?

  “I wish—” She clenched her hands in her lap and stared down at the table when she realized she’d just interrupted Drake and the President. “I just wish I understood at least one thing.”

  The silence stretched out in the room.

  “Ms. Chase,” the President was the first to break the silence.

  She studied the scuff pattern on the table. Whoever typically used this seat was left-handed. Tiny indentations in the surface finish indicated they would often tap their pen there. Two sets of indentations. Rocking it back and forth between their fingers rapidly. Tap-tap-tap-tap.

  Probably when alone.

  She’d learned that such habits could irritate others and did her best to only indulge them when she was alone.

  “Miranda?” Roy asked. Miranda had no idea what the question was.

  “Who usually sits in this chair?”

  “My chief-of-staff. Currently running a budget meeting upstairs in the Roosevelt room.”

  “She likes bouncing her pen back and forth.”
Miranda ran her hand over the surface. The tiny marks were too shallow to feel.

  “She does.”

  Too shallow to feel, but nonetheless real.

  She looked up at Roy, not quite able to meet his eyes.

  “I don’t like not understanding.”

  “None of us do, Miranda.”

  “But that doesn’t make the questions any less real, does it?”

  “No,” his nod was slow enough to be easily classified as friendly rather than dismissive. “But you’re right, they’re no less real for all that.”

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose.” Miranda set that aside and turned to the display screen at the end of the table.

  She woke her tablet, synced it to the Situation Room’s display system, and pulled up the first image she’d taken through the cockpit window of the C-130 as they’d approached the Condor’s crash site at sunrise this morning.

  “At 6:17 a.m. local time, that would be Central Standard—we really must talk about Daylight Savings Time someday, Roy, as you’re no longer at the creative whim of the nineteenth-century New Zealand insect collector or the early twentieth-century British golfer who disliked dusk interrupting their hobbies—”

  She could feel the others looking at her strangely. At least that was familiar.

  “—we observed this aircraft disabled on Runway 23 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.”

  “Disabled?” Roy exclaimed, then laughed. Short and sharp.

  Miranda almost started thinking about why that might have been funny, but managed to stop herself. Perhaps she’d ask Holly about teasing humor versus other categories next time they were together.

  Assuming she saw Holly again.

  That thought was very upsetting, so she set that aside as well.

  She selected the next image, “We traced the damage through the following steps.”

  And she also wouldn’t think about the other items spread across the potential debris field of the upcoming operation.

  51

  Crossing the four thousand miles from DC to Ramstein, Germany, in just over three hours—a flight that normally took eight—with a midair refueling south of Iceland, was a brand-new experience for Holly.

  She needed sleep, but there wasn’t a chance of it. and it wasn’t the new experience that kept her awake.

  The back seat of an F/A-18F Super Hornet multirole fighter jet running hot wasn’t a place conducive to sleep. The pilot had assured her that all of the weapon systems controls had been disabled at her position, not that there were any weapons aboard. Instead of missiles under the wings, the jet carried four auxiliary fuel tanks, doubling its range.

  The weapons officer seat didn’t offer much spare space, even for a woman, but that was fine.

  Thankfully, the pilot seemed more than content to enjoy his unexpected night flight than chatting with his passenger. Of course, Drake might have said something about cutting off his balls if he bothered his priority passenger.

  She wondered for a while if it was the mission keeping her awake.

  Typically a deep-insertion mission took months of planning. After that, it often took weeks of preparation, training, testing different scenarios until every variation was reflex.

  The SEALs who’d gone into bin Laden’s compound had trained for months running literally hundreds of scenarios many times over. On site, when the main entry door had been bolted, the breacher already had his hand on the proper charges. Furthermore, he knew to warn the team working on entering from the other direction to stand clear of the blast.

  But that wasn’t every mission.

  America’s Delta Force in Iraq had perfected the on-the-fly mission profile. Hit the first site, gather intel, and based on what they found, immediately launch on the new site. They often did roll-ups of four, five, six sites in a single night.

  All on the fly.

  She was okay with that.

  This was a little extreme perhaps. But once they’d picked up the two combat controllers in Germany, they’d have three Spec Ops plus Major Swift.

  It wasn’t completely off the track.

  No, the mission, she’d be apples. Hopefully.

  Holly glanced across the midnight sky. Or whatever time zone they were in at the moment.

  Fifty meters away, a second F/A-18F appeared to be bolted to the sky. Visible only by the steady red left-wingtip light and, if she looked far enough aft, the flashing white of the tailfin anti-collision strobe.

  Major Jon Swift was invisible in the darkness of his clear canopy.

  She might as well be alone beyond the Black Stump. No one and nothing near her.

  But she wasn’t. Jon was off her wingtip. Mike and Miranda back in DC, lost in the wake of her exhaust but impossibly connected. Even Jeremy playing with spray painting a giant plane in Seattle. They were all connected. And soon they’d be picking up a pair of combat controllers?

  The thought of ‘team’ still made her nauseous.

  She wanted to talk to Mike about that. For the first time since that awful night, she wanted to try and hash out her feelings about being the lone survivor.

  No one lost a whole team unscathed. Except that’s exactly what had happened.

  Then she remembered that scout of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. Nineteen wildland firefighters trapped in their fire shelters and dead from burnover. One lone Hotshot had survived by being out doing his job, scouting ahead.

  How had he lived with that?

  If she was the only one coming back this time, she just…wouldn’t.

  Holly didn’t know how she felt about Major Jon Swift’s obvious interest in Miranda, but she knew that it was reciprocated and she’d never be able to face Miranda without bringing Jon back.

  Something she’d have to survive to achieve.

  But that wasn’t the worry either. Not really.

  Her best estimate was that the mission was survivable. Possibly ugly, but almost dead set to be survivable.

  Finally, Holly looked up.

  Cruising at fifty thousand feet placed ninety percent of the atmosphere below them. Over the mid-Atlantic, in the middle of the night with the dashboard dimmed down for night vision, the stars seemed to burn in the sky above.

  How many nights had she lain out and watched those stars?

  Except they were wrong.

  The stars of home were dominated by the Southern Cross, not the Big Dipper. And Orion didn’t command the sky girded by his mighty belt and dangling scabbard. In the Southern hemisphere, Orion stood on his head and was drawn differently. Instead the belt was three brothers, and the downward-pointing scabbard was now the upward-leaping sawfish they had eaten against their laws. This had angered the Sun-woman Walu who created a waterspout and cast their canoe into the sky.

  Getting away from the town lights of Tennant Creek wasn’t hard. Three thousand people in the middle of the Northern Territory desert, with the nearest roadhouses thirty klicks north or a hundred and thirty south, didn’t cast much of a glow.

  As teenagers, they’d take their dirt bikes out into the Barkly Tablelands.

  The Warumunga and Yapa, who made up half the town, had learned from their parents how to survive in the Outback. On school holiday, a whole group of them might go for a night and end up staying for a week. She’d learned fieldcraft out there. Holly had also lost her virginity to a lovely Yapa boy with skin the same brown-hued richness as the landscape’s crimson sand. She’d often envied him the lazy brown curls of his sun-lightened hair.

  She’d also had her first puking drunk out in the Tablelands. Not one of her better moments.

  Not many of the white kids went along on the jaunts.

  But one other did.

  Her brother had always gone out with them.

  Until he hadn’t.

  Holly closed her eyes but it didn’t help, she…could still see him as clear as day.

  Though it was dark, she slid down her helmet’s sun visor. It blocked even the brightest stars.

  She
kept it down until she felt the jolt of F/A-18F Super Hornet’s wheels contacting the runway at Ramstein Air Force Base.

  52

  “Set your phone to encrypt. Use the Kontrrazvedki department’s code.” There was a sharp buzz as the woman on the other end set her security code.

  Elayne Kasprak stepped out of the flow of disembarking passengers. Surrounded by the comfortable buzz of Muscovites glad to be home, she’d been feeling warm and happy—until this moment.

  She set today’s code and drifted over to the window looking out at the Aeroflot plane that had just delivered her from London.

  She didn’t know the caller’s voice, and she was good at voices. But the call had come in with a simple identifier that knocked all the warm out of the day.

  Nobody wanted a call from the FSB. The Federal Security Service itself didn’t particularly worry her though; she was above their parochial purview.

  However, specifying that she use the Counterintelligence Department’s code for encryption…

  Their job was locating and “removing” spies. Nobody, not even a Zaslon operative, was wholly immune from their fearsome clutch.

  The FSB were based in the Lubyanka Building. Those who entered against their will never again left the yellow fired-brick eight-story edifice under their own power. When the KGB had been headquartered there, it had become known as the tallest building in Moscow—because the prisoners incarcerated in its notorious basement dungeons could see all the way to the gulags of Siberia.

  Elayne took a deep breath. “I’m here.”

  “I have a message for you.” The woman spoke in perfect English, though with a heavier Russian accent than Elayne’s.

  “Listening.”

  “It was given to me in English, so I am repeating it that way. To Ms. Elayne Egorova. There—”

  “Say that again!”

  “To Ms. Elayne Egorova.”

  No one! Absolutely no one was supposed to know those two names were associated. Per Zaslon requirements, she’d killed Elizaveta Egorova. Actually, Zaslon had done it for her when she’d joined. Elayne Kasprak, as well as her other aliases, had then each been generated through distinct and separate channels. A crossover between aliases was a clear sign of a major failure—like a leak of the master agents’ list.