Borman didn’t argue. He drained his nearly full glass of Argentine Malbec before leaving. When he was out of sight, I addressed the other two.
“We’re drinking wine,” Dutch muttered, “just like you said we should.”
Unwillingly, my lips twisted upward on one side of my mouth. What little control I had was vested in huge, over-sized children. Except Marlys. She was still much younger, but all adult. I thought of going to her cabin and laying down in her bed. But I almost cackled aloud at the thought. I might wake up missing a few strategic parts. She was every bit of the Yemaya goddess, deep into the syncretic religion of Santeria.
I intended to remind Don and Dutch of our last Mouseketeer meeting later that night. Its agenda would be vitally important to my survival and the potential longevity of many people aboard ship. Just then, however, Hathoot arrived. He was sparkling in his white and black uniform, befitting a man in charge of the dry cleaners and the laundry forces aboard ship. He put his hat on the bar flat side down next to Dutch, who was on the end. I looked at Don. He nodded, ever so slightly. Hathoot had been given the bait and he’d taken it.
“There is no bartender aboard the Lindy thanks to you,” Hathoot complained, not looking at any of us.
I just waited. Don and Dutch remained reticent as well.
“What is a man to do for a drink?” he said.
Dutch got up slowly, walked around the short tear-drop-shaped figure, then pulled a wine glass from a holder. He set it in front of Hathoot and then poured an overly large supply of rich, red wine into the man’s glass. Hathoot thanked him. When he raised the glass the sun shone right through the marvelous liquid.
“Don David,” he said. “Not as classy as that Val de Flores concoction, but good stuff.” He swallowed half the contents of his glass. “I’m charging you twenty dollars a bottle for that rotgut they’re serving down there.” He nodded towards the dock in the direction of Sarda’s.
I didn’t bite. One benefit, if I were killed, was that I would not have to pay my bar tab, I thought to myself. What are you up to? Now that is the question.
He drank more wine. I hoped that neither Don nor Dutch would look at me — and they didn’t.
“Well, we’ll certainly find out sometime tomorrow, won’t we?” He drained his glass and then set his hat back atop his round balding head. “Good day, gentlemen.” He strode through the Lido area without looking back.
“I don’t like this,” I told Don after the man was well out of hearing.
Then I felt a presence behind me. Over my right shoulder the Basque hovered. I had only seen her out of Don’s cabin once before. I registered astonishment, which she returned with a smile.
She got her own glass from the bar. She was wearing dark slacks of expensive material. Her blouse was also designer. She looked terrific. Not like Marlys, but in the same league. She bent to the little cooler, fumbled around, and then came up with a block of cheese. She put it on a board, found some crackers, and went to work with a Chicago Cutlery butcher knife. We all ate some of the stuff. She drank no wine. After a few minutes, the Basque left, not gracing us with a goodbye. She kept her hands in front of her as she exited, which was unusual, but I missed its significance.
I left Don and Dutch drinking and smoking at the bar. They knew about the meeting. I was not going to babysit them. They had a lot on the line, too, or thought they did. The gold vein was real. Dutch and I had seen that. We had samples. Which reminded me of his sample. The huge nugget. I wanted that for the morning. Little nuggets and coins of pure gold had impact. But a fist-sized nugget had the impact of an asteroid. It might come in handy.
I went back to my cabin to take a hot shower and sleep, intending to miss dinner. Nor would I eat breakfast tomorrow. I had gone on a liquid diet that morning. If I were to take a hit in the torso during the next twenty-four hours, I wanted my stomach and intestines empty. It was a precaution, a small edge, but I had to take any I could find.
I lay in my bunk with the door locked. I almost got up to play song number seven and then I thought for a second and did get up to check the battery pack. No recorder again.
“Where are you Kessler?” I brooded, and then fell into a deep sleep.
Don knocked on my door to snap me awake. I came out of sleep bleary. I had been crossing the plains in a covered wagon. Marlys had been on the Conestoga next to me. The Indians had attacked, but it was over. I had an arrow in my shoulder. She inspected it, then reached into a bag at her feet and took out a piece of string. “Here, take the end of this string,” she had said. The knock brought me instantly out of my dream.
We went to the meeting. The air inside the cabin was electric. Tomorrow was the day and it could not be avoided by any of us. Günter already sat next to Marlys, leaving no room for me on the bunk. Don and Dutch shared Don’s bunk. Filipe and Gloria were together, with her half in the little bathroom again. Standing with my back to the closed door, I stared over at the Basque, who was in good spirits again. I didn’t like the fact that she had, all of a sudden, taken to smiling, but I discounted it. Don broke the silence.
“Are we gonna go over everyone’s role tomorrow?” he asked.
On cue, I launched into everyone’s assignment.
“Marlys goes to the museum, taking Günter with her.”
I knew now that Günter was a potential liability of unknown strength. I needed him isolated.
“Don, Dutch and I are going to Sarda’s, before you.”
I looked at Günter and Marlys, ordering them to “come back down with Khromov and Dora to re-open Sarda’s.”
They both agreed.
“I want the booze to flow freely. Most of those people will be hung over and they’ll want some of the ‘hair of the dog.’ Don’t manage the glass kitty. Let them drink. Don and Dutch will carry a couple of more cases when we go in.”
Again, they both agreed.
“You,” I pointed at the Basque, momentarily forgetting here name, “are our only true contact with communications aboard the ship. Watch. Report. Move around the decks. Get a feel. Don’t let them see you with that earphone in your head.”
Her radiance faded by the time I finished.
“And you, Filipe, man the boat like we discussed. Extra gas tanks and canvas. Lots of canvas and rope to tie it down.”
He didn’t nod, but I caught the readiness in his expression.
“Gloria, you’re our Filipino hope. We need to know with certainty that the World Discoverer does not leave without us, under any circumstance.”
She evinced surprise. I did not ask any questions of her, however. She would do all she could to make sure we all had at least a fighting chance of making it aboard.
“What if things go wrong?” I asked my team of amateurs.
I was met with dead silence.
“Wrong?” Don finally said, for all of them.
“Yes, wrong. What if there are weapons fired? I get killed, you two get killed?” I pointed at Don and Dutch. “What do the survivors do?”
They all looked back at me with round eyes and blank faces.
“That’s very unlikely, I will admit. We’re not expecting any violence. We’re expecting to go talk to the Commissar, pay him off, and get this American kid back from him, who he’s probably tired of messing with anyway. But things can go wrong doing stuff like this. You have to be ready for it. You have to pull together and make decisions about what to do. Then you have to follow those decisions. Without me, the team leader is Don. Without Don, it’s Marlys.”
Her eyebrows shot up. Her surprise was palpable, but I also knew it was the right decision.
“That’s it,” I concluded, clapping my hands, then spreading them, like a dealer leaving the table in Vegas.
“No detail or advice about what we should do?” Don asked, hesitantly.
I shook my head. “We won’t know
what might go wrong. We could talk about it all night. It wouldn’t make any difference, because it would be something else. You just have to stay flexible, be adaptable, and not freeze mentally.”
I hoped that those who knew about Ivan, and even the dissident Alexi, would not bring either up. Even the sub-plot to get rid of Hathoot needed to stay out of Günter’s hearing.
Borman was our ghost. He did not come to the meeting. If he had, I would have turned him away. I had a use for Borman, but I wouldn’t see to him until after the meeting. I wanted out of there, without any more discussion.
I closed the door behind me and made for my cabin. As I got to my cabin, I heard footsteps behind me. Marlys was closing on me. I looked up at the ceiling of the corridor.
“But I’ve prayed about this, Lord!” I reminded Him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE:
The Gulag
Following the Mouseketeers gathering, I made my way through connecting corridors with Marlys trailing not far behind me. My mind abandoned vital business, which I had discussed in detail at the meeting. Instead, my attention was concentrated on what might occur when we both came together at my door. I was not going to deny her again, if that is what had happened before.
My interactions with Marlys had never had any real substance to them. I had never left her presence certain of anything, especially my standing with her or my place in her life. If I had one. I walked with a firm step. We had this night before us. The morning was eight hours away. The ship was not due to sail until mid-afternoon. Tomorrow would come soon enough and it would have sufficient hours to accomplish the mission or at least enough to give me a marginal chance of success.
I reached down to unlock the bolt, but quit after turning the key. The door was no longer locked as I had left it. The cabin was restocked with everything I had prepared for the mission, save the Kel-Tec automatic.
Marlys joined me. Her presence was tangible. I looked away from her as her appearance alone caused me to do and say things I usually regretted later. I gestured for her to enter. Her facial expression had softened and filled with worldliness. I stumbled at the threshold.
Günter stepped out of the cabin. Marlys and I both stopped dead in our tracks. Neither uttered a word, just looking at the fastidious Third Mate in his formal ship’s attire. He reacted stiffly. I verged on asking him what he was doing in my cabin and how he had come to be there. I did not get the chance.
“My compliments, Indy, but the Commissar of the Oblast has requested your presence at his residence immediately,” Günter announced, then bowed, as if he had just extended his compliments to a visiting admiral.
Marlys backed up several steps in order to stand behind me. I tried to fathom what was occurring. The Commissar, Igor Kasinski, had received my request for an interview, which was scheduled for the following morning. Professor Khromov had assured me of that. So what was going on? It was early evening of the night before. Not that it mattered. I had little choice. When I turned to Marlys, she was gone. I had not even heard her departing footsteps. My shoulders sank a bit. I regarded Günter with some anger and a bit of peevishness.
“You know, Third Mate, if you’re going to do that formal delivery thing, then how about using one of my real titles?” I shook my finger at the martinet of a man, who bowed in his Germanic way once more.
“Herr Professor Indy,” he corrected, but this time with a slight snarl.
I surrendered. Günter was a stiff, unbending reflection of a real man, but I liked something about him, even if he was a cipher in Kessler’s operation.
“Get out of the doorway. I need to freshen up for dinner. I’ll be right out,” I said, as I eased him out of my way.
I slammed the door in Günter’s face. I did need to freshen up, but I needed to get rid of my automatic and passport even more. I did not want to be caught at the Commissar’s residence with a firearm. At least not at a time of his design. And I did not want my “papers” examined, even though the passport was authentic. All my passports were genuine. The days of fakes were long gone. Technology had seen to that. But it meant that you had to have other real identities, as well.
So, I was the real professor, just as I was the real realtor, diver, pilot, and several more personae. The Agency was becoming comfortable with people who were more than one person. Really and legally. But it was a transitional time. I knew things would change. Still, I wanted to go into Commissar Kasinski’s clean, with nothing on me. It would prepare me for what was likely to occur in the morning. Or not. Serendipity ruled so much of my work, a fact I both loved and hated.
I checked the drawer with all my stuff. It seemed undisturbed. The switch on the CD player beckoned. What additional chunk of horoscope-like data might pour forth?
But I refrained. Business was at hand. Günter stood, just as I had left him, except his back was to the door. He was in an attentive parade-rest position, looking like my cabin had its own posted guard
We headed for the lido deck. I inquired of Günter as to whether I might inform Don of my leaving the ship, but he just kept walking, shaking his head.
“I’m quite certain that my Marlys will see to that.”
I looked at the back of the man’s neck as he sped up in front of me. He had inadvertently said “my Marlys” and then realized what he’d said. I didn’t comment, but I did snicker. Poor fool, I thought. Then I almost laughed aloud.
Günter stopped at the top of the gangplank. He gestured down toward the dock where a small Russian jeep sat idling.
“Transportation for both of you awaits,” he advised.
He waited for me to walk down. Along the way I weighed the exact wording of his comment. “Both?” I thought to myself. I opened the jeep’s back door. Inside, behind the driver, sat Benito. She waved me in. The jeep drove off with a jerk, powered by Vodka, no doubt.
Benito wore a dress and pumps. She didn’t look as bad as my moniker suggested. In fact, she seemed feminine and I regretted that I had ever given her such a masculine nickname, which was used so often that passengers never even remembered her real name anymore. But I could not undo the damage.
“We can’t cross the tundra in this thing, can we?” I asked, loudly, hanging on for dear life, as we careened through Providenya’s streets and alleys. “God, only an eastern European bucket can make this much noise,” I yelled to Benito.
She grinned. I could tell that she was enjoying herself and that did not make me feel any more comfortable. She cupped one hand, holding to the back of the driver’s seat with the other.
“You think this is bad, wait until we get to the Tundra Cat.”
I sighed, trying to lean deeper into the thin cheap plastic of my badly made seat.
Minutes later we hit the edge of town, doing a broadside skid into the mud of the tundra. There was a road below us, I saw, close to the water, but it ran atop the bedrock near the water’s edge. Roads through the tundra were just not constructed. It was too expensive, and besides, when things were frozen, which was nine months of the year, no road was necessary. What little gravel the gulag produced was used these days for concrete mix. With eighty prisoners, its output could not be significant.
The Tundra Cat was a tracked vehicle. It was much wider than the jeep, and diesel powered. The big motor that drove it shook the steel goliath with each stroke of its rotation. I followed Benito up the steel ladder. We strapped into larger plusher seats atop the beast. I knew where I had seen this kind of vehicle before. At the South Pole. Those had been called Arctic Cats. American-built, they had been agile, fast and comfortable. Those Arctic Cats had been thoroughbreds compared to what I was now in.
We lurched off hard ground as the driver threw levers and hit the gas. I felt a squishy sensation in my stomach as we sank into the muck and then began accelerating. We kept accelerating until the huge diesel down beneath us was screaming. I observed that at speed the huge tr
acked vehicle ran up on top of the tundra. I felt like we were flying, although I gaged our speed to be about a hundred kilometers per hour. I was impressed. The Russians did some things right and the vehicle I was in was an example of one of them. It was a Clydesdale, but a wonderfully rugged one.
The entire trip was mesmerizing. The vehicle threw mud chunks forty to fifty feet into the air and even further out to both sides. The tundra itself was beautiful in season. Small yellow and red flowers carpeted everything. It resembled the Highlands of Scotland or the High Desert of New Mexico in spring, both inhospitable places which I loved. I recognized the old Victorian home as we closed in on it. My NRO maps were pretty accurate and detailed. Satellites did not always image straight down. They also passed overhead at angles. You could get some interesting perspectives, ones you would not expect from hundreds of miles up.
There were four outbuildings, I confirmed, all in more disrepair than the main house. None of the wooden structures had been painted, not even the main house.
We pulled up. The Russian driver shut the engine off. An American driver would have let it run, but the Russian driver was better trained. Diesels no longer needed to be left running to keep them warm and lubricated. Technology had improved them, too.
The driver helped us down. Although he smelled strongly of booze, I was still favorably inclined toward him. His uniform was a bit tattered, but laundered. Two guards stood at either side of the front door. They were in shade, as the first floor was indented to form a huge slatted porch. They stood with AK-Ms, the updated version of the venerable, and in my opinion, over-rated AK-47. The guards were casual, not at attention. They made no move to search us.
I felt we might be the first visitors to the place in some time. I was encouraged. The place was old, the military guards bored, and the security lax. Maybe things were going to come to a simple, logical conclusion. It all seemed plausible. Prisoners had no chance to escape. They could not walk across the bog-like tundra in summer and they could not survive forty kilometers in the open during winter. The guards were there to probe and push the prisoners around, not to guard them.
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