“You were inside the burning airplane?”
“Yeah. It was a frigging nightmare.”
“Holy shit. I can imagine. Anyway, under the circumstances, sick leave is approved, obviously. I’ll be in the tower until morning anyway. But listen, an NTSB accident investigation team is on the way. They’ll be here tomorrow along with representatives from the Air Force, since it was their airplane. Under the circumstances, they’re going to want to interview you, so call the facility first thing in the morning and plan on coming in here sometime during the day to talk to the investigators.”
“Will do, Chuck, and thanks.”
“No problem. What kind of condition is the victim in? Have the doctors told you anything?”
“There are no doctors. She’s passed out on my couch even as we speak.”
“Your couch? What are you talking about? She’s at your apartment?”
“Yeah, she refused to go to the hospital.” Shane said nothing about the young woman waving a gun around.
“But you said she’s passed out. How do you know she didn’t want to go to the hospital?”
“She was conscious in my car and she told me. She didn’t pass out until we got back to my place.”
“Christ, Shane, don’t be an idiot. Get that girl to the hospital, like, right now.”
“Yeah, I guess I should,” Shane answered, knowing it was the smart thing to do but knowing also he was not about to do it. “Anyway, thanks again, Chuck, and good luck. I know you’re busy.”
“It’s just paperwork bullshit at this point. I’ll be fine. Get that girl to the hospital.”
“See ya.” Shane hung up the phone and glanced around the kitchen’s open entryway into the living room and saw Tracie watching him from the couch. She looked even paler than before, but Shane figured regaining consciousness had to be a good sign.
He flashed a smile. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Never mind that,” she said shortly. “Who the hell were you talking to just now?”
“My supervisor, if it’s any of your business,” he said, angered by her tone and, he had to admit, a little hurt by her attitude. After all he had done for her, who was she to snap at him for no reason?
“Your supervisor? Who do you work for? Why do you need to talk to your supervisor in the middle of the night?”
“Again,” he said, “not that it’s any of your business, but I’m an air traffic controller at Bangor Airport and I’m supposed to be at work right now. I thought my supervisor might consider it rude of me not to let him know why I didn’t show up, especially tonight. They’re kind of busy. It seems there was an airplane crash. I’m lucky I still have a job.”
She was silent. Shane could see her thinking. “Did you tell him about me?” she asked.
“Of course. You’re the whole reason I’m here and not there. It wouldn’t have made much sense for me to say I stopped and watched the burning wreckage of a crashed military jet before blowing off work and returning home.”
She blew out an angry breath and shook her head. “You could have said you checked inside the wreckage and didn’t find anyone alive. Dammit!”
Shane spread his hands in exasperation. “Why would I do that? What would be the point?” He turned toward his kitchen, anger building, and then spun back around to face the injured woman. “Who the hell are you? Why were you on that plane? Where were you coming from? What were you doing that’s so freaking top-secret that you can’t even go to the hospital after a goddamned plane crash?”
Again she was silent and Shane could see her weighing her options for a response. Finally she sighed. “Never mind,” she said. “Forget it. I don’t mean to seem ungrateful after everything you’ve done for me, but I simply can’t talk about it. I’m sorry.”
She closed her eyes and leaned back on Shane’s two Syracuse University throw pillows his proud mother had knitted when he was accepted into their journalism program after high school. He’d graduated with a degree he had never used, opting instead to apply for a job with the FAA after the disastrous PATCO strike in 1981, when President Reagan fired the illegally striking air traffic controllers en masse. His mother, angry and hurt, had never asked for the pillows back.
Shane walked across the room and perched on the arm of the couch at her feet, unsure of what to say. Tracie’s face was still bone-white, shiny from a thin coating of sweat. Her eyes looked glassy. “Sorry I’m dripping blood onto your couch,” she said, her voice weak, and suddenly she looked very young and vulnerable.
Shane waved a hand airily. “This old thing? Don’t worry about it. I picked it up for twenty bucks at the Salvation Army. In fact, I should apologize to you for subjecting you to all those potential germs.”
She attempted a smile.
“Speaking of germs…” he continued.
“I know. I need to clean this wound.”
“I’ll help you. I have a decent first-aid kit in the bathroom.”
She narrowed her eyes and Shane raised his hands in surrender. “My intentions are honorable, I swear,” he said. “Come on, I’ll help you to the bathroom. I think I still have a pair of gym shorts from high school that are too small for me. You might be able to wear them without them sliding right off. I’ll toss them in and you can put them on, then we’ll clean your leg in the bathtub.”
Tracie nodded and rose to a half-sitting position, gritting her teeth against the pain. Shane pulled her arm around his neck, then stood slowly and the pair began stumbling awkwardly across the living room. When they reached the bathroom, he kicked the toilet seat cover down and eased her into a sitting position on it.
“If you want to get those bloody pants off, I’ll be right back with the shorts.”
She nodded tiredly. He pulled the door closed as he was leaving and heard her say “Thank you” as he was walking away.
The wound was deep, but to Shane’s eye looked clean. He went to work on it, washing it as gently as he could with warm, soapy water and then disinfecting it with hydrogen peroxide. Her burns appeared minimal, and Shane knew she had been extremely lucky. Tracie was mostly silent, stoic, occasionally grunting or gasping through gritted teeth, but she never complained and even helped steady her leg with both hands.
After patting the wound dry with a clean towel, Shane pulled a new, sealed Ace bandage out of his medicine chest. He opened the package and began wrapping the stretchy gauze around her leg as tightly as he dared, closing the sides of the puncture wound together and sealing it. The bleeding had stopped, more or less, and when he had finished he examined his handiwork and said, “Well, you still should be in the emergency room for stitches, but it looks like you might survive another day.”
“I was afraid of that,” she answered jokingly. “Now if this invisible guy will stop hitting me in the head with a baseball bat, I’ll be good to go.”
“Concussion?” Shane asked.
She nodded. “Probably. I know I’m supposed to get woken up every hour or something, but screw that. If I can get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, I’m sure I’ll be as good as new. If you don’t mind helping me back to your couch, I’ll sleep a while and then I’ll be out of your hair in the morning, I promise.”
“No worries,” Shane said, helping her to her feet. “Except you’re not going to use the couch. You’re sleeping in my bed.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Assuming an awful lot there, cowboy, aren’t ya?”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, you’ll be alone. I’ll take the couch.”
“I’m not going to take your bed and make you—”
“I know, I know, you’re tough as nails. A real badass. We’ve already established that. You could sleep on a bed of hot coals if you had to. Just do this one little thing for me, okay? My mom would never forgive me if she found out I made an injured woman sleep on the couch. You’d actually be doing me a favor,” he said with a smile.
She sputtered and shook her head, but allowed herself to be led into the apartment
’s only bedroom. He helped her under the covers and turned out the light. “Goodnight,” he said, but she was already asleep.
20
May 31, 1987
8:40 a.m. local time
Moscow
“We have a problem.” The man on the other end of the secure telephone line spoke in a hushed voice, but the concern was plainly evident in his tone.
“Of course we do,” Vasily Kopalev said. “There is always a problem.” As head of the KGB’s American Operations Branch, Vasily spent most of his time dealing with one emergency or another from one of his small cadre of operatives stationed throughout the United States. He lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply, savoring the bite of the tar and the smooth flavor of the smuggled Lucky Strikes. The Americans may be a threat to Mother Russia, but they make a damned fine cigarette.
“Maybe so,” the voice continued, “but this problem is bigger than most.”
“Get on with it, then. Are you going to make me guess?”
“The airplane carrying Gorbachev’s letter has crashed, and—”
“That was the plan, remember?”
“No, you don’t understand. The plane did not disappear over the ocean. It crash-landed near an airport here in the U.S. In Bangor, Maine.”
“What?”
“That’s not the worst of it.”
“Of course not,” Kopalev muttered. Suddenly his Lucky Strike tasted bitter. He sucked down a deep drag anyway. He was going to need it. “Tell me,” he sighed, exhaling cigarette smoke.
“All of the crew members are dead, except the woman.”
“Except the woman.”
“That’s right. The CIA operative has vanished. Virtually the entire B-52 was destroyed in a massive fire following the accident, so it is of course possible the letter burned up in the blaze, but given the fact the agent has disappeared, it would seem likely the letter survived and disappeared with her.”
“Yes, it would seem likely,” Vasily agreed. He was silent for a moment, thinking. “We can’t be certain what is contained in that letter, but I have a pretty good idea.”
The man on the other end of the line waited patiently. Vasily knew he didn’t care what was in the letter, it was not his job to care what was in the letter. His job was to carry out Vasily’s instructions, thus his words were irrelevant until they contained those instructions. “You are stationed in Boston, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you have two comrades also stationed in Boston, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And what is the distance from Boston to Bangor, Maine?” Kopalev leaned back in his chair and consulted a map of the United States posted behind his desk. The map was enormous and took up one entire wall. Vasily did the calculations along with the agent. He knew the answer before the man spoke.
“It is roughly a three-hour drive in normal traffic conditions.”
“Very good. Take your two comrades and get up there immediately. Recover that letter. The agent was involved in a plane crash. Even if she escaped, she must have suffered injuries. She probably wandered away from the wreckage and is even now lying dead somewhere. If that is the case, find her body and relieve it of that letter before someone else does. It is not enough to keep the communique from President Reagan. It must be kept from anyone who would have the ability to publicize its contents.”
“And if she somehow survived?”
“Your mission remains unchanged. Get that letter. Whether the CIA operative lives or dies is of no concern.”
21
May 31, 1987
7:30 a.m.
Bangor, Maine
The ringing of the telephone worked its way into Shane’s consciousness gradually, pulling him out of a deep sleep. He had been dreaming about a young red-haired woman, mysterious and sexy. In his dream they were sharing his bed, and he was doing things with her he had not done since the break-up of his marriage over a year ago.
He burst into wakefulness like a swimmer surfacing, the dream already fading, Shane reluctant to let it go. He glanced at the clock on the living room wall as he crossed to the kitchen. Seven thirty. He had gotten barely five hours of sleep and still felt exhausted and weak. His entire body ached, leg muscles complaining, back stiff, joints popping. And he needed coffee.
He picked up the phone. “What?” he barked into the receiver. It came out harsher than he had intended, but he didn’t much care.
“Shane, this is Marty Hall. I understand you had quite an adventure last night.” Marty was the FAA Air Traffic Manager at Bangor Tower, an older man with a mop of thick white hair and a heavily lined face who had spent his entire adult life working his way up the FAA ladder. Shane barely knew Marty because they rarely had the opportunity for interaction beyond the occasional nod and smile as they passed in the hallway of the facility’s base building stationed next to the control tower.
“Hi, Marty. Yeah, you could say that.” Shane remembered Chuck McNally’s statement that he would have to come in and talk to the NTSB accident investigators and cursed under his breath. He wanted nothing more than to lie back down on his couch and sleep for another couple of hours. Or days.
“Listen, Shane, I know you’re supposed to be off for the next couple of days, but the crash team is going to be here at nine and would like to talk with you as soon as possible. Think you can get in here by then?”
He sighed. It’s not like this was unexpected. “I’ll be there,” he said, then hung up the phone and this time cursed out loud. There would be no going back to sleep today.
He padded past his bedroom on the way to the shower and saw the bedroom door ajar, as he’d left it. He eased it open and peeked in at his injured guest. She was lying on her side in a fetal position. He took two steps into the room and saw her breathing deeply and steadily. She looked impossibly small and helpless.
Her back was to him, so it was difficult to see how the bandage on her leg was holding up. Shane thought for a moment about trying to take a quick look at it while she slept, then imagined her waking up to see him bent down over the bed, looking at her bare legs. He remembered the feeling of staring into a gun barrel last night and decided the bandage was probably holding just fine. He eased the door closed and continued to the shower.
22
May 31, 1987
7:40 a.m.
Hampden, Maine
The early-morning air was cool and crisp, and the slanting sunlight reflected off the windshields of dozens of vehicles parked in the truck-stop lot. Anatoli Simonov stepped out of the rented Chevy Caprice and shaded his eyes against the glare. The relative warmth reminded Anatoli how far he had come from his childhood in Siberia, where the bitter cold was so complete it was like being stabbed in the lungs if you tried to breathe too deeply.
But the desolation felt familiar. Dysart’s Truck Stop was located south of Bangor, Maine on Interstate 95, and apart from the truck stop buildings and the big paved parking lot, he was surrounded by a massive expanse of mostly unpopulated landscape, thousands of square miles of rolling terrain filled with millions of evergreen trees, the city of Bangor just a rumor to the north.
“Come on,” Bogdan Fedorov urged, climbing out of the back seat along with a second KGB operative. “We have much to do, and standing around is accomplishing nothing.” The three men hurried across the tarmac and into the truck stop for breakfast.
***
They ate mostly in silence, preferring to interact with the locals as little as possible. It was easy to blend in with the Americans visually, much more difficult when you spoke in heavily Russian-accented English, as Anatoli’s two companions did. Anatoli had long ago achieved a certain familiarity with the language, so he ordered for everyone, and their conversation ground to a halt whenever the waitress—a heavy-set middle-aged woman with rust-colored hair and an aggrieved demeanor—approached to refill their coffee.
An ancient black-and-white television suspended in one corner of the dining room was tuned to a local chann
el, the volume cranked to a decibel level roughly equivalent to that of an air raid siren. Local programming had been pre-empted to carry continuous coverage of a breaking news story—last night’s crash of an Air Force B-52 jet.
The men ate their omelets, drank their coffee, and paid close attention as a female reporter gazed solemnly into the camera and said, “It appears as though there was at least one survivor of last night’s fiery airplane crash in a heavily wooded area north of Bangor International Airport. Sources close to the investigation have confirmed that a passing motorist witnessed the crash and braved an out-of-control fire to pull a young woman from the wreckage.”
Anatoli lowered his coffee cup to the table, unable to believe his good fortune as a graphic was superimposed on the lower right hand corner of the screen, depicting a head-shot photo of a youngish man, perhaps in his late twenties. The television’s distance from their table and the small size of the picture made it impossible to distinguish any details of the man’s facial features.
The reporter continued: “Sources tell us this man, Shane Rowley, an air traffic controller living in Bangor, was on his way to work at the time of the crash and managed to rescue the as-yet unidentified woman. Her condition and whereabouts, as well as the whereabouts of Rowley, are at this time unknown, but we’ve learned Mr. Rowley is scheduled to meet with NTSB investigators as well as representatives of the Air Force at nine a.m. at the control tower building at BIA to assist in the investigation. More on this story as it develops. Jane Finneran, WBGR News 9.”
Anatoli tried to keep from smiling but just couldn’t do it. He tore his eyes from the television for the first time since the news report had begun and saw that his fellow operatives were smiling also.
“This would be considered good news, yes?” Fedorov said softly between bites of omelet, flecks of cheese peppering his black beard.
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