Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02

by Day of the Cheetah (v1. 1)

  “You can try some of that,” Musi said. “It is very special. It is my favorite.” As he dropped ice cubes into a couple of glasses she added, “It was Janet’s favorite, too.”

  “Who?”

  “Janet. Janet Larson. Her real name was Katrina Litkovka— the woman you murdered eleven years ago.”

  He froze, then, willing his muscles to move, turned around. Musi Zaykov was standing in the center of the room holding a silenced nine-millimeter automatic pistol in her right hand. Her seductive smile had vanished, leaving a stone-cold murderous glare.

  “What in hell is going on, Musi?” He put the glass down on the bar but kept the Scotch bottle in his left hand, sliding it down his leg to hide it as best he could. “Put that thing down.”

  “You are under arrest, Colonel Maraklov,” Zaykov said, “for the act of murder.”

  “What are you talking about? Is this some kind of sick joke?” Loosen up, he told himself. Find out what she knows and use the time to figure out something . . . He forced himself to put on a broad smile. “What’s going on, Musi? Put that thing away. Are you crazy? I’m no threat to you—”

  “Stay where you are.” She reached into her jacket pocket and took out a sheet of paper. “A copy of a message transmitted to you from Moscow, directing you to go to Puerto Cabezas and steal the DreamStar aircraft. What is this about?”

  “Just what it says, Musi. I’ve been ordered to steal the damn thing again and fly it to a secret base in Costa Rica.” As he said it he took the opportunity to take a half-step toward her. “They figured I did such a good job the first time, they wanted to see if I could do it again.”

  “If that was meant to be humorous, Andrei, you failed,” Zaykov said. “My last orders from General Tret’yak were to see to it that you are confined to the base until morning.”

  “Well, I have orders too, Musi. Given to me by Vladimir Kalinin. I’m sure you have ways of confirming that. I don’t have much time to waste.”

  “I must check this with General Tret’yak. If what you say is true, this contradicts previous orders. Orders must be verified—”

  “There’s no damn time to verify anything. DreamStar will be gone in ten hours, maybe less.”

  “And you had to come here to get your flight suit and helmet,” Zaykov said. “Then you had to do one more thing—kill me. You could not make it appear that we had gone to Managua as scheduled unless I was out of your way.”

  “I wasn’t going to kill you. I could never do that. I’m much too fond of you . . . you know that...” He searched her face, found little softening in it. “You can help me, Musi. You can get a helicopter to take me to Puerto Cabezas—”

  “I can’t do that. Even if these orders were fully authorized I would not do it.”

  Something else was wrong “Musi, what is it?”

  She let the first letter drop to the floor, then drew another one from her jacket. “Some research I did when you left Sebaco for Puerto Cabezas ... The morning after your attempt to fly to Cuba you were delirious from dehydration. You called out a woman’s name—Janet.”

  “Janet? You mentioned that name moments ago. I don’t know a Janet.”

  “You did know a Janet, Andrei—or should I say, Kenneth James. I knew a Janet too. Janet Larson. We were good friends . . . back at the Connecticut Academy.”

  Now the words hit Maraklov like a baseball bat against his skull. He had forgotten the name the minute he left the Soviet Union for Hawaii all those years ago. The delirium caused by the ANTARES interface somehow had unearthed it—unfortunately, in the presence of another Connecticut Academy graduate who knew her.

  “Yes, I knew Janet. . . Janet Larson. What has she got to do with my orders?”

  “Perhaps nothing—perhaps everything,” Zaykov said. “Janet Larson—Katrina Litkovka—was found dead in a car crash. They say she had been drinking, that her car went off the road. But Katrina was fond of having affairs with many of the students at the Academy. You were one of them.” She paused, then said, “I was one of them too.”

  “You and Larson were lovers?”

  “Those of us in courtesan training at the Academy were taught to ... to please women as well as men,” she said. “It was all part of the game at the Academy. But mostly we were friends, damn it, friends... She apparently had been drinking an expensive Scotch whiskey. Even though she didn’t have much alcohol in her blood, drunk driving was blamed for the accident. But the whiskey was very suspicious. Under questioning, a truck driver that delivered supplies to the Academy admitted that he sold or traded bottles of contraband foreign liquor to students and employees. One of the students he sold the whiskey to was you. ”

  Zaykov took a tighter grip on the weapon. “All of Katrina’s lovers were suspects in the investigation. All of us were officially cleared—all but you. No investigation was started on you because you had just been inserted into the United States Air Force Academy training program. After a time interest in the case disappeared. Katrina Litkovka’s murderer was never found.”

  “I still don’t see what this has to do with anything,” Maraklov said. “Are you accusing me of her murder? Now, after all these years, you’re on a manhunt for a murder that happened over a decade ago and ten thousand miles away?”

  “There is no statute of limitations on murder.” She held up the paper. “I did some more checking, Mr. Kenneth James. A report done by a KGB agent that assisted you in killing the real Kenneth James in Hawaii during the substitution. He reported that the dying American admitted to two murders in his presence—the murder of his infant brother, and the murder of his high school girlfriend.”

  Maraklov took a step forward. The gun did not waver. “Musi, I still don’t understand. What does this have to do with what’s going on here? Yes, the real Kenneth James killed his brother—he admitted that. He was seconds away from death when he said he killed his girlfriend. He was delirious—”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. My friend Katrina Litkovka used to tell me about you, about the stories you supposedly made up, about how realistic they were. She told me about how you told her about how James killed his girlfriend before he went to Hawaii. Katrina said you were close to killing her then. Strange, isn’t it—the real Kenneth James confessed to the very crime that you described to Katrina.”

  That made Maraklov stop in hopeless confusion. The parallels between the real Ken James and what he thought was James’ life were indeed startling, but he had never thought of it as his thoughts versus James’ real life. At the very instant that he realized he had been left alone in that hotel room in Honolulu, he became the ultimate extreme of his training ... he became Kenneth Francis James. He evaded the security checks, the encounters with James’ friends and lovers, even related intimate details about James’ childhood because he had ceased to be Andrei Ivanschichin Maraklov and had become Ken James. Which was more than they wanted at the Academy.

  Zaykov let the report fall to the floor and took out still another piece of paper from her jacket. “I am detaining you so we can speak with General Tret’yak, but I am also reopening the investigation of Katrina Litkovka’s murder.

  “Motive: She told me you threatened to kill her if she exposed your behavior to Headmaster Roberts. That would have destroyed your chances to go to America, something you had spent half your life and every part of your peculiar mind training for. I recall the talk that your mission was to be canceled because you were unprepared emotionally for the role. Opportunity: The whiskey you bought two days before the accident. The security guards testified that Litkovka was not drunk before leaving the Academy. You arranged the accident, made it look like Katrina had been drinking, then killed her, Kenneth James ...”

  “I am not Kenneth James,” Maraklov said. “I am Colonel

  Andrei Maraklov, an officer in the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, a trained deep-cover agent just like yourself. And I am not a murderer . .

  Zaykov held up the last piece of paper in her hand. It was a
photograph. She tossed it across to him. Maraklov stepped forward to pick it up, she moved backward to stay out of his reach. “Look at it.”

  Sweat popped off his forehead as he studied the picture. It was an old photocopy of a picture of Kenneth James, the real Kenneth James, taken in Hawaii, obviously by a KGB hidden camera. It appeared to have been taken not long before he had arrived in Hawaii to make the switch—possibly it was the photo used by the plastic surgeons to give him his new face before replacing James.

  Even though the photo was much enlarged and grainy, Maraklov could still make out the drawn features, the thinning hair, the sickly appearance. The guy had been tearing himself apart from the inside out for ten years over the murder of his infant brother. He had destroyed not only his own life but the life of his natural father as well. No wonder he had expressed such relief when he realized he was dying and had confessed the truth to Maraklov that evening.

  “What about this, Musi? We’re wasting time . . .”

  She motioned to a mirror on the living room wall. “Take a look.”

  Maraklov dropped the photograph and moved over to the mirror. He stared at the face in the mirror. It was Kenneth Francis James—at least the face of James in the photograph. The plastic surgery Maraklov had undergone before coming to America kept most of his face looking like it was still seventeen years old, but it couldn’t hide the thinning hair, the hollow cheeks, the sunken eyes, the thin neck and protruding Adam’s apple ... in his case, the strain of the ANTARES interface and the other attritions in the theft of DreamStar had chewed away at Maraklov’s body, much as the murders of his brother and girlfriend had eaten away at James.

  “I’m arresting you for the murder of Katrina Litkovka,” Musi Zaykov said. “You come with—”

  Ignoring the weapon pointed at his chest, he reared back and hurled the scotch bottle at the mirror. The bottle hit the glass and exploded. Instinctively Zaykov turned at the sound, the gun still pointed at Maraklov, but her head turned toward the shattered mirror. It was the opening Maraklov needed. Forgetting the pistol she still held, he covered the few steps between him and Zaykov, and with the skill and precision developed from years of training, turned the pistol away from his left hand and delivered a solid roundhouse kick with his right foot. Zaykov collapsed to the floor, but Maraklov could not take control of the gun. As she doubled over and fell, she swung the gun back up and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun exploded, he felt his left shoulder yanked backward, there was a loud buzzing in his ears and the blood drained from his head. His knees buckled and he dropped backward, clutching his shoulder. There was no pain—yet— only a steady rivulet of blood leaking from between his fingers, and the disorienting feeling of confusion mixed with fear. The room began to spin. He felt lightheaded, almost intoxicated.

  Gasping, Musi crawled up to her hands and knees, reaching for the pistol. Maraklov caught it first. Musi dug her nails into the back of his left hand, raked the nails of her right hand across his face. He let go of the gun. She tried to grab the gun but the hot silencer-barrel burned her fingers, and before she could grab the stock he had tumbled on top of her. He rolled her over onto her back and sat on top of her, trying to pin her arms down.

  “Musi, don’t . . .”

  Blood ran down from his shoulder over her T-shirt, covering her chest, her face and hands. He put one hand over her mouth, ignoring the pain as she bit into it. With his other hand he pulled the hunting knife out of his boot. “Musi, all I want is the flight suit ...”

  Zaykov freed her right arm, punched Maraklov in the left shoulder, then on the jaw. He toppled off her and she rolled to her right away from him, reached out and grabbed the pistol. She swung it up and fired.

  The bullet just missed Maraklov’s left ear. Before she could get off another shot he had knocked the pistol aside, swung around and, before he realized what he was doing, plunged the hunting knife into her abdomen. The blade pierced her diaphragm and punctured the right lung. She took one more breath, exhaled, blood coming from her open mouth in spasmodic coughs. She shuddered slightly, stared at him with a look of surprise, and then lay motionless underneath him.

  He rolled off her, staring back at her lifeless eyes, then away. Janet Larson, James’ girlfriend ... all over again . . .

  He shook himself back to the present . . . pulled the pistol from her fingers and crawled to the window, checking outside. Nothing. He checked the side windows, the bedroom, the back door. Nothing. The gunshots that had shocked him had not carried beyond her secluded quarters.

  He went back to the living room. Forcing himself back to her, forcing himself to touch her, he grabbed her hands and dragged her to the bedroom, then into her closet. There was little blood—her heart had stopped beating almost instantly. He rested her as best he could in the closet and closed the door. She would not likely be discovered until morning.

  His shoulder wound hurt badly now, but the bullet had only taken a shallow, ragged gouge out of his left shoulder muscle. Maraklov found bandages, disinfectant ointment and tape and wrapped the wound tightly as he could. The pain began to build, but he decided against any of the pain-killers he found in Zaykov’s medicine cabinet—the drive would be long enough, and any drugs might later interfere with the ANTARES interface. The pain also acted like a stimulant, helping to clear his mind. Fortunately, he thought wryly, he could fly DreamStar without a fully functioning left arm.

  He found the two aluminum cases in a living-room closet and made a fast check of the flight suit and superconducting helmet—both were as he had packed them the day before. He pocketed the pistol, picked up the two aluminum cases and headed for the back door. After checking outside for several minutes he brought the cases out to the car, got behind the wheel, and drove oflF.

  He followed the access road out from the southeast runway hammerhead toward the destroyed anti-aircraft gun emplacement, then turned onto a dirt road that led toward the perimeter. No patrols were in sight. He followed the road right to the base perimeter fence and found a long-unused gate secured by a chain and a rusty lock that gave way when he rammed it open with the sedan. Ten minutes later he was on the Isabella Highway heading east toward Puerto Cabezas.

  Puerto Lempira Airbase, Honduras

  Monday, 22 June 1996, 0515 CDT (0615 EDT)

  Powell and McLanahan had just finished refueling and securing Cheetah in its portable hangar on the Honduran coastal airbase about eighty nautical miles north of the concrete bunkers at Puerto Cabezas. They were also watching the construction of a second portable aircraft shelter right beside Cheetah’s hangar. The second hangar was for DreamStar. After leaving Puerto Cabezas, Powell was to take it here to Puerto Lempira, where technicians would give it a thorough going over before Powell would fly it first to Houston, and then on to Dreamland in Nevada.

  Cheetah was still armed for combat—there had not been time in nearly two days to disarm her. She still carried four AIM-120C Scorpion radar-guided missiles in semi-recessed fuselage stations, and two AIM-132 infrared-guided missiles on wing pylons—two other AIM-132 missiles had been expended on Soviet fighters during the bombing raid on Sebaco—plus FASTPACK conformal fuel tanks and five hundred rounds of 20-millimeter ammunition.

  “The Russians figured out how to put external fuel tanks on DreamStar,” Powell was saying as they watched the final parts being assembled onto the steel-and-fiberglass structure. “We should be able to do it. With external tanks I’m sure I can fly her all the way back to Dreamland.”

  “I’m sure you can, but it’s too risky. From what you said yourself, you’ll be flying DreamStar right on the edge of your capabilities to begin with—it’s been at least two years, J.C., since you’ve flown her. The Russians probably didn’t bother testing DreamStar with the external tanks—they just slapped them on and hoped they’d work. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather make a few fuel stops along the way than trust those tanks.”

  “I know. Well, I’ve no big desire to fly that t
hing all the way from Central America to Nevada in one leg. Four hours hooked up to ANTARES? Gives me a migraine just thinking about it.”

  “A bad time for a headache,” McLanahan said. “We want that plane out of there today. ”

  “Hell, why don’t you fly it out of Nicaragua then? You at least flew in DreamStar’s simulator a couple weeks ago. You’d probably do better than me. I could fly Cheetah on your wing and keep you company ...”

  “It’s an idea. But you know what happened the last time I flew in the simulator—I crashed and burned, in more ways than one. If you think you can’t do it, we’ll just call Elliott on the horn and get that Navy barge in here. No, I think I’ll let you have all the pleasure of flying DreamStar. I’ll be in Cheetah on your wing.”

  Powell looked at him. “I’ll be happy if I can just keep it upright.”

  A few minutes later they heard the steady rhythm of helicopter blades approaching. An Air Force HH-65A Dolphin helicopter swung in over the saltwater marshes, down the runway and over to the asphalt and concrete parking area. A security guard directed in the chopper with lighted wands, and it settled gently in for a landing. As the rotors began to spin down, a fuel truck and maintenance crew began making their way toward the chopper, and the passengers began to deplane. Powell and McLanahan went over to greet them.

  “These helicopters have some real possibilities,” Master Sergeant Ray Butler said as he exited the Dolphin. “But I’ll take solid wings and big turbofans any day.” He shook hands with McLanahan. “How are you, sir?”

  “Okay, Ray.”

  “Sorry about Dr. Tork,” He mumbled.

  Alan Carmichael wrapped his big arms around McLanahan before saying a word. “I called Brooks before we left La Cieba, Patrick. Wendy’s hanging right in there. Still on full respiratory life support but she’s a fighter. I think she’s going to pull out of it.”

  “Me too. Thanks for the news, Alan.”