Death is a Ruby Light

by Paul Kenyon

  The customs inspector said, "Russian wolfhounds?" and then, sharply, "But dogs are not allowed."

  "These were," Penelope said, and handed him the paper from Intourist.

  He raised his eyebrows when he saw her passport. "A Baroness? In Soviet Union we have no aristocracy."

  "I'm sure you don't, darling," the Baroness said.

  The baggage inspection was courteous but thorough. The customs man slit open the tubes of toothpaste, poked a finger in a jar of cold cream. But he didn't bat an eye at the memory-plastic belts or the electronic de-bugging equipment that Sumo had camouflaged amidst all the photography gear that he and Skytop carried between them.

  The Intourist man assigned to them was waiting at a booth near the door. His eyes goggled when he saw all the luggage. "So many suitcases? But I have ordered only three limousines for your party. There is no room." They waited another half hour while he rustled up another car, a black Zil sedan.

  They rode silently into town through a landscape of housing developments, tall construction cranes, muddy excavation sites. Then there were the vast ornamented skyscrapers that Stalin had put up and the gaudy onion domes of the Kremlin, and they were at the shabby lobby door of the National, with its tubs of sick pansies on either side.

  Penelope waited next to one of the heroic nude statues by the elevators while Wharton and Eric saw to the rooms, ignoring the stares that were directed at her and the borzois. The elevator operator, an elderly man in a threadbare brown uniform, a cigarette hanging from his lip, protested when they all crowded into the car, but finally, grumbling, took them up.

  Her suite looked out on Red Square and gave her a sidewise view of St. Basil's peppermint towers and colored domes. They'd given her a grand piano — standard for the luxury suites — and tons of dark, dusty furniture. It took her just three minutes to find the first bug, a black perforated disc unimaginatively wired to the back of a picture.

  She picked up die phone and called Sumo's room. "Tommy, darling," she chattered brightly for the benefit of the tap at the switchboard, "why don't you call room service and have them send some champagne and vodka and caviar up to my suite. Come along and bring the others. Let's have a party."

  Sumo slipped into her room a few minutes later. "They're on their way, Baroness," he said. "I asked Eric to order up the refreshments. His Russian's better than mine."

  He spread his equipment over the fringed damask cover of the big circular table that dominated the room. Quickly and expertly he ran the little detector around the walls and fixtures, making a circle with thumb and forefinger whenever he found a bug. There were three of them, besides the one she'd already located. One of them was embedded in the plaster, out of reach. They were cumbersome, primitive things compared to the ultra-miniaturized bugs used by American agencies.

  Almost absentmindedly he neutralized the four bugs, canceling out the embedded one with an adhesive-backed button that he stuck on the wall over it. He took a tiny tape player out of his pocket and set it going. It was patched into the little receivers feeding the Russian bugs.

  "They're now listening to you and me having a conversation about the Bolshoi Ballet," he said. "Let's take a look at the john."

  He approached the bathroom door cautiously with his detection equipment. A moment later he jumped back as if he'd encountered a striking snake.

  "I thought the Russians were supposed to be prudes," he said.

  "What is it, Tommy?

  "There's a video eye facing the shower. It's disguised as one of those glass hobnails bordering the mirror. It worries me, Baroness. The Russians don't bother much with video for ordinary tourists — just eavesdropping devices. Do you think they're on to us?"

  She thought it over. "I don't think so, Tommy. This is the VIP suite. Lenin once stayed here. The eye's probably there for simple blackmail purposes — sex in the shower, instigated by the girls or the pansies that the KGB sics on important foreigners. There's probably one over the bed, too."

  There was.

  "What do we do about it, Baroness? I can patch in sound — conversation, moving around, flushing water. But I don't have the facilities here for videotape."

  She laughed. "We'll do it live. Inga and Fiona will take turns with the black wig and a makeup job. Keep them moving around while I'm gone. A lot of activity will confuse our hosts — they'll never be able to keep track. Fiona can do the X-rated scenes. She'll enjoy that!"

  "She's got Tversky on her agenda anyhow."

  "Poor Tversky! It'll be in his KGB zapiska forever."

  Wharton slipped in a few minutes later. She gave him instructions for himself and the others. "The Russian agency in charge of antisatellite warfare is known as the PKO. It's very hush-hush. They're hooked in with military intelligence, not the KGB. They've got an office at the Arbatskaya Ploshchad on the opposite side of the Kremlin from Lubianka, right in GRU headquarters. I want them bugged top to bottom. Penetrated, if possible."

  Wharton nodded soberly. "We'll do it, Baroness."

  She began searching through her wardrobe. "That's it then. Now let's see if there's something here that will make me look like a country girl from Kazakhstan."

  "I wish you'd change your mind about going alone, Baroness," Wharton said uneasily. "Take Eric or Inga with you. Their Russian is perfect, and they know the country."

  She shook her head. "One person has a much better chance of getting through the security net at Baikonour. I've got the right documents and travel papers. My Russian's passable and so is my Kazakh dialect. When I talk to a Russian, I'll be a Kazakh — thick accent and all. When I talk to a Kazakh, I'll be a Russian."

  "When do you leave?"

  "Tonight."

  They both looked startled. "So soon? But don't you want to establish your presence at the All Union fashion show first?"

  "There's nothing dumpier than Russian fashions, darling. I'd rather take my chances at Baikonour."

  Someone was knocking at the door. They heard the sound of laughing voices and the guttural protests of the concierge for their floor.

  "There are the others, Tommy darling," she said. "Turn off your tape machine and let them in. Let's let the KGB listen to us having a party."

  She slipped out of the suite at three in the morning and closed the frosted-glass door quietly behind her. She could hear the sounds of a party behind the glass: a babble of voices, some of them belonging to the drunken party of Evenki reindeer breeders who had been attracted by the festivities. She could hear Skytop trying to teach a ribald song to the leader of the Evenki delegation.

  She was dressed in the soft boots, billowing trousers and conical fur hat of a Kazakh maiden. Her eyes had been altered to slanted slits by the flesh-colored adhesive, and the vegetable dye had given a yellowish cast to her skin. Her papers said that she had a Russian father and a Kazakh mother. Her little suitcase was covered with a slipcover, after the fashion of national minority members traveling through the Soviet Union.

  The floor concierge, a buxom middle-aged woman in a flowered print dress, was dozing at her station between the elevator doors. Her mouth opened in a snore, showing stainless steel teeth. Penelope went past her, silent as a prowling cat, and took the service stairs down. At the street level she left the service door ajar until a drunken delegation of junketing Czechs bumbled their way into the lobby, attracting the attention of whoever might be assigned nighttime surveillance of the foreigners at the National, then walked swiftly away through the almost deserted streets.

  She hitched a ride in a truck carrying prefabricated concrete sections for a housing project. The truck seemed to be heading in her direction: southeast. The driver was a pudgy, carefree young man named Feodor.

  "Where are you headed, gospazah?" he said, leaning out of the cab.

  "Domodedovo Airport," she said.

  "You're in luck. Climb in."

  They drove for some miles along the circular bypass highway surrounding Moscow till they hit the Ryazanskoye Expressway,
past acre after acre of public housing rising like new growth out of a bed of ancient log cabins. Feodor was cheerful and voluble, telling her about the urban delights of Moscow as if he'd invented them himself. Some twenty kilometers out of Moscow, he grew amorous.

  She was peering through the windshield at the endless stream of nighttime truck traffic when she suddenly felt Feodor's hand on her breast. Still chattering on about the sophisticated valuta cafes, he began a brisk and systematic exploration of its contours. His fingers stopped at the plastic nipple that concealed the pea-like microwave generator. He must have mistaken its protruding hardness for instant passion, because he said, "There's a place a few kilometers ahead where I can pull over." He began teasing the fake nipple between thumb and forefinger so energetically that she was afraid he'd pull loose the adhesive. "I heard you Kazakh girls were hot stuff," he leered.

  She smiled sweetly at him and gave a fond squeeze to the cucumber shape distending the fork of his trousers. "Ya lyooblyoo tiebya, Feodor darling," she said passionately. "You're the man for me. My father and my four brothers are waiting for me at the airport. I can hardly wait to introduce you to them. We can get married right away. There's a Wedding Palace near Domodedovo."

  He withdrew his hand as if it had been burned. He looked frightened.

  She squeezed the cucumber again. It began to go limp. "What's the matter, darling? Don't you love me?"

  He stepped on the gas. The big tractor-trailer leaped forward. "Only another ten kilometers to Domodedovo," he said with false joviality. "I'll have to drop you off at the approach road. I'm behind in my schedule."

  His face showed undisguised relief when he let her off.

  "But don't you want to meet my father and my brothers?" she said, standing beside the cab holding her suitcase.

  "Have a good flight home, little Kazakh," he called, racing the engine. He took off in a cloud of dust.

  The airport was swarming with people in a bewildering variety of native costumes: turbaned Moslems from Ashkhabad, Georgians in embroidered blouses, fur-clad Mongols from Yakutsk, Eskimo-like Chukchis. Demodedovo served most of Siberia and the Far East, and it seemed that all of the Soviet Union's ninety-plus ethnic minorities were waiting for their flights. Penelope's Kazakh costume went unnoticed in the crowd.

  Her plane turned out to be a big TU-104 jet, the civilian version of the Badger bomber. The aisles were crowded with suitcases, dufflebags, market baskets full of produce. Squabbling sounds came from several crates of geese and chickens. An elderly Mongol sat cross-legged on the floor trying to brew tea over a charcoal brazier until the pilot came back to tell him sharply that it was not allowed.

  Her seatmate was a villainous-looking Kazakh in leather-trimmed riding clothes, who immediately offered her a drink of kumis from a leather flask and started earnestly to tell her about his herds.

  "I'm sorry," she said in Russian. "I'm half Russian. I was raised in Leningrad."

  He switched immediately to broken Russian. By the time the sun came up, shining through the cabin porthole at their right, he already had asked her to marry him.

  * * *

  The Evenki couldn't wait to take off his boots. His trousers down around his ankles, he inched forward on his knees into the wide V of Fiona's spread legs.

  Her red pubic hair had been dyed black. The black wig she wore spilled as if by accident over her face, half hiding it. By the time the Evenki got to work in earnest, his broad back would be concealing her face from the television eye in the ceiling.

  She stretched out a slender hand and grasped the long pole that sprouted between his thighs, pulling him to her by it like a dog on a lead. It was too much for him. There was a spurt of milky semen, and Fiona could feel the warm, sticky stuff spilling over her belly. The reindeer breeder made frantic, drunken sounds and tried to stuff his softening tool into her vagina.

  She sat up quickly and patted him on the shoulder. The television eye had a good view of the top of her head.

  "It's all right, darling," she said in a fair approximation of the Baroness' voice. "We can try again later. Right now I'm going to take a shower."

  She turned and walked nude to the bathroom door, leaving the Evenki trying to rub some life back into his slack rod.

  * * *

  The KGB technician sat in front of the monitor screen, sweating and goggle eyed. There was the sound of a door opening behind him, then approaching footsteps.

  Etava yeshsho ne dastavahlo! he cursed under his breath. That bastard of a relief man is late every night! Tonight, when I've got something interesting, he arrives early!

  "All right, comrade," the relief man said. "You can go home now, eh?"

  The technician turned his head reluctantly. "Just a moment, comrade," he said.

  "Shto…? What have we here?" The relief man leaned over his shoulder.

  A stunning pair of bare buttocks was walking away from the camera. On the bed, a drunken Siberian was playing with his agoorjets.

  The technician switched to camera number two just in time to catch the black-haired lady entering the bathroom. They watched as she put on a shower cap and stepped into the stall. Her figure was fully visible through the glass shower door.

  "Look at those tits!" the relief man said, using the Georgian vulgarism. "Like melons!"

  "Enjoy yourself, comrade," the technician said. "You're looking at nobility. A Baroness!"

  "Same ass and tits as the proletariat, eh comrade?"

  They watched in admiring silence as the girl in the television screen gave herself a thorough scrubbing. Somehow they never seemed to get a good look at her face. But then, who cared about her face?

  6

  The launching pad was less than six miles away. The Baroness could see it all clearly through her high-powered scope as she lay on her stomach on the hillside, in the shelter of an abandoned apple orchard.

  She squirmed into a more comfortable position and used the battery-powered zoom. Something unusual was going on down there. There was a lot of activity. Little, boxy service vehicles, toylike with distance, were clustered around a huge railborne launcher that held a multiple-stage rocket in its steel cradle. The Russians, unlike the Americans, liked to build and move their rockets in a horizontal position.

  As she watched, the giant rocket began to swing toward the vertical. Sway braces from the launch platform leaned to embrace it. In a few minutes it was upright, a gleaming metal tube surrounded at the base by a skirt of boosters. Squinting against the bright Central Asian sun, she focused on the capsule perched atop the rocket's nose. There was something peculiar about it. It was obviously going to be a manned flight. The umbilicals that the antlike technicians were plugging in testified to that. But the configuration of the capsule showed it to be an utterly new design, unlike the Soyuz and Voskhod capsules she'd been briefed on.

  She was still trying to puzzle it out when the capsule opened up like a metallic flower. A cluster of jointed stamens sprang into view. They began to move as the technicians tested them.

  Four of them were grapples: a pair of magnetic grapples and a pair of claws. Penelope frowned. There were more of the jointed rods, obviously designed to emit some form of radiant energy.

  And there was something else, held in a web. It was a spidery nest of propulsion units, with nozzles pointing every which way. There was something suspiciously like a saddle attached to it. Some kind of space scooter!

  Penelope returned the scope to her shoulder bag and inched back into the shelter of the apple trees. She smiled grimly to herself.

  It looked as if she'd found the satellite killer.

  She looked at her watch. Two hours till transmission time. She'd need fifteen minutes to encode her report before broadcasting it in a high-speed burst that would be over in less than a second — much too short a time for the Russians to get a fix. She'd get any additional instructions — or any useful information that her team had picked up in Moscow — the same way.

  And then, somehow,
she'd have to find a way to get inside that heavily guarded complex. From the look of it, the launch was set for early morning.

  She'd have to penetrate the base tonight.

  It was a miracle she'd gotten this far. When her plane had landed at the capital, Alma Ata, she'd wondered how she was going to travel the five hundred miles to the missile site at Baikonour. The whole area east of the Aral Sea had been sealed off. Something big was going on, it was whispered. A whole Soviet armored division had been moved into place. Thousands of security men were scouring the countryside, stopping and questioning strangers.

  It was her seatmate on the jet — the villainous-looking Kazakh — who'd been the key. After he'd polished off another couple of flasks of fermented mare's milk, he'd grown increasingly insistent that she marry him.

  "I am important man, a chieftain," he'd said in his broken Russian. "My name is known from Karaganda to Samarkand. Marry me and you will be the mistress of my flocks. Your yurt will have silk hangings, and you will have a Russian apartment in Karsakpay."

  She'd questioned him more closely at that. Karsakpay was only a stone's throw from Baikonour and well within the security perimeter the Russians had thrown around the base.

  His name was Abai — the same as the great Kazakh poet, he'd proudly told her. She agreed to travel with him and his tribesmen to his spring encampment outside Karsakpay. A huge party of savage-looking Kazakh tribesmen was waiting for them when the plane landed at Alma Ata. Abai had shown her off as if she already were his possession.

  "She has promised to marry me," he told them. Nobody seemed to find this at all odd. Evidently, a red-blooded Kazakh was doing nothing unusual if he proposed to a girl two minutes after meeting her. "I've been looking for you all my life," was the phrase.

  They covered the five hundred miles in six days, riding hard, pitching the octagonal felt yurts every night on a grassy slope, preparing enormous meals of bisbarmak — horsemeat stewed with onions and pastry — and a spicy stew called lapsha ocabova.