Death is a Ruby Light

by Paul Kenyon

  "I know, I know. It's been fixed at the highest levels. That's what the Joint Chiefs told me when I complained. But what about accidents? This vessel's cost is in the billions. The Russians aren't used to carrier landings — they have no carriers of their own. If they overshoot…"

  "The pilots are handpicked," the Baroness said impatiently. "They've been practicing. And they've adapted our arresting gear."

  The admiral stuck a finger under his collar to loosen it. It didn't help. His color was the same brick red. "I don't see why our boys couldn't have flown you to the base in Siberia in our own jets. The Russians could have given permission — opened an air corridor…"

  "You're lucky you got permission to operate in this part of the Sea of Japan." She smiled guilelessly. "The Russians don't want you within a hundred miles of their naval base at Vladivostok."

  "But…"

  "It's been nice having this discussion with you, Admiral, but my team and I have a lot to do, and not very much time left to do it."

  He shook his head. "I don't know who you are, lady, but you must have some clout in Washington." He paused at the bulkhead door. "I'll tell you this, though. I'm scrambling our jets as soon as I pick up a blip on the radar."

  When the admiral had gone, the Baroness turned to face the other four. They'd finished packing their gear while she'd been arguing with the admiral. They looked at her expectantly, looking like a quartet of Eskimos in their Yakut-style fur parkas and boots.

  "Can we turn up that air conditioning another notch?" Joe Skytop said. His Cherokee features looked startlingly Mongolian in the Yakut costume. It wasn't surprising, in view of the fact that his ancestors had crossed a land bridge from Asia some thousands of years before.

  Inga looked up from the pair of skis she was waxing. "In about two hours you'll be complaining about the cold."

  Dan Wharton said, "Cold? I thought we were going to Miami Beach, judging by that pair of sunglasses Tommy's wearing."

  Tom Sumo took off the sunglasses sheepishly. "Just a little insurance against snow blindness."

  "Come on, Tommy," the Baroness smiled. "You've got issue snow goggles. What are the sunglasses for?"

  He handed them over, looking pleased with himself. "Notice anything unusual?"

  "The curve of the glass is a parabola. And you can hardly see through them."

  "They're laser reflectors."

  "Laser reflectors?"

  "Yup. Got 'em from NASA. The optical grinding's done with the same precision as they did on the laser mirrors they left behind on the moon. You'll remember that was good enough to bounce back a laser beam 240,000 miles."

  Skytop snorted. "You'll have to make a pretty high jump if you expect to catch a Chinese laser beam in those."

  Sumo looked offended. "It won't hurt to have 'em along."

  The Baroness had hand-picked the four for the mission. Skytop because of his great strength and endurance, and because in a pinch he could pass for a Mongol. Sumo, because of his technical expertise, and his working command of the Chinese language. Inga, because her fluent Russian would make her a useful liaison with the Soviet team, and because she was used to skis and snow-shoes. Wharton, because he was a superb mountain climber, and because of his experience in organizing military operations.

  The Russians, she knew, would probably assemble a much larger team. But she believed more in swiftness and flexibility than in strength of numbers.

  The equipment was adapted from Air Force survival gear, from space agency innovations and from NSA's secret laboratories. The little tents, for example, weighed only a couple of pounds apiece, telescoping plastic rods and all, and could be carried in a pocket. But they'd stand up to a Siberian gale at forty degrees below zero. The fur parkas were incredibly lightweight; their real warmth came from the space-age insulation sewn into the linings — a thin reflecting layer adapted from moon suits. The pitons and safety lines, the ice axes and other mountain-climbing gear looked like flimsy toys. But they were several times tougher than orthodox equipment.

  She finished packing, studying the equipment with approval. It would keep her alive.

  She hadn't worried about staying alive when John had died. She'd married John Stanton Marlowe when she was barely out of finishing school. He was a good match for the girl she'd been then: Penelope Worthington, Philadelphia debutante, daughter of a wealthy family with society connections. He'd made a fortune by the time he was thirty, then gave up his companies and investments to serve under two presidents. He was supposed to be in the State Department. But Penelope knew he was a top policymaker in the powerful, secret U.S. espionage establishment. The CIA was run by a tight, gentlemen's club. The White House decided that the Defense Intelligence Agency, too, could use a gentleman like John Marlowe.

  He died in the crash of his private jet. He was his own pilot that day. His copilot had been an Air Force colonel. She never found out what kind of a mission they'd been on.

  Marlowe's death had left her rich — incredibly rich. It had also left a big, aching empty place in her life. She filled it with amusements. One of her amusements was posing for fashion ads, making a few fun television commercials, acting in a couple of films made by her friends in the movie business.

  But her beauty, her poise, her quality put her in great demand as a model. Almost against her will, she became one of the leading lights in the select circle of international beauties that included Veruschka, Jackie Onassis, Princess von Furstenberg, Sophia, Raquel, Christina, Jean Shrimpton. Her face became a familiar sight on the covers of Vogue and Elk and Harper's Bazaar.

  She met the Baron Reynaldo St. John-Orsini while on a cover assignment in Florence. His eighteenth-century palazzo was the backdrop.

  Two weeks later she was the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini. She brushed up her Italian. The Florentine and Roman aristocracy looked over Reynaldo's new wife, and accepted her. She also found herself in Burke's Peerage, by virtue of her connection with the British branch of Reynaldo's family.

  Reynaldo was fun. He lived for excitement: auto racing, sky diving, skiing the dangerous slopes, mountain climbing, skin diving. Life took on a new zest for Penelope: risking her neck with Reynaldo by day and making inventive, passionate love with him at night, when their senses were raw and tingling with the dangers of their violent activities.

  It lasted for three years. Then she watched him die, one sunny day at Monte Carlo when his Ferrari blew a tire and sent him crashing into the seawall.

  Life wasn't much fun anymore. She had a title and two enormous fortunes: Reynaldo's inheritance on top of her previous one. But she didn't have Reynaldo anymore. "Life is keener when death is looking over your shoulder," he'd once told her. Maybe that was what she missed.

  She used her money, her beauty and her influence. First she started doing favors for the CIA and NSA. They were happy to get their hands on a reliable courier whose way of life included crossing borders and mingling with important people on four continents. They could trust her: she was the former Mrs. John Stanton Marlowe. And she had an impeccable cover.

  She presented her bill a year later. Only she didn't present it to the CIA or NSA. She went to a single powerful man close to the President. He listened to her pitch and agreed it made sense. He said he'd see what he could do.

  It took another entire year to set it up. A remarkable man named John Farnsworth was chosen to do the work. Farnsworth's roots went back to the OSS. He'd watched the CIA spring out of its ashes, helped Ike set up NSA in 1952 and was McNamara's deputy in 1961 when the DIA was created.

  Getting an agent named Coin operational was right down his alley.

  They gave him an annual budget of $1,250,000 to start with. That was the under-the-counter money. To set up the cover, he used legitimate money. Anybody could look at the books.

  The cover was a company called International Models, Inc. It had offices in New York, Rome and London. The majority shareholder was the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini. She ran it and, sinc
e she was its most important asset, modeled for it. Her business manager was John Farnsworth.

  He raided the CIA, the DIA and the Army for agents. Wharton and Skytop came out of the Green Berets. Sumo had a civilian job with IBM — but he had an NSA dossier. Eric had once worked for the Gehlen organization, but was now an American citizen, earning big money making television commercials. Paul had been disowned by the CIA when they found out he was using his guerrilla training to instruct black militants. The three girls, Inga, Yvette and Fiona, were legitimate models. But they'd done chores for the different alphabet agencies.

  Farnsworth got the Baroness and her team into the secret, deadly schools run by the CIA and the DIA Their instructors never penetrated the false identities that Farnsworth supplied. They were part of a swarm of trainees that included agents sent over by friendly foreign powers.

  Coin went to work for NSA. But even the director didn't know who the agent named Coin was. Instructions were transmitted through Key. The jobs got done. That was all that mattered.

  Coin got the jobs that were too delicate for anyone else to handle.

  Like penetrating the mountains of Manchuria with a team of Russian spies and wiping out a Chinese laser weapon that, the experts said, couldn't possibly exist.

  Penelope made a final check of her equipment. It was all in order: the cold-weather gear, the weapons, the explosives, the communications equipment. The other four were fidgeting; the waiting was getting them down.

  Then the whooper went on.

  She opened the door of the cabin. It was pandemonium outside. Sailors were running down the passageways, going to their posts. There was a hubbub of voices and running feet, overlaid by the crackling of loudspeakers giving orders. A deafening screech of jet engines filled the air, as the Phantoms wanned up.

  The entire ship trembled as the steam catapult flung the first Phantom aloft. There was an incredible, howling scream. The ship shuddered again, and again the howl of a Phantom clawing its way into the sky.

  "The admiral's scrambling his jets," the Baroness said. "The radar pickets must have spotted the Russians. Let's get up on the flight deck."

  The Russian jets were streaking toward them out of the gray sky less than ten minutes later, surrounded by an escort of Phantoms. They were sleek, needle-nosed Yak-28s, the red stars plainly visible on their swept-back wings. They were unarmed; no missiles were hanging next to the twin jet engines under the wings.

  "Look at those boys fly!" Skytop said, looking bearlike in his furs. "I'll bet the admiral's having a nervous breakdown."

  There were five of them. One passenger for each.

  They made a single pass over the flight deck, the Phantoms crowding their wingtips, then circled back. The lead Yak-28 cut power, wabbling dangerously, and stood on its tail. There was an ear-splitting whine as the Russian went to full throttle just as his landing hook grabbed the arresting cable at 150 miles per hour. The Yak's nose toppled to the flight deck with jarring violence. Then the Russian pilot was sliding back his cockpit bubble, grinning at them, while the flight-deck crew wrestled the landing hook free and wheeled the Yak clear in time for the next plane to land.

  The Russians looked strange on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier, with their old-fashioned leather flying helmets and their Tatar features. They grinned with delight, looking about them with unabashed curiosity. The Yak-28s were surrounded by a milling crowd of young sailors, some of them taking pictures to send home. She could hear the sailors and the Russians exchanging banter in broken English and a few halting Russian phrases. She waited until an officer cleared the area.

  She climbed into the cockpit. The Russian turned around and gaped at her. He hadn't been told to expect a woman. He helped her stow the gear that a sailor below passed up to them.

  She clamped the restrainers around herself and pushed the back of her head into the leather pad behind her. Down below, a crewman was hooking on the hawser of the catapult. The pilot gave Penelope a reassuring smile, then pushed the throttles to open up the afterburner nozzles. The plane shook with suppressed power. The Russian signaled the catapult officer with his arm, and Penelope suddenly had the wind knocked out of her. Her vision blurred as the G-force flattened her eyeballs.

  And then they were free, climbing westward, the escort of Phantoms already falling back. She twisted her head and saw the other four Yak-28s in formation behind her.

  They were on their way to the staging area, somewhere in the frozen wastes of eastern Siberia.

  11

  A light snow was falling when their Yakut guide led them into the village. He was a squat muscular man in a fur hat and long coat, with old-fashioned bandoliers of bullets draped across his chest. The shotgun he carried wasn't old fashioned, though; it was a gleaming Finnish make used in a dozen countries for riot control.

  "You come," he said in halting Russian. A half-dozen burly young men with the same Mongol features loaded the Baroness' equipment on sledges and began hauling it after them.

  "Cold!" Skytop said, flapping his arms. He looked uncannily like the Yakuts himself, in his furs.

  "Only thirty below," Sumo said. "It drops to minus seventy during the really cold part of the year."

  There was a banshee shriek behind them. They turned their heads to see the five Yak-28s take off from the improvised airstrip. The jets howled into the fishbelly sky and disappeared. They were on their own.

  The Baroness crunched through the snow, resembling some princess out of a Russian fairy tale, in her white ermine coat and hood, her green eyes and black hair startling against her ivory face. The little Bernardelli VB automatic was tucked in her mitten, making no bulge, ready for use in case of treachery. She could see Wharton up ahead and to one side, where he could keep an eye on their Yakut guide. Inga had fallen behind to watch the sledges with their luggage.

  They passed a ghostly stand of larch, and the village was there. It was like something out of the Brothers Grimm, a double row of gingerbread houses standing incongruously in the midst of this snowy waste. As she drew closer she could see that basically they were rough-hewn log cabins. But their façades were covered with lacelike carvings that dropped from the eaves, climbed intricately up the walls and turned posts and doorframes into incredible filigrees.

  "Woodcarving is hobby in Siberia," said a voice at her elbow. "Is way to pass long winter nights."

  She turned. It was one of the welcoming party. He had caught up with her so quietly that she hadn't been aware of him. She looked at him more closely. He was a broad man with a bluff, hearty face. He was a Russian, not a Mongol. His features had been obscured by his hood before.

  "I am Sergei," he explained. "I am with team sent from Moscow, not one of these backward Yakuts."

  "Your people are civilizing them, though, aren't they?" she said innocently.

  He laughed. "We are civilizing them, not oppressing them, as you did with your own native Indians." He took her by the arm. It was a friendly grip, but firm. It would have hindered her if she wanted to reach for a weapon.

  Dogs began barking as they entered the village street. An old man splitting kindling with an axe looked up to gawk at the strange party from the outside world. In the middle of the street a group of small boys played a game resembling marbles with frozen and polished horse droppings. They interrupted their game to trot at the heels of the laboring Mongols pulling the sledges. One of them came too close and got a cuff on the ear.

  Skytop drifted over and began clumping along beside Sergei He took Sergei by the arm. It looked friendly, but Sergei winced and let go of the Baroness.

  "I thought we were going to have top security in this staging area," Skytop said.

  "Is nothing to worry," Sergei said. "This village is very remote, very isolated. People here can go nowhere. Supplies come by air once a month. When river is frozen, truck convoys travel on ice."

  "How isolated?" the Baroness said.

  Sergei stopped walking. "There is nothing else for hundreds o
f miles. A few nomadic Yakuts living in yarangahk made of sod and hide. Has been like this since days of the Tsar. This village was settled a hundred years ago by varnaks — escaped prisoners. They intermarried with local population. Today Moscow sends out napravlenia — new university graduates — to teach, give medical service, supervise the mining and prospecting." He spread his hands. "How could the Chinese have spies here?"

  "All right, Sergei, you've convinced me."

  He smiled happily. "We go in there. Alexey is waiting."

  He led them toward the largest of the log structures, a chocolate-brown building leaning at a crazy angle from frost heave. The elaborately carved fences and gates around it were tilted in every direction. A tough-looking Mongol squatting on the porch stood up when they approached and picked up the submachine gun that had been leaning beside him.

  "It's all right, Ellai," Sergei said. "These are our American friends."

  A wave of heat hit Penelope in the face when the door was opened. They entered a large square room with plank floors. The heat was coming from a cast-iron stove in the center. There were six or seven people waiting. When the Baroness and her team entered, and the welcoming party of Yakuts followed them inside, the room was crowded.

  A tall, good-looking man with flaxen hair got up and came over to her.

  "I'm Alexey Krylov," he said, smiling. "You must be the one they call Coin."

  He looked into her face with frank sexual interest. His blue eyes crinkled. The Baroness felt the magnetism coming from him. This was a superb specimen of man by any standard. He projected a powerful competence, intense vitality. There was no doubt that he was a dangerous animal.

  She returned his frank stare. Alexey would be interesting.

  "They tell me you're the best the GRU has," she said.

  "I've been studying your dossier too," he said. "Somehow it didn't contain a picture of you. Something seems to have happened to the negatives they exposed when you were captured in Baikonour." He shook his head in mock dismay. "I wonder how that happened."