by A. W. Mykel
Justin’s heart hit bottom. Stop Eagle!
There was no response.
“Confirm, Pilgrim,” SENTINEL said.
Nothing.
“Pilgrim, did you receive transmission concerning Eagle?”
BLEEP! Affirmative.
Blood rushed to Justin’s head. His eyes grew suddenly hot, his head pounded with the words, “…imperative that you stop Eagle…stop Eagle.”
It couldn’t be possible. It wasn’t asked. Not Pappy.
His heart thumped wildly, his legs grew weak. He slowed the pace, as his mind raced.
“Can we take out all three with the explosive implant?” Honeycut asked Elizabeth Ryerson. “At their closest point of contact, can it be done?”
She shook her head. “No guarantee. Maybe all three, but I strongly doubt it,” she answered.
Wyatt came running into the situation room.
Honeycut thought quickly for alternatives. SENTINEL’s laser batteries could do it, but that would tip a very valuable hand.
“How long does Centaur have left?” he asked.
“About forty-eight hours,” Elizabeth answered, referring to the time left before Centaur would die. He had been secretly put on a D-83 protocol without Dials’s knowledge. This was done to guarantee that he would be of little help to the Soviets after the trade.
“That’s too long,” Wyatt said. “In a matter this important, his debriefing will begin the minute he sets foot on that plane.”
“We can take care of the plane with the lasers after it takes off,” Honeycut said.
“No good,” Wyatt cut in. “The tapes will be in an indestructible box. If he even gets only the memory basis down on tape, that’ll do it,” he said.
“Then it has to be now,” Honeycut said. “It’s all up to Pilgrim.”
Justin’s mind continued to race. The logical thing to do would be to stop now, take out Steve, then use Centaur as a shield in trying to get back to the cover of the cars.
But that was Steve out there, not just anyone. He couldn’t do it.
His chances weren’t good of making it back over that much open ground, anyway. He decided to try to get Steve back alive. He had to at least try it that way. For Pappy.
He continued walking, thinking.
Justin saw the Soviet escort carrying a long trench coat folded over his arm. He knew that it was a bullet-proof garment to protect Centaur after the trade. That would mean a head shot.
He had to optimize the chances of survival for himself and Steve. His mind began lightning-quick calculations.
The Colt was sighted at twenty-five yards. He figured he could probably still get a kill from thirty-five.
Kuradin turned his head and looked at Justin. He could see the tension on the face, the quick eye movements of a thinking brain. So close, so few steps left.
The parties came together in the middle of the expanse.
Steve looked up weakly. Disbelief filled his eyes.
“J…Justin?” he said hoarsely.
“It’s okay, Pappy. We’re going home now,” Justin said.
He unlocked the cuffs, as did the Russian escort. Justin put an arm out to help Steve.
Kuradin took one step and then turned to face Justin. Their eyes met.
For the first time, Justin saw something in Kuradin’s eyes that he hadn’t recognized earlier. It was victory. Not only here, but in England, as well. It was not the Russian who had lost, but Justin that day in England.
And, in Justin’s eyes, Kuradin saw menace. It didn’t really surprise him. He knew it was in the man, but it disturbed him that he should see it now, instead of apparent victory.
Kuradin offered his hand. “A farewell, comrade?” he said. “And to thank you again.”
Justin stared at him coldly until the hand dropped away.
“There will come a day when there will be no need for men like us. No need for enemies to stand where only friends should be,” Kuradin said. “In another time you would have been my friend. Good-bye, comrade.”
Their eyes stayed locked for a few silent moments, then both men turned away. The parties began to walk back to their respective sides.
“What’s he waiting for?” Honeycut growled.
The display screen now showed a picture. SENTINEL had gone to infrared scan. The figures showed up as red images against a blue background. The bad weather made visual tracking impossible.
“He’s not going to do it,” Elizabeth rattled in near hysteria. “I told you about him,” she said, shaking, nearly foaming at the mouth. Her computer, her baby! It was being stolen.
“No. No, he’s okay,” Wyatt said. “I think he’s trying to get Eagle out alive.”
“SENTINEL, I want all laser batteries armed,” Honeycut said urgently.
“No, wait,” Wyatt cut in. “Give him a few more seconds. I know what I’m saying.”
“Laser batteries are armed and ready,” SENTINEL said.
Honeycut looked at Wyatt.
“He’ll do it,” Wyatt said, nodding repeatedly.
“Hold for my command,” Honeycut ordered.
“Holding.”
“Justin, what are you doing here?” Steve asked as they walked slowly.
“Just listen. Can you run? Do you think you could make it to the cars?” Justin asked him.
“Sure, I can do it,” Steve said.
“Then get your ass ready to go,” Justin said, reaching into the vinyl jacket.
“SENTINEL, I want the distance between parties in yards, called out by fives.”
“Fifteen yards, Pilgrim,” the voice said.
“Twenty yards.”
Justin’s hand tightened on the Colt, lifting it from the holster. He pulled it out from underneath the jacket.
“Twenty-five yards.”
“What’s that?” Morsand shouted. “What’s he doing?” he screamed, pointing at Justin.
“Thirty yards.”
“Go!” Justin shouted to Steve, giving him a shove to get him started.
All eyes shifted to Justin as he spun toward the Russian party.
“Centaur!” Justin shouted.
The word broke the damp silence like the crack of a whip.
Kuradin stopped dead in his tracks at the sound of his code name. He turned to face Pilgrim, filled with the realization that the end had come. The last step had been taken.
The Colt was ready and aimed.
For one second time hung suspended. Minds raced at the speed of light, eyes exchanged unspoken words of winning and losing, of respect and hatred, of living and dying and never going home.
BOOM! The magnum roared.
Kuradin’s head splattered like a pumpkin, the tremendous energy of the magnum slug converting brain matter to near luminescence, as the skull expanded violently.
Justin turned to run as the first cracks from Russian weapons began. He had gone but two steps when he tripped over Steve, who had been unable to run and had fallen with Justin’s shove.
As Justin began his fall, he was hit simultaneously in the right foot and a grazing blow to the back side of the head behind the right ear, exactly where the implant was located.
The impact of the hits knocked him forward onto his face. He rolled once and stopped, motionless.
The Americans, stunned by what had happened, were slow to react. No one fired at the Russian escort, as he sprinted the distance back to Steve and grabbed him under both arms. He dragged him back toward the Russian side, using him for cover.
Steve kicked weakly, but could do nothing to help himself.
Justin’s head was filled with an unbearable screeching sound from the damaged implant, his eyes were barely able to open through the paralyzing pain.
He rolled to his stomach, the Colt still in his hand, and forced his eyes to open.
Steve kicked vainly, screaming, “No…No…God, no…” in a pathetic tone.
Justin blurrily watched Steve’s futile efforts, the arms reaching out toward him, as
though imploring his help.
Justin winced and shook uncontrollably from the pain. His eyes were tear-filled and blurred.
Stop Eagle!
Stop Eagle!
The words thundered in his head above the horrible screeching. Was it his own mind shouting the command? Or was it SENTINEL? He didn’t know.
Stop Eagle!
He forced control above the pain and lifted the Colt. He rested the butt of the handle on the runway, both trembling hands gripping the Colt tightly. He pointed it at the blurred, unsteady target aiming for the center of the indistinct forms.
The cracking gunfire started from the Soviet side again.
Justin squeezed.
BOOM! The Colt thundered once more.
At the same instant, Justin’s head jarred backward. He felt incredible blinding pain in the right eye, and his brain filled with a kaleidoscopic flash of colors.
All sound stopped, all colors faded into blackness, and total stillness came over him.
It was checkmate! The final moves had been played. There was no going back.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I have heard the voices almost daily over the past months. They cry just outside my window. But I am old and can move only very slowly. They are gone when I get there. They leave saddened. They must think that I do not hear them or that I do not care. If they would only wait a little longer so that I can speak to them one last time, as in the old days, to tell them that they need not fear, that our hour is at hand. To tell them that our opponents knew very little and that now it is too late.
To the people I say we have won. Our destiny is fulfilled. The pain and the suffering, the years of tormented waiting are over. I have never stopped loving you, and have never given up the hope of our ultimate victory.
Entry No. 82 from the partially
recovered Wolf Journal
“Platt has finally gotten the green light to start an official investigation,” Robert Morsand said to his aide.
“Platt’s pretty pissed, isn’t he?” Kodek asked.
“Ha! My ass has got his teeth marks all over it. That worm Edgar got his butt out of there the second the lead started flying. You know who that left to catch the bucket of flying shit with a teaspoon, don’t you? You’re looking at him. Don’t be surprised if you’re behind this desk before too long.”
“They’re not going to do that,” Kodek insisted. “What the hell could you do about what happened? It was as much a surprise to you as to anyone.”
“That’s the problem. I can’t explain it. When Edgar and I spoke on the plane, he said that the State Department would accept responsibility for anything that happened. Well, the buck stopped here. Not because I wanted it that way, but because I was the dumb son-of-a-bitch standing there with my thumb up my ass without answers.
“Four people dead—Chaple, Limpoulous, Yarin, and the Soviet escort. And not a single shot was fired from our side. Only Chaple’s. It would have been better if it turned into a real shoot ’em up out there. We could have blamed it all on the Russians. As it is, we’re responsible for those people dying.”
“What happens now?” Kodek asked.
“Now we get busy finding out what really happened and why. We do it our way. I don’t care who gets their toes stepped on. It’s my ass on the line now, and you can bet that I’m going to have the answers this time.”
Leonid Travkin sat at his desk behind closed office doors. He had just returned from a meeting with the Central Committee.
It had come so close to a successful outcome. The only explanation that he could offer was that Dmitri Chakhovsky had blown Centaur’s cover.
There was no describing the attitude of the committee. Failure was inexcusable. The failure to stop Chakhovsky and to get the schematics was his responsibility. That’s the price paid for authority.
He packed a few personal items from the desk at which, only the day before, he had wept openly for his friend Alexi Kuradin when the news came to him. The committee had recommended an extended vacation, to collect his thoughts before beginning preparations for another try at the SENTINEL computer plans. But he doubted that he would ever again sit at this desk as KGB director. Fate was a fickle thing in the Soviet Union. Its axe swung with an equal disregard for all.
He needed this vacation desperately. He felt depressed, tired, and totally beaten by the events of the past months. He had seen the world change right before his eyes.
He no longer felt the anger that he had experienced as the committee came at him relentlessly. He had wanted to silence them all, by asking what they would have done in his place, to condemn them for not developing a computer with SENTINEL’s capabilities first. But they would have given answers spawned from hindsight. Months earlier, when he told them of the computer and the possibility of getting its plans, they were without suggestions, all ears, helpless, depending upon him to work it all out to a successful conclusion. Had he done it, he would have been their hero. But he hadn’t and he was nobody’s hero today.
Life would go on for him, he was sure of that. Whether he would ever hold the position and responsibility of his present circumstance mattered little to him at this point.
He just wanted to get away from the failure, from the guilt of his friend’s death, and from the overshadowing realization that a SENTINEL even existed.
He wanted only to forget.
The months passed rapidly for some, slowly for others. It was the first day of December.
The small Lear streaked effortlessly across a clear blue sky. It carried one passenger.
The man sat looking out of the starboard window at the beautiful expanse of the Rockies. The plane banked sharply to the right, as though to give him a better look at nature’s frozen beauty below him.
His left hand clutched the wooden cane across his lap. His right hand absently traced the patch over the missing right eye. It still hurt at times.
He stared at the endless expanse of peaks and wondered which one it was that housed SENTINEL.
The plane dropped swiftly through the skies above Colorado. The man had been summoned once again by SENTINEL. Summoned to Sigma.
Irwin Honeycut stood with Dr. Elizabeth Ryerson in the control center of Sigma, watching the slow-moving dot on the display panel. It gave the plane’s position, superimposed on a state map of Colorado. It was just minutes from touchdown at the private field.
“He’ll be here in less than an hour,” Honeycut said.
Elizabeth said nothing. There was a strange tension across her face, as she looked at the tiny flowing dot on the map.
“An incredible man, to say the least,” Honeycut said, just above a whisper.
“I still don’t like it,” she said. “The man has more lives than a cat.”
“A survivor,” Honeycut said.
“It’s no good bringing him here,” she objected for about the hundredth time.
“He knows where the journal is,” Honeycut said. “Priest got a letter off to him. Gemini was unable to find it. He’s maintaining a post office box somewhere. My guess is that we’ll find the twenty-fifth page there, too.”
“We don’t know that Priest mailed him anything,” she blurted out. “That journal will never be found. We should have just taken care of Pilgrim while he was recovering at St. Simon’s.”
“He knows where it is,” Honeycut said. “I want the issue finally and totally resolved once and for all. Recovering that journal is the only way that that can be done.”
“And you think you can just get him to tell you where the journal is hidden, if he really does know?” she asked skeptically.
“Maybe not. But one way or another, we’ll have it soon.”
“He’s doubly dangerous to us without an implant. If he ever gets away from us, we’ll lose him for good,” Elizabeth said.
“That won’t happen. I’d like to keep him in the agency if I can. And I think the offer I’m going to make him might just do that,” Honeycut told her.
“Yo
u’re crazy. You’ll never be able to trust him.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Honeycut countered. “He only knows where the journal is, not what it contains. If we can get it back, without his finding out more than he already knows, we’ll stand a good chance of keeping a most valuable and exceptional man.”
“I don’t know why you keep insisting on keeping him alive,” she said. “He’s like a wild animal that you take into your home. You feed him, care for him, think you’ve taught him love and trust. Then one night as you sleep he’ll tear your throat out solely for the pleasure of the kill.
“You’re making a mistake, Irv. A very, very big mistake,” she admonished.
“I think not. But Rainmaker and Gemini are close by, just in case you’re right.”
“What can they do against him?” Elizabeth asked.
“Rainmaker may be the only man alive who can handle Pilgrim on his own terms. Gemini can be just as effective, but in a more subtle way,” Honeycut said. “Out here, we can exercise complete control over him. I’m confident that this will work out exactly as I’ve planned. We’ll get both the journal and our most effective agent back,” Honeycut said.
“I’m as confident as you are, Irv—that you’re wrong. I only hope that we don’t come to regret your decision.”
“Time will tell us that, Beth. Time will tell.”
The Lear touched down gently on the long runway. A black limousine accelerated across the smooth surface, circled around the stopped Lear, and came to a rest about thirty feet from the plane.
The back door opened, and Rainmaker stepped out. He walked to the opening hatch on the side of the Lear. The metal stairway folded down, and the hatch opened fully. Justin appeared in the opening.
Rainmaker looked up, shielding his eyes from the bright sun reflecting off the white jet. Justin looked about fifteen pounds lighter. His face was thin and drawn, and a black patch was tied angularly over the right eye. He leaned heavily on the cane in his left hand, his head turned slightly to the right as the left squinting eye surveyed the former partner.
“Hi, Smiley,” Justin said cheerfully.
“Hello, Pilgrim,” Rainmaker replied with a smile, possibly the first that Justin had seen him show since meeting him.
