The Arctic Event

by James Cobb

  “I see, Mr. Danforth. Should I swing by the office?”

  “Yes. I’ll have your tickets, and we can go over the outlines of this new project. You’ll be met by a Mr. Smith in Seattle. He’s with one of our associate firms, and you’ll be working with him on a joint venture.”

  Randi frowned. Mr. Smith? The Agency would never use a cover name like that. It must be the real thing.

  Her frown deepened. It couldn’t be. Not again.

  Chapter Six

  San Francisco Bay

  The diseased mind known in the Bay Area as the “BART rapist” settled back in his seat and luxuriated in the contemplation of the next woman he would destroy. The big Bay Transit Authority SuperCat passenger ferry was just backing away from the Market Street terminal, and he would have a full fifty minutes for his contemplation before their arrival in Vallejo. It pleased him that she was already his possession but still totally unaware of it.

  The Bay Area’s public transport systems were his private stalking ground, and as with all his previous half-dozen assaults, this one would be a work of art, in its inception and execution and in his evasion of the police, a thing of great beauty. The actual debasement of his prey would merely be the delicious frosting applied to a master baker’s cake.

  He never used the same persona twice. For this act he would be a cross-bay business commuter, recently moved from the city to the wine country north of the bay. His falsified identification would support the cover story, as would his assumed appropriate appearance: graying temples and wire-framed glasses, sweater and slacks and an expensive tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, Birkenstocks and dark socks. It would all match the image conjured in the mind of any stupid policeman or security guard who might question him.

  Even the contents of the paper bag he carried primly on his knees would be justifiable to any random police check: two pint tins of interior enamel paint, a selection of small paintbrushes, a few cards of hardware screws and cupboard hooks-all things a new DIY home owner would be justified in possessing-complete with a purchasing slip drawn on a downtown San Francisco decorating store.

  In such company, the roll of duct tape and the box cutter would be totally unremarkable.

  He had taken equal care with his past assaults. In the last, he had been the grimy mentally deficient street person, and in the one before that, the slovenly truck driver, and so on. The police didn’t have a clue whom they were truly pursuing.

  A pity, in a way, that he could not be admired for his artistry and his genius.

  Riding the thunder of its hydrojet drives, the SuperCat cut northeastward across the bay, its twin bladelike bows slicing cleanly through the low swells. Beyond the ferry’s windows, shore lights glittered on as the misty dusk settled. This was the eight o’clock run, the last of the day, and the ferry’s commodious passenger bay with its multiple rows of seating was three-quarters empty.

  The woman whom he had honored with his attention sat in the front row to port. Contentedly munching a crisp apple purchased from the ferry’s snack bar, her attention was lost in the book resting on her crossed knee. She was beautiful, as were all his ladies-the rapist was, after all, a connoisseur. A tall brunette, she was slender but full-breasted, her long midnight black hair worn up in a neatly pinned chignon. She was somewhere in her thirties, with flawless, creamy skin, lightly tanned and glowing with health.

  Her eyes were gray, and they had glinted with good humor as she had bantered with the snack bar attendant. She was a regular. Every Tuesday and Thursday she crossed on the ten o’clock morning run from Vallejo and returned on this, the last evening boat.

  What she did in the city, he wasn’t quite sure. But she was clearly a woman of fashion and means; her clothes were always of superb taste and quality. This night she wore a trim gray cord pantsuit that matched her eyes and stiletto-heeled black boots.

  He might allow her to keep those boots after he destroyed the rest of her clothing; they would add something to the experience.

  She always read her way across the bay with a book taken from the briefcase she inevitably carried. In his weeks of preattack surveillance he had made a point of positioning himself to see the book titles as a method of getting inside her head, of deepening his advantage.

  But what he had seen had puzzled him: Anthony M. Thornborough’s Airborne Weapons of the West, The Greenville Military Manual of Main Battle Tanks, and the like. Tonight’s book was a crumbling yellow-paged volume in some Germanic tongue. From its illustrations it was concerned with cavalry warfare. Such topics were inexplicable for such a refined and totally feminine individual, and totally inappropriate. He would punish her for her interest in them.

  The ferry slowed as it nosed up the Mare Island shipping channel, with the blazing city lights of Vallejo to starboard and the scattered work arcs of the old Mare Island Navy Yard to port. The great turbocharged diesels grumbled down into an idle as the catamaran came off plane. They were turning in toward the docking slips, the floodlights of the ferry terminal glaring in through the forward windscreen.

  The BART rapist gathered himself. It was time for the final act.

  He held back, just keeping his prey in sight as they descended the boarding ramps and passed by the big octagonal terminal building. He knew precisely where she was going. His rented minivan was already parked beside her dove gray Lincoln LS sedan out in the far parking lot of the terminal. Away from the lights of the terminal, he paused to hastily transfer the box cutter and duct tape to his jacket pockets, depositing his shopping bag in a trash can. He left the purchasing slip in the bag. Let the police chase this yuppie commuter; he would dissolve in a matter of a few more hours.

  Perhaps he would become a Seventh-day Adventist missionary next.

  His prey was crossing the broad asphalt expanse of the emptied parking lot now. The only thing that could delay her fate was the presence of some unexpected onlooker nearby. But no, the environment was entirely favorable. A few automobiles hissed past, uncaring, on the streets, and a small group of weary workers clumped at the bus stop a full block away. Probably even a scream would go unacted upon.

  He hastened his steps, starting the rush that would close the distance as she reached her vehicle. In moments she would be in the shadowy gap between the car and the van, fumbling in her shoulder bag for her keys, diverted, ultimately vulnerable. Moments later, with wrists, mouth, and ankles taped, she would be under a concealing blanket on the floor of his vehicle.

  But then the tall brunette stepped past the driver’s door of the Lincoln. Turning abruptly at the front bumper, she put her back to the concrete bulkhead of the parking lot. Allowing her briefcase and shoulder bag to slip to the ground, she faced him, her arms loosely crossed over her stomach. In the dimness, she seemed to be smiling a wry, derisive smile.

  “Morally, I should just let nature take its course,” she said, her voice a contralto rich with the same wry derisiveness, “but I really don’t need this kind of complication in my life.” Her voice dropped an octave. “So I’ll say it just once. Go away and leave me alone.”

  She…was…discounting…him. She viewed him and all his arts and efforts an irrelevancy to be shooed away. The elemental hate at the core of his being boiled up, sweeping away his warped pretensions.

  His hand plunged into his pocket, the box cutter’s razor wedge of blade snicking open as he drew it. He stepped forward, spitting out his first vile epithet.

  She moved, her arm sweeping in a flat, inhumanly fast blur. Something struck him sharply in the abdomen with a soft whucking sound. For a moment there was just the shock of impact; then came the impossible, searing pain. Instinctively he dropped the box cutter and clutched at the agony, his fingers closing over the slender metal haft of a knife buried in his stomach.

  This…was not…in the plan.

  His legs buckled, and he went to his knees on the cracked asphalt, the bits of gravel biting through his trouser legs, faint echoes of the agony in the center of his body.


  Paralyzed by the pain, he heard footsteps click closer with deliberation. “Excuse me,” that wry, now utterly terrifying voice said, “but I believe that’s my property.”

  Then the boot heel rested against his shoulder, putting him flat onto his back with a sharp shove. There was a final impossible explosion of pain as the blade was twisted from his punctured stomach, and all consciousness faded.

  A few minutes later someone dialed 911 from a waterfront public telephone and asked for the police department. The dispatcher picking up the call heard a pleasant contralto voice say, “You will find a recently retired rapist in the C lot of the ferry terminal. He needs an aid car rather badly. If you do a DNA match with the BART attacker, you may be pleasantly surprised.”

  Valentina Metrace, professor of history, PhD, Radcliffe and Cambridge, hung up the phone and walked back to her car at the curb. As the sleek sedan whispered toward the Redwood Parkway, she called up a disk on the CD player, and a Henry Mancini collection pulsed softly from the multiple speakers.

  Fourteen miles into the North Bay wine country, the Lincoln turned off the highway and drew up in front of a steel grille security gate in a gray-pink stuccoed perimeter wall. An understated bronze plaque was mounted beside the gate:

  SANDOVAL ARMAMENTS COLLECTION

  Museum Hours: 10:00 to 5:00 Tuesday through Saturday.

  The dab of a key card retracted the power gate, granting the professor entrance. She eased the car down the entrance loop road, past the F2H Banshee jet fighter banking on its gate guard pedestal, and the Matilda infantry tank on its display slab, to the turnoff drive that led to her quarters.

  The Sandoval arms collection had been initiated at the turn of the previous century as the personal hobby of the wealthy scion of one of the old Californio families. Over the four generations since its inception, it had taken on a life and a justification of its own as one of the largest historical archives on weaponry and the tools of warfare in the United States.

  A number of perks came with its prestigious curator’s position, including the neat little California mission bungalow behind the sprawling complex of display buildings, libraries, and restoration laboratories. Parking in its carport, Metrace paused for a brief techno-ritual before passing through the sliding glass doors that led into the kitchenette. The multiple rows of check lights for the museum compound’s extensive network of security systems all glowed green on the exterior alarm station.

  Snapping on the kitchenette’s indirect lighting, she set her briefcase and shoulder bag on the carmine-tiled breakfast bar. It was good to be home, even with complications. With a sigh, she shrugged out of her jacket and slipped the elastic band of the nylon concealed-carry sheath over her left wrist. Drawing the slender black-bladed throwing knife from the sheath, she examined the shimmering blade edges for bone or belt buckle nicks.

  She bit her lower lip and considered. She couldn’t have just left the superb little weapon in its target; she’d hand-machined and balanced it in her own workshop. Besides, as with all the knives she made, her initials were scripted in silver on the blade. Admittedly a vanity on her part.

  She’d wiped it off on her attacker’s jacket, but that wouldn’t be at all adequate in these days of CSI. An overnight soak in a panful of gasoline would eliminate any DNA trace evidence on the knife, and the sheath could go into the fire, but if her erstwhile rapist didn’t do the world a large favor and terminally hemorrhage before the paramedics got to him, he might be able to give the police her description and license number.

  She sighed again. There was no getting around it. She was going to have to contact her controller, just in case there was any rap-chilling to be done. Bay Area prosecuting attorneys could be peculiar at times, even in cases of flagrant self-defense. It might be suggested that she should have gone to social counseling with her attacker before implanting four inches of steel in his duodenum.

  Mr. Klein wouldn’t be at all happy if this incident went public. He much preferred that his mobile ciphers maintain a decidedly low profile in their private lives. And as a professor of history, she was supposed to know only about weapons, not about how to use them.

  She set the knife and sheath on the breakfast bar and crossed the hall to her office. She kept her private collection here. A built-in gun cabinet took up one entire end wall, and more razor-edged steel glittered on display against the dark cherrywood paneling, a number of the blades bearing her silver signature. The polished horn of a great sable antelope curved saberlike above the mission-style desk.

  The overall air of the room should have been masculine, yet it wasn’t. A subtle stylistic femininity had been imprinted upon it-subtle, yet dynamic and profoundly individualistic.

  Sinking down behind the desk, the professor found a recorded message light glowing on her answering machine: a call on her unlisted private number. She pushed the caller ID key, and an Anacosta, Maryland, area code flashed up. Her brow cocked. She didn’t need to contact Covert One. Her alternate employers were trying to contact her.

  Chapter Seven

  Russian Long Range Aviation Headquarters,

  Vladivostok, the Russian Pacific Maritime Provinces

  Major Gregori Smyslov braced a hand against the dashboard as the GAZ command car lurched over the potholed base road. Glancing out of the moisture-streaked side window, he frowned at the passing vista of dilapidated barracks and abandoned operations buildings under a sodden lead-colored sky. Serving here must have really been something…once.

  The huge air base complex was a ghost of what it had been. Only a few of the hundreds of hardstands lining its broad runways were still occupied. Where once entire regiments of sleek swept-wing Sukhois and Tupolevs had staged, only a couple of understrength squadrons remained on alert, nervously watching the Chinese border.

  The remainder of the vast facility hadn’t even been mothballed, just abandoned to the wind and the rot and the foxes.

  Smyslov was a New Russian. He could recognize the elemental fallacies at the heart of Communism that had led to the collapse of the USSR, and he still had the hope of seeing the eventual success of a free and democratic Russia in the twenty-first century. But he could understand the bitterness in the hearts of some of the old hands. They could remember the days of power, of respect-days when they weren’t a joke in the eyes of the world.

  The command car drew up in front of the Pacific Air Forces headquarters building, a massive windowless bastion of rust and water-stained concrete. Dismounting, Smyslov dismissed his driver. Turning up the collar of his greatcoat against the chill hiss of the rain, he strode up the puddle-mottled walkway to the main entrance.

  Just short of the great bronze doors he paused and knelt, picking up a stony fragment from the pavement. It was a small chunk of concrete, freshly flaked from the facing of the headquarters building. Such disintegration was an endemic problem with much of the old Soviet architecture. Smyslov applied pressure, and the concrete crumbled between his gloved fingers. The Russian officer smiled without humor and shook away the wet, sandy remnants.

  He was expected. After verifying his identification, a respectful sentry accepted his uniform cap and greatcoat, and a second led him deeper into the core of the headquarters. Even this building seemed only partially occupied, with many of its offices darkened and its echoing gray corridors nearly empty.

  Smyslov cleared through a second security checkpoint, and the sentry handed him off to a tense staff officer, who led him on to the innermost sanctum of the complex.

  The well-appointed wood-paneled office belonged to the commanding general of all Pacific Zone Long Range Aviation Forces, but the man seated behind a massive dark mahogany desk had more authority than even that.

  “Major Gregori Smyslov of the Four forty-ninth Air Force Special Security Regiment, reporting as ordered, sir.”

  General Baranov returned the salute. “Good afternoon, Major. As you have no doubt been advised, you never received those orders. You are not here
. I am not here. This meeting has never taken place. Is this understood?”

  “I understand, sir, fully.”

  Baranov’s cold gray eyes drilled into his. “No, Major, you do not, but you will presently.” The general gestured to the chair positioned before the desk. “Please be seated.”

  As Smyslov sank into the appointed chair, the general drew an inch-thick folder onto the center of the desk’s black leather blotter, flipping it open. Smyslov recognized his own zapiska, his service record. And he knew what its facing page would say.

  Name: Smyslov, Gregori Andriovitch

  Age: 31

  Height: 199 centimeters

  Weight: 92 kilograms

  Eyes: Green

  Hair: Blond

  Birthplace: Berezovo, Uralsky Khrebet, Russian Federation

  The photograph that accompanied the facing sheet would show a strong, not unpleasant mixture of blunt and angular features and narrow, rather good-humored eyes.

  What else might be contained in the zapiska, Smyslov did not know. It might be his life, but it was the Air Force’s concern.

  General Baranov flipped through a few of the pages. “Major, your regimental commander thinks highly of you. He feels you are one of the best officers under his command, if not one of the best in our service. Looking through your records, I am inclined to agree.”

  The general flipped another page of the file, looking not down at it but into Smyslov’s face, as if attempting to match what he had read with the man behind the words.

  “Thank you, General,” Smyslov replied, carefully keeping his voice neutral. “I have always endeavored to be a good officer.”

  “You have succeeded. That is why you are here. I trust your regimental commander briefed you on the Misha 124 affair and of your duties related to it.”