by Albert Able
Suspicious as Igor was, he was eager to get away and so happily accepted the written order that meant they could leave.
The KGB officer and Political Commissar on the other hand breathed a sigh of relief as the convoy of departing guards drove out of the camp; now they should have just enough time to plunder the weapons silo where they believed an advance version of a ‘Depleted Uranium Artillery Shell’ was stored.
It was thought to have been the single success the oppressed scientists had been able to celebrate over the last few years: convincing the KGB Officer and the Political Commissar that if they could get hold of the prototype, they would at least be able to sell the technology to one of the non super-powers for enough money to assure a more comfortable retirement than the one currently facing them.
They were not entirely sure for what they were looking on that chilly October morning as they descended deep into the lower levels of the factory. They only knew that the device had to be down there somewhere.
The KGB Officer, the same man who had dispassionately shot the bodyguard at the fuel depot, sat at a metal desk studying a plan of the ‘lower level’.
“Look here, you see the tunnel entrance to the test zone?” He stabbed the drawing with his gloved finger; they were both wearing bulky radiation suits. “That is the tunnel seal lock over there.” He pointed to the large red bulkhead door with ‘Radiation Zone’ emblazoned over it.
The Political Commissar standing next to him looked at the door. “I can hardly miss it, can I,” he scoffed irritably.
“Well, on the plan it shows the entrance to the miniature ordinance store next to it; see?” The KGB officer tapped the plan again ignoring the jibe. “So just show me where it is down here?” He pointed at the blank wall again.
The Commissar shuffled in his bulky suit to the spot where the door should have been and ran his hand across the rough whitewashed wall. “It’s been filled in; look you can just see where it’s been blocked up.”
Still holding the layout plan in his hand, the KGB officer moved to the wall by the Commissar. “You’re right, so what does that mean?” He looked at the drawing again. “I wonder if they put the entrance inside the danger zone for extra security.”
“Makes sense if you think about it,” the Commissar’s reply was slightly muffled by the protective-suit, “and there’s only one way to find out.”
Moving to the radiation door, he grabbed the large red wheel in his gloved hand and started to unwind.
“For fuck’s sake be careful! How do we know if our suits are ok beyond here?” shouted the KGB man anxiously.
The wheel spun freely and the well-lubricated clamps slipped away.
“I don’t, so just give me a hand and stop whingeing. It can’t be that bad - the scientists used to come down here quite regularly.”
Together they pulled at the heavy door; to their surprise it swung open quite easily, revealing a concrete lobby lit by a small caged wall lamp that clearly illuminated yet another wheel-locked door.
The ‘Auto Detect’ patches on their radiation suits had already changed from green to amber. The Commissar tapped the KGB Officer and pointed to the patch on his arm.
“Still safe enough in these suits,” the KGB man replied to the Commissar’s anxious observation. “We have twenty minutes maximum - gives us all the time we need!”
“I bloody well hope so,” the Commissar countered.
They looked at each other in silence for a few seconds.
“Well here goes.” The KGB man spoke with renewed confidence as he stepped forward and rotated the wheel lock.
Once again the door opened smoothly, but this time the room it revealed was in total darkness.
“There must be a light here somewhere,” the KGB man queried, stepping into the room.
To their surprise the lights came on automatically as he crossed the security beam, as did a screaming klaxon causing him to jump back in alarm almost knocking over the Commissar.
“Dear God,” the Commissar shouted in near panic, then turned, and as quickly as the radiation suite would allow, shuffled back into the control room and punched the ‘Alarm Test’ button outside the main door. The klaxon and the flashing lights stopped, thankfully the interior lights remained on.
“I attended an evacuation exercise down here once; thank God I remembered how they cancelled the alarm!”
“I just wish you’d have remembered before it was triggered,” the KGB man snapped angrily.
Still in a slight daze, the two men remained standing at the entrance as their elevated adrenalin levels slowly drained from their bodies.
“Any more surprises?” the KGB man asked absently as they stepped back into the room.
The floor and the shelves on either side were completely empty.
“Nothing! After all that, nothing at all!” shouted the Commissar in desperation.
“Don’t give up yet Comrade. I wonder what’s in here?” The KGB quietly moved to the far wall where he pulled aside a panel to reveal four smooth aluminium cases stacked neatly on the floor.
Each case, the size of a pilot’s flight bag, had a plastic handgrip. The KGB Officer carefully held the first one and gingerly lifted it. He guessed that it weighed about five kilos. He tried each in turn; the last two, he noticed, were a little heavier.
“Well, I don’t know what they are, but they must be special otherwise they wouldn’t be in here, eh?
“Here.” He passed the two lighter cases to the Commissar and carried the other two. “Let’s get out of here, my Radiation patch has turned pink.”
They didn’t need any further encouragement and left the room, carefully closing the door and returning to the main tunnel, where they secured the large red blast-door behind them.
“I suggest that we get into the decontamination room right away. We’ll take these with us,” the KGB man directed.
They spent several minutes being automatically hosed and scrubbed until the detector declared them safe to enter the ‘clean’ zone. The four cases, which went through the special equipment purge with them also checked clear.
“Well, quite frankly that’s a big disappointment. If they’d been the sort of thing we’re looking for, I would have expected them to be heavily toxic, especially having been stored in that room,” the Commissar said with some surprise. “Anyway we don’t have time to check their contents now, the army will be here at any minute.”
He looked anxiously at his wristwatch before grabbing the nearest two of the aluminium boxes.
The KGB man nodded agreement, gathered up the other two and strode towards the elevators.
As they arrived at the surface they discovered that the replacement guards had already arrived and were trying to establish themselves, but in the absence of a formal handover there was considerable confusion.
The KGB Officer and the Political Commissar took advantage of the situation and walked casually to a parked van. They placed the containers in the back, the rest of their personal possessions were already there.
Using his natural authority the tall KGB man waved his identity card as they approached the exit gate.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes to set up the rotas,” he barked commandingly at the confused men standing uncertainly at the gate. They instantly recognised the KGB uniform and paid little attention to the stern faced man sitting next to him. They raised the barrier and the van drove at a sedate pace away from the plant.
Five hours later and low on diesel they pulled into the fuelling depot where they had previously had the confrontation with the Moscow underworld men.
“Stay in the van and leave this to me, we can get fuel here all right.”
The KGB man smiled confidently as they pulled up in front of the dispatcher’s shack.
“I’ll stretch my legs if
you don’t mind,” the Commissar corrected, getting out his side of the vehicle.
The KGB man ignored the comment and walked into the shack. It took him a moment to adjust his eyes to the dim light inside; he could just make out a man sitting at the desk.
“We need some fuel,” he ordered in his usual brusque manner.
The man behind the desk laughed. “Fuel? What makes you think we’re going to let you have any fuel, you bastard!”
Colonel Ivan Nyecraski was no coward; his military career had been dedicated to the KGB where, genuinely believing it to be in the best interests of the holy Communist State, he had committed many excesses. The extent of his depravity had earned him the nick name ‘Ivan the Terrible’.
Now as he faced the man at the desk, all his instincts instantly recognised the imminent danger; grabbing reflexively at his holstered pistol, he dived for the corner of the tiny shack. The din of the first shot and the pain in his arm were almost simultaneous. His own pistol tumbled impotently to the floor.
“I don’t expect you will remember the man you shot here, in this very shack, among all the other poor bastards you have killed or mutilated, but Gregory was my cousin and you shot him in cold blood. Do you remember now?”
The man at the desk stood up, still pointing his large ugly-looking handgun at the fallen KGB Officer. “Well, I can tell you that he did live but the damage to his brain was such that he is little better than a vegetable.”
He moved closer to his victim and raised his gun. “Well, this is from Gregory.”
“Wait!” Sitting forward, Ivan pleaded, raising his good hand.
“Oh, so it’s Ivan the ‘not so terrible’ now, eh?”
Ignoring the plea, the gun fired. Bucking wildly from the recoil, the gunman clinically adjusted his aim and fired again. Ivan was slammed back against the wall by the impact of the bullets, one wound in his chest. The other, in his forehead, started to seep blood as he slithered, eyes staring lifelessly, to the floor.
“I hope to God there’s no one else around here. Those shots must have echoed for miles!” The Commissar stood in the doorway looking at the dead KGB Officer.
The man with the gun turned. “You’re probably right Comrade, so one more won’t matter will it?”
The shot smashed into the Political Commissars chest. He sank to his knees before falling down dead, a look of surprise on his face.
“You didn’t really think I was really going to have a deal with you?” The gunman spat at the Commissar’s prostrate body. “Come on, let’s get these carcasses into the van,” he ordered the armed men who emerged from the shadow at the rear of the shack.
Between them they dragged the two lifeless bodies and bundled them without emotion into the van they had arrived in.
“We can refuel it now,” the gunman ordered with a cynical smile.
He opened the driver’s door. “I’ll drive this one, you follow in the car. First, we’ll dump them as arranged, then when we get back to town we’ll check out what they managed to steal.”
***
Although Liz and Karen Peterson looked like twins, Liz was fifteen months older than her sister. Right from their earliest days they had been dressed in identical clothes and by the time Liz was sixteen and Karen seventeen years, they appeared to be identical twins and regularly engaged in swapping roles to confuse, either their teachers or even their father, but occasionally and most amusingly for them, their boyfriends.
Sexually mature at an early age they had happily shared their older brother’s bed in regular orgies of shameless delight.
Rudy, the eldest by eighteen months, was born with the debilitating effects of his mothers ‘morning sickness’ medication, Thalidomide. Rudy had two fingers and a thumb on his right hand but only a jumble of boneless lumps on his left. The left leg finished just below the knee with a miniature toeless foot, his right leg was complete except for its toes. A hair lip and cleft pallet contributed to a face creased with deep lines, which, even as a teenager made him look like an old man. Spiky black hair grew recklessly on his oversized head.
His father’s great wealth funded endless painful operations in an attempt to reconstruct his defective body. The cleft pallet and hair lip had been relatively easily restored. All attempts to create a functioning hand and leg, however, ended in painful failure. Finally, his left hand at the wrist and left leg from the knee had to be amputated and replaced with state of the art digitally operated prosthetic limbs.
Relieved of the prospect of still more painful surgery, Rudy quickly learned to live with and to expertly manipulate his new limbs. Nonetheless, he became a recluse, being educated entirely at home by personal tutors. He rarely came into contact with other people and when he did, they almost always recoiled either in horror or fear, at the sight of his scared face and claw hand.
Sadly, Rudi’s mother passed away soon after his youngest sister was born. However, Rudi was blessed with the endless love of his nanny and her tutor husband, who to all intents and purposes became his mummy and daddy and who, like his devoted sisters, only saw the charming and sometimes frightened little boy tragically trapped for ever inside his damaged body.
Amazingly, with only the equivalent of two fingers on each hand he learned to play the electronic organ. Rudi loved haunting moody music and often wallowed, sometimes for hours in a lyrical world of sounds, created out of his own tormented mind.
To entertain his sisters, he learned to play rock and the loud, thumping, brain-deadening bass sounds that they seemed to love so much.
Rudi’s real passion was electronic communications. Thanks to the efforts of his multilingual Swiss-French nanny he was fluent in the main European languages; he also understood reasonable Arabic but had never attempted any of the Oriental languages.
“They all seem to speak English,” he told his sisters happily. “Anyway it’s just too difficult!”
Consequently he loved his ‘ham’ radio sessions, listening to and talking with people from all over the world. The blessing for Rudi of course was that no one could see the ravaged face or the wretched body of the man they were speaking to.
Through his father’s investments in one of the world’s most advanced technology companies ‘SKY-SEC’, Rudy was able to obtain the best equipment available. Although he steadfastly refused offers to physically visit the laboratory and its advanced technical development departments, he enjoyed unlimited access to their databases through the Internet.
One morning, a few years later when Rudy was just eighteen, his father stepped into his son’s study to bid his customary ‘good morning” when he noticed with mild surprise, that one wall of the young man’s room looked more like the cockpit of a Jumbo jet.
Revered more like a god than a daddy, their father was, in all the children’s eyes, to be respected and obeyed and he was the unquestioned leader of the family. Rudy in particular had always been anxious to please him. Carl Peterson’s attitude however often seemed be remote and uncaring to the scared young boy who tried endlessly to impress and please him.
On this particular morning he sat in his specially designed high back chair facing the array of blinking lights.
“Can I show you something Dad?” Rudi said casually, unintentionally ignoring the greeting. “You know that security system at ‘SKY-SEC’, the ‘all singing all dancing’ new one, which automatically scrambles any telephone call made from the building?”
Carl Peterson looked at his son with genuine interest. “Yes,” he said cautiously.
Rudy produced a laser mobile phone, placed it in front one of the instruments cluttering the desktop and pressed an auto-connect number on the phone and waited.
A remote speaker briefly relayed a normal dialling tone. “SKY-SEC Corporation,” a metallic recorded voice answered, “if you know the extension you wish to be connected with please pres
s the number after the tone, otherwise wait to be connected to an assistant.” A sharp ‘ping’ followed the message.
Rudy entered an eight-digit number. “Now watch - or rather listen to - this.” His scared face split into a craggy grin.
Four of the speakers in the panel suddenly came to life each carrying a conversation in plain English, Rudy reached across and reduced the volume on three of them.
“...installation would naturally cost more if you used the satellite relay.”
The voice paused while the other party continued the conversation. Rudy reached over, his claw like finger and thumb deftly operating the instruments.
“Incoming communications are not necessarily scrambled, of course, so I haven’t bothered to perfect that side yet, but that’s just a question of a little fine-tuning.”
Rudy reached up to the panel and selected the female voice on number four speaker “...late, I have to do a little shopping on the way home. Anything you need?”
Rudy turned the sound down swivelled around in his chair and looked at his father triumphantly.
“Not so perfect eh?” Carl Peterson offered thoughtfully. “I’m truly amazed, how on earth did you do it?” he added after a pause.
Rudy shrugged his shoulders. “Not so difficult really.” He replied honestly.
Carl Peterson had been standing with his arms crossed, deep in thought; the index finger on one hand tapped his pursed lips. Then in a rare gesture of affection he placed an arm around his son and hugged him warmly. “Thank goodness someone around here knows what they’re doing!”
Rudy glowed with pride. Solving a challenge and pleasing his father were his only real pleasures - ‘and playing with my sisters of course,’ he reminded himself with a little smile.
