The Bitter Past, page 23
“Worse,” Georgiy said, winking. “Nuclear bomb.”
O’Hara laughed. “Really? I pictured them being a lot bigger.”
Georgiy laughed back. “This one is a mock-up some of the engineers put together for Dr. Ellison. They were going to put some firecrackers on top of it and set them off after the shot. Strange sense of humor. But I guess that’s going to have to wait now.”
The guard stared at him for a long moment, and Georgiy’s fingers tensed around the revolver’s grip. “Well, God Almighty,” he said, “why didn’t they just make the man a cake? Get outta here, Freddie. We’ll be praying for the doc.”
A moment later, the gate was up and Georgiy drove off the grounds of the Nevada Test Site for the last time, turning left onto the Widowmaker highway. He couldn’t believe it. He was alive, no one had been killed, and he had a warhead full of deadly plutonium in his trunk. If he could make it to Indian Springs, he might just survive the night.
They would be looking for him now, if only to determine why he had left Building 11 and not rotated to his next post in Area 13 or returned to CP-1 in Area 6. In a very short time, Georgiy knew, they would alert the entire site, and the guards at the main gate would report his departure at 1:00 A.M. As he pulled into the darkened Thunderbird station, he knew it wouldn’t be long until someone checked inside Building 11 and realized they were missing the device for their top-secret project.
Pulling around to the back of the gas station, Georgiy watched as William, in coveralls and a knit hat, motioned him to drive up a ramp into the back of a long moving van. It was red and white and had a North American Van Lines logo emblazoned on the side. “Why?” Georgiy yelled.
William approached his door, his coveralls bearing the same emblem. “Do you have it?”
Georgiy wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. “I do.”
“Then they will be looking for your car. Now drive up the ramp.”
It was a tight fit on the sides, and once in the back of the trailer, Georgiy engaged the parking brake and crawled out of the window. He helped William stow the ramp behind the Crestliner, and a minute later they were driving south.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” said William. “It won’t be long.”
Georgiy lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the open window, his nerves finally starting to calm.
William seemed ebullient and clapped Georgiy on the chest. “You did it, Comrade Captain. No problems?”
Georgiy looked over at the man, bewildered. “Problems? Not for you. In an hour, every law enforcement officer in the country will be looking for me.”
William handed him a thermos. “Vodka. Calm your nerves. It’s American and tastes like shit, but it will do the job. We’ll drink the real stuff when we get home. Heroes!”
He needed the drink. “How are you getting me back to Moscow, William? What is the plan for that?”
Keeping his eyes on the winding road, William related the steps. “Once we’ve set the warhead in motion, we will drive to a warehouse we have rented. It contains furniture, appliances, enough to fill this truck. We are a moving company after all.”
“And?”
“And we will drive to San Diego, California, where we will charter a deep-sea fishing boat that will take us into Mexican waters.”
Georgiy was unconvinced. “What then?”
William glared at him. “When we get there, Captain, you’ll know.”
Georgiy had no doubt that was true. If he actually made it to the waters off Mexico, William might just shoot him and throw him overboard. It didn’t make sense—Georgiy would be a treasure trove of intelligence his masters in Moscow could pick through—but in his gut he didn’t trust William to keep him alive.
As the drink took effect and the adrenaline in his veins subsided, Georgiy allowed his exhaustion to take him. He was jarred from the slumber more than an hour later when William turned onto a narrow dirt road well outside of Las Vegas that led west through the desert toward the Sierra Nevada mountains. Georgiy checked his watch. It was almost 3:30 A.M. To the south and east, he could see the bright neon lights of the Las Vegas Strip. Surrounding those lights were fifty-five thousand inhabitants, Kitty included.
Kitty.
Did William actually have someone watching her, or was that a bluff? Georgiy looked over at his superior as he steered carefully around the larger rocks on the trail, the big wheel vibrating in his hands.
“Anything on the radio yet?” Georgiy asked.
“Just bad music. No alerts about a missing warhead, if that’s what you mean. This will be the biggest scandal the American nuclear program has ever encountered, Comrade. They won’t be broadcasting their embarrassment on civilian radio.”
“They must know it’s gone by now.”
“Yes, but they will be unsure of what to do. They will put up roadblocks. They will be looking for your car but won’t find it. They will go to your apartment. You won’t be there. By the time all that happens, it will be over, and they will have something else to worry about.”
“Are we close?”
“Twenty minutes.” It was actually thirty, at the speed the moving van could manage over the bumpy trail, when William turned due south and stopped next to a smaller pickup in the empty desert. “We transfer here,” he told Georgiy.
After removing the warhead from the trunk of the Crestliner, both men lifted it down from the moving van and set it gently in the bed of the gray pickup. “Why the blanket?” William asked.
Georgiy shook his head. There were a million things that had been done to get him to where he was today, and William would appreciate none of them. “It doesn’t matter now.”
William shrugged. “Bring the vodka. This desert makes me thirsty.”
Georgiy returned a minute later with the thermos and poured William a cup. “To success,” the KGB man said raising his glass and noting Georgiy wasn’t drinking. “None for you?”
“I’ll drink more when we get to Mexico.”
At just about half past four, they arrived behind a small, lone mountain west of town. In fact, it was called Lone Mountain. On the west side of the mountain, though, the city was invisible, and the Russians were completely concealed. Before they even came to a stop, Georgiy got the answer to how William planned to deliver the warhead to Las Vegas: below them in a trough in the road three men were already inflating a giant balloon, just like the ones Georgiy had photographed months earlier.
They had several lanterns surrounding them, enough to illuminate their tools and the immediate space they needed to inflate the balloon, and as Georgiy climbed out of the truck, he could feel the wind hitting his back, blowing from the northwest. His heart sank. Once it crested the mountain, the balloon would float over the heart of town just a few short miles away. For the first time, he could see how this “accident” would happen. When the balloon was over the city, the explosion would be triggered remotely. There would be no huge fireball, no mushroom cloud like what the town’s residents had witnessed from their rooftops countless times. No, this detonation would be tiny by comparison but sufficient enough to crack the plutonium core and spew perhaps the most deadly element on earth across the valley below, an invisible mist spreading through the open air, poisoning thousands as they unwittingly inhaled the radioactive particles into their lungs, killing them in miserable ways over the next weeks and months and making the area uninhabitable for the rest of man’s time on earth.
William started down the hill, flashlight in hand, motioning for Georgiy to follow. Two of the men were the Spetsnaz apes Georgiy had seen several times at the Thunderbird, but the third man was bespectacled, much thinner, with gray hair. William introduced him as Dr. Volkov. The scientist, Georgiy said to himself. Here to manage the bomb. The man was adjusting a valve on a large tank attached to the inflating balloon by a long hose. Several cables extended from the fabric of the balloon and were tethered to the ground around it.
William instructed the Spetnaz soldiers to retrieve the warhead from his truck. “Be careful. It is heavy.”
“Why the balloon?” Georgiy asked. “Why not just drive it into the city?”
“Because it’s an accident, remember? We need people to see the balloon before we detonate the device. That way, the Americans will not be able to blame this on us. By the time the balloon is over the city, it will be daylight, and there will be many witnesses.”
“If they survive,” muttered Georgiy. “What kind of gas are you using?”
Volkov turned. “Hydrogen.”
The breath caught in Georgiy’s throat. “Hydrogen? Are you insane?”
“Relax,” said the man, adjusting his glasses. “We’re not creating the Hindenburg here. And all the better that it’s more flammable. We actually need that for the accident.”
William stepped up to check the gauge on the cylinder. “We couldn’t get helium. And hydrogen is actually lighter. More lift.”
“Twice as light, actually,” said Georgiy, stepping closer to the balloon where a large square platform stood in the dirt. It was black, about four feet high by three feet wide. “You’re going to suspend the device from this.”
“Precisely,” said Volkov, opening a flap on the platform. “And it will be wired to this explosive.”
Georgiy took a closer look at the explosive material. It was about eight inches long and looked like a tube of clay. It was wrapped in paper and said “Composition C-4.” Georgiy asked what it was.
“The very latest from the U.S. Army,” William answered. “We have sympathizers within their ranks, as you know.”
The two larger men walked the unwrapped warhead down the hill slowly, one of them tripping as they neared the bottom. “Be careful, you idiot!” William shouted. “We have not come all this way for you to kill us all.”
“Bring it here,” said Volkov. “And gently lay it on the platform so I can wire it to the explosive.”
William touched Georgiy on the shoulder. “Let’s let them finish up their preparations, shall we?” He started up the hill to the pickup. “I could use another drink.”
They walked toward Lone Mountain with William leading the way in the predawn darkness, and Georgiy followed at an uncertain pace, at one point noticing they were completely out of sight of the other men now. He could just see the top of the balloon rising above the trough in the road. When he turned back around, William was pointing a gun down at him. A long cylindrical silencer was affixed to the barrel.
“Why?” was all Georgiy could think to say.
“Your sidearm, please. In the dirt. Slowly.” Georgiy removed the .38 from its holster and tossed it on the ground next to William. “Even if we could get you back home, Comrade, what we do here today must remain with the fewest people possible. I have my orders. I am sorry, if that means anything. You did well. And you will die a hero.”
“So, the exfiltration plan—”
“Is for me,” William said.
“The others?”
William shrugged. “The others are like you. Loose lips potentially, as the Americans say. You especially, Georgiy.”
Georgiy stuffed his hands inside his trouser pockets, somewhat consigned to his fate. “Me especially?”
William took two steps down the hill, glowering. “It’s that moral superiority of yours, that ethical angel that whispers in your ear. We can’t have you walking around with a guilty conscience about what needs to be done.”
“And you, William—what is your real name, anyway? Will you have no guilt about the deaths you will cause today, the lives you will take on this hill and down there in the city?”
William switched to Russian. “Very well, my name is Miroslav. But everyone calls me Slavko. And no, I will not lose sleep over what I do today. Duty is duty, Comrade Captain.”
Georgiy’s head came up. “Doesn’t the fact that I did go through with it tell you that I can be trusted?”
“I’m afraid we are out of time, my—”
William froze. Georgiy had seen the expression before, just a few hours earlier when he watched Dr. Ellison grab his chest. William’s body reacted involuntarily, the sides of his face scrunching up in the middle as the pain stabbed into his heart, his free hand coming up to support the other with the gun. “Bastard,” he squeaked.
Georgiy had given him ten drops, almost twice the amount he had given Ellison, and since William was far smaller, they had done their work in half the time. Before William could fire, Georgiy slapped his hands away. The shot sounded almost like the popping of a champagne cork, and the bullet struck the dirt somewhere behind Georgiy. But somehow, William was still on his feet. Georgiy bull-rushed him, his shoulder catching the spy just above the waist, landing him on top. William’s arms flew above his head, as did the semiautomatic pistol. The crushing weight squeezing his heart had just increased by another two hundred pounds.
Georgiy could feel the life ebbing out of the man, his breath coming in great gasps now, his eyes bulging from their sockets. “Die, you miserable shit,” he whispered, his nose pressed hard into William’s. “Die.”
He did not see the knife coming up. It struck him on the right side of the face, angling up from his cheekbone toward his eye. It was the pain that saved him, forcing him to roll off William to the left into the dirt and clutching at the jagged tear in his skin. He could feel the blood bubbling up between his fingers. He rolled again to gain some distance and watched as William took a final, blind swipe into the air with the knife again. A moment later, the knife came slowly down and rested on his chest. Georgiy heard one last rush of air escape William’s lungs.
Move or die, Georgiy told himself, half-blind from the blood. Move or die.
* * *
It took him minutes to get his breath back after William had taken his last. Struggling to his feet, Georgiy could see the skin hanging from his own cheek like a slab of meat. Gravity pulled at the muscle, sending a searing pain to his brain, and he had to clamp the wound together with his hand to keep from fainting. He was bleeding profusely. A hundred yards away, he could see the top of the balloon rising above the hill like a huge onion in the sky, which meant that he had little time.
After stopping the bleeding by tying a sock around his face as tightly as he could bear, Georgiy dragged William down the hill. Then he traded clothes with him. Finally, he set him just far enough away from the truck so that the men on the other side could not see and walked down the dip in the road, gun in hand.
Volkov saw the man in the Thunderbird coveralls and knit hat coming toward him. “It is done,” he said to the two brutes attaching the platform to the bottom of the balloon. “Poor chap.” But in the darkness, it wasn’t until he was almost upon them that Volkov saw the gray sock wrapped tightly around the face and realized it wasn’t William. By the time it registered in his brain and he was able to yell, Georgiy had advanced another three steps.
“No!” Volkov screamed just before Georgiy fired a bullet into his forehead.
The Spetsnaz men were strong but slow. They turned simultaneously and froze for an instant, just long enough for Georgiy to shoot the man on the left in the chest. The one on the right threw up his hands. “Don’t shoot,” he pleaded in Russian.
Georgiy shot him in the face. In the span of ten minutes, he had killed four men. They were his countrymen, men who had survived the Nazi invasion, the great purges, the starvation. The cold. They had shared a common purpose, to defeat the American imperialists and free the slaves of capitalism around the world. But now Georgiy’s purpose had changed, and he could never go home again. He had betrayed his country.
A minute later, the balloon and its empty cargo shot into the sky and immediately caught the stiff wind and headed southeast. It rose quickly but not enough to avoid slamming into the mountain in front of it, where it bounced and rattled around before finally climbing several hundred feet and over the crest. Where it would eventually crash, Georgiy did not have a clue and cared even less. He only cared that the warhead was not on board.
There was just one last thing to do before he left the scene, and that was to make it appear he never left it. With William now dressed in Georgiy’s security uniform, Georgiy carefully drove the truck down the hill to where the three bodies lay. He placed his identification and test site badge several feet away in the dirt. The gash in his cheek feeling like a hot iron, Georgiy lifted William into the driver’s seat. Then he took his .38 Special and placed the muzzle against William’s right temple. The explosion of gunpower echoed off the mountain walls, but there was no one around to hear it. He let the revolver tumble out of his hand onto the floor of the pickup.
Carefully, he took the end of the hose that had been used to fill the balloon with hydrogen and placed it in the passenger window, securing it in place by rolling up the window. Then he walked back to the tank and turned on the valve. The invisible gas began to fill the truck’s cab. Uncertain of what to do with the warhead but certain it was in too close proximity to the hydrogen, Georgiy wrapped it in the blanket again, and dragged it over the next rise in the road. He didn’t like the idea of leaving it unsecured, but he was confident the Americans would find it in short order. Exhausted and racked with pain, he walked back to the site, taking a position a good twenty yards behind the pickup. He withdrew William’s pistol from his belt and fired a round through the rear window. The first explosion was the hydrogen igniting. It lifted the truck off the ground, and knocked Georgiy off his feet. He had just glimpsed the huge fireball rising into the sky when the hydrogen cylinder next to the balloon exploded. The blast felt like he had just stepped into the sun, the sound crashing through his eardrums, and in that moment he was certain that nuclear detonations, a million times hotter, had no place in this world. The flames and the sound would bring people running, but he stayed a minute to be sure that all physical traces of Frederick Meyer would burn to a crisp, everything except his badge which now reflected the firelight in the pre-dawn sky.
