Duel of Assassins Read online

  “Traitors have reason to expect us. Unless you confess your crimes at once, Rodion Igorovich, and tell us everything, you will be shot here and now.” As an added insult to the senior officer, Starkov had employed the familiar form of address.

  “Confess what? What’s my treason?”

  “Conspiracy to assassinate President Rybkin.”

  Marchenko tilted the vodka bottle to his lips. Starkov—along with his men—couldn’t help noticing the military honors arrayed on the wall behind the colonel general—Hero of the Soviet Union, orders of Suvorov, Kutuzov, Aleksandr Nevsky and the Red Star, decorations and flashes for battle wounds in Egypt, Vietnam, Afghanistan.

  “If it’s treason to want to stop Alois Maksimovich from destroying our homeland, I’m guilty, and so is most of the Red Army—and so should you be, Comrade Chekist. I am a patriot. Rybkin is the traitor. Which is, of course, why he sends thugs in the middle of the night to execute me. He’s afraid to put me on trial. He knows he’d have a full-scale Army revolt on his hands.”

  “Is that your whole confession, Rodion Igorovich?”

  “All you’re going to get, shitface. So why don’t you give the order? Come on, you bastards, shoot me!” All eyes were on Starkov, who did not react. The old man snorted. “What are you waiting for? Did Rybkin hand you a list of questions to ask before you can pull the trigger? Like why I’ve been such a docile fellow, making no protest when he stripped me of my rocket command and exiled me to this shithole? The answer is simple. I like teaching kolkhoz boys how to dig latrines in the spring mud.” Marchenko chuckled, took another pull of vodka, banged the bottle down, wiped his lips. “Either that, or I’ve got one last ace up my asshole.”

  “If you’ve got an ace hidden anywhere, old man, you’ve waited too long to play it against Rybkin.”

  “I was waiting for just the right moment. And now it’s here. I will stop this madman, Comrade Chekist, and you and your stormtroopers cannot stop me.”

  “We already have, Comrade General. We’ve been watching you for months, you know, tracing your treasonous little network. We’re shutting it down completely tonight. Removing your conspirators in a dozen military districts. And we know from our interrogations that your plans for overthrowing the President are a very long way from complete.”

  “For overthrowing, yes. Not for killing the bastard. For that I just have to give the word.”

  “Go ahead. I’d like to see this, Comrade, since we’ve severed every means of communication from this place.”

  Marchenko finished the bottle, set it down gently this time. “Alas for your ass-licking career, Comrade Chekist, you haveoverlooked one means of communication.”

  “What?”

  “Pigeon.”

  Starkov stared at the old rocketry general without comprehension. Marchenko acted tipsy; was he delusional as well? Yet, despite himself, the KGB officer raked his glance once more over the small office—past books, encased medals and orders, dusty regalia that included a cavalry saber and saddle, photos of rocket launchings, family gatherings, officer academy gradu-ations. There were no carrier pigeons, no birds of any kind.

  “Pigeon?” Starkov said, at a loss.

  Marchenko smiled for the first time, revealing several stainless-steel teeth. He tapped the rocket tube and repeated the word: Golub, “dove” or “pigeon.” Then he pressed the wireless ignition switch concealed in his palm.

  From the base of the Golub there came an explosive whoosh, and the projectile, in a compressed-gas cold launch, shot out of its silo tube toward the roof—and a skylight that flew open before it, framing a square of night.

  Startled, Starkov and several others swung their AKRs, firing upward bursts at the vanishing missile. It seemed they had hit their target when a gout of flame exploded over their heads. Then his stunned senses registered the diminishing roar and a sudden sulfurous stink in the room, and Starkov realized the explosion must have been the delayed ignition of the first-stage rocket motor. The Golub had disappeared into the night.

  Yet several of his men continued to direct their machine-gun rounds upward, thudding into the roof timbers and shattering the rapidly retracting plexiglass skylight. And worse! Starkov whirled and shouted—too late to stop one of his men from opening fire on Marchenko, who crashed backward off his chair. By the time Starkov had rushed around the desk, the colonel general had escaped their grasp like his “pigeon.” His nightshirt was a red ruin, and from the scrawny neck arterial blood pooled over the floorboards, dividing around Starkov’s boots.

  The KGB officer stared down in impotent fury, his right fist clenching and reclenching the AKR’s butt-stock. Marchenko’s broad skull was thrown back on the floor, his death-glazed eyes staring up at the shattered skylight and blackness beyond. And the old bastard was still grinning his steely smile.

  *

  The Golub streaked northeastward through the Siberian night like a tiny meteorite, perhaps a straggler from the Eta Aquarid showers of early May, a week previous. Its trajectory was precisely controlled by a tiny Japanese microprocessor, and its solid-fuel propellant burned for a carefully calculated one hundred forty seconds, enough to carry it over twenty kilometers of pine and birch, and well beyond the silent River Ob and the university complex of Akademgorodok sprawled across the Zolotaya Dolina, the Golden Valley.

  As it passed once again above dense forest, the rocket reached apogee and abruptly cut its motor. A split-second later a recovery ejection charge triggered, the sudden retro-thrust separating the nosecone and deploying a parachute. As the exhausted first stage dropped away into the trees, the polyethylene canopy unfurled and snapped open. The Golub payload, swinging slightly in the breeze and now emitting a tiny radio signal, drifted down through the pinetops, its shrouds barely evading entrapment as it slipped past tiers of web-fingered boughs to impact softly into the thick mulch of a small clearing.

  An hour passed with only the rustle of pines. Then the wind carried the approaching whine of a truck transmission laboring over the rough ground. Several minutes later twin headlamps lanced back and forth through the night as the vehicle crashed through thickets and slalomed around pine boles. Finally it bounced into the clearing—an old, rebuilt Lend-Lease Studebaker bearing the insignia of the Ministry of Timber—and came to a halt.

  Leaving the motor running and the headlamps probing ahead, two men jumped out of the cab—a father swinging an electric torch, and his strapping son with an RDF receiver. It took them less than a minute to locate the payload under its collapsed canopy. In another minute, the old Studebaker was growling off through the woods, and the clearing was once again empty.

  A half-hour later, the Golub’s nosecone lay hidden beneath the winter woodpile outside the forester’s cabin, while inside Marchenko’s final operational order was carefully unfolded, read, encrypted and sent on its way once more, this time disguised in a stream of meteorological data over the Akademgorodok computer network for distribution throughout the Soviet Union. The last sentence of the colonel general’s message was the key one. Decoded, it read simply:

  ACTIVATE MARCUS.

  Two

  Orlando, a swarthy party animal up for the week from Brescia, thought up the stunt around midnight in an ersatz London pub in Kitzbühel, after considerable quantities of dark pilsner. He tried to explain it to the two Austrian girls at the table, but they were unable to hear over indefatigable choruses of “Fräulein, Fräulein, Fräulein” led by the resident zither and accordion duo. Finally the Italian shouted out his tipsy idea.

  “Zu-pa!” answered the girl on his left, Lise—straw blonde, nicely freckled, smiling while licking off a foam mustache.

  “With you everything is ‘super.’ What do you say, Silvie?”

  The dark-haired, slightly more serious girl on his right shook her head: “Orlo, you want to kill yourself, I don’t care. But think of little Lise. She will be sad forever.”

  “Ha! Nothing makes Lise sad.”

  “Okay, maybe not
sad forever—”

  “Maybe only till I find a new big love,” giggled Lise. “Maybe a week.”

  “You lovely ladies don’t understand. It’s not for me to do such a crazy thing. I must think always of my big future, and of Papa’s business. No, this is for our brave and crazy American to do. Wake him up, one of you, so I can tell him.”

  The three turned to the young man across the table, just now lounging back precariously in his cafe chair. Only a long dimpled jaw and muscular smile were visible below a black felt cowboy hat, tipped comically far forward. Silvie reached and lifted the hat.

  “Okay, I’m awake,” he said, grinning at them out of his long, handsome, adolescent mask of a face. The voice was husky and melodious, the mouth frankly sensual, the light-blue eyes playful against a deep Alpine tan. Despite the boyish appeal, he looked to be past thirty, clearly older and more experienced than his companions, none of whom knew his real identity.

  “But you don’t listen to us, Jack. We are boring you?”

  “I heard every damned drunken word, Orlo. I’ll try your little stunt tomorrow, as soon as the chair lift starts running up to Hohe Salve. If the weather isn’t too shitty.”

  “But Jack! Orlo was only making a joke.”

  “Jack”—known to Soviet intelligence as Marcus Jolly—righted his chair, reached into a jeans pocket and fished out a wad of Austrian banknotes, peeled off a dozen and tossed them onto the beer-puddled table. “Orlando may be joking, but twelve thousand schillings says I’m serious. What do you say, amico?”

  The Italian grabbed up the notes, shook them dry and handed them to Lise. “Keep these. It’s not much, but I’m afraid our crazy friend will need them for the hospital.” He turned to “Jack.” “Okay, fifteen thousand. But you wake up tomorrow, you want to change your mind, it’s plenty okay with me.”

  Marcus shook his head and reached for a fresh half liter of beer. “What do you mean, ‘wake up’? Who’s going to sleep?”

  *

  Orlo’s stunt didn’t scare Marcus, it excited him. He’d been getting stale down in Lugano waiting for something to happen. Not trying something truly balls-out demented once in a while, going for the blood rush, now that was frightening. If he ever reached the time of his life that he counted all the costs and balked at barriers in his path like a skittish steeplechaser, they might as well just take him out and shoot him.

  Oh, there were plenty of crazy and dangerous things beyond Marcus’ sphere of daredeviltry—a host of circus stunts, for instance. But only once could he remember being afraid to try something he wanted desperately to do.

  He’d been fourteen, showing off for a couple of girls at the local plunge with his self-taught repertoire of forward and backward somersaults. Suddenly a bunch of country club kids, collegiate types, had showed up, and several big, musclebound characters took over the diving boards. Marcus had tried to compete, but was plainly outclassed.

  This one bleach-blond guy kept bouncing up and down on the high board, making the fiberglass twang like a bass guitar string. When he had everybody watching, he had bounded straight up and grabbed his knees in a tight backward tuck. There was a collective gasp all around the pool—you could see the big kid was not going to clear the board.

  And he didn’t. He finished the somersault cleanly and banged both feet right back on the end of the vibrating board. It twanged again as he arced up and out into a graceful forward one-and-a-half pike with hardly a splash. As he broke surface and flung his blond hair out of his eyes, the poolside gasp had turned to applause.

  Later, when the college kids had left and the guard was clearing the pool, Marcus had gone out on the low board—the high board was out of the question. He had screwed up his courage to attempt the incredible dive. He had bounced on the end—three, four, five times. But that was all. His knees had turned to jelly, his stomach got oily, cowardice stole his soul. When the guard ordered him out, he slunk away.

  Marcus had pretty much given up on diving the rest of that summer. In the amazing run of years since, Lord knows, he’d pulled off many crazier and incomparably more dangerous stunts, while today that country-club showoff was probably pushing insurance and turning into one more lard-ass. But Marcus could never forget that dive. Someday, before it was all over, he’d get up there and do the damned thing.

  Now he hung suspended beneath a rainbow-striped hang glider. Increasing his exhilaration, and in violation of all the rules of the Hopfgarten Hang Gliding School from which he had hired his Rogallo wing, Marcus was unencumbered with helmet, goggles, flight suit or cocoon harness. Except for swimming briefs, Rolex and running shoes, his sleekly muscled body was bare, stretched prone and prismed by sunlight through the multi-hued sailcloth.

  Directly above, a tiny, drifting circumflex against the vaulted blue, a golden eagle worked the same thermal that held Marcus. It was a perfect morning for soaring. He had gained a thousand meters in ridge lift from the grassy summit of Hohe Salve, his launch site. That put him something like twenty-two hundred meters above the emerald vales of Brixental and Kelchsau, which joined just beyond Hopfgarten. From here the tumbling Kelchsauer Ache, in a full spring torrent he had kayaked two days before, shone as a fine, golden filament in the sunlight.

  Arrayed off to his left were the snowglossed summits of the Kitzbüheler Alps and the Wilder Kaiser, and beyond them, rising from the Hohe Tauern on the horizon, the bright white saddle of the Grossglockner, at nearly thirty-eight hundred meters Austria’s highest peak.

  He would have liked to ride the thermal higher, to chase the eagle like Icarus, beyond the limestone crags and the far glistening snowfields, allowing the sense of splendid isolation to overcome him. It was supremely intoxicating and utterly solitary. Indeed, Marcus prized this feeling precisely because—like all the really extraordinary experiences of his life—it could not be shared.

  But a wager was on, and far below the little trio waited witness. Mundanity, more than gravity, thus summoned him down. Reluctantly he exited the updraft, drew his body toward the control bar, dipped his wings below the horizon and, carefully gaining airspeed, began a slow, spiraling descent to the valley.

  Several minutes later he was skimming steep green pastures dotted with butterscotch cows, then banking in a wide turn above the storybook village of Hopfgarten, with its plump, white and wood gasthofs cascading red and pink pelargoniums from their balconies. Marcus’ wing shadow passed directly over the tidy parish churchyard cemetery, then flashed across the church’s steep roof and between its twin baroque spires.

  He was steering toward one of the larger structures, a Tyrol-ean-modern hotel bordering a grassy meadow. He swooped in from the west over a windscreen of dark solar-glass, unbuckling his harness a dozen meters above the sudden sparkle of a swimming pool. He had only an instant to register the trio of familiar upturned faces on the stone-flagged terrace. Then he let go the control bar, grabbed his knees and executed a forward two-and-a-half into the deep end.

  He surfaced to cheers from the poolside table, in time to see his glider vanish serenely over the windscreen. The dive had been fairly ragged, but Orlo had stipulated only a successful splashdown, not a thing of beauty. And Marcus had by God pulled it off. He stroked to the side, lifted himself out in one fluid motion and walked toward the group, grinning and dripping. They continued to applaud, all three in tennis whites, shoes and socks powdered with red clay from the nearby courts.

  “Bravo, Jack!” Orlando said.

  “The name’s Bond. James Bond. Just dropped in for a swim, old chap.” He caught the towel tossed by Silvie, bent to her kiss and sank into an empty chair. “It wasn’t half bad, was it?”

  “It was zu-pa!” Lise said.

  “But we should have made a video,” Silvie complained. “Jack, could you do it again?”

  “Si,” Orlando laughed. “Encore, encore!”

  “No problemo. As soon as il grosso Italiano here pays up.”

  “Ecco!” Orlando tossed some bills across
the table. “For you, my crazy friend, you earn it.”

  “Why crazy?”

  “Because, to win only fifteen thousand schillings, you just destroy a beautiful glider for which you are going to have to pay, I don’t know, maybe forty, fifty thousand?”

  “I didn’t hear a crash, did you? I’ll bet you another ten thousand the glider’s hardly got a scratch.”

  Orlando shrugged in apparent defeat.

  “So, what is it like up there, Jack?” Lise asked.

  “It’s fucking zu-pa, Lise! I was playing sky-tag with an eagle. You ought to try it.”

  “Scheisse! Too much of danger.”

  “Naw! The only really nasty part is catching all the damn bugs in your teeth.” Marcus spat over his shoulder. “Seriously, you know what it’s like?”

  “Sex?” asked Silvie.

  “Better.”

  “Nothing is better!” Orlando protested.

  “How do you know, until you’ve tried everything else? Okay, I’ll agree, great sex is the best thing going. But the kind of high you get from risking your buns hang-gliding, say, or sky-diving or helicopter skiing—I’m talking about really nifty, gung-ho, semi-life-threatening activities—let me tell you, it’s usually a whole lot better than your ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill fuck—”

  “Hey, you bastard!”

  “Silvie, take it easy. I’m not talking about you and me here. This is a purely philosophical discussion, okay? All I’m saying is, good danger beats bad sex, or even average sex, okay?” He fished a Süddeutsche Zeitung off the next table and began idly leafing through the pages. “As a matter of fact, it’s almost the same sensation for a guy, gets you right down in the nuts, verstehe? Obviously I don’t know what it’s like for you Fräulein—hey, Silvie, what’s your problem?”

  “You! Why you talk so dirty? And you think you are such a smart guy. What are you doing back there?” She slapped the newspaper down. “You can’t read German.”

  “I can read the damned Fussball scores, okay, and today’s Wetter.” He readjusted the paper. “Anyway, how do you know what I’m looking for?”