The Red Eagles (16 page)

“Not only in comparison.”

“True. And she and I were outside all that.”

“But no longer. I’m sorry, my friend.”

“So am I. Maybe she is too.”

“And you never saw each other again,” Kuznetsky repeated. “Regrets?”

“At the time.”

“Now?”

“No.” She didn’t want to talk about it with him, because all he cared about was whether it would affect the operation. And it wouldn’t. The Germans would be left for the FBI to pick up as planned, and that was that. Her feelings were irrelevant. But … it was cruel. She felt as if she was being tested, tempted almost, as if some malicious fate had decided to find the one person she’d least like to sacrifice …

They drove through Scottsboro. She looked at the bunch of white flowers on the dashboard, already beginning to wither in the heat. “Are you married?” she asked Kuznetsky.

“In a way,” he said. “What’s the old word? ‘Betrothed.’” He smiled at some unspoken thought, looking for a moment almost vulnerable. What a life he must have led, she thought. Or was she just romanticizing?

“Tell me about the Soviet Union.”

He was silent for a while. “It’s a place where the present
hardly exists,” he said finally. “The past and the future are both very real, but the present – you have to steal it piece by piece.”

She hadn’t expected this. “Where do you live, before the war I mean?”

“In a lot of ways we hardly noticed the war. There was no one moment when peace turned into war. There’s been no real peace since Kirov was shot, ten years ago. I’ve lived all over, wherever my work was.”

“I don’t think you can have been a propagandist.”

He smiled. “You don’t hear people saying how wonderful breathing is. It depends on what inspires you. We have crammed two hundred years of development into twenty, and most of it will have to be done all over again when the war ends. All the children have schools, there are no famines, everyone has work and purpose, sometimes too much work. You should go to Siberia. There the past is weakest, the future strongest. And it’s beautiful, beautiful beyond imagining.”

“Moscow?”

“Just another city.”

Another country boy. But she felt like a child with this man. He couldn’t be more than ten years older than she, but it was like what she’d always imagined talking with a father would be like. Stern, distant, wise, sure of himself, above all, sure of himself. The way adults were supposed to be, the way so few were.

They were coming into Bridgeport. He stopped a block down from the hotel and got out. “Take care driving back,” he said as she slipped across behind the wheel. “I’ll see you later.”

“Good luck,” she said, not sure that he’d consider luck relevant.

He was already walking away, turning into the shambling bear once more. She turned the car and headed back out of
town. It was four o’clock – nine hours to go. She’d often wondered how soldiers felt waiting to make an attack and now she knew – a mixture of impatience, terror, and curiosity.

And in nine hours she’d say good-bye to Paul again. Siberia, she’d go to Siberia, where the past was weaker.

At ten o’clock Kuznetsky put a call through to a hotel in Knoxville. The telephone rang only once. “How is Rosa’s uncle?” he asked.

“Fine. She took the train this evening.”

“And her cousin?”

“I’ll be seeing him tonight.”

“Good.”

He went back up to the familiar room, studied the yard through Markham’s binoculars for the last time, and then hid them under the mattress, taking care to leave the cord visible. He left by the fire escape and followed the preplanned route through the darkened back streets and alleys to the perimeter of the freight yard. There was no sign of life. He climbed through the rail fencing, under a couple of Pullman cars, and found himself forty yards from the solitary boxcar. Still nothing. He darted across the open space and took up position underneath it. It was 10:20. If everything went well, they’d be at sea in just over twenty-four hours.

Kuznetsky felt intense relief at the thought. Was it only two weeks ago that he’d been considering espionage one of the lesser forms of endeavour? Well, he’d be glad to get back to where the enemy wore a different uniform and openly challenged you. Deception was a tiring business, and, he thought, probably as self-damaging as anything he’d ever done. He didn’t know how Amy had held herself together all those years. With people like Richard Lee, he supposed. And a capacity for self-delusion.

The noises of the town slowly died down and the lights finally went out on Main Street. It must be the war – Friday nights in St. Cloud had never been so quiet. He had a fleeting image of Nadezhda at a barn dance, smiled to himself in the gloom. America! So much energy so ill-directed. He was glad he’d come back, glad he’d seen the Minnesota plains again. It seemed like an end, a welcome end. The war would soon be over, and they could start to build again, this time with the people as one. Taming the wildernesses, the one outside and the ones within.

He heard the sound of a car approaching. He mentally ran through the sequence of events Amy had written out, as he watched the state troopers, both of them this time, walking across to the depot. He heard the rap on the door, the greetings, a laugh. The lights went on, brighter than he’d expected. Three men came out, lit cigarettes, and gazed hopefully down the track. The train was late. They sat down on the edge of a loading platform, their voices unnaturally loud in the overall silence.

Then the toot of a whistle, the distant chuffing of the engine. Kuznetsky watched it pull around the curve into the station and stop at the predicted place.
Damn
. He had miscalculated the length of the train: the caboose didn’t cut off his line of approach from the group of men. He would have to cross the first ten yards in clear line of sight.

The fireman stood atop the tender, holding the hose as the water glugged through. As he disappeared over the other side, the meeting began to break up. Now or never. He crawled across the rail, out from under the cover of the boxcar, and wriggled his way across the first ten yards. There were no shouts. He got to his feet and sprinted the remainder, drawing the Walther as he did so. Hauling himself up the cab steps, he found himself face-to-face with the fireman, who had just lifted a sandwich to his mouth.

“Silence or you’re dead,” he whispered harshly. The
sandwich dropped as the man lifted his arms, shock giving way to indignation on his face.

The engineer was coming, shouting something back to the men he’d left. “I mean it,” Kuznetsky said, maneuvering himself into position for the driver’s appearance. At least the engine was making enough noise to half-drown a shot. But the fireman’s face relaxed; the moment of immediate danger for him had passed.

“Keep coming,” Kuznetsky said, holding the automatic a foot from the engineer’s face as he climbed into the cab. “Now let’s go,” he said, moving back to where he could cover them both.

“Hey …!”

“Do it. Your life is hanging by a thread, mister. Believe me.”

The two men stared at him, found nothing in his eyes to doubt. The engineer opened the regulator, and the engine began moving forward. “There’s easier ways to get a ride, bud,” he muttered.

“Just drive the train. Normal speed, normal everything.”

“Can we talk?”

“Just drive the train.” Kuznetsky shifted position to allow the fireman to shovel some coal while he watched the engineer’s actions. “Now slow down slightly,” he ordered. The man did so. “Okay, back to the usual speed.”

“What sort of game are you playing, bud?” He sounded curious rather than belligerent.

“No games. I wanted to know how to slow this thing down if you two happen to meet with an accident.”

The two men exchanged glances. The train rattled across a bridge. Kuznetsky lit the cigarette he’d been wanting for two hours.

“Where are you heading, bud?”

“Down the line. Shut up.”

Behind him, as if in pursuit, the half-moon was rising.

Fifty feet farther back, and considerably closer to the ground rushing by, Bob Crosby was tightening the strap that held him to the girders beneath the boxcar. He’d run away from home that evening and was already beginning to regret it. The noise was unbearable, his mouth seemed choked with dust, and he felt as if his bones were all being wrenched loose from their sockets.

He’d boarded the train at Chattanooga, more from desperation than choice. He’d expected a long train of boxcars with straw-filled interiors and sliding doors, not this strange short train with one car and a cargo that seemed to consist solely of policemen. But he’d had to get away before his father alerted the local cops, and at least he’d done that.

There were probably better places to travel; he’d learn as he went, he supposed. God knew where that guy at the last stop had ended up. He’d watched him crawling, then running toward the locomotive. There must be places to hide there too. He’d have to find out. There was lots of time: he was only fourteen. He’d go back home in a few years, when he was big enough, and show his father what a beating was really like. The bastard. He couldn’t understand why his mother stayed with him.

The train approached Scottsboro. “We stop here,” the engineer shouted over his shoulder.

Not according to Melville’s information, Kuznetsky thought, and there’d been no other way of checking. If the driver was telling the truth, and they went straight through, then the wires would start humming, to the north at least. If they stopped, and the driver was bluffing, the guard and the troopers would get suspicious. He had to trust Melville.

“We go straight through,” he shouted over the noise of the engine.

The engineer turned to protest, but Kuznetsky could see the bluff in his eyes. “Straight through,” he repeated.
It was the correct decision: Scottsboro station was dark and deserted.

The driver spat over the side, an empty gesture of defiance. “Huntsville, then,” he shouted.

“Okay. Huntsville.” The train climbed away from the valley floor, bellowing smoke across the stars. Another ten miles. The road on their left was devoid of traffic, the houses dark. Kuznetsky felt a sense of rising exhilaration, swaying with the passage of the train, feeling the warm gusts of air from the firebox whipping past his face.

At the spur turnoff Amy stood by the car, straining her ears for the sound of the approaching train. Her eyes had grown used to the darkness since their arrival an hour before, but even so she could barely make out the line of the main road two hundred yards away. Paul and Gerd had taken the camper up the valley. The switch had been thrown.

She gripped the tommy gun in one hand, hoping she wouldn’t have to use it. If Kuznetsky had failed, if the train failed to slow down, there was every chance that it would come off the rails at the turnoff, and she alone would have to take on the occupants, at least until Paul and Gerd arrived. And it would all be in full view of the main road. Only one car had passed in the last hour, but it needed only one at the wrong time. That car had swept past only seconds after Paul had finished cutting the wires above the road.

An orange glow could be seen in the distance, climbing the valley toward her. For a moment it disappeared, sheltered from sight by the invisible buildings of Lim Rock, and there it was again, growing larger and brighter. Now she could see the long, moving shadow that was the train, now she could hear it above the natural sounds of the night.

“Slow down,” Kuznetsky said.

“On this grade – you’re crazy!”

Kuznetsky moved forward, immediately behind the engineer, jamming the Walther into the back of his neck. “We’re taking the spur. Slow down.”

“We’ll have to throw the switch.”

“It’s already thrown.”

At least he hoped it was. There was a sudden movement behind him; he ducked by instinct, glimpsed the shovel flash past his head. Straightening up, he put a bullet through the fireman’s face, reached out too late to catch his body as it tumbled from the cab, and turned the gun quickly enough to stop the engineer in his tracks.

“Slow it down,” he screamed, and the driver, his mouth hanging open, turned to obey.

It was almost too late. The locomotive’s wheels screeched as they hit the points and the whole train swayed alarmingly. Beneath them the trestles of the river bridge creaked and snapped, but they were across, moving up the narrow valley.

Amy watched the train rock its way through the points and the bridge, saw a silhouetted guard emerge from his lighted sanctum and apply himself energetically to the hand brake on the rear platform. Blue-white sparks flashed across the valley as the braked wheels ground against the rails, but the train kept moving away as the engineer overrode the hand brake. The noise seemed deafening. She looked up and down the road – nothing.

Half a mile ahead Paul and Gerd heard the train, stamped out their cigarettes, exchanged grim smiles, and moved to their positions. Soon they could see it rounding the bend in the valley, first the glow from the locomotive, then the sparks from the wheels at the rear. The train’s shape slowly swam into focus, and two figures were visible in the engineer’s compartment. And one on the roof of the boxcar! Someone was going forward to see what had gone wrong.

Suddenly the boxcar door slid open, throwing light across the road and the valley. The train pulled to a halt, and as the engine subsided into relative silence, the noise of the man running along the car roof mingled with shouts from the men hanging out of the boxcar door.

The first rattle of Paul’s tommy gun blew the man off the roof and out of sight; simultaneously Gerd sprayed the open door, knocking at least two troopers back across the car.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the engineer kneeling as if in prayer, Kuznetsky standing above him, holding the gun to his head and pulling the trigger.

Paul and Gerd reached their positions on either side of the open door. They could hear talking inside, frightened, bewildered talking, then the rasp of the other door being pulled back. At a signal from Gerd they moved forward in unison, firing as they went. Two bodies plummeted out through the far door, thumping into the gravel. Kuznetsky stepped past them, pulled himself up into the car. Inside, one man was dead, another whimpering from wounds in his thigh and chest. Kuznetsky walked behind him, placed the gun to the back of his head, and fired. The man slumped forward across the makeshift table of crates, scattering cards and quarters.