Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (432 page)

“Brazil?”

“There’s a smaller version of the complex down there, somewhere west of Manaus, I think. I never been there. The rain forest doesn’t interest me that much. I’m an open-country sort of guy,” Hunnicutt explained. “Now, the African veldt, the plains there, that’s something else. Well, I guess I’ll get to see it, and hunt it.”

“Yes, I would like to see that, to see the wildlife, how it lives and thrives in the sun,” Popov agreed, coming to his own decision.

“Yep. Gonna get me a lion or two there with my H&H .375.” Hunnicutt clucked and got Jeremiah to go faster, an easy canter that Popov tried to duplicate. He’d done this pace before, but now he found that he had trouble synchronizing with Buttermilk’s rather easy motions. He had to switch his mind back into his body to make that happen, but he managed it, catching up with the hunter.

“So, you will transform this country to the Old West, eh?” The interstate was about two miles off. The trucks were passing by swiftly, their trailers lit in amber lights. There would be intercity buses, too, similarly lit, he hoped.

“That’s one of the things we’re going to do.”

“And you’ll carry your pistol everywhere?”

“Revolver, Dmitriy,” Foster corrected. “But, yeah. I’ll be like the guys I’ve read about, living out here in harmony with nature. Maybe find me a woman who thinks like I do, maybe build me a nice cabin in the mountains, like Jeremiah Johnson did—but no Crow Indians to worry me there,” he added with a chuckle.

“Foster?”

He turned. “Yeah?”

“Your pistol, may I hold it?” the Russian asked, praying for the correct response.

He got it. “Sure.” He drew it and passed it across, muzzle up for safety.

Popov felt the weight and the balance. “It is loaded?”

“Nothing much more useless than a handgun that ain’t loaded. Hell, you want to shoot it? Just cock the hammer back and let go, but you want to make sure your horse is reined in tight, okay? Jeremiah here’s used to the noise. That mare might not be.”

“I see.” Popov took the reins in his left hand to keep Buttermilk in check. Next he extended his right hand and cocked the hammer on the Colt, heard the distinctive triple click of this particular type of revolver, and took aim at a wooden surveyor’s stake and pulled the trigger. It broke cleanly at about five pounds.

Buttermilk jumped slightly with the noise, so close to her sensitive ears, but the horse didn’t react all that badly. And the bullet, Popov saw, grazed the two-inch stake, six meters or so away. So, he still knew how to shoot.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Hunnicutt asked. “If you ask me, the Single-Action Army’s got the best balance of any handgun ever made.”

“Yes,” Popov agreed, “it is very nice.” Then he turned. Foster Hunnicutt was seated on his stallion, Jeremiah, not three meters away. That made it easy. The former KGB officer cocked the hammer again, turned and aimed right at the center of his chest, and pulled the trigger before the hunter could even be surprised by the action. His target’s eyes widened, either from his unbelieving recognition of the impossible thing that was happening or from the impact of the heavy bullet, but what it was didn’t matter. The bullet went straight through his heart. The body of the hunter stayed erect in the saddle for a few seconds, the eyes still wide with shock, then it fell lifelessly backward away from Popov and onto the grassland.

Dmitriy dismounted and took the three steps to the body to make sure that Hunnicutt was dead. Then he unsaddled Jeremiah, who took the death of his owner phlegmatically, and removed the bridle, too, surprised that the animal didn’t bite him for what he’d just done, but a horse wasn’t a dog. With that done, he smacked the stallion heavily on the rump, and it trotted off for fifty meters or so, then stopped and started grazing.

Popov remounted Buttermilk and clucked her to a northerly direction. He looked back, saw the lit windows of the Project building complex, and wondered if he or Hunnicutt would be missed. Probably not, he judged, as the interstate highway grew closer. There was supposed to be that little village to the west, but he decided that his best chance was the bus stop hut, or perhaps thumbing a ride on a car or truck. What he’d do after that, he wasn’t sure, but he knew he had to get the hell away from this place, just as fast and as far as he could manage. Popov was not a man who believed in God. His education and his upbringing had not aimed him in that direction, and so for him “god” was only the first part of “goddamned.” But he’d learned something important today. He might never know if there was a God, but there were surely devils—and he had worked for them, and the horror of that was like nothing he’d ever known as a young colonel of the KGB.

CHAPTER 36

FLIGHTS OF NECESSITY

The fear was as bad as the horror. Popov had never experienced a really frightening time as a field-intelligence officer. There had always been tension, especially at the beginning of his career, but he’d quickly grown confident in his fieldcraft, and the skills had become for him a kind of security blanket, whose warm folds had always made his soul comfortable. But not today.

Now he was in a foreign place. Not merely a foreign land, for he was a man of cities. In any such place he knew how to disappear in minutes, to vanish so completely that scarcely any police force in the world could find him. But this wasn’t a city. He dismounted Buttermilk a hundred meters from the bus hut, and again he took the time to remove the saddle and bridle, because a saddled, riderless horse was sure to attract notice, but a horse merely walking about on its own probably would not, not here, where many people kept such animals for their pleasure. Then it was just a matter of easing his way through the barbed-wire fence and walking to the bus hut, which, he found, was empty. There was no schedule on the blank, white-painted walls. It was the simplest of structures, seemingly made of poured concrete, with a thick roof to stand up against the heavy winter snows, and perhaps survive the tornadoes that he’d heard about but never experienced. The bench was also made of concrete, and he sat on it briefly to work on making his shakes go away. He’d never felt like this in his life. The fear—if these people were willing to kill millions—billions—of people, surely they would not hesitate as long as a blink to end his solitary life. He had to get away.

Ten minutes after arriving at the hut, he checked his watch and wondered if there were any buses at this hour. If not, well, there were cars and trucks, and perhaps—

He walked to the shoulder and held up his hand. Cars were passing by at over a hundred thirty kilometers per hour, which left them little time to see him in the darkness, much less brake to stop. But after fifteen minutes, a cream-colored Ford pickup truck eased over to the side of the road.

“Where you headin’, buddy?” the driver asked. He looked to be a farmer, perhaps sixty years of age, his face and neck scored by lines from too many afternoon suns.

“The airport in the next town. Can you take me there?” Dmitriy said, getting in. The driver wasn’t wearing a seat belt, which was probably against the law, but, then, so was cold-blooded murder, and for that reason alone he had to get the hell away from this place.

“Sure, I have to get off at that exit anyway. What’s your name?”

“Joe—Joseph,” Popov said.

“Well, I’m Pete. You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Not originally. England, actually,” Dmitriy went on, trying that accent on for size.

“Oh, yeah? What brings you here?”

“Business.”

“What kind?” Pete asked.

“I am a consultant, kind of a go-between.”

“So, how’d you get stuck out here, Joe?” the driver asked.

What was the matter with this man? Was he a police officer? He asked questions like someone from the Second Chief Directorate. “My, uh, friend, had a family emergency, and he had to drop me off there to wait for a bus.”

“Oh.” And that shut him up, Popov saw, blessing his most recent lie.
You see, I just shot and killed someone who wanted to kill you and everyone you know . . .
It was one of those times when the truth simply didn’t work for him or for anyone else. His mind was going at a very rapid speed, faster by a considerable margin than this damned pickup truck, whose driver seemed unwilling to push the pedal much harder, every other vehicle on the road whizzing past. The farmer was an elderly man and evidently a patient one. Had Popov been driving, he’d soon establish how fast this damned truck could go. But for all that, it was only ten minutes to the green exit sign with the silhouette of an airplane tacked onto one side. He tried not to pound his fist on the armrest as the driver slowly took the exit, then a right turn to what looked like a small regional airport. In another minute, Pete took him to the US Air Express door.

“Thank you, sir,” Popov said, as he left.

“Have a good trip, Joe,” the driver said, with a friendly Kansas smile.

Popov walked rapidly into the diminutive terminal, and then to the desk, only twenty meters inside.

“I need to get to New York,” Popov told the clerk. “First class, if possible.”

“Well, we have a flight leaving in fifteen minutes for Kansas City, and from there you can connect to a US Airways flight to La Guardia, Mr.? . . . ”

“Demetrius,” Popov replied, remembering the name on his single remaining credit card. “Joseph Demetrius,” he said, taking out his wallet and handing the card over. He had a passport in that name in a safe-deposit box in New York, and the credit card was good, with a high limit and nothing charged on it in the past three months. The desk clerk probably thought he was working quickly, but Popov also needed to visit a men’s room and did his best not to show that urgent requirement. It was at that moment he realized he had a loaded revolver in the saddle-bags he was carrying, and he had to get rid of
that
at once.

“Okay, Mr. Demetrius, here’s your ticket for now, Gate 1, and here’s the one for the Kansas City flight. It will be leaving from Gate A-34, and it’s a first-class aisle seat, 2C. Any questions, sir?”

“No, no, thank you.” Popov took the tickets and tucked them in his pocket. Then he looked for the entrance to the departure concourse, and headed that way, stopped by a waste bin and, after quickly looking around, very carefully took the monster handgun out of the bags, wiped it, and dumped it into the trash. He checked the terminal again. No, no one had noticed. He checked the saddlebags for anything else they might contain, but they were completely empty now. Satisfied, he headed through the security checkpoint, whose magnetometer blessedly didn’t beep at his passage. Collecting the leather saddle-bags off the conveyor system, he looked for and found a men’s room, to which he headed directly, emerging in another minute feeling far better.

This regional airport, he saw, had but two gates, but it
did
have a bar, to which Popov went next. He had fifty dollars of cash in his wallet, and five of those paid for a double vodka, which he gulped down before taking the next hundred steps to the gate. Handing the ticket to the next clerk, he was directed out the door. The aircraft had propellers, and he hadn’t traveled on one of those for years. But for this flight he would have settled for rubber bands, and Popov clambered aboard the Saab 340B short-haul airliner. Five minutes later, the propellers started turning, and Popov started to relax. Thirty-five minutes to Kansas City, a forty-five-minute layover, and then off to New York on a 737, in first class, where the alcohol was free. Best of all, he sat alone on the left side of the aircraft, with nobody to engage him in conversation. Popov needed to think, very carefully, and though quickly, not too quickly.

He closed his eyes as the aircraft started its takeoff roll, the noise of the engines blotting out all extraneous noise.
Okay,
he thought,
what have you learned, and what should you do with that knowledge?
Two simple questions, perhaps, but he had to organize the answer to the first before he knew how to answer the second. He almost started praying to a God in whose existence he did not believe, but instead he stared out the window at the mainly dark ground while his mind churned away in a darkness of its own.

Clark awoke with a start. It was three in the morning at Hereford, and he’d had a dream whose substance retreated away from his consciousness like a cloud of smoke, shapeless and impossible to grab. He knew it had been an unpleasant dream, and he could only estimate the degree of unpleasantness by the fact that it had awakened him, a rare occurrence even when on a dangerous field assignment. He realized that his hands were shaking—and he didn’t know why. He dismissed it, rolled back over, and closed his eyes for more sleep. He had a budgeting meeting today, the bane of his existence as commander of Rainbow group, playing goddamned accountant. Maybe that had been the substance of his dream, he thought with his head on the pillow. Trapped forever with accountants in discussions of where the money came from and how it would be spent . . .

The landing at Kansas City was a smooth one, and the Saab airliner pulled up to the terminal, where, presently, the propellers stopped. A ground-crewman came up and attached a rope to the propeller tip to keep it from turning while the passengers debarked. Popov checked his watch. They were a few minutes early as he walked out the door into the clean air, then into the terminal. There, three gates away from his flight at A-34—he checked to make sure it was the correct flight—he found a bar again. They even allowed smoking in here, which was unusual for an American airport, and he sniffed in the secondhand fumes, remembering the youth in which he’d smoked
Trud
cigarettes, and almost asked one of these Americans for a smoke. But he stopped short of it and merely drank his next double vodka in a corner booth, facing the wall, wanting no one to have a reason to remember him here. After thirty minutes, his flight was called. He left ten dollars on the table and walked off, carrying the empty saddlebags, then asked himself why he was bothering. But it would appear unusual for a person to board a flight carrying nothing, and so he retained them, and tucked them into the overhead bin. The best news of this flight was that 2-D was not occupied, and he took that, facing the window to make it harder for the stewardess to see his face. Then the Boeing 737 backed away from the gate and took off into the darkness. Popov declined the drink offered to him. He’d had enough for the moment, and though some alcohol helped him to organize his thoughts, too much of it muddled them. He had enough in his system to relax, and that was all he wanted.