The red menace 1, p.10
The Red Menace #1, page 10
By every best guess — from Wainwright to Director Kirk’s expert consultants — the killer agent worked remarkably fast. If transferring some of the liquid from one plant to another did not kill the leaves on contact, the Menace had to assume that the Russian planes had successfully rendered inert whatever had caused the damage.
Two weeks of boots tramping around the clearing had crushed most of the dead vegetation to pulp. The Menace found a few intact stalks and slipped them inside some small plastic vials which he corked and tucked away inside his cape. He also took a few clippings from the undamaged foliage around the dead zone.
No sooner had he collected Wainwright’s samples than the ground began to rumble and the drone of truck engines rose from out the night.
A moment later, amber headlights sliced the darkness.
His path had led him close to the ocean side of the base. He was aware from the aerial photographs of the road that ran up along the southern perimeter but was surprised that he had come so close to stumbling out onto it. In the darkness, in a strange environment, it was difficult to get his bearings.
For a moment the Red Menace retreated back into the brush.
The trucks appeared, a caravan of four big Russian Army vehicles. The canvas backs were open at the top and the beds were laden with freshly harvested brush.
The Russians had apparently grown weary of the slow camouflage progress that was proceeding onsite and had enlisted other teams to pitch in the effort. The first two trucks rumbled past. Further along the road they were waved along by Cuban sentries.
The Menace could see the first truck driving deep onto the base, heading in the direction of the distant area that Jeb Wilson had failed to penetrate.
Instinct took hold and the Red Menace was running even before his conscious mind realized it. The second truck was being waved onto the base and the third was rolling past. He only needed to time it just right…
Branches slapped his face and he swatted them angrily back with gloved hands as he raced determinedly forward. The forest ended on a short bluff into which the road had been cut, and when the jungle’s muddy edge began to crumble beneath his boots the Red Menace jumped. There was the awful, exhilarating feeling of empty air beneath him for a split-second, and in the next he was crashing into the pile of brush that was packed inside the fourth and final truck.
He had twisted in midair to wrap himself in the cape, hitting with his shoulder, rolling so that the cape unfurled as he sprang free. The sturdy cloth did not tear, but sharp branches jabbed hard through the material. A short knife blade of a rough-hewn branch struck the ancient wound on his left side and he gasped at the pain.
He grabbed at his old scar. His fingers came back slick, and not from sweat.
The wound was not life-threatening. The toughened skin that formed the scar had kept the machete-like branch from piercing deep.
The truck squeaked to a stop on protesting brakes and the Red Menace drew his cape up protectively.
A few bored words exchanged in Spanish. A flashlight beam shined perfunctorily across the rear gate of the truck but not inside the bed. This time the Menace did not need to hold his breath, this time his entire body seemed to instinctively still. He waited.
After only a few seconds the truck was waved forward.
The final truck in the small convoy bounced through potholes and up the road, unknowingly carrying its hidden cargo to the next checkpoint on its way inside the top secret Russian base.
10
Colonel Petr Bolgevik did not trust Colonel Ivan Strankov. Not in the least, and certainly not as director of the most important strategic Soviet inroad in the Western Hemisphere since the glorious October Revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union.
Not that trust came easily to Petr Bolgevik. As an officer in the KGB, mistrust was Bolgevik’s bread and butter. Trust was for the weak, for the foolish, for the West. In training he had been taught to trust only in the great communist mission. As for those charged with seeing that mission realized? They were men and, his instructors had drilled into his brain, all men were fallible and, therefore, untrustworthy. Bolgevik took the lesson to heart. The KGB colonel believed in communism, not men. And the man he believed in least of all these days was Red Army Colonel Ivan Strankov.
Bolgevik was colonel in rank, but not in uniform. He was the head of the plainclothes KGB unit at the Cuban base which Strankov commanded.
Bolgevik was a much younger man than Strankov. He had been alive during the Great Patriotic War, but as a baby, a toddler. The guns had fallen silent on the Eastern Front, the Germans had retreated from outside Moscow and Leningrad, and the Iron Curtain of the Cold War had descended before Petr Bolgevik’s first childhood memory.
Technically, Colonels Bolgevik and Strankov were of equal rank but in reality this was nonsense. Bolgevik had compiled a mental list of several reasons Strankov should be considered the subordinate officer, the primary reason being that Bolgevik was KGB. The most powerful men in the Politburo feared the clandestine agency and the harm its agents could do to reputation, let alone life. Add to that the fact that Strankov had spent a decade in a labor camp. This humbling experience should have sent Strankov stumbling for the shadows in fright at the mere sight of Colonel Bolgevik.
As if that weren’t enough, Bolgevik had been the first of the two colonels assigned to the Cuban base. He had been stationed in Cuba during the earliest days of planning and had watched the first trees being cut down, the stumps being hauled from the ground and the first trenches being dug. In fact, Bolgevik was in Cuba a full two years before Strankov was even released from the Siberian gulag. The pecking order was firmly established before Strankov arrived. Or at least it should have been. But since his first day Strankov acted as if the base were his private domain.
Finally, as the disgraced head of the failed agency Motherland, an agency that had been largely folded into the KGB after Strankov’s removal from power, Strankov should have realized the supremacy of the KGB over all he had once commanded.
Yet in not a single matter did Ivan Strankov demonstrate the least awareness that Bolgevik was his superior. Never did he show Petr Bolgevik the deference that was the KGB colonel’s due. That, however, would soon change. If Colonel Bolgevik had played his cards right, this warm Cuban night would be one of the last Strankov spent in Cuba.
Bolgevik had left the apartment of his Cuban mistress after midnight and returned to his quarters on the Russian base. There was a note tacked to his door.
SEE ME IN MY OFFICE AT ONCE. STRANKOV
Bolgevik tore the note down and scowled.
“Your impertinence has doomed you, comrade colonel,” he muttered, through tightly clenched teeth.
He considered ignoring the note. He had no idea how long it had been tacked up. Strankov could be long in bed by now.
But the trucks were still driving up the bay road with their loads of camouflage and the chainsaws were still running day and night in the jungle, and with all the activity Bolgevik would have a difficult time getting to sleep.
The KGB colonel crumpled the note, stuck it in his pocket, and struck out across the compound for the entrance to the main bunker.
The sentries stood at attention as he passed between them. Bolgevik skipped lightly down the stairs and ducked down the nearest side corridor. The hallway was chilly, as usual. He rapped his knuckles on the unmarked steel door at the end of the hall and was surprised when the knock was answered.
“Come in, Comrade Bolgevik.”
It irritated Colonel Bolgevik that Strankov would know it was him, as if Bolgevik had nothing better to do in the middle of the night than come running like a servant answering his master’s call. He was scowling as he pushed open the door.
The room was dark but for a single desk lamp which brightly illuminated a stark white circle on the desk directly below. The shadow of a thin man was barely visible seated behind the desk, beyond the splash of light. Cigarette smoke filled the office and fingers of smoke curled through the light, although Bolgevik could not see evidence of a lit cigarette in the darkness. One lonely butt was stabbed out in the ashtray on the desk.
“Do you treasure loyalty, Comrade Colonel Bolgevik?” the shadow of Ivan Strankov asked. The base director’s voice creaked like a rusty hinge.
Bolgevik flashed an oily smile. “I see what this is,” he said. “My report has reached the right eyes in Moscow. There is no need to play games, Strankov.”
“Game? This is no game. This is life.”
An envelope appeared from out the dark, slapping hard on the metal desk and sending twisting streams of cigarette smoke dancing crazily across the splash of light.
Petr Bolgevik’s jaw dropped a fraction of an inch when he recognized his own handwriting in the phrases “TOP SECRET,” “KGB EYES ONLY” on the envelope. The end had been torn open and a typed sheet of white paper hung from the hole.
“I put that on a plane to Moscow two days ago,” Bolgevik sputtered. “It is a state security matter. What do you think you are playing with here, Strankov?”
“I,” said the shadow seated at the desk, “was a fan of loyalty once upon a time. When I was young and stupid like you. Fortunately I still engender loyalty from others even if I myself do not feel it for anything these days.”
“You have loyalty, Strankov. You have it for yourself. You have staffed this site with old Motherland cronies and officers so young they fear to question you. You have shut out the KGB in virtually everything you do. You have the Cubans fooled into thinking you have a direct line to Comrade Brezhnev at the Kremlin up here in your mountain bunker. And those experiments you have allowed Dr. Plassko to conduct. I only just found out that you lied in your report to Moscow of the events here last month. You should not even be associating with Plassko, one of your failed cronies from your failed agency. Moscow was right to banish him to the University of Havana. They should have put him in the gulag and left you both there to rot.”
Such accusations from a KGB official would be enough to freeze the heart of any sane Russian. And in this case both men knew that these, unlike most KGB accusations, were all true. Bolgevik was furious and breathless by the time he finished, and he puffed his chest out defiantly to await the traitor Strankov’s feeble, bleating defense.
At first was a very long moment of silence. Bolgevik briefly wondered if the man behind the desk had dropped dead. It was possible. Strankov was clearly in terrible health. The charges might have been enough to finish him.
All at once, a cleared throat. Not fear. Just a contemplative repositioning of phlegm.
A hand snaked out into the light, fingers grotesquely discolored, and brushed the envelope. “So you say.” The hand retreated and there was a rustling in the shadows. “I do not have time for arguments, for second guessing, for secret notes to Moscow questioning my command from some KGB junior officer seeking advancement.”
Bolgevik growled and waved a furious hand. “I do not care about advancement, Strankov. I care only for the glorious communist mission. Whatever fleeting sense of accomplishment it has given you to intercept that letter, you have only delayed the inevitable. What is more, by tampering with a top secret KGB communique, you have made matters worse for yourself. Whatever it is you think you are doing here in Cuba, it is over. You are finished, Strankov.”
Bolgevik puffed out his chest even further and gave the shadow lurking behind the desk a victorious sneer.
The KGB colonel thought he heard a soft click, magnified by the claustrophobic darkness of the otherwise silent office. He was not sure he heard the sound. And an instant later, when the bullet scrambled his brain, the ability to hear, speak or send letters to Moscow was forever lost to young Colonel Petr Bolgevik.
The silenced bullet slapped young Petr Bolgevik in the forehead, splattering skull and gray matter on wall and door. Bolgevik collapsed as if all the bones in his body had instantly turned to jelly.
Colonel Petr Bolgevik kicked feebly at the floor, as residual impulses fled his body along with the trail of thick black blood that dribbled off into the dark crevices of the small office. Eventually the kicking stopped and the body was still.
The desk light snapped out.
In the darkness behind the desk, a drawer opened and closed. The sudden blaze of a match briefly illuminated a ravaged face. The flame was abruptly extinguished.
In the darkened office, the soft inhale and exhale of a pair of struggling lungs was accompanied by the gently floating orange tip of a lonely cigarette.
11
Private Ernesto Cruz had been stuck on guard duty nearly nonstop for the past three weeks. The longest he had slept in that time was one four hour stretch over a week ago. The rest was stolen catnaps here and there, and the best of those didn’t amount to a full hour. At least he was not alone. Everyone was being pushed to his limit since the incident that had destroyed a huge patch of jungle and set off alarm bells throughout the Cuban government. Not that it made Private Cruz feel any better to know everyone else was as exhausted as he. It was taking all his effort just trying to stay awake.
By the time the latest caravan of trucks laden with jungle brush arrived at his checkpoint, Private Cruz was practically seeing double.
It seemed as if the entire Cuban army had been put to work like slave labor in the literal coverup that had followed the accident, with teams of soldiers hacking away at jungle brush for hours on end. As bad as his extended guard duty shifts were, he much preferred it to the tough physical labor most of the men were enduring out in the forest.
The latest truck drivers were blinking away sleep as he waved them onto the base. They were like dead men, none speaking so much as a word as they passed. From this final checkpoint they bumped across the acres of dead forest to the far side of the clearing where teams of sweating Cuban soldiers swarmed the trucks and unloaded the cargo.
“How many is that tonight?” Cruz asked as the latest set of tail lights briefly stained the jungle red. He yawned, a huge gulp of air that exposed his back molars.
“Nineteen,” Private Ramondo Ruiz replied. “And do not start yawning again. I am tired enough as it is. You will put me to sleep.”
A new truck drove up and Ruiz shined a flashlight beam across it.
“These Russians, they are demanding too much of us,” Cruz said. He rapped the side of the truck and the driver put the vehicle in gear and drove off.
“You were not here when this base was constructed,” Ruiz replied, he stifled his own yawn with the back of his hand. “Now that was two years of hard labor the likes of which you cannot know. The cargo ships smuggling in the supplies every day. Even submarines many times each week. The work was done almost entirely at night at the beginning so that we could not be seen from the American planes. Only when the tunnels were started were we able to work during the day. But then we were forced to work underground, like burrowing rats. This? This is nothing compared to that.”
“I would still like to know what happened. Have you heard anything?”
The last truck pulled up to their checkpoint. Private Ruiz shook his head. “From the Russians? Are you joking? We are supposed to be comrades, but I would not trust that Strankov to tell me if my hair was on fire and he had the last bucket of water on Cuba. What was that?”
Cruz was yawning once more. “What?”
“I heard a noise,” Ruiz said. Suddenly he was no longer tired. Alert, rifle at the ready and the flashlight tucked up with the gun’s butt in the crook of his arm, he nodded for Private Cruz to circle the front of the truck.
Cruz unhitched his rifle from his shoulder and crept around the front bumper as Private Ruiz moved stealthily around the back.
Private Cruz strained his ears but all he could hear was the soft purr of the engine, the chirp of jungle insects and the occasional outburst from distant chainsaws.
Then a footstep. The crack of a branch very close by.
Cruz froze.
He swore he heard someone moving, the rustle of fabric. It sounded very near but though he strained his senses he could see no one in the nearby jungle.
A flash. A brilliant streak of crimson at the corner of his eye. And as quickly as it came, it was gone. The night seemed darker in its wake.
More footfalls, these passing away into the dark, then swallowed by the jungle.
Sudden movement at the rear of the truck. Cruz snapped his rifle up with a start, leveling it at the silhouette.
“Do not shoot!” Private Ruiz snapped. He lowered his own gun and swept his flashlight around the area.
Cruz took in a sip of air and lowered his rifle, slipping his finger from the trigger. He winced at the flashlight beam that raked across his face.
“Did you see anything?” Ruiz asked.
Cruz hesitated. The red splash from the truck’s taillights illuminated the road behind the truck and stained the left side of Private Ruiz’s face. This must have been the flash of red he had seen. His tired eyes were playing tricks on him.
“No, nothing,” Private Cruz said.
Private Ruiz hooked his rifle back over his shoulder. “I could have sworn I heard something,” he said, yawning.
“You have been on duty too long,” Cruz replied, shouldering his own weapon. He no longer felt like yawning. “You are jumping at shadows.”
Cruz rapped his palm on the passenger door and the truck headed up the last leg of the long road and into the patch of deforested jungle.
THE GUARD had nearly spotted him. The road was too narrow, the jungle too close and dense to slip into without being heard. The Red Menace had no choice but to wait until the Cuban private’s back was turned and then make a break for it.
As he ran up the road he cursed again the arrogance of his own youth. The cape and mask had been a dramatic combination back then; the legendary Red Menace sweeping up to an enemy from out of nowhere in a blinding flash. But the hubris of youth seemed ridiculously reckless to him now.
