Sole Survivor td-72 Read online

  "Who is that man?" Rader barked into the field phone.

  "I don't know, sir," the captain replied. "He's a civilian."

  "I know that! Only an idiot civilian would do what he just did."

  "We're still awaiting the backup team from NASA, sir, but I can send in a squad."

  "And lose them too? No chance. We'll wait this out. Washington wants that thing intact."

  Colonel Rader did not have to wait long. Less than ten minutes after the civilian disappeared into the open hatch, the hatch closed. The hatch should not have been able to close because its hinges had been mangled by plastic explosives. But it did close. Colonel Rader saw through his binoculars that the door looked as good as new.

  Then the shuttle's tail jets thundered to life. The sound even penetrated the control tower's windows.

  "It's taking off," the captain radioed.

  "I can see that, you fool! Stop it. Get a vehicle in front of it. Two vehicles. One in front and one in back." But the captain was unable to get his men organized in time. The Yuri Gagarin rolled down the runway, turned smartly, and vaulted into the twilight sky.

  As it screamed past the control tower, Colonel Jack Dellingsworth Rader looked down through the finest military binoculars available and saw that the control cockpit was completely empty. He could have sworn, however, that he saw the control yoke move as if under unseen hands.

  That, of course, was impossible. But so was everything else about the mysterious Soviet shuttlecraft. After the Gagarin disappeared to the north, the second NASA anticontamination team arrived. They descended upon runway 13-Right like maggots on rotting meat. They swept the runway with Geiger counters, scraped up samples of asphalt, soaked up blood with sterilized sponges, and gathered other bits of physical evidence.

  They started from where the shuttle had stood immobile and worked their way down its two-mile takeoff path.

  The team leader found the first cube. It was a white square like a child's block. He picked it up in his white-gloved hand and the first thing he noticed was that the cube seemed to be made of material very similar to the rubberized fabric of his anticontamination suit. He placed the cube into a black box and sealed it hermetically.

  They found six other cubes scattered along the takeoff path, as if they had been jettisoned from the escaping shuttle.

  Four of the cubes were white. The other two were a silvery color. The team leader radioed back a question to the captain in charge of the operation.

  "How many men in the first team?" "Four. Why?"

  "I'd rather not say. But I think you'd better send a jeep out here to pick me up."

  "Why?"

  "I think I'm going to faint."

  Chapter 4

  They came to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, deep in Soviet Central Asia, in the dead of night.

  They flew in separately from Moscow because they were too important to risk traveling on a single aircraft. A crash would have obliterated half of the Soviet command structure. The other, truer reason was that they did not trust each other.

  The head of the KGB arrived first. He was a general in a green uniform and an abundance of chest medals. Then came his rival, the leader of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence apparatus. His uniform was gray. They were met at the landing field by the chief scientific adviser to the Soviet space program. Behind them, the moon rose above the skeletal tower from which the Yuri Gagarin had been launched by the hulking Energia booster system only hours before.

  The men waited stiff-necked in an operations building for the man who had summoned them to this critical meeting.

  The General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics arrived in his personal jet just after midnight. He hurried to the operations building.

  The others knew that the matter was grave when they saw that he was alone. Whatever this meeting was about, it was so critical the General Secretary dared not bring his advisers.

  Guards were stationed about the entrances. The General Secretary personally shut off the lights when he entered.

  "To discourage the guards from watching," he said grimly, taking off his astrakhan fur hat and setting it on the table before him. He regarded it intently for several minutes, as if it were a crystal ball. Faint moonlight threw the edges of his bald skull into relief.

  The General Secretary had just opened his mouth to speak when a siren wailed in the darkness. Searchlights sprang into life. The crisscrossed under the cold stars, searching, probing for something.

  One beam caught a flashing wing. Two searchlights converged on and followed a tiny Anotov-2 biplane as it settled onto the runway, bounced once, and came to an idling stop in front of the General Secretary's guarded plane.

  A graceful figure stepped from the plane onto one wing and jumped to the ground.

  The guards immediately unlimbered their rifles. Recognizing the pilot's slim-hipped walk, the General Secretary thrust his head out the door and ordered the frantic guards to stand down. He was just in time. They were leveling rifles at the pilot.

  He turned to reassure the others.

  "It is Anna. I left word where I could be found." The others nodded in the darkness. They all knew Anna Chutesov, special strategic adviser to the General Secretary himself. None of them liked her.

  Anna clicked on the light switch when she entered. The four men blinked like startled owls.

  "Typical male response," Anna Chutesov told them. "To hide in the darkness in a time of difficulty."

  "It is to discourage lip-reading by the guards," the General Secretary said, half-apologetically. "There must be no leaks."

  "You are too late. The whole world knows that our shuttle is in American hands. You cannot keep this a secret. Especially this."

  "That is not the secret, Ms. Chutesov," said the chief scientific adviser to the Soviet space program, Koldunov. "The loss of the craft is bad, but that is not the worst of it."

  "We will talk in the light, where I can see your faces, and you can see mine," said Anna Chutesov. "Lies breed in the dark. If the fear on your faces is true, then there must be no lies between us this night."

  "Agreed," said the General Secretary. He did not fear Anna Chutesov, or dislike her as the others did, but he respected this willow-slim blond woman with the chilled steel mind, "Please sit."

  Anna Chutesov took the seat that gave her the clearest view of their faces. This was not a time for shirking or flinching. Something terrible had happened, and she had been summoned to help deal with it.

  "Now," began the General Secretary. "Our shuttle is in American hands. Now everyone knows this. Koldunov will explain the basic situation."

  Koldunov rose to his feet like an instructor before a class, causing the military representatives of the KGB and GRU to sneer. They did not like civilians, especially scientist civilians.

  "I will be brief," said Koldunov, and Anna leaned back in her chair because she knew when a man said he would be brief it was a preemptive move to keep the audience from getting restless too soon.

  "We lost voice contact with the Yuri Gagarin at twelve hundred hours this afternoon," he went on. "Attempts to make the crew respond continued for several hours, in vain. During that time, there was only one communication from the spacecraft. A single voice, speaking English."

  "Which crewman spoke?" asked Anna Chutesov, immediately and instinctively going to the heart of the matter.

  "That is the first impossible part. None of them spoke."

  "None?"

  "There was a crew of three. The voice belonged to none of them."

  "How can you be certain?" demanded Anna, her blue eyes like ice.

  "Two reasons: voiceprint identification, and the fact that all three crewmen spoke excellent English. The voice from the shuttle spoke turkey English."

  "Pidgin English," said Anna, and the General Secretary smiled. Anna was excellent with details. That was her genius.

  "Tell her what the voice said," the General Secretary ordered.

  "
Hello is all right," Koldunov said in English. "It makes no sense. And here is the voiceprint readout." He pulled a long sheet of paper from a brown folder and slid it to the center of the table.

  The graph showed four horizontal lines. The top three were like lightning crackling across the page. The bottom one was straight with slight waves just barely visible.

  "This is the unfamiliar voice?" asked Anna when the sheet at last came to her.

  "Yes," said Koldunov. "Our expert insists no human larynx could cause that kind of readout, but . . ." Koldunov simply shrugged.

  "A stowaway," insisted the KGB head.

  "You see spies in your soup," Anna said flatly.

  "Prior to the accident, the Gagarin encountered a space object of unknown origin and attempted to salvage it," Koldunov went on.

  "What idiot gave that order?" said the GRU chief, looking at Koldunov accusingly.

  "This idiot," said the General Secretary coolly. "The object might have been an artifact of extraterrestrial origin. It was my decision to risk the mission to obtain it. I admit I may have erred, but the risk appeared worth the prize."

  "What was the Gagarin's mission?" asked the KGB head.

  "I do not know," admitted Koldunov.

  The General Secretary waved for the GRU chief to answer.

  "To deploy a highly secret military payload," the GRU chief said reluctantly.

  "What payload?" asked the KGB head, sensing an opportunity to pry into the affairs of his GRU rival.

  "It is classified," the GRU chief answered resentfully. The General Secretary made a soothing gesture with his hands. "I have called the four of you here for specific reasons," he said. "Koldunov was responsible for the shuttle, our illustrious GRU comrade was in charge of the Sword of Damocles. Anna and the KGB will be in charge of recovery operations. Be good enough to put aside these tiresome interministry rivalries and let us get down to business. And sit down, Comrade Koldunov. This is not a school lesson."

  Koldunov dropped into his chair so hard he passed gas from the shock.

  "What is the Sword of Damocles?" Anna Chutesov asked the GRU chief.

  "The ultimate insurance against an American first strike," the GRU chief said proudly.

  "Oh, really," Anna replied, arching an elegant eyebrow. "Don't tell me. Let me guess. It is some kind of a doomsday device. No?"

  "How did you know?" demanded the GRU chief indignantly. "It was a secret of highest order."

  "I did not know," Anna said acidly. "I guessed. I know how your military minds work. If you cannot win a war, you do not want the other side to survive."

  "It is not like that," the GRU chief said.

  "No! Then tell me what it is like," Anna ordered.

  "It is a satellite. To American sensors, it would appear as a communications satellite. In truth, it has that function. It is a microwave relay device. But that is not its primary purpose. As long as it received a countermand signal, sent each May Day, the primary function would remain dormant. If it failed to receive the countermand, it would activate, and assume a geosynchronous orbit over the continental United States. Microwave bombardment would begin immediately."

  "An interesting idea," said the KGB head in spite of himself. "If the Americans ever launched a successful first strike, there would be no Russia to send the countermand signal. By winning, the Americans would initiate their own doom. What do these microwaves do-fry them all like TV dinners?"

  "No," said the General Secretary. "The microwaves do not kill people. They sterilize them by raising their body temperatures ever so slightly. We have had many incidents of sterility caused by exposure to small microwave dosages among our radar technicians of both sexes. That was the inspiration. In the men, it destroys the semen-producing capabilities of the testicles. Woman cease to ovulate. You see, it is all quite humane. Our revenge from beyond the grave would be the slow extinction of the American population."

  "Killing the unborn is not humane," said Anna Chutesov bitterly. "Why not just fry them and be done with it?"

  "If any other nations survive a nuclear exchange, we do not want the Russians to be remembered as the extinct race who had their macabre revenge," the General Secretary explained, "but as a peace-loving people who were cut down in their prime by the warmongering Americans, who subsequently became extinct, possibly through divine retribution. It would be good P.R."

  "P.R.! P.R.!" shouted Anna Chutesov, leaping to her feet. "We will all be dead anyway. Who gives a damn about P.R. All that effort for what? Revenge? Better that you place the satellite in orbit and shout its capabilities to the world. Then it would be a deterrent. As mad as nuclear weapons, but a deterrent. By keeping this so-called Sword of Damocles a secret, you accomplish nothing except to be able to congratulate yourselves in advance for a Pyrrhic victory in the event of ultimate defeat. This is insane."

  The General Secretary frowned. He did not like it when Anna Chutesov yelled at him. It set a bad example. But Anna always spoke her mind without fear of consequences. She was too valuable to liquidate. And she delivered.

  "It is a good idea," he said quietly.

  Anna slid back into her seat, her eyes blazing.

  "We'll never know now, will we? The Sword of Damocles satellite is now in American hands. Once they dissect it, they will understand its true function. They will either have an excellent propaganda gift or they will quickly and quietly deploy a Sword of Damocles of their own. Wonderful. We can have a new kind of war. You men love that. Instead of killing each other, we will sterilize one another's populations. Slow extinction. Barren couples going childless to their graves. Children growing up without younger brothers or sisters. In ten, fifteen years, there will be no more children. In twenty, we will exist in a world of adults. In eighty or so years the last doddering remnants of the human race will be living out their final years. What will they do? Will they bemoan you fools who made it all come to pass, or will they fight toothlessly to be the last living human on earth?"

  Anna Chutesov's voice carried a passionate intensity that was more damning than her shouting. She looked about the room. The men avoided her eyes. Their scheme, which had seemed so magnificent, so brilliant, in the research-and-development stage, had been laid before them in all its embarrassing idiocy.

  "What then?" Anna repeated.

  The General Secretary broke the silence. His voice was low and disturbed. " 'What then' cannot concern us now. It may be that the Sword of Damocles was an imperfect idea. Later, we shall have that discussion. Now we must recover or destroy the Sword before its secrets are laid bare. I have sent a formal letter of protest to the United States, demanding the immediate return of the Yuri Gagarin and its crew."

  "They will ignore it," said Koldunov bitterly.

  "They have already answered. They admitted that the Gagarin landed at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. They insist that it took off again after picking up an unidentified person, possibly an American."

  "This makes no sense," Anna said. "Who is flying that craft, if not one of the crew?"

  "Three men went up on the Gagarin. A fourth has taken over. We cannot discount any possibility, no matter how incredible. It will be your task, Anna, to resolve this crisis. You have done good work in America before. I am calling on you once again to serve Mother Russia. You will have all the resources of the KGB at your disposal."

  "We can land a commando team near New York, by submarine," said the KGB head confidently.

  "Weren't you listening?" Anna said acidly. "The Gagarin is no longer in New York City. It flew away. And no bold military maneuvers, please. They give me a headache. I will fly to New York City. I have a contact high in the infrastructure of the American Intelligence apparatus. This contact will be the first one they will send to investigate the Gagarin's landing. I know how they work over there. I will find my contact and he will lead me to the Gagarin."

  "What about my role?" demanded the KGB head.

  "Your people will enter America quietly.
Fly to Mexico. Dress your men-a small team, please-in peasant clothes and have them walk across the border dressed as migrant workers."

  "That will not do. If they are seen, their equipment will give them away."

  "They will not carry weapons, idiot. Why do you always have to do something so predictable? In America, weapons are as plentiful as rubles. They cross as unarmed workers, Assemble them in a place we will decide on later and await my contacting them. If I need KGB help-which I deeply, sincerely hope will not come to pass-I will supply the weapons. If I do not, they will sneak back over the border without the Americans ever suspecting they were in their country. Submarine landings by moonlight!"

  The General Secretary nodded his implicit agreement. "Anna's plan is sound. It is quiet and I see no serious problems in its implementation. Of course, Anna, you will fly into America under diplomatic cover."

  "Immediately," said Anna Chutesov.

  The General Secretary looked about the room. "Any objections?" he asked.

  There were none. But then, the others all understood it was a rhetorical question. Objections were seldom voiced around the General Secretary. And he so much preferred it to be that way.

  Chapter 5

  The guard at the entrance gate to Graystone State Prison was not being cooperative.

  "Visiting hours are over," he told Remo Williams, who had just sent away the taxi which had brought him from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

  "I don't want to visit one of the regular prisoners," said Remo. "I want to see Dexter Barn."

  "Barn? He was paroled last month," said the guard. He was a beefy black man with a baritone bellow and a lot of gold edging his front teeth.

  "I heard he was back."