Page 63 of Air Force One
“Good. Keep it that way.” He hung up. Let the man know that there were people willing to do to him what he’d done to that poor sap Wilson.
The President had cleared China as a likely suspect. He didn’t know how that had happened so fast. He’d expected months of confusion, leaving him time to act.
Well, it couldn’t be helped.
And there was still Russia to blame.
60
Holly hunkered behind the corner of the main terminal at Nalchik Airport. Thirty meters long, it was the best building of the place, which wasn’t saying much. All the airport boasted were a pair of rusting Quonset huts without ends, presumably for servicing planes, and a scattering of job trailers that were probably leftover from the tsar. They broke into one of the trailers—not locked, just fighting the rusty hinge—that hadn’t been used in forever. There they dumped their gear bags and pulled on orange work vests so that they’d look at least somewhat official.
Back outside, it was a mild January dawn: calf-deep snow, seven degrees below zero, and enough wind chill to turn a polar bear into a giant vanilla freeze pop despite being dressed in a cozy white rug.
“I requested somewhere warm.”
“We’re invading Russia in midwinter.” Mike laughed. “Get a grip, Hol.”
Not something she expected to happen anytime soon.
Tad had flown them through a low pass in the Caucasus Mountains that separated northern Georgia from southernmost Russia, landing them at a remote farm fifteen kilometers east of Nalchik. The farmer, a friend of someone or other in Pavle’s Georgian Intelligence Service, had given her, Mike, and their gear bag a ride into the city. The Toyota wasn’t that old, but the heater was on the fritz. It had trapped the midnight chill inside, far colder inside than the dawn outside.
Parts, the farmer sounded very annoyed. Since himself, he jerked his head to the north apparently indicating the Kremlin in Moscow, invades Ukraine, nothing foreign keeps running. As if my car knows he is asshole, it breaks out of spite because it knows the parts now require the chernyy rynok to buy. More money in his pockets and his cronies’ pockets as they are the ones who run the black market. I should have bought Russian car. Then I would not be so surprised when it breaks; I would be expecting it. The farmer rolled down a window to spit out his distaste, which briefly raised the temperature inside the car but also increased its windchill. If he noticed, it didn’t show; he hadn’t bothered to zip up his parka.
He was glad to talk the whole way without asking any questions, which saved her from making up a bunch of lies. It also let her hear the local accent so that she could shift her own. Mike’s Russian had improved over these last years, but even when he didn’t mangle the syntax, he’d always sound like a Muscovite with a broken nose, so she’d told him to keep quiet whenever possible.
It had also given her a chance to watch the land emerge in the predawn light. Nalchik was a Russian city of a quarter of a million people, mostly Muslim. She’d never been in one like it before. It lay in a curved cradle of foothills leading to the Caucasus Mountains rising five hundred meters all around the city. But the mountains beyond the foothills, like Seattle’s Cascade Range, kept striving skyward in sharp crags. And like Mount Rainier’s abrupt quiescent volcano, which rose for fourteen thousand feet out of almost nothing, the icy twin peaks of the dormant Mount Elbrus punched up to eighteen thousand. Catching the first sunlight, the peaks shone like white beacons that defined the skyline to the southwest.
Holly forced herself to look away, but her thoughts didn’t turn. Eighteen thousand feet high made it the tallest mountain in both Europe and Russia. Perched at forty-three degrees north latitude also made the peak one of the coldest spots in either. For every thousand feet higher up a mountain, it was like moving three hundred miles north. That placed the peak climatically about two thousand miles north of the North Pole.
Knowing what lay in their future didn’t quite rise to a level of panic, but she seriously considered freaking out in Russia as the safer option compared to what they’d cooked up in The Bunker last night.
Nalchik city was also strange because it didn’t have the gray Khruschevian concrete projects that every other city in the USSR had succumbed to. It had gotten its start as a resort town for spas, mineral baths, hiking, and skiing. For once, Nikita had left something alone. Instead of dismal gray, it boasted row upon row of white buildings with interesting and varied designs. But she saw more businesses closed than open, and restaurants were few and far between.
The airport was almost a relief as it made few pretensions. A peek through the front windows of the still-closed terminal building revealed fifty or so steel seats bolted onto a white linoleum floor that had seen better days. A pair of vending machines stood in the back corner, one with no lights showing. There was no electronic arrivals-and-departures board. Instead, there was a curling poster that had the days of the weeks and a handwritten list of flight schedules that hadn’t been changed in a long time. One every day from and to Moscow, two a week from Kazan. By the schedule, neither spent much time in Nalchik. Bits of paper with a large red X on them were tacked along one edge of the board. One of these had been moved to X out tomorrow’s flight. Or was it today’s?
“What day is this?”
“Doomsday.”
She elbowed Mike in the ribs, but his parka, down vest, sweater, turtleneck, and long johns layers made it strictly symbolic.
Except he wasn’t looking through the window of the only decent building there was. He was looking up at the sky.
A sleek bizjet overflew the airport before entering the pattern and coming in to land.
“No flights today,” Mike whispered. “That means?—”
“We aren’t ready yet. She needs to be seen here in Nalchik. I’ll take care of it.”
The jet landed cleanly and within a minute had pulled up to the terminal and was cycling down its engines.
“No, Holly. No. No! NO!”
“What?”
“You are not doing it to me again.” He stabbed a finger at the jet.
She slapped his arm down as the pilot was looking at them strangely. “I’m not doing what?”
