Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (28 page)

 
          
“
Astanavleevat
!
sya!
Stop!
” The first officer, much younger than the second, seemed confused
about what to do—get out of the car, call for help, or pull out his weapon—so
he tried everything at once. He seemed to be moving in slow motion, while at
the same time Linda’s head was spinning as if everything was happening in
triple speed.

 
          
The
pistol she had taken from the second officer was much heavier than she
thought—and it fired much easier than she thought, too, two rounds going off at
the slightest finger pressure. The first round went through the passenger’s
side window into the car, spraying the first officer with glass and shattering
the instrument panel. The second went somewhere off into space over the car.
“Get out of the car!” Linda yelled. “Get out!”

 
          
“Freeze!
Don’t move!” the officer shouted. His hand squeezed the microphone transmit
button. “Emergency! Officer down! I need assis—”

 
          
Linda
only wanted to put a bullet through the car radio—at least that's what she told
herself. But when she stopped squeezing the trigger, the driver’s side window
was shattered and the officer’s head was blasted apart like a hammered coconut,
with strings of blood-soaked hair surrounding a gory hole.

 
          
It
took all of her physical and emotional strength to go around to that car door,
reach across the pool of brains, blood, and bones on the dead officer’s lap to
unfasten his seat belt, and drag the corpse out onto the ground. Somewhere in
the background noise of the blood roaring in her ears, she could hear the
second officer shouting, probably into a portable radio, but she didn’t care.
She jumped into the police car, shifted it into drive, and sped away. The first
left turn took her to the road to the back gate of the base. She saw emergency
lights and, not realizing they belonged to her car, she sped up. The guard
shack to the back gate was coming up fast. She saw the automatic assault rifle
in a holder next to her and for an instant thought about grabbing it and trying
to shoot her way off the base, but she sped by the guardhouse before she could
act on the idea. Linda heard several sharp raps on the outside of the
car—bullets fired from the security officers on duty at the guardhouse—but it
kept running.

 
          
At
the end of the access road, she took a left turn, which took her toward the
nearest city, Itslav. She finally found the switch for the emergency lights and
shut them off.

 
          
Now
that she was on the move, things actually began to get clearer for her, because
Linda rehearsed her escape procedures several times a year, and she knew
exactly what to do. The one thing the American Central Intelligence Agency did
well for its agents was plan an escape system.

 
          
There
were four contact points around Zhukovsky Air Base. On a signal from Linda sent
via a secret satellite signal beacon in the recorder, or after some trigger
event—and a murder at Zhukovsky certainly qualified as a trigger event—a person
would begin to visit the contact points on a regular basis. Linda had no idea
who it was, when he or she would show, or what he or she would do—it was up to
her to identify the person and make contact. If it were her contact person, she
would be taken to a secret location, identified, and then inserted into a
preestablished exfiltration network set up inside
Russia
for exactly this purpose. All Linda had to
do was to activate the satellite signal beacon in the recorder and ...

 
          
..
But when she reached down to her side, she realized she didn’t have the
recorder. The second guard must’ve tom it off her when they struggled.

 
          
After
swearing hotly in English, Creole, and Russian for several moments, Linda
collected her thoughts and calmed herself. The signal beacon wasn’t important.
Certainly all the excitement at the base would activate the escape network. All
she had to do was make her way to one of the contact points, properly meet up
with the contact, and then do exactly what she was told to do until she was
safe.

           
Her first task was to ditch the
police car. She selected a utility company parking lot, about ten miles away
from the base, hiding it between two large trucks that looked as if they hadn’t
been moved in a while. She kept the handgun, after counting and finding three rounds
still in the magazine—the assault rifle was much heavier than she thought, so
she left it in the car— then walked all the way back out of the lot and onto
the highway. Linda was tempted to try hitchhiking east on the highway toward
the nearest contact point, but her handlers advised against that. Too many
escapees got caught that way. The south side of the highway had numerous
businesses and lighted parking lots along it, but the north side was mostly
open fields of winter wheat turned mushy from melting snows, with a small river
farther north beyond the trees. She crossed the highway at a dark place, as far
as possible from streetlights, walked away from the highway to the tree line
about a kilometer from the highway, then began to parallel it, heading
eastbound. Linda passed a few businesses and parking lots between her and the
highway, but none of the lights or fences extended to the tree line, so it was
a fairly straight shot. Her handler was very explicit—stay away from roads,
rivers, railroads, transmission lines, any sort of travel path.

 
          
Several
hours later, she arrived at an intersection where a bridge took traffic north
across the river, and where there was a tavern that she sometimes visited,
still open and still inviting. Linda even thought she saw cars belonging to
friends of hers, good friends that had known her for years. She was tired,
aching, hungry, freezing cold, cut, bruised, and bleeding from crossing fences
and snagged by branches and sticker bushes. She could stay hidden in the parking
lot, wait for her friends to show, ask for help, maybe get a ride to someplace
close to the contact point...

 
          
No,
no,
no,
she admonished herself. Again, her handlers were very
specific—stay away from everyone, no matter how close or trusted they were.
Reluctantly, almost whimpering in pain and fear and weakness, she trudged
through the ankle- deep, half-frozen mud behind the tavern, keeping to the shadows.
She followed a dirt path toward the river and found another path that led under
the bridge abutment. Under the bridge, she found some homeless persons huddled
under blankets with tiny fires in buckets, drinking vodka and eating discarded
food from the tavern, and again she considered asking for something, anything,
to help ease the cold and hunger. She could either use the gun to buy food or
threaten to kill someone if they didn’t help her. But she kept away, staying
away from the hoboes and staying away from the narrow access road along the
river’s edge without their detecting her presence. Leaving even that tiny bit
of civilization was the hardest thing she ever had to do.

 
          
But
as she disappeared back into the shadows once again, she heard sirens behind
her. Two police cars had pulled up to the tavern, lights flashing. If she had
stopped, even for five minutes, she would’ve been trapped, If she had talked to
the hoboes, and they were later questioned by police, they would surely have
betrayed her. How about that? she thought—maybe her handlers really knew what
they were talking about!

 
          
By
the time the dawn started to peek above the horizon, Linda had reached the
contact spot. There was a small dirt parking lot next to the river beside
another north-south bridge, where during the summer vacationers could launch
rafts and float down the river toward the city. There used to be a small
campground there, where rafters from farther upstream could spend the night,
but a lack of funds and abuse by drug dealers and hoboes had caused the
campground to fall into disuse and disrepair. Of the dozen campsites, only one
still had a rickety picnic table on it. That was her contact point.

 
          
The
ground was rocky and felt frozen, but there were plenty qf trees and
vegetation. Her job was to find a good hiding spot and wait. Sometime during
daylight hours, her contact person would arrive at the contact point and
somehow make himself known to her. She had to stay hidden the rest of the day
and night. Surely, she thought, the hue and cry for her was out. Surely, she
prayed, the network had heard of the murder on base and activated itself.
Surely, she pleaded, her contact would realize she was on the move and show
this morning.

 
          
But
the time came and went, and no one showed. Tears flowed down her cheeks, and
her lips trembled in fear and loneliness. Nothing. She had never felt so alone,
so helpless.

           
Since it was now daytime and she was
less than a kilometer from both the highway and the bridge—and if she could see
cars, they might be able to see her—Linda had no choice but to crawl away to
the densest part of the little patch of trees near the park, crawl into the
deepest and darkest dirt gully she could find, and wait. The river was just a
few meters away across the parking lot, but she didn’t dare try to get water in
daytime; there was even a coffee and doughnut vendor in the parking lot across
the highway to the south, selling his goods to workers arriving at the steel
scrapyard and woodworking factory on the south side of the highway, and even in
her hole she could smell the boiled dough and strong black coffee. She always had
rolled-up pancake crepes with jam, fruit, or cream cheese inside and coffee
every morning, and now the emptiness in her belly was beginning to turn into a
dull ache.

 
          
This
was going to be impossible, she thought grimly. She had practiced her
procedures, memorized her directives, and thought through her moves for years,
and all the time thought she could do it, if she ever had to. But it was just
barely twelve hours since going on the run, and she doubted whether she could
make it even another twelve hours. Her handler said it could take days to
activate the network, and then it was up to the contact person to decide if it
was safe enough to try to make contact. Even then, the actual procedure took
days— Linda wasn’t supposed to contact the first person she saw, but had to
verify simply by waiting and watching if he or she was the right one. Sleep was
impossible—every sound, every car noise, every voice she heard was a potential
captor.

 
          
From
her hole, she could see the parking lot and campground. A few hoboes came
around, searching the garbage cans. To Linda’s immense shock, moments after the
hoboes arrived, they were jacked up by local police and taken away. The police
were everywhere, but they were out of sight, immediately pouncing on anyone who
looked suspicious. After the arrest, the police would do a short search of the
area, checking nearby bushes and trees for any sign of anyone else’s presence.
They would sweep denser bushes aside roughly with nightsticks, beating them and
looking for evidence of anyone’s presence, checking behind and around any
shrubs that might be large enough to conceal a person, then disappear as
quickly as they appeared.

 
          
It
was hopeless, Linda thought. The contact person would never dare come anywhere
near here, ever. Her handler had warned her exactly what would happen.
Eventually, her hunger, loneliness, hopelessness, weariness, and fear would
cause her to do something stupid, and she would be nabbed, and just like that,
the game would be over.

 
          
She
burrowed down as deep as she could into the dirt, sobbing softly to herself,
afraid to show even the tiniest bit of skin outside her hole. It began to rain,
big fat cold sleety drops, then soon started to snow. She had never been so
cold in her life, and she knew she would probably die of hypothermia before
long. When darkness fell, she felt brave enough to eat some dirty wet snow for
water and carefully pile leaves and branches around herself, and with a sort of
crude nest made for herself, she at least felt strong enough to make it through
the night. But it was hopeless, useless. The police were everywhere, and the
killing of a fellow cop only made them more determined to get the killer.

 
          
She
expected, then soon hoped, that the police would swoop down on her and take her
away any moment. Even being gang- raped and sodomized by vengeful police
officers in an MSB prison cell would be far better than freezing to death.

High-Technology
Aerospace
Weapons
Center
,

Elliott Air Force Base,
Groom Lake
,
Nevada
Early