The Disposable Man (32 page)

He lifted his face, intrigued. I felt we’d become courtiers to his fickle king, finding any way possible to prop up his spirits—and extend our own lives.

“How?” he asked, reasonably enough. “What would they want of ours?”

“Weapons,” I answered.

There was dead silence in the room. “The one thing you both have in common, as you pointed out,” I continued, “is you want to kill each other. If you leave behind a cache of arms—like they’d been abandoned in a panic—they’ll probably be picked up and distributed.”

He frowned. “And used against us.”

“A few extra aren’t going to make much difference. We only have eight bugs. We could plant them in eight gun butts.”

“Screw up the sights,” Rarig suggested.

Padzhev shook his head. “They would check for something like that. The Lieutenant is quite right—they must be of obvious value.”

He buried his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the bathroom door, taking us in like a challenging teacher. “So now we are in need of a fort with walls a mile thick—someplace we can control, where we know the terrain, and into which our opponents will have to penetrate on foot, allowing us to intercept them by eavesdropping on their positions.”

“Someplace high and lonely?” Corbin-Teich asked softly.

Rarig looked at him meaningfully. It struck me then that Corbin-Teich had been almost mute since being bundled in here with the rest of us, overwhelmed and perhaps quite frightened by all the fireworks. Or so I’d thought.

Padzhev watched him carefully. “You know of such a place?”

“With only one narrow road, eight miles long,” Lew admitted, sounding like he was reaching far back in time.

Rarig seemed to have made the same decision I had, about buying time with cooperation. “You have a map?” he asked. “I know where he’s talking about.”

Padzhev didn’t move, but one of his men immediately produced a road map of the state, spreading it open at the foot of the bed. Rarig leaned over it, slowly extending his finger and tapping it in the middle of Vermont’s so-called Northeast Kingdom, a remote, sparsely populated, harsh, and beautiful area, famous for its desolate, forested land and the independence of its inhabitants.

“There’s a mountaintop here that might suit your needs,” he said. “It worked for us forty years ago.”

I suddenly remembered what he’d told me earlier of how and why Lew had come to know Vermont. “That the old radar site you were talking about? Where he was held under wraps for two years?”

Lew smiled wistfully. “It was well known for good hunting.”

The irony of that was lost on no one.

· · ·

Rarig’s mountain was as empty and unmolested as he and Corbin-Teich had foretold, but their description had missed the hostile vastness of the place. As we drove in a caravan up miles of narrow, broken, blacktopped road, the edges of which disappeared into the bordering vegetation like liquid, I began feeling we’d left one world for another. Vermont is famous for its trees and mountains, but mostly as a backdrop to a rural domesticity that has stamped the state for well over a hundred years.

The reality of Rarig’s radar mountain was something else entirely.

The Kingdom, of course, has always been a separate entity from that other, bucolic image. Poorer, colder, and less inhabited than the rest of Vermont, it remains the most stalwart reminder of the Ice Age’s grinding havoc. Where sections just slightly south and west of it reflect the ease of long summers, gentle springs, and recreational winters, the Kingdom stays aloof. Hard, harsh, and stark, it is the symbol of what has given New Englanders their tough reputation. This mountain reflected all of that, and more.

The entrance to its single access road had been subtlety itself—a winding country lane, dotted with the occasional modest home, gradually becoming narrower, darker, and less friendly. By the time we’d reached the first of two unlocked steel gates, it was clear we were no longer among the inhabitants of this region. Where once military trucks had rumbled freely back and forth, trees now crowded the ragged edge of a scarred pavement barely wide enough for a single car. Overhead, blocking the light, branches reached out for one another like slow-moving dancers.

Had the road been dirt, as they are all over the state, the contrast would have been less jarring—we’d have been using yet another temporary man-made incursion into the wilderness, prone to washouts, overgrowth, and winter’s annual ravages. But this was a government-built road, still in remarkably good shape, lying on the ground like some vestige of a vanished civilization. I thought of Mayan ruins, ghost towns, and abandoned factory buildings—images of hopes lost, people displaced, ambitions thwarted—and the dread that had been rising in me since leaving the motel in South Burlington suddenly overflowed.

Padzhev had chosen to make that motel room the means to deliver the eight doctored weapons, faking a scene of hasty retreat. He hadn’t told us how he’d tipped Kyrov to our whereabouts, but the urgency with which we’d left had injected a mood of genuine desperation in everyone. Padzhev, it was clear, was gambling everything on this tactic, and as we drove farther up the mountain, leaving a familiar world behind, it occurred to everyone, I think, that our chances of returning alive were very slim.

Rarig had told us this mountain was one of the tallest in the Kingdom, and the higher we drove the more easily I believed him. Not only did occasional gaps in the trees reveal views stretching for dozens of miles, but the vegetation began to reflect an exposure to unremitting harshness. Like hundreds of other sites strung out along the nation’s eastern coast like baubles on a necklace, this radar installation had been chosen for the breadth of sky available to it—sky that also carried snow and wind and rain from miles away, sometimes at terrible velocity. The more we climbed the more the trees, the bushes, and even the boulders took on a hunkered-down appearance, like the shoulders of miners kept too long in the pit.

The temperature, too, spoke of altitude and exposure, and I slowly realized a threat none of us had considered during our beleaguered calculations. It was nearing the start of fall, when the weather could turn capricious, and nowhere else in the state was that more likely than right here—exposed on a mountain in Vermont’s bleakest environment.

Unless we were lucky, and the elements held off, none of us had enough warm clothing to survive what was dished out so commonly in these hills. And through the open window of the car, the tang of brittle cold air told of a coming menace.

· · ·

Apart from where we’d dropped off two sentries on the way in, our first stop came about eight miles up. The road suddenly widened, the trees pulled back, and we found ourselves on a broad shelf of land—flat, overgrown, and appointed with a broad, tidy scattering of bruised and discolored Quonset huts, their rigid uniformity at odds with the raging growth crowding around them—weeds, bushes, and stunted trees had overtaken once-mowed yards and trimmed walkways, making the whole look like a long-abandoned playground.

Rarig and Corbin-Teich stood by the cars, the latter transfixed by the metamorphosis of a place he’d once known as a small but bustling military base.

I walked over to them. “Big change?”

Corbin-Teich seemed in shock. “This was the United States to me. Men in green and khaki. Everything ‘shipshape.’ It was I who mowed many of the lawns here, just so I could do something.”

“How many people lived here?” I asked, impressed at the number of buildings.

Rarig shrugged. “Two hundred, maybe, give or take fifty. I don’t know. It was a small village, really—housing, mess, dispensary, mail room, all the rest.” He jerked his thumb toward the cloud-shrouded peak above us. “The installation is another two miles up. After satellites replaced radar stations in the sixties, they sold the whole thing to a couple who tried turning it into a toy factory. They could’ve done it, too, except that the woodchucks drove ’em off the mountain—gangs on skimobiles, shooting guns, terrorizing them. In the wintertime, the snowdrifts get so deep, the huts turn into huge moguls, irresistible to the half-wit, twenty-something crowd. The locals figured since it was once government-owned, it now belonged to them. After the couple retreated back into the valley, the place was stripped clean, and what the punks couldn’t steal, they destroyed.” He shook his head. “Take a look around, assuming Prince Igor’ll let you—you won’t believe what people are capable of doing.”

I wondered at his tour-guide tone of voice, but Rarig had progressed from the nervous excitement I’d seen grip him on our trip to Middlebury. Now he seemed fatalistically resigned, as if his present situation was merely a logical, if delayed, extension of all that had gone before.

Padzhev overheard that last remark and approached us from a small conference he was having with the eight or so men he had left. “The prince has no objection. In fact, we need to find that telephone line you mentioned in the car, to see if it is connected.”

“Should be,” Rarig said. “The wardens still use it sometimes. We’ll have to tap in down here, though, ’cause the only actual phone outlet is on top of the mountain, where the radar towers are.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” I commented.

He smiled slightly. “Old man, old memories. I’ve come up here a couple of times since those days. This is one of the few old stomping grounds still available to me.”

“You did not tell me,” Corbin-Teich said.

“No. I figured your memories of the place were a little different from mine.”

Padzhev gave instructions to his men, most of whom fanned out, and then turned to us, gesturing like a nanny urging her brood to run and play. “Go, go. We don’t have much time to establish our defenses. Once Kyrov finds the map we left behind and convinces himself it isn’t a trap, he’ll be rapping on our door without much delay.”

I glanced toward the car holding Gail and the still-handcuffed Willy Kunkle. A guard stood beside it with his arms crossed.

Padzhev shook his head. “No, Lieutenant. You may have some tender moment later on—perhaps. Right now, I need you out there.” He pointed toward the overgrown compound.

With some imagination, I could still see what Lew had called home so long ago. I’d spent enough time on bases in the fifties to recognize the traces, as of dinosaurs in ancient soil. The huts were arranged like neatly placed railroad cars, among a grid of now patchy asphalt. Everything, although strictly utilitarian, had been built to last and had even endured the ravages Rarig had mentioned.

Not that considerable effort hadn’t been made to destroy it. Every building I entered had been mauled by the passage of violence, frustration, and pain. Room after room was gutted—holes punched in the Sheetrock, heating ducts torn from the ceilings, floors pried up. The wiring was gone, the windows broken, the doors smashed, the tile bathrooms ritualistically reduced to rubble with sledges. Graffiti was everywhere, most of it vile and raging, lashing out at a world too far away to hear—or care.

And yet it all stood, often reduced to curved metal walls and foundation only—as seemingly indomitable a monument to human engineering as any Roman ruin. I could walk its shattered byways as tourists do in Pompeii, and as easily picture the place in its heyday, all the way down to the bustling communal dining room.

Anatoly found me standing in the middle of a particularly ravaged building, its insulation streaming from the rounded ceiling like stalactites. “You come,” he ordered.

I followed him outside and across the compound to a small, nondescript building not far from the access road. Several of our group were standing around the gaping door. Beyond them, sitting in the gloom, was Sammie, the laptop balanced on her knees.

Anatoly gave an order and the group parted to let me pass. Padzhev was beside Sammie, looking unhappy.

“I’m not a phone technician,” she was saying. “I’d feel a whole lot more comfortable if we just kept looking till we found a terminal point.”

Padzhev addressed me as I entered. “This is a singularly inopportune time to start dragging our heels.”

“Or to cut corners that could screw everything up,” I answered. I turned to Sam. “He want you to splice into a line?”

“Yeah. It’s stupid. Getting all this junk and running the risk of hooking it up wrong. Christ knows how many wires there are.”

Rarig spoke up from outside. “You find the line?”

Sammie answered. “Yeah, but it’s more like a cable. And there’s no connection that’ll fit the computer.”

Rarig shoved his way inside, laughing. “No kidding. All this was state-of-the-art at the time—jam-packed with stuff. I can pretty much guarantee a connection at the top, though—that’s where the few people who use this place call out from. Push comes to shove, and you still want to fight ’em off down here, you can direct things from above using a radio.”

Padzhev scowled angrily and for the first time showed his mounting impatience. “God damn it. I want to see where those bastards are, not hear about it thirdhand.” He shouted something in Russian and then said, “Get out. We’ll go up.”

We went in one car—Sammie, Padzhev, Rarig, and myself with one man driving. The others had been given orders to dig in, set up crossfire zones, and otherwise prepare for an onslaught. Nothing had changed in our status since we’d arrived here—the sentries below had reported nothing, and none of us had been given cause for alarm—but the tension was rising nevertheless, as it might have upon the approach of a hurricane on a sunny day.

The trip to the top was distinctly different from what we’d already seen. The road remained the same, but the bordering vegetation, from a hodgepodge of trees, brush, and meadow, now became a uniform stand of stunted, thick evergreens, giving the narrow road the appearance of a carefully groomed path in a tightly knit English garden maze. In contrast to the wild abandon of the compound’s woodsy jungle, this looked almost lovingly maintained.

But it also had an ominous undertone, for the higher we climbed—turning corner after corner, always wondering what lay ahead—the more the clouds enveloping the peak began to press down upon us, decapitating the already low treetops and making us feel we were crawling between two unmovable forces, destined to be snuffed out entirely.