“We’ll do it again some time.”
“I don’t want you to spend too many weekends refinishing some chopper pilot’s boat.”
“Believe me,” he said, watching her, “it’s worth it.”
Yes, she could be another source of information … on the new ECM gear, for example.
2
East Las Vegas, Nevada
Maraklov didn’t return to his condominium in the east Las Vegas subdivision of Frenchman Mountain until late that night. The early start and the intense flying had taken their toll, and the lectures he had received from McLanahan and Elliott during the long debriefing didn’t help.
He locked his car in the carport, took his briefcase, and trudged upstairs to his second-story entranceway. He wasn’t able to get on the Dolphin helicopter back to Nellis and had to bump along in the electric shuttle bus from Dreamland to Nellis. Then twenty hot, steamy minutes on the freeway just to go four exits in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Maybe a cold shower, a cold beer, a casino run.
He punched his code in the lock’s keypad. The door was already unlocked. He pushed it open a crack. No lights on. The lights were programmed to come on in the evening when the door was opened. Someone had overridden the programming. Someone was inside his apartment …
All he had for a weapon was his briefcase. Maybe he should have gotten out of there and called the cops, but the less he had to do with them, the better. He reached through the door and flicked on the lights. He strained against the faint street noises behind him but heard no sounds from inside. He flung the door open, letting it bang on the doorstep. Still no sounds.
He slowly crossed the threshold, looked down the hallway into the living room. Stereo, TV, VCR all in place. Of course, a burglar was the last thing he was worried about — he’d almost welcome that. There were others more dangerous.
He moved to the fireplace, picked up a poker and made a fast search of the apartment. Nothing. No sign of forcible entry, nothing missing. One more place to check.
He stood up on a stool and removed six books from the top shelf of the built-in bookshelves in the living room. On the back wall of the bookshelf he pressed on a board and a section sprang open about a half inch, revealing a panel hiding the steel door to a small wall safe. He had installed the safe himself shortly after moving into the apartment — one of the precautions he had taken years earlier, along with carefully arranging things in his drawers to help detect intruders, when he got his assignment to Las Vegas.
Instead of opening the hidden panel fully, he reached behind the panel with one finger and disconnected a wire leading from the door inside to the combination safe behind the panel. The wire was connected to an incendiary device inside the safe; if the door had been opened more than a finger’s width the device inside the safe would incinerate the contents. The safe obviously had not been—
A faint, lingering odor. Cigarettes, or an old stale cigar. He did not smoke. He turned …
“Sloppy of you, Captain James.” The voice came from behind him. He braced along the wall. A quick leap, a hard push and—
He heard the metallic click, and another voice: “Come down from there, Maraklov, before you hurt yourself, or worse.”
Slowly he replaced the trip wire on the safe’s hidden panel, closed it and stepped off the stool. Turning, he saw two men, one standing directly behind him holding a weapon, the other man seated on his sofa. He noted the weapon — not a pistol but a taser, a gun that shot small electrified darts. The darts, connected to the taser gun by a thin wire, were charged with twenty thousand volts at low amperage with the press of a trigger, causing instant paralysis. The dart only buried itself a fraction of an inch into the skin, but with a strong electric current from the taser short-circuiting the victim’s nervous system, he was powerless to pull or shake it free. A potent weapon — quiet, effective but non-lethal. That last encouraged Maraklov. They wanted him, but they didn’t want him dead.
He turned to the man on the couch. Henry Kramer was fiftyish, short, bulky but not fat, thin dark hair and beady eyes. He was dressed in a dark ill-fitting suit with a thin dark tie, looking too much a caricature of what he was — a conniving Soviet KGB agent, far more serious and dangerous than he looked.
“What are you doing here, Kramer?” Maraklov tried to control his anger as he also looked at the younger man with the taser. “Put that away. Look, you people are crazy to come here—”
Moffitt, the younger agent, lowered the taser but did not put it down. “We were worried about you, Captain James. And you should have locked your door before searching your apartment. We not only were able to get behind you, but found out where your safe is. You seem to be getting complacent …”
Maraklov forced himself to answer. He locked the front door, closed the blinds and began replacing books on the shelf. “Now what are you really doing here?”
“Captain,” Kramer said, “people are displeased. The information stream you have been supplying has become a trickle.”
“I told you why in my last report. Perhaps you’ve not had time to read it. They’re cracking down on security at HAWC like never before. Major Briggs has been given the widest leeway to stop security leaks, and they’ve been promised full cooperation from the federal judges in Las Vegas. That means not only searches of military property at Dreamland and Nellis but legal searches of private non-military residences too. They could even get, probably have gotten, authority for wiretapping, no-knock searches and arrests at any time. I thought it was Briggs in here already.”
“We have connections at the federal courthouse,” Kramer said. “If there has been cooperation between the military and the federal courts I’m sure an anonymous tip to the Las Vegas papers will stir things up. A report about widespread military authority to search private residences? They go crazy over such things here. Especially the press. Our perestroika caught some of it.” Kramer studied Maraklov. “Are you saying tightened security is your reason for not supplying one photograph of the XF-34A fighter plane or its components in over three weeks?”
“They haven’t let me be alone with the plane or its technical data since then. I was able to be alone with a set of the aircraft’s technical layouts a week ago but discovered an unusual change in the schematics that I didn’t understand … a dogtooth modification to the wings—”
“A what?”
“A special wing design that creates two differently performing wing structures on one surface. On a mission-adaptive wing like DreamStar’s, the dogtooth might increase its capabilities twenty percent.”
“A significant development indeed,” Moffitt said. “Why didn’t you report this? If they left you alone with the specifications why did you not photograph them?”
James turned to him. “Because I think it’s a fake. Or it could be. A plant. A trick. They may want me to see the dogtooth wing — and then they want to see if the dogtooth shows up on a satellite photograph of a Russian fighter at Ramenskoye or in a supposedly secure telephone message to Moscow. The dogtooth looks like a notch in the wings and is visible on satellite photography. It’s not just me. I’m sure they showed something different to each of the key players — a tail modification drawing to Powell, a nozzle mod to Butler … Major Briggs probably cooked up dozens of these tests for security leaks. Mine was the dogtooth … “
“You are sure these are fakes?”
Maraklov had to pause, even though he knew the hesitation, no matter how slight, would make Kramer and Moffitt suspicious. Then: “No, I’m not sure. The dogtooth design has been incorporated in numerous advanced fighters — it would be possible for our designers to use a dogtooth wing without stealing the idea from the Americans. But I’m sticking to my hunch: I think the dogtooth wing is a fake. And that’s why I didn’t report it.”