He rolled over onto his knees. Rubbed at his throat with his hand, feeling the bruises that were already blooming on the skin there. He twisted his head around, trying so see, trying to figure out where Favorov had gone.
Vision returned slowly, and if time had seemed to stretch out before, it sped up now like a rubber band released from tension. Little slices of the world around him were all he could see, and his brain worked feverishly trying to assemble a clear picture out of those little swatches.
It looked like Favorov had staggered backward, hand pressed tight against a wound on the inside of his left thigh. Blood was pouring down his leg and sheeting away across the deck, more blood than a tiny wound like that should have been able to produce.
Chapel knew right away what had happened. What his little knife had achieved.
Favorov’s face had gone white. He was breathing heavily, like a racehorse after the Preakness. He was staring at Chapel in horror. It seemed the Russian knew what had happened as well.
Crawling like an infant, Chapel started moving again. Over to his left. Toward the pistol he’d dropped when Favorov hit him the first time with the boat hook. Favorov saw what he was doing and tried to beat him there, but it looked like the Russian could barely walk. He staggered closer to the gun, ever closer, as he clutched at his wound with one hand and grabbed for any support he could find with the other.
It was the world’s slowest race, and Chapel couldn’t have said for sure which of them was going to win. If Favorov got the pistol first, there was no question he would shoot to kill. Chapel put every ounce of strength he had left into moving faster, bashing his knees against the deck, scrambling for the pistol.
They both reached for it at the same time. Chapel could hear nothing but Favorov’s ragged breathing. And his own. He flung out his hand to get the pistol. Favorov dropped to the deck and grabbed for it simultaneously.
“Wait,” Chapel said.
Surprisingly, the Russian did.
42
“We both know you’re dying,” Chapel said.
The Russian only sneered.
“I cut your femoral artery,” Chapel went on. It hurt to talk through a partially crushed windpipe, but he had to. “You’re bleeding out. If you don’t get that leg bandaged you have maybe a minute left before you pass out. And then you’ll die.”
“Plenty of time to shoot you. And I don’t trust you to just watch while I wrap up my leg.”
Chapel shook his head. “I have a better plan. You tell me what I need to know. Then I’ll bandage your leg, and radio for the Coast Guard to pick us up. We can airlift you right to a hospital. You’ll live.”
“I’ll live in prison for the rest of my life, you mean.”
Chapel shrugged. “You’ll live,” he said again.
Favorov slumped backward, pressing his shoulders against the sailboat’s high gunwale. At least he wasn’t grabbing for the pistol. “After all this, you would save my life,” he said. “You Americans. You never understood total war.”
“We understand that when you get what you’re fighting for, you stop fighting,” Chapel said. “Come on, Favorov. This is your only chance and you know it.”
Still the Russian waited. He turned his head and looked away. “I can bandage myself after you are dead. But I will lack the strength to sail. I won’t make it to Cuba, now,” he admitted. He sighed deeply. “I think, though, you do understand one thing. Secrecy… it gets in a man’s marrow. It becomes so ingrained. Even with my life at stake, it is so hard to tell the truth.”
“Fight that instinct,” Chapel said.
Favorov shook his head. Then he grabbed for the pistol. Chapel had time to throw his hand over his face, to try to shield himself from the bullet, but Favorov had something else in mind. He shoved the barrel of the pistol between his teeth and started to squeeze the trigger.
“No!” Chapel shouted.
Favorov stared down at the gun in his hand. He hadn’t fired it. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, not all the way. He’d made the classic mistake of attempted suicides everywhere—he’d stopped to think, even for a moment, about what he was doing.
Slowly he removed the gun from his mouth. He lifted it again and pointed it roughly in Chapel’s direction. But Chapel was already on top of him, and he yanked the pistol out of Favorov’s hands. The Russian was too weak with blood loss to put up much resistance.
“I couldn’t do it,” Favorov said. His pale face looked haunted. “I… I lacked the will.”
There was something in his eye, something Chapel recognized. It chilled him to the core, but he knew exactly what Favorov was feeling. He’d felt exactly the same thing, when he’d thought he’d failed in his mission, that he hadn’t been good enough. Tough enough.
It was a terrible feeling. Despite everything that had happened—everything Favorov had done—Chapel couldn’t help feeling sorry for the man.
Favorov had lost, and he knew it.
43
While Chapel worked at getting a tourniquet on Favorov’s leg, the Russian explained everything. “It started in the seventies,” he said. He had one hand pressed over his eyes as he lay back on the deck, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Chapel while he confessed. Chapel just worried about getting the bandage tight. It wasn’t easy with one hand.
“It was a very different time, for both our countries. In Russia, we were still struggling with the notion we would never have a land war with you. We had destroyed our economy building up stockpiles of weapons, training and feeding a massive army, because we had always believed our destiny lay in World War III. But advances in nuclear weapons technology had demonstrated that such a thing would be… a joke. A superfluity. Any war between our nations would mean the destruction of both, so fast all those soldiers—and all those AK-47 rifles—would be unnecessary. Yet still the factories churned away, pouring out guns day after day.
“In America, under capitalism, the answer would have been clear. Stop making rifles. Fire the workers and close down the factories. But we had one hundred percent employment, in the Worker’s Paradise. The factories stayed open. Crate after crate after shipload of rifles, and no one to shoot. I do not know who had the brilliant idea, as this was well before my time. But it must have been a KGB man. It was crazy, like all their ideas.
“In your country, your people were tearing each other apart. Radical groups were fighting police over whether or not your Vietnam war was a good idea. Race war seemed a distinct possibility. Maybe even another civil war, eh? Hippies versus the National Guard. Ha! Funny now but at the time it seemed we need only stand back and let you defeat yourself. We would not need to launch our missiles, after all. But soon we saw it wasn’t enough. In skirmish after skirmish, the radical groups were always crushed, because they lacked firepower. The one thing we had.
“So we started sending our surplus rifles abroad. Many to Africa, of course, and to Asia, as many as they could take. But some, just a trickle of the supply, to politicals in your country. It had to be done very quietly. It would take spies to make it happen.
“I was not the first man with the job. I was given this task only at the very end, after it was clear we would lose in Afghanistan. I was sent here with my million dollars’ worth of intelligence and put in place, given the list of contacts, supplied with the weapons.”
“Wait,” Chapel said. “You mean the Russians had you defect intentionally? What about the intel you supplied the CIA? Was that all bogus?”