He looked around again, nervously, stunned at what he had done. No, no one had yet seen him. Breathing hard — good Lord, he was going to have a heart attack! — he pushed his fat hand through the slot of the window, reached for the lock button, and with an — oof! almost, no, almost, yes! — got it open. Disengaging, he quickly opened the door. The smell of the new car rose to his nostrils, a rich American smell. He reached across the front seat and tugged at the briefcase and — it would not come! There seemed to be a bit of an impediment, as if he were pulling from the wrong angle, and Gregor gave a little tug and—
Gregor had a brief impression of an insect buzzing swiftly by his face, or perhaps it was more like the sudden swoop of a small, darting bird, an angry swallow or hummingbird flashing by, harmless but nevertheless confusing, disorienting, completely stunning, and then in the next second, even as these impressions accumulated, he heard the sound of a dense thunk, metallic and vivid with texture, and then the low hum of something shivering rapidly. Gregor stood back, stupefied, trying to make sense of it all. His heart began to thunder again. Quickly, he checked himself; he seemed all right and—
Then he saw, sunk into the car roof just a few inches beyond his eyes, something particularly bright and evil. It was the blade of a vicious fighting knife, smooth with oil and glinting in the light. Its top edge was savagely serrated, all the better for sawing through flesh, and, driven with enormous force, it had sunk nearly half its length into the car roof. What blade remained visible was a long, graceful shank of steel. At its base were two prongs; it appeared to have no grip at all.
Gregor recognized it immediately; it was the blade of a Spetsnaz ballistic knife, a weapon carried by the GRU’s Special Raiding Forces, his country’s equivalent of the American Green Berets or the British Special Air Service regiment. The blade was locked onto its hilt atop a powerful coiled spring; it could be used as a conventional fighting knife, but when a button of the crossguard was triggered, the spring sprang, and the blade was driven forward with enormous velocity, literally fired. It could kill silently at twenty-five meters and was a special assassination weapon not only of Spetsnaz but of KGB and all the Eastern bloc secret services, a favorite device of the masters of the mokrie dela, the wet job, at the KGB procedures school at Karlovy Vary, on the Black Sea. Gregor bent to the case and saw the gleaming metal of the hilt inside and a wire rigged from the trigger button in the crossguard through the case to the floor. It was designed so that when he picked the case up, it fired through the open mouth of the case.
He sat back. He realized that if he’d come through the unlocked door, the proper door, and had been leaning across the case as he tried to lift it, the blade would have speared him through the center chest; he would have been dead in seconds, choking on his own blood in the backseat of this little car.
Someone had planned his murder.
He vomited.
Then, very quickly, he began to walk away.
Poo Hummel said, “Mommy. Mommy. Airplanes!” She ran to the window, drawn by the roar of the low-flying craft. Herman, her guardian, watched her go, took a quick look at his watch.
So late, he thought.
I would have thought it would have been earlier. They are doing such a bad job of it.
“Poo, you be careful,” Beth Hummel screamed from her bedroom.
But Poo had her nose pressed against the glass, drawn by the noise, the spectacle of the big, slow ships zooming overhead toward the mountain.
Herman was next to her, with a hand on her shoulder.
“Herman, what are they doing?” Poo asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Herman. “They probably came to show off for all the children of the town, to make them happy and excited with their noise and to make the snow melt faster.”
“They look like scarecrows,” said Poo.
Herman wasn’t listening. Suddenly grave, he said, “Let’s go into the basement, all right, Poo? We’ll take your mommy and your sister into the basement and we’ll have a little party.”
But Poo had made the kind of connection of phenomena, intuitive but brilliant, with which children often astonish adults.
“Herman,” she asked, squinching up her eyes, “did the airplanes come for you?”
“No,” said Herman. But he knew men would, soon enough. And he knew what he was expected to do then.
“Herman, I like you,” said Poo as he lifted her up. She gave him a squeeze and a kiss.
“I like you too, Poo.”
You feel like you’re the king of creation in an A-10. You’re up front and the plane itself — wings, engines, rudders — is way back. You sit at the end of the long snout in a fishbowl wide and bright to the world and the only thing in your head-up display is a little rubbery smudge of nose. It’s really just you, slung out there. That’s why pilots like Leo Pell loved the ship; you really fly her, you’re really airborne, on the wind. It’s World War II stuff, Jugs and Bostons lowlevel over the hedgerows of occupied Europe.
“Delta Six, this is Papa Tango One, do you copy?” asked Major Pell in The Green Pig, leading Tango flight toward South Mountain, which rose like a glob of ice cream before him.
“Uh, roger, I copy, Papa Tango One,” came the response in his earphones from his forward air controller, on the ground with Delta.
“You want us to rough up this old mountain, Delta Six?” asked Pell.
“That’s a big rog,” said the FAC. “Twenty mike-mike only.”
“Uh, I got that, Delta, and we’re only packing twenty mike-mike. Papa Tango to Tango Flight, let’s arm guns, boys.”
Pell’s finger snaked off his stick to his armament control panel on the left lower quadrant of his instrument board; he hit a switch and the red gun ready light went on up at the top of the panel. His hand back on the stick, his thumb grazed the little nipple, red and lively, beneath it.
His plane felt giddy, alive, teenaged. Pig was lighter than a dream today because she didn’t have the usual wingload of external stores for air support jobs and wouldn’t even be firing her heavy 30-mm gun that ran through the center of the fuselage. Instead, she wore the two gun pods under her wings that Leo and his boys had labored so furiously to mount up.
“Papa Tango, Delta Six, do you copy?”
I copy.
“Leo, you all clear on targeting?”
“Hey, Delta, I read you loud and clear.”
“Leo, they tell me there’s some kind of tarpaulin or something on top of the mountain and some breastworks or trenches or something right at its edges. You want to put your ordnance into the trenches, you got that?”
“Map coordinates bravo zero niner, Delta, I read you, and I’ve got the map on my knee and I have visually acquired the target.”
“You may commence your run anytime, then, Papa Tango.”
“I read you, Delta. Tango Flight, time to party. On my mark, Tango Flight, five-second bursts at max altitude 3200, do you read?”