Zebra One, Zebra Two.
There was still no definitive answer. It was possible Donald Harman had been Zebra One, but it was just as possible, and in some ways more likely, that Robert Highnote had been the prime agent working with General Borodin through Gennadi Potemkin.
McAllister turned that over in his mind for a time, thinking back to the moment he’d said those words to Highnote. He knew the man or at least he thought he had… and yet he had been able to detect no reaction, not a trace that Highnote had known what he was talking about.
Which left what?
In the late afternoon, when the light began to fail, he climbed out of the little car and walked around to where Miroshnikov lay on his back. The wind had piled snow up against his body, the flesh on his face tinged blue, his open eyes no more empty in death than they had been in life.
His interrogator, in the end, had become his creator. “I gave you motivation…. I gave you my hate…. I gave you your life.
But at what price? McAllister asked the dead man. Stephanie had told him to let go, to trust in his own instincts not only for tradecraft, but for his sense of right versus wrong. Yet all that had been confused by the drugs and the brainwashing he’d been subjected to at Miroshnikov’s hands. At this point it was nearly impossible for him to separate his own thoughts and impulses from those that had been implanted.
At one point he had told himself that he could still run. Get out of Moscow before it was truly too late. Break the cycle of events that Miroshnikov had set into motion. Yet even as he’d had that thought, e knew that he could not do it. If Borodin were left alive, then everyone else who had died-and their number was a legion-would have been in vain.
All his life he’d been driven by a sense of completeness. Never walk away from a job until it is finished. Once it begins, boyo, never turn your back. It’s not in our blood. We’re not quitters. In the end, then, it really didn’t matter what was driving him, iroshnikov’s mechanizations, or his own instincts. Now he had no choice.
There was absolutely no traffic on the highway at this hour, when McAllister found the turnoff a couple miles past the village, and when he reached the covered bridge he shut off the Moskvich’s headlights and rolled down the window as he coasted across the narrow river. A hundred yards farther he came to a narrow, snow-covered track fading to the right, back through the woods, and he stopped the car, shut off the engine and got out, the Makarov automatic in his hand, the safety catch off. There were no noises, no sounds other than his ragged breathing, the ticking of the cooling engine, and the wind. The driveway was lost in the darkness. Nowhere could he see even the faintest glimmer of light.
He stepped around the front of the car and walked ten yards down the driveway, stopping again to listen, to search the woods ahead fora sign that anyone was here waiting for him. Still there was nothing, and he turned and hurried back up to the car, laying the pistol beside him on the seat and starting the engine.
The Moskvich nearly stalled out when he hit the first snowdrift twenty yards from the road, and he had to gun the engine to get through, the little car lurching forward, accelerating as the driveway cleared.
McAllister had no idea how far General Borodin’s dacha was set back into the woods. But he’d seen no tire tracks in the snow so far, which meant no one had come this way for several hours at least.
With the headlights off, his night vision had begun to return, and although the woods were very dark, he could make out the driveway, and the trees crowding in on both sides.
A little more than fifty yards from the road, he was about to stop the car again and get out so that he could listen for more sounds, when a tremendous yellow flash erupted just beneath him, followed instantly by a huge thunderclap. The Moskvich was shoved violently over on its side, off the road, the explosion destroying the entire front of the car, ripping the front seats from the floorboards. McAllister was slammed into the rear corner of the cabin, his head smashing into the window post, something very hot and sharp slicing through his coat into his left side.
The car was on fire. For a seeming eternity McAllister couldn’t make his arms and legs work. His body was tangled in a heap beneath a part of the car’s roof and large pieces of one of the seats. His ears were ringing from the effects of the blast, and bright yellow flashes danced in front of his eyes.
Flames. His brain crystallized on that one thought. He had to get out of the wreckage before the car’s gas tank in the rear exploded.
It took him several long seconds to scramble out from beneath the debris, and moments longer for him to orient himself, realizing all of a sudden that the front of the car was gone, and he could pull himself through the opening where the windshield had been.
He cut his hands on the broken glass and jagged edges of twisted metal, and then he was tumbling, rolling over and over through the flames, his hair singeing, parts of his nylon jacket melting. The snow was blessedly cool and soothing to his burns and other injuries, but his legs were numb and the best he could do was crawl down the driveway.
He managed to get thirty feet away when the Moskvich’s gas tank blew, destroying what remained of the car, spewing flames and wreckage in all directions.
For a long time, perhaps a full minute or more, McAllister lay face down in the snow, his head spinning, yellow flashes still dancing in front of his eyes, his ears still ringing.
General Borodin had known he was coming. The road had been booby-trapped. A dozen incidents from Vietnam raced through his head. Car bombings, rocket attacks, land mines.
But how had the Russian known? Who had warned him? To lie there would be to die. That thought finally came to the forefront of McAllister’s mind. He lifted himself up, and with a great deal of difficulty managed to struggle to his feet where he stood weaving back and forth, blood streaming from his hands and from the jagged wound in his side.
General Borodin was here. Waiting for him. The answers were here. All of them.
McAllister lurched forward a few steps, but then stopped dead in his tracks.
The road had been booby-trapped. General Borodin had planted a land mine. Were there others?
He stepped back a pace, searching the trees along both sides of the road, trying to decide, trying to think what to do, trying to think what Borodin might have done.
Finally he stepped off the road and plunged into the woods angling immediately toward the right so that he could still follow the track of the driveway.
Slowly his vision and hearing began to clear, but this time he was harmed.
He stopped again and looked back the way he had come. Already the flames from the explosion had begun to die down. A few of the rees and some of the brush at the side of the road had caught fire, but it didn’t seem as if it would spread. The wind was blowing the flames back toward the driveway. But Miroshnikov’s gun had been beside him on the front seat. There was no possibility of finding it now. None.
He turned back. There was no more running. General Borodin wanted him, and the general was going to have him.
McAllister started forward again and twenty feet later he lurched and stumbled, falling forward over a thin wire stretched across the snow.
The Kalashnikov rifle strapped to the hole of a tree ten yards away, erupted on full automatic, one slug tearing into McAllister’s side as he went down, and a second smashing into the side of his head, just grazing his skull, but shoving him bodily against a fallen tree, ten billion stars bursting in his brain.