The Rybinsk Deception (15 page)

He was annoyed for not realizing the place was a magazine – an explanation for it being the only smudge on the satellite photo located safely away from all the others.

Using the binoculars again, he studied the door and took another look at the ventilation slots.

‘Have you seen something?’ O’Halloran was curious.

‘No.’

‘Why are you looking through my binoculars then?’

‘I’m not.’ Coburn gave them back. ‘Come on. We’re wasting our time. We’re not going to learn anything by hanging around here making out we’re fishermen.’

Preferring not to consider the implications of what he’d seen, he returned to the car where he made the mistake of declining O’Halloran’s offer to take over the driving.

‘Why?’

‘I drove us here, so I might as well drive back. I know what the track’s like, you don’t.’

‘Now tell me the real reason.’

‘There isn’t one – only that if I have to come back it’ll be easier to remember where the worst of the bends are.’

‘Why would you need to come back?’

‘I don’t know. It’s no big deal.’ Refusing to be drawn, Coburn successfully avoided answering the question during their return drive, and had begun to think he’d got away with it until they were sitting at a table in a small diner in John Day where they’d stopped for lunch.

‘Right.’ O’Halloran finished eating his sandwich and pushed his plate away. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘What?’

‘If you want to carry on with this job by yourself, just say the word.’

‘It’s not that.’ Coburn thought for a moment. ‘Do you remember
saying I’d stand about as much chance of pulling this off as you would of getting a pat on the head from the President?’

‘Yeah, I remember.’

‘If we try to walk in to Shriver’s place on a dark night and help ourselves to his files, neither of us will be around long enough to get a pat on the head from anyone.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Shriver won’t be living in his house alone. Unless we can get him out of it and get his men out with him, we’ll never make it past the front door.’

‘So?’ O’Halloran tipped more sugar into his coffee.

‘So there are two of us. It’s about the only edge we have. What if you’re waiting in the right place while I’m somewhere else, and I get everybody out of the house? Do you think you could find what we’re after?’

O’Halloran frowned. ‘Are you talking about setting off a fire alarm or something?’

‘No. I’m talking about blowing up that munitions store. If you want a diversion, I can give you a diversion that’ll scare the shit out of half the people in Canyon City.’

‘How are you going to do that? Didn’t you see the padlocks? There’s not a window in the place, and if you hadn’t noticed, it’s got a nice steel door. Without a truckload of dynamite you’d be better off trying to blow up Fort Knox.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Coburn said. ‘All we need is a propane cylinder, a length of hose and a couple of candles. I’ve seen it done before.’

‘Where?’

‘In Iraq. What do you know about gas explosions?’

‘Nothing.’

‘The ones you hear about are accidents, but you can set up your own accident. Pump propane into a room for long enough, and sooner or later the ratio of gas to air will reach what’s called the Lower Explosive Limit or the LEL. After that, fix up some kind of ignition source and you’re in business.’ Coburn paused. ‘It happens all the time on board boats and yachts when a cylinder in a galley springs an overnight leak, and some poor bastard gets up in the morning and lights a cigarette.’

O’Halloran hadn’t touched his coffee. ‘But we’re not dealing with a boat, are we?’ he said.

‘No, we’re not. We’re dealing with a concrete storeroom that should have enough high-explosive in it to blow out your eardrums and flatten everything inside a quarter of a mile.’ Coburn smiled. ‘What do you think?’

‘Why the hell wait until now to tell me?’

‘Because until now I figured one of us was going to come up with a better idea. I wouldn’t get too enthusiastic. If we give this a try, you’re the guy who’ll be taking all the risk.’

Coburn had intended the statement to be a warning, hoping it would persuade the American to consider an approach that would be less of a gamble. But, during the rest of their drive back to the motel and for much of the remainder of the day, instead of O’Halloran worrying about the risk, or being willing to explore alternatives, he appeared to be more interested in discussing the details of a proposal so sketchy that the longer Coburn thought about the possibility of it going wrong, the more foolhardy it seemed to be.

By late evening, all talked out and having eventually agreed that there was no reason why tomorrow night wouldn’t be as good a night as any to see whether the plan would work, Coburn left O’Halloran sitting by himself in the motel restaurant and went to his room to make his second call to Heather.

It had been three days and two nights since he’d spoken to her last. The days had been more or less OK, he thought. But the nights hadn’t – in part because he’d had trouble getting to sleep, but mostly because of his dreams; two of them triggered by his memories of her lying beside him on the bed in his Singapore apartment, and one in which he returned to the village to discover she’d never meant to wait for him and had left for an unknown destination as soon as she’d been able to.

When he’d phoned her from Maryland she’d answered right away. Tonight she didn’t, sounding pleased but out of breath when she eventually said hello.

‘Did you have to run from somewhere?’ Coburn asked.

‘I was outside, helping Indiri’s husband. He’s trying to chase a
porcupine out of the drainage ditch behind the hut. I forgot to take the phone with me.’

‘I seem to remember you promising not to do that.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She pretended to sound apologetic. ‘Do you want me to promise again?’

‘You can make it up to me later. Anything interesting going on? What happened about the guy who was selling amphetamines?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody does. He just disappeared. Hari said to tell you that he’s thinking of organizing another raid. He’s heard about a shipment of Chinese DVD players that’s due through the Strait on Saturday. I can’t see him going ahead unless he can pre-sell them, though – you know, because they’re on a big ship that would be dangerous to board, and right now the black market’s oversupplied with pirated consumer goods, so the profit margin wouldn’t be that good.’

Coburn couldn’t help but be amused. ‘You want to be careful,’ he said. ‘Give yourself another couple of weeks and you’ll be walking around the village with a parrot on your shoulder.’

‘That’s not how long you’re going to be away, is it?’

‘No. With any luck by this time tomorrow we’ll have the hard part wrapped up, and O’Halloran can take things from there. He’s a pretty good guy once you get to know him.’

‘He’s not there with you now, is he?’

‘Not in the same room. Are you still OK?’

‘Of course I am. You asked me that last time.’ She hesitated. ‘I want you back here. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yeah I know that.’ Coburn wished he hadn’t mentioned tomorrow, knowing that if the mission were to fail it could be a while until he’d be able to see her again.

For a few more minutes he continued talking, more conscious of the distance between them the longer he did so, and feeling even further away after he’d said goodbye to her and hung up the receiver.

It was his own fault, he decided. He should have put off the call until tomorrow when he’d have a clearer idea of where he stood. But instead, he’d called her tonight with no real news, and as a consequence, had found himself repeating the promise he’d made her when she’d kissed him goodbye at the airport in Singapore.

At least things had progressed a bit since Singapore, he thought. He had twenty-four hours in which to figure out how to avoid any screwups, then, as long as there was none, for the first time he’d have a chance to secure a more certain future not just for himself, but for the young woman who, unlike the girl in his dream, seemed to have every intention of waiting for him at the village.

E
VERY SO OFTEN,
headlights from approaching vehicles were illuminating the interior of the car. In between times, because O’Halloran was black, and because of the dark-coloured jacket and jeans he was wearing, he was almost impossible to see.

He was sitting in the passenger seat with his laptop balanced on his knees, and for the last five or six miles had been staring at the screen while he punched at keys with a single finger.

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Coburn asked.

‘Checking.’

‘Checking what?’

‘That I can download files from Shriver’s computer in a hurry if I have to.’

‘Suppose he doesn’t have a computer.’

‘He has.’ The American folded down his screen. ‘All four of the FAL websites list his email address. Even if you wanted to run an outfit the size of the FAL without a computer, you couldn’t.’

‘So why bring a camera too?’

‘Quick and easy if there’s hard copy lying around.’

Despite O’Halloran sounding confident, Coburn knew he wasn’t. Since leaving their motel, when the American hadn’t been busy at his laptop he hadn’t said a great deal, and only now they were approaching the east-west highway crossing did he seem more willing to talk.

‘Have you ever had a go at anything like this before?’ Coburn asked.

‘If you work for the National Counter-Proliferation Centre you don’t spend your time breaking into places. Taking pictures of a
Pakistani nuclear reactor or having a look round inside a uranium-enrichment plant in Iran might sound like a good idea, but nobody knows how to do that.’

‘You don’t know how to get inside Shriver’s house either,’ Coburn said. ‘Not yet, you don’t.’

‘Listen.’ O’Halloran kept his voice level. ‘If you and I start going over this again, we’re both going to get pissed off again. You worry about the munitions store – I can handle the break-in. If the place has closed circuit television cameras, I’ll work round them. If it has a security system, I’ll have a go at deactivating it, and if the password I’ve got for Shriver’s computer doesn’t work I won’t hang around any longer than I have to.’

‘What if Shriver’s been smart enough to change his password?’ The possibility hadn’t occurred to Coburn before.

‘He isn’t smart enough. Lucky for us he’s been using the same one for the last 18 months. According to the guy who ran Yegorov’s facial recognition search, if Shriver wasn’t in the habit of accessing his home computer when he’s away on trips, we wouldn’t have been able to get it at all. Not even his internet service provider would have known what it is.’

‘Your CIA friend made a call to Shriver’s ISP, did he?’

‘Not much point working for an intelligence agency if you can’t put the screws on to get what you need to keep the country safe.’

Coburn tried to see if the American was grinning, but in the dark it was hard to be certain. ‘Are you going to tell me what the password is?’ he said.

‘Sure. It’s
SARIWON
, the place where Shriver’s father got killed in the Korean War.’ O’Halloran paused for a moment. ‘Have you thought any more about how long it’ll take you to rig up your bang?’

Last night, after making his call to Heather, Coburn had spent nearly an hour trying to work it out, but without knowing the flow rate of the propane, and having to estimate the volume of the building, he’d eventually given up.

‘This is a guess,’ he said. ‘Starting from the time I drop you off, I figure it’ll take me twenty minutes to reach the clearing, and I’ll need another ten or fifteen to carry my stuff over the fence and get it ready. While I’m doing that, you’ll have to decide where you want to be. Then all you have to do is wait.’

‘That still doesn’t tell me how long I’ll have to wait, does it?’

‘No.’ Coburn knew that the problem wasn’t so much in the timing: it was whether or not the explosion was going to do what it was intended to do – something that had been bothering him for a while, and a doubt that was still nagging at him when they reached the intersection with highway 20.

Unlike yesterday, tonight with no logging trucks on the road and fewer cars to contend with, they made good progress, driving through John Day ahead of schedule at three minutes before ten o’clock, and reaching Canyon City shortly afterwards.

Except for two or three cars parked outside a bar and some late-evening revellers, the township was quiet, flanked on each side by shadows cast by the walls of the canyon and giving Coburn the impression that the whole place was preparing to go to sleep.

More conscious of his misgivings than he had been, and tired of telling himself that O’Halloran wouldn’t run into trouble, he concentrated on his immediate concerns, keeping an eye on the rising moon on the odd occasion when he could see it through the trees and mentally running through his checklist.

Except for a small LED flashlight and a box of waterproof matches, he’d doubled up on everything. In the boot of the car were two twenty pound cylinders of propane, two three-foot lengths of braided hose complete with fittings, four candles and four candle-holders to screen out any light and shield the flames from wind.

O’Halloran had made the holders last night, fabricating them from empty asparagus cans he’d found in a rubbish bin at the rear of the motel restaurant. Everything else they’d purchased yesterday afternoon from a sporting-goods shop on the main street of John Day – a store that had been displaying so many rifles and handguns that Coburn had almost considered adding an automatic to their inventory.

In the end he’d decided against it, not wishing to suggest that either of them might be in need of one.

Now though, sitting in the dark driving south towards the ranch, and knowing that the American was armed only with his camera and a laptop, Coburn was beginning to think O’Halloran was a little unprepared in the event of things taking an unexpected turn.

The American turned up the collar of his jacket. ‘Better start looking for a place to let me out,’ he said.

‘How about the entrance to the track?’ Coburn had already more or less decided. ‘There’s plenty of cover, and once you get yourself into the trees, no one’s going to see you walking back towards the house.’

‘If that’s where you’re going to wait for me afterwards, I’ll need time to get back.’

‘Have you got a better idea?’ Ahead of him in his headlights Coburn could see the stone pillars and the gates of the Long Creek ranch.

‘No.’

‘OK. We’ll be at the track in a couple of minutes. Are you ready?’

O’Halloran was too preoccupied to answer, trying to get a glimpse of the house as they drove past.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Coburn began to slow the car.

‘Yeah, I heard. It’s not me who needs to be ready. It’s you. Drive yourself off a ridge before you get to the clearing and all this will have been for nothing, won’t it?’

This time it was Coburn who didn’t reply, keeping his thoughts to himself until he turned off the road at the track entrance and switched off the Chrysler’s lights.

‘I’ll see you in a bit,’ he said. Before he could think of anything else to say or had the chance to wish O’Halloran good luck, the American had opened his door and was gone, moving quickly towards the trees and disappearing into the shadows.

Coburn was less willing to rush, allowing his eyes to become more accustomed to the dark before he put the Chrysler’s transmission into low and set off along the track, discovering almost at once that his ability to remember the twists and bends was nothing like as good as he’d hoped it would be.

Trusting the ruts to guide him, he’d travelled no further than 200 yards when he made his first mistake, narrowly missing a tree that swam out at him from nowhere.

It was a lesson he was quick to learn, and equally quick to abandon whenever he became disoriented or on those occasions when the ruts became too shallow to be a reliable means of keeping the Chrysler on course.

Over the next 200 yards, despite proceeding far more cautiously, twice he found himself heading across flower-strewn knolls towards what would have been disaster had he been slower to react and not switched on his parking lights.

Whether the lights could be seen, he didn’t know. Even if they could be, where would they be visible from, he wondered? And at this late hour, who, if anyone, might be looking?

He was negotiating a steep section that he was almost certain he recalled when without warning everything in front of him turned black.

Had he been travelling downhill instead of uphill he’d never have stopped quickly enough. As it was he barely made it, slithering to a heart-stopping halt, this time hitting his headlight switch.

It was an elk, standing dazzled in the middle of the track until it came to its senses and bounded away.

Although Coburn had killed his headlights almost at once, much of his night vision had gone, and for the moment, along with it had gone his confidence.

No longer prepared to push his luck, for the remainder of the journey he kept his parking lights switched on, driving at a crawl and persuading himself that it didn’t matter how long O’Halloran was forced to wait provided the wait turned out to be worthwhile.

He reached the clearing without encountering another elk and with the car still in one piece, but found that the drive had taken him nearly half as long again as he’d thought it would.

Instead of weighing himself down with equipment, once he’d unloaded it he made two trips from the car to the fence then, after listening and watching, made another two trips to transfer everything over to the building.

In spite of the cool night he was still sweating from his drive, and after he’d finished ferrying forty pounds of propane and was ready to put the cylinders in place and connect up the hoses, he was out of breath and even hotter.

At the south end of the munitions store he stood the first of the cylinders beside the right-hand wall, and the second one beside the left hand wall, slipping the open ends of the hoses through the nearest
ventilation slot before he went to set up the candles in their holders. These he positioned as close as he could to ventilation slots at the other end of the building – a location he hoped would guarantee the best result by preventing any pre-ignition before the gas reached its lower explosive limit.

Somehow the arrangement looked too simple and too innocent, he thought, perhaps because none of the candles were yet alight.

Shielding the flame from a match, he lit the first of them, making sure the perforated asparagus can was doing its job and that the wick was burning steadily before he went to attend to the other three.

When he’d finished and stepped back to look, although a glow from the nearest can was surprisingly bright, it wouldn’t be visible from any distance, he decided, and even less easy to see once the candle inside had burned down a little.

So far he’d been able to manage without the help of his flashlight. But he used it now, poking it into the ventilation slots to make certain nothing was blocking the ends of the hoses before he opened the cylinder valves and listened for the hiss of escaping gas.

Instead of retreating right away, for several minutes he stayed where he was, breathing in the night air and trying not to wonder whether or not O’Halloran had run into trouble.

When he did finally leave, he made a point of walking back slowly to the fence and climbed it equally slowly, resisting the temptation to look back until he reached his car.

In the moonlight he could just make out the bank of scrub and the outlines of some larger trees, but beyond that the darkness had swallowed up the glow from the candles and he could barely see the building.

Before commencing his return drive, he took off the new watch he’d bought and put it in his pocket, hoping that if he couldn’t see the hands creeping round he’d be able to concentrate more on his driving.

The idea was unsuccessful. Less than halfway into what had turned out to be an uneventful journey, he found himself counting down the minutes under his breath, and long before he reached the highway and had parked the car out of sight behind the trees, he’d all but convinced himself that something had gone wrong.

He was outside relieving himself against a tree when a flash of light and a dull boom told him that it hadn’t.

The initial explosion was unimpressive. The one that followed wasn’t.

In Singapore, the violence of the blast that had blown out the front of his apartment had caught Coburn off guard. But this blast was on a different scale entirely.

A second after everything around him turned white, the shock wave slammed him face-first against the tree, and the night was filled with a thunderous reverberating roar.

The roar didn’t stop, rolling off hills, echoing from nearby canyons and varying in intensity as munitions continued to explode and burn, fuelling a fire that from the highway to the ski-field was slowly turning the sky deep red.

For a while, before he went back to sit in the car he continued staring at the sky, pleased to have given O’Halloran the best possible chance, but a little taken aback by what he’d managed to achieve.

If nothing else this was going to cost the Free America League a heap of money, he thought, hardly compensation for the deaths and misery they’d been causing around the world, but a good first step towards stopping them from doing it again.

With his part of the job done, while he waited to learn whether O’Halloran had been equally successful, he stopped himself from counting down another set of minutes by thinking, not about O’Halloran, but about Heather – remembering the day he’d first met her at the shipyard, picturing her sitting in the sun on the village jetty, and recalling her expression on the night when she’d tried to discover whether he wanted to make love to her.

The faster he was able to conjure up the images, the more there were – snapshots of her in different places at different times, some easy to hold in his mind, others not, and one of her combing her hair in the hut that was so fleeting he decided to recapture it.

But before he could do so, the passenger door of the car was wrenched open, and O’Halloran threw himself inside.