Duel of Assassins Read Free Page A

over their heads. Then his stunned senses
registered the diminishing roar and a sudden sulfurous stink in the room, and
Starkov realized the explosion must have been the delayed ignition of the
first-stage rocket motor. The Golub had disappeared into the night.
    Yet several of his men continued to direct their machine-gun
rounds upward, thudding into the roof timbers and shattering the rapidly
retracting plexiglass skylight. And worse! Starkov whirled and shouted—too late
to stop one of his men from opening fire on Marchenko, who crashed backward off
his chair. By the time Starkov had rushed around the desk, the colonel general
had escaped their grasp like his “pigeon.” His nightshirt was a red ruin, and
from the scrawny neck arterial blood pooled over the floorboards, dividing
around Starkov’s boots.
    The KGB officer stared down in impotent fury, his right fist
clenching and reclenching the AKR’s butt-stock. Marchenko’s broad skull was
thrown back on the floor, his death-glazed eyes staring up at the shattered
skylight and blackness beyond. And the old bastard was still grinning his
steely smile.
    *
    The Golub streaked northeastward through the Siberian
night like a tiny meteorite, perhaps a straggler from the Eta Aquarid showers
of early May, a week previous. Its trajectory was precisely controlled by a
tiny Japanese microprocessor, and its solid-fuel propellant burned for a
carefully calculated one hundred forty seconds, enough to carry it over twenty
kilometers of pine and birch, and well beyond the silent River Ob and the
university complex of Akademgorodok sprawled across the Zolotaya Dolina ,
the Golden Valley.
    As it passed once again above dense forest, the rocket
reached apogee and abruptly cut its motor. A split-second later a recovery
ejection charge triggered, the sudden retro-thrust separating the nosecone and
deploying a parachute. As the exhausted first stage dropped away into the
trees, the polyethylene canopy unfurled and snapped open. The Golub payload, swinging slightly in the breeze and now emitting a tiny radio signal,
drifted down through the pinetops, its shrouds barely evading entrapment as it
slipped past tiers of web-fingered boughs to impact softly into the thick mulch
of a small clearing.
    An hour passed with only the rustle of pines. Then the wind
carried the approaching whine of a truck transmission laboring over the rough
ground. Several minutes later twin headlamps lanced back and forth through the
night as the vehicle crashed through thickets and slalomed around pine boles.
Finally it bounced into the clearing—an old, rebuilt Lend-Lease Studebaker
bearing the insignia of the Ministry of Timber—and came to a halt.
    Leaving the motor running and the headlamps probing ahead,
two men jumped out of the cab—a father swinging an electric torch, and his
strapping son with an RDF receiver. It took them less than a minute to locate
the payload under its collapsed canopy. In another minute, the old Studebaker
was growling off through the woods, and the clearing was once again empty.
    A half-hour later, the Golub ’s nosecone lay hidden
beneath the winter woodpile outside the forester’s cabin, while inside
Marchenko’s final operational order was carefully unfolded, read, encrypted and
sent on its way once more, this time disguised in a stream of meteorological
data over the Akademgorodok computer network for distribution throughout the
Soviet Union. The last sentence of the colonel general’s message was the key
one. Decoded, it read simply:
    ACTIVATE MARCUS.

Two
    Orlando, a swarthy party animal up for the week from
Brescia, thought up the stunt around midnight in an ersatz London pub in
Kitzbühel, after considerable quantities of dark pilsner. He tried to explain
it to the two Austrian girls at the table, but they were unable to hear over
indefatigable choruses of “Fräulein, Fräulein, Fräulein” led by the
resident zither and accordion duo. Finally the Italian shouted out