helicopters to start again at the border, and follow the M9 toward us, at an altitude of no more than eight or ten meters.”
“You mean to catch the bastard between us?” Petrovsky said.
“That’s the idea.” Chernov said, although he didn’t think it was going to be quite that easy.
Petrovsky started to turn away when Chernov called him back.
“When you’ve done that, I want every cop in Moscow to be on the lookout for that gray Mercedes. It was stolen.”
“He’ll never get that far, Colonel.”
“Just do it,” Chernov ordered sharply.
“What are they supposed to do if they spot him? My street cops wouldn’t be any match for him if he’s as good as you say he is.”
“Tell them to report directly to you, and follow him. Nothing more.”
It was nearly eight o’clock when the Mercedes pulled off the main highway near a tiny hamlet dark at this hour, followed a bumpy road up to the onion domes of an Orthodox church and parked under the shelter of a grape arbor at the entrance to a cemetery. McGarvey shut off the headlights, got the gas cans from the back and filled the tank.
He estimated that he was two hundred miles from the outskirts of Moscow, and with any luck he’d be in the city well before midnight with plenty of time to take care of one final preparation before he went to ground.
What little traffic he’d encountered were mostly trucks heading east, with an occasional passenger car, and one bus.
The only city of any size that he would have to pass through would be Volokolamsk. By then the traffic would pick up, but it was only another fifty or sixty miles into the outskirts of Moscow where he figured he might be safe unless they’d transmitted a description of his car to the police there. But he’d picked this color Mercedes because it was common in Moscow.
Finished with the gas cans, he put them back in the cargo section, and happened to glance down at the highway east of the village in time to see what at first appeared to be a truck. Its headlights were unusually bright and seemed very far off the ground.
McGarvey stepped around the back of the Mercedes to get a better look, when the lights rose up into the sky at the same moment he heard the distinct chop of a helicopter’s rotors.
As the machine slowly flew over the village, a spotlight searched the main road and the side streets.
McGarvey eased back a little farther under the grape arbor. This was no coincidence. The military helicopters at the border had been conducting a search. And now this machine was coming directly down the M9, obviously searching for someone.
The helicopter’s spotlight went out as it dropped down to twenty feet or so above the highway on (his side of the village, and headed west.
It was possible that the military helicopters he’d seen earlier were a part of a coordinated search, and would be heading east by now. When this helicopter met them without any sign of McGarvey they would turn around and retrace the highway, greatly expanding their search pattern to include hiding places such as the trees where he’d stopped by the creek, and this grape arbor.
While he waited for the helicopter’s lights to disappear into the distance he studied his road map. Three main highways entered Moscow from the west. The M9, which he was on, came from Riga. The M10 from St. Petersburg was well to his north, and the M1 from Smolensk and Minsk was about ninety miles to the south. Even the most recent Russian maps, however, showed very few of the secondary roads that connected the smaller towns and villages between the main motor routes, although he knew they were there.
The three highways funneled into Moscow, so the farther east he got before turning south, the closer he would be to the M1. If he got off the M9 now, he might get bogged down in the countryside and never reach the other highway. But if he remained on the M9 too long, the helicopter that had just passed might turn around and overtake him. One hour, he decided, as he watched the receding lights of the helicopter. Then, no matter how far he got, he would turn off the M9 and head across country to the south.
Abandoning the speed limit, McGarvey barreled down the highway at ninety to one hundred miles per hour, slowing only for. small towns and villages, and the occasional truck still on the highway. Each time he saw the oncoming lights of another vehicle, he slowed down and prepared to douse his own headlights and pull off the road until he made certain that what he was seeing wasn’t another helicopter.
It was a few minutes after nine when he came upon an unmarked paved road heading south. He’d been watching his rearview mirror, but so far there’d been no sign of the returning helicopter. Nonetheless he figured he’d pushed his luck far enough, and turned onto the secondary road. Within five miles he came to a collection of a half-dozen peasant houses, shuttered and dark, and on the other side of this village the road continued, but the pavement stopped.
The winter had been a harsh one, and the spring very late in coming so that the road, which at times was little more than a dirt track, was still reasonably firm. In a couple of weeks it would turn into a ribbon of deep sticky mud that even the big Mercedes might not be able to manage.
For stretches he was able to push the Mercedes to speeds in excess of sixty miles per hour, but for most of the way he had to keep below forty, and sometimes he was even slowed to a crawl as he had to detour around ruts that were five or six feet deep.
He was passing through mostly farmlands, he could tell that much but little else in the dark. Occasionally he passed through tiny villages of eight or ten crude hovels, and for twenty minutes he had a conglomeration of lights in sight, low down on the horizon to the west, which he took to be a factory, or possibly a power station.
But he never saw the helicopter again, so by 10:30 when he finally reached the M1 near the town of Gagarin with the outskirts of Moscow barely one hundred miles away, he dropped back to the posted speed limit of 90 kilometers per hour and lit his first cigarette in two and a half hours.
For nearly four hours there was no sign of the gray Mercedes anywhere on the highway between the Latvian border and the outskirts of Moscow. Given the time since McGarvey had crossed the border, he could have made it to Moscow by now. So far Petrovsky had received three radioed reports of Mercedes four-by-fours in Moscow, but in each sighting the cops, on the ground checked the license tags with the motor vehicle department and found them to be legitimate. In all three sightings the officers reported that the drivers were not alone, they carried passengers, something Chernov didn’t think McGarvey would do.
“Where the hell did he go?” Petrovsky asked a little before midnight. “He couldn’t have disappeared’ into thin air, unless he’s hiding somewhere.”
They’d touched down in a farm field just off the highway three hundred kilometers from Moscow to take on fuel from one of the air force Mi-24s, and stretch their ‘ legs. “He might have spotted the helicopters and done just that,” Chernov said, staring into the darkness. “He’s not a stupid man.”
“If that’s true than he knows that its all over for him. He’ll probably ditch the car and try to make it to the nearest border. He might be hiding somewhere in Volokolamsk, changing his identity and waiting for the morning train.”
“Do we have anyone watching the station?”
“No, but I’ll see to it. We’ll close that place up so tightly that even a mouse couldn’t get through,” Petrovsky said. “It’s his only option now. He’s not on the M9, which is the only route from Riga into Moscow, so he has to be in Volokolamsk.”
Petrovsky went back to the helicopter to radio his instructions, leaving Chernov standing by himself in the darkness.
He shook his head, tiredly. McGarvey was smart, but he wasn’t a fool. If he had seen the helicopters, and realized that they were searching for him, he would have to turn tail and run. But he had not run. Chernov was certain of it, because men like McGarvey never did.
Chernov thought about it, putting himself in McGarvey’s position. His mission was to assassinate Tarankov, for which he had a plan. He would understand that things could go wrong, they always did, and he would have planned for them. McGarvey would be able to think clearly on the run. Even backed into a corner, he’d find a way. His extensive file made that quite clear.
