chooses such terrible champions to defend her! he thought bitterly.
Liquid courage. He pulled the bottle from his pocket, sloshed it to find it only half full, unscrewed the cap, and threw down a long, hot swallow. The world blurred perceptibly, turned mellow and marvelous. Now he felt ready. He put aside his servility and his avuncularity and his sniveling obsequiousness, his need to please all his masters; and he put aside his fear: he decided that he could kill and after that he decided that he would kill.
Gregor walked into the dark corridor.
Klimov had switched the lights off.
Gregor slipped out of his shoes. He began to pad down the hall. His nervousness had left him. His heart was beating hard, but not out of fear, rather out of excitement. Now he had him: little Klimov, the piglet, who had killed his friend Magda and would just as soon kill the world. With the vodka he was able to imagine pressing the life out of the piglet’s throat, watching his eyes go blank and dull as death overcame them.
Gregor glanced through the first doorway; inside there was a filing cabinet, three obsolete portable coding machines, nothing else.
He walked on. He breathed in small wheezes, evenly, quietly, only through his nose. He felt his eyes narrow. In a curious way he felt himself concentrate as he had never concentrated before, or as he had not concentrated in years. He flexed his hands, tried to limber up his muscles.
He tried to remember the lessons from so many years ago.
Any part of your body is a killing weapon: the heel of the palm driven upward against the nose or into the throat; the edge of the hand against the neck; the knee, planted with thunderous force into the testicles; the bunched fist, one knuckle extended in the form called the dragon’s head, into the temple; the elbow, like a knife point, driven into the face; the thumbs into the eyes. You are all weapons; you are a weapon.
Gregor slid around the second doorway: more filing cabinets, old trunks, hanging uniforms.
He proceeded. The next little room bore outmoded communications and coding equipment, too bulky to be shipped back, too sensitive to be abandoned, too imperishable to be destroyed. The following room contained weapons, a row of old PPsH-41s locked in their rack, some RPGs chained to a circular stand. Also some stores of explosives and detonating devices, left over, all of it, from the maniac Stalin’s reign, when it seemed that war would break out at any moment and every second commercial attache might be turned into a saboteur or a partisan.
And on to another room, which had nothing in it but furniture from some purged functionary’s office, cast off as if it, too, had been contaminated by political unorthodoxy, and it, too, had been consigned to a Gulag.
In the last room he found the ratfuck Klimov.
And he found the bomb.
Gregor recognized it, of course, from the drawings he’d seen: it was a variation on the American W54, the famous suitcase bomb called a Special Atomic Demolition Munition. It was in the one-kiloton range, from here easily powerful enough to vaporize all primary governmental structures and, by virtue of blast, heat, and electromagnetic pulse, completely destroy the Pentagon across the river in Virginia, while doing massive damage to CIA up the river in McLean and, in its farther reaches, rupturing the communications at the National Security Agency in Maryland. The thing looked like a big green metal suitcase sitting there on the table. It was open, its padlocks sprung. The top was off, and the firing mechanism appeared
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So the fucker was set. Klimov sat before it in immobile fascination as the digits flicked up toward the ultimate moment. He brought an old roller chair in from the storage room. He’d just sit there and be atomized in the detonation.
Gregor walked to him, waiting for the piglet to turn and rise with the pistol. Gregor knew he was close enough. He felt the murderous rage building within him. He’d kill him with his hands and it would feel good. He’d kill him for Magda already gone and the sleeping millions who’d join her.
Inch by inch he stepped closer.
Klimov just sat there.
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He touched the boy on the shoulder, making ready to strike.
Young Klimov slipped forward an inch, then toppled to the cement, hitting it with a sickening thud, and the crack of teeth.
Young Klimov had been shot in the heart with a ballistic knife blade that projected from the center of his chest in a sodden mass of blood. Blood also flowed from his mouth and nostrils. His eyes were open in absurd blankness.
“He didn’t believe it when I shot him,” said Magda Goshgarian, standing behind him in the doorway. “I wish you could have been there, dear Tata, when the blade went in and the life went out of his eyes.”
“Magda, I—”
He gestured to her but she raised a pistol.
“He knew something was up. He was very smart, the little prick. He’s been nosing around me for weeks now. He came down and I killed him, Tata.”
Then her eyes moved to Gregor’s, and he saw that she was mad, quite mad.
“And I heard you coming, yelling my name with your voice trembling in fear. So I played dead, and off you went. I will shoot you, too, Tata, though I love
Peter stood by the mouth of the elevator shaft, listening to the gunfire below. It sounded horrible, roaring up the dark space of the shaft, no individual sounds to the shots at all, just a mass of noise. He was at the same time fussing with something around his waist.
“Excuse me,” he said to a Delta soldier close by, “is this right?”
The young man looked at it.
“No, sir, you’ve got to rotate the snaplink a half turn so that the gate is up and opens away from the body. And I don’t think you’re in the rope-seat just right. And you’ve got to take up some slack between the snaplink and the anchor point and—”
Peter fumbled with it. He’d never get it right.
“Look, could you fix it for me?” he said.
The soldier made a face, but bent and began to twist and adjust Peter’s rig.
“Dr. Thiokol?”
It was Dick Puller.
“How’s it going down there?” Peter asked.
“Not good. Lots of fire. Very heavy casualties.”
Peter nodded.
Puller checked his watch, then looked at the other Delta boys queueing up for the long slide down to the battle.
“Delta, second squadron, ready for the descent,” an NCO called. “You locked and loaded?”
“Locked and loaded,” came the cry.
“Check your buddies. Remember your quick-fire techniques and to go to the opposite shoulder at these damn corners. No fire on the way down, the show starts about halfway down the corridor. In twos, then, Delta, on rappel, go, go, go.”
As he tapped them off, the Delta men began their slide down.
“More men, maybe that’ll do it,” said Dick.
“That’s it,” said the soldier, rising. “Now you’re rigged right. You just thread the rope through the bit, under your leg. You brake with your right hand — you’re righthanded, right? — by closing it and pressing the rope into your
