licked her lower lip. “There’s a long, rounded object. I think it’s metal but it’s…It must be old. It’s rusted. Wet. It’s resting on something bigger, something flat. I think it’s also metal.”
McClintock felt his heart begin to race. He’d been working with remote viewing for some thirty years. Yet every time he witnessed a successful viewing, every time he watched someone reach out with their mind and touch a distant place-he still felt the same chilling rush of excitement and wonder.
“Good, Tobie,” said Peter. “Now I want you to move a little farther away.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“I get the impression of water. Lots of water. Rocks. Pebbles. It’s a beach. A rocky beach. There’s a rise of ground…here.” Her pencil scratched across the pad as she drew a rough sketch. “A rise with trees.” She paused. “I get a sense of cold. Clouds.”
“Good,” said Peter as she worked on her sketch. She barely glanced at what she was drawing. It was as if the image flowed directly from her mind to the paper. “Now look back at the long metal object. What do you see?”
“Wooden planks. It’s…it’s like a wooden platform or a dock. That’s it. It’s a dock. Wharves. A long stretch of wharves. But they seem old. Deserted. There’s a big piece of machinery. Here.” She added to her sketch. “It’s yellow, and it sticks up in the air.”
A crane? wondered McClintock, watching her.
Her pencil skittered across the page. She said, “I see a long row of something rectangular. I get the impression of storage, like warehouses, although they’re mainly empty. And a road. Here.”
“Can you follow it?”
“Yes.” There was a pause. “It goes up a rise.”
“Go to the top and tell me what you see.”
“It’s open, like a meadow. Maybe farmland. But it feels oddly empty, like it’s…like it’s abandoned.”
McClintock knew a sense of frustration. Remote viewing worked best when the viewers were given specific geographical coordinates and simply asked to describe what was there. Back in the eighties, the Army remote viewers up at Fort Meade had successfully described secret Soviet submarine installations and the insides of enemy embassies. But there was a reason remote viewing had never worked well when it came to finding missing persons. The viewer could describe a room, maybe even a house or a ravine in the woods where the missing person was being kept. But where was that house? Where was that ravine?
Where was this beach?
McClintock had heard stories about how, back in the seventies, remote viewers at Fort Meade had helped the government find a Soviet plane that had crashed in the jungles of Africa. But that was a rare success story in the history of using RV as part of an attempt to find missing people or things. The Army viewers who had tried to trace kidnapping victims in Italy and Lebanon had been able to describe the captives; they had accurately described their physical health and mental states, the rooms in which they were being held, sometimes even the street outside. But they’d never been able to provide the specific type of information that could enable the Special Forces guys to go in and rescue anyone.
“Okay, Tobie,” said Peter. “Go back to the wharves and look again at the metal object. You said it was by the water?”
“Not by the water. On the water.” She worked on her sketches some more, refining them, adding details. “There’s another building. Away from the warehouses, maybe halfway up the hill from the water.”
“Tell me about the building.”
“I get the impression of metal. A wavy metal. It’s like another warehouse, but smaller. I can see cars parked behind it. No, not cars. Vans. Blue vans. I think they all have the same thing written on the sides.”
McClintock felt a renewed surge of hope. Most remote viewers couldn’t read words or numbers. McClintock had heard it had something to do with the way the two halves of the brain process information. But Tobie-like Pat Price, back in the seventies-could do it.
Her forehead crinkled into a frown. “It’s in Greek. No. Not Greek. Cyrillic.” A talented linguist, Tobie knew Russian. But many other languages, from Macedonian and Serbian to Belarusian and Ukrainian used the Cyrillic alphabet, and she didn’t know any of those.
“Militia,” she said. “That’s what it is. They’re militia vans. I think I can read…K…A…” Her frown deepened as she slowly sounded the word out. “ KALININGRAD,” she said suddenly. “That’s it. Kaliningrad.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the Colonel, pushing away from the window. He put in a call to Division Thirteen. “Matt? McClintock here. I think what you’re looking for is at a shipyard on a rocky beach in Kaliningrad Oblast. That’s right. Russia.”
5
Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia: Sunday 25 October
12:30 A.M. local time
Stefan Baklanov awoke in the grip of a blind terror. He felt his heart pound out one, two panicked beats before he realized the blackness that seemed to have swallowed him was merely the darkness of a cloud-shrouded night. It was another moment still before he remembered where he was.
He sat up, his arms wrapping around his bent knees, an ache pulling across his chest as he thought about Uncle Jasha and the others on the Yalena. There had been times during that long, seemingly endless swim to the shore when he’d come close to giving up and letting the sea take him. But he’d pushed on, even when his arms went numb and his legs felt so heavy he could barely move them. He still wasn’t sure how he managed to drag himself up on the rocky point, gasping for breath and shivering so hard he didn’t think he’d ever stop.
All he’d wanted to do was lie on the shore, close his eyes, and let exhaustion take him. But the throb of an outboard motor somewhere in the misty cove had driven him up and across a rutted, narrow road into the protective shelter of a copse of birch. His legs had felt as wobbly as a newborn calf’s and his teeth chattered so hard he kept biting his tongue, but he knew he had to move or die.
He figured he’d covered maybe nine or ten kilometers, sticking to the fields and woods, hiding at the sound of every voice or approaching car, before he came upon the abandoned old German farmhouse. Built a century or more ago of good red brick, it sat well back from the main road in the midst of an overgrown field. There were tens of thousands of such houses scattered across Kaliningrad Oblast-entire villages whose inhabitants had fled west ahead of the conquering Red Army, or had been shot, or had disappeared forever into the frozen wastelands of Siberia.
The farmhouse door had long since been battered in and broken, but the old tile roof was still fairly sound and the stout brick walls kept out the cold wind that cut cruelly through Stefan’s wet clothes. He thought about building a fire to warm himself, then realized that would be a mistake. Staggering up the stairs, he rummaged around until he found a tattered old blanket. Stripping off his icy clothes, he curled up in a leaf-littered corner and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.
He’d had a vague idea of sleeping until nightfall and then pushing on under the cover of darkness. But when he now looked at his watch he realized it was already past midnight. He’d slept far longer than he’d intended.
He pushed to his feet. Hugging the motheaten blanket around his shoulders, he lurched to the nearby window and peered through the broken panes at the dark, silent yard below.
He stared in helpless frustration into the blackness of the night. He could vaguely make out the looming outline of a collapsed barn and the distant, darker smudge of a copse of trees. But there could be a hundred men out there hiding in the shadows and Stefan knew he’d never see them. A sudden noise and a flurry of movement made him jerk back, gasping with terror. Then he let out a weak laugh as a barn owl landed on the rotting window casing, its eyes wide and staring.
The painful rumbling of Stefan’s stomach reminded him that he’d eaten nothing all day except for a few scavenged wild berries he’d found in the woods. He couldn’t stay here. Groping for his still damp pants, he reluctantly drew them on and reached for his shirt and sweater. He considered for a moment finding the nearest
