airplane, which sounded as if it were flying back and forth near the house.
He loaded the gun and went to the head of the stairs, where he could see the door. 'Look out the windows, see if you can get a shot,' he told Ilin.
Several minutes passed. He wiped the perspiration off his face, tried to calm down. He had a gun in his hand, everything was going to be okay. They were going to live through this. Yeah.
The shotgun felt heavy, solid, good.
He eased down the stairs, trying to see out the windows.
There, at the window in the living room, someone looking in. He flipped off the safety, raised the shotgun, and fired both barrels as fast as he could pull the trigger. The glass in the window exploded outward.
Too late! The face had disappeared just before he fired.
He reloaded as quickly as possible, then eased over to the window and looked outside, ready to duck if someone out there decided he was enough of a target to be worth the effort.
No one in sight. No blood, either, which filled him with relief.
He got a glimpse of the plane, up there under the clouds.
'Did you wound him?' Ilin asked. He was on the stairs, his shotgun at the ready.
'I was too late.'
'So who wants you dead?'
'Nobody. I'm a junior flag officer in the navy. I don't know anything about anything. Nobody in his right mind would have any reason to want me dead. They must be after you.'
'No.'
'Think what you like,' Jake said. He checked the doors coming from the basement and garage — all locked.
'If they try to get in again, this is the way they will come,' he told Ilin and left him to keep an eye on these doors while he searched for food in the kitchen. He was hungry and thirsty.
There was little in the refrigerator. Jake checked the freezer, then the cabinets. Finally he filled a glass of water from the sink tap and took it to Ilin, who accepted it gratefully. Back in the kitchen he stood at the sink and drank two glasses full.
More exploring followed, with both men carefully avoiding windows. Fortunately the lawn fell away on the front of the house, which had huge windows looking toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Taking his time, Jake unlocked the door to the garage and gently pushed it open, half expecting someone to be in there. There wasn't.
He flipped on the light —-A pickup. Four-wheel drive. Unlocked but no key. 'Here's our way out if we can find a key,' he told the Russian.
Back upstairs he went to the den, rooted through the desk drawers. Plenty of keys, but none that looked like it might fit the pickup.
'Look in the kitchen,' he advised the Russian, who left him in the den.
After a bit Jake went downstairs and met Ilin heading for the garage with a key ring in his hand. 'They were in a drawer with batteries and flashlights,' Ilin said over his shoulder.
When they were satisfied they had the right key, Jake held up a hand, stopping Ilin from turning on the truck. 'If we drive out now, they'll follow. We'll have a better chance after dark.'
'That's hours away.'
'We've got shotguns, water, and toilet paper. I'm in no hurry.'
Ilin nodded and climbed out of the truck.
They sat on the stools at the kitchen counter, well back from the windows, shotguns on their laps. The Cessna was still up there, circling. On the walls were family pictures, teenage girls at the beach, girls with boys, a photo around a Christmas tree. Several of the framed pictures were of a couple in their fifties, the owners, probably.
'Who are these people?' Ilin asked. 'Who owns this house?'
'The guy is a car dealer, I think. Maybe retired. There were some old awards from Ford Motor Company up in his office, a framed picture of a dealership.'
'A capitalist.'
'Yep. A leech. Sold cars to anyone who wanted one. Sucked the blood of the proletariat. The proletariat liked it, apparently, which is why America is full of cars and millions of people make an excellent living in the auto industry.'
'Too bad Karl Marx didn't sell cars.'
'And Lenin,' Jake said, flashing a grin.
'I think after dark would be best,' Ilin said, leaning back on his stool and making sure the shotgun was handy.
'There's food in the freezer and a television. Maybe even liquor. And a loaded gun at hand. What more do you want?'
'What I want is a cigarette.' Without another word Ilin lit one. There were no ashtrays, of course. He found a saucer in the cabinet and used that.
Seated in the left seat of the P-3 Orion, Duke Dolan checked his watch. The sonobuoys were in the water, the TACCO and his troops were trying to sort out the undersea noises… and the copilot was talking to Scout One, the E-3 Sentry AWACS that was somewhere nearby, directing aerial traffic. The four-engine patrol plane was low, only two hundred feet over the ocean, so Duke was working hard as he hand-flew it.
Clouds were moving in from the west. The high overcast would come down during the day and showers would develop this evening, according to the weather briefer when Duke discussed the forecast with him this morning an hour before dawn. That was the thing about the military — the working hours were truly terrible. Up at three in the morning, brief and fly for twelve hours, debrief, sleep a little, then get up and do it over again. At least his crew was flying days. He hated flying all night and trying to sleep in the middle of the day.
This contact was a welcome break from the boredom of long patrols. The people in back were pumped, the copilot was energized, Duke was working hard. All this over an ocean empty in every direction as far as the eye could see, which was about eight or nine miles; then the sea and sky merged in a bluish haze.
Duke turned the selector knob on his intercom box so that he could listen to the crew in back as they sorted out the undersea sounds. The sonobuoys were set to reel out their hydrophones to different depths, so
That thought had just crossed his mind when he heard one of the operators tell the TACCO, 'I've got something here.'
After a moment the TACCO began giving Duke heading changes. He brought him around in a fairly tight circle and had him fly toward an area he wanted investigated.
Duke Dolan was amused by the whole business. Didn't these people understand that they weren't going to hear
The TACCO had him make a turn and come back over the area that he thought might have something.
Time passed as the plane droned along, turning this way and that, the pilots following the TACCO's orders. After about twelve minutes of this, the radar operator, who also ran the magnetic anomaly detector, or MAD gear, sang out, 'MAD, MAD, MAD.' He had a contact! 'The needle pegged! Clear to the stop!' the man shouted over the ICS at the TACCO.
'Back around for another run,' the TACCO told Duke. 'We'll put a sonobuoy in on this pass, then work out his course and speed.'
'When you get it all figured out, then what are you going to do?' Duke asked.
'Report it all to the heavies, I guess. They aren't going to let us shoot if there are American boats within a hundred miles. You know that as well as I do.'
'Yeah,' Duke said disgustedly and laid the P-3 over in a turn.
'P-3 went directly overhead,' Eck said softly, just loud enough for Kolnikov to hear. There were still a few kibitzers in
