“I turned onto it about half an hour before the bridge.”
The sun had heaved itself above the horizon and was filtering through the blue summer haze that hung over Charleston. The helicopter climbed to nine hundred feet and flew southwestward until the highway unreeled beyond the cockpit windows. The pilot pointed downward and Suvorov nodded. They followed the outbound traffic as the South Carolina coastal plain spread beneath them. Here and there a few cultivated fields lay enclosed on all sides by forests of long-leafed pines. They passed over a farmer standing in a tobacco field who waved his hat at them.
“See anything familiar?” the pilot asked.
Suvorov shook his head helplessly. “The road I turned off of might be anywhere.”
“What direction were you facing when you met the highway?”
“I made a left turn so I must have been heading south.”
“This area is called Wadmalaw Island. I’ll start a circular search pattern. Let me know if you spot something.”
An hour slipped by, and then two. The scene below transformed into a maze of creeks and small rivers snaking through bottomland and swamps. One road looked the same as another from the air. Thin ribbons of reddish-brown dirt or potholed asphalt slicing through dense overgrowth like lines on the palm of a hand. Suvorov became more confused as time wore on, and the pilot lost his patience.
“We’ll have to knock off the search,” he said, “or I won’t have enough fuel to make Savannah.”
“Savannah is in the state of Georgia,” Suvorov said, as though reciting in a school class.
The pilot smiled. “Yeah, you got it.”
“Our departure point for the Soviet Union?”
“Only a fuel stop.” Then the pilot clammed up.
Suvorov saw it was impossible to draw any information out of the man, so he turned his attention back to the ground.
Suddenly he pointed excitedly over the instrument panel. “There!” he shouted above the engine’s roar. “The small intersection to the left.”
“Recognize it?”
“I think so. Drop lower. I want to read the sign on that shabby building sitting on the corner.”
The pilot obliged and lowered the helicopter until it hovered thirty feet over the bisecting roadways. “Is that what you want?” he asked. “ ‘Glover Culpepper— gas and groceries’?”
“We’re close,” said Suvorov. “Fly up the road that leads toward that river to the north.”
“The Intracoastal Waterway.”
“A canal?”
“A shallow canal that provides an almost continuous inshore water passage from the North Atlantic States to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Used mostly by small pleasure boats and tugs.”
The helicopter beat over the tops of trees, whipping leaves and bending branches with the wash from its rotor blades. Suddenly, at the edge of a wide marshy creek, the road ended. Suvorov stared through the windshield.
“The laboratory, it must be around here.”
“I don’t see anything,” the pilot said, banking the craft and studying the ground.
“Set us down!” Suvorov demanded nervously. “Over there, a hundred meters from the road in that glade.”
The pilot nodded and gently eased the helicopter’s landing skids into the soft grassy earth, sending up a swirl of dead and moldy leaves. He set the engine on idle with the blades slowly turning and opened the door. Suvorov leaped out and ran stumbling through the underbrush back to the road. After a few minutes of frantic searching he stopped at the bank of the creek and looked around in exasperation.
“What’s the problem?” asked the pilot as he approached.
“Not here,” Suvorov said dazedly. “A warehouse with an elevator that dropped down to a laboratory. It’s gone.”
“Buildings can’t vanish in six hours,” said the pilot. He was beginning to look bored. “You must be on the wrong road.”
“No, no, this has to be the right one.”
“I only see trees and swamp”—he hesitated and pointed—”and that decrepit old houseboat on the other side of the creek.”
“A boat!” Suvorov said as though having a revelation. “It must have been a boat.”
The pilot gazed down into the muddy water of the creek. “The bottom here is only three or four feet deep. Impossible to bring a vessel the size of a warehouse, requiring an elevator, in here from the waterway.”
Suvorov threw up his hands in bewilderment. “We must keep searching.”
“Sorry,” the pilot said firmly. “We haven’t the time or the fuel to continue. To keep our appointment we’ve got to leave now.”
He turned without waiting for a reply and walked back to the helicopter. Slowly Suvorov followed him, looking for all the world like a man deep in a trance.
As the helicopter lifted above the trees and swung toward Savannah, a gunnysack curtain in the window of the houseboat was pulled aside to reveal an old Chinaman peering through an expensive pair of Celestron 11 x 80 binoculars.
Satisfied he had read the aircraft’s identification number on the fuselage correctly, he laid down the glasses and dialed a number on a portable telephone scrambling unit and spoke in rapid Chinese.
44
“Got a minute, Dan?” Curtis Mayo asked as Dan Fawcett got out of his car in the private street beside the White House.
“You’ll have to catch me on the run,” Fawcett replied without looking in Mayo’s direction. “I’m late for a meeting.”
“Another heavy situation in the Situation Room?”
Fawcett sucked in his breath. Then, as calmly as his trembling fingers would permit, he locked the car door and picked up his attache case.
“Care to comment?” Mayo asked.
Fawcett marched off toward the security gate. “I shot an arrow in the air…”
“It fell to earth, I know not where,” Mayo finished, keeping step. “Longfellow. Want to see my arrow?”
“Not particularly.”
“This one is going to land on the six o’clock news.”
Fawcett slowed his pace. “Just what are you after?”
Mayo took a large tape cassette from his pocket and handed it to Fawcett. “You might like to view this before air time.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Call it professional courtesy.”
“Now
Mayo smiled. “Like I said, view the tape.”
“Save me the trouble. What’s on it?”
“A folksy scene of the President playing farmer. Only it isn’t the President.”
Fawcett drew up and stared at Mayo. “You’re full of crap.”
“Can I quote you?”
“Don’t get cute,” Fawcett snapped. “I’m in no mood for a slanted interview.”
“Okay, straight question,” said Mayo. “Who is impersonating the President and Vice President in New Mexico?”
“Nobody.”
