He looked at the wall clock and came to a decision, the individuals at the dacha were not likely to be staying there indefinitely, and they had to get back to their posts before too long, so he would give it until 4am and then attach another monitor, restart the system and get cracking on filtering out the jamming. His boss would want to know what the hell he had been doing with his time if he had a report of suspicious activity, and nothing usable to give to his boss!
Caroline watched the Russian girl disappear and checked her watch, allowing fifteen minutes to elapse before leaving the car also, she noted that she could see well enough to follow Svetlana’s tracks in the snow, which aside from small animal tracks was almost pristine; apparently no one was going for strolls in the woods these days.
It took ten minutes for her to reach a spot where the Russian girl had obviously paused for a few minutes to listen, before moving off again at a tangent. This new course went around almost in a complete circle, and it wasn’t until she saw a tiny speck of light that Caroline noticed the dark outline of a two-storey building. Svetlana had circled the building as a precaution should a trap be awaiting her instead the promised meeting.
The American pilot had gotten as far as the far side of the house when she froze in her tracks. A door had opened and then shut, briefly illuminating the snow, but with the outline of a man silhouetted within it. She hears footfalls on the steps and the crunch of snow underfoot but they did not come toward her, a car door opened and closed, followed after a few minutes by the engine starting, no doubt to keep the occupant warm.
Whoever was in the vehicle left the headlights off and after waiting for two minutes, Caroline backed away until the building was between herself and the vehicle, before screwing up her courage and leaving the trees, to cross the open ground to the dacha’s rear wall.
Working her way around, keeping close to the wall she looked for some means of seeing or hearing what was going on inside the building. Heavy drapes were at all the windows and music was being played which drowned out all other sounds from within, but at one the curtains had not been closed with the same care as the others, the chink of light that Caroline had seen from the trees allowed her a very limited view inside.
There was no one in sight, but a mirror on an internal wall across from her allowed her to see that an open staircase ran above the window she was using, it was hardly a prime surveillance post that she had found for herself and she was about to move on when a movement in the mirror caught her eye. It was so quick that she had to think hard on what she had seen, it was a man in an unbuttoned uniform jacket she decided, coming down the stairs and then the door opened and she heard him go to the car and join the other man inside it.
Short of climbing up to an upper window, which would be noisy, or trying the front of the house, where she would be seen by the car’s occupants, this was her only option, so she stayed where she was.
The cold was making inroads into her feet through the soles of her borrowed boots before something again happened indoors; another man in uniform descended the stairs and went to the car.
Whatever was going on, she had seen no guns or attack dogs, no torture chamber or heard any screams from within, but she kept her promise to Constantine and stayed beside the window, her hand in the coat pocket fingering the pistol.
It was a full twenty minutes later before a, by now thoroughly chilled, Caroline saw anything else, but it made her start; she saw the thigh length boots and her long tanned legs. No one followed behind with cattle prod or firearm so Caroline backed off before Svetlana descended the stairs, withdrawing to where she could just see through the trees, and waited. After a few minutes the door open and Svetlana emerged, wrapped in the fur coat and with hat firmly in place. Caroline saw her wave girlishly toward the car and then hurry off the porch toward the trees, so she too made rapid tracks back to the car herself, arriving five minutes before the Russian, and about thirty seconds before the deadline set by the Russian girl expired.
Svetlana walked slowly up to the car when she did appear, and stood for a moment looking at Caroline through the windscreen; the Americans footprints had been very evident, following the Russians as they had. When she open the door and slid inside she continued to look levelly at the pilot before speaking, and there was tenseness, an air of apprehension about her when she did. “You followed me… why?”
Caroline shrugged.
“Con asked me to keep an eye on you, he thought that there was something you weren’t telling him.”
“And?”
“He said that you seemed to think you were the bionic woman, and he thought that this meeting was more dangerous than you let on.”
“So how did it look to you?”
“I’m not expert at clandestine plotting, from what I could see it was you and a bunch of military types. No one was waving heated irons and wearing hoods, so I guess you read it right… … … .how did it go anyway?”
Svetlana relaxed visibly, almost letting out a gasp of relief but caught herself in time.
“Well, they wanted more than Scott thought they would, but I knew better so I was ready for it. I’ve got the location of the premier’s present location, and the next one he will be moving to, if he hasn’t already. All we need now is for the contact to let us know he is there… ok?” Svetlana paused before continuing. “So what else did my knight in shining armour tell you about me?”
Caroline laughed.
“Nothing, he was just worried that you would get in over your head, and that he wouldn’t be there to ride shotgun.”
Constantine knew, or rather feared a lot more than that about the people she was dealing with. So Svetlana held out her hand, palm upwards.
“Hand it over!”
After a moment’s hesitation Caroline brought out the small handgun, extracted the magazine and worked the slide. An exasperated Svetlana took the items and then checked the chamber was clear.
“Jesus Caroline, it’s bad enough that we’d have been shot out of hand had we run into a road block, and they’d found this… but it wasn’t even cocked?”
“Sorry, but I’m a flier not a spook.”
Svetlana opened the car window and tossed the pistol and magazine out into the night.
“Caroline, and I am speaking from some experience here, a good looking female body and a pretty face will get you out of most situations that a gun never could, because once a guy has a stiffy, then things get blurry in his head. What he sees will bypass his frontal lobe and logic centres, before taking a radical turn and heading straight south.”
Caroline laughed aloud.
“Well let’s hope whoever stops us isn’t gay.”
The Russian girl reached into a pocket and withdrew some US dollar bills, handing across $500 to Caroline who raised a questioning eyebrow, so she explained.
“It’s camouflage, you have just ridden a balding general to heaven and back… and I was pretty damn nasty between the sheets too,” she added with a wink. “It would look a bit odd if we came away empty handed, don’t you think?” before starting up the car and getting them on the service road again towards the city. “Open your coat and show those great legs of yours, just in case we are less lucky getting home than we were coming here.”
The cash was her own but the curfew pass had been handed over in the dacha. The general in question was still otherwise engaged several miles from the other dacha, and would never know his name had been taken in vain.