The air warmed as he descended, and the wind slackened. To his front he saw the village of Glen Cove and the strands of crisscrossing roads that surrounded it like a net of white blinking Christmas lights. Beyond the village were suburban housing tracts, and here and there the large houses of country estates surrounded by dark blotches of woodland and fields. Grenville spotted the Russian estate and saw that there was no mistaking anything else for it. Scratch that idea, he thought.
Grenville looked down. The ground was coming up fast now, as it always did at the end. He realized he could pop his chute at this moment and guide himself to a safe landing outside the enclosed thirty-seven acres of the Russian estate. A few more seconds and he wouldn’t be able to move laterally far enough to do that. He put his hand on his rip cord.
But something Van Dorn had said made him hesitate. Beyond all the patriotic hoopla, and the assurances of a favorable promotion review, Van Dorn had said, “If you and Joan make it back, everything will be all right between you two for a long time to come.”
Grenville knew instinctively that was true. He really did love her. They’d just gone off the track. They had to share something special to put the spark back in their relationship. Like a commando raid.
Grenville heard himself saying, “I can’t let her go in there alone. I have to go too.”
He looked down at the big floodlighted area around the house. It was very close now, and it was too late to avoid his rendezvous with it, his rendezvous with death or with life. “Oh, shit… ”
He looked at the quickly changing red LED numbers on his altimeter: one thousand feet above sea level, nine hundred, eight hundred. He pulled his rip cord and felt the deceleration as the skydiver chute filled with air. He looked up at his chute, spread like black bat wings above his head. He felt himself drifting slowly, updrafts keeping the altimeter at five hundred feet. “Shit!” He didn’t like the idea of hanging above the target. Even though the skyrockets had stopped on schedule, and he supposed no one below was looking up anymore, he felt very exposed. The altimeter read four hundred and fifty feet. Much too slow a descent. He began to guide his chute toward the house.
Grenville looked back over his shoulder. The Sikorsky wasn’t visible any longer. Grenville suspected it was still there, monitoring their fall, but its gray camouflage paint and its darkened lights made it impossible to see.
The four other chutes were close behind him. They were maneuvering also, closing in on the house. Grenville turned back to his front, then his head swung around quickly. He counted: One, two, three, four… five! That wasn’t right. He counted again and again and came up with five. “What the hell…?” He thought, Farber? But Farber hadn’t been wearing a chute and couldn’t have gotten into one quickly enough to be that close. Who the hell was that? Maybe they had a buddy for him. But Grenville could see that the other men had swiveled around also and were watching the unknown chutist above and behind them. Instinctively he knew that the sixth man was not one of them. He was no buddy.
65
Stanley Kuchik held the cable tighter as the grade became steeper. He thought he should be nearing the end of the conduit by now. He called out softly to Joan, “You still there?”
“In body only. I projected my spirit to the Côte d’Azur.”
“Oh…” Stanley said, “don’t let go. If you do let go, tell me first. I’ll let go too.”
Joan thought the boy seemed frightened. She said, “You’ll be the first to know.”
Stanley was silent as the cable carried him through the conduit. He felt something brush over his helmet and face and heard the tinkling of metal chimes — the signal marker that meant he had ten seconds before his fingers reached the return pulley. He quickly released one hand from the cable and felt around the top of the conduit, finding the first of the handgrips embedded in the pipe. He released the moving cable with his other hand and reached back for the next grip, pulling himself, hand over hand, through the conduit, the trolley still beneath him.
He heard the chimes again and heard Joan feeling for the first overhead grip. Stanley said, “I’m pulling myself through.”
“Me too.”
Stanley felt her head come into contact with his feet. He said, “Hold it there.”
Stanley heard the return pulley spinning above his face. “Christ, talk about tight… .” He found the next handgrip and pulled himself another foot along, feeling his helmet come into contact with the concrete plug that the Russians had poured into the conduit. He drew a deep breath. The air was foul and he felt dizzy. He whispered, “I hit the wall.”
“Well, ram through it.”
“Okay… ” Bergen had explained that his men — the midgets — had used muriatic acid to eat away most of the concrete plug, leaving just a two-inch shell. Stanley gave a mental shrug. Nuts.
He began a difficult turning motion, thrusting his body around until he lay facedown on the trolley. He found a recessed handgrip in front of him, buried his gloved fingers in it, and pulled. He and the trolley traveled forward, sending his helmet into the concrete wall. The brittle acid-eaten concrete shattered immediately and fell noisily to the floor of the boiler room.
Light flooded into the conduit and Stanley was almost blinded by the sudden glare. Cool air bathed his sweaty face as he squinted into the lights. He drew his pistol and aimed it to his front.
If anyone was in the boiler room, or came in to investigate the noise, he was to call out “Red!” and they’d both push off, sending the trolleys rolling back to the basement of the tennis court.
Stanley stared at the closed door of the boiler room twenty feet away. He realized that he was the only one who would ever know whether or not that door opened. He kept staring at it, praying, but not knowing if he was praying for it to open or stay closed.
Joan whispered urgently, “Green or red?”
Stanley replied, “Yellow.” He waited for some time, his eyes adjusting to the light as he stared at the door, considering his options, then suddenly blurted, “Green! Green!”
Joan replied, somewhat unhappily, he thought, “Understand. Green.”
Stanley stuck his pistol into his chest pouch, then pulled the small trolley from under his body and dangled it over the edge of the conduit. He let it fall and heard a soft thud as the rubber trolley hit the floor.
Stanley knocked off a few clinging fragments of concrete, then pulled his head and torso out of the conduit. He glanced around the big boiler room, lit with naked incandescent light bulbs. He looked down. Bergen had said it would be a three- or four-foot drop, but it was at least five feet. Shit.
He worked his body out farther and bent at the waist, pushing his palms against the wall until his weight and gravity took over and he felt himself sliding down, face first, to the floor. He hit with his hands and somersaulted away from the wall, ending up on his feet. He drew his pistol quickly and backed up to the wall again. He called softly up to the conduit. “Okay. I’m in. Hold on a minute.” He went to the boiler room door and listened. There were sounds in the distance, but he couldn’t make them out. Stanley turned from the door and made his way silently around the large concrete room. He found a handmade wooden bench and carried it to the wall. He stepped up on it and peered into the conduit. He saw Joan’s head and shoulders a few feet away. She was still lying on her back, the trolley beneath her. Looking at her stuffed in there, he didn’t see how either of them had got through. No way, he thought, would the Russians expect this. He called out, “Okay, I’m here—”