“Astanavleevat’sya! Stop! “ The first officer, much younger than the second, seemed confused about what to do — get out of the car, call for help, or pull out his weapon — so he tried everything at once. He seemed to be moving in slow motion, while at the same time Linda’s head was spinning as if everything was happening in triple speed.
The pistol she had taken from the second officer was much heavier than she thought — and it fired much easier than she thought, too, two rounds going off at the slightest finger pressure. The first round went through the passenger’s side window into the car, spraying the first officer with glass and shattering the instrument panel. The second went somewhere off into space over the car. “Get out of the car!” Linda yelled. “Get out!”
“Freeze! Don’t move!” the officer shouted. His hand squeezed the microphone transmit button. “Emergency! Officer down! I need assis—”
Linda only wanted to put a bullet through the car radio — at least that’s what she told herself But when she stopped squeezing the trigger, the driver’s side window was shattered and the officer’s head was blasted apart like a hammered coconut, with strings of blood-soaked hair surrounding a gory hole.
It took all of her physical and emotional strength to go around to that car door, reach across the pool of brains, blood, and bones on the dead officers lap to unfasten his seat belt, and drag the corpse out onto the ground. Somewhere in the background noise of the blood roaring in her ears, she could hear the second officer shouting, probably into a portable radio, but she didn’t care. She jumped into the police car, shifted it into drive, and sped away. The first left turn took her to the road to the back gate of the base. She saw emergency lights and, not realizing they belonged to her car, she sped up. The guard shack to the back gate was coming up fast. She saw the automatic assault rifle in a holder next to her and for an instant thought about grabbing it and trying to shoot her way off the base, but she sped by the guardhouse before she could act on the idea. Linda heard several sharp raps on the outside of the car-bullets fired from the security officers on duty at the guardhouse — but it kept running.
At the end of the access road, she took a left turn, which took her toward the nearest city, Itslay. She finally found the switch for the emergency lights and shut them off.
Now that she was on the move, things actually began to get clearer for her, because Linda rehearsed her escape procedures several times a year, and she knew exactly what to do. The one thing the American Central Intelligence Agency did well for its agents was plan an escape system. There were four contact points around Zhukovsky Air Base. On a signal from Linda sent via a secret satellite signal beacon in the recorder, or after some trigger event — and a murder at Zhukovsky certainly qualified as a trigger event — a person would begin to visit the contact points on a regular basis. Linda had no idea who it was, when he or she would show, or what he or she would do — it was up to her to identify the person and make contact. If it were her contact person, she would be taken to a secret location, identified, and then inserted into a preestablished exfiltration network set up inside Russia for exactly this purpose. All Linda had to do was to activate the satellite signal beacon in the recorder and …
… But when she reached down to her side, she realized she didn’t have the recorder. The second guard must’ve torn it off her when they struggled.
After swearing hotly in English, Creole, and Russian for several moments, Linda collected her thoughts and calmed herself. The signal beacon wasn’t important. Certainly all the excitement at the base would activate the escape network. All she had to do was make her way to one of the contact points, properly meet up with the contact, and then do exactly what she was told to do until she was safe.
Her first task was to ditch the police car. She selected a utility company parking lot, about ten miles away from the base, hiding it between two large trucks that looked as if they hadn’t been moved in a while. She kept the handgun, after counting and finding three rounds still in the magazine — the assault rifle was much heavier than she thought, so she left it in the car — then walked all the way back out of the lot and onto the highway. Linda was tempted to try hitchhiking east on the highway toward the nearest contact point, but her handlers advised against that. Too many escapees got caught that way. The south side of the highway had numerous businesses and lighted parking lots along it, but the north side was mostly open fields of winter wheat turned mushy from melting snows, with a small river farther north beyond the trees. She crossed the highway at a dark place, as far as possible from streetlights, walked away from the highway to the tree line about a kilometer from the highway, then began to parallel it, heading eastbound. Linda passed a few businesses and parking lots between her and the highway, but none of the lights or fences extended to the tree line, so it was a fairly straight shot. Her handler was very explicit — stay away from roads, rivers, railroads, transmission lines, any sort of travel path.
Several hours later, she arrived at an intersection where a bridge took traffic north across the river, and where there was a tavern that she sometimes visited, still open and still inviting. Linda even thought she saw cars belonging to friends of hers, good friends that had known her for years. She was tired, aching, hungry, freezing cold, cut, bruised, and bleeding from crossing fences and snagged by branches and sticker bushes. She could stay hidden in the parking lot, wait for her friends to show, ask for help, maybe get a ride to someplace close to the contact point …
No, no, no, she admonished herself. Again, her handlers were very specific — stay away from everyone, no matter how close or trusted they were. Reluctantly, almost whimpering in pain and fear and weakness, she trudged through the ankle-deep, half-frozen mud behind the tavern, keeping to the shadows. She followed a dirt path toward the river and found another path that led under the bridge abutment. Under the bridge, she found some homeless persons huddled under blankets with tiny fires in buckets, drinking vodka and eating discarded food from the tavern, and again she considered asking for something, anything, to help ease the cold and hunger. She could either use the gun to buy food or threaten to kill someone if they didn’t help her. But she kept away, staying away from the hoboes and staying away from the narrow access road along the river’s edge without their detecting her presence. Leaving even that tiny bit of civilization was the hardest thing she ever had to do.
But as she disappeared back into the shadows once again, she heard sirens behind her. Two police cars had pulled up to the tavern, lights flashing. If she had stopped, even for five minutes, she would’ve been trapped. If she had talked to the hoboes, and they were later questioned by police, they would surely have betrayed her. How about that? she thought — maybe her handlers really knew what they were talking about!
By the time the dawn started to peek above the horizon, Linda had reached the contact spot. There was a small dirt parking lot next to the river beside another north-south bridge, where during the summer vacationers could launch rafts and float down the river toward the city. There used to be a small campground there, where rafters from farther upstream could spend the night, but a lack of funds and abuse by drug dealers and hoboes had caused the campground to fall into disuse and disrepair. Of the dozen campsites, only one still had a rickety picnic table on it. That was her contact point.
The ground was rocky and felt frozen, but there were plenty of trees and vegetation. Her job was to find a good hiding spot and wait. Sometime during daylight hours, her contact person would arrive at the contact point and somehow make himself known to her. She had to stay hidden the rest of the day and night. Surely, she thought, the hue and cry for her was out. Surely, she prayed, the network had heard of the murder on base and activated itself. Surely, she pleaded, her contact would realize she was on the move and show this morning.
But the time came and went, and no one showed. Tears flowed down her cheeks, and her lips trembled in fear and loneliness. Nothing. She had never felt so alone, so helpless.
Since it was now daytime and she was less than a kilometer from both the highway and the bridge — and if she could see cars, they might be able to see her — Linda had no choice but to crawl away to the densest part of the little patch of trees near the park, crawl into the deepest and darkest dirt gully she could find, and wait. The river was just a few meters away across the parking lot, but she didn’t dare try to get water in daytime; there was even a coffee and doughnut vendor in the parking lot across the highway to the south, selling his goods to workers arriving at the steel scrapyard and woodworking factory on the south side of the highway, and even in her hole she could smell the boiled dough and strong black coffee. She always had rolled-up pancake crepes with jam, fruit, or cream cheese inside and coffee every morning, and now the emptiness in her belly was beginning to turn into a dull ache.
This was going to be impossible, she thought grimly. She had practiced her procedures, memorized her directives, and thought through her moves for years, and all the time thought she could do it, if she ever had to. But it was just barely twelve hours since going on the run, and she doubted whether she could make it even another twelve hours. Her handler said it could take days to activate the network, and then it was up to the contact person to decide if it was safe enough to try to make contact. Even then, the actual procedure took days — Linda wasn’t supposed to contact the first person she saw, but had to verify simply by waiting and watching if he or she was the right one. Sleep was impossible — every sound, every car noise, every voice she heard was a potential captor.
From her hole, she could see the parking lot and campground. A few hoboes came around, searching the garbage cans. To Linda’s immense shock, moments after the hoboes arrived, they were jacked up by local police and taken away. The police were everywhere, but they were out of sight, immediately pouncing on anyone who looked suspicious. After the arrest, the police would do a short search of the area, checking nearby bushes and trees for any sign of anyone else’s presence. They would sweep denser bushes aside roughly with nightsticks, beating them and looking for evidence of anyone’s presence, checking behind and around any shrubs that might be large enough to conceal a person, then disappear as quickly as they appeared.
It was hopeless, Linda thought. The contact person would never dare come anywhere near here, ever. Her handler had warned her exactly what would happen. Eventually, her hunger, loneliness, hopelessness, weariness, and fear would cause her to do something stupid, and she would be nabbed, and just like that, the game would be over.
She burrowed down as deep as she could into the dirt, sobbing softly to herself, afraid to show even the tiniest bit of skin outside her hole. It began to rain, big fat cold sleety drops, then soon started to snow. She had never been so cold in her life, and she knew she would probably die of hypothermia before long. When darkness fell, she felt brave enough to eat some dirty wet snow for water and carefully pile leaves and branches around herself, and with a sort of crude nest made for herself, she at least felt strong enough to make it through the night. But it was hopeless, useless. The police were everywhere, and the killing of a fellow cop only made them more determined to get the killer.
She expected, then soon hoped, that the police would swoop down on her and take her away any moment. Even being gang-raped and sodomized by vengeful police officers in an MSB prison cell would be far better than freezing to death.