Duel of Assassins by Dan Pollock Page B

or less in
that line of work, it seemed to make sense. Besides, we’re closer to the chow
here.”
    He gestured toward the forward galley, where a flight
steward—a uniformed staff sergeant—was busy stowing things in cold lockers.
Farther aft, just behind the door on the left side, a master sergeant with
headset was working a communications console that looked designed for two. Then
the chief flight engineer emerged from the flight deck, swung the cabin door
shut and locked it down.
    Taras glanced out the portside window in time to see the
truck-mounted boarding stairs backing away from the left wing. They were
rolling forward without benefit of safety lecture or seat-belt check.
    “I hope the taxpayers don’t hear about this,” Taras joked.
    “There’s lots of stuff happens on these birds nobody knows
about, until maybe years later. Like back when Henry the K was conducting
top-secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, he used SAM 26000 and SAM
970 as his private taxis—all over the globe. Officially, they called ’em
‘training missions.’”
    “Those were pretty important missions,” Taras said.
    “Hey, all I know is, if you’re on here, so is yours.”
    Brunton outlined the flight plan as they taxied toward
takeoff. They would be heading northeast up over Quebec and the Labrador
Peninsula, making landfall over Belfast. They would stop at the U.S. Air Force
base in Tempelhof, West Berlin, just long enough to refuel and get diplomatic
clearance for Soviet air space, which would entail taking on a Soviet
navigator. They would land at Vnukovo, the VIP airfield, in about eleven
hours—midnight Moscow time the next day.
    *
    It was about a half-hour out that the euphoria induced by
his surroundings and his sister’s deliverance began to wear off, and Taras
found himself overtaken by thoughts first of Marcus, then of Charlotte. He was
looking out the window, following the shimmering moonpath on the St. Lawrence
far below, when she gradually coalesced out there in the night, usurping his
own faint reflection in the Plexiglas.
    If only he had been permitted to tell her the whole of
it—the deal to free Luiza, Anatoly and the boys. Surely, then, she would have
understood his going.
    As it was, she’d have to trust him, dammit. Don’t be too
desperate, he told the astral image in the window. Don’t for God’s sake
go putting some damn horny stranger in your bed. I’m coming back, no matter
what you said, and I still intend to be part of your crazy life.
    And he really did. Despite Charlotte’s stubbornness, her
rapid, righteous opinions on every topic you could mention, her stormy moods,
insane hours and constant traveling—despite all these things, Taras had always
found her wonderfully feminine and vulnerable. And her fierce determination to
have a child summoned up his own deepest, most protective instincts.
    But perhaps it was her honesty that Taras prized the most.
Charlotte’s need to reveal herself, and to probe constantly and painfully for
his own thoughts and feelings—and not be stopped when he went into what she
called “Slavic withdrawal”—had from the first created real intimacy between
them.
    They had met on an autumn afternoon two years before at a
house party in Chevy Chase. After lunch, while the men huddled around the big
TV in the den to watch football and the women held forth among the gleaming
Chippendale in the living room, Taras had retreated toward the back of the
sprawling house with his dessert plate. An elegant, angular, dark-haired woman
had followed him onto the back veranda. Taras gauged her perhaps five years his
senior (she was actually six), and was intrigued at once, sensing—especially in
the challenging brown eyes—both intelligence and appetite for life. She had
launched, after the breeziest of introductions (“Call me Charlie”), into a
witty commentary on weekly NFL games as essential American male bonding
rituals.
    Taras had reacted with appropriate