The Nightmare begins

Chapter Eleven

Major Vladmir Karamatsov glanced to Captain Natalia Tiemerovna at his side in the gathering darkness. He could just make out the outline of her profile, the skin of her face smudged with black camouflage stick, a black silk bandanna tied over her hair, her hands fitted with tight black leather fingerless gloves, a close-fitting black jumpsuit covering the rest of her lithe body. He noticed her hands again—she held an assault rifle the way most women held a baby, he noted.

A smile crossed his thin lips, his black camouflage-painted cheeks creasing at the corners of his mouth into heavy lines.

Karamatsov upped the safety catch on the blued-black Smith & Wesson Model 59 in his right hand. Like all the people in his special KGB liquidation squad, he carried strictly American or Western European-made firearms. In the event that they encountered a substantial American force, regular or irregular, there was nothing to identify himself or any of his handpicked, personally trained team as Soviet—their English was perfect midwestern, all of them trained, as was Karamatsov himself, at the KGB's top-secret "Chicago" espionage school. They had read American books and newspapers, watched videotapes of American television, worn American-made clothes, trained on American-made firearms. American food, American slang—everything so American that they soon thought, talked and acted like Americans who had lived in America all their lives—with the one exception being their often-tested allegiance to the KGB.

Like most of the top clandestine operatives in the KGB, Karamatsov—like the girl beside him in the darkness—had gone to the Chicago school in his mid-teens. He had grown up playing basketball and betting on the World Series. For years, Karamatsov's one outside interest besides chess had been American football. He had arranged to attend three Super Bowls and had sat in the crowd happily munching hot dogs; drinking beer and shouting and cheering no less earnestly than everyone around him. He had been Arnold Warshawski of South Bend, Indiana, or Craig Bates of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or someone else. Karamatsov was a past master at dying his hair, creating life-mask wrinkles or built-up noses.

Sometimes he would stroke his cheek expecting to find a full beard and remember suddenly that that had been yesterday—instead of forty-three with a red beard and broken nose he was twenty-eight with blond hair, a small mustache and a nose that looked as though it had been the model for a Roman or Greek statue.

And very frequently over the years he had worked with the magnificent Natalia—sometimes they had posed as husband and wife, sometimes as brother and sister, sometimes as father and daughter. He liked her best as she looked now, the black hair just past the shoulders, her own strikingly dark blue eyes rather than contacts which had made them appear brown or green, her own slightly upturned nose—the figure that he had warmed himself beside so many nights. She was technically his second-in-command, his right hand. Her heart was too soft, sometimes, he reflected; but it had never interfered with her work.

He stared into the darkness, trying to make out the shapes of the others of his team who were there— Nicolai, Yuri, Boris, Constantine… he could not see them and Karamatsov smiled because of this.

His head itched under the black watch cap he wore. He scratched the itch, checked the Rolex watch on his wrist and felt again in the darkness the safety catch on the fifteen-shot 9mm pistol he held, checked the position of the tiny blue Chiefs Special .38 in the small of his back, checked the 9mm MAC-10 slung from his shoulder.

He watched the face of the Rolex, and as the hand swept into position, he raised up from his low crouch and started into a dead run, Natalia—as she always was, he thought comfortably—beside him, ready to die for him. The ranch house was just beyond the end of the bracken and as he reached the clearing, he could see the others of the team breaking from the shadows as well.

There was gunfire coming from the house, slow as though from a bolt action rifle. A shotgun went off in the darkness—none of his men carried a shotgun and he cursed. He kept on running, the pistol raised in his hand, 9mm slugs—115-grain jacketed hollow points—spinning from its muzzle toward the plate glass front of the building. He could hear glass shattering. There was a faster-working rifle now firing into his team in the darkness, and he tried to make out the sound. As he turned to bear his pistol down onto the suspected target, he turned to his left and saw Natalia, down on one knee, the H-K assault rifle to her shoulder, firing steady three-shot bursts, the window that had been Karamatsov's projected target shattering and even in the near total darkness the ill-defined shape of a body falling forward through the glass and into the bed of white flowers just outside.

Karamatsov started running again, first to reach the front door, kicking at the lock, which held, then stepping back and blasting at it with the MAC-11 on full auto. Natalia was beside him, her left foot smashing toward the lock, kicking the shot-through mechanism away, swinging the door inward. Karamatsov rolled through.

The house was in near total darkness. He fired the MAC-11 at a flash of brightness, his gun going empty on him. Rather than swapping magazines, he reached for the Model 59 pistol—he gauged there were at least eight rounds left in it.

There was another flash in the darkness and he fired twice, hearing a moaning sound then a heavy thud as there was another gunshot, the fireburst of the muzzle going off in the direction of the ceiling.

He stood in a crouch, his fists wrapped around the pistol butt, the first finger of his right hand poised against the revolverlike trigger of the auto-loading pistol.

He could hear the rustle of Natalia's clothes as she moved through the darkness.

"There is no electric power here, Vladmir."

"Lights—and on guard," Karamatsov shouted. There was a clicking sound, followed immediately by a second similar sound and suddenly the room was bathed in light.

He glanced obliquely at the powerful lanterns now in the middle of the floor, staying out of the circle of light to guard against still another defender being alive somewhere in the house.

"I don't think Chambers is here—President Chambers," Natalia added as an afterthought and walked toward Karamatsov, standing beside and a little behind him, the H-K in her hands, its muzzle moving like a wand through the darkness.

Karamatsov put his arm around her shoulders, whispering, "As always—you are my right arm, Natalia."

Then Karamatsov moved away from her, issuing orders to the men standing on the edge of the wall of darkness.