Hunter Killer by James Rouch Read Free Book Online

building dead ahead.’ Again his hand flirted with the autopilot cut-off, but withdrew. ‘Those sleds you’re going down on travel quite a ways after they touch. There’s three in the drop, so allowing for intervals between each, on an island two miles long I have to find a half mile stretch of reasonably flat land, blindfolded.’
    ‘Is there anything else, or is that the extent of the horror story?’ Hogg heard the pilot, but kept his eyes on the Russian. The man sat impassively, his heavy- jowelled face revealing no hint of emotion or reaction to the words he must have understood.
    ‘You want more?’ The pilot turned round in his seat. ‘Alright then, try this on. These big babies were never meant for this work. Starlifters were designed as strategic transports, heavy load, long haul, that’s their business. OK, so this is one of the early models and it’s been modified and re-allocated to tactical re-supply work, but it still isn’t happy hedge-hopping about the place, piddling about with nickel and dime loads that a prop-job could handle.’
    ‘Just so long as you put us down on the right island, that’s all we ask.’ Revell cut into the exchange.
‘That we can promise, we’re just not offering any guarantees as to what sort of condition your men and equipment will be in by the time the sleds come to a stop.’
    Ignoring the pilot’s chuckle, Revell found his own eyes straying to the Russian. It was the first time he’d worked with one of the many deserters from the Warsaw Pact, armies. The man was an archetypical Russian; stocky build, dark deep-set eyes, with heavy features that betrayed little of his thoughts and no hint of any capacity for humour. Perhaps it was because of his appearance, and the fact that his actual name, Vasili Shalamov, did not trip readily from the tongue, that everyone had taken to-calling him Boris. He wondered what the man’s reasons were not just for deserting - God knows there were enough reasons for men to leave the Soviet forces by any means they could - but for volunteering his services to NATO. The lengthy screening process he’d have been subjected to should have weeded him out if he was a plant, but some always got through and had built a mountain of distrust towards their sort as a whole. Only rarely were they assigned any task other than rear-area or pioneer work, and then only under the very strictest supervision, though with the growing numbers involved, there were rumours of the formation of Free-Russian combat units.
‘Is the island inhabited?’
    The accent was impeccable textbook English that would not have been out of place on a BBC news bulletin. Revell hadn’t been told what rank the Russian had held, but he must have at the very least been the equivalent of a technical sergeant, first-grade. His immediate reaction to the question was to ignore it. The instinct sprang in part from his natural distaste for contact of any sort with a people that two years of barbaric warfare had taught him to hate, and partly from a distrust that all the assurances from I-Corp could not shake off. But damn it, the man was going with them, was taking the same risks, more if he came to be captured, and in any event he’d soon learn the truth for himself. 
    ‘No, not now. Before the war the west coast of Sweden was a popular tourist area in summer. There’s a few holiday homes on the island, mostly the converted houses of what used to be a small fishing community, and the remains of an old castle at the northern tip. The rest of it is much the same as the hundreds of other islands along the coast.’
‘You still have much to learn about the Russian mind.’ Boris watched the fuel gauges on the engineer’s panel ticking away the fractions of tons of fuel with each mile they travelled. ‘In the West to be among a crowd is to be safe; in Russia, to be among a crowd is to invite danger.’
‘Either way, you’re about to find out.’ The pilot eased his headphones off