Strangers When We Meet Read online

  The only personal item of any kind was the eight-by-ten framed photo on the desk. The photographer had captured a pigtailed girl of five or six. She was holding a kitten up to the camera. Her gap-toothed grin was so mischievous that it drew an answering smile from Dodge.

  “Pretty little girl,” he commented when the major walked back into the living room.

  Her glance went to the photo. “So do I think.”

  “Is she your daughter?”

  He wasn’t prepared for the effect the simple question produced. Before his eyes, Larissa Petrovna’s face softened and a hint of a smile curved her mouth.

  “Da. That is my Katya.”

  Well, damn! The woman was a stunner even when encased in ice. Without it, she took on a transcendent beauty. Hoping to prolong the transformation, Dodge ventured another observation.

  “She looks like she’s a handful. A youngster with a lively spirit,” he interpreted, at her questioning look.

  “A most lively spirit.” Her almost-smile turned rueful. “She does not understand the meaning of nyet, that one.”

  For a few dangerous moments, Dodge stopped thinking of Larissa Petrovna as a Russian and the target he’d been sent to keep in his sights. She looked all too human as she gazed at the photo of her daughter. Human, and surprisingly fragile.

  Everyone had their weak point, some family secret or prized possession or passion that made them vulnerable. Dodge’s years in the field had taught him a number of innovative—and occasionally brutal—ways to discover and exploit those weaknesses. Yet as he studied Petrovna’s face, he found himself hoping he wouldn’t have to exploit this particular weakness.

  That thought stayed with him as he escorted her through the predawn darkness to the sedan. The temperature inside the vehicle was as cold as it was outside. From the corner of his eye, he caught the series of shivers that wracked his passenger.

  “Do you want to go back to your room for a coat?”

  “No.”

  “You sure? It’s supposed to warm up this afternoon, but the weather around here’s pretty unpredictable.”

  “I am sure. You will drive, please.”

  Dodge put the sedan in gear and waited for the engine to warm before he flipped on the heater. The hot air that gushed out would soon have him sweating under his flight suit and jacket, but he figured a little perspiration was better than nursing Larissa Petrovna through a bout of pneumonia.

  They waited for the other team members and escorts to claim their vehicles, then drove to the dining facility. Major Petrovna took a tray from the stack at the end of the self-serve counter and proceeded to fill a coffee mug and a plate with modest helpings of sliced peaches, scrambled eggs and bacon. Her teammates, however, appeared stunned by the array of choices offered. They broke into excited Russian and heaped plates and bowls to overflowing. Dodge took last place in line and signed the meal chit for the team.

  Petrovna ate sparingly and watched with barely disguised distaste as the heavyset Aleksei Bugarin went back for seconds, then thirds. The scarred skin on the side of her chin was drawn tight when she glanced pointedly at her watch.

  “It grows late,” she told the FSB officer coolly. “We must leave.”

  Bugarin swiped the last of the gravy from his plate with two slices of bread, crammed them into his mouth and nodded.

  The in-brief at the 90th Missile Wing headquarters lasted for more than two hours. The wing battle staff filled the high-backed blue chairs around the oval conference table, with three seats reserved at the table for the Russian team. Dodge sat beside his charge, Lieutenant Tate and SMSgt. Lewis behind theirs.

  Tom Jordan, the wing’s treaty compliance officer, took the podium to the left of the oval conference table. Major Petrovna took the podium to the right. As the sides came up on screen, Jordan briefed it and the major translated it into Russian for her teammates. They began with a detailed recap of the provisions of the new START treaty and progressed to an even more detailed discussion of the inspections.

  “The first will take place at Alpha-7.”

  Jordan aimed his pointer beam at a satellite image that included a three-state region. Highlighted on the image was a schematic of the 90th Missile Wing’s launch facilities and silos. Dodge knew the location of the Minuteman III silos weren’t classified. He also knew anyone could use Google to find the same information. As one leg of a triad that included submarine and aircraft-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, the land-based missiles underscored the basic concept of deterrence. By letting the other guy know you had the power to take him out, you—hopefully—discouraged him from trying to take you out. Still, it gave him a goosey feeling to see those silos so nakedly exposed.

  “The inspections will occur in conjunction with scheduled downtime for maintenance,” Jordan said. “Ninetieth Missile Wing personnel will conduct the maintenance, supplemented by Boeing personnel as required. Air-force security personnel will secure the site before, during and after each inspection.”

  Jordan worked his way methodically through slide after slide. Thin and wiry, he clearly showed his former military training in his erect carriage and neatly trimmed mustache. Dodge could only admire his grasp of the most minute details of a treaty that had taken almost a decade to negotiate, debate and push through the legislative bodies of nations.

  When the meeting broke up, the Russians gathered their notes and paper copies of the slides. Dodge took Tom Jordan off to the side and advised him of Major Petrovna’s strange reaction yesterday. Jordan made a note of it and suggested Dodge apprise the Office of Special Investigations detachment commander, as well.

  “Already have.”

  Dodge turned away, intending to collect his team for the trip out to Alpha-7. The sight of his fellow escort officers reaching for their cold-weather parkas had him swinging back to Jordan.

  “One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s pretty frosty in the mornings. The Russians only brought a couple of small suitcases each. I’m not sure they have any cold-weather gear. I can check the necessary kits out of supply, right?”

  “Section five-C-twenty of the protocol covers safety or special equipment,” Jordan confirmed. “That includes cold-weather gear.”

  He’d have Sergeant Lewis detour by supply on the way to the rendezvous point for the convoy out to Alpha-7, Dodge decided. Lieutenant Tate he sent to secure box lunches for their team.

  The convoy that would take them to Alpha-7 included a contingent of heavily armed security forces in a lead Jeep and a trailing armored personnel carrier. The convoy wasn’t transporting live warheads, but any penetration of an active ICBM silo called for robust security.

  Trucks loaded with maintenance personnel and support equipment lined up behind the Jeep. In the center of the convoy was the PT—the payload transporter. A long white boxcar on wheels, it would be angled upright before being rolled over the launch tube. Maintenance crews would then open the blast door that covered the silo, hoist the missile into the PT and perform necessary maintenance to the warheads or guidance systems while shielded from overhead spy satellites. In this case, however, the Russians would be observing the process up close and personal.

  The blue bus that would transport the observers to Alpha-7 was waiting with its engine idling. Sergeant Lewis drove up as Dodge and Lieutenant Tate were shepherding their charges onto the bus. Just in time, too. The morning wind hadn’t lost its bite. It would be even more bone-cutting out on the plains, with no buildings within a hundred-mile radius to block it.

  Lewis joined them in the bus and handed out the parkas. They were designed for wear with military field uniforms. The tiger-striped camouflage jackets were water-resistant, windproof and breathable, with a moisture-wicking barrier for maximum com fort and durability in even the harshest conditions. The Russian males accepted them gratefully, but Petrovna’s blond brows snapped together.

  “Why do you give us these? We cannot accept such expensive gifts.�
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  “They’re not gifts. They’re standard-issue cold-weather gear, covered by section five-C-ten of the inspection protocol.”

  Her lips pursed, Petrovna treated him to a long stare. The vigorous gust that blasted through the open bus door settled the matter.

  “Very well. We will take them. But the section you refer to is five-C-twenty.”

  The convoy rolled out of the staging area a short time later. Luckily, Alpha-7 was only a little over forty minutes from the base. Some of the more remote launch sites required a drive of three or more hours. Being out on the high plains that long when blizzards howled in from the north wasn’t fun, Dodge knew from personal experience.

  The convoy followed a paved state highway for thirty miles or so before turning off onto one of the dirt-and-gravel roads that bisected the Wyoming countryside. This one ran past miles of fenced-in range dotted with herds of longhorns. A few stunted cottonwoods marked a meandering creek. Tall prairie grasses rippled before the breeze like a sea of football fans doing the wave. Every so often, the helo providing aerial security for the convoy would pass overhead and beat the grass on either side of the road flat.

  Each time the chopper swooped by, Dodge’s hands twitched. It stuck in his craw to be chugging along on a bus instead of up there, skimming above the hills with the freedom of a hawk.

  The convoy finally braked to a stop in the middle of nowhere. Literally nowhere. The plains rolled for miles in every direction, without so much as a barbed-wire fence or tree-lined creek to break their brown monotony. The only sign of human intervention was the slender white radar tower that poked above the next hill.

  Engines idling, the long line of vehicles puffed vapor fumes into the cloudless sky while the security-team chief radioed the Missile Alert Facility some fifteen miles distant. The purpose of his call was to advise the MAF that the convoy would be penetrating Alpha-7’s outer security zone. He would also pass on a list of personnel entering the launch site for verification by the MAF.

  It took some time to complete the personnel checks and deactivate the active and passive sensors guarding the missile’s outer field. The security system was so sensitive a passing coyote or antelope could—and often did—trip the sensors. Security forces from Warren responded to hundreds of alarm activations a year, never knowing whether they’d encounter a herd of grazing pronghorn antelope or a wild-eyed terrorist group attempting to infiltrate the site. That possibility kept everyone in the missile business on their toes.

  After the MAF cleared them for entry, the convoy revved up. A few moments later, the vehicles topped a small rise. Directly ahead lay the fenced-in rectangle that comprised the site. From here, it looked like little more than a flat patch of gravel surrounded by waving prairie grass.

  Even when they got closer, the launch site gave little hint of the awesome destructive power lurking just beneath its surface. Aside from the slender white radar tower that received and transmitted data from the security sensors, there wasn’t much to see inside the fenced enclosure. A flat manhole cover protected the shaft that allowed personnel access to the silo. A massive concrete slab covered the launch tube itself. Steel doors, laid flat against the gravel, gave access to an underground support building which housed the batteries and support equipment necessary to keep the missile on prolonged strategic alert.

  Before allowing anyone into the fenced enclosure, security forces armed with automatic assault weapons positioned themselves around its perimeter. Once they were in place, maintenance personnel backed the payload transporter in and maneuvered it directly over the blast doors.

  The bus driver parked just inside the fenced enclosure. Like the maintenance and security vehicles, he kept the bus pointed away from the silo and toward the gate for fast egress if commanded by the distant Missile Alert Facility. Dodge got off the bus first to make sure security set up a rope barrier as required by the protocol. When that was done, the passengers descended.

  Their first order of business was to verify the site they were standing on. Captain Tyschenko extracted a GPS locator from his briefcase. The device received signals from GLONASS, the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Global Positioning Satellite System. Originally developed by the military, commercial variations of GPS were now used by everyone from soldiers of fortune to Ford-pickup owners. The Russian team wasted no time verifying and recording the exact coordinates of Alpha-7.

  Watching them at work once again stirred the goosey feeling Dodge had experienced during the in-brief. He knew that every U.S. Missile silo was under constant surveillance by spy satellites. He also knew U.S. satellites peered down with the same unwinking vigilance on Russian missile fields. Somehow, that didn’t make him feel better about the fact that the Russians were standing right here at ground zero. He remained to one side, saying nothing while his charges finished their preliminary work. After that, there was nothing to do but wait.

  “Anyone want coffee?” Sergeant Lewis asked. “This is going to take a while.”

  He passed around the foam cups he’d obtained from the twenty-gallon boilermaker loaded in one of the trucks. With a word of thanks, Dodge sipped at the steaming brew and watched the activity taking place within the enclosure.

  Larissa Petrovna accepted one, as well. Her cheeks pinked from the wind, she sipped at the steaming brew. “Interesting, is it not?”

  “And complicated.”

  “It is not easy, getting into a nuclear-missile silo,” the Russian observed drily. “Yours or ours.”

  “You won’t find me complaining about that.”

  He divided his attention between the Russians and the maintainers positioning the payload transporter over the blast doors. Like a camel hunkering down, the PT’s rear end angled down. Then slowly, so slowly, its front end rose until it pointed into the sky.

  That done, the maintenance personnel prepared to descend the shaft that would give them access to the missile itself.

  “Watch this,” Lewis said as a couple of beefy maintainers wrestled loose the lug nuts on the weather shield covering the shaft. “The minute those guys lift the weather shield, they trigger the inner-zone alarms. The security-team chief has only seconds to enter his codes.”

  Evidently, the team chief punched in his codes in time. No alarms sounded. No sirens blared. One by one, the maintenance crew disappeared into the shaft.

  “There’s a second door about twenty feet down,” Lewis explained. “They have to unlock more combinations and wait through another sequence of timed delays. Once inside, they’ll disconnect the umbilical and hook the hoist to the missile.”

  Dodge had downed all of his coffee and was working on a refill when several maintenance troops reemerged and initiated the sequence to open the blast door. An ominous rumble echoed like thunder across the site. Slowly, the massive concrete slab rolled out from under the payload transporter. Just as slowly, the hoist raised the upper portion of the Minuteman III into the PT.

  Finally, the maintenance-team chief came back and announced they were ready for the observers.

  “We have to stay within the roped-off area,” Dodge reminded his charges. “And you need to coordinate any pictures with me.”

  “We know this,” Petrovna replied brusquely.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m sure you do.”

  His boots crunching on gravel, Dodge followed the maintenance-team chief across the site. A moment later, he entered the long, narrow boxcar and came nose to nose with a nuke.

  The scheduled maintenance took almost five hours. The sun was dropping out of a sky streaked with flaming reds and gold by the time the convoy reassembled for the return trip.

  As interesting as he’d found the entire process, Dodge was glad to head back. There was something real sobering about being up close and personal with a nuclear warhead. He took a couple of steps toward the bus before he noticed Major Petrovna had slowed to a stop a short distance away.

  Arms wrapped around her waist, she stared at the jagged peaks of the Rockies.
The wind played with a silky, pale gold tendril that had escaped her severe twist. When Dodge moved to stand beside her, he had to fight a ridiculous urge to hook the wayward strand behind her ear.

  “These mountains are so beautiful,” she murmured. “Taller, I think, than the Caucasus.”

  “And then some,” he agreed.

  “My parents would take me to the mountains when I was a girl,” she said quietly, as if mesmerized by the glorious scene. “Now I take my Katya, so she may breathe the air. It is so clean, the air of the Caucasus. Like here. Katya could breathe here.”

  “Does your daughter have respiratory problems?”

  The joy she’d taken from the stunning vista faded. He could almost feel her shutting down as she answered slowly, reluctantly.

  “The apartment building where we lived… My husband and Katya and I… It took fire.”

  Dodge knew she was a widow. Knew, as well, that her husband had been killed in a fire. That didn’t lessen the impact of her stark recital.

  “Katya was then a baby,” she said, her gaze on the distant mountains. “She survives the fire, but her lungs are damaged.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “Da.”

  The word was little more than a whisper, almost lost in the shiver that wracked the woman from head to toe. Unthinking, Dodge stepped around her, caught the zipper tab of her parka and tugged it up until the high collar came together to frame her face.

  Her startled gaze flew up to lock with his. Her eyes were dark pools of blue, her mouth lush and ripe. Little puffs of breath escaped her lips and clouded on the cold air. Dodge thought they came a little faster with each second the two of them stood toe-to-toe. His pulse had sure as hell kicked into a gallop. He was still trying to rein it in when the major took a quick step back.

  “It’s not…” She stopped, swallowed and dropped her voice by fifty or so degrees. “It’s not permitted to touch.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She turned away, leaving him to deal with the fact that he wanted to kiss her. Badly. And would have, if they hadn’t been out in the middle of a windswept plain with a nuclear missile at their backs and a convoy full of personnel looking on. Calling himself ten kinds of a fool, Dodge wrestled the almost overwhelming urge to haul her back into his arms and take a taste of those luscious lips.