The Enemy

“Then they won’t do us any good. They’ll be flattened beyond recognition.”

“They were jacketed,” I said. “They won’t have broken up. We could weigh them, at least.”

“They haven’t found them.”

“Are they looking?”

“I don’t know.”

“They dug up any witnesses yet?”

“No.”

“Did they find Brubaker’s car?”

“No.”

“It’s got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and arrived at midnight or one o’clock. In a distinctive car. Aren’t they looking for it?”

“There’s something they’re not sharing. I can feel it.”

“Did Willard get there yet?”

“I expect him any minute.”

“Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up,” I said. “And tell him you heard the other thing wasn’t a training accident after all. That should make his day.”

Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer had stepped inside and she was shoulder to shoulder with the armory clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing through his logbook together.

“Look at this,” she said.

She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries. Trifonov had signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimeter pistol at seven-thirty on the evening of January fourth. He had signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.

“Why did he take it?” I said.

“We don’t ask for a reason,” the clerk said. “We just do the paperwork.”

We came out of the hangar and walked toward the accommodations block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers’ rides. Not many imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but mostly there were pickup trucks and big Detroit coupes, some of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tires. There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.

We detoured to take a look at it.

It was about ten years old. It looked immaculately clean, inside and out. It had been washed and waxed, thoroughly, within the last day or two. The wheel arches were clean. The tires were black and shiny. There was a coiled hose on the hangar wall, thirty feet away. We bent down and peered in through the windows. The interior looked like it had been soaked with detailing fluid and wiped and vacuumed. It was a two-seat car, but there was a parcel shelf. It was small, but probably big enough for a crowbar hidden under a coat. Summer knelt down and ran her fingers under the sills. Came up with clean hands.

“No grit from the track,” she said. “No blood on the seats.”

“No yogurt pot on the floor,” I said.

“He cleaned up after himself.”

We walked away. We went out through their main gate and locked Trifonov’s gun in the front of our Humvee. Then we turned around and headed back inside.

I didn’t want to involve the adjutant. I just wanted to get Trifonov out of there before anyone knew what was going down. So we went in through the mess kitchen door and I found a steward and told him to find Trifonov and bring him out through the kitchen on some kind of a pretext. Then we stepped back into the cold and waited. The steward came out alone five minutes later and told us Trifonov wasn’t anywhere in the mess.

So we headed for the cells. Found a soldier coming out of the showers and he told us where to look. We walked past Carbone’s empty room. It was quiet and undisturbed. Trifonov bunked three doors farther down. We got there. His door was standing open. The guy was right there in his room, sitting on the narrow cot, reading a book.

I had no idea what to expect. As far as I knew Bulgaria had no Special Forces. Truly elite units were not common inside the Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia had a pretty good airborne brigade, and Poland had airborne and amphibious divisions. The Soviet Union itself had a few Vysotniki tough guys. Apart from that, sheer weight of numbers was the name of the game, in the eastern part of Europe. Throw enough bodies into the fray, and eventually you win, as long as you regard two-thirds of them as expendable. And they did.

So who was this guy?