Delta Green - страница 39

Her pale green eyes darkened with fire.

“Please,” he added.

Aleksander Illiyich Maslov had been destined for stars. His grandfather had been a general during the Great Patriotic war, and his father surely would have attained the same status had he not been killed in an artillery accident when he was only a major.

His father left him the legacy of Colonel General Anatoly Shelepin, however. The two of them had attended, Schevchenko University together and entered the Red Army directly after graduation. After the elder Maslov died from the erupting shells inside a resupply trailer, then Major Shelepin had taken it upon himself to shepherd young Aleksander Illiyich, like a godson, through his academic training and his military career. Maslov had been posted to units where his abilities could shine. He had the proper staff schools as well as a combat stint with MiG-29s in Afghanistan listed in his dossier. When General Sheremetevo had obtained the Mako aerospace craft from the Americans, Shelepin had arranged Maslov’s transfer to the 5th Interceptor Wing’s training squadron. In a career path ever ascendant, Maslov had been stunned by two successive failures. The first came at the hands of Colonel Pyotr Mikhailovich Volontov, commander of the 5th Interceptor Wing, who had been assigned authority for the aerospace transport training program. Volontov, without allowance for excuse or a second chance, had terminated Maslov as unsuitable as a Mako command pilot. Though they shared the same ranks, Volontov was senior, and he had the full weight of General Vitaly Sheremetevo, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Red Air Force behind him. Even Shelepin’s intervention had not abrogated the orders.

His second failure, similar to the first as he perceived it, was also beyond his control. The Red Air Force had abruptly ceased to exist.

Maslov had been assigned to an interceptor wing near Sevastopol, on the tip of the Crimean peninsula when Anatoly Shelepin called him on the telephone: “If you value your life, Aleksander Illiyich, you must see that you are assigned to the next patrol flight. And when you are airborne, continue south to Aleppo in Syria. You will be allowed to land, and I will contact you later with instructions.”

He had known nothing of the coup attempt, but Maslov had learned long before to obey his adopted uncle. He and his friend, Major Boris Nikitin, also a failure of the Mako program, had taken off at midnight in their MiG-29s, and they had flown half their patrol, topping up their fuel bladders from an airborne tanker before diving below radar coverage. They had followed a low and straight course across the Black Sea, then illegally over Turkey before landing in Aleppo with only drops of jet fuel left in the tanks.

The minute he had made the decision to go, Maslov knew he had given up his arduous quest for a general’s stars.

He would not have them, but he had now proven Volontov wrong…

He had the stars!

They were all around him, starkly brilliant against the utter nothingness of space. Only twice before in the training program had he achieved orbit in space, and that was with another’s hands at the controls. This time, he was responsible, and it was exhilarating. Ecstasy beyond any he had ever known.

“Boris?”

Nikitin was in the rear seat of the MakoShark. He had been there almost around the clock since they had obtained the craft, learning the secret systems, voicing his amazement of the MakoShark advancements over the Mako subsystems practically on the hour.

“I still wish we had Cyrillic and metric equivalents for the instruments and computers, Aleks. My head spins from making constant translations.”

“You will become accustomed to it,” Maslov promised. Already, his own mind was accepting feet and miles and pounds without undue concern. Perhaps it was because he had had more training in English than Nikitin.

“Sixty-two miles from us, Aleks. Three minutes until contact.”

“I have armed the propulsion system of one of the Wasp II missiles for you.”