Revolution (22 page)

The general wished them good luck. “For
reasons of security, I cannot make radio contact with you once you
cross into Russian airspace. Once you leave, though, the pilot will
contact me. Good luck and good hunting.”

If we can find Anastasia, if we can find
where the main lab is, Harry thought.
If
had to be the
biggest word in the English language. “Well, let’s get going.”

The pilot clambered on board and started the
engine, and they taxied smoothly down the runway. The front seat
was small and torn, and there was very little room to maneuver. The
plane also creaked and shook once they were airborne. Silence ruled
as Harry didn’t know what to say and the pilot didn’t offer much in
the way of conversation, either. The only thing he did during the
first thirty minutes was to notify the general of their position,
but then he turned the radio off.

Additionally, it was noisy and cold. The
pilot wore a heavy bomber jacket over his army fatigues, but Harry
wore nothing more than a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. “No have heat
in plane,” the pilot said, glancing over and catching Harry in
mid-shiver. “Sorry for inconvenience. You have fur, yes?”

“It’s not enough,” Harry replied, teeth
chattering. While stealing a quick look at Istvan, he noticed that
the little pig-man had found a blanket and was now snuggling under
it, fast asleep. Some people had all the luck. “What happens at the
border? How are we going to get past the Russians?”

“Sneak past them,” the answer came. “There
are always two men there in small box. It is called sentry post,
yes?” He continued gesturing with his arm in the fashion of a
railroad crossing bar going up and down. “It is like gate. It will
be dark. They will probably be drunk.”

Let’s hope so
was Harry’s sole thought
as they cruised on through the darkness. They were flying below
radar level, but all the same, he expected the military to open
fire on them any second. As it turned out, it wasn’t enemy fire
that threatened them, but simply... fire.

Roughly ten minutes from their target, the
smell of something burning entered Harry’s nostrils. “I smell
smoke,” he said. He trained his nose in the direction where the
smoke seemed to be coming from. “It’s, uh, I think it’s coming from
underneath us.”

Immediately, the pilot got an alarmed look on
his face. “This is old plane. Wiring is bad, so I check.”

Keeping one hand on the wheel, the man bent
over and lifted a board from underneath the pilot’s seat. A wall of
smoke rushed in, making both of them cough. The pilot sat up and
opened the window to air out the cockpit. Istvan woke up and asked
in a thoroughly terrified voice, “What is happening?”

“Plane’s on fire,” said Harry in a
matter-of-fact voice, wondering if this was how he was going to go
out. He’d never really thought about dying before. Now, he did. He
looked around, but there didn’t appear to be any parachutes...

Cursing, the pilot pressed a button on the
control panel. “We are on auto-pilot now.” He took a small handheld
fire extinguisher from under his seat and began spraying. A second
later, he stopped, shook the cylinder and said, “Damn this thing! I
cannot put out fire.”

The thought of
wonderful, this couldn’t
happen at a better time
coursed through Harry’s mind. “How far
are we from the border?” he yelled over the roar of the motor. It
took a massive effort to stop his voice from shaking and he
wondered if he’d been successful.

“Maybe three kilometers,” the pilot answered.
“I must put plane down in field.”

“This is bad idea,” Istvan nervously opined
from the back seat, sitting up now and trembling with fear. “This
is very bad idea.”

“Have you got better one?” the pilot enquired
in a voice that could have killed fresh flowers. “Be quiet, piggy,
I put plane down.”

Gripping the steering column, he pushed
buttons and pulled levers, but it didn’t stop the plane from
dropping and dropping fast. The smoke got thicker and a flame came
up and singed his feet. Waving it away and pulling his legs up out
of harm’s way, Harry saw the tops of farms and vast fields of
grain. “We are close!” the pilot yelled. “I put her down now.”

The ground came up fast to meet them.
Wrenching the yoke back and forth, the pilot fought for control and
Istvan let out a high keening sound from his position. By now,
Harry was thoroughly terrified. He put his head down and prayed for
something good to happen.

A few seconds later, the plane shuddered as
it touched down. It zigzagged unsteadily, Istvan’s keening got
louder, and the pilot yelled for him to shut up. Harry thought this
would certainly be the end of everything. A sense of relief
overwhelmed him when the plane slammed into and then through a
series of haystacks and finally came to a teeth-jarring stop nose
down in the field.

However, there was no time to relax. “We must
go,” the pilot said in a matter-of-fact voice. “There is too much
fire.”

“C’mon, Istvan,” Harry urged and snatched his
companion from the back seat. They’d gotten around thirty feet away
when the downed plane caught fire and exploded. They hunkered down
in the field and watched it burn.

Someone in the distance shouted. The natives
had suddenly become restless. “Border is that way,” the pilot said.
“We go now.”

With quick steps, he set off at a fast clip.
Harry and Istvan followed him into the darkness. Along the way,
Harry asked what they would do if the Russians fired on them. “That
is good question,” the pilot answered. “Let me think.”

He took out his pistol and cocked it. “This
might be answer.”

Silence then ruled for the next ten minutes.
As they neared the border, Harry saw that the crossing was on a
dirt road maybe twenty feet wide, with a small guardhouse on one
side of it. “The Russians control this part of the border,” the
pilot said. “It is joint effort between our two countries, but I no
like it. It lets too many bad people in.” He gave a sideways glance
at Istvan, one filled with scorn.

The little pig-man caught the look. “I am
Hungarian. I was before the bad people change me. I love my own
country.”

“I do, too,” the pilot replied.

Oh great, another war about to break out,
Harry thought as he surveyed the scene. The guards, two men in
brown and red Russian uniforms, came out of the room. One of them
took out a package of cigarettes. He offered one to the other man
and they lit up and started to talk.

Squinting through the darkness, Harry saw
that they were wearing pistols at their sides. Both men had machine
guns slung around their shoulders. Some good news appeared, though.
Behind the sentry box was a jeep. That would be useful. “First off,
guys, cool it. We have to get by those two dudes up ahead.”

Both men quit bickering and the pilot trained
his pistol on the guards. “I kill them both,” he said.

An idea popped into Harry’s head that didn’t
involve shooting anyone. “I have a better plan,” he said and
pointed to the guards. “Istvan, take a walk.”

The little pig-man turned to him, startled.
“You want me to walk in front of them?”

“That’s the idea.”

Looking extremely doubtful, Istvan strolled
out of their hiding position, holding up his hands and saying
slowly in English, “I surrender. I surrender.”

Both guards ran over to Istvan and
immediately started yelling at him. The little man sat on the
ground and repeated his
I-give-up
message. The Russians
continued to yell at him, with one of the guards punctuating his
questions by kicking Istvan in the butt a few times.

Harry got ready. “Take the man on the right,”
he said to the pilot. “Hand to hand—I got the one on the left.”

A grunt came his way. “One Serb is better
than two Russians.”

Swiftly and silently, they converged on the
soldiers. Istvan put his head down and covered it with his arms.
The Russians never saw what was coming as the pilot smashed his
target behind the head and the man fell. Harry spun the other
Russian around, caught his shocked look and clocked him with a
right hook that knocked him cold.

The pilot observed the short and sweet fight
with respect in his eyes. “Nice,” he commented. “We tie up,
yes?”

“Good idea.”

After tying up the soldiers, they relieved
them of their weapons and took the extra ammo they found in the
sentry post. “What we do now?” the pilot asked.

“Start searching and follow him,” Harry said
and pointed to Istvan who’d dropped to the ground and was already
snuffling around.

The pilot searched the guards, came up with a
key and after pocketing it, smashed the radio and computer in the
guardhouse as a precaution. He went to the jeep, fired it up and
joined Harry. “What we look for?” he asked.

“We’ve got our tracker,” Harry said. “We wait
for him to catch a scent.”

A second later, Istvan said excitedly while
waving his hoof, “Something was here. I have found something.”

The pilot eyed the ground with a dubious
expression on his face. He shivered slightly in the cool wind.
Siberia was not the warmest place around even in the summer and had
an extremely short growing season. Harry also shivered, but stopped
shaking when Istvan suddenly broke off his search. “What’s wrong?”
the pilot asked.

Dark though it was Harry saw the look of
uncertainty in his companion’s eyes. “I have lost trail,” he said.
“They enter here and now... I do not know.”

With his admission, Harry felt his heart sink
a little lower. The pilot suggested finding shelter as soon as
possible. “It will be very cold soon.”

After Istvan climbed in the back of the jeep,
they set off. Every hundred yards or so, they stopped so that
Istvan could continue his search-and-sniff routine. He maintained
his on-all-fours stance, kept his nose trained to the dirt, but he
didn’t find any clues as to the whereabouts of Anastasia or the
mutant army.

After another twenty minutes of fruitless
searching, the pilot called a halt to things. His teeth had begun
to chatter, Istvan was weaving and Harry felt strung out by the
tension. “We must find shelter,” the pilot said. “I keep
driving.”

Istvan hopped in the back seat and curled up.
The jeep shot forward through miles of empty land. Harry wondered
if they’d ever find some place to pass out in this wilderness. It
seemed that only the truly hardy or the foolhardy would live out
there.

Fortunately, a few minutes later, they
happened upon an abandoned farmhouse in a state of severe
disrepair. They cautiously entered and found nothing of note, but
there were some threadbare blankets strewn around a small room with
wooden floors that creaked under their weight.

The pilot made a quick check of the upstairs
and came down again, shaking his head. “There is no one here but
us. We stay here tonight and try tomorrow,” he said. “I no leave
without your friend. General Slobovic order me to do so. You and
pig-man sleep. I stand guard.”

Harry gratefully accepted, but even though
Istvan immediately passed out, he couldn’t. The thought of what
might be happening to Anastasia kept him awake for a long time. He
listened to the sounds of the wind and for the sounds of monsters
approaching in the night.

Morning came and it was cold. Harry awoke in the
middle of the bare room, shivering. Immediately, he sprang to his
feet, his body tensed for a possible attack. There was none. His
body felt stiff and sore so he took a few minutes to stretch out
and limber up. Opening up the door, he stepped out to survey the
land. The plain was empty save for the three of them and a field of
grass that blew from the early morning wind.

Fingers of yellow and orange poked through
the cloud cover and a few seconds later, the sun came out,
accompanied by a harsh gust of wind. Glancing behind him, he saw
Istvan still sleeping soundly, snoring away. It seemed as if he
could sleep through anything.

As for the pilot, he remained on duty,
walking around with his pistol at the ready. He, like Slobovic and
Bartok, enjoyed his tobacco. A plume of bluish-gray smoke, heavy
and foul smelling, came Harry’s way. The stink made him wrinkle his
nose in disgust.

A second later, the pilot strode over,
rubbing red-rimmed eyes. “I see nothing and hear nothing all
night,” he said in a soft voice and then yawned. “I listen for
anything strange, but I hear nothing. You... you can smell these
people?”

“Sometimes,” Harry answered. He was testing
the air, checking for anything unusual, but all he got were odors
of mice, rats and worms as they turned over the earth. Nothing
pungent or gamy was out there. When Istvan woke up, he’d try to
find the trail again. “Sometimes I can. Not now. Nothing’s out
there.”

He wondered how they were going to get back,
assuming they found Anastasia and survived. For him, there was no
going back, not until he did what had to be done. If he couldn’t be
with his girlfriend, then there was no point in returning. As a
just-in-case
idea, he asked the pilot. The man, still
bleary-eyed, rough and coarse in manner, shrugged and ground the
cigarette out under his foot.

“That is hard to say,” he finally said. “We
have no plane and no radio. From here, we got two choices. Either
we go to where mountains are, or we turn back.”

“I’m not going back,” Harry declared. “Not
until I find Anastasia.”

“Who is that?”

“She’s my girlfriend. She’s, uh, like
me.”

A grunt came from the pilot, something
unintelligible. He coughed out a wad of mucus and spit it out into
the wind. “She is on our side?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

The man scratched his head with a dirty
fingernail. “Why you look this way?” he suddenly asked. “I see
pictures of others... the bad animal people... but I no understand
why you look this way?”