Last of the Breed: Prologue–Chapter 4

Hunger, cold, and the exhaustion of long trails had sapped the man's strength and drained him of feeling. Gaunt and hollow eyed he awaited orders.

“So? He has eluded us again.”

The sender of the packet could not have seen paper or string for many months, and the packet was just one more item in a pursuit that had seemed time and again to be nearing its end, only to have the American evade them once again.

He studied Joe Makatozi with appraising eyes.

Only Zamatev knew there were three Soviet agents in the American division of military personnel assignment, no one of them aware of the others.

The provision for the secret prison camp had been made four years before.

The necessity for understanding the extent and ramifications of advances in American and British military and naval technology had given birth to the plan.

Locate and seize certain key personnel, bring them to this camp, a place known to only the most powerful figures in the Politburo, secure what information their prisoners had, and then get rid of them.

Operations had begun two years before with the seizure of a warrant officer, a very minor figure who, in the normal progress of his duties, had come into possession of some key information. That had been a modest success.

The blue-gray eyes were oddly disconcerting in the dark, strongly boned face, yet it was the prisoner’s cool arrogance that aroused his ire.

It was not arrogance alone, but a kind of bored contempt that irritated Zamatev.

Colonel Zamatev had a dossier before him that he believed told him all he needed to know about the man before him.

Beneath the veneer of education, culture, and training lay an unreconstructed savage.

“We won the last battle.” Joe Makatozi put into his tone a studied insolence. “As we always shall.”

He exuded the power of a gorilla and had the wrinkled, seamed face of a tired monkey until one looked a second time and recognized the lines for what they were, lines of cruelty and ruthlessness.

Suddenly, in his small, bare office, two savages faced each other, each a paragon of his kind.

Perhaps it was the man’s total lack of fear, even of uncertainty. Yet was that normal? Was it not natural to fear in such a situation? To be wary?

Major Makatozi showed no signs of apprehension, and at the brief meeting in this office he had seemed completely at ease.

Success was imperative in both the Pennington and the Makatozi operations, and his plans had been carefully laid.

His earlier ventures, in which he had been tentative, testing, feeling his way, had been uniformly successful.

Within the hour The Man On The Other End was on a train for Glasgow, and the morning after he arrived he knew where the Admiral was staying and was himself having a drink in a pub near the chemical plant, a pub where workers at the plant dropped in for an evening libation before going home.

Also, beyond the wire lay the enormous length and breadth of a friendless land.

Once beyond the wire he could cover the distance to the woods in five or six seconds. With guns behind him to lend impetus he might do even better.

At night the compound would be a glare of light, but suppose the lights could be shorted out? Undoubtedly there was a backup system. But might there not be a time lapse?

I had been working in insecticides, and all of eastern Siberia is beset with vicious flies and mosquitoes.

He had often vaulted over sixteen feet, but that had been with a resilient pole, and when he was dressed lightly.

He pivoted away, saw a dip in the ground, and ran down a small declivity as bullets tore the leaves above his head.

He must travel with extreme care not to be seen or to leave any vestige behind that might arouse the curiosity of dwellers in the country.

Occasionally he saw birds. Grouse seemed common and a kind of lark that was unfamiliar to him.

He stood up and with his boot he rubbed out his crude map.

The Colonel had been an attaché in both London and Paris. He spoke English and French with equal fluency.

He seemed disposed to be affable. What he wanted was information.

“You have chosen a formidable antagonist, Colonel Zamatev.”

“I had hoped you would help us, and him.” Zamatev was curt. “If you can, you are a fool not to do so. We have use for him; otherwise we would just let him go. Siberia would provide its own solution.”

But Blucher had become too well known and too popular, and as a result he disappeared in one of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.

He made three calls, mobilizing still stronger searching parties.

To get the technical people to come out here and stay they had to be accorded privileges as well as much higher pay, and this had brought innovators and thinkers, men and women whose ideas did not always agree with those expressed in Moscow.

As yet there had been no trouble, nor did Zamatev believe such people would go too far, yet a bridle must be put upon some of the free thinking.

He waited, trying to breathe evenly. He must make the attempt, even at the risk of discovery. An instant he poised, then he was across the open space and into the house.

Putting the remaining cans in his pockets and inside his shirt, he donned the heavy sweatshirt.