Ed Kovacs - The Russian Bride

Sincere thanks to Christopher Graham and Richard Curtis. Michael Homler, Hector DeJean, Kate Davis, a terrific art department, and all the rest of the good folks at SMP have my deep appreciation for their hard work and efforts on behalf of my books.

Pilots and aviation raconteurs Carl Scholl and Tony Ritzman provided aviation expertise that fit the bill perfectly. I owe them many thanks for their ongoing generosity and support.

Special thanks to a former U.S. Army defense attaché, who wishes to remain unnamed, for providing background information and insight into the world of military attachés. Col. John B. Alexander, U.S. Army (Ret.), generously shared his knowledge of electromagnetic pulse and directed energy weapons, and pointed me in the proper directions for further research. I’m proud to be able to call John and his lovely, catalyst-of-a-wife Victoria, my dear friends.

Warren Sessler, a Korean War–decorated hero from the brutal siege of Outpost Harry, helped out with my research in Las Vegas. Warren is just a great guy; he and his beautiful wife, Captain Xiao Sessler, U.S. Army, are true American Profiles in Courage.

The Phoenix Group, as always, deserves special mention for all of the unsung assistance they afford me behind the scenes.

I’m fortunate and grateful to have such a terrific, loving family. I not only offer my heartfelt thanks to my wife, children, and other family members for taking such good care of me and being so supportive, but I must also ask their forgiveness for my long absences.

Very specific and hugely significant thanks go to David Reeves of Bedlam Group in Las Vegas. Serendipity brought our families together, and how grateful I am for that. David is a brilliant, generous soul who was instrumental in contributing astute technical advice, and other input. Thankfully, he’s also a devious genius who enjoys a good Scotch, a fine cigar, and a hot cup of well-brewed coffee; please, David, accept my most humble thanks.

Thanks in advance to my readers for understanding that while most of the locations in this book are real and worth a visit, others are purely fictional.

The big sky hung low. Charcoal-hued cumulus clouds crowded the airspace above Interstate 80 east of Evanston, Wyoming, like they were moving in for a takedown. The weather made Irene Shanks’s ankles hurt even more than the walking did.

“Rain coming soon,” said Irene, without even glancing up. At seventy-eight years old, she didn’t need a barometer; the swelling in her joints told her everything she needed to know about the weather forecast. She loosely held the L-rods favored by most dowsers as she hobbled her grid pattern over the hard soil.

“Will we have to stop?” asked Lily Bain, the pretty, blue-eyed blond woman who had shown up unannounced two days earlier on the doorstep of Irene’s Tucson home with a lucrative proposition to come to the Salt Lake City area for a quick dowsing job.

“No, this shouldn’t take long at all. Locating buried cables is child’s play for me. Howard, my deceased husband, taught me how to find buried cables over forty years ago.”

Lily and her partner Dennis had flown Irene first-class to Salt Lake City, put her in a nice hotel to rest, and then set out early this morning for the drive east on the interstate into Wyoming. Irene wasn’t sure exactly where they were now, but back in Tucson she had map-dowsed the couple’s Wyoming property using a pendulum. She had marked an area on a large-scale map they had provided her of a two-acre-sized plot where she felt the buried cable would most likely be found. And since the homemade map contained no reference that identified the actual location, Irene wondered if they were really treasure hunters trying to disguise their true intent.

They had all arrived from Salt Lake City in a rented four-wheel-drive GMC Yukon about thirty minutes earlier. Irene had set to work quickly and found the area that corresponded with the points she had marked on the map. She was now carefully walking a grid pattern on the desolate, gently sloping land, letting a moisture-laden prestorm breeze rich with ozone blow wayward strands of silver hair into her eyes.

Irene looked up. The foreground roller-coaster horizon didn’t reveal much perspective; she knew they were close to I-80 and civilization—at least truck-stop civilization—but the view only suggested that they stood in the middle of nowhere. Something nagged at her as she slowly covered more ground; it wasn’t the approaching storm bothering her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

“Can I ask what you two are going to do out here in the boondocks that you’re worried about the location of this cable?” asked Irene.

“We haven’t decided that exactly,” said Dennis, smiling. At thirty-four years old he stood six feet three, and even with a long-sleeved shirt covering his torso, one could see that he clearly was no stranger to the weight room. The bulk contrasted with a babyish face and pale skin featuring perennially rosy cheeks. His golden hair was combed back and made darker by using some kind of cream or gel. “But since the county has misplaced the maps showing where the cable is located, we want to know where not to dig or build something.”

“I mean, you’ll have to construct some kind of real road just to drive in here and…”

“It’s amazing that you dowsed a water well for the Tucson water utility,” said Lily, gently changing the subject. Only in her mid-twenties, Lily was slender, her ghost-white skin freckled out from the nose, and her smile was completely sweet. Irene thought of it as a “cutie-pie smile.” Lily had explained away her slight accent as the result of spending her high school years in Prague, where her businessman father had been working. Lily’s limp, straight hair was not cut fashionably, making Dennis appear to be the vain one of the young couple.

“But I got a call from the Tucson water company telling me I was wrong,” protested Irene.

Dennis and Lily suddenly looked aghast. “Wrong?”

A smile came to Irene’s lips, since she knew she had them going. “The water utility executive told me they drilled on the spot I had marked, and that they found water at exactly one hundred forty-three feet deep, just like I told them. But he said they were getting two hundred and two gallons a minute from the well, not two hundred and one, like I had said.” Nothing wrong with a little bragging from a seventy-eight-year-old, thought Irene.