Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Twelve Swingers

“Look, Evan!”

Sofija, swinging on a length of wire cable, sailed in a perfect parabolic arc toward a fat bug-eyed guard. He was trying to draw a bead on her with his pistol but couldn’t get the gun aimed in time. With one nimble foot she kicked the gun out of his hand. Her other foot took the guard full on the point of the chin and tumbled him out of the game. Another guard crawled on his hands and knees toward the fallen gun. Zenta dropped twenty feet through the air, feet first, and landed with a foot upon each of the guard’s shoulders. He crumpled to the floor, and the room rang with the sound of his shoulder bones snapping from the impact.

Minna was dancing beside me, clapping her hands madly in hysterical glee. The guards, the few who were still conscious, had abandoned their guns entirely by now. They were merely trying to get out of the way of the wild Lettish gymnasts.

They didn’t have a chance.

Outside, the night once again began to erupt with bells and sirens. Inside the battle was quickly drawing to a close. The plant guards, though not outnumbered, were clearly outclassed; this wasn’t the type of situation they had been trained to handle, and the girls were too much for them. Within minutes it was over, and Minna and I emerged from our hiding place and stepped over the inert bodies of the guards. The final score stood at Christians 14, Lions 0. One of our girls – Lenja, I think – had turned an ankle in the course of the fray. She limped slightly. And that, incredibly, was the extent of our injuries.

The girls were beaming with pride. Milan, an odd smile on his round face, moved toward me. “I violated orders,” he said apologetically, “because I suspected a trap.”

“No trap. The harbor police picked up Anders, and then I blundered into this mess.”

“And now?”

“We have to get the hell out of here. The MVD is on the way. God alone knows what’s going on outside.”

“Shall we run for the bus, Evan?”

“And then what? The bus won’t get us out of Russia.”

“We could hide.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

I tried to think straight and couldn’t get anywhere. We were in the building, and the building was locked, but sooner or later someone would come and find a way to get in. If we opened the door now, they would all stream in and…

And we would all stream out.

That seemed fair enough for openers. I went to the door, opened it. A small gang of troops stood at the ready in front of the door. Other than that, the place was surprisingly quiet. Only the wail of a siren in the distance broke the quiet of the night.

The MVD, I thought. On their merry way.

I glowered at the batch of troops. “About time you got here,” I snapped.

“But we have been here all along. The door-”

“Hurry,” I said. “Inside, quickly!”

They rushed inside. I scooped up Minna, and as the men rushed inside the rest of us hurried outside and closed the door.

Now what?

On the outside wall of the building there was a glass-enclosed box with a little hammer beside it dangling from a chain. A fire alarm, I thought brightly. I wondered what the penalty might be for turning in a false alarm in Estonia. It did not seem likely to be the greatest of our worries and, if nothing else, it ought to engender a certain amount of immediate confusion. If there was one thing we needed, it was confusion. It could only help us.

I didn’t bother with the little hammer. Instead I smashed the glass front with the butt of my pistol and reached through the broken glass to yank the little red lever.

At which point all hell broke loose. Every light in the base went on, and men poured out of every building. They did not come for us, nor did they run to the source of the alarm. In fact they ignored us entirely. They ran in all different directions, some of them dressing as they ran. Mechanics wheeled out fuel tanks, crews righted missiles on their launching pads, and everyone bustled about doing various important tasks.

Milan asked me what the hell was going on.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But-”

“Yes?”

“It looks to me as though they’re… well… taking up battle stations. Finding their posts and waiting for further orders from up above.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t think that was a fire alarm box.”

“Then-”

“I think I’ve just put the whole base on Red Alert,” I said. “I don’t know if that was a good idea or not.”

The Russians probably call it something other than Red Alert. But whatever they called it, the entire place was quite definitely on it. Planes sat with their engines on, missiles were poised on launching pads, and all around us all manner of furious activity went on.

We, on the other hand, did nothing. We stood around stupidly, all fifteen of us, while the rest of the base very busily ignored us. It was a pleasant state of affairs, but one that seemed unlikely to last for very long. Every base has a commander, and every commander, however incompetent, must sooner or later become aware of two men, twelve women, and a child standing like sheep in the midst of meticulous preparations for World War III.

I wondered suddenly whether I had managed the neat trick of starting a war. I had started a local revolution once, in Macedonia, but that was not at all the same thing as sending Soviet missiles streaming toward Washington and New York. Of course it couldn’t happen; the Russians would have built-in safeguards to prevent such a thing. One couldn’t honestly launch a global conflict by turning in a false fire alarm. Still…

“What shall we do now, Evan?”

I turned to Milan. “I don’t know,” I said.

“We ought to do something.”

“Yes.”

“The bus?”

I gave him a suggestion concerning the bus that carried overtones of a warmer relationship between himself and the bus than in fact existed. He manfully ignored my suggestion and waited for me to think of something a bit more practical.

“Forget the bus,” I said this time. “We need something fast, something dramatic, something to slash through all this miasma and get us straight to where we’re going. A straight line. Shortest distance between two points. Except the shortest distance isn’t always a straight line, sometimes it’s a circle. Great circle routes and all that. Flat Earth Society doesn’t believe in them, of course, but fly right over the poles. One, two, three and hello, Alaska. Oh, for God’s sake!”

“Evan?”

“Follow me,” I called out. And without knowing quite where I was going, I began dashing at top speed across the asphalt surface of the missile base.

They followed me.

So did a great many pairs of alien eyes. We could not have looked as though we belonged in those surroundings and we did draw stares. Everyone seemed to have something else to do, though, and no one made any attempt to find out who we were or where we thought we were going. There were no idle hands about, and the Devil’s work remained undone.

We ran. We dodged fuel trucks, circled around little gangs of mechanics and ground crew men. We ran, and I led, and everyone followed, and I wished to hell I knew just what it was I was looking for. A plane, of course. A plane that could take us out of Russia and back to America. A good, fast plane that would get us up and out before anyone could figure out what we were doing. But all the planes were manned with huge crews, and I couldn’t imagine how we could capture one or do anything with it once we did. It had been miracle enough that I had driven our bus from Riga to Tallinn; piloting a jet from Tallinn to Alaska was too much to expect.

And then, at the far end of the field, I saw something unlikely. A huge plane, its engines running, its wings swept back at acute angles, its body positioned almost vertically for takeoff.