The Target
A Lance Spector Thriller
Saul Herzog
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Afterword
Foreword
I’d like to take a moment to thank you personally for buying this book. A lot of time and work has gone into it and I truly hope you enjoy the story I’ve come up with.
If you have any concerns at all about this story, if you spot any typos or errors, or if you’d just like to get in touch to say hello, please feel free to contact me at any time.
I can always be reached by email at:
saulherzog@authorcontact.com
Alternatively, you can sign up for updates from me at:
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I am always thrilled to hear from readers so please stop by, say hello, let me know what you think of Lance Spector and the world he inhabits.
God bless and happy reading,
Saul Herzog
1
Arturs Alda taxied onto the runway at Rumbula Air Base and checked his gauges.
Fuel. Okay.
Pressure. Okay.
Engine. Okay.
He was in the cockpit of a forty-year-old Antonov An-2, and it rattled around him like the cage of a rickety fairground ride.
This was the aircraft his father had flown.
It was the aircraft his father died in.
For Alda, it was as much a part of who he was as his own name. Its controls were an extension of his limbs.
When he was a boy, there’d been a picture of its designer, the Soviet aeronautics engineer, Oleg Antonov, on his father’s desk. For the first eight years of his life, Alda had believed the man was his grandfather.
The plane was a simple, sturdy thing, a utility plane used for agricultural and forestry duty. It was far and away the most successful aircraft ever put into production by the Soviets. Over eighteen thousand were built, and they were as common in the former Eastern Bloc today as they’d ever been.
They were hardy. Durable. Easy to maintain.
As was Alda himself, or so he liked to think.
The plane had a long history of use in the Latvian Forestry Department. It began service in 1947, and to this day, was the only plane the department ever operated. The mechanics affectionately called them Kukuruzniks, or crop dusters, and the nine-cylinder Shvestov engine, they bragged, was cheaper to maintain than the department’s own Latvian-built tractors.
Alda opened up the throttle and revved it.
It was early, just after dawn, and the cloud was dense and low, gloomy even by the standards of a Latvian January.
It had started to drizzle, and he wondered if he’d be able to take off. The runway was a travesty, notoriously bad, and decent visibility was required just to take off without hitting a pothole.
“What do you think, boss?” he said into his radio.
His supervisor, a corpulent, grizzled old man named Agranov, who’d known his father, didn’t respond. Alda knew he’d heard him, but union rules, and civil aviation regulations, didn’t allow him to order Alda to take off in these conditions.
“I can hardly see the barriers,” Alda said.
The light in front of him turned green, indicating he was cleared for takeoff, and he sighed.
He had a glass bottle in his coat, and he pulled it out and unscrewed the cap.
Vodka.
The very cheapest kind.
He bought it at the gas station outside the airbase every morning and took swigs throughout the day. He remembered when a bottle had been enough to get him through an entire week’s worth of shifts. These days it barely lasted the day, and he had to buy a second bottle on his way home in the evening.
The runway was vast, one of the largest in Europe, and he couldn’t see to the end of it, two miles off in the distance. It was built to handle the very largest Soviet strategic bombers, and if the Cold War had ever come to blows, the enormous, hardened hangars still buried on either side of the runway would have opened up to release an entire fleet of Tupolev TU-95’s.
Those aircraft were over a hundred-fifty feet in length, and their four Kuznetsov propellor engines made them the loudest ever produced. When powered up, just sitting on the runway, they could be heard from the chamber of the Latvian Supreme Council in central Riga, eight miles away. The tips of the propellor blades moved faster than the speed of sound, which was what made them so ungodly loud, and they could carry payloads of up to twenty-four-thousand pounds.
If the Cold War had gone nuclear, they were the planes that would have delivered death from above to the entire US Eastern Seaboard. This expanse of rotting concrete was where they’d have taken off.
And before they ever returned, all of Latvia, all of the Soviet Union, would have been obliterated.
Alda sometimes thought of that, of those pilots, and the state of mind they’d have to be in to carry out that mission.
He wondered, were it him, would he even bother to return after he dropped the bombs.
There would be nothing to return to.
No runway.
No country.
No people.
Better to fly on to Cuba, or South America maybe. Ditch
in the jungle. The depths of the Amazon. Live out the holocaust with the Indians and pretend he had nothing to do with the strange clouds fomenting in the distance, getting closer by the day, as the world got colder and a nuclear winter unlike anything seen before, or to be seen again, set in.
There was nothing about the runway now to suggest such an ignoble history.
Potholes the size of bathtubs pocked the concrete, and entire sections had been cordoned off with concrete barriers. Those areas were now used by local high schoolers learning to drive, or car dealerships testing new vehicles.
Alda rubbed his eyes and revved the engine.
He was tired.
He was hungover.
The morning before, he’d had yet another fight with his wife, and she hadn’t been home when he got back after his shift. She’d left the heat off, and the apartment was as cold as a refrigerator.
No note, no message, no dinner in the oven.
He’d have been worried if it hadn’t happened before.
He called her cell, and she didn’t pick up, so he called her mother’s house and her mother picked up.
“She’s not coming home this time, Arturs. She’s had enough.”
“We have a two-year-old child. Has she lost her mind?”
“That’s between you and her.”
“Then put her on.”
“She knows how to get hold of you,” the old woman said and hung up.
Alda slammed the receiver so hard he broke it.
He couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself.
But then, he didn’t think he could be the husband she wanted him to be, either.
It was the drinking that did it.
That and the sleeping around.
He took another sip of the vodka and screwed the cap shut.
Then Agranov’s voice came over the radio. “Alda? You going to shit or get off the pot?”
Alda knew the runway like the back of his hand. Every stray chunk of concrete, every pothole. He didn’t need to see to take off.
He opened up the throttle, and one-hundred-seventy yards later, he was airborne. The monochrome, Stalinist expanse of Riga’s southern suburbs stretched out in front of him.
He followed the line of the Daugava River over the city, and a few minutes later, he was out over the gulf, its gray waters blurring into an icy mist that gave the Baltic a distinctive chill known to sailors from every corner of the globe. They cursed it. They never forgot it.
They called it the Baltic kiss.
He hugged the coast northward until he saw the mouth of the Gauja River, and from there, flew two miles inland to the Adazi and Dzelves-Krona forests.
If they could even be called forests at this point.
Loggers had taken so many trees that they looked more like the scarred wastes of a battlefield.
He flew in low and flicked the switch to turn on the cameras. His plane was fitted with a set of three high-definition, multi-spectral cameras. Each picked up a different segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, infrared, ultraviolet, and normal. When the three feeds were stitched back together in the lab, they revealed an image of the forest more detailed than anything ever made by satellite.
Alda didn’t know how they worked. He didn’t really know what use the scientists at the University of Riga made of them. All he knew was how to fly the plane.
He might not have flown it sober, but he flew it well.
And cheap.
And low.
He flew very low.
Lower than regulations permitted.
The department never came out and said it, but the lower he got, the more they liked it.
On this morning, with the mist and the rain and the low cloud, and the thought of Anya nagging at him, he flew low even by his own standards.
The tops of the trees were so close that they whipped away violently from his exhausts.
He was so low he hit a bird. A stork, he thought. He never saw it.
The clang against the hull shocked him to attention, and the plane swayed and yawed on its axis before leveling.
He took a long swig of vodka and gave himself a little more altitude for the rest of the run. When he got back to base, the cloud had cleared a little. He approached from the north and landed on the final two hundred yards of the runway, cocky as ever, jamming to a halt, the plane’s pneumatic brakes screeching loudly.
Before he was even back in the hangar, he was checking his cell for messages.
Nothing.
He tried calling Anya.
She didn’t answer.
“Easy on that stuff,” Agranov said from the metal staircase overlooking the hangar.
Alda hadn’t seen him there. They could trust each other, but he wouldn’t have taken the sip if he’d known Agranov was watching.
“Anya slept at her mother’s again,” he said.
Agranov lit a cigarette. “She’ll come home when her wallet empties.”
Alda shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
Agranov made his way back up the steps to his office. “Well go easy on the drink,” he said over his shoulder. “I need you to go out again.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You’ll get overtime.”
“I shouldn’t have gone out on that last one. I almost killed myself hitting a stork or some blasted thing.”
“You look fine to me,” Agranov said.
Alda sighed. He took another swig and looked at his watch. It was still before noon.
The plane had its own fuel pump, and he went outside to get the hose. Then he checked the fuselage for any sign of the stork. Everything looked fine and, after refueling, he went up the stairs to Agranov’s office to warm up before heading back out.
There was a small mauve-colored propane heater in the corner of the office and he stood next to it.
“Coffee?” Agranov said.
Alda nodded and sat down. There was a pack of smokes on the wooden table and Alda said, “Are those yours?”
“I don’t know whose they are,” Agranov said.
Alda helped himself to one.
“Try not to look so glum,” Agranov said when he handed him the coffee. “If you knew how many times my wife walked out on me…”.
“So you’re the standard?” Alda said.
“I’m just saying…”.
“Your wife divorced you.”
Agranov sighed. He lit himself one of the cigarettes and sat on the other side of the heater. Alda topped up both their cups with a little vodka, and they sat staring at each other.
“No lunch today?” Agranov said.
“Anya makes my lunch.”
Agranov laughed. “Of course she does.”
Alda took a long sip of coffee and sucked in through his teeth to cool it.
“Are you refueled?” Agranov said.
He nodded. “Where’s this second run?”
“You won’t like it.”
“I already don’t like it.”
“Gruzdovas mezi,” Agranov said.
Alda sighed.
Agranov nodded.
Latvia was not a large country, but the flight to the Russian border was still over a hundred miles, right at the limit of their area of operation.
Alda tried Anya’s cell again and then her mother’s house.
The mother answered.
“It’s me,” he said.
The old woman coughed before she spoke. “I already told you, she doesn’t want to hear from you.”
“Will you at least tell her…”.
“Tell her what?”
Alda shook his head. It was no use.
It was nothing more than he deserved. He’d always hated his father. Now he flew the same model of plane, from the same runway, and fucked around with the same women, at the same two-bit bars.
He even had the same drinking buddy.
“Tell her, I understand,” he said.
Agranov had prepa
red a flight chart, and he spread it on the table.
“Good thing I wore my wool socks,” Alda said, looking at it.
“You’ll be back before you know it.”
“I’m taking these,” Alda said, taking the cigarettes from the table and putting them in his coat pocket.
He also filled his mug with fresh coffee. It would be cold before he got to the plane, and he couldn’t stand cold coffee, but he brought it with him anyway.
The weather hadn’t improved but he got back up into the air and set a course due east. He passed the ribbons of Riga’s outer highway system, the thinning out of its suburbs, and in just a few minutes, he was out over virgin forests of spruce and pine, interspersed with boggy marshes and lakes.
Latvia’s forests were among the oldest in Europe, and it was not uncommon to see eagles, otters, beavers, lynx, even packs of wild wolves. As forests in other countries continued to dwindle, Latvia’s were growing.
And gaining in economic importance.
Hence the need to scan them.