Chapter Text
18 AUGUST 1977 – MOSCOW, U.S.S.R.
Even Muscovites would not see Golyanovo as the kind of place to which Intourist would direct the rare foreign visitor. Grey, bleak, blighted by grimy factories and odd and unspecified industrial smells, in these times it was largely a place where people lived because they had to live somewhere, and because the city authorities and the Party still frowned upon the notion that the socialist workers’ paradise didn’t have a kind of home for everyone.
But just because it wasn’t a great place to live didn’t make it a place where people deserved to die. Not that the crew from Moscow’s fire brigade had the time or the will to be that philosophical when a small tenement block off the Altayskaya Ulitsa was going up in flames like a birthday cake.
“Get that hose higher!” Fire-captain Yuri Orlov swept a hand over his brow to clear the sweat, felt the grit and dust underneath it sticking to his skin. “Second floor, to the left!”
The hose moved, but the stream was weak. “Water pressure’s shit, chief,” one of his men called. “Can’t get a line strong enough on it.”
“Damn, blast and buggery,” Orlov muttered. “Do what you can!” he shouted. “We have to do that.” A shadow passed over his head as he spoke, and he flinched for a moment as a tall man settled to the ground a few metres away. He was broadly built, a mound of muscle under red hair in a short army crop. The mainly green uniform which he wore carried a bold red star on the chest.
“Where is it worst, Captain?” he said. “I can help here. Hold the fire a little.”
Orlov let out a gasp of breath. The visitor wasn’t a common sight in street-level Moscow, but right now he was a sight for sore eyes. “Up there. Left corner of the second floor as we look,” he said. “My guess is a cooking fire got out of hand. I don’t smell gas, so we might be spared that, but I’m not ruling anything out.”
“I’m on it. Ease off on the water while I go in.” Starfire seemed to bounce on his heels for a moment before taking off, making a straight line for one half-open window.
The fireman standing alongside Orlov stared at the flying man. “What in the name of…” he sputtered.
“I think we may have caught a break,” the captain allowed. “Right, I forgot, you’re up from the provinces, aren’t you? You won’t know Starfire.”
“No, chief.”
“Flying tank for the most part, but he can control fire some. Worked with us a few times. Depends how big it is; don’t know if he can put it out, but he can hold it back while we work. So move your sorry butt and get to it!” Orlov shouted that last.
o-o-o
Starfire angled himself to hover in place as he entered what proved to be a small apartment on the second floor. Nobody home, which was good – definitely good for them! – but he wasn’t willing to trust the floors. And he could hear a bigger fire outside the entry. He drifted over to the flat’s front door and opened it.
Definitely bigger fire. These buildings usually didn’t have common spaces on the upper floors, but the area around the main stairwell was a lot bigger than usual, and the fire was roaring around it – probably being funnelled a bit by the open stairs. On the far side, through the flames, he could see people. A few kids, elementary-school at the oldest, and an old babushka probably there looking after them while their parents were working.
One of the kids saw him and squealed. That spooked some of the others into shrieks of their own. “Stay where you are!” Starfire shouted. “I’ll come get you!”
As he pivoted towards them, a stray gust of air pumped the flames up for a moment. A big tongue of fire was swept sideways towards Starfire. He reacted almost without thinking – his pyrokinetic power reached out, big psychic “hands” somehow gripping the intangible fires and sweeping them to one side, beating open a pathway.
The reaction left him off balance for a moment, and he lost his line of sight on the kids and the old woman. The youngest one was frightened; she yelled something incomprehensible and darted forward from the others. She couldn’t be all that heavy – fifteen kilos max, to look at her – but the floorboard splintered and cracked; her left leg broke through the floorspace, and she shrieked as she tried to pull it free.
Bozhe moi! Starfire muttered. “Don’t panic!” he shouted. “I’m coming!” He pushed his flight over to her, grabbed her under her armpits.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “It’s okay. We’re going to get out of here. All you need to do is trust me. Can you do that?” The girl nodded, so hard as though her head would fall off. Starfire looked at the floor. Yes, if he struck just there… A hard kick smashed what was left of the floorboard and he lifted himself to pull the girl free to bring her back to the others. “Okay!” he shouted. “Everyone grab hold, hard as you can; we’re going to take a little trip.”
No time for subtlely, he thought; he screwed his eyes almost closed as he formed a telekinetic bubble around them. Make it hard, he said to himself as he surged forward; like a wrecking ball, the sphere cracked through the picture window over the second-floor stairwell. The screams were almost painful this close to his ears as he came in to land beside an ambulance which had been summoned to the scene.
As the ambulanceman examined the old woman, she shouted up at him. “God bless you, young man!” she called. Starfire waved in thanks: God was a convenient fiction which good socialists had grown out of, but a blessing was a boon wherever it came from. No time to think about that now, he thought as he dived back into the blazing building. Stop the fire, get anyone else out. Right now, nothing else – including the meeting that he was supposed to be on his way to – was important.
o-o-o
In a red-brick building within a short walk of the Kremlin, a young and nervous-looking girl in a corporal’s uniform escorted Captain Leonid Kovar – Starfire to the wider world – into an office. A grey-haired man with the three stars of an army colonel looked up as they came in. “Good afternoon, Captain.” He looked stern. “I’m glad you were able to come.”
Kovar just managed to suppress a wince. “My apologies, sir. I was – well, unavoidably detained on the way here.”
“I know.” The older man smiled. It was a thin smile, but it still counted. “We were advised of the circumstances through local police. I understand, and I perfectly approve.”
“Thank you.”
“But, if we may, to business. You’ve been called in because we have a sensitive matter which requires to be handled, and we think that you are best placed of anyone at our disposal to help resolve it.”
“Indeed, sir? I don’t follow.”
Colonel Andrei Shesternev tapped a finger on the buff folder on his desk. “You are one of a number of our group of super-functionaries who know and have worked with Lieutenant-Colonel Valentina Vostok.”
“Yes, I know Va… – know Colonel Vostok well.” Something in Shesternev’s expression suggested to Kovar that he not use Valentina’s name. “We met when I was a boy. She was part of the support team when I submitted myself for training, not long after I acquired my abilities. We’ve known each other for years, and... is something wrong with her?”
“I suppose that you could say that,” the colonel allowed. “Two weeks ago, Colonel Vostok entered an air force base in Kaliningrad. She bluffed her way through security and was able to access an experimental fighter plane built by the Mikoyan works not far from the field. It’s a prototype; no official designation yet. She overpowered the plane’s ground crew and hijacked the plane, initially flying it to an airfield on Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. The Danish air force helped her to refuel the plane and fly it to what was her intended destination in the United States.”
“She… she was defecting?”
“So it would seem. People around her – or at least those we’ve spoken to – appear genuinely surprised; she hid her doubts very well. The trail becomes somewhat confusing, as the plane itself crashed on an island in the Bahamas group, but Colonel Vostok evidently survived the crash and reached America. Some of our people have located her in Midway City, and we have attempted to – ah – recover her, but this has proven less than successful.”
“I can imagine, sir. She was able to teach me an awful lot about unarmed combat.”
“We’re anxious to retrieve Colonel Vostok and the plane both. The latter is in hand, but the former less so. Obviously, we don’t want her to speak to the American authorities. She has seemingly made no effort to contact them, and we’d like to keep it that way. It was thought that you may be best able to convince her to do the right thing for her country.”
“I understand, sir.” Kovar was fairly sure that he understood a lot more, but… “May I ask, sir, what should be done if I can’t convince her?”
“Captain Kovar, I would not presume to instruct someone with your distinguished – and distinctive – service record on how to conduct himself in such an instance.”
Like that, is it? “As you say, sir,” Kovar replied. “When do I leave?”
“You are booked on a flight at 6:30 AM tomorrow out of Sheremetyevo. Initially to London, and to New York and Midway from there. Pack lightly. We can supply anything that you think that you may need once you are on the ground.” Shesternev stood up, reached out a hand. “Good luck, Captain Kovar. And good hunting.”