04/25/1992
Blankenberg glanced back, surveyed the brightening April sky with a half-moon hanging in the west, and followed the others onto the folded ladder. The plane had already started its engines and was, presumably, fully operational. Less than five minutes later, the Dassault Falcon was taxiing to the runway.
The night had been relatively calm – not a single one of those helicopters was visible on the way to the airport, although they had a habit of flying over the city, shining their spotlights wherever they could. It was hard to say whether today's calm was the calm before the storm – although the rebels who had taken up positions in the suburbs were in cahoots with the SSN command, it was unlikely that they had managed to establish cooperation with the federal troops, of which they had been a part before the events began. This would have been too much, although both Blankenberg and his superiors were interested in such a disgrace to the organizers of the crazy plan and the collapse of their calculations. Theirs, but not theirs.
Having taken off, the plane flew at a completely uncharacteristic low altitude - a completely understandable desire to stay below the radar level as long as possible. Blankenberg glanced out the window and saw how the fields freed from snow, separated by strips of poplars, were flying by. Of course, it was impossible to say that the plane almost touched the treetops, but still it was flying very low, no more than fifty to seventy meters, which is why the landscapes outside the window replaced each other like roadside village scenes from the window of a high-speed car.
Somewhere out there, in the fields, there were deployed camps of armored groups. There was nothing to indicate their presence – the corresponding flight route had not been chosen without reason, and the former military pilots sitting in the cockpit now clearly, or rather instinctively, realized that it was better to keep behind the folds of the terrain from the air defense systems that the rebels, although formally friendly, had. Behind the curtain of relief. Who knows what to expect from these Russians. These were not the intended thoughts in the pilots' heads – Blankenberg himself thought exactly the same about his former compatriots. Nevertheless, he had rendered a service to these same compatriots that would be difficult to overestimate or even simply assess – the consequences of the planned massacre could have been too large-scale. How all these snipers were now making their way to the border was anyone's guess. Gandlow disappeared about ten hours after the data from the diskette had been transmitted via satellite. I wonder how Rockwell will react when he gets a report or something, describing how they took his hastily put together network by the ass, coordinating a group of snipers recruited from the scum of Europe - Irish militants, neo-Nazis, just killers from the former Yugoslavia.
The NSA is the embodiment of control over communications, a supermachine that can illuminate the entire network with the push of a few buttons - the power of the new, twenty-first century. The British builders of terrorist networks and intrigues are the twentieth century and they lost this time, in this match. One must assume they will lose in the future.
And this time there was also a downright comedy - the plan collapsed because this Landskricht left her expensive computer, undoubtedly paid for by Rockwell's funds, unattended. Blankenberg, it must be said, did not want to think that without this oversight of hers everything could have gone according to a different scenario, but, most likely, some more comprehensive principle was at work here - the half-crazy Landskricht, who was fond of drugs, the eccentric Johnson - the globalists deserve such personnel. So if they had missed not with the computer and the mail, then they would have definitely missed with something else. Here, on board, there was another one - a Soviet migrant. Blankenberg met him several times and each time he was dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet army. Once, being very drunk, he sang, obviously trying to please the audience, "God Save the Tsar." It was largely due to this that Blankenberg remembered him. Gandlow, it must be said, made a completely different impression, but he, one must think, will have a reason to somewhat rethink the role and value of these, if one could put it that way, colleagues of his. The plane was racing over the plains to the south, to now independent Kazakhstan, beyond Russia. The border, even taking into account the atypical low-altitude flight conditions, was just over an hour away.