Russian Spring Read Online Free PDF Page A

shrugged. “I’m afraid he’s right,” he told Jerry. “Best you fly with the peasantry in coach.” He smiled, he winked. “But not to worry, Jerry, we will begin to atone for this unfortunate piece of necessary tackiness and then some the moment you are safely in Paris, I can promise you that, and first class on Air France on the flight back.”
    He paused, blew out another plume of smoke. “If there
is
a flight back,” he said.
    “Well, I’m glad you two guys have gotten it all decided for me,” Jerry snapped. But there was little vehemence in it. For after all, Rob was right.
    What the fuck, they weren’t about to lift his clearance for applying for a passport. What the fuck, he could always play innocent if they didn’t let him on the plane, couldn’t he? All he would be doing would be taking a vacation in Paris, as far as they were concerned.
    And as if a sign had been granted, there was suddenly a distant roar, and a bright point of light became barely visible, burning its way skyward through the mist at unreal speed, accelerating as it rose like a glorious ascending angel.
    “Alors!” André Deutcher exclaimed. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
    Jerry’s eyes met Rob Post’s. They both laughed wanly, and somehow, in that moment, the decision was made.
    “Nothing to get excited about, André,” Rob said.
    “Yeah, it’s just another ground-based reentry phase interceptor test from Vandenberg.”
     
    And a strangely similar roar, but louder, and closer, blasted Jerry out of his time-zoned reverie, and he found himself all but pressing his nose against the cabin window in a futile attempt to see.
    “My goodness, what was that?” the old lady in the seat beside him exclaimed.
    “An Antonov 300 boosting off the runway,” Jerry muttered, for he knew that no other civilian aircraft made such a godawful noise on takeoff.
    Until the ignition of the Antonov’s rocket-trolley had abruptly jolted him out of it, Jerry had been dozing along in airline space, where the interior of one plane was the interior of every other, and one great amoeboid airport seemed to connect the spaces between, and any connection to actually being in a country other than America had been quite unreal.
    But now the ancient Pan World 747 was taxiing up to the main terminal at Charles de Gaulle, and Jerry could see two more Antonovs sitting there on the tarmac connected to the terminal building by jetways and surrounded by trains of baggage carts as if they were ordinary Boeings sitting on the ground at LAX —one painted in the red, white, and blue of British Air and the other actually bearing the winged hammer and sickle of Aeroflot—and he knew he was no longer in technological Kansas.
    The Antonov 300 was the plane that had finally given the Russians a real piece of the world market. They had taken their old shuttle transporter, itself a monster upgraded from an older military transport by adding on two more engines, and turned the world’s biggest airplane into the world’s biggest airliner.
    With a full load of fuel in its gigantic belly tanks, it could carry one thousand coach passengers and their luggage 10,000 kilometers at about 800 kph in somewhat dubious comfort, and as much as a hundred more in spacious first-class luxury in the add-on upper deck that replaced the shuttle pylons, making it the most profitable airplane in the world to run in terms of fares versus cost per passenger mile.
    It was also a ponderous mother that required a runway longer than most commercial airports had to groan its way up to takeoff speed and then leave the ground-effect envelope.
    In their typical straightforward, brute-force manner, the Russians had solved the problem by mounting a fall-away trolley aft of the main landing gear and equipping it with a battery of solid-fuel throw-away rocket engines apparently adapted from old short-range missiles.
    The Antonov was a joke at Rockwell, where they built hypersonic bombers that could give