The Russian Factor

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It was entirely unlike Jack to vanish without a trace.

It’s what ended me up in a Soviet built Jeep, lurching and crashing along a goat trail in the mountains of southern Kazakhstan. Had that desolate landscape harbored a casual observer, we would have seemed an unlikely pair. My native driver was a man who looked ninety, but was probably not a day over forty. I was a woman in her mid-thirties, clinging to the rusty innards of a vehicle trying to toss me out. The driver had no idea I was a western intelligence contractor and to him, I was probably as out of place in his world as he would have been in Bloomingdales.

He’d told me his vehicle was called a Wahzeek and looked at me with a toothless grin every time the oil pan slammed into solid rock. I stifled the urge to look behind for puddles of oil, held on tight and stared straight ahead.

I couldn’t shake the gut wrenching feeling that Jack was dead. Worse, was thinking it was my fault. I figured I’d find an answer, one way or another, at an abandoned Soviet airfield, hours ahead along the boulder strewn trail. Some kind of communication breakdown, maybe, but this was Jack. He had never failed to make his reports on time using any method necessary. “Jack is a survivor!” Rolled around in my head like a mantra. He had flown fighters, bombers, and almost every bush-plane around for the last forty some-odd years.

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