The Nuclear Option

by Allan Leverone

Tracie almost burst out laughing but tamped down on the impulse. “If I’m being honest, it was a long night last night. I would love a cup of tea, thank you.”

  “I will bring it to you shortly.” Valeria released Tracie’s hand and set to work steeping more tea as Marinovich turned toward the stairs without a word and began stomping up them.

  Tracie stifled another smile as she followed. This sort of exchange was exactly why she’d wanted to corner Marinovich in his home rather than at his place of business. An “important man” could push people around and intimidate his underlings at work, but at home he was just another guy who would try not to anger his wife if he knew what was good for him.

  She hoped the differing dynamic would help her get the intel she needed.

  11

  June 12, 1988

  9:05 a.m.

  Marinovich residence

  Pushkino, Russia, USSR

  Marinovich entered his home office and waited impatiently for Tracie to follow. He closed the door behind her and then indicated a plush chair in the corner.

  “Take a seat,” he said gruffly as he settled himself behind his desk.

  “I’ll stand.”

  “Fine. What is this about?”

  “I think you know,” Tracie said.

  “Refresh my memory.”

  “We know you are funneling money to a group whose goals are contrary to those of the Soviet state.”

  “This again?” Marinovich said. The look on his face was that of a man who’d just bitten into rancid meat. “I answered all of your associate’s questions on that particular subject weeks ago.”

  “Clearly not to the satisfaction of my superiors,” she shot back, “or I would not be standing here today.”

  “I have nothing more to say to you than I said to the other KGB lackey.”

  “Refresh my memory,” she said coldly, repeating the line he’d used on her.

  “Tell me what you want to know and I will answer as best I can,” he countered.

  “I want to know the name of your contact with the terrorist group Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda.”

  “Terrorist group?” His voice was incredulous. “Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda is committed to reestablishing the Soviet Union’s standing in the world. I make no secret of my distaste for the direction Comrade Gorbachev’s rule—like that of Comrade Chernenko and Comrade Andropov before him—has taken my beloved country. The policies of glasnost and perestoika have been unmitigated disasters, and unless the USSR reverses course we are doomed.”

  Tracie sat quietly, letting Marinovich vent, and then said, “So you do not deny that you have been funneling money to a clandestine organization working to undermine General Secretary Gorbachev.”

  “Of course I deny it. I have differences of opinion with the appropriateness of Comrade Gorbachev’s policy choices, but as I told your associate when he came bearing unfounded accusations, I do not know what you are talking about regarding Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda.”

  “I want the name of your Navsegda contact, and I want it now.”

  “I do not know what you are talking about!” Marinovich shouted. His face was red, rapidly turning purple with anger. “There is no funneling of money, and there is no contact!”

  A knock came at the door and then it swung open before Marinovich could answer. His wife entered, carrying an ornate serving tray upon which she’d placed a pair of teacups and a silver steeping pot.

  “My goodness,” she said, setting the tray on Marinovich’s desk. “You are going to give yourself a heart attack if you do not start taking it easy, dear.”

  “I would be fine,” he said, “if the KGB would stop sending flunkies to harass me with wild accusations regarding imaginary conspiracy theories.”

  “I am not accusing you of anything,” Tracie said. “I merely need to know the name of your Navsegda contact and then I will be on my way.”

  “And I told you I do not have the first clue what you are talking about.” He had made a conscious effort to calm himself down with his wife’s arrival, but now the volume of his voice began to rise again.

  “Please, Sergei,” Valeria said. “You must try to relax.” She turned to Tracie and said, “Please finish your business with my husband as soon as you can. He does not need this aggravation at home. His life is stressful enough at work.”

  “He can be rid of me in a matter of seconds,” Tracie responded, “by simply giving me the information I require.”

  Valeria retreated out of the room without another word, pulling the door closed quietly behind her.

  “Where were we?” Tracie said. “Oh, yes. You were stonewalling me.”

  “I do not know what you are talking about.”

  ***

  Twenty minutes later Tracie was forced to accept the fact that Sergei Marinovich was not about to deviate from his story that he was a man in disagreement with the direction of the Soviet leadership but not one actively working to undermine that leadership. The only way he was going to part with the name of his Navsegda contact was through the use of physical force, a tactic Aaron Stallings had expressly forbidden.

  She sipped her tea—it really was good, strong and black like Russians had been drinking it for millennia—and stared at Marinovich, her expression severe. “I am sorry you continue to stonewall. I am not at liberty to divulge details, but Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda are becoming increasingly radicalized and pose a very real threat to the country you claim to love.”

  He returned her gaze serenely. “Will that be all?”

  “For now,” she answered. “But rest assured, this matter is not closed.”

  “Please show yourself out. You have ruined my Sunday morning, so I may as well stay in my office and get some work done.”

  Tracie rose and stalked across the floor. Her frustration was palpable but she had to give Marinovich credit, he was one strong-willed individual. The communist party’s stranglehold on the civilian population was so all encompassing that most citizens would crumble in the face of the kind of governmental authority the KGB represented.

  Marinovich had made it clear he was not most citizens. He was not about to cooperate.

  At least not voluntarily.

  She pulled the office door closed—more forcefully than was strictly necessary—and moved toward the stairs. She would have to contact Stallings tonight and convince him to change his mind regarding the use of torture. Even if she were successful, though, they would fall another day behind Navsegda, and there was no telling how soon the group would manage to smuggle their tactical nuke into position inside some defenseless American city.

  She was lost in her thoughts as she descended the stairs and was surprised to find Valeria Marinovich waiting for her at the front door.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” she said awkwardly. “The tea was delicious.”

  When the woman answered, her voice was much louder than should have been necessary to speak to someone standing right in front of her. “Just go. I do not appreciate you antagonizing my husband.”

  Tracie blinked. This attitude was nothing like what the woman had displayed to this point in Tracie’s visit. But the surprises weren’t over. As she spoke, she pressed a slip of paper into Tracie’s hand, closing Tracie’s fingers firmly over it.

  She opened the front door and, still speaking loudly enough to be heard upstairs, said, “Please leave and do not return.”

  Tracie walked outside and the door slammed behind her. She slid the paper into her jacket pocket and ignored it until she’d driven far enough to be fully out of sight of the Marinovich home.

  Then she pulled to the side of the road and fished the paper out of her pocket. It said, “Meet me at ten a.m. tomorrow. Podsolnukh Café.”

  12

  June 12, 1988

  7:30 p.m.

  Abandoned gasoline station

  Yaroslavl, Russia, USSR

  Nikolay Stepanov tried to suppress a smile as Ilya Kalinin threw his cards onto the table in disgust. Ilya
had just lost another game of Durak, his seventh such loss in a row, and Nikolay could see he was getting damned tired of being victimized. The loser was considered the durak, or the fool, and he really wanted someone else to be the durak for a while.

  Ilya walked away from the table and lit another Belomorkanal cigarette from the stub of his last. Then he flicked the old one to the concrete floor and ground it out with the heel of his boot.

  It wasn’t just the card game that was getting to Ilya, Nikolay knew, because he had to admit he felt exactly the same. He had grown tired of everything about this mission, from hiding in this crumbling relic of a filling station, to eating cold food and sacking out on rickety cots in the station’s office, to shitting in a makeshift outhouse, to not knowing from moment to moment whether the KGB was about to storm into Yaroslavl and execute him and his fellow Navsegda operatives.

  “How much longer do we have to wait before we can finish this mission?” Ilya groused. “I miss my family and if I have to look at your ugly faces too much longer I think I will have no choice but to put a bullet in my brain.”

  “We all miss our families,” Nikolay said. “And I am not too excited to gaze on your face twenty-four hours a day, either.”

  “Then let us finish this thing. The longer we sit around here with our thumbs up our asses, the greater the odds we will never get the chance to complete our assignment. You know damned well the KGB is scouring Russia looking for us. Not to mention that thing.” He nodded in the direction of the tactical nuke sitting in one of the repair bays of the old filling station

  Nikolay worked to suppress his frustration. He had had this exact conversation, or variants of it, more times than he could count with Ilya—and occasionally even with levelheaded Rostya Terschenko—over the last thirty-three days. And it wasn’t like he necessarily disagreed with his men, either. He could feel their time running out just as much as could his Navsegda comrades.

  He breathed deeply and tried to keep his tone conversational. Antagonizing Ilya would be counterproductive. When they had completed their assignment he could tell Ilya what he thought of the man’s endless whining, but not one minute before.

  “We will ‘finish this thing’,” Nikolay said quietly, “the moment we have all the items necessary to send the appropriate message to the people who need to hear it. Detonating the device without setting the stage properly will accomplish nothing but making us the most hated—not to mention the most wanted—men in Russia. You know all this, Ilya. Please try to be patient.”

  “I have been patient,” Ilya snapped. “I am tired of being patient. How long does it take to find the right vehicle?”

  “When it is an American pickup truck with a cargo bed large enough to hold what we need it to hold, it clearly takes a month, since that is how long we have been here.”

  “It has already been over a month,” Kalinin grumbled.

  Nikolay smiled and considered the proper response. He needed Ilya, and part of his job as leader of this mission was to ensure his people were ready to act when the time came.

  He said, “I think things would have moved much more swiftly had Vasily Labochev not been murdered in Leningrad last month. Over the course of several decades, Vasily had developed a network of contacts unmatched throughout Russia, and probably throughout the entire USSR. He could have gotten us a Ford F-150 pickup truck within a week, I am certain of it.”

  Ilya lit another cigarette and repeated his previous ritual of stomping out the stub of the old one with his boot. “And you expect me to believe there is no one else in the entire Soviet empire that can steal or otherwise procure one American made truck?”

  “Of course not,” Nikolay said. “I merely expect you to believe there is no one who can produce such a truck as quickly as Vasily would have.”

  “Who is working on it, exactly?”

  Nikolay shrugged. The hierarchy of Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda was intentionally amorphous, designed with the notion that if one member—or even one group of members—were to be apprehended, there would be very little they could tell the KGB about the rest of the organization’s makeup, regardless of how brutally they were tortured or how enthusiastically they then wished to cooperate as a result of that torture.

  Nikolay realized Ilya was staring at him, awaiting a response, one that should not have been necessary. Ilya was as familiar with Navsegda’s organizational structure as was Nikolay himself. He assumed this entire conversation was Ilya’s way of busting his balls over the fact that Nikolay had been selected over himself to lead this mission.

  “I do not know who is working on it, Ilya. Whoever it is, I am sure they are doing their best and will very soon be successful. I am sure Navsegda leadership will be in touch any day now about delivery of the vehicle and about putting the rest of the plan into motion.”

  Ilya walked away muttering to himself. He shoved open a side door and exited the building, puffing hard on his Belomorkanal, a small cloud of cigarette smoke trailing him out the door.

  Rostya Terschenko, the third member of their merry little band of Soviet hardliners, had been watching the exchange from his seat at the rickety card table the men had liberated from a city dump on the outskirts of Yaroslavl the day after their arrival. He met Nikolay’s gaze with a sardonic grin and said, “Does this mean our game of Durak is over?”

  “I believe that is exactly what it means.”

  “Too bad. I never tire of reminding Kalinin he is truly a durak.”

  Nikolay snorted and fished his own cigarette out of a pack. He really hoped the damned American truck would arrive soon.

  13

  June 13, 1988

  9:55 a.m.

  Across the street from Podsolnukh Café

  Pushkino, Russia, USSR

  Tracie lingered on the street corner, watching the Podsolnukh Café, unsure even what she expected to see. To say she’d been surprised when Sergei Marinovich’s wife handed her a note requesting—or, more accurately, demanding—a meeting after Tracie had gotten exactly nowhere in her attempt to intimidate Marinovich into revealing the name of his Navsegda contact yesterday would be the understatement of the century.

  But the note had given her at least the possibility of a Plan B at a time when her only alternative seemed to be to call Stallings and try to convince him to let her take a more aggressive stance the next time she crossed paths with Marinovich.

  And there would be a next time, she’d already promised herself that.

  Stallings might actually have given her the green light for torture, too, considering all that was at stake, with a nuclear device missing and a United States city soon to be at risk.

  And it still may come to that. Hell, it probably would come to that. She had no idea why Valeria Marinovich wanted to meet this morning at a tiny café on the opposite side of the city from her home. The obvious conclusion to be drawn was that she had something important to tell Tracie and wanted to remain anonymous while doing so.

  But the obvious conclusion was not always the accurate conclusion in the world of international espionage, and without knowing more about Sergei and Valeria Marinovich, Tracie couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to the woman’s possible motives.

  But one thing she could do was prepare as thoroughly as possible, so that instead of walking into a potential trap blind, she would at least be walking into that trap with her eyes wide open.

  To that end, she had caught up on some much-needed sleep last night and then arisen before sunrise. She showered and dressed in virtually the same outfit as yesterday, not because she felt there was anything to be gained by it, but simply because she didn’t have many clothes she felt gave off an aura that said, “KGB functionary.”

  Then she’d set out for Pushkino.

  She arrived at 8:30 a.m. and in the time since, had been walking the neighborhood surrounding Podsolnukh Café until she’d become somewhat familiar with the area. Then she’d surveilled the café itself from various angles and locations. After
awhile she came to the conclusion the café was exactly what it appeared to be: a modest eatery in a mid-sized Russian city, which was just finishing up the breakfast rush.

  If a trap had been set for her, she couldn’t imagine what it might be or who might be springing it. Customers had come and gone with regularity and none of them seemed interested in much of anything besides enjoying their black tea and biscuits and then getting on with the rest of their day.

  It was always possible an angry Sergei Marinovich had called the KGB to complain about them sending a representative to his home on a Sunday morning to harass him, at which point the KGB would realize someone was going around impersonating one of their operatives. That would undoubtedly get their attention and it was entirely possible they would take action to identify and apprehend that person.

  She didn’t think that particular scenario was likely, though. The entire reason Tracie had pressured Marinovich in the first place was because of the man’s virulent anti-government philosophy. He wasn’t likely to trust the KGB—or any other element of the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy—to take action to protect his welfare. He would more likely want to stay as far away from Soviet officialdom as possible.

  Plus, even if he had notified the KGB, and even if they did take his complaint seriously, how would they have picked up her trail? She’d disappeared from his home before he would have had time to make a telephone call, and she was as certain as she could be that no one had followed her out of Moscow this morning.

  The only logical conclusion she could reach was that Valeria Marinovich really was just a concerned wife who had some kind of information she wanted to share with Tracie. That conclusion made Tracie even more curious about this morning’s meeting than she had been when she first read the note yesterday.

  She checked her watch. It was almost about ten o’clock and Marinovich’s wife had not yet arrived. Hopefully this whole exercise wasn’t just a wild goose chase designed to gain Marinovich a little time, although what that would accomplish, Tracie had no idea. He had already refused to tell her anything and couldn’t possibly suspect she was considering torture as the next option.