by Tom Clancy
When the task was complete, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov looked again at Elena’s picture and asked if he’d done the right thing. But Elena merely smiled as she had always done. All these years, he thought, and it still troubles my conscience. He shook his head. The final part of the ritual followed. He ate sausage and bread while his long-dead comrades of the Great Patriotic War came to visit, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask those who had died for their country if he was justified in betraying it. He thought they would understand even better than his Elena, but was afraid to find out. The half-liter of vodka didn’t provide the answer either. At least it drugged his brain to insensibility, and he staggered off to bed just after ten, leaving the lights on behind him.
Just after eleven, a car drove by the wide boulevard that fronted the apartment block, and a pair of blue eyes checked the Colonel’s windows. It was Ed Foley this time. He noted the shades. On the way to his own flat, another covert message was passed. A Moscow sanitation worker set up a collection of signals. They were innocuous things, a chalk mark on a lamp post, for example, each of which would tell a part of the cutout team to be at their assigned posts. Another member of the CIA Moscow Station staff would check the cues at dawn, and if anything was amiss, Foley himself could abort everything.
As tense as his job was, Ed Foley found many aspects of it amusing. For one thing, the Russians themselves had made it easier by giving CARDINAL an apartment on a heavily traveled street. For another, in making such a hash of the new embassy building, they prevented him and his family from living in the new compound, and that forced Foley or his wife to drive down this boulevard every night. And they were so glad to have his son on their hockey team. That was one thing he’d miss on leaving this place, Foley told himself as he got out of the car. He now liked junior-league hockey better than baseball. Well, there was always soccer. He didn’t want his son to play football. Too many kids got hurt, and he’d never be big enough. But that was in the future, and he still had the present to worry about.
He had to be careful saying things aloud in his own apartment. Every room in every flat occupied by Americans was assumed to be more heavily bugged than an ant farm, but over the years, Ed and Mary Pat had made a joke of that, too. After he came in and hung up his coat, he kissed his wife, then tickled her ear at the same time. She giggled in recognition, though both were thoroughly tired of the stress that came with this post. Just a few more months.
“So how was the reception?” she asked for the benefit of the wall microphones.
“The usual crap,” was the recorded answer.
9.
Opportunities
BEATRICE Taussig didn’t make up a report, though she considered the slip Candi had made significant. Cleared for nearly everything that happened at Los Alamos National Laboratory, she hadn’t been told about an unscheduled test, and while some SDI work was being done in Europe and Japan, none of it required Al Gregory as an interpreter. That made it Russian, and if they’d flown the little geek to Washington—and, she remembered, he’d left his car at the lab; so they’d sent him a helicopter, too—it had to have been something big. She didn’t like Gregory, but she had no reason to doubt the quality of his brain. She wondered what the test was, but she wasn’t cleared for what the Russians were up to, and her curiosity was disciplined. It had to be. What she was doing was dangerous.
But that was part of the fun, wasn’t it? She smiled to herself.
“That leaves three unaccounted for.” Behind the Afghans, the Russians were sifting through the wreckage of the An- 26. The man talking was a KGB major. He’d never seen an air crash before, and only the cold air on his face had kept him from losing his breakfast.
“Your man?” The infantry Captain of the Soviet Army—until very recently a battalion advisor to the puppet Afghan Army—tooked around to make sure his troops were manning the perimeter properly. His stomach was as settled as it could be. Watching his friend nearly gutted before his eyes had been the greatest shock of his life, and he was wondering if his Afghan comrade would survive emergency surgery.
“Still missing, I think.” The aircraft’s fuselage had broken into several pieces. Those passengers in the forward section had been bathed in fuel when the plane had hit the ground, and were burned beyond recognition. Still, the troops had assembled the pieces for nearly all the bodies. All but three, that is, and the forensic experts would have to determine who was surely dead and who was still missing. They were not normally so solicitous for the victims of an airline crash—the An-26 had technically been part of Aeroflot rather than the Soviet Air Force—but a full effort was being made in this case. The missing Captain was part of the KGB’s Ninth “Guards” Directorate, an administrative officer who’d been making a tour of the region, checking up on personnel and security activities at certain sensitive areas. His travel documents included some highly sensitive papers, but, more important, he had intimate knowledge of numerous KGB personnel and activities. The papers could have been destroyed—the remains of several briefcases had been found, burned to ashes, but until the death of the Captain could be confirmed there would be some very unhappy people at Moscow Center.
“He left a family—well, a widow. His son died last month, they tell me. Some kind of cancer,” the KGB Major noted quietly.
“I hope you will take proper care of his wife,” the Captain replied.
“Yes, we have a department to manage that. Might they have dragged him off?”
“Well, we know they were here. They always loot crash sites, looking for weapons. Documents?” The Captain shrugged. “We’re fighting ignorant savages, Comrade Major. I doubt that they have much interest in documents of any kind. They might have recognized his uniform as that of a KGB officer, then dragged him off to mutilate the body. You wouldn’t believe what they do to captives.”
“Barbarians,” the KGB man muttered. “Shooting down an unarmed airliner.” He looked around. “Loyal” Afghan troops—that was an optimistic adjective for them, he grumbled—were putting the bodies, and the pieces, into rubber bags to be helicoptered back to Ghazni, then flown to Moscow for identification. “And if they dragged my man’s body off?”
“We’ll never find it. Oh, there’s some chance, but not a good one. Every circling vulture we see, we’ll send a helicopter out, but...” The Captain shook his head. “The odds are that you already have the body, Comrade Major. It will just require some time to confirm the fact.”
“Poor bastard—desk man. Wasn’t even his territory, but the man assigned here is in the hospital with gallbladder problems, and he took this job in addition to his own.”
“What’s his usual territory?”
“The Tadzhik SSR. I suppose he wanted the extra work to get his mind off his troubles.”
“How are you feeling, Russian?” the Archer asked his prisoner. They couldn’t provide much in the way of medical attention. The nearest medical team, made up of French doctors and nurses, was in a cave near Hasan Khél. Their own walking casualties were heading there now. Those more seriously hurt... well, what could they do? They had a goodly supply of painkillers, morphine ampuls manufactured in Switzerland, and injected the dying to ease their pain. In some cases the morphine helped them along, but anyone who showed hope of recovery was placed on a litter and carried southeast toward the Pakistani border. Those who survived the sixty-mile journey would receive care in something that passed for a real hospital, near the closed airfield at Miram Shah. The Archer led this party. He’d successfully argued with his comrades that the Russian was worth more alive than dead, that the Americastani would give them much for a member of the Russian political police and his documents. Only the tribal headman could have defeated this argument, and he was dead. They’d given the body as hasty a burial as their faith permitted, but he was now in Paradise. That left the Archer now as the most senior and trusted warrior of the band.
Who could have told from his flint-hard eyes and cold words that for the first ti
me in three years there was pity in his heart? Even he was bemused by it. Why had those thoughts entered his head? Was it the will of Allah? It had to be, he thought. Who else could stop me from killing a Russian?
“Hurt,” the Russian answered finally. But the Archer’s pity didn’t stretch that far. The morphine the mudjaheddin carried was only for their own. After looking to be sure that no one saw, he passed the Russian the photographs of his family. For the briefest instant his eyes softened. The KGB officer looked at him in surprise that overcame the pain. His good hand took the photographs, cupping them to his chest. There was gratitude on his face, gratitude and puzzlement. The man thought of his dead son, and contemplated his own fate. The worst thing that could happen, he decided within the cloud of pain, was that he’d rejoin his child, wherever he was. The Afghans could not hurt him worse than he already was in body and soul. The Captain was already to the point that the pain had become like a drug, so familiar that the agony had become tolerable, almost comfortable. He’d heard that this was possible, but not believed it until now.
His mental processes were still not fully functional. In his twilight state he wondered why he hadn’t been killed. He’d heard enough stories in Moscow about how the Afghans treated captives... and was that why you volunteered to handle this tour in addition to your own ... ? He wondered now at his fate, and how he’d brought it about.
You cannot die, Valeriy Mikhailovich, you must live. You have a wife, and she has suffered enough, he told himself. Already she is going through... The thought stopped of its own accord. The Captain slid the photo into a breast pocket and surrendered himself to the beckoning unconsciousness as his body labored to heal itself. He didn’t wake as he was bound to a board and placed aboard a travois. The Archer led his party off.
Misha woke with the sounds of battle reverberating through his head. It was still dark outside—the sun would not rise for some time—and his first considered action was to go into the bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his face and washed down three aspirin. Some dry heaves followed, over the toilet, but all that came out was yellow bile, and he rose to look in the mirror to see what treason had done to a Hero of the Soviet Union. He could not—would not—stop, of course, but... but look what it is doing to you, Misha. The once clear-blue eyes were bloodshot and lifeless, the ruddy complexion gray like a corpse. His skin sagged, and the gray stubble on his cheeks blurred a face that had once been called handsome. He stretched his right arm, and as usual the scar tissue was stiff, looking like plastic. Well. He washed out his mouth and trudged off to the kitchen to make some coffee.
At least he had some of that, also bought in a store that catered to the members of the nomenklatura, and a Western-made machine with which to brew it. He debated over eating something, but decided to stick with coffee alone. He could always have some bread at his desk. The coffee was ready in three minutes. He drank a cup straight down, ignoring the damaging heat of the liquid, then lifted his phone to order his staff car. He wanted to be picked up early, and though he didn’t say that he wanted to visit the baths this morning, the sergeant who answered the phone at the motor pool knew what the reason was.
Twenty minutes later Misha emerged from the front of his building. His eyes were already watering, and he squinted painfully into the cold northwest wind that tried to sweep him back through the doors. The sergeant thought to reach out and steady his Colonel, but Filitov shifted his weight slightly to fight against the invisible hand of nature that held him back and got into the car as he always did, as though he were boarding his old T-34 for combat.
“The baths, Comrade Colonel?” the driver asked after getting back in front.
“Did you sell the vodka I gave you?”
“Why, yes, Comrade Colonel,” the youngster answered.
“Good for you, that’s healthier than drinking it. The baths. Quickly,” the Colonel said with mock gravity, “and I might yet live.”
“If the Germans couldn’t kill you, my Colonel, I doubt that a few drops of good Russian vodka can,” the boy said cheerfully.
Misha allowed himself a laugh, accepting the flash in his head with good humor. The driver even looked like his Corporal Romanov. “How would you like to be an officer someday?”
“Thank you, Comrade Colonel, but I wish to return to the university to study. My father is a chemical engineer and I plan to follow him.”
“He is a lucky man, then, Sergeant. Let’s get moving.”
The car pulled up to the proper building in ten minutes. The sergeant let his Colonel out, then parked in the reserved spaces from which he could see the doors. He lit a cigarette and opened a book. This was very good duty, better than tromping around in the mud with a motor-rifle company. He checked his watch. Old Misha wouldn’t be back for nearly an hour. Poor old bastard, he thought, to be so lonely. What miserable luck that a hero should come to this.
Inside, the routine was so fixed that Misha could have done it asleep. After undressing, he got his towels, and slippers, and birch branches, and moved off to the steam room. He was earlier than usual. Most of the regulars hadn’t shown up yet. So much the better. He increased the flow of water onto the firebricks and sat down to allow his pounding head to clear. Three others were scattered about the room. He recognized two of them, but they weren’t acquaintances, and none seemed in the mood to talk. That was fine with Misha. The mere act of moving his jaw hurt, and the aspirin were slow today.
Fifteen minutes later the sweat poured off the white body. He looked up to see the attendant, heard the usual cant about a drink—nobody wanted one just yet—plus the line about the swimming pool. It seemed the likely thing for a man in this job to say, but what the precise wording meant was: All secure. I am ready for the transfer. By way of reply, Misha wiped the sweat off his brow in an exaggerated gesture common to elderly men. Ready. The attendant left. Slowly, Misha began counting to three hundred. When he got to two hundred and fifty-seven, one of his fellow alcoholics stood and walked out. Misha took note of this, but didn’t worry about it. He had far too much practice. When he got to three hundred he rose with a jerking movement of his knees and left the room without a word.
The air was much cooler in the robing room, but he saw that the other man hadn’t left yet. He was talking to the attendant about something or other. Misha waited patiently for the attendant to notice him, which he did. The young man came over, and the Colonel took a few steps to meet him. Misha stumbled on a loose tile and nearly fell. His good arm went forward. The attendant caught him, or nearly did. The birch sticks fell to the floor.
The young man swept them up in an instant and helped Misha to his feet. In another few seconds he’d given him a fresh towel for his shower and sent him on his way.
“Are you all right, Comrade?” the other man asked from the far end of the room.
“Yes, thank you. My old knees, and these old floors. They should pay more attention to the floor.”
“Indeed they should. Come, we can shower together,” the man said. He was about forty, and nondescript except for his bloodshot eyes. Another drinker, Misha observed at once. “You were in the war, then?”
“Tanker. The last German gun got me—but I got him, too, at the Kursk Bulge.”
“My father was there. He served in the Seventh Guards Army under Konev.”
“I was on the other side: Second Tanks, under Konstantin Rokossovskiy. My last campaign.”
“I can see why, Comrade...”
“Filitov, Mikhail Semyonovich, Colonel of Tank Troops.”
“I am Klementi Vladimirovich Vatutin, but I am no one’s hero. It is a pleasure to meet you, Comrade.”
“It is good for an old man to be shown respect.”
Vatutin’s father had served in the Kursk Campaign, but as a political officer. He’d retired a colonel in the NKVD, and his son had followed in his footsteps, in the agency later redesignated KGB.
Twenty minutes later, the Colonel was off to his office, and the bath atten
dant had slipped out the rear door again and entered that of the dry-cleaners. The store manager had to be called from the machine room, where he’d been oiling a pump. As a matter of simple security, the man who took the cassette from his hand was supposed to know neither the man’s name nor where he worked. He pocketed the cassette, passed over three half-liter bottles of liquor, and returned to finish oiling the pump, his heart rate up as it always was on these days. He was quietly amused that his cover assignment as a CIA “agent”—a Soviet national working for the American intelligence agency—worked very much to his personal fiscal benefit. The under-the-counter marketing of alcohol paid him in “certificate” rubles that could be used to buy Western goods and premium foodstuffs at the hard-currency stores. He balanced that against the tension of his assignment as he washed the machine oil off his hands. He’d been part of this line of cutouts for six months, and though he didn’t know it, his work along this line would soon be ended. He’d still be used to pass along information, but not for CARDINAL. Soon thereafter the man at the baths would seek another job, and this link of nameless agents would be dissolved—and untraceable even to the relentless counterintelligence officers of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate.
Fifteen minutes later, a regular customer appeared with one of her English coats. It was an Aquascutum with the zippered-in liner removed. As always, she said something about taking special care to use the gentlest process on the coat, and as always he nodded and protested that this was the best cleaning shop in all of the Soviet Union. But it didn’t have pre-printed check forms, and he wrote out three by hand on carbon-sets. The first was attached to the coat with a straight pin, the second went into a small box, and the third—but first he checked the pockets.