The Espionage Game

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  Fred Kelder chuckled at the thought of what a scene she must have thrown. He made a mental note to call some of his colleagues at Brooks in the morning. “Tell me about the operation,” he asked.

  “Well,” Jerry responded hesitantly, “I don’t want to bore you with the gory details.” He glanced around the little group and was surprised at the interest.

  “Well, okay.” He looked down at his abdomen and added, “and I ain’t about to show you the scars here in the living room, but there is surprisingly little to show. They made a two-inch slit here,” he noted as rubbed his finger on his shirt above his belly button. “They did the whole thing through that little hole. Maddy said that she watched from behind the nurses and that they used long flexible tubes to position each of the electrodes. They apparently stapled them into place.”

  Jerry looked quizzically at Fred Kelder. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is that they had me in a centrifuge two days later. They only spun me at two g’s, but they didn’t seem to think it was much of a big deal.”

  “Except for the incision on your stomach,” Fred replied, “there really wasn’t much to it. We’ve been told to keep you quiet for a couple of weeks, until the incision heals. After that, we can put you to work full-time. Actually, we’re going to put you into the simulator with Cleo next week. We’ll keep you down to a two-g max for a couple more weeks, and then we can let it rip.”

  Jerry looked down at his feet bashfully. “If you guys would like to do something really special for Maddy and me—well, I guess the way to say it is that they had me in a hospital bed until this morning, and we haven’t even had dinner yet.”

  “Ah, yes, love,” Fred remarked philosophically. “I quite understand. I’ll clear that mob out of there in a few minutes. Then you and Maddy can be alone at last.”

  “Will it be all right?” Jerry asked when he suddenly realized that the strain might be too much. “You’re a doctor.”

  “Just lay back and enjoy it,” Fred responded with a twinkle in his eye, “and don’t exceed two g’s.”

  “That was delicious,” Madeline proclaimed. She reached up and snuffed out the dinner candles. “Now I know why I agreed to marry you: I hate to cook.”

  Madeline got up, walked around the table, and gave Jerry an appreciative kiss on his cheek.

  “Ah,” Jerry countered, “but you’re still doing the dishes.”

  “But I have work to do.”

  “A deal is a deal,” Jerry insisted firmly, “I cook, you wash.”

  “At least help me clear the table.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Me,” she answered, giving him a seductive come-hither look.

  “Ah,” Jerry sighed in resignation. “What a man does for love.”

  “It’s not that much work, and besides, I’m still washing the damn things,” she replied.

  “You mean stacking them in the dishwasher and turning the machine on,” he groused as he began stacking the dinner plates.

  “Jerry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Jerry,” Madeline pleaded softly, “let’s go to Las Vegas next weekend.”

  Jerry paused and put the dishes in his hands back onto the table. “Whatever for?”

  “Well,” Madeline answered slowly, “we’ve been out here in the middle of the desert too long. I think we both need to get back to civilization again, see the sights, have a little fun.”

  “Who needs civilization?” Jerry snapped. “Traffic jams, crowds, dust and noise. Arrgh!”

  “Jerry,” she cooed, “I need a little excitement. I want to go shopping, see a couple of those stage shows, go out to dinner, go dancing.…” Madeline walked to Jerry and put her arms around him as though they were dancing.

  “I’ve already reserved the Bridal Suite at the Hilton,” she whispered.

  “You what!” Jerry struggled to keep from laughing.

  “We haven’t had a pre-honeymoon,” she replied.

  “But I have a poker game on Saturday night.”

  “MEN!” Madeline cried in frustration. She turned on her heel and stalked toward the bedroom.

  “Hey! I was just kidding! Maddy!” Jerry shouted. He ran after her and stopped her. “Of course we’ll go, if it’s what you want. In fact, why don’t we make a three-day weekend out of it?”

  “Really?” Madeline squealed with delight.

  “Absolutely,” he said, kissing her.

  She took his hand and tugged him toward the bedroom. “The dishes can wait,” she whispered with a sudden urgency. “It’s been a week.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Early the next morning.

  The scorpion stood just a few inches in front of its home, a pile of rocks under which it hid during the heat of the day. It stood defiantly holding out its miniature lobster-like claws like a prizefighter, enjoying the first warming rays of the rising sun. A new day was dawning in the Nevada desert. Once again the dangers of the night were safely behind the scorpion. Once again it had survived. Once again it had hunted and had not been hunted. Once again it had eaten and had not been eaten. Now it was time to enjoy the birth of a new day.

  The scorpion moved slightly to allow the sun’s rays to warm its body while it searched for unseen enemies with its iridescent, bead-like eyes. Soon, when the rising sun was again scorching the desert, the little two-inch scorpion would be safely hidden under the nearby pile of rocks. However, first it needed to warm the chill of the night out of its tiny body. Just a few more minutes of sun and it could retreat to safety.

  The thick-soled boot came crashing down from above.

  “¡Cagón de mierdas!You little shit!” Juan Pablo de Carranza y Fernandez snarled while he stomped the hapless scorpion a second and then a third time. A native of Havana, Cuba, Juan Pablo had never seen a scorpion until three months earlier, when one stung him on his hand when he reached down to retrieve an empty soda can. He viciously kicked the crushed remains of the little arachnid well away from the empty beer can lying near the edge of the rural highway, then he gently kicked the can to tentatively test it for any undesirable inhabitants. More than once a scorpion or spider had come rushing from similarly tested cans. He waited a moment before picking up the can and shaking it vigorously, listening carefully for a rattle caused by a tenacious inhabitant. However, all he heard was the sound of the remaining beer sloshing around inside. He held the can upside-down to drain it before dropping it on the ground and crushing it with the heel of his boot. Finally, he threw it into his sack of similarly crushed cans and moved on to the next glint of aluminum flashing in the morning sun.

  To the idle passerby, Juan Pablo appeared to be just another undocumented Mexican immigrant eking out a few extra dollars by collecting empty cans and bottles from the roadsides around Las Vegas.

  In fact, he was spying.

  He’d been promised a life of intrigue and adventure, traveling from one capital city to another in the disguise of a Cuban diplomat, living the life of a Latino James Bond. Such glamorous dreams proved elusive. Instead of spending his days sipping champagne and nibbling on caviar at diplomatic receptions, he cut grass and manicured gardens in Las Vegas, living the life of an itinerant Mexican farm worker. He had even learned to speak the illiterate Mexican patois, even though it still grated on his nerves every time he heard it spoken.

  Juan Pablo walked along the edge of the road, ignoring the sleek American cars rushing by as they carried their overweight occupants to their well-paying jobs in air-conditioned comfort. He picked up an empty glass bottle and then another beer can. At last, he saw what he was really searching for. It looked like any other can except that it had once been filled with iced tea. Juan Pablo nudged the can with his toe. He wasn’t surprised to hear a rustling sound.

  Still, he took care that nothing had taken up residence inside. He peeked in and instantly spotted the source of the sound. A piece of paper had been rolled up and inserted through the hole left by the pop- top tab. Once inside, t
he piece of paper had unrolled and now lined the inside of the can.

  Juan Pablo dropped the can and crushed it, but carefully, so that the lid could be easily cut off and the paper removed. That would be done by somebody else—he had no idea whom. Although he temporarily put the can in his sack with the rest of the morning’s collection, he would not take it to the recycling yard. Instead of turning the iced tea can in for ten cents a pound, he would throw it into a vacant lot on his way to his gardening job.

  He neither knew nor cared about what happened to the can after that; it wasn’t his job to know, for he was what is known as a cutout. Neither the person who had thrown the can from a passing car onto Juan Pablo’s stretch of highway nor the person who would later retrieve it from the vacant lot had any idea who Juan Pablo was. Likewise, he had no idea who they were. All he was responsible for was checking a particular section of highway every morning for empty cans and throwing the iced tea cans onto the vacant lot. What was in them and who picked them up was none of his business. However, he had his ideas about what was written on the paper inside the can; he was gleaning the cans from the highway leading to the main gate of Nellis Air Force Base, north of Las Vegas.

  “Wilma,” Madeline called over the counter in the guardhouse for Hangar 18. “Are you in there?”

  Captain Wilma Korfman poked her head out of her office. “Yes, Madeline.”

  “I understand that you get the Las Vegas Sunday newspaper. Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” Wilma replied. “Want to see it?”

  “If I may,” Madeline responded. “Jerry and I are going to town for a three-day weekend, and I thought that I would get tickets for some of the shows. I want to see what entertainers are in town this weekend.”

  Wilma disappeared for a moment and reappeared with the entertainment section from the Sunday paper.

  “Here, you can keep it,” she said, handing it over the counter. “How did you ever get Jerry to agree? I thought he was something of a stick- in-the-mud when it came to going out.”

  Madeline laughed. “You have that right, but I found the secret to convincing him.”

  “What might that be?”

  “Making him wash the dishes all by himself.”

  Sergei Ilyich Kadomtsev sat by the nicked and marred dinette table of his two-room apartment and carefully cut away the top of the iced tea can with the can opener blade of his Swiss Army knife. Once, during his childhood, he had been an expert sniper with over a hundred dead German soldiers to his credit. Now, almost fifty years later, he needed thick eyeglasses to read even the large, childish block letters crudely printed on the piece of paper he found inside. It was a love note from a little girl to her puppy.

  Sergei appreciatedZerkalo ’s creativity. Should the iced tea can have been intercepted and the paper discovered, only the most suspicious mind would have guessed that the note wasn’t written by a child and playfully hidden in the empty can. It was simple tradecraft technique, but effective. Sergei liked simplicity, it was safest; forty years of experience proved it.

  His philosophy was to avoid suspicion by never doing anything or having anything in his possession that wasn’t a natural part of his daily routine. He had also insisted on a complex system of cutouts and dead drops: Nobody in his chain was to know anybody else. All he knew was where to look for empty iced tea cans at eight in the morning and where to leave a rumpled newspaper by four that afternoon. That was all he knew. That, and how to read the message in the can, for it was also his responsibility to encodeZerkalo ’s intelligence for transmission back to Moscow.

  Sergei got up and threw the cut up can into the trash. He turned on one of the gas burners on his battered kitchen stove. A moment later, as he gently heated the paper, a second message appeared. The writing was as finely done as a draftsman’s. The secret of the magic writing was hundreds of years old; it was written in so-called “invisible ink.” In this case, the invisible ink was nothing more than diluted lemon juice. He could have chosen any of the exotic chemicals available, but he insisted on simplicity—everyone has an excuse for having lemon juice, he argued, particularly in desert climates like Nevada.

  Sergei sat down wearily on one of the dinette chairs. “Ah,” he said softly while he read the message with a magnifying glass to aid his aged eyes. “ATASF pilot back from implant,” he mumbled while he read the message in a whisper. “SR-96 ordered to fly secret mission.” He put the note down.

  “Not much this time,” he mumbled to himself. He picked up a pencil and carefully transcribed the message to a pad of paper. The encoding procedure required a list of random numbers. Special lists of such numbers can be found in a number of places, particularly statistics books. However, retired street workers are not normally expected to be statisticians, so Sergei instead reached for his telephone book and mentally multiplied the date by the number of the month. He opened the phone book to that page number and set to work.

  Even though it was possible for somebody determined to do so to break Sergei’s code by using a computer, it would take a good deal of computer time. Since the message was now scrambled, there were many alternate solutions that would have to be checked, one by one. Only someone with a copy of the same telephone book Sergei used and knowledge of how he encoded the message had any hope of decoding it in a reasonable period of time.

  But to do that, they’d have to first realize that it was a coded message. The last touch Sergei added to his efforts was to copy the message as coded to a clean sheet of paper that looked like a horse- racing form, complete with names of actual horses taken from the newspaper sporting section. Even if the message were accidentally found, it would appear to be nothing more sinister than the discarded handicapping efforts of a horseracing fan.

  “Papa Bear,” Wilma purred while she ran her hand over Bill Winslow’s face, “you never take me anywhere anymore.” They were alone in his quarters at Groom.

  “What does that mean?” Winslow inquired with a decidedly defensive tone.

  “When we were still in Washington, we used go all over together, even to Europe, for weeks,” she replied. “Now, since we’re out here, I don’t even see you for days on end. And we never leave this damn place.”

  Bill Winslow sat up in his chair and peered at her. “What are you driving at, Wilma?”

  “Let’s spend the weekend in Las Vegas,” she prompted.

  “I have a wife in Las Vegas,” Winslow responded. “I don’t think she’d be very understanding.”

  “You mean you have that floozy of a secretary,” Wilma pouted.

  “As hard as you might find it to believe, Wilma,” Winslow said sternly, “I haven’t been to bed with her.”

  “I bet!”

  “As I said, I have a battle-ax of a wife in Las Vegas,” he explained. “She’s not very understanding.”

  “Then let’s go to Reno, or maybe LA!”

  “Whatever brought on this sudden need to travel?” he demanded.

  “Well,” Wilma murmured, “Madeline and Jerry are going to Las Vegas this weekend. She has it all planned. They’re going to have a great time.”

  “You want to go, too.”

  “You never take me anyplace anymore,” Wilma complained.

  “You know, Wilma,” he replied, “you’re beginning to sound like a wife.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  A week later.

  Although it was midnight, many were already at work at Groom Lake. At the very southern part of the base, in an base-within-a-base with its own security parameter, double barbed-wire fences, and heavily-armed guards, the doors of Hangar 17 creaked as they opened for the first time in months. Inside, only the headlamps of the towing vehicle were lit as it pulled its tarpaulin-covered burden out of the darkened hangar and into the frigid night air. At first, the towing vehicle moved very gradually, pulling its load forward until it was well clear of the hangar.

  Then, at a faster pace, the vehicle moved toward the large shed behind the fuel generation pla
nt located nearly three miles away on the far side of the runway. Thus began theYorktown ’s journey.

  Designed to replace the SR-85 Snake strategic reconnaissance aircraft, the first SR-96 was promptly dubbed the Super Snake by the SR-85 pilots the moment they saw it. However, Senator Walter Bennett, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the man responsible for finding the money to fund the aircraft’s secret development, was not amused. He insisted on a more dignified name, and so the tradition of naming each individual SR-96 started. His choice for the first SR-96 was theYorktown .

  The towing tug took nearly a half-hour to cover the distance to the fueling shed. Once there, another half-hour was required to maneuver the tarpaulin-enshrouded craft inside the football-field sized shed. Finally, after the ends of the building were closed to the prying eyes of Russian satellites by large canvas flaps, the lights were turned on and the tarpaulins covering the aircraft were removed. TheYorktown now stood naked, looking like a Concorde supersonic transport someone had painted black and mounted on a multi-wheeled tubular steel trolley. It also appeared pregnant, for its fuselage was swollen to nearly twice the diameter of the Concorde’s svelte main cabin.

  Soon, men dressed in thickly insulated safety suits and hoods moved toward the black aircraft and connected large hoses to receptacles. The fueling began; the hoses gurgled and twisted as the propellant first touched them. In a few moments, the hoses finished dancing, growing rigid and white as ice formed on the outer surface, making gurgling sounds as the fuel gushed into the vast tank formed by theYorktown ’s bulbous fuselage. Had any of the propellant spilled, it would have looked like slush or partially melted snow. However, it was far colder by hundreds of degrees. It was slush hydrogen, cooled to nearly the freezing point of hydrogen, minus 259 degrees Celsius.