“Ha!” he laughed, tossing the pitiful carcass onto the flame. “Better here than leaving them lying around inside, don’t you think?”
“I like my men to smell a little less bad,” she sang back. “And you can go tell your clever friend at the facility that if he’s got rubles on him, I’ll sleep with him on the fourth of the month! And mind you say hello to Lludmila for me!”
The burly meat-carver burst out laughing as the truck trundled by. “What a tart you are! As if you’d spread your legs for anybody, Katia! But I’ll tell him, I certainly will!”
Genrikh was better than the Soviet Postal Service and twice as reliable. Mail a letter and there was no telling whether it would get to its destination or not, but give Genrikh a message to carry and come hell or high water he would carry it. Even knowing she wasn’t serious, he was so bull-headedly linear that he would still carry the message she had given him. He was the perfect mule, completely above suspicion. Eventually they would learn of her, for when the transfer had been completed and she left the village the KGB would arrive. It would not take them long to figure out the meaning of her innocent flirtation with her contact. Her husband had set the code phrases up before his death. It was not a sophisticated code but neither were the phrases likely to arouse suspicion in the casual hearer. There were only enough phrases to cover a few pre-planned circumstances: the work was proceeding, the work was not proceeding, the work was finished, the contact was being watched, there was trouble, and emergency or the operation was blown. The phrases took the form of a flirtation one might hear on any street corner in any city in the world: when will you sleep with me? I don’t have enough money to sleep with you yet, and the like. A savvy KGB officer, if they had any in that place, would be able to identify the code phrases in no time at all. But the KGB had no idea what was about to take place, she was certain of it. The exchange of code phrases between herself and her contact was too facile, so she knew her contact was not being watched. Further, Genrikh had done his work so well that apparently nobody in the Facility had taken note of the flirtation. The first few messages between them had caused her some worry, because it would not have been difficult to see through the flirtatious phrases to divine the hidden meaning. But clearly Genrikh hadn’t bellowed her messages out for everyone’s Uncle Ivan to hear and take note of, he had obviously passed them in some semblance of discretion. What a find he had been! She absolutely could not have wished for a better mule than Genrikh the butcher.
Of course he would pay for it and live out what remained of his life in the gulag. Occasionally those thoughts intruded into the cold hardness of her heart. But she didn’t need to think about that. That was Russia, and that was that.
U.S.S Bennington, CV 20
An Essex-class carrier, the Bennington it had a shorter hull than the newer carriers being built and had a crew complement of around 3000. During the Pacific war the Bennington had acquitted herself well. Her aircraft participated in a running battle with the Japanese fleet in the East China Sea and conducted numerous airstrikes on the Japanese homeland. Her luck following the war had not been as good. In 1953 a boiler exploded, killing 11 crewmen, and the next year a steam catapult exploded, killing 103. After a complete rebuild in 1955, she was back in service with the Pacific Fleet.
Hardin and his British companion had been installed in a cabin by themselves, and for the most part their contact with the officers and crew of the carrier was minimal. They took their meals and spent most of their time in their cabin, except for the occasions that Hardin was taken up in one of VAH-6’s AJ-2 Savages to give him some flight hours. His world thus far had been four haze-gray bulkheads, a narrow ‘rack,’ and not much else. The boredom was excruciating.
In spite of his initial misgivings about the Brit’s personality, Smith turned out to be the type of man Hardin instinctively got along with. He was from some place he called Foulmouth, which Hardin gathered was somewhere to the west of London. Hardin suspected he meant Falmouth. He had apparently been at Oxford in ’39 when the war broke out, at which time he left his studies to fly Hurricanes with the RAF. A Messerschmitt left a round in his thigh, coming perilously close to shattering the femur, and he had been laid up in a hospital for several months. After the war he’d finished his studies at Oxford and had been recruited by MI-6.
Hardin was drunk on Vodka more than he liked, enough so that headaches were becoming a permanent state. But he was developing a tolerance for the liquor, of which Captain Holveck indeed seemed to have an endless supply, but he doubted he would ever like it.
They conversed in Russian exclusively. Smith could speak it like a native, and after a few days Hardin slipped into the old patterns of childhood and his command of the language improved immensely. His accent, though, was a different matter and one evening when they were alone on the carrier’s signal bridge—Holveck ensured that when they were above decks they were left to themselves—Smith addressed the issue.
“You still sound like a Brooklyn hoodlum,” he grumbled in flawless Russian as the moon appeared from behind a dark cloud, sparkling on the water below. A gentle breeze swept over the signal bridge, bringing with it the strong, intoxicating smell of the sea. “It will never do!”
“Dammit, I’m from Brooklyn!”
“Look, mate. Ivan never speaks with a Brooklyn accent and yours is the worst. If you have to speak to a real Russian it will give you away immediately. You’re too nasal. Shape your vowels in your throat more, like so.”
Hardin practiced, but it wasn’t easy. The main problem with his accent was that he wasn’t aware he had one, and thus it was difficult to change his habits of speaking. He fished in his pocket for his pack of Troika cigarettes and lit one, enjoying the evening in spite of the fact that the cigarettes tasted like manure and made his lungs ache. “Tell me about Russian pilots, Graham. What do you guys know about them?”
“Actually, not much,” Graham confessed, leaning on the metal rail and staring out over the moonlit sea. Around them were the ships of DESDIV-112, dark shapes rising from the ocean and disturbing its placid surface with their wakes. Several hundred yards off the port beam steamed the Worcester, a light cruiser, and abeam her was the destroyer Buckley. Half a mile aft of the carrier was the oiler Taluga. “They haven’t been a matter we’ve paid a lot of attention to until now, so our information on them is rather slim, you know? We know they’re considered elite. They’re trusted with the some of the Party’s most advanced hardware, so they’re not your typical blokes off the streets of Kiev.” Some of his British terms didn’t translate correctly into Russian, but Hardin got the jist of the words he was substituting for British slang. Smith sighed, lighting one of his own—Hardin’s old—cigarettes. “Ivan the pilot probably has a big opinion of himself. He probably swaggers around like a typical pilot would. Drinks a lot since everyone seems to in that benighted country. Smokes a lot if he can get cigarettes. Jet fuel is expensive so he likely doesn’t get many flight hours in. He’s probably scheduled to fly every so often, but he won’t get near as much flight time as our blokes do.”
“Like how much?”
“I would guess…maybe once every couple of weeks for an hour or two. That’s just a guess, though. Now, the boys that fly around Moscow and in that area will get more hours. But out east, where you’re going…I’d guess they fly once a month if they’re lucky. I don’t really believe they’d have the fuel on hand to support more than that.”
“They’d have tank farms though, wouldn’t they? Even out there.”
“Not sure. Probably. You chaps haven’t been taking pictures of the air bases out there from the U2, have you? So we don’t really know. If they do have fuel farms, I’d almost guarantee they’re not full. You see, cash flow over there is a huge problem. They just don’t have it, and with the horrible agriculture situation Khrushchev’s got them in it’s even worse. Defense gets most of the budget but even so jet fuel is probably at a premium, and most would go to the forward areas.”
Smith chuckled. “Not unless it’s with each other. You need women to have sex with and I don’t think there are a lot of females at PVO bases. Plus the KGB would frown on that.”
“What, they don’t approve of sex?”
“Not with trusted assets they don’t. Sex is an easy way to become compromised. The KGB would be watching pilots a little more closely than the ordinary citizen, I should think, given how easy it should be to point a MiG towards the Channel and keep on going. Why? Are you thinking of having a big rut when you’re on the ground?”
Hardin grinned. “Hadn’t planned on it, but it pays to be prepared.”
“Facetious bastard,” Smith grumbled. “And speaking of which you don’t look much like a Russian. Your face is all wrong. You have too much jaw. You look like a yank, damn it.”
“I was kind of born that way. What did you expect?”
“Well, I suppose it could be worse. You could look like a jerry, and that would be deuced inconvenient. But for God’s sake do your movements at night. And dirty yourself up whenever you have to be on the ground.”
“Movements? Look, Graham, I have just about no idea what I’m supposed to do other than try to set down at a place called Kyzylorda.”
“It’s a little early to be going into specifics…”
“In the middle of the South China Sea,” he interrupted sarcastically, “you still think it’s a little early to tell me what’s going on? I hope you aren’t planning to spring all this on me five minutes before launch.”
“To be completely frank, John, there’s going to be quite a lot of flying by the seat of your pants in this operation. When we get a little closer to Iran I’ll give you the information on how to contact our assets there, but…”
“But anything could happen and I might be on my own?” He sighed.
Smith nodded, dropping his glowing cigarette stub into the butt kit. “If that turns out to be the case—if you can’t make contact in Kyzylorda, we would consider the operation scrubbed and you’ll need to get yourself back out.”
“If I can.” But he was not greatly concerned. In spite of momentary frustrations at the Brit’s tendency to balk at giving him information, the matter all seemed distant and theoretical. And although the carrier was steaming through the South China Sea on its way to Iran the whole operation seemed somehow speculative and unreal. Yet here he was, smoking Russian cigarettes, drinking vodka and having conversations in Russian with a British agent. It did not trouble him to be doing so, nor did he feel nervous. Why did he seem to have such a cavalier attitude? Occasionally the thought that he was being a bit supercilious troubled him, but mostly when he was drinking. He had been through Korea and come out a hero; this did not seem much different. He was confident that his capabilities would see him through, as they had before.
Footsteps sounded on the ladder leading to the Signal Bridge and Captain Holveck appeared, his hands on the rail to steady himself as he stepped up onto the dark platform. The carrier was rolling gently and it was a soothing, comforting motion. Graham let out a gusty breath, switching from Russian to English as he spoke. “Shit. You frightened the hell out of me, Bill.”
“How are ya, boss,” Hardin nodded as moonlight silhouetted the air boss’s familiar form. It was appropriate aboard ship, he’d learned, to refer to the air boss as simply ‘boss.’ Holveck carried a lot of weight aboard the Bennington, and not only due to his Company associations. As air boss, he commanded all flight operations aboard ship and was obeyed instantly and without question.
“Well, third watch just came on and I’m tired of being in pri-fly, especially since nothing’s going on,” the captain said, pulling a cigarette out of a worn pack in the pocket of his khakis and lighting it. The tip glowed red in the darkness as he leaned back against a stanchion, crossing his arms and exhaling smoke into the wind. “What’s going on up here?”
“Shooting the breeze,” Hardin told him with a grin. “I was about to ask fatty about Russian pilots, what kind of stuff they tend to say.”
“Damned disrespectful yank,” Graham groused. “What do you mean what do they say?”
“Am I going to talk to a Russian controller the same way I talk to one of ours? ‘Hey mac, can I get a bearing to Phoenix?’”
“Oh, oh, right,” the Brit nodded, “I’m with you now. Well, once in a while,” he dropped his voice slightly, “we’ll put up a bird over the North Sea to snoop around and listen to them a bit. When we can catch them flying, which they don’t do terribly often. But they have a hell of a lot of bases up there in the Murmansk oblast, and when they spot our bird, they’ll usually send a flight or two of MiGs to come take a look—make sure we’re behaving and what not.”
“What do you pick up?” Holveck asked, interested.
“Not a lot of chatter. Not like one of our exercises. Their pilots are pretty well glued to the controllers and they clear everything with them.”
Hardin listened intently. “Like what? Give me an example.”
Graham thought. “Well…rather like, ‘Control, this is one-two-three. I am going into afterburner.’ And the controller might say something like, ‘Flight one-two-three, you are cleared for afterburner.’ Or a pilot might say, uh, ‘Control, this is Flight one-two-three, I request permission to climb to twenty-five thousand feet.’ Then they’ll give him permission and he’ll say, ‘I am climbing to twenty-five thousand feet.’ They don’t leave much to chance over there. They keep a tight rein on their pilots.”
“Gah,” Hardin muttered disdainfully. “What a mess. Guess I better remember that before I say something stupid over guard.”
“Guess you better,” Holveck grinned, his teeth shining in the darkness.
“So how did you get involved with this bunch, boss?”
“What, Sal and Bob? I’ve known Bob Davis since the war. Not Korea, the big one.”
“Where at?”
“I started running into him on Guadalcanal in the early forties. I was on the Enterprise during the battle of the Solomons, and we’d send some planes to Henderson now and again. Used to run into him in flight ops—that was that Jap looking building on Pagoda Hill, ever seen the pictures? Have to show you sometime. He was flying Wildcats back then.”
“I flew a Wildcat for a bit,” Graham announced. Hardin and Holveck eyed him dubiously. “Well I did! You lot had the poor sense to export the things. Built like my mother-in-law and handled like a lorry. It pitched well enough, but the roll was horrible.”
“They could sure take a beating,” Holveck continued. “A fact Bob appreciated since he was flying mainly air to mud, which I think he’d rather have been doing than going against Zeros. The air to ground guys had a better survival rate, at least in the F4F. Anyway, we started having some beers whenever I was around and seemed to keep track of each other ever since. He got me involved with that crowd of yours…”
“Hey, they’re not my crowd,” Hardin protested.
“…and I’ve done a few favors for them over the years. For this particular deal I happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
“I might have been involved in one or two of those favors,” Smith added.
“What about that Weiss character? You know him at all?”
Holveck shook his head and lit another cigarette. “No, never seen him before. You?”
Hardin shook his head.
“Who are we talking about?” Smith wanted to know.
“Some guy from the CIA who seems to be in charge of our end of this,” Hardin explained. “Old guy, thinning hair, calls himself Weiss.”
The Brit shrugged. “Nobody I know, but that’s hardly surprising.”
They stood in silence for a while, feeling the deck sway gently, watching the moon illuminate the ships of DESDIV-112. “Well, come on, you two,” Holveck muttered. “Fleet weather has us running into a squall in another couple hours, so you’d better get some sleep while you can. After t
hat you may be standing on the bulkheads.”
Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
By late October the Kazakhstan weather was rapidly worsening, an indicator of the kind of winter that was to come. During the day temperatures might reach a high of 40 degrees and nights were bitter cold. Soon the snow would come, and the winds that normally howled across the steppe would drive snow into drifts several feet deep. Already the frost had set in, making the ground far too hard for much construction work. Now the heavy equipment stood for the most part idle, unless the occasionally warmer day allowed for some excavating activity. At the launch pad the flame trench had not yet been completed, and the hard ground made the crews of the 217thlabor like zeks.
Loginov walked from the barracks down the road to the Oxygen/Nitrogen plant, a huge concrete structure bristling with pipes and cooling towers. The sun was barely up and he had a headache again. It was cold this morning, and he shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his gray overcoat, his breath steaming out amidst the smoke of the cigarette that trailed from his mouth. Another day in the Worker’s Paradise. Another day working to stabilize the formulas for solid propellants. They’d been working with potassium perchlorate, trying to figure out a way to improve the quality over 90% so the compound would prove stable enough to actually do something with. Research on the compound was well established and had been ongoing since the 40’s, but turning research into usable products in the Worker’s Paradise was an entirely different matter.
A Cold Flight To Nowhereville Page 10