A Cold Flight To Nowhereville

by Steve Fletcher

  Loginov had been right after all: he was going to end up as zampolit of a harbor tug in Murmansk. If he was lucky.

  A subdued voice came from around the near corner in the deep darkness, someone who wished to remain hidden. “One of the noncoms squealed. He was trying to get his superior in trouble.”

  Dmitri Osipov. “I thought as much,” Ushakov muttered in a voice equally low, not turning his head. “You found out?”

  “I was there when Lieutenant Arkov went to see the Director. Thought I might give you a head’s up, comrade Colonel.”

  “Noted.” Osipov was probably just as interested—or more so—in learning whether or not his name had been mentioned, but Ushakov didn’t care. He was actually glad for some company, and nobody else was party to his affairs the way Osipov had been of late. “Junior officers. Fucking pain, aren’t they?”

  There came the sound of a low chuckle. “Yes, Comrade Colonel. Shall I do anything? What about the traitor Loginov?”

  You really believe, don’t you Dmitri? You’re not just kissing my ass, you really do believe it. You have faith in me that I would not just go tilting at windmills. Well…that makes two of us. “No,” he muttered, “do nothing. It’s too risky now. Return to your unit. You may listen for gossip, but that’s all.”

  A moment of silence. The winter wind whistled mournfully under the eaves of the concrete building. “What of you, comrade Colonel? What will happen to you?”

  “Don’t know yet,” he replied presently. “Return to your unit now.”

  Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan

  Hardin stretched himself out full length on the uncomfortable Russian sofa, staring up at the cracked and flaking plaster overhead. There was a hard button from one of the cushions digging into his left shoulder but he didn’t care. It felt too good to lie down. The stress of the flight was off him now, and he felt drained. Katia did not seem to share his sense of relief at being in a building that offered at least a measure of peace, for she was standing to one side of a filthy window, looking outside at the snowy courtyard below. He saw her fidgeting with the dusty, aged curtains absently. “Here,” he said and tossed her his pack of cigarettes. “Have one.”

  She turned in time to catch the thrown pack. She turned it over in her hands, tapping the small box with a finger. “Troika. This is a famous Soviet brand. They call them ‘the People’s cigarettes.’ They’re very popular. But all you can get out here is off-brands or you do what the kolkhozniks do and roll their own. I knew you were smoking something unusual for this area…but I suppose they might be available on the black market.” She lit a cigarette and returned the pack to him.

  “You’d probably like American smokes,” he muttered. “These are pretty harsh in comparison. They’re not totally bad though.”

  Katia had brought him on a circuitous route through a city that looked like industrial Cleveland, pre-1920 and in worse shape. It was a strange, depressing place, filled with abandoned buildings and the occasional colorless peasant shuffling down the street. Once he had seen a small store that appeared to be open but few goods were in evidence on the shelves. The building she had parked nearby looked like an old condemned blockhouse apartment complex, one in a small sea of deserted buildings. For anonymity the place suited Hardin perfectly.

  “I’ve never had an American cigarette.”

  Katia wasn’t a knockout but she wasn’t bad looking either, he decided. Her hips were shapely and her waist was trim, her hair dark and falling past her shoulders, but her features were a little too hard for beauty. Rather, her loose-fitting clothing had not yet given him a clear view of her figure, except when she bent over and that was interesting enough, but it was apparent that she was not coming very close to filling out the bulky garments she wore. It had required some close scrutiny on his part to conclude that, though, and such was no doubt her plan. He could imagine several reasons a pretty girl like Katia would want to hide her figure. Her cheekbones were pronounced and her almond-shaped eyes were rather wide set, giving her a distinctively Slavic appearance. Her face seemed somehow to reflect the difficulty of her life, perhaps in the tiny lines that were already starting to show around her mouth and eyes. He thought he might like her smile, but he hadn’t seen one of those from her yet. “I should go look at that truck of yours,” he yawned. “It sounds like it’s missing on a couple cylinders. Cleaning the plugs should fix it.”

  “Well, we won’t leave until tonight,” she told him. “Tyuratam has become much too busy a place during the day. Many soldiers are typically around, so we’ll try to slip in at night. The truck hasn’t much gas, either, but I think it will make it back.”

  “I’ll definitely clean the plugs then. That will help a lot.” He watched her for a moment as she stood with her back to him, smoking quietly and staring out the window. “Do you have a plan?”

  She sighed. “Not really.”

  “Why don’t you tell me the situation? Maybe I can figure something out.”

  She turned to face him. “That seems a little presumptuous.”

  He choked back an angry retort. “Look. Things sound a certain way in your head, but they sound different when you say them out loud. It’s a very common trick among people who give briefings to important generals back in the States that they give the briefing out loud to someone first. You work out problems you didn’t know you had that way.”

  Katia seemed to accept his reasoning but didn’t look very happy about it. “All right. Communication between my contact and me has been conducted by code phrases. Simple, flirty lines that nobody would think twice about. In Tyuratam there is a butcher who makes deliveries of meat to the Facility, and he carries messages for us.”

  “I take it he’s not aware of what he’s doing?”

  “He’s a mule. He isn’t aware of what the messages mean nor is he suspicious. It’s worked out very well for almost a year.”

  “So what changed?”

  “A few weeks ago my contact sent me the message that all the schematics had been photographed. I came and passed the message to my handler who told me a courier would be here on the sixth of November.”

  “Graham must have sent out the projected launch date,” he mused. “And the Brits were passing your guy the position of the Bennington.”

  “The which?”

  “U.S.S. Bennington, the aircraft carrier I launched from south of Iran.”

  “You flew a MiG jet off an aircraft carrier?” She sounded incredulous.

  He nodded. “Had a heart attack doing it, but yes.”

  “I didn’t think they were made to do that!”

  “They’re not. We had to modify it a little and do a lot of praying.”

  “How did you acquire such an advanced jet in the first place?”

  “I think we got it from Egypt,” he replied with a wink. “But that’s a secret.”

  He could have filled books with what he didn’t know about humint. He probably wasn’t supposed to be having these conversations with her, if she was picked up and interrogated she might revel a disastrous amount of information. He sighed inwardly, making an imaginary fist and thumping himself in the forehead. His first day of personal reforms wasn’t going well.

  She shook her head slowly. “When my handler told me that the courier was going to fly into Kyzylorda, I thought that was a bold plan. I had no idea how bold it was.”

  “Neither did I. In fact if I’d been thinking about things a little more I might not have agreed to do it in the first place.”

  “You’re a fighter pilot all right,” she sniffed. “As you cook the porridge, so you must eat it. But it’s perfect, don’t you see? They would never believe that the Imperialists would try something so forward. They wouldn’t think your intelligence was nearly so good.”

  “Let’s get back to the plan,” he said, scowling at her. “So you got the message to be back here on the sixth. What happened?”

  “A few days ago I went onto the Facility with the old man I work for—real wo
rk, not this work. My contact was supposed to make a brush-pass and give me the film, but he didn’t. Instead he gave me a gesture than I was to wait. Security had been increased at the main gate and there was a KGB officer watching me as I worked.”

  Hardin considered her story. “Does that mean the operation was blown? Katia, military bases have all kinds of reasons to increase security. We’re only one of the reasons.”

  “No,” she said sharply. “The operation isn’t blown yet. The gate would have been closed, not open. Security would have been doubled or tripled and arrests would have been made, at least Ilia and I would have been interrogated. So I think someone suspects something is afoot but doesn’t know what yet. My handler thought the operation was blown but I do not. But my handler has already departed.”

  And you didn’t like that. That much was obvious by her tone. Hardin nodded his understanding.

  “I think the operation can still be saved as long as my contact is not arrested. If they had arrested him the gate would have been sealed and they would probably have arrested me.”

  “So you need a plan to contact him.”

  She began to pace slowly. “When Kingfish was still alive he set up one specific code phrase that was to be used in an emergency situation, when all was certainly lost. If that phrase was used I was to go immediately to an old gulag, maybe twenty kilometers northwest of the village, and wait there. It was a failsafe point. My contact would leave the Facility, forcibly if he had to, and meet me there. We would conceal ourselves in some canyons west of the gulag and make our way south to Iran.”

  “That would still work if you could get the signal to him.”

  She nodded. “It’s also possible that he might go to the failsafe point without the signal—if it were impossible to communicate, he might invoke failsafe on his own. The film is ready and all that remains is to transfer it, but if he thought he couldn’t make the transfer the day we were supposed to then I think it likely that he will try another communication. I’d thought of just going to failsafe and waiting, but perhaps we should return to the village and see what happens.”

  “What would you do, go to some old gulag in the middle of nowhere, in the dead of winter, and just hang out there hoping he gets himself there before you froze to death?” Hardin smirked. “If he was arrested you’d never know it. I like your other plan better. Providing you can hide me somewhere.”

  “That’s not a problem. The problem is whether or not my mule can receive any messages from him.” She sat heavily in a chair facing him, shooting him a cold look and seeming to bridle at his attitude. “I may be under suspicion at Tyuratam for running off to Kyzylorda, I don’t know. This was supposed to happen in a three-step process. He would pass the film to me, I would pass it to you, and you would take it out with no one the wiser. But now everything has changed, thanks in part to you.”

  “Part of combat is thinking on your feet, being able to convert a situation to your advantage. Why don’t you try that?”

  “Thank you for that insight. If I was a pilot I’m sure that would be meaningful to me.”

  “Don’t snap at me, damn it! I’m not the cause of your troubles.”

  “Well you don’t seem to be helping much either,” she replied acridly.

  “You’re the spy, Katia, not me!”

  “Do you know what I used to do?” She leaned her chin on her hand and her temper seemed to diffuse. Her voice sounded pensive and dull. “I used to be an executive secretary to an important General back in Ukraine. I would photograph secret documents and take the film to a drop point where I was told to place it in a specific trash bin. I did that every few months for three years before becoming Kingfish’s partner. That’s my spy experience for you.”

  He shrugged, wondering what to do or say next. He wasn’t getting along too well with this Russian woman and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe you’re being too much of a jerk, a.k.a your normal self. That had been his manner ever since Korea, when success had started flowing his way, and he wasn’t accustomed to worrying about the effects his brusqueness had on other people. But the thought belatedly occurred to him that alienating his only ally in a country the size of the Pacific Ocean might not be the best idea. Empathy wasn’t his strong suit though, not by a long shot, and if he tried too hard he would probably mess it up. “You took chances. You learned to cover your tracks. You worked for three years without being caught. That sounds pretty good to me. You must have done well to draw an assignment like this.”

  “Sometimes I think Kingfish just wanted someone to sleep with out here,” she groused. “He didn’t think about much else.”

  Hardin lit a cigarette. “I thought you said you two were married.”

  “It was just for appearances. I wouldn’t let him…you know. He was much older than I was.”

  “Bet he wasn’t too happy about that,” he observed with a grin.

  “I’m sure he wasn’t,” she snapped rudely. “I didn’t care. This was a job and that was never part of it.”

  “May be I’m missing something, but on an operation as important as this I don’t see why that would be such a big deal.”

  “Oh, you are new to this business! The main use for women, according to Kingfish, was sex. Either to compromise someone by having sex with them, or to provide comfort for a man. To him I was a whore, and I wouldn’t play the part. ”

  “Did he let you plan much?”

  “No, he didn’t. He did all the planning. I was just the backup in case something happened to him.”

  Hardin was getting the idea Katia had a fairly serious grudge against this Kingfish; he’d already heard her give two reasons. And she was right: he was a rube in the intelligence business. He had no idea how field operations were run. She also seemed to have a beef with her handler for leaving her in the lurch. If her head wasn’t clear her chances of planning a successful operation were not good, and she seemed to be carrying around enough emotional baggage to make those chances slimmer yet. Although she had ostensibly pronounced herself open to ideas, he had a hunch she wouldn’t be too favorably disposed to any he might come up with on such short notice. She seemed more the type to want to muscle through a problem on her own. “Look, Katia. Nobody knows this operation better than you do. But sometimes you can be thinking about something so hard that you miss something obvious that’s staring right at you. Sit down, smoke a few cigarettes and think about something else. Then come back to it.”

  “Easy for you to say,” she replied tightly. “It’s already after dark. It would be best if we started back before too much longer.

  “Okay. Here.” He fished a roll of Russian currency out of his pocket—another gift from the British agent—and tossed it to her. “I’m sure we’re going to need some supplies, and better to buy them here than have you asking around in your village. Food, if you can find any. And vodka, lots of it. I’m supposed to be drinking the stuff like it’s going out of style, and it’s going to look weird if your friends start seeing you buying loads of the stuff. Why don’t you go see what’s at the store while I work on the truck?”

  “All right,” she agreed. “I need to get out and do something else for a bit anyway.”

  He hoped the innocuous activity would clear her head, but Katia’s personality seemed mercurial and he had his doubts.

  Kyzylorda, Kazakhstan

  She drew her worn wrap more tightly around herself, huddling into its limited warmth as she trudged through the empty streets of Kyzylorda, her booted feet leaving tracks in the snow covering the sidewalks and alleys. The weather was worsening. Snow was falling and the cold wind sighed through the dirty alleyways as she searched for evidence of the black market. That was typically a small assortment of vendor stalls hastily set up, easily taken down, on a side street or alley at which customers could buy or barter for various hard-to-find goods. Milk, shoes, used American “blue jeans,” coffee, sometimes good brands of cigarettes, all were items not generally available in the stores, or that tended
to sell out quickly. Government regulations and price controls, whether by design or not, ensured some goods were always in short supply. The black markets were illegal, for they short-circuited the government’s attempts to control the economy, but the tighter those controls, the more the black market flourished. Depending on the efficiency of the bureaucratic machinery in a given locale assigned to prosecute black marketers—in Kyzylorda, non-existent—symbiosis was achieved.

  Finding the market was another issue. If the KGB tended to look the other way, the location of the black market remained fairly constant. If the KGB was more active in prosecuting crimes, the location of the market shifted. As far as Katia knew, there was little or no KGB presence in Kyzylorda at all. She had been to the black market once before, but that had been a while ago and now she could not recall exactly where it was. But the cold weather did much to clear her head and settle her thoughts, and she enjoyed being out in the quiet town.

  Her thoughts drifted to the American, John Hardin. She had to admit to herself that she was not treating him very well, and she was not sure why. Her defense mechanisms were many and well developed, especially after her life with Kingfish. But was it fair to subject the American to those and take out her anger on him?

  She was not accustomed to controlling her innate reactions to men.

  Hardin was a good-looking man, educated and capable. The things he had accomplished impressed her tremendously: piloting a Russian jet off an American aircraft carrier, navigating over half the Soviet Union, fighting against Russian pilots. She had to admit that, in spite of her defensive reactions, he appealed to her intellect. Perhaps, just perhaps, she had fallen into the habit of assigning men guilt for crimes they had not necessarily committed. Perhaps she had automatically assumed Hardin would treat her as other men had. But so far he had not.