by Dean Ing
"One day we shall trace him," Suslov said wistfully.
"If we did, Lenya, I would not be able to tell you." Karotkin rarely used diminutive forms of address, and never before to Suslov. It suggested— not friendship, for Karotkin avoided closeness— perhaps something akin to pity for a fellow rezident denied his fondest desire.
Suslov nodded without rancor. The rigid constraints on exactly who may know what was even more strict in Soviet intelligence agencies—KGB, GRU, and the party secretariat's own spooks as well—than in those of the United States. No one above field-grade operatives gave it a moment's thought; it had always been thus, and would only intensify in the future. Suslov passed a hand through his curly black hair, dyed assiduously to maintain his youthful appearance, and laid down the bag with care. He would know, in any case, that Sasha had not been smoked out so long as his clay pigeons kept sailing in every year or so. Once the KGB was running him, Sasha would damned well report when, how, and on what he was told.
Karotkin had not bothered to hide the stack of three-by-five cards, his favored method of arranging pieces of a puzzle, that lay on his blotter. His habit was to sit erect, shuffling and arranging the cards feverishly with fingers that scuttled like white tarantulas, as he pondered the meanings hidden in each set of cards, like a blind man with a tarot deck. This deck was pink, with dates scribbled on upper right-hand corners. The top card, Suslov saw, read "99" because he was reading it upside down. Therefore, 'sixty-six. The year of their first message from Sasha. Suslov could infer the data his colleague had scribbled on those cards.
In 1966, Leonid Suslov had been in Moscow when Sasha's first clay pigeon soared onto the old embassy grounds in Washington, to be found by a guard. According to the printed message in clear English, CIA was coordinating data from new American spy aircraft and ferret satellites for early missile warnings. If true, this could give Americans an edge so tempting that they might grow more bellicose, more reckless in their demands. Once they knew where to focus their antennae, Soviet science had found it was true. The USSR had taken certain steps to equalize that situation. Suslov still did not know exactly what steps.
1967: Sasha had warned of CIA-run "Phoenix" recon teams in Vietnam, small hit teams of boyevaya as murderous as the GRU's. Sasha said they were targeting Viet Cong nurses and doctors for assassination. Destabilizing, and true again.
1971: CIA stealth aircraft had progressed far beyond the Helio Courier, the Windecker Eagle, and Lockheed's Quietships, said Sasha. The long-winged, turbojet "Cope" had no pilot and could find its way home after a full day of mapping at high altitudes. The shopping list had brought confirmation, finally, with photographed blueprints from a paid schpick, a rank novice.
1974: According to Sasha, NSA found unexpected success in Wisconsin with a low-frequency antenna rig that could permit direct communication between submerged Poseidon subs and command locations. Some American hawks were already whispering that this provided a first-strike advantage that should be used before the Soviets equalized the situation. The most stabilizing response, Sasha added, would be a crash program by the Soviets in the same technology.
1977: A secret Nevada air base was soon to receive its first production-type stealth aircraft from Lockheed's supersecret "Skunk Works" in Bur-bank. If they could be refueled in flight—and they could, Sasha warned—such aircraft could blind radars or lay a nuclear weapon on any given acre in Libya, China, or the Soviet Union with relatively low danger of detection. It must have been a tremendous temptation for Americans, who might think they could vaporize a Soviet nuclear power plant undetected and then offer regrets about the nuclear "accident."
1981: Sasha claimed that, with NSA equipment and CIA operational help, Americans were tapping Soviet undersea cables to verify the accuracy of Soviet test missiles. Such knowledge generated a dangerous power imbalance. An American traitor named Pelton said so, too. This problem was remedied immediately by the Soviet Navy.
1984: A devilish device built by NSA and airdropped by CIA near East German air bases looked exactly like shrubs, said Sasha. But they recorded and eventually transmitted MiG radar signals, until a counterintelligence team found and destroyed this fake foliage.
1988: Similar shrubbery had been air-dropped near the Nicaraguan coast, which gave warning when Ortega's people tried to ship arms to certain other communist forces. With such precise information, an unidentified aircraft had sunk two boatloads of arms. It was very possible that the aircraft in question was some new experimental stealth model, one of the so-called "black," or unmentionable, U.S. programs.
Eight clay pigeons. Eight crucial messages, all accurate as far as could be determined. And now another, the longest yet, in some ways the most detailed. And easily the most galvanizing, if Moscow reacted as Suslov knew they would.
Tapping those pink cards on his blotter, Karotkin said, "I am even more certain, now, that Sasha is either CIA in a middle-echelon technical post, or NSA. If he is NSA, he could be in a minor position."
"Or somewhere above," Suslov said. "But you had concluded that already." He gave his colleague a thoughtful glance. "If CIA, be glad that their man Weston is only a few years from retirement. The technical man could be on his staff, and Weston has shut down two efforts to penetrate CIA already."
Karotkin's shrug suggested that James D. Weston was not all that unbeatable, and the pursing of his lips said he was considering a new idea. "Weston's tendency to play spy-catcher, when his job lies in other areas, has bought him some enemies among his counterintelligence colleagues," Karotkin said dreamily. "No matter how adept, a man with too many enemies—" He gestured as if to say the outcome was predictable. In the KGB, it certainly was. "Like their spy-catcher Angleton, in the old days," he added, "ultimately forced to resign. We could help Weston make more enemies, perhaps."
Suslov put his head back and laughed. "An exquisite irony! Anonymous tips from us, which let him unmask a low-level schpick or two of ours. More long faces and new enemies for Weston in his own agency, eh? Eh?" Suslov was nodding as he asked.
"A man can be too successful for his own good," was Karotkin's only response, but the heavy-lidded smile endorsed Suslov's guess. Even at the rezident level, KGB colleagues were wise to avoid brainstorming freely even in matters of mutual concern. Both men knew and accepted the rules. You sought subtle colleagues with a creative bent, and you swapped ideas as necessary, but you did not divulge your decisions beyond gestures and innuendo.
As their smiles faded, Karotkin snapped a finger against the crimson Flutterbird in its bag. "It was necessary to pass the message across my desk before you saw it. If I can be of use—"
"We're turning up the heat to verify it," Suslov said, "and I suspect a major covert operation will be demanded from your people by Moscow's papakhas." The word meant "big hats," and implied only faint disdain between equals for the top decision-makers.
"Then you believe Moscow will want us to make a deal with this turncoat who contacted the Bulgarians," said Karotkin. His colleague's unchanged expression was as good as a nod and Karotkin continued, "Which implies that Moscow believes it is possible to build a truly undetectable aircraft. I had hoped that was an exaggeration."
"Perhaps it is. The first that we knew of it, we learned from a few moments of conversation by two NSA men when the window laser scrambler failed in their limousine. Almost any price would not be too steep for such a craft." It was a veiled query: how high was that price? Karotkin would reply if he could. Suslov went on, "If they alone have it, the thing could upset delicate balances of force, worldwide." In this, Soviet spymasters agreed with their counterparts in the West. Men who failed to understand delicate balances failed to rise very far. Of course, each side viewed proper balance as a slight slope in its favor. Even a small fleet of truly undetectable aircraft would tend to shift that slope against the player who relied most on secrecy.
"I cannot divulge the turncoat pilot's asking price," Karotkin said. But he pointed at the ceiling.
"If it is high enough, it could tempt good men into a high jump." Suslov's phrase for an agent who took his booty and disappeared had its counterpart among U.S. agents. A Soviet agent took the high jump; an American agent went private. Each side knew the other's jargon, with a few exceptions. There was no jargon phrase in Russian for the hidden packet, including a great sum of money, some agents kept in readiness for the day when they might, for personal reasons, opt for abrupt retirement. Alcoholics had supplied the word when hiding that emergency pint of booze: it was called a "spooker." Perhaps no phrase in spookspeak had ever been borrowed more appropriately.
"The man who steals a stealth aircraft," said Karotkin darkly, "is a fool if he asks for less than enough for a lifetime in, say, Paraguay."
Suslov checked the Omega on his wrist. "He is a fool anyway. Moscow would never give your people the sanction to offer such a price without some means of getting it back," he said, getting up with a sigh. "We rely too much on ideology, and not enough on the charm of money."
Karotkin stood companionably, toying with his cards, walking with Suslov toward the door. "Ask yourself, Lenya, how they would get it back, and what damp sanctions they would have. My people may not get the entire task."
Suslov nodded and walked out. The simplest way to avoid payment was to kill the American turncoat pilot—wet work, in Soviet parlance. And that meant the job would probably go not to KGB, but to the violent men of GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence.
Suslov was not a man who believed in unnecessary violence. Like Karotkin, he felt that wet work only escalated until the boyevayas on both sides had turned the world's great cities into travesties of dusty streets in Wild West movies. It had happened in Vienna, for a time.
And wherever the turncoat pilot chose to deliver that stealth aircraft, he could not be so stupid as to forget that—for a sufficiently high price—the West could get wild again.
SIX
On a late spring afternoon in the mile-high altitude of San Luis Potosi, the Mexican sun is fierce enough to fade paint, and the windburned man in stained coveralls found a triangular blotch of shadow near Morales's rickety hangar. He fingered a pack of Alas from a breast pocket and lit one, idly watching the tail of a Mexicana jet shimmer as it taxied to the distant terminal. The yanqui tourists on that plane were only a mile away. And a world apart. He had almost ceased envying them.
The Mexican youth finished buttoning the cowl on the AgriCat, still one of the best craft around for crop dusting, and shuffled toward that triangle of shade. The older man, whose dark hair was sun-blotched and graying, wished he had some of the kid's Indio blood, maybe some of his youth, too, to help fight the ravages of sun and wind in the central highlands of Mexico. Evidently this was going to be one of those days when envy drove him early to a cantina. Well, no hay problema, no problem. The Negro Modelo was cold and cheap, and better than Dos Equis. At least he could afford a few of the finer things in life. Good beer, a restored Borgward coupe, and a small whitewashed place with a patio near town, yes; safe travel and young bones, no.
He offered the pack to the youth, who shook his head. "Tomato, Enrique," the older man insisted, but the youth was already lighting a Winston. He pocketed the pack, thinking the kid was right, the little unfiltered Alas were strong as dynamite fuse and burned just about as fast. Winstons were a luxury. He felt good, knowing Enrique could afford them.
He squinted at the reflection off Morales's Agri-Cat, glad that they'd finished the overhaul early because a man could fry petrified eggs on that aluminum by now. Morales, a man who knew how to keep good help, would probably spring for a bonus, and the middle-aged mechanic would share it with Enrique because that kid already had two kids of his own.
The windburned mechanic would have gladly traded his bonus for a chance to test-hop the Agri-Cat, or for that matter anything else with enough power to make a cinch of a hammerhead stall, but knew Morales would never allow it. The rancher, a better than average pilot with several aircraft in addition to the AgriCat, had good reason for his view. He'd seen his mechanic flying his own fabric-winged MX, an ultralight that was half hang glider and half go-kart which had been sold cheap to Morales and which the rancher had sold more cheaply still. Some pilots were deadly mechanics, some mechanics deadly pilots. Morales watched his excellent mechanic falling around the sky in that damned MX and then, good man that he was, tried to buy it back at a higher price. He'd rather have a live mechanic, he'd said, than a dead pilot. But Mexicans, even rich ones, know how to let a man go to hell as he likes and Morales hadn't insisted.
It evidently never occurred to the rancher that it took an exceptional pilot to make an ultralight flounder like that, year after year, with never a bent spar. So Morales helped spread the legend: fine mechanic, awful pilot.
Enrique was idly flipping the pages of a new copy of Sport Aviation magazine which Morales subscribed to, though the text was in English and the youth could understand only the pictures. Knowing the older mechanic always kept them, Enrique borrowed it first. The semiofficial magazine of the Experimental Aircraft Association, Sport Aviation's tattered remnants could be found in hangars all over the world. Presently the youth finished, handing it silently to his companion, and strolled off to douse his head in tepid water. The older man spent ten minutes on a first cursory survey of the articles, which might save lives, and then turned to the Marketplace section which could only lose him in further hopeless envy.
Well, this was a day for it. A Long-EZ with all the trick stuff in the cockpit, only $14,000; a steal, but not on his pay. One of Molt Taylor's little Imps, half completed; he noted the seller's address and forgot it. And, near the bottom of the ultralight category, felt gooseflesh in hundred-degree heat, sliding his backside down the hangar wall to squat, his knees trembling.
DEPEW Humongous—complete. ITS SPEEDY. URGENT, must sacrifice but no foreign sale, please! (607) 734-5137 eves.
His hands did not tremble, but they sweated as he checked the instructions for classified ads. That ad had been placed only two months before, but a lot can happen in sixty days. He did not doubt for a millisecond that the ad was intended to be read by a dead man, but by now the man who had that telephone number might be dead, too; dead, or turned. If so, the ad was as neat a trap as a man could devise.
He read the ad again, moving into the sunlight to soak up warmth which had suddenly fled his body. He had absolutely no doubt about most of the ad, but foreign sale? That seemed wildly unlikely, but a hell of a bunch of unlikely things had happened since he and Speedy began their little games. The ad itself was roughly as likely as tits on a lizard. And nobody on God's earth could have devised that ad but Speedy, whether or not somebody had held a gun at his head while he did it.
Probably that was the truth of it: caught and turned, and once the mechanic called that telephone number he would be on the shit list again, and that would mean he was half caught already. But only half, and he'd escaped worse odds. But you were younger then, his demon critic whispered.
Fuck it, he answered it; nobody lives forever. He knew what he was going to do, as surely as if he had already done it, but there were ways to do it half smart, and ways exceedingly estúpido. He could fire up the MX and be in Aguascalientes in two hours, not that he needed more than a cow pasture but there was a jet-rated strip there too, and that might make them hunt Lears, not MX's. Or they might not.
There was a chance, no bigger than a needle roller but still a faint chance, that Speedy was running clear on this. And besides himself there were only two men on Earth, if that many, who had reason to become inextricably tangled in the fate of the "complete Humongous." Oh, that was cute, Speedy. To any other EAA reader that would be plain gibberish, easily forgotten, especially when there was no ultralight designer named Depew. But there was a place.
If he intended to be back from Aguascalientes before dark, he knew it was time to pray for tail-winds both ways. He walked behind the hangar and tossed the magazine into the Borgward
, then told Enrique to go home to his kids. He needed only a few minutes to fuel the MX alone, and pushed it out of the hangar as a man would push a kite. A humongous kite...
SEVEN
Two thousand miles to the northeast of the aircraft buzzing toward Aguascalientes, the blue vintage Javelin of Dar Weston thrummed onto the Connecticut Turnpike at roughly half of its potential speed. Dar enjoyed the old brute but would have denied he loved it, with its firm ride, whopping semirace engine and fat tires to match. Weston had thought auto racing a singularly senseless pastime until his sister Andrea married Philip Leigh.
Who would have thought a no-nonsense New Haven stockbroker like Phil, with more serious money than the Westons, would take up such a sport? Dar had turned over the family portfolio to Philip Leigh, his sister's husband, in 1960 after returning from a Turkish U-2 base. Now that had been a fiasco! A sweet bird of high passage, the U-2 had scanned millions of square miles of Soviet turf before the Sovs, with an SA-2 missile the size of a telephone pole, managed to shoot one down— on May Day, of all days. Dar, dividing his time between base personnel and the handling of the U-2's crucial spy equipment, had listened to the vacillations of his own leadership, including Dwight Eisenhower, with growing disappointment and then alarm. You didn't offer transparent lies to the Sovs, let alone switch stories in public, if you wanted the bastards to respect you. If they didn't respect you, sooner or later they would eat you alive. The trick to living with a murderous paranoid, Dar's father used to say, was to keep him respectfully worried but not terrified. Old Farley Weston had made a lot of mistakes with his stony conservatism, but Dar had found that particular adage more apt with every passing year.