“Thanks, Colonel. Master Sergeant Becker, what happens when you depart the house with the asset?”
“We’ll make it look like OZ has committed suicide and burn the house so that the evidence will make it extremely difficult to prove otherwise. We have incendiary devices that are very effective.”
“What about any dental evidence, like his teeth?”
“OZ assured me that he had long ago removed all his medical records from the system and has been using his own choice of practitioners. They apparently have nothing that can be used for identification.”
“He was always meticulous. He’s been preparing for this day for a long time.”
25
Fischer took the long way out of town. He stopped at one of the better supplied stores to stock up on a few necessities he couldn’t get in the village near the Dacha. Carrying his groceries he walked back to his car and loaded the bag into the back seat. When he was finished arranging things, he stood up and looked over the roof of his car at the buildings across the street. He suddenly realized what he had done.
Damn. How could I have been so stupid?
Fischer cursed himself. Unthinkingly, he had driven to a place he had been to many times before, a place he knew all too well. But in this moment he had forgotten what else was close by. So close, that for a brief instant, he thought about crossing the street.
No, I can’t. Not now.
It was a fleeting moment before he came back to the business at hand. He slammed the door shut a bit too hard and walked around to climb into the car. Starting the engine, he drove off without another look back. He prayed his plan would succeed and no one would suffer because of him.
Watching him from across the street was a woman. She was standing behind the plate glass window of her shop. Lila wondered what Fischer was doing.
Why doesn’t he come in?
As he drove off, she was left alone with her questions, questions that she had held inside over the years, not sure if she would ever find the answers.
Not today, either. Maybe never.
Lila sighed and went back to her work.
***
Fischer drove north through the city, processing through a checkpoint before arriving at the Berliner Ring, the Autobahn that circled the city. He got the car up to speed for a few kilometers and then joined another highway, the E28, which went straight north. It was a bit of a longer route, but the road was better. It was well maintained because it headed towards Wandlitz, the small enclave where most of the party bosses preferred to live, and to and from which their big cars commuted daily. It was an exclusive gated community, restricted to the communist elite. There they could live in luxury away from the prying eyes of the proletarian masses.
Fischer would have no trouble driving through the area with his documentation. His car alone was validation; its registration numbers were from a series reserved for government officials of the highest rank. His passing would be recorded, of course. But that was fine. He had nothing to hide.
Fischer was thinking about his long-ago adopted credo of hiding in the open. If an agent hides his life and activities from others, then eventually he will come under suspicion. Fischer did the opposite. His life was an open book. Everything he did had a real purpose at its core. It was only in the very fine print of his life that there were secrets and someone would have to be very good to even find them, let alone read them.
Großmann had been lucky, it must have been the Soviets who recognized the Americans’ mistake and compromised Gypsy. But that was the nature of the business; it’s the small details that can kill you. Luckily, Großmann must have screwed up the arrest and probably no evidence was found. Despite that Fischer knew he must leave; the Americans could have mistakenly left other clues. He just hoped the people working to get him out were all trustworthy. Unfortunately, the one thing he had learned in the business of espionage was that trust was something you didn’t give easily and sometimes those who received trust weren’t worthy of it in the end.
Fischer silently apologized to his dead friend as he drove and thanked him for his sacrifice. He only hoped it would be worth it in the end. Now, he had to be careful not only of Großmann, but of Markus Wolf.
He committed himself to one thought. If the plan works, I will soon be free. Failing that, I won’t be taken at all.
Passing through the small orderly village of Wandlitz, he turned to the northwest and made his way across country on the small roads that crisscrossed the countryside. He much preferred driving at a relaxed pace, away from the routes intended to be high-speed military highways for some future Warsaw Pact attack on NATO. That wouldn’t happen anytime soon, he knew. For one, Wolf wouldn’t have sent him away if any sort of conflict was looming in the near term.
Relax, he told himself. He was thinking too much and needed to focus his thoughts on the next few days. He drove on towards his refuge in the forest.
It wasn’t long before he arrived. The detour had made the trip a bit longer, but he wasn’t in a hurry. He drove through the village and continued up the road and into the forest. He turned onto his side road and stopped to open the gate. It was always a routine if you were alone: stop, get out, open the gate, drive through, get out, close the gate, continue on. Today, however, it was different for him. He knew he would not be coming back here again. He stopped before he got back into the car and stood looking wistfully at the road and the dark green forest beyond.
It is truly peaceful here.
He got back into the car and continued up the dirt road slowly. As he did, he reacquainted himself with the environment, the trees, and the animals. He was sure he would soon see the deer that lived in the deeper forest nearby. It was about as far removed from Berlin as possible. He was alone here except for several neighbors, all farmers. Even so, their properties were a kilometer or so away. This was his sanctuary.
I hope they can find me something like this in the United States, maybe in the mountains.
After nearly a kilometer, the Dacha appeared ahead. It was a single-story house built of heavy wood timbers, quite modest compared to the villas that some of the senior officials had been given. A small front porch with an entryway led to an inside hall. A small library at the front, a couple of bedrooms, a living area, and a large kitchen comprised the living space. There was a patio and a shed for the tools he rarely used. Beyond that, there was just the green of the forest that seemed to be creeping closer and closer to the house every time he visited.
My forest needs Lebensraum too.
There were paths that led off into the forest, but he would leave them until later.
He parked the Tatra on the side of the house and took the groceries inside, returning to grab a small suitcase he had packed with his country clothing and a few essentials. He had brought several new books acquired on one of his long walks in the city. He had meant to read them before but, perhaps unconsciously, left them closed on his table because he read too much at work. Now he might have a chance. It would be a good diversion from thinking too much about the future—or the past.
26
The big Mercedes-Benz sedan pulled up to the barrier on Glienicke Brücke. The bridge was named after a nearby palace but, to be different, the communists in East Germany had renamed it Unity Bridge because it linked the East German town of Potsdam with West Berlin. In reality, the bridge did little to promote unity and linked no one on either side of the Havel River.
Its most appropriate name was probably “Bridge of Spies” because it was occasionally used for Cold War exchanges of people who had been arrested by the United States or the Soviets, including the spy Rudolf Abel and the U-2 pilot Gary Powers. But those events were rare. Today the Mercedes was participating in a routine that took place more often: the passage of Allied Mission vehicles back and forth between the West and East.
The Mercedes was unremarkable except for its non-reflective, olive-green paint job and license plates with the number “23” and an American flag
. Beneath the flag were Cyrillic words that translated to “US Military Liaison Mission to the Commander-in-Chief of the Group of Soviet Forces Germany.” There were many other interesting and unique tweaks to the car, but they were hidden beneath its skin. Its 6.9-liter engine purred contentedly as it sat waiting to be released from its enforced stop while the driver and passenger sat and chatted. The guy in the trunk was quiet. A Russian border guard was trying to have a conversation with the passenger who, for the most part, just ignored him.
Sergeant Jason Marazano was trying to make a point.
“Listen, just because Michigan squashed Wisconsin like a bug last week doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Purdue doesn’t stand a chance. They’re totally inconsistent. I’ll bet Michigan wins by ten points.”
About that time the Russian private who had been standing outside the door chattering, leaned down and looked in the window.
“Are you going to give me your documents, Major?” “Ah, yes,” Bright said, handing him their identity cards. “Okay, you’re on. I’ll put ten bucks on Purdue.”
“Your loss,” Bright said, “that will buy me two six-packs for the next game.”
“Ha, fat chance,” Marazano replied, “and what are you drinking anyway, PBR? That’s not beer, it’s dish water!”
“Nah. I only drink the golden nectar of the Rockies.”
“Coors? Christ, why don’t you drink one of our local brews? Granted, Berliner beers are garbage, but anything from Munich is great.”
“Two reasons, I’m cheap and I’m nostalgic for American beer, especially when I’m watching football.”
The Russian came back to the car and spouted the usual litany of warnings and threats while Bright and Marazano bickered about beer and football. They’d heard the same rehearsed speech many times before and would ignore or violate most of the warnings anyway. Eventually, the passes were returned and the gate boom was lifted. Marazano accelerated away and off the bridge towards Potsdam.
It was early afternoon and they were the last of three US Mission cars scheduled to cross the bridge that day. The Russians didn’t know beforehand that three cars would cross and the intervals were close enough that anyone who chose to follow the first two would not be able to re-orient on the third car. At least, that was the theory. They hoped that the bad guys didn’t have enough assets ready to follow them at all.
So far the plan seemed to work. Marazano pointed the car on a southwest heading, first through a bit of the town paralleling the river, then along the Zeppelinstraße through a park and out of town. With no traffic on the road, Bright turned his head to the rear of the car.
“You still alive back there?”
A muffled reply came through the backseat cushion. “Just fine. I was taking a nap, it’s so comfortable in here.”
“I’m glad you like it. I’ll give you a shout when we’re ready for you to come out of the cave.”
“Okay, I’ll be here if you need me.”
After they broke out of Potsdam, Marazano continued west crossing the Berliner Ring towards Brandenburg.
As usual, Marazano was calling out landmarks while Bright recorded anything interesting in his logbook. There wasn’t much of military interest to see. On a section of straight, open road, he yelled back to Becker.
“Drop the hatch and come on out.”
Becker struggled with the latch, finally succeeding in popping it free. The rear cushion of the seat folded forward and he rolled out enough that it could be shut again. He lay on the seat awhile.
“The ventilation in there sucks.”
“Not that it helps now, but I’ll get someone to improve the airflow when we get back. We don’t get many stowaways on these trips.”
“I’m sure the next one would appreciate that.”
He popped his head up to look out the front windscreen. “Where are we?”
“Nearing Groß Kreutz, west of Werder. We’ll head north soon and do our fishhook. We’re gonna come close to a couple of installations, but not too close. We don’t want to attract too much attention.”
They drove on, kilometer after kilometer, through the countryside. Small villages were easily negotiated. The bigger ones they avoided as much as possible. There was no need to be slowed by traffic controls. Out in the country they were only hindered by farm machinery and empty hay wagons. It was amazing to see how East German farmers still used horse-drawn equipment alongside more modern “technik” like diesel tractors.
“The farmers are not all collectivized.” Bright liked to throw out tidbits of his socio-economic observations when there was nothing military to talk about.
“I know. The government has realized what would happen to their economic production if they did. They’ve formed farmer cooperatives but, at the core, they still control everything.”
Becker kept tabs on the system as well. It was all part of the unit’s continual in-depth area studies program. Beyond studying the uniforms, equipment, and tactics of the East Germans and Russians, the unit’s soldiers also looked at the cultural part of life in the East. It was one aspect of life in SDB that contrasted heavily from life in the regular army. It was also very different from nailing a tight 300-meter shot group with a sniper rifle or fifteen words per minute in Morse code, which were just two of the other esoteric skills everyone needed to master.
An interesting life…
Marazano had been quiet for a while and decided he needed to be heard.
“It was around here that one of our cars got clobbered last March.”
“What happened?”
“One of the teams was parked on the edge of a forest and a Soviet convoy passed. They got some good info and photographs, but they decided to follow the trucks. By the time they caught up, the convoy had stopped, so they started to pass it doing the usual vehicle identification and count and getting photos of bumper identification. They reached the head of the convoy and an officer stepped out to stop them and then waved them on after they had slowed. It was just enough of a ruse to let a BTR-60 run out of a side road and T-bone them as they passed. The thing must have been doing about forty, because the Merc flipped twice and landed on its roof. Major Nelson got a broken collarbone in the crash. He was out for about four weeks.”
“What happened then?”
“The Russians swarmed the car and stole everything inside, including the coffee thermos. The gave most of it back, but without any film or notes. Said it was our fault. ‘The car was driving too fast,’ they said. Total B.S.”
“What did we do?”
“The usual protest letter. I think they detained a couple of Russian tours in West Germany for like twelve hours each. Hardly the same thing.”
“It would be good if we can avoid that.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Bright said, “We’ve been fairly lucky. One tour driver was almost shot a couple of years ago. Luckily the Russians are either bad marksmen or they’re just trying to scare us. We’re not sure ’cause the driver got a bullet through the door that hit him in his boot. We just keep driving on.”
“Good thing. Your intel helps us all out.”
“We aim to please.”
“We’re coming into range of Object 41,” Marazano said.
“Object 41?” Becker asked.
“It’s an East German munitions depot. They give them numbers instead of names. And, unlike the Soviet installations, you have to be careful. The civilians will report us when we’re near their own facilities, but they don’t care so much for the Soviets.”
“There might be a good reason for that.”
Becker saw a sign on the road that appeared to be military. It pointed off into the woods and as they passed the access road he looked down it. In the distance, he could the red and white marked barrier pole that closed the road to outsiders. It was the first perimeter of security.
“We’ll skip them today, I think.”
It was early evening and they continued on to the north, pas
sing more villages and many more farms. There were a few National People’s Army trucks on the road but no signature vehicles and no convoys, which was disappointing and comforting at the same time.
Finally, Marazano chimped out.
“Oo, oo! Look at that!”
He was pointing out into an open field about 2 kilometers distant. In the dwindling light, a semi-circle of military truck vans could be seen parked together with a big Zil 131 in the center. A large antenna loomed over it.
“Any guesses?”
Becker squinted around the curtain and out the window.
“It’s air defense radar, but I can’t tell what type. Maybe a ‘Bar Lock’?”
“Close but no cigar. It’s a P-19 ‘Flat Face.’ It’s a Russian unit,” Marazano said, using the NATO codename for the air defense radar. “We’ll come back and find them again after we drop you off.
They’ll be worth a closer look.”
“If they stay around,” Becker said.
“They’ll be here. It takes too much effort to set up after they leave their base and the Russians are pretty lazy. They must be monitoring an exercise or something.”
“They’re not watching the air corridor?”
“No, I doubt it. For one, they’re oriented in the wrong direction. Two, they have fixed radar for that.”
Becker felt a bit of unease thinking about the air support part of the mission. That was. scheduled to happen just about twenty-four hours from that moment. What the air force was about to do had been done many times before, but never in this area. He hoped it worked as well this time.
Trust the experts, Kim.
Bright made a couple of annotations in his notebook as they drove on. At the minimum, they had a sighting. If the radar did move before he and Marazano got back, they might be able to track its movements. But first, the priority was getting the “package” to the drop-off point securely and safely.
Before the village of Pritzwalk, they turned east and began the fishhook.
Soon they were heading south, crisscrossing the first section of territory. Once they were convinced no one was tracking their progress, they turned in the direction of the drop-off.
A Question of Time Page 18