by Allen Steele
Helga laughed. “I’m not, but my friend Alex is. My cousin and I are from West Germany.”
“Really?” Arnault took a sip from the Red Stripe the bartender had just put in front of him. “Which town?”
“Hannover.”
“Hannover! Great place! I was there once, just a couple of years ago. I stayed at a hotel in the center of town, the—” Arnault closed his eyes and tapped a finger against the bar, as if trying to conjure a memory “—I can’t remember the name.”
“Yes. Of course.” Helga turned to me again. “As I was saying, there are quite a number of West Indian Flamingos here. Also parrots, herons, pintails…”
“Y’know. The major hotel in the middle of the city.”
“There are many hotels in Hannover.” Helga’s smile flickered a bit as she gazed past me at him.
“This one was the biggest.” He stared at her. “You know which one I’m talking about…don’t you?”
Helga’s face lost its color, and she pointedly looked away from him. I looked over at Arnault, wondering why he was being so rude. “Lieutenant, we were talking about birds. You can’t—”
“Can’t what, ensign?” His eyes narrowed as he deliberately emphasized my lesser rank. “Talk about hotels instead of birds?” A humorless smile. “I can…but I think it’s more interesting that your friend can’t give me the name of—”
“Pardon me…is there a problem?”
I turned to see the tall, blond-haired man who’d come up from behind us. His accent was the same as Helga’s, and it wasn’t hard to guess that this was Kurt. I don’t know how long he’d been standing there, but I guessed that he’d overheard some of what Arnault had said.
The lieutenant’s face turned red. “Not at all,” he replied, a little less sure of himself now. “We were just talking about Germany…that’s where you’re from, right?”
“Yes, it is.” Kurt looked at Helga. “We’ve bought dinner for this evening, and Alex is waiting in the car. Are you ready to…?”
“Yes. Of course.” Helga stood up from the bar stool, leaving her drink unfinished. She glanced at me and smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Floyd. I hope you enjoy your visit here.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And…um, happy bird-watching.” Helga nodded in return, then she stepped past me to join her cousin. Both ignored Arnault as they headed for the door.
But the lieutenant wasn’t done with them yet. He waited until the door closed behind them, then jumped off his stool and hurried to the front window. Hiding behind a curtain, he peered outside for a minute or so, then turned to walk back to the bar.
“Lieutenant, what in the world are you—?” I began.
“Listen, Floyd…you didn’t really buy that story of hers, did you?” Arnault didn’t sit down again, but instead leaned against the counter. “That they’re here just to watch flamingos?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Oh, really.” He gave me a disgusted look, then moved closer, lowering his voice to a near-whisper. “Soviet ships in the vicinity of Cuba, and two Germans just happen to be visiting an island near two of the major passages from the Atlantic to the Cuban coast. Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Maybe it is.” I shrugged and picked up my beer.
“And maybe it isn’t.” He paused to see if anyone was listening in, then went on. “Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that someone from Hannover can’t tell me the name of the biggest hotel in the city?”
“You got me. What is it?”
“I don’t know. Never been there.” A cunning grin. “But she didn’t know either, and that’s the point. Oh, she’s German, all right, and so is her cousin…if that really is her cousin. The question is, which side of Checkpoint Charlie are they from?”
Now he had my interest. “You think they might be from East Germany?”
“That would explain why she couldn’t answer my question, wouldn’t it?” He cocked his head toward the room. “I happened to overhear the two of you talking, and when I heard that kraut accent of hers I came over to see what was going on. When she asked you why you’re here, that’s when I stepped in.”
“Oh, c’mon.” I shook my head. “It was just a friendly question.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Arnault hesitated. “Floyd, there’s a lot about this mission that you don’t know, but believe me, there’s good reasons why there might be red spies hanging around. And if that’s what they are, we need to find out for sure.”
All this was just a little too paranoid for me. I knew guys who’d spout John Birch Society nonsense about commie infiltrators at the drop of a red hat, and what Arnault was saying sounded like more of the same. Arnault must have read the expression on my face. “You’re going to help me, ensign,” he added. “Consider that an order.”
“Yes, sir.” I put down my beer, but didn’t get off the stool. “What would you like me to do, sir?”
Either he didn’t catch my sarcasm or he simply chose to ignore it. “Did she say where they’re staying?”
“They’ve rented a house just south of town. That’s all she told me.”
“Hmm…” He thought it over a moment. “Well, I caught a glimpse of their car, and there can’t be that many red ’52 Buicks on the island.” He pushed back from the bar. “C’mon…we’re going to take a walk and see if we can spot where they’ve parked it.”
Find the car, find the house; the logic made sense, even if the motive didn’t. I took a last slug of beer, then reluctantly got off the barstool. “Then what?”
“Then we see if we can figure out what they’re doing here.” As if he hadn’t decided already.
It was dark when we left the restaurant, and there was no one on the streets. The grocery store had closed for the night, as had the few other shops, and only one lonely streetlight illuminated the center of town. There weren’t even any sidewalks to roll up.
We didn’t tell anyone where we were going or why, and I was just as happy that we hadn’t. I didn’t want to have egg on my face when it turned out that the lieutenant’s communist spies were nothing but some birdwatchers on vacation. I just hoped that we’d get this nonsense over and done with before Capt. Gerrard noticed we were missing.
The sky was overcast, with thick clouds shrouding the quarter moon, but it was easy to see where we were going. A lighthouse rose from the beach south of Matthew Town; every few seconds its revolving beam turned our way, showing us the twigs, branches, and palm seeds that the storm had tom from the trees. After a mile or so we left the town behind and found ourselves on a narrow beachside road, with an occasional house here and there overlooking the ocean.
We had almost reached the lighthouse when we came upon a two-story wood-frame house built on a low rise across the road from the beach. There were lights in the ground floor windows, but the upstairs was dark; as we came closer, we saw a car port half-hidden behind scrub brush and Spanish bayonet. We went a little way up the driveway, trying to walk lightly upon the gravel and broken seashells, and sure enough, there was the red Buick the lieutenant had seen drive away from the restaurant.
Seeking cover in the bushes, we crept close enough to the house that we could peer through a side window. We saw what looked like a dining room. An older man, thick-set and with grey hair combed back from his temples, sat at a table that had been set for a late dinner; I assumed this was Alex, Helga and Kurt’s American friend. His back was half-turned to us and he appeared to be talking to someone in another room. We couldn’t hear what was being said, but a moment later Helga appeared, carrying a casserole dish in a pair of oven mitts. She carefully placed the dish on the table, then turned around and walked away again, probably returning to the kitchen.
“I don’t see Kurt,” I whispered.
“If they’re getting ready to eat, he’s probably downstairs.” Arnault pointed to the back of the house. “Let’s look around there,” he said, and then began making his way through the bushes.
In the rear of
the house was a set of outside stairs leading to a small second-floor porch. Without hesitation, Arnault left the bushes and quickly made for the stairs. Reaching them, he turned to urgently gesture for me to follow him. The last thing I wanted to do was sneak into a house, especially when its tenants were there, but the lieutenant wasn’t giving me any choice. I swore under my breath, then moved to join him.
The wooden stairs were weatherbeaten and a little rickety; the first couple of steps creaked under our shoes until we put most of our weight upon the railing. We carefully made our way up to the porch, where Arnault stopped to test the knob of the door leading inside. The door was unlocked; he eased it open, revealing a darkness broken only by a sullen blue glow from some distant source. He entered the house and, even though it felt as if my heart was going to hammer its way through my ribs, I followed him.
We found ourselves in an upstairs hallway, with a nearby staircase leading down to the first floor. Closed doors were to either side of us, and straight ahead was another room; its door was ajar, and coming through the crack was the dim light that provided us with what little illumination we had. The light flickered a bit, and I figured that it must be coming from a TV someone had left on.
Unintelligible conversation from downstairs, broken by the scrape of chair legs across a wooden floor, told us that Helga, Kurt, and Alex were sitting down for dinner. I could only hope that they took their time savoring Helga’s casserole as Arnault and I tip-toed down the hall, drawn like moths toward the light at its end.
The door made a soft groan as the lieutenant pushed it open, and for a second it seemed as if the voices coming from downstairs had faltered a little. But then Arnault gave a low gasp; I looked past him, and all else was suddenly forgotten.
I was right about the light; it was coming from a screen. Four of them, in fact, arranged in a semicircle upon two wooden desks pulled together to form a shallow V. But they weren’t TVs, or at least not like any I’d seen on sale at Sears.
“Holy smokes!” Arnault whispered as he slowly walked into the room. “Willya look at that!”
I was looking, all right…and I was having a hard time believing what I was seeing. The two center screens displayed what, at first glance, appeared to be high-altitude camera images like those taken by a U2 spy plane. But nothing the Air Force or CIA put in the sky had ever produced pictures like these; they resembled photographic negatives, with the colors reversed, but even those colors were strangely accented with unnatural shades of green, red, and blue, making them look like weird cartoons. Although the images were obviously taken from a height, their magnification was much better than any aerial photos I’d ever seen.
And they moved.
On the right screen was what seemed to be a jungle clearing. Infantry trucks were parked in a row at one side of the clearing, with a longer row of tank trucks lined up behind them. Across the clearing was a large shed that might have been a tobacco bam were it not for the flat-bed truck slowly backing up it. A long, narrow cylinder with a cone at one end rested on the back of the truck; the tiny figures of men slowly walked on either side of the vehicle while others patrolled the edges of the clearing, evidently watching the surrounding jungle.
The left screen showed something even more chilling. An ocean harbor, with a freighter docked at a wharf. The ship’s cargo hold was open, and a mobile crane parked on the wharf appeared to be raising something from belowdecks. As I watched, the crane moved just enough for me to make out what it was lifting from the freighter: another cylindrical shape, much like the one on the other screen.
“God damn.” Arnault’s voice was low but hoarse with anger. “God damn!” He pointed at the two screens. “That’s Cuba, and those are Soviet missiles!”
I barely paid attention to him; I was looking at something else. The screens themselves had caught my interest; they didn’t look like normal cathode-ray tubes but instead were as flat as cafeteria trays, with no visible buttons or switches. The screens bookending the middle two were dark, but when I stepped closer, the one on the far left suddenly lit up to display a row of tiny symbols arranged against a background that fluctuated like a small aurora.
On the desktops below the left and right screens were what appeared at first to be a pair of small portable typewriters. There were no rollers in them, though, and when I bent to examine them more closely, I saw that, while their keyboards had the familiar QWERTYUIOP arrangement, the keys themselves were as flat as if they’d been painted on a glass surface, with a double row of buttons above them.
Looking at them, I was reminded of something I’d seen once before: the Enigma code-making machine used by the Germans during World War II. That looked a little like a typewriter, too, but it wasn’t. It was a computer. Could this be…?
“I told you so.” Arnault was still staring at the two middle screens. “This is a red spy nest. Some sort of observation post.”
I ignored him as I glanced behind the desks. No wires or cables; what was the power source? I was still puzzling over that when I noticed a plastic sheet about the size of a notebook page on the left desk next to the keyboard. I picked it up, and almost dropped it again as it glowed with a light of its own, exposing another row of tiny symbols against a shifting background. I experimentally touched one of the symbols; the page instantly changed, this time to show another aerial view: a different jungle clearing, now in broad daylight, with tiny soldiers erecting what appeared to be an anti-aircraft missile launcher.
“This stuff isn’t from Russia,” I murmured, hearing my voice tremble. “It’s not from East Germany either. This is…something else.”
“I don’t care where it’s from. I know missiles when I see ’em…”
“At night?” I pointed to the right center screen. “Look at that truck and those people. They’re moving, lieutenant. That’s not a still picture…this is happening right now, while we’re watching. Do the reds have that kind of…?”
The door creaked behind us.
My heart stopped beating, and I’d just turned around when the ceiling light suddenly came on. I winced against the abrupt glare, but not before I saw Helga, Kurt, and Alex standing in the doorway.
For a long moment, both groups stared at one another in dumb surprise. I flashed back to when I was a kid and my father caught me stealing a quarter from his bedroom dresser; the look on my face must have been the same.
This time, Helga played my dad’s role. “Floyd…what are you doing here?” she asked, more shocked than angry.
“Is this the man you were talking about?” Alex’s hand was still on the wall switch. Helga nodded, and he glared at us. “You’re trespassing,” he said, stating the obvious.
“And you’re Russian spies!” Arnault snapped, as if a blunt accusation would justify our intrusion.
Alex’s mouth fell open, Kurt rapidly blinked, and Helga simply stared at him. Then Helga raised a hand to her mouth, but not quite fast enough to hide her giggle. Kurt and Alex traded a glance, then Kurt’s eyes rolled up as Alex tried to control the amused grin that threatened to spread across his face.
“No…no, we’re not Russian spies.” Alex relaxed a little, letting his hand drop from the light switch. “I assure you, we—”
“Then what’s all this?” Arnault jabbed a finger at the screens. “Tell me those aren’t pictures of Soviet rockets in Cuba!”
That quickly sobered up the three of them. This was no longer funny. Meanwhile, I felt like I was the only person in the room who didn’t know what was going on. “Lieutenant,” I asked, “what makes you think the Russians are putting missiles in Cuba?”
Arnault barely glanced at me. “We’ve received intelligence that Ivan may be shipping nukes to Cuba,” he said, not taking his eyes off Helga, Kurt, and Alex. “That’s what our mission is…to gather any evidence that the reports are true.” A corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “I think we’ve got all the proof we need right here.”
I looked at the screens again. The view of the Cu
ban harbor was still there, but the image on the center-right screen had changed. It now displayed what appeared to be a beach; in the nearby jungle, an antiaircraft missile launcher was being covered by camouflage netting. It seemed to be the same shot as the one in the plastic sheet still in my hand, but this time it had the same photo-negative appearance as the earlier images. I realized that they were from an apparent altitude of only a few hundred feet. That was much lower than our blimp could go without being seen, but the people on the ground were apparently unaware that they were being observed.
“Lieutenant, this isn’t Russian equipment.” I picked up one of the keyboards, held it out for him to see. “They can’t even make a decent toaster, for heaven’s sake.”
“They’re pretty good at building rockets!”
“Never mind that. Have you ever seen TVs like those before? Or—” I put down the keyboard, picked up the weird sheet of plastic “—whatever this is? Man, even NASA doesn’t have stuff like this!”
Looking away from the three people at the door, Arnault turned his head slightly to examine the equipment on the desks. For the first time, he seemed to notice something besides the missiles. “Those could be aerial photos…”
“At night? At the same time that things are happening on the ground?” A new thought occurred to me. I turned to Helga. “This is…this is from space, isn’t it?”
She reluctantly nodded. “We’re using satellites, yes…ones far more sophisticated than any your country or the Soviet Union now has. High resolution radar imaging…”
“Don’t be too specific,” Alex said quietly.
“No, of course not,” Helga said. “But Floyd’s right. The Soviet Union does not possess technology of this kind, and nor does East Germany.” She hesitated. “No one will…at least, not for some time to come.”
“Helga…” Kurt cast a warning look at her.
“Let her speak,” Alex said. “The truth is no worse than the accusation.” He frowned at Kurt. “Besides, this is your fault, for leaving the porch door unlocked. I asked you not to do that.” Kurt’s face reddened as Alex turned to Helga again. “Go on.”