High Flight

by David Hagberg

  She’d made her first circumnavigation from 1980 to 1986, by way of Hawaii, the Samoas, Australia, across the Indian Ocean to South Africa, then northwest, following the trades to the Caribbean, then the Panama Canal, and finally the long run out to Hawaii where she doubled her track, and then back home to Washington state.

  A new set of owners sailed her around the world from 1987 to 1990, this time up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, and then across the Atlantic to Florida.

  The last owners had trucked her to Vancouver where they’d sailed her up the Inside Passage to Alaska, out into the Aleutians, then down to Japan and finally Okinawa, where the wife put her foot down: “Me or the boat,” she told her husband, and she won.

  Liskey bought the boat two months ago, put her up on chocks at Sporty’s Commercial Boatyard on the south end of the island, and had painstakingly brought her back to like-new. Now he knew every nut and bolt, every screw, every foot of wiring and plumbing, and every square inch of fiberglass, inside and out. By this afternoon the bottom would be sanded and painted and she’d be back in the water. In two days the rigging would be fully tuned, and the sea trials finished, and on Monday his and Carol’s thirty-day leaves began.

  Navy Lieutenant, j.g., Carol Moss popped out into the cockpit from below, where she’d been varnishing bright-work, and peered over the side. She was a plain-looking woman with short, dishwater-blonde hair, pale green eyes, and an athletic, almost stocky build. She had a devastating smile that could light up the darkest of rooms, and that could never be mistaken for anything other than what it was: sincere. At twenty-five she was five years younger than Liskey, which was, she maintained, exactly as it should be. She planned on marrying him, and she definitely wanted an older, wiser man, someone who knew more than she, and had more experience. Her father had brought her up that way.

  Liskey looked up at her, and she smiled. He’d been daydreaming again. “Caught me,” he said.

  She laughed out loud, the sound musical. “Keep that up and you’re going to sand a hole right through the hull.”

  “Not this one,” Liskey said, thumping the side of the boat with the heel of his hand. “Are you done up there?”

  “All set for the cushions, which I’ll pick up tomorrow. Soon as they’re in I’ll start loading the provisions. Other than that we’re set up here. How about you?”

  “Another couple hours of sanding, and then the paint,” he said. “We’ll be in the water by this afternoon.”

  Carol smiled. The day was warm. She wore shorts and a halter top. Like Liskey, she spent a lot of time in the sun and was well-tanned. “How about a cold beer? Then I’ll help you.”

  “Sounds like a good deal to me,” Liskey said, and Carol ducked below.

  He put the sander down and shaded his eyes against the sun so that he could see past the breakwater to the East China Sea. They would have thirty days together, island hopping all the way to the Japanese main islands. Isolated anchorages when they wanted them; charming little fishing villages if they wanted that sort of thing; and even bigger cities once they reached Kyushu if that was their desire. Besides the sailing, though, Liskey wanted to be with Carol. It would be a test, he figured, to see if they were compatible with each other. Thirty days alone on a small boat would see to that. The prospect of it excited and frightened him at the same time. He did not want to lose her, but he didn’t want to give up sailing either.

  At 0800 sharp, Foreign Intelligence Service Colonel Mikhail Amosovich Lyalin was shown into the office of the head of First Chief Directorate General Leonty Dmitrevich Polunin, and although he wore civilian clothes as most SUR officers did these days, he approached the vast desk, brought his heels together, and saluted smartly.

  He’d been called upstairs because of the overnight from Washington. Yemlin’s highly unusual request had caught them off guard. There’d not been a hint of anything like it. Thank Christ he happened to be here when it came in. At least he’d had a few hours to prepare himself. As chief of the First Department, which ran U.S. and Canadian operations, he was Yemlin’s boss and it was expected of him.

  On the surface Yemlin’s message was intriguing because of the many possibilities raised, yet disturbing because of the way the Washington rezident had been approached and the information the Americans had about SUR operations in Tokyo. The Siberian Far East had plenty of problems without a Japanese complication. But a high-tech airplane factory in Moscow was something to think about. Lyalin had been doing nothing but for the past five hours.

  General Polunin, was a bear of a Russian, with a thick, square face, bushy black eyebrows, and the biggest ears Lyalin had ever seen on a human being. The saying went that what the man couldn’t hear hadn’t been spoken yet. He’d wanted to get into politics, but in 1991 Boris Yeltsin had promoted him to chief of the First Directorate, which was responsible for the former KGB’s foreign operations, promised him the entire SUR within five years, and made him swear a personal oath of allegiance. The five years were up soon, but it didn’t look as if the general would be getting his promotion. This latest development from Washington, however, Lyalin thought, might help.

  “Good morning, General,” Lyalin said.

  “Have a seat,” General Polunin said, returning the salute. “Yegorov will be here in a few minutes. Enough time for your briefing?” Colonel Yegorov was chief of the Directorate’s Seventh Department, which oversaw operations in Japan and the region.

  “Yes, sir,” Lyalin said, again thanking Christ that he’d personally checked the overnights. “The book cable has been verified as authentic.”

  “I hope that was done before it was sent to me.”

  “It was, General. I want to assure you that this isn’t some hoax or disinformation plot.”

  The general’s eyes never left Lyalin’s. “What about Yemlin? Is the man to be trusted? He hasn’t gone insane?”

  “He’s to be trusted, and I think he’s as sane as any of us. His two concerns outlined in the message were Kirk McGarvey’s veracity and the man’s knowledge of our Tokyo operations. Network Abunai is our major asset in the region.”

  “The name McGarvey is familiar. Why?”

  “Because of the trouble we’ve suffered at his hand,” Lyalin said. He too had heard the name, but he’d been flabbergasted when he’d pulled up the American’s file. If he’d been one of General Baranov’s team in the old days, he would have made damn sure that McGarvey was killed. As it was, he found it nearly impossible to fathom that Viktor Yemlin had come face-to-face with the man and lived to tell about it.

  He passed McGarvey’s thick file across the big desk. “It would be easier for you to look through his dossier.”

  “CIA?”

  “A former field officer, an assassin actually. But he was fired from the Agency some years ago. Since then he’s done contract work for them on an irregular basis.”

  General Polunin opened the file to several photographs of McGarvey. Immediate recognition dawned in his eyes. He looked up. “He killed Baranov, and Kurshin, and the others.”

  Lyalin nodded. “Evidently Guerin Airplane Company has hired him to straighten out this problem with the Japanese. Fascinating.”

  “To say the least.”

  “We stand to gain a great deal from this.”

  “Yes, or lose a lot. Is the offer legitimate?”

  “Yemlin seems to think so. But I’ll need approval before I can tell him to proceed.”

  The general thought about it for several long seconds. “I’ll talk to Yegorov first, and then I will take it upstairs. We’ll see, Mikhail Amosovich. We’ll see.”

  It would be light soon, and the farmhouse had been quiet for a full two hours. Bruno Mueller lay hidden beneath the rock wool insulation in the attic, his face pressed against the rough ceiling boards above the living room. At just under five-feet-nine, he was an unremarkable-looking man with a bland complexion, hazel eyes that sometimes watered, sand-colored hair that was thinning in back
, slope shoulders, a slight paunch, and a face that was forgettable. He’d been the perfect spy, able to blend into any scene in Europe or America. He was also a complete sociopath; human life meant absolutely nothing to him.

  After the cops and the Action Service Schwein had finally cleared out, the helicopter pilot and the other one, called Henri, had stoked the fire on the grate and had dozed off, the pilot in a big chair and the other on the couch. Mueller could see them through a crack. Stupid little men, afraid to go into the bedroom and sleep in a perfectly good bed even though the bodies of the farm couple had been removed and most of the blood cleaned up. But the pilot had to be very good to have gotten down here from Paris in the storm. Mueller had heard them talking about it. The pilot had balls, and his presence was a stroke of luck.

  But even though he figured he would get out of this fix, like he’d gotten out of every other one since his childhood, he knew that there was little or nothing left for him. There were very few places where he would be welcomed. Libya, Iran, perhaps Lebanon, if he wanted, which he didn’t. Nor were there any masters left worth serving, or any causes still viable enough to fight for. The religious fanaticism of the Shiites or the Hezbollah were not for him. The superpower struggle was over and his side had lost, as he’d secretly feared it might from the moment he’d seen America with his own eyes.

  Born in Leipzig in 1952, he’d been a child of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall nothing more than the fence along any frontier between two nations. His childhood was troubled, his father an alcoholic, and his mother a petty thief and sometime informant to the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. When Bruno was seventeen, lagging in school, always in trouble, he killed a homosexual one night after receiving what he said was the worst blow job of his life, and the Stasi recruited him out of jail where he was awaiting trial. He was their kind of man: young, therefore trainable; common looking, therefore the perfect chameleon; and a killer of queers, therefore pragmatic.

  The Stasi owned him, and over a four-year period spared no expense in his training, both physical and mental. And he responded. He was intelligent, and he was pragmatic enough to know a good thing when he saw it. He was taught hand-to-hand combat, along with mathematics, physics, chemistry, psychology, philosophy, religion, and a host of other subjects. He learned about codes and ciphers, about weapons and weapons systems from handguns to short-range missiles. He learned English and French in total-immersion courses, so that by the end of his four years he could speak well enough to be identified as a citizen, possibly second generation, but of very good breeding and excellent schooling.

  Ultimately the Stasi wanted to place Mueller inside the CIA, a plan that even the Service’s Russian advisers thought was too ambitious for their East German friends until Mueller received some additional training at the KGB’s School One outside of Moscow.

  Over eighteen months Mueller learned tradecraft from the pros, from men and women who’d actually been there and returned to teach it, and from the master strategists who knew the inner workings of every intelligence agency in the world. Again no expense was spared on Mueller’s training, because the Russians also thought he had great potential.

  The final plan was as simple as it was time-consuming. There was no way for Mueller to be placed directly into the CIA—he would never be able to pass as an American—nor was it believed he would survive the intense vetting he would get if he applied off the street. First his reputation had to be built.

  A job as a reporter with the Frankfurt am Main newspaper was arranged for him in 1976, and one year later he applied to and was accepted for employment by the West German Secret Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND. A family (all dead) had been manufactured for him in Stuttgart; schooling records at Heidelberg (Don’t remember him, but this is a big school after all); and even military service with the army (Mueller? Certainly, a damned fine soldier) all stood up to the BND’s background check. In that period background investigations of new recruits were supervised by Major Karl Schey, who’d been working for the Stasi for eight years.

  Mueller fit in well in West Germany, catching infiltrators from the East (a task at which he received help from his Stasi masters), but it was a full ten years before he went to work as a liaison officer to the British Secret Intelligence Service … one step closer to the Americans.

  But they had waited too long. It was 1988 by the time he was ready to go to Washington, and the beginning of 1989 by the time he got there, and the Wall was coming down, the entire Soviet sphere of influence unraveling.

  He remembered his short six months of shuffling papers on the Russian desk at Langley with confusion. So much was happening at such a frenetic pace that it was impossible to keep up with it all. One memory, however, stood out clearly in his life, and that was his first sight from the air of New York City. He was awestruck. Nothing he’d been taught by his masters, nor anything he’d learned on his own, had prepared him for that sight and the sudden inner vision that the Soviets and certainly the East Germans would lose.

  Mueller rose up from between the rough-hewn ceiling joists and shook the insulation off his back, careful to make no noise. He wanted to rip off his clothes and scratch himself all over. The irritating rock wool fibers had worked their way into his pores, and he was in agony. Instead, he concentrated on his automatic pistol, an old Walther 9mm P-38, checking its action by feel to make sure it wouldn’t jam up because of the insulation dust.

  Control, his masters had preached. His was superb. Each minute of the ten hours he’d lain up here, motionless, barely daring to breathe, listening to the sounds of the police and Action Service below and the storm outside, he’d waited for just this moment. If there were no longer any masters to be served, he’d decided, there was always revenge.

  He worked his way, joist by joist, silently to the rear of the attic where the trapdoor to the pantry behind the kitchen was still open. The cops had crawled up here. There’d been two of them, but they hadn’t been very thorough in their search. They’d been put off by the rock wool.

  Nothing moved below. Mueller dropped down into the pantry, landing in a crouch, as if he were a cat, and went immediately through the kitchen to the door into the living room.

  Neither the pilot nor the other one, named Henri, had stirred. Everything was as Mueller had seen it from above except for a small line of dust that had filtered down from the ceiling onto the stone floor in front of the couch. Mueller stared at it. Once again he’d been lucky that neither man had awoken and spotted it.

  Keeping his eye on the two sleeping men, he crossed the narrow living room to the window and looked outside. The storm had subsided a little. From here he could make out the vague form of the helicopter across the field in the lee of the woods. The sky was beginning to grow light in the east. But there was no one else out there.

  Turning away from the window he crept back to the couch and looked down at the sleeping man. His name was Henri Boutet, a sergeant in the SDECE. He looked like a boy, not a government-sponsored bully.

  Mueller placed the muzzle of his pistol a half-inch from Boutet’s temple and, looking over toward the pilot, fired.

  Gisgard reared up from a deep sleep and clawed for his gun beneath his camos as he jumped unsteadily to his feet.

  “Arretez!” Mueller shouted, bringing his gun up.

  For a moment it seemed as if Gisgard would ignore the command, but coming fully awake and realizing what was happening, he stepped back, his hands moving away from his tunic.

  “Ah, bon,”Mueller said. “Your friend here is dead. Do you understand this?”

  Gisgard nodded hesitantly.

  “Good. Now if you do not wish to join him, you will do something for me.”

  “What?” Gisgard asked.

  “Fly me out of here in your helicopter, of course.”

  THREE

  The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force patrol submarine SS588 Samisho ran submerged at one hundred fifty feet in the Tatar Strait fifty miles off
the Siberian coast. It was in a run-and-drift mode, an American naval tactic in which a submarine would run at ten or fifteen knots for a half-hour, then shut down and drift for a half-hour. It gave the sonar people practice, and if there were any surface ships looking for it, the maneuver sometimes flushed them out, forcing them to make a mistake, revealing their position and interest.

  These waters between Sakhalin Island and the Siberian mainland had been a subject of bitter dispute since the First World War when the newly emergent Soviet Union claimed the island and all the waters of the strait for itself. Sakhalin was historically and geologically a part of Japan, a part of the chain of islands—Kyushu, Honshu, Hokkaido, and Karafuto (Sakhalin, as the Russians renamed it)—even though the Russians may have been the first official visitors to the barren place in the mid-1600s. Since 1945 the Soviet Navy, and now the Russian Federal Navy, constantly patrolled the region. There’d been incidents in which ship-to-ship and air-to-ship weapons launches had occurred, but the Japanese had always backed down.

  Let them know we’re there, but avoid direct confrontation at all costs. Samisho’s orders were explicit, yet she carried a full complement of GRX-2 (B) torpedoes and three highly modified Sub-Harpoon antiship missiles.

  It was 0700 when Lieutenant Commander Seiji Kiyoda dismounted from the compact exercise machine, his well-muscled body glistening with sweat. At five-feet-three he was short even by Japanese standards, but he looked dangerous, his eyes dark and narrow, his face cruel except when he smiled. He drew some cold water in the tiny stainless-steel sink in his cramped quarters abaft the control center and splashed it on his face. At thirty-eight his body and his mind were as hard as the NS-90 high-tensile steel of which his boat was constructed. Every day he did a strenuous physical workout that at home port at Yokosuka was directed by his sensei. Every day he studied the writings of Yukio Mishima, the man of steel, and of Bushido, the warrior’s code, for which he had another sensei at home. Iron will and a rigid discipline tempered with an appreciation of art and beauty, for beauty’s sake alone. It was the old way. The best way. The only way for Japan now that her enemies were beginning to gather.