A stand of trees along the near rim; the open meadow and at the far end of it more trees—highland woods running down the slopes. And he could see the square old cars bumpety-bumping out across the meadow: four of them, their courses diverging a little because there was no one driving them. The men had been tenting there for three weeks now, setting targets for them. They’d turned the toys loose on the meadow and now it was up to the airmen to bomb the moving automobiles before they got across the thousand-foot meadow.
“Twelve hundred feet. We’re approaching the I.P,” Initial point of the bombardier’s run.
Pappy Johnson growled, “Do it good, Chujoy, or you go back by bus.”
“Center your P.D.I.”
“P.D.I. centered sir.”
“Ready to take over.… It’s your airplane.” Felix took his hands off the yoke and leaned forward to watch.
There was a stir as the bomb racks opened.
“Bombs away.”
The string of hundred-pounders left the racks and arched away earthward; he couldn’t see them but he knew. The bombardier had mirrors to watch the drop.
They were real bombs with practice warheads designed to create a small explosion—enough to prove where they’d hit even if the bomb bounced away from its point of impact.
“Your aircraft sir.”
Felix hauled back on the yoke. “How did it look?”
Chujoy was very dry. “We just blew hell out of eight patches of grass.”
Into the clouds and a steep starboard turn. “Making a three-sixty.” A full circle to bomb again. “Jigsaw One to Jigsaw Flight—report.”
“Jigsaw Two. One hit I think. Seven near-misses.”
“Jigsaw Three. No hits sir. Sorry.”
Pappy Johnson switched on his throat mike. “This time you misters will get those bombs on target or I’ll personally throw you out of these airplanes with no parachutes.”
They made five passes. The last three were good enough to make Felix beam at Pappy Johnson: on the third go they stopped three out of four motorcars in their tracks with bombs that penetrated clear through to the ground. On the fourth go they hit two out of three. On the fifth the ground echelon sent five cars onto the field and Felix’s flight hit four of them.
“The last drop looked pretty good,” Johnson admitted into the radio.
“We’re out of bombs,” Felix announced. “Close up those holes and keep it tight—let’s go home for a coffee break.”
He put the nose up into the clouds and they swam into the sunlight. “Now all I’ve got to do is find a place to put this thing down.”
“They’ll bring you in.”
“Jigsaw Tower—this is Jigsaw One. Can you give me a radar fix?”
The answer was a moment coming and he felt his jaw tighten but then the radio spoke cheerfully:
“Roger, Jigsaw One. Turn to zero-four-five and fly for eight minutes. Then turn to one-six-zero. We’ll keep a fix on you.”
Johnson was charging the flare pistol, inserting it in the fuselage tube above his head in case they made a forced landing: a flare would pinpoint them for rescuers.
Down to 1,000 feet now and about six miles to go. Pappy Johnson said drily, “You want the gear down by any chance, Your Highness?”
“What? Oh—yes. Yes.”
“Thought you might.”
He peered into the soup. There were bangs and rattles in the airframe as the wheels locked down.
“Tower to Jigsaw One. Fly one-five-five.”
“Roger. I have the runway in sight.” He glanced at Johnson: “Flaps twenty.”
“Yeah. Just remember this airplane does not have reversible props.”
The ground came up grey and wet. He came in fast—100 knots—and he had to stop the airplane before he ran out of runway so he fishtailed gently and rode his brakes and brought her in fifty yards short of the limit. He pulled off to the side to give the others room to land and when they were down he taxied her over to the hardstands and sliced an index finger across his Adam’s apple—the signal to Johnson to cut his engines.
Calhoun was walking over with the chocks when they dropped out of the hatch. “Give us a dollar’s worth,” Pappy Johnson said, “and a manicure and a good rubdown, Calhoun.”
Then Johnson turned and walked Felix toward the Ready Room. “You’ve got four weeks left to hit the targets every time. Not three out of four, not four out of five. Every time.”
“I hope we can.”
“You can do it,” Johnson said. “You’re a good outfit. Better than you think you are.”
“Are we?”
“You know you are. You just needed to have someone tell you.”
18.
At the dying end of October the three Russian noblemen boarded a trimotor at Barcelona and flew to Lisbon, A hard Atlantic sun burned in the cloudless Portuguese sky but the wind that came off the ocean was cold and whipping; there were whitecaps in the Tagus estuary.
The Peugeot that transported them through Lisbon had hard springs and stank of imbedded fumes of Gauloise tobacco; the driver was a chain-smoking Frenchman badly in need of a shave. The three Russians—Prince Leon Kirov; Count Anatol Markov; Baron Oleg Zimovoi—wore Homburgs and topcoats and their luggage consisted only of overnight cases.
The narrow streets of Lisbon thronged with human flotsam—the refugee overflow of the European war—and here and there a man could be seen walking purposefully, topcoat flying in the sinister wind; these were the ones who had somewhere to go, the black-marketeers and salesmen of information who had descended upon Lisbon in the past year like hungry ants on a dying carcass. Lisbon was the Occident’s Macao: the capital of intrigue, a living museum of every phylum and species of human vice and avarice. The crowded architecture was stone and stucco in bleak grey hues; cobblestones glistening with river spray; crumbling buildings five hundred years old that bespoke suspicion, evil, torture, Inquisition. In the passages dark automobiles crowded horse carts aside and darted homicidally among the pedestrian fugitives.
Their host’s driver slid the Peugeot through the crowds with stolid contempt and presently they were out of Lisbon along the right bank of the estuary; now the speed went up and they were wheeling along the coast road with a rubbery whine, speeding through the fishing villages—Belém, Oeiras, Estoril—finally Cascais.
Count Anatol said, “It is just up to the right now if I recall.”
Oleg was instantly suspicious: “You have been here before?”
“It was not always American Embassy property. At one time it was a villa belonging to the Graf von Schnee. One of the finest private baccarat tables in Europe. Players came from as far away as South America.”
“When men have nothing better to do with money than gamble it away.…”
Prince Leon cut across him smoothly: “I think we’re here.”
The villa was on a height in a pastel cluster of genteel residences each of which had its two or three acre garden of semi-tropical vegetation: rubbery greenery, bougainvillaea, palms, grape trees, Bermuda lawns, flowers carefully tended and vividly displayed. A high wall sealed off the property and a man in an olive drab uniform and a white Sam Browne belt came to attention at the gate. The driveway was crushed seashells; it gritted under the tires.
The portico was an arched stucco affair; the villa was high and massive with walls of North African tile, predominantly pink—very bright in the sun. Their heels rang on the mosaic floor.
They had proceeded along half the length of the lofty corridor when the wide doors opened at the far end and their host revealed himself. “Welcome, gentlemen. I’m Colonel Buckner.”
“It’s good of you to come on such short notice.” Buckner arranged the seating and saw to their drinks. Then he took a place in the circle of chairs.
It had been the Graf von Schnee’s game room and the silent deep carpet remained but the room had been redesigned by its American tenants as a conference chamber; there was a long table beneath the windows but h
e hadn’t wanted the formality of that.
He began with casual inquiries; it was the first time he’d met any of them and he didn’t want to reveal the extent of his knowledge about them.
After a decent interval he cleared his throat and leaned forward in his seat with his forearms across his knees. “Very well then. Suppose we start by having me lay out the situation and then we’ll discuss it from there. Are there any questions you’d like to ask me before I start?”
There were none; he hadn’t expected any. They were smart enough to sound him out first.
He said, “I’m here as the informal representative of the President. I stress the word ‘informal.’ Nothing I say can be construed to be a binding commitment by my government. We’re involved in a clandestine operation—if there’s ever a public question about it we’re all bound to deny it. Even if your operation succeeds it’ll be many years before Washington will be able to admit having had any part in it.”
“That’s fully understood,” said Baron Oleg Zimovoi. “There won’t be any embarrassing exposures on our part.”
“I’m just trying to explain to you why we’d have to deny it.”
Baron Oleg produced a pipe and a pouch.
Buckner said, “Here’s where we stand. You’re trying to overthrow the Stalin government. You’ve got tacit approval and a certain amount of secret matériel support from the governments of the United States and Great Britain.
“This thing was pretty chancy from the start. There’ve always been a lot of ifs in it. I don’t know if you realize this but we very nearly lost Russia to the Nazis ten days ago—there was an attempt on Stalin’s life.”
“We were aware of it,” murmured Count Anatol Markov.
Buckner gave him a sharp glance. “Then you know the Kremlin discovered the plot in time to head it off and corral the perpetrators. They’re not fools. They’re bound to be twice as alert now as they were before that attempt—your chances are getting slimmer all the.…”
“Colonel Buckner,” Count Anatol said, very cool. “The recent attempt on Stalin’s life failed because Stalin was warned in advance.”
“By whom?” He had to ask it even though he suddenly felt he knew the answer.
“By us,” Anatol told him without hesitation.
Buckner was angry and showed it. “Is it your idea of good faith to keep your allies in the dark on an issue that vital?”
“The issue is no longer vital,” Anatol said.
Baron Oleg said, “That attempt failed because we foiled it, Colonel. Stalin will not be given warning of our own attack. And it is reassuring, don’t you think, that our participation in forestalling the German attempt was not discovered by your own intelligence. It leads one to conclude that our security is very tight.”
“I’d damn well like to know how you got wind of that scheme.”
“We have access to channels of information in Germany that are denied to you, I’m sure,” Anatol said.
The Russian Count seemed made of ice: no emotion at all in his presentation. Buckner said, “It might be helpful to us all if you’d share those channels.”
For the first time Prince Leon spoke. “The time may very well come when it is mutually advantageous for us to do that, Colonel. At the moment however our alliance is fragile as you know. Clearly that makes it important that we retain what few advantages we have. They may prove useful as bargaining points as time goes by—I’m sure you can appreciate that.”
“You’re very candid.”
“I try to be when the reverse would serve no purpose.”
“At least you can tell me this much. Who organized that attempt against Stalin?”
He saw them look at one another; Prince Leon nodded his visible assent and Count Anatol said, “They were White Russians—the followers of the Grand Duke Mikhail. The program had Nazi support.”
“Just as yours has Anglo-American support. That’s rather cozy—playing both ends against the middle.”
“It was hardly like that, Colonel,” Baron Oleg said. He pushed his thumb down into the pipe and prepared to strike a match. “If we had been working with them we’d hardly have given away their plan to the Bolsheviks.”
Anatol said, “It was a race between their operation and ours. We have put them out of the race—temporarily at least.”
“What did they expect to achieve?”
“A German victory. Apparently Hitler offered Mikhail the puppet throne of Russia.”
“I see.”
Prince Leon said, “I’m sure you did not summon us here to discuss the thwarted attempt on Stalin’s life last week.”
Oleg sucked at his pipe until he had it going to his satisfaction and then he said. “He asked us here in order to impose a schedule on us.”
They were damnably irritating: forever a jump ahead of him. He’d underestimated them badly. He said cautiously. “I’m not trying to impose anything on anybody. But history has a way of doing those things for us. I think we’ve reached the point where we’ve got no choice but to trust one another—there isn’t time for anything else.”
Prince Leon said, “In what matters are we to trust one another, Colonel?”
“It’s time you let us in on your tactical plan, I think.”
“Of course he thinks that,” Baron Oleg remarked to Anatol. “He has thought that from the beginning.”
Prince Leon said, “The British seem satisfied, Colonel.”
“Then perhaps the British have been approached more frankly than we have.”
He saw them glance at one another again. He said, “Danilov went to London two weeks ago. Who did he talk to? What did he do there?”
“I’m sure we cannot answer that,” Anatol said. “We were not there.”
“You’re playing a dangerous game.”
Baron Oleg took the pipe out of his mouth. “We are fighting for Russia, Colonel. Not for the United States of America. Surely you recognize that our first obligation is not to you.”
Buckner willed himself to sit back and cross his legs. “Very well. According to our latest intelligence briefs the Germans have surrounded four entire Red Armies west of Moscow—the Nineteenth, the Twenty-fourth, the Thirtieth and the Thirty-second. Von Bock has them trapped east of Smolensk. Those pockets will be wiped out or captured within five or six days at most. Guderian has the Third and the Thirteenth surrounded. That’s six entire armies, gentlemen—the better part of a million troops and God knows how many tanks and guns. The roads to Moscow will be wide open within a week. Stalin’s throwing everything he’s got left into the Mozhaisk Line and he’s put Zhukov personally in charge of it—but it’s only forty miles from the center of Moscow and the way things look right now Zhukov won’t be able to hold it for long.”
Count Anatol said, “The blizzards of winter will stop them, Colonel. Winter comes in three to four weeks.”
“And if the panzers breach the Mozhaisk Line before that?”
“We do not think they will. The German tanks are wallowing in deep mud now—quite often they have been immobilized completely. They are not likely to break Zhukov’s lines within a week or two. And those four armies on the Smolensk-Moscow road are still holding their positions, surrounded or not. As long as they remain there the Germans can’t advance with their full force.”
Prince Leon had a gentle voice. “Colonel, we began this undertaking with the understanding that it would be done within one hundred days. We expect to be in operation well within that time limit.”
“The limit has been shortened,” Buckner said flatly. “Hitler has moved faster than we had any reason to expect. We credited the Russian army with more fighting ability than it’s demonstrated.”
“No,” Leon said softly. “It was not their ability you depended on—it was their will to fight. The elimination of Stalin—the restoration of their country to its people—will rekindle that spirit.”
“I’m not sure we have time for that any more.”
Leon’s face told h
im nothing. It was nearly expressionless: remote, courteous, attentive. “I’m not certain I understand your position, Colonel. What is it you wish us to do—abandon the enterprise?”
“No. I’m asking you to accelerate it. To convince Danilov he hasn’t got as much time as he thought he had.”
Baron Oleg said, “There are certain things you can’t rush, Colonel. You can’t expect to make nine women pregnant in order to get a baby in one month. Nor can you execute a plan like ours with half-trained and half-equipped troops. There is no point starting the operation unless it has every possible advantage—the odds are poor enough as it is.”
Buckner shook his head. “It’s your choice, gentlemen. Speed it up or cancel it. There’s no third course.”
Count Anatol said, “That is an ultimatum, is it?”
“I’m not dictating it. The facts are.”
“No,” Prince Leon said. “It is not the facts, Colonel, it is your interpretation of them. One has the impression your President has developed—what is your expression—cold feet? The Nazis have not moved very much faster than we anticipated. They are approximately where we expected them to be by autumn—nearer Moscow than they were before but not yet at the gates of the city. We expected Zhukov to blunt their drive and he did so. We expected the rains to slow their tanks and they have done so. We now expect winter to stall the German advance and while no one can promise it there is a good likelihood it will do so. No, Colonel. The facts in Europe have not changed. It is only the facts in Washington that may have changed.”
“What are you implying, Your Highness? That we’re trying to back out of our agreement?” He could feel the blood rise to his cheeks. “My country isn’t in the habit of reneging on its commitments.”
“Oh come now,” Baron Oleg said. “You’re not in a public forum now—we are not impressed by a show of the flag, Colonel. You will renege on this agreement the moment you feel it is in your interests to do so. You have kept the bargain only because you are convinced it can still be profitable to your interests. And you are trying to increase the odds of success by shortening the schedule.”
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