Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  Grady sank back in his chair. “Once they've drawn a bead on you, there's not much you can do. Go live somewhere else and keep your mouth shut. That's what I told her to do.”

  A long and terrible silence gripped the room, as if there were nothing else to say, much less do. Grady steadied himself and sat up a bit.

  “What this is all about? It must be one hell of a secret,” he concluded.

  “Give us enough time and there will be answers,” Cooper said. “I can promise that.”

  “Unless someone blows you away first, right?”

  Cooper had no answer for that one.

  “What about those heavy-handed FBI bastards? Where do they fit in?” Grady asked.

  “That's what made me write to Peggy again,” Grady explained. “That's when I knew this was heating up again. A couple of FBI pricks came to see me. Tried to intimidate me.”

  “Excuse me?” Cooper asked. “In person? They were here?”

  Grady nodded. “One of them sat right where you did.”

  “You wouldn't have a specific date of the visit, would you?”

  Grady figured the numbers backward. He arrived at a date in May four days after Stanley Rudawski's obituary had appeared in the Eagle.

  “Remember much about them?” Cooper asked. “Names?”

  “I didn’t get names,” Grady said. “They flashed me their federal tin, then pulled it away real fast. One of them was a big, tall bastard. Close cut, clean, mean face. The other one was his gorilla. Shorter. Never said anything. Probably wasn’t smart enough to talk. They mostly asked about Peggy.” Grady recalled. “I told them she was the one with the crazy theories about Mr. Carman. I told them she needed protection. I didn't know anything, and I said I'd blow the head off any fucker who came by to hassle me. They knew I meant it.”

  There was a silence.

  Cooper felt that he had worked the interview as long as he could. He was on the point of conclusion when Lauren spoke. “Were photographs taken of the crime scene?” she asked.

  Grady’s eyes shot to her. “It wasn’t no crime scene,” Grady answered. “It was a motor vehicle accident,” he reminded. “So the photos wouldn’t be with the police. They’d be with the Highway Department division of Maryland Motor Vehicles. You’d need a cop to go with you.”

  “Or an ex-cop,” Cooper asked. “Such as yourself? Tomorrow, maybe?”

  “For Peggy’ sake?” Lauren asked.

  Grady snorted. He shook his head to indicate no. Then he re-examined. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Why not?”

  Chapter 63

  Alone in New York, Misha had time on his hands. He walked the streets and went to movies. He loitered around Grand Central and watched pretty American girls hustle to and from their trains and their jobs.

  He sat around. He liked Kelly’s Bar across the street from Grand Central. He began drinking moderately. Then heavily. Who could blame him? He considered himself to be at midlife. Much of the first half of his life haunted him.

  Toward the end of World War Two, Misha had been a Red Army sniper against the

  the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger or simply the Dirlewanger Brigade. Never in his life did he enjoy his work more. The targeted brigade consisted of German criminals and psychopaths expected to die fighting in the front lines. The unit was led by an SS commander named Oskar Dirlewanger.

  Dirlewanger had been the founder and commander of an infamous Nazi SS penal unit, the brigade that bore his name. Dirlewanger had been a psychopathic killer and child molester in Germany in the 1930’s. Some knew him as the most vicious man in the SS. Few could compete in cruelty with Dirlewanger and the men he recruited to be under his command.

  During its operations, the unit participated in some of World War II's most notorious campaigns of terror. In Russia, Dirlewanger burned women and children alive. He let packs of starved dogs feed on the remains. He ordered his troops to inject healthy Jews with strychnine.

  On February 1945, the brigade was sent north to the Oder-Neisse line in an attempt to halt the Soviet advance. Misha was a sniper on the front. Day after day, Misha subsisted on melted snow and frozen bread as he angled to get shots at members of the 36th, and in particular the commander. Picking off individual soldiers was easy. They were stupid and undisciplined. The commander was sly and coy. In March, Misha had thrown one high-odds shot at him. The shot had missed, but zipped Dirlewanger’s staff sergeant in the neck from eight hundred meters, killing him. Misha had watched through his scope. The sergeant’s blood and neck tissue sprayed the commander, who had immediately dived for cover before a second shot arrived. It was a good prize, but a consolation prize.

  When the final Soviet offensive began on 16 April 16, 1945, the Red Army pushed the 36th Waffen-Grenadier-Division division back to the northeast. The next day, Oskar Dirlewanger was seriously wounded in combat for the twelfth time. He was sent to the rear. Looking back, Misha cursed his fate. With good reason, he loathed Nazis. He never had another shot at the notorious commander. He was a man Misha would have been proud to murder. In the closing days of the war, Polish guerillas finally captured Dirlewanger and beat him to death.

  Over beer and vodka at Kelly’s Bar on Lexington Avenue, Misha played out such long-ago heroics in his head. It got him through the evening. The glory days of the big war, training snipers in the Soviet Union, challenging quick-kill assignments in Africa and South America, these glory days were sadly gone.

  Now it was all grunt work. Nothing to get excited about, but stuff to get done. Impatiently, he awaited the details of his final assignment in New York. He also had the phone numbers of some people who worked at the Soviet Consulate on East 68th Street. Some were old friends. They had some contacts with some lovely Ukrainian women who occasionally worked as escorts in New York. Misha had time to burn and money to spend. Who could blame the ladies for discreetly supplementing their income? And who could blame him for discreetly seeking some companionship and comfort?

  Chapter 64

  The next morning, Albert Grady sat in his Jeep in front of his home when Cooper and Richie arrived. Grady gave them a thumbs-up hand signal. He indicated they should follow. They did. He led them to Maryland Motor Vehicles.

  At the D.M.V. where the Highway Unit kept accident reports, Cooper and Lauren entered the archives. They found the packets of envelopes on the highway carnage of February 8, 1966. It was not investigative gold, but it was an impressive strain of silver.

  There were seventeen eight-by-ten photographs. Grady was friendly with a ruby-lipped file clerk named Bijou who, off the record, made copies of the pictures for Cooper and Lauren. Grady was prepared to slip her ten dollars for her efforts when Cooper dispensed a twenty from his wallet.

  The pictures were gruesome. They showed the flow of blood that defied gravity. They showed the dead battered body wedged in the upside-down car. They showed cops surrounding the vehicles, most of them shivering and smoking. Ten of the shots focused on the logistics of the accident. One was a headshot of the dead man at the wheel. There was blood on half his head and part of his skull had been crushed. One eye was closed and the other one, with a star-fracture, was open, dislodged from its socket and staring off into a private hell.

  To Cooper’s mind, it was gory enough to be a battlefield shot. But it was a solid photograph. Oddly, one of the first things Cooper noticed about the late David Charles was that he seemed to have Tartar features. Life took strange hooks and feints like that.

  Eventually, Lauren turned away from the carnage. Cooper arranged his copies in an envelope which became part of their traveling research kit.

  They had lunch at a local Mexican cantina. Grady came with them. To Cooper’s amusement, Lauren spoke Spanish with the owner and waiter.

  “Convenient,” Cooper said, needling her with some affection. “I’ll admit Spanish is a useful language. But unless you need a taco, it’s just not an important one.”

  “We’v
e had this conversation before,” Lauren said. “It’s convenient and important.”

  “This is America. We speak English,” Grady said.

  “Maybe you do,” Lauren said, “but I speak English and Spanish.”

  “Sure,” Grady snorted. “Anyone ever tell you anything important in Spanish, other than where to buy drugs?”

  “Okay, enough,” Cooper said, interrupting the flow of conversation.

  He signaled for the check. Afterwards, Cooper and Lauren felt exhausted. “Good job back there, by the way, with Grady,” Cooper said after the retired cop had gone to his car and departed.

  “How so?”

  “Part of talking to a source is knowing when to pipe down.”

  “The Spanish thing?” she asked.

  “Right,” he said. “You need to stop being defensive about it.”

  “I’ll stop being defensive when you admit it’s an important language.”

  “So show me some time,” he suggested.

  “I’ll do that,” she said. “Count on it.”

  They decided they needed to refresh and play hooky.

  They explored the waterfront, checked into one of the city's better hotels, maintaining separate rooms to keep happy the Puritans and spies in the Eagle’s accounting department happy. They went for dinner at Obrycki's, a crab joint in its twenty-fourth year, and smashed hard shells on newspapers that served as tablecloths.

  It was a marvelous day's respite from the challenge and danger before them. They behaved as if they were newly in love, which in a sense they were. The hotel room was big and comfortable and overlooked the harbor. They returned to it toward ten in the evening.

  Worse, or better, depending on the point of view, Cooper was falling hard for his traveling companion and peer reporter. He could easily have mistaken such emotions for the first tingling of love, something that had been distant for years. But he knew better and suppressed them. She was a J-schooler, after all, and even worse more of the hippie generation than the I-Like-Ike generation. Worst of all, she was too young for him, an unfathomable thirteen-year difference in age.

  It was not until the hours after midnight, when Cooper was finally drifting off to sleep beside Lauren, that visions of the late Stanley Rudawski reappeared like a ghostly presence before his mind’s eye. He slept fitfully. They haunted him until dawn.

  In the morning, reality again arose.

  A phone call from New York revealed that Lauren’s skip-trace partners had so far come up frosty-cold in their attempts to locate Diego Ramirez, the Marine at the U.S. Embassy in Paris in 1965. This detail failing to fall into place, Cooper and Lauren had no reason to remain on the road.

  So they turned their car around and headed north on Interstate Ninety-five. They split the driving, got into a massive traffic jam around the stinking oil refineries of North Jersey at five p.m. and were through the Holland Tunnel by 6:30.

  Coming out of the tunnel, he put the turn signal on to turn right on Seventh Avenue to go downtown and take Lauren home.

  “No thanks,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “How about we stay together?” she asked. “Your place.”

  He thought about it for a few seconds.

  “We can review what we have and relax a little,” she said. “Plus your place is nicer than mine.”

  He laughed. “Okay. Sold,” he said.

  He hit Sixth Avenue and turned uptown toward West 96th Street. For several minutes, neither spoke.

  Then she broke the silence.

  “Do you think we’ll both survive this case?” she asked.

  He glanced her way for a split second. “Why do you ask that?” he answered.

  “Because the thought has occurred to me. We don’t really know what we’re messing with.”

  “I’ve messed with worse,” he said.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

  He drew a breath. “We’ll survive,” he said. “You can’t go on any other assumption.”

  “If something happens to one of us, the other persists with the case. The other takes it as far as it can go, no matter how long it takes,” she said. “Weeks? Years? Right?”

  A longer breath, then, “Of course,” he answered.

  “Good,” she said, sounding as if a decision had been made.

  They rode again in silence. His free hand rested on Lauren’s as he drove. Idly, he wondered how he would ever be able to deal with it if anything horrible happened to her.

  Chapter 65

  Alone in New York, Misha walked down upper Broadway. He went to a vacant apartment that his employers had secured for him. His contact in New York, a man he knew as Mr. Renzulli, had left him a pair of keys on a ring.

  The apartment was in the rear of the sixth floor of a walk-up tenement on the north side of West 96th Street. One key on his new key ring allowed him into the building. The other key let him into the apartment. There was litter and broken glass in the hallways. He recognized a heroin shooting gallery on the third floor. The men who operated it glared at him. He glared back.

  He reached the apartment, stepped in and closed the door. He finally put down his packages. He stood very quietly. He could hear street noise and building noise. In a neighboring apartment, a man and woman were having a noisy argument in Creole.

  The apartment had a musty smell. It was one room, studio style. There was rudimentary furniture: a bed, a dresser, a small table and two wooden chairs. A small dirty refrigerator. No one had been there for a while, at least not for any length of time. He wondered what it had last been used for, not that it mattered. The assassin turned on some lights and opened one of the two windows that looked south. He withdrew the binoculars from his pocket. He easily found Frank Cooper's building.

  Cooper's living room window was a challenging target to Misha’s naked eye. But with powerful binoculars or the sight of a powerful rifle, the movement within the window would be easily discernible. A man in that apartment, or a woman, or both, would be easily visible.

  Misha knew he had his angle for his shot. Or two shots. He estimated that the sniping could be accomplished from six hundred fifty, maybe seven hundred meters. But he had his trajectory. With a modem sniping weapon, such as the one he had used in Fort Myers, such a proposed hit was not difficult. Misha was confident. From this range, he could do this job.

  “Okay,” he said aloud to himself. This would serve his purpose. Sometimes everything proceeded without complication, just as it had in Fort Myers.

  He stashed his packages in a closet. There was a panel under the floorboards for hiding things. His employers had advised him well. He left the apartment. He took a taxi downtown to his hotel. This time his driver spoke no English, for which Misha was grateful. The driver needed directions to the hotel on Seventh Avenue

  During the ride, Misha ran through some telephone numbers in New York. He was still angry that a final assignment had been thrust upon him. The Americans sometimes knew no honor. He could not wait to finish this assignment and retire to South America, even though running into some Teutonic enemies was not out of the question in places like Argentina and Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay.

  The cabbie dropped him at his high-rise hotel. He would buy a few bottles of vodka and maybe find a whore in the hotel bar. The evening would be built around such pleasures. Who could blame a man after all he had been through?

  Chapter 66

  The Nixon campaign finally had the diplomatic conduit they needed to monkey-wrench the election.

  They prevailed upon Anna Chennault, widow of Claire Chennault, the charismatic aviator and World War Two hero. Mrs. Chennault was a Republican doyenne and Nixon fund-raiser. She was member of the pro-nationalist China lobby, with connections across Asia, and she currently lived at the Watergate Complex in D.C.

  Anna Chen’s father, a diplomat in Mexico, had feared a war between Japan and China in the 1930s, so he sent his wife and children to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to live
with his mother. Anna had been born in Beijing, China in 1935.

  Anna Chen was attending class at St. Paul's School when the Imperial Japanese Air Force bombed the school on 8 December 1941. She witnessed the battle of Hong Kong as the invading Japanese army fought British, Indian and Canadian troops. The battle ended with the surrender of Hong Kong on Christmas Day. After taking Hong Kong, the Japanese declared all Chinese females to be prostitutes. They were to have sex for free for the next three days with invading Japanese soldiers. This was to “thank them” for "liberating" them from the rule of the English. Non-cooperation was punishable by decapitation.

  Chen and her sisters fled to the Chinese mainland.

  They survived in poverty. Anna, however, persisted in her academics. In 1944, she received a bachelor's degree in Chinese from Lingnan University. Employed as a journalist later the same year, the nineteen-year-old Chen interviewed General Chennault, the leader of the Flying Tigers. Claire Chennault was a warrior-celebrity who had saved thousands of Chinese lives. The Japanese had mercilessly bombed everything in China from 1937 onward, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. As best they could, Chenault’s valiant pilots, the “Flying Tigers,” had harassed and attacked Japanese forces, protecting the Chinese people from the marauding Japanese. After the interview, Chen had tea with Chennault. The Louisianan’s gentlemanly behavior and Southern charm impressed Anna.

  Not all of General Chennault’s conquests were wartime. In 1946, Chennault divorced his first wife, whom he had married in 1911 and who was the mother of his eight children. He married Anna Chen, who was more than three decades years his junior, in 1947.

  A heavy smoker, Chennault died in 1958 of lung cancer, cigarettes accomplishing what the entire Imperial Japanese Army had been unable to do. In his will, Chennault left most of his estate to his ex-wife and their children. But he left all the shares he owned in the Civil Air Transport company and the Flying Tiger Line, an immensely profitable airline in Asia after the war, to Anna and their daughters. Upon Chennault’s death, the ladies of his second family were multi-millionaires.