by Tom Clancy
“How was the crossing, Captain?” the man asked.
“Quiet.” Well, get on with it!
“You sail in three hours. Here are your mission orders.” He handed over a manila envelope with wax seals, and a note on the front that told Mancuso when he could open it. Though often a feature in movies, it was the first time this had happened to him as a CO. You were supposed to be able to discuss your mission with the people who gave it to you. But not this time. Mancuso signed for them, locked them in his safe under the watchful eyes of the spook, and sent him back on his way.
“Shit,” the Captain observed to himself. Now his guests could come aboard.
There were two of them, both in civilian clothes. The first came down the torpedo-loading hatch with the aplomb of a real sailor. Mancuso soon saw why.
“Howdy, skipper!”
“Jonesy, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Admiral Williamson gave me a choice: either be recalled to temporary active duty or come aboard as a civilian tech-rep. I’d rather be a tech-rep. Pay’s better.” Jones lowered his voice. “This here’s Mr. Clark. He doesn’t talk much.”
And he didn’t. Mancuso assigned him to the spare bunk in the engineer’s stateroom. After his gear came down the hatch, Mr. Clark walked into the room, closed the door behind him, and that was that.
“Where do you want me to stash my stuff?” Jones asked.
“There’s a spare bunk in the goat locker,” Mancuso replied.
“Fine. The chiefs eat better anyway.”
“How’s school?”
“One more semester till my masters. I’m already getting nibbles from some contractors. And I’m engaged.” Jones pulled out his wallet and showed the Captain a photo. “Her name’s Kim, and she works in the library.”
“Congratulations, Mr. Jones.”
“Thanks, skipper. The Admiral said you really needed me. Kim understands. Her dad’s Army. So, what’s up? Some kind of spec-op, and you couldn’t make it without me, right?” “Special Operations” was a euphemism that covered all sorts of things, most of which were dangerous.
“I don’t know. They haven’t told me yet.”
“Well, one more trip ’up north’ wouldn’t be too bad,” Jones observed. “To be honest, I kind of missed it.”
Mancuso didn’t think they were going there, but refrained from saying so. Jones went aft to get settled. Mancuso went into the engineer’s stateroom.
“Mr. Clark?”
“Yes, sir.” He’d hung up his jacket, revealing that he wore a short-sleeved shirt. The man was a little over forty, Mancuso judged. On first inspection, he didn’t look all that special, perhaps six-one, and slim, but then Mancuso noted that the man didn’t have the normal middle-age roll at the waist, and his shoulders were broader than they looked on the tall frame. It was the second glance at an arm that added a piece to the jigsaw. Half hidden under the black hair on his forearm was a tattoo, a red seal, it seemed to be, with a wide, impudent grin.
“I knew a guy with a tattoo like that. Officer—he’s with Team-Six now.”
“Once upon a time, Captain. I’m not supposed to talk about that, sir.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Sir, your mission orders will—”
“Humor me.” Mancuso smiled out the order. “They just took in the brow.”
“It involves making a pickup.”
My God. Mancuso nodded impassively. “Will you need any additional support?”
“No, sir. Solo shot. Just me and my gear.”
“Okay. We can go over it in detail after we sail. You’ll eat in the wardroom. Right down the ladder outside, then a few feet aft, on the starboard side. One other thing: is time a problem?”
“Shouldn’t be, unless you mind waiting. Part of this is still up in the air—and that’s all I can say for now, Captain. Sorry, but I have my orders, too.”
“Fair enough. You take the top bunk. Get some sleep if you need it.”
“Thank you, sir.” Clark watched the Captain leave, but didn’t smile until the door closed. He’d never been on a Los Angeles-class submarine before. Most intelligence missions were conducted by the smaller, more maneuverable Sturgeons. He always slept in the same place, always in the upper bunk in the engineer’s stateroom, the only spare bed on the ship. There was the usual problem stowing his gear, but “Clark” had done it enough to know all the tricks. When he’d finished that, he climbed up into the bunk. He was tired from the flight and needed a few hours to relax. The bunk was always the same, hard against the curved hull of the submarine. It was like being in a coffin with the lid half-open.
“One must admire the Americans for their cleverness,” Morozov said. It had been a busy several weeks at Dushanbe. Immediately after the test—more precisely, immediately after their visitor from Moscow had left—two of the six lasers had been defrosted and disassembled for service, and it was found that their optics had been badly scorched. So there was still a problem with the optical coating, after all. More likely quality-control, his section chief had observed, dismissing the problem to another team of engineers. What they had now was far more exciting. Here was the American mirror design that they’d heard about for years.
“The idea came from an astronomer. He wanted a way to make stellar photographs that didn’t suffer from ‘twinkling.’ Nobody bothered to tell him that it was impossible, so he went ahead and did it. I knew the rough idea, but not the details. You are right, young man. This is very clever. Too clever for us,” the man growled briefly as he flipped to the page on computer specifications. “We don’t have anything that can duplicate this performance. Just building the actuators—I don’t know if we can even do that.”
“The Americans are building the telescope—”
“Yes, at Hawaii. I know. But the one at Hawaii is far behind this one, technically speaking. The Americans have made a breakthrough that has not yet found its way into the general scientific community. Note the date on the diagram. They may actually have this one operating now.” He shook his head. “They’re ahead of us.”
“You have to leave.”
“Yes. Thank you for protecting me this long.” Eduard Vassilyevich Altunin’s gratitude was genuine. He’d had a floor on which to sleep, and several warm meals to sustain him while he made his plans.
Or attempted to. He couldn’t even appreciate the disadvantages under which he labored. In the West he could easily have obtained new clothing, a wig to disguise his hair, even a theatrical makeup kit that came with instructions on how to alter his features. In the West he could hide in the back seat of a car, and be driven two hundred miles in under four hours. In Moscow he had none of those options. The KGB would have searched his flat by now, and determined what clothing he wore. They’d know his face and hair color. The only thing they evidently did not know was his small circle of friends from military service in Afghanistan. He’d never talked to anyone about them.
They offered him a different sort of coat, but it didn’t fit, and he had no wish to endanger these people further. He already had his cover story down: he’d hidden out with a criminal group a few blocks away. One fact about Moscow little known in the West was its crime situation, which was bad and getting worse. Though Moscow had not yet caught up with American cities of comparable size, there were districts where the prudent did not walk alone at night. But since foreigners didn’t often visit such areas, and since the street criminals rarely troubled foreigners—doing so guaranteed a vigorous response from the Moscow Militia—the story was slow getting out.
He walked out onto Trofimovo, a dingy thoroughfare near the river. Altunin marveled at his stupidity. He’d always told himself that if he needed to escape from the city, he’d do so on a cargo barge. His father had worked on them all his life, and Eduard knew hiding places that no one could find—but the river was frozen, and barge traffic was at a stop, and he hadn’t thought of it! Altunin raged at himself.
There was no sense w
orrying about that now, he told himself. There had to be another way. He knew that the Moskvich auto plant was only a kilometer away, and the trains ran year round. He’d try to catch one going south, perhaps hide in a freight car filled with auto parts. With luck he’d make it to Soviet Georgia, where no one would inspect his new papers all that closely. People could disappear in the Soviet Union. After all, it was a country of 280,000,000, he told himself. People were always losing or damaging their papers. He wondered how many of these thoughts were realistic and how many were simply an attempt to cheer himself up.
But he couldn’t stop now. It had started in Afghanistan and he wondered if it would ever stop.
He’d been able to shut it out at first. A corporal in an ordnance company, he worked with what the Soviet military euphemistically referred to as “counterterrorist devices.” These were distributed by air, or most often by Soviet soldiers completing a sweep through a village. Some were the prototypical Russian matryoshka dolls, a bandanaed figure with a rolypoly bottom; or a truck; or a fountain pen. Adults learned fast, but children were cursed both with curiosity and the inability to learn from the mistakes of others. Soon it was learned that children would pick up anything, and the number of doll-bombs distributed was reduced. But one thing remained constant: when picked up, a hundred grams of explosive would go off. His job had been assembling the bombs and teaching the soldiers how to use them properly.
Altunin hadn’t thought about it much at first. It had been his job, the orders for which came from on high; Russians are neither inclined by temperament nor conditioned by education to question orders from on high. Besides, it had been a safe, easy job. He hadn’t had to carry a rifle and go walking in the bandit country. The only dangers to him had been in the bazaars of Kabul, and he’d always been careful to walk about in groups of five or more. But on one such trip he’d seen a young child—boy or girl, he didn’t know—whose right hand was now a claw, and whose mother stared at him and his comrades in a way he would never forget. He’d known the stories, how the Afghan bandits took particular delight in flaying captured Soviet pilots alive, how their women often handled the matter entirely. He’d thought it clear evidence of the barbarism of these primitive people—but a child wasn’t primitive. Marxism said that. Take any child, give it proper schooling and leadership, and you’d have a communist for life. Not that child. He remembered it, that cold November day two years ago. The wound was fully healed, and the child had actually been smiling, too young to understand that its disfigurement would last forever. But the mother knew, and knew how and why her child had been punished for being... born. And after that, the safe, easy job hadn’t been quite the same. Every time he screwed the explosives section onto the mechanism, he saw a small, pudgy child’s hand. He started seeing them in his sleep. Drink, and even an experiment with hashish hadn’t driven the images away. Speaking with his fellow technicians hadn’t helped—though it had earned him the wrathful attention of his company zampolit. It was a hard thing he had to do, the political officer had explained, but necessary to prevent greater loss of life, you see. Complaining about it would not change matters, unless Corporal Altunin wanted transfer to a rifle company, where he might see for himself why such harsh measures were necessary.
He knew now that he should have taken that offer, and hated himself for the cowardice that had prevented the impulse. Service in a line company might have restored his self-image, might have—might have done a lot of things, Altunin told himself, but he hadn’t made the choice and it hadn’t made the difference. In the end, all he’d earned for himself was a letter from the zampolit that would travel with him for the rest of his life.
So now he tried to expiate that wrong. He told himself that perhaps he already had—and now, if he were very lucky, he could disappear, and perhaps he could forget the toys that he’d prepared for their evil mission. That was the only positive thought that his mind had room for, this cold, cloudy night.
He walked north, keeping off the dirt sidewalks, staying in shadows, away from the streetlamps. Shift workers coming home from the Moskvich plant made the streets agreeably crowded, but when he arrived at the rail yard outside the plant, all the commuting was over. Snow started to fall heavily, reducing visibility to a hundred meters or so, with small globes of flakes around each of the lights over the stationary freight cars. A train seemed to be forming up, probably heading south, he told himself. Switching locomotives were moving back and forth, shunting boxcars from one siding to another. He spent a few minutes huddled by a car to make sure that he knew what was happening. The wind picked up as he watched, and Altunin looked for a better vantage point. There were some boxcars fifty or so meters away, from which he could observe better. One of them had an opened door, and he’d need to inspect the locking mechanism if he wanted to break inside one. He walked over with his head down to shield his face from the wind. The only thing he could hear, other than the crunch of snow under his boots, was the signal whistles of the switch engines. It was a friendly sound, he told himself, the sound that would change his life, perhaps lead the way to something like freedom.
He was surprised to see that there were people in the boxcar. Three of them. Two held cartons of auto parts. The third’s hands were empty, until he reached into his pocket and came out with a knife.
Altunin started to say something. He didn’t care if they were stealing parts for sale on the black market. He wasn’t concerned at all, but before he could speak, the third one leaped down on him. Altunin was stunned when his head struck a steel rail. He was conscious, but couldn’t move for a second, too surprised even to be afraid. The third one turned and said something. Altunin couldn’t make out the reply, but knew it was sharp and quick. He was still trying to understand what was happening when his assailant turned back and slashed his throat. There wasn’t even any pain. He wanted to explain that he wasn’t ... concerned ... didn’t care ... just wanted to ... one of them stood over him, two cartons in his arms, and clearly he was afraid, and Altunin thought this very odd, since he was the one who was dying ...
Two hours later, a switch engine couldn’t stop in time when its engineer noted an odd, snow-covered shape on the rails. On seeing what he’d run over, he called for the yardmaster.
13.
Councils
“BEAUTIFUL job,” Vatutin commented. “The bastards.” They’ve broken the rule, he said to himself. The rule was unwritten but nevertheless very real: CIA does not kill Soviets in the Soviet Union; KGB does not kill Americans, or even Soviet defectors, in the United States. So far as Vatutin knew, the rule had never been broken by either side—at least not obviously so. The rule made sense: the job of intelligence agencies was to gather intelligence; if KGB and CIA officers spent their time killing people—with the inevitable retaliation and counter-retaliation—the primary job would not get done. And so the business of intelligence was a civilized, predictable business. In third-world countries, different rules applied, of course, but in America and the Soviet Union, the rules were assiduously followed.
Until now, that is—unless I’m supposed to believe that this poor, sad bastard was murdered by auto-parts thieves! Vatutin wondered if CIA might have contracted the job out to a criminal gang—he suspected that the Americans used Soviet criminals for some things too sensitive for their own lily-white hands. That would not be a technical violation of the rules, would it? He wondered if the First Directorate men ever used a similar dodge...
All he knew right now was that the next step in the courier chain was dead at his feet, and with it his only hope of linking the microfilm to the American spy in the Defense Ministry. Vatutin corrected himself: He also knew that he’d have to report this to the Chairman in about six hours. He needed a drink. Vatutin shook his head and looked down at what was left of his suspect. The snow was falling so rapidly that you couldn’t see the blood anymore.
“You know, if they’d only been a little bit more clever putting his body on the tracks, we might have wri
tten it off to an accident,” another KGB officer observed. Despite the horrendous work done to the body by the wheels of the locomotive, it was clear that Altunin’s throat had been expertly sliced by a narrow-bladed knife. Death, the responding physician reported, could not have taken longer than a minute. There were no signs of a struggle. The victim‘s—the traitor’s! —hands were not bruised or cut. He hadn’t fought back against whoever had killed him. Conclusion: His killer was probably known to him. Might it have been an American?
“First thing,” Vatutin said. “I want to know if any Americans were away from their flats between eighteen and twenty-three hours.” He turned. “Doctor!”
“Yes, Colonel?”
“Time of death again?”
“Judging by the temperature of the larger pieces, between twenty-one and midnight. Earlier rather than later, I think, but the cold and snow cover complicate matters.” Not to mention the state of the remains, he didn’t add.
Vatutin turned back to his principal assistant. “Any who were away from quarters, I want to know who, where, when, and why.”
“Step up surveillance of all the foreigners?” the man wondered aloud.
“I’ll have to go to the Chairman for that, but I’m thinking about it. I want you to speak to the chief Militia investigator. This is to be classified most-secret. We don’t need a mob of fumbling policemen messing this affair up.”
“Understood, Comrade Colonel. They’d only be interested in recovering the auto parts anyway,” the man noted sourly. This perestroika business is turning everyone into a capitalist!
Vatutin walked over to the locomotive driver. “It’s cold, isn’t it?”
The message was received. “Yes, Comrade. Perhaps you’d like something to take away the chill?”
“That would be very kind of you, Comrade Engineer.”
“My pleasure, Comrade Colonel.” The engine driver produced a small bottle. As soon as he’d seen that the man was a colonel of the KGB, he’d thought himself doomed. But the man seemed decent enough. His colleagues were businesslike, their questions had been reasonable ones, and the man was almost at ease—until he realized that he could be punished for having a bottle on the job. He watched the man take a long pull, then hand the bottle back.