by Tom Clancy
“Your husband is associated with the Greifswald-Nord Nuclear Power Station?”
“He was. As you know, it is being closed down.”
“Quite so. I would like to know what you and he think of that. Is Dr. Fromm at home?”
“No, he is not,” she answered uncomfortably. “Wiegler” didn’t react visibly.
“Really? May I ask where he is?”
“He is away on business.”
“Perhaps I might come back in a few days, then?”
“Perhaps. You might call ahead?” It was the way she said it that the KGB officer noticed. She was hiding something, and the Captain knew that it had to be something—
There was another knock at the door. Traudl Fromm went to answer it.
“Guten Abend, Frau Fromm,” a voice said. “We bring a message from Manfred.”
The Captain heard the voice, and something inside his head went on alert. He told himself not to react. This was Germany, and everything was in Ordnung. Besides, he might learn something....
“I, ah, have a guest at the moment,” Traudl answered.
The next statement was delivered in a whisper. The Captain heard approaching steps, and took his time before turning to look. It was a fatal error.
The face he saw might as easily have come from one of the endless World War II movies that he’d grown up on, just that it lacked the black-and-silver-trimmed uniform of an SS officer. It was a stern, middle-aged face with light blue eyes entirely devoid of emotion. A professional face that measured his as quickly as he—
It was time to—
“Hello. I was just about to leave.”
“Who is he?” Traudl didn’t get a chance to answer.
“I’m a reporter with—” It was too late. A pistol appeared from nowhere. “Was gibt’s hier?” he demanded.
“Where is your car?” the man behind the gun asked.
“I parked it down the street. I—”
“All those spaces right in front? Reporters are lazy. Who are you?”
“I’m a reporter with the—”
“I think not.”
“This one, too,” the one in back said. The Captain remembered the face from somewhere.... He told himself not to panic. That, too, was a mistake.
“Listen closely. You will be going on a short trip. If you cooperate, you will be returned here within three hours. If you do not cooperate, things will go badly for you. Verstehen Sie?”
They had to be intelligence officers, the Captain thought, making a correct guess. And they had to be German, and that meant that they would play by the rules, he told himself, making the last mistake of what had been a promising career.
The courier arrived from Cyprus right on schedule, handing off his package to another man at one of five pre-selected transfer points, all of which had been under surveillance for twelve hours. The second man walked two blocks and started up his Yamaha motorcycle, tearing off into the countryside just as fast as he could in an area where motorcyclists were all certifiably mad. Two hours after that, he delivered the package, certain that he had not been followed, and kept going another thirty minutes before circling back to his point of origin.
Günther Bock took the package and was annoyed to see that it was to all appearances a movie cassette—Chariots of Fire—rather than the hollowed-out book he’d requested. Perhaps Erwin was delivering a message along with the cassette. Bock inserted it in a player and switched it on, catching the first few minutes of the feature movie, which was subtitled in French. Soon, he realized that Keitel’s message was on what intelligence professionals really did. He fast-forwarded through ninety minutes of the film before the picture changed.
What?
“Who are you?” an off-camera voice asked harshly.
“I am Peter Wiegler, I am a reporter with—” The rest was a scream. The equipment used was crude, just an electrical cord ripped off a lamp or appliance, the insulation trimmed off the free end to expose a few centimeters of copper. Few understood just how effective crude instruments could be, especially if the user possessed some degree of sophistication. The man who called himself Peter Wiegler screamed as though his throat would split from the effort. He’d already bitten through his lower lip in previous efforts to keep silent. The only good thing about using electricity was that it wasn’t especially bloody, just noisy.
“You must understand that you are being foolish. Your courage is impressive, but wasted here. Courage only has use when there is hope of rescue. We’ve already searched your car. We have your passports. We know that you are not German. So, what are you? Pole, Russian, what?”
The young man opened his eyes and took a long breath before speaking. “I am an investigative reporter with the Berliner Tageblatt. ” They hit him again with the electric cord, and this time he passed out. Bock watched a man’s back approach the victim and check his eyes and pulse. The torturer appeared to be wearing a chemical-warfare-protective suit of rubberized fabric, but without the hood and gloves. It must have been awfully hot, Bock thought.
“Obviously a trained intelligence officer. Probably Russian. Not circumcised, and his dental work is stainless steel, not especially well done. That means an East Bloc service, of course. Too bad, this lad is quite brave.” The voice was admirably clinical, Bock thought.
“What drugs do we have?” another voice asked.
“A rather good tranquilizer. Now?”
“Now. Not too much.”
“Very well.” The man went off-camera, then returned with a syringe. He grasped the victim’s upper arm, then injected the drug into a vein inside the elbow. It took three minutes before the KGB man regained consciousness, just enough for the rush of drugs to assault his higher brain functions.
“Sorry we had to do that to you. You have passed the test,” the voice said, this time in Russian.
“What test—” The answer was in Russian, just two words before his brain took hold and stopped him. “Why did you ask me in Russian?”
“Because that was what we wished to know. Good night.”
The victim’s eyes went wide as a small-caliber pistol appeared, was placed against his chest, and fired. The camera withdrew a bit to show more of the room. A plastic sheet—actually three of them—covered the floor to catch blood and other droppings under the metal chair. The bullet wound was speckled with black powder marks and bulged outward from the intrusion of gun-gasses below the skin. There wasn’t much bleeding. Heart wounds never produced much. In a few more seconds the body stopped quivering.
“We could have taken more time to ascertain additional information, but we have what we need, as I will explain later.” It was Keitel’s voice, off-camera.
“Now, Traudl ...”
They brought her in front of the camera, hands bound in front of her, her mouth gagged with the same bandaging tape, her eyes wide in terror, naked. She was trying to say something around the gag, but no one there had been interested. The tape was a day and a half old, of course. Günther could tell that from the TV that was playing in the corner, tuned to an evening news broadcast. The entire performance was a professional tour de force designed to meet his requirements.
Bock could almost hear the man thinking, Now, how do we do this? Günther momentarily regretted the instructions he’d given Keitel. But the evidence had to be positive. Magicians and other experts in illusion regularly consulted with intelligence agencies—but some things could not be faked, and he had to be sure that he could trust Keitel to do terrible and dangerous things. It was an objective necessity that this be graphic.
Another man looped a rope over a ceiling beam and hauled her hands up, then the first pressed his pistol into her armpit and fired a single shot. At least he wasn’t a sadist, Bock thought. Such people were not reliable. It was quite sad to watch in any case. The bullet had punctured her heart, but she was too excited to die quickly, struggling for more than half a minute, eyes still wide, fighting for breath, still trying to speak, probably begging for h
elp, asking why.... After she went limp, one checked the pulse at her neck, then lowered her slowly to the floor. They’d been as gentle about it as they could have been under the circumstances. The shooter spoke without facing the camera.
“I hope you are satisfied. I did not enjoy this.”
“You weren’t supposed to,” Bock said to the television set.
The Russian was taken off the chair and laid beside Traudl Fromm. While the bodies were dismembered, Keitel’s voice spoke. It was a useful diversion, as the visual scene simply got more horrible. Bock was not squeamish about many things, but it troubled his psyche when human bodies were abused after death. Necessary or not, it seemed gratuitous to him.
“The Russian is undoubtedly an intelligence officer, as you have seen. His automobile was a rental from Berlin, and is being driven tomorrow to Magdeburg, where it will be turned in. It was parked down the street, normal procedure for a professional, of course, but a giveaway in the event of capture. In the car we found a list of names, all of them in the DDR nuclear-power industry. It would seem that our Russian comrades have suddenly become interested in Honecker’s bomb project. A pity we didn’t have another few years to follow up on that, no? I regret the complication involved, but it took us several days to set up arrangements for disposing of the bodies, and we had no idea Frau Fromm had her ‘guest’ when we knocked on the door. At that point, of course, it was too late. Besides, with the rain we had ideal conditions for the kidnapping.” Two men were working on each body. All wore the protective suits, and now they had their hoods and masks on, doubtless to protect them from the smell as much as to protect their identity. As in a slaughterhouse, sawdust was applied in buckets full to soak up the copious amounts of blood being spilled. Bock knew from experience just how messy murders could be. They worked quickly as Keitel’s voice-over went on, using powered industrial cutting tools. Arms and legs had been removed from the torsos, and then the heads were removed and held up to the camera. No one could fake this. Keitel’s men had truly murdered two human beings. The dismemberment in front of a playing television made that absolutely certain, and would doubtless also make disposal easier. The pieces were assembled neatly for wrapping in plastic. One of the men started brushing the blood-soaked sawdust into a pile for yet another plastic bag.
“The body parts will be burned at two widely separated locations. This will be accomplished long before you get the tape. That ends our message. We await further instructions.” And the tape returned to the dramatization of the 1920 Olympics—or was it 1924? Bock wondered. Not that it mattered, of course.
“Yes, Colonel?”
“One of my officers has failed to check in.” The Colonel was from Directorate T, the technical branch of the First Chief Directorate. The holder of a doctor’s degree in engineering, his personal specialty was missile systems. He had worked in America and France, ferreting out the secrets of various military weapons before being promoted to his current job.
“Details?”
“Captain Yevgeniy Stepanovich Feodorov, age thirty, married, one child, a fine young officer on the Major’s List. He was one of the three I sent into Germany at your direction to check out their nuclear facilities. He’s one of my best.”
“How long?” Golovko asked.
“Six days. He flew into Berlin via Paris last week. He had German papers, good ones from downstairs, and a list of ten names to investigate. His instructions were to maintain a low profile unless he discovered something important, in which case he was to make contact with Station Berlin—what’s left of it, I mean. We scheduled a periodic check-in, of course. He didn’t make it, and after twenty-four hours, I got the alert.”
“Could it be that he’s just careless?”
“Not this boy,” the Colonel said flatly. “Does the name mean anything to you?”
“Feodorov ... wasn’t his father ... ?”
“Stefan Yurievich, yes. Yevgeniy is his youngest son.”
“Good God, Stefan taught me, ” Golovko said. “Possibility of...?”
“Defection?” The Colonel shook his head angrily. “Not a chance. His wife is in the chorus with the opera. No—they met in university and married young over the objections of both sets of parents. It’s a love match like we all wish we had. She’s a stunningly beautiful girl, voice like an angel. Only a zhopnik would walk away from her. Then there’s the child. He is by all reports a good father.” Golovko saw where this was leading.
“Arrested, then?”
“I haven’t heard a whisper. Perhaps you might arrange to have that checked. I fear the worst.” The Colonel frowned and stared down at the rug. He didn’t want to be the one who broke the news to Natalia Feodorova.
“Hard to believe,” Golovko said.
“Sergey Nikolay’ch, if your suspicions are correct, then this program we were tasked to investigate is a matter of grave importance to them, is it not? We may have confirmed something in the most expensive way possible.”
General Lieutenant Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko was silent for several seconds. It’s not supposed to be like this, he told himself. The intelligence business is supposed to be civilized. Killing each other’s officers is a thing of the distant past. We don’t do that sort of thing anymore, haven’t done it in years ... decades....
“None of the alternatives are credible, are they?”
The Colonel shook his head. “No. But the most credible is that our man stumbled into something both real and extremely sensitive. Sensitive enough to kill for. A secret nuclear-weapons program is that sensitive, is it not?”
“Arguably, yes.” The Colonel was showing the sort of loyalty to his people that KGB expected, Golovko noted. He was also thinking over the alternatives and presenting his best estimate of the situation.
“Have you sent your technical people to Sarova yet?”
“Day after tomorrow. My best man was sick, just got out of the hospital—broke his leg in a fall down some stairs.”
“Have him carried there if necessary. I want a worst-case estimate of plutonium production at the DDR power stations. Send another man to Kyshtym to back-check the people at Sarova. Pull in the other people you sent to Germany. We’ll restart the investigation more carefully. Two-man teams, and the backup man is to be armed ... that is dangerous,” Golovko said on reflection.
“General, it takes a lot of time and money to train my field people. I will need two years to replace Feodorov, two whole years. You can’t just pull an officer out of another branch and drop him into this line of work. These people must understand what they are looking for. Assets like that should be protected.”
“You are correct. I will clear it with the Chairman and send experienced officers ... maybe some people from the Academy ... credential them like German police officials?”
“I like that, Sergey Nikolay’ch.”
“Good man, Pavel Ivan’ch. And on Feodorov?”
“Maybe he’ll turn up. Thirty days before he’s declared missing, then I’ll have to see his wife. Very well, I’ll pull my people in and start planning the next phase of the operation. When will I have a list of the escort officers?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Very well, General, thank you for your time.”
Golovko shook the man’s hand and remained standing until the door closed. He had ten minutes until his next appointment.
“Damn,” he said to his desk top.
“More delays?”
Fromm did not quite manage to hide his disgust. “We are saving time! The material we will be working on has machining characteristics similar to stainless steel. We must also manufacture blanks for the casting process. Here.”
Fromm unfolded his working drawings.
“We have here a folded cylinder of plutonium. Around the plutonium is a cylinder of beryllium, which is a godsend for our purposes. It is very light, very stiff, an X-ray window, and a neutron reflector. Unfortunately, it is also rather difficult to machine. We must use cubic boron-nit
ride tools, essentially an analog to industrial diamond. Steel or carbon tools would have results you do not wish to contemplate. We also have health considerations.”
“Beryllium is not toxic,” Ghosn said. “I checked.”
“True, but the dust resulting from the matching process converts to beryllium oxide, which when inspired converts again to beryllium hydroxide, and that causes berylliosis, which is uniformly fatal.” Fromm paused, staring at Ghosn like a schoolmaster before going on.
“Now, around the beryllium is a cylinder of tungsten-rhenium, which we need for its density. We will purchase twelve kilograms in powder form, which we will sinter into cylindrical segments. You know sintering? That is heating it just hot enough to form. Melting and casting is too difficult, and not necessary for our purposes. Around that goes the explosive-lens assembly. And this is just the primary, Ghosn, not even a quarter of our total energy budget.”
“And the precision required ...”
“Exactly. Think of this as the world’s largest ring or necklace. What we produce must be as finely finished as the most beautiful piece of jewelry you have ever seen—or perhaps a precision optical instrument.”
“The tungsten-rhenium?”
“Available from any major electrical concern. It’s used in special filaments for vacuum tubes, numerous other applications, and it’s far easier to work than pure tungsten.”