by Tom Clancy
“Why you want?” the sergeant asked, mainly to be polite. He was a tanker, and getting the right garb was not a problem.
“Make movie—television movie.”
“Television?” The man’s eyes lit up. “Belts, boots?”
“Yes.”
The man checked left and right, then lowered his voice. “Pistol?”
“You can do that?”
The sergeant smiled and nodded emphatically to show that he was a serious broker. “Take money.”
“Must be Russian pistol, correct pistol,” Keitel said, hoping that this pidgin exchange was clear.
“Yes, I can get.”
“How soon?”
“One hour.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand mark, no pistol. Ten pistol, five thousand mark more.” And that, Keitel thought, was highway robbery.
He held up his hands again. “Ten thousand mark, yes. I pay.” To show he was serious, he displayed a sheaf of hundred-mark notes. He tucked one in the soldier’s pocket. “I wait one hour.”
“I come back here, one hour.” The soldier left the area rapidly. Keitel walked into the nearest Gasthaus and ordered a beer.
“If this were any easier,” he observed to a colleague, “I’d say it was a trap.”
“You heard about the tank?”
“The T-80, yes, why?”
“Willi Heydrich did that for the Americans.”
“Willi?” Keitel shook his head. “What was his fee?”
“Five hundred thousand D-Mark. Damned-fool Americans. Anyone could have set that up.”
“But they didn’t know that at the time.” The man laughed bleakly. DM500,000 had been enough to set the former Oberst-Leutnant Wilhelm Heydrich up in a business—a Gasthaus like this one—which made for a much better living than he’d ever gotten from the Stasi. Heydrich had been one of Keitel’s most promising subordinates, and now he had sold out, quit his career, turned his back on his political heritage, and turned into one more new-German citizen. His intelligence training had merely served as a vehicle, to take one last measure of spite out on the Americans.
“What about the Russian?”
“The one who made the deal? Ha!” the man snorted. “Two million marks. He undoubtedly paid off the division commander, got his Mercedes, and banked the rest. That unit rotated back to the Union soon thereafter, and one tank more or less from a division ... ? The inspectorate might not even have noticed.”
They had one more round while watching the TV over the bar—a disgusting habit picked up from the Americans, Keitel thought. When forty minutes had passed, he went back outside, with his colleague in visual contact. It might be a trap, after all.
The Russian sergeant was back early. He wasn’t carrying anything but a smile.
“Where is it?” Keitel asked.
“Truck, around ...” The man gestured.
“Ecke? Corner?”
“Da, that word, corner. Um die Ecke. ” The man nodded emphatically.
Keitel waved to the other man, who went to get the car. Erwin wanted to ask the soldier how much of the money was going to his lieutenant, who typically skimmed a sizable percentage of every deal for their own use, but that really was beside the point, wasn’t it?
The Soviet Army GAZ-69 light truck was parked a block away. It was a simple matter of backing up the agent’s car to the tailgate and popping the trunk. But first, of course, Keitel had to inspect the merchandise. There were ten camouflage battle-dress uniforms, lightweight, but of better than normal quality because these were for officers’ use. Headwear was a black beret with the red star and rather antique-looking tank badge that showed them to be for an armor officer. The shoulderboards of each uniform had the three stars of a full colonel. Also included were the uniform belts and boots.
“Pistolen?” Keitel asked.
First, eyes swept the street. Then ten cardboard boxes appeared. Keitel pointed to one, and it opened to reveal a Makarov PM. That was a 9-millimeter automatic modeled on the German Walther PP. The Russians, in a gesture of magnanimity, even tossed in five boxes of 9mm- x -18 ball ammunition.
“Ausgezeichnet,” Keitel observed, reaching for his money. He counted out ninety-nine hundred-mark bills.
“Thank you,” the Russian said. “You need more, you see me, yes?”
“Yes, thank you.” Keitel shook his hand and got into the car.
“What has the world become?” the driver said as he headed off. As recently as three years before, those soldiers would have been court-martialed—perhaps even shot—for what they had done.
“We have enriched the Soviet Union to the tune of ten thousand marks.”
The driver grunted. “Doch, and that ‘merchandise’ must have cost at least two thousand to manufacture! What is it they call that ... ?”
“A ‘volume discount.’ ” Keitel couldn’t decide whether to laugh or not. “Our Russian friends learn fast. Or perhaps the muzhik cannot count past ten.”
“What we plan to do is dangerous.”
“That is true, but we are being well paid.”
“You think I do this for money?” the man asked, an edge on his voice.
“No, nor do I. But if we must risk our lives, we might as well be rewarded for it.”
“As you say, Colonel.”
It never occurred to Keitel that he really did not know what he was doing, that Bock had not told him everything. For all his professionalism, Keitel had neglected to remind himself that he was doing business with a terrorist.
The air was wonderfully still, Ghosn thought. He’d never experienced really heavy snow. The storm was lingering longer than expected, was expected to continue for another hour or so. It had dropped half a meter, which, along with the flakes still in the air, muffled sound to a degree he had never known. It was a silence you could hear, he told himself standing on the porch.
“Like it, eh?” Marvin asked.
“Yes.”
“When I was a boy we got really big storms, not like this one, storms that dropped feet of snow—like a whole meter at once, man—and then it would really get cold, like twenty or thirty below. You go outside, and it’s like you’re on another planet or something, and you wonder what it was like a hundred years ago, living in a tipi with your woman and your babies and your horses outside, everything clean and pure like it’s supposed to be. It must have been something, man, it must have really been something.”
The man was poetic, but foolish, Ibrahim thought. So primitive a life, most of your children died before their first year had ended, starving in winter because there was no game to hunt. What fodder was there for the horses, and how did they get to it under the snow? How many people and animals froze to death? Yet he idolized the life. That was foolish. Marvin had courage. He had tenacity, and strength, and devotion, but the fact of the matter was that he didn’t understand the world, didn’t know God, and lived according to a fantasy. It really was unfortunate. He could have been a valuable asset.
“When do we leave?”
“We’ll give the highway boys a couple of hours to scrape the roads. You take the car—it has front-wheel drive and you won’t have any problem driving. I’ll take the van. There’s no hurry, right? We don’t want to take chances.”
“That is right.”
“Let’s go inside ’fore we both freeze.”
“They really gotta clean up the air in this place,” Clark said when he finished coughing.
“It is pretty bad,” Chavez agreed.
They’d rented a small place near the airport. Everything they needed was tucked away in closets. They’d made their contacts on the ground. The usual service team would be sick when the 747 came in. It would be a fiscal illness, of course. It turned out that getting the two CIA officers aboard wasn’t all that hard. The Mexicans did not especially like the Japanese, at least not the government kind, whom they regarded as more arrogant than Americans—which, to a Mexican citizen, was remarkable. Clark checked h
is watch. Nine more hours until it swooped in through the pollution. Just a brief courtesy visit to see the Mexican President, supposedly, then off to Washington to see Fowler. Well, that made things easy for Clark and Chavez.
They started off for Denver just at midnight. The Colorado state-roads teams had done their usual professional job. What could not be scraped was salted and sanded, and the usual one-hour drive took merely an additional fifteen minutes. Marvin handled the check-in, paying for three nights with cash, and making a show of getting a receipt for his expense account. The desk clerk noted the ABC logo on the truck, and was disappointed that the rooms he’d given them were around back. Had they parked in front, maybe he could get more business. As soon as he left, the clerk went back to dozing in front of the TV. The Minnesota fans would be arriving the next day, and they promised to be a raucous, troublesome crowd.
The meet with Lyalin proved easier to arrange than expected. Cabot’s brief get-acquainted session with the new head of the Korean CIA had gone even more smoothly than he’d dared to hope—the Koreans were quite professional—allow—ing him to fly off to Japan twelve hours early. The Chief of Station Tokyo had a favorite spot, a hostess house located in one of the innumerable meandering back streets within a mile of the embassy, and also a place very easy to secure and surveil.
“Here is my latest report,” Agent MUSHASHI said, handing over the envelope.
“Our President is most impressed with the quality of your information,” Cabot replied.
“As I am impressed with the salary.”
“So, what can I do for you?”
“I wanted to be sure that you are taking me seriously,” Lyalin said.
“We do that,” Marcus assured him. Does this fellow think we pay in the millions for the fun of it? He wondered. It was Cabot’s first face-to-face with an agent. Though he’d been briefed to expect a conversation just like this one, it still came as a surprise.
“I plan to defect in a year, with my family. What exactly will you do for me?”
“Well, we will debrief you at length, then assist you in finding a comfortable place to live and work.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere you wish, within reason.” Cabot managed to conceal his exasperation. This was work for a junior case officer.
“What do you mean, ‘within reason’?”
“We won’t let you live right across the street from the Russian Embassy. What exactly do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Then why did you bring this up? “What sort of climate do you like?”
“Warm, I think.”
“Well, there’s Florida, lots of sun.”
“I will think about that.” The man paused. “You do not lie to me?”
“Mr. Lyalin, we take good care of our guests.”
“Okay. I will continue to send you information.” And with that, the man simply got up and left.
Marcus Cabot managed not to swear, but the look he gave to the station chief ignited a laugh.
“First time you’ve done a touchy-feely, right?”
“You mean that’s all?” Cabot could scarcely believe it.
“Director, this is a funny business. Crazy as it sounds, what you just did was very important,” Sam Yamata said. “Now he knows that we really care about him. Bringing up the President was a good move, by the way.”
“You say so.” Cabot opened the envelope and started reading. “Good Lord!”
“More on the Prime Minister’s trip?”
“Yes, the details we didn’t get before. Which bank, payoffs to other officials. We may not even need to bug the airplane....”
“Bug an airplane?” Yamata asked.
“You never heard me say that.”
The station chief nodded. “How could I? You were never here.”
“I need to get this off to Washington fast.”
Yamata checked his watch. “We’ll never catch the direct flight in time.”
“Then we’ll fax it secure.”
“We’re not set up for that. Not on the Agency side, I mean.”
“How about the NSA guys?”
“They have it, Director, but we’ve been warned about the security of their systems.”
“The President needs this. It has to go out. Do it, my authority.”
“Yes, sir.”
33
PASSAGES
It was nice to wake up at a decent hour—eight o’clock—at home on a Saturday. Without a headache. That was something he hadn’t done in months. He fully planned to spend the day at home doing precisely nothing more than shave, and he planned that only because he’d be going to mass that evening. Ryan soon learned that on Saturday mornings his children were glued to the TV set, watching various cartoons, including something concerning turtles that he’d heard about but never seen. On reflection, he decided to pass on it this morning also.
“How are you this morning?” he asked Cathy on his way into the kitchen.
“Not bad at all. I—oh, damn!”
The noise she heard was the distinctive trilling of the secure phone. Jack ran into the library to catch it.
“Yeah?” “Dr. Ryan, this is the ops room. Swordsman,” the watch officer said.
“Okay.” Jack hung up. “Damn.”
“What’s the matter?” Cathy asked from the doorway.
“I have to go in. By the way, I have to be in tomorrow, too.”
“Jack, come on—”
“Look, babe, there are a couple of things I have to do before I leave. One’s happening right about now—and you can forget that, okay?—and I have to be in on it.”
“Where do you have to go this time?”
“Just into the office. I don’t have any overseas stuff planned at all, as a matter of fact.”
“Supposed to snow tonight, maybe a big one.”
“Great. Well, I can always stay over.”
“I’m going to be so happy when you leave that goddamned place for good.”
“Can you stick with me just a couple months more?”
“‘Couple of months’?”
“April first, I’m out of there. Deal?”
“Jack, it’s not that I don’t like what you do, just that—”
“Yeah, the hours. Me, too. I’m used to the idea of leaving now, turning into a normal person again. I gotta change.”
Cathy bowed to the inevitable and went back to the kitchen. Jack dressed casually. On weekends you didn’t have to wear a suit. He decided that he could even dispense with a tie, and also that he’d drive himself. Thirty minutes later he was on the road.
It was a gloriously clear afternoon over the Strait of Gibraltar. Europe to the north, Africa to the south. The narrow passage had once been a mountain range, the geologists said, and the Mediterranean a dry basin until the Atlantic had broken in. This would have been the perfect place to watch from, too, thirty thousand feet up.
And best of all, he would not have had to worry about commercial air traffic back then. Now he had to listen to the guard circuit make sure some airliner didn’t blunder into his path. Or the other way around, which was actually more honest.
“There’s our company,” Robby Jackson observed.
“Never seen her before, sir,” Lieutenant Walters said.
“Her” was the Soviet carrier Kuznetzov, the first real carrier in the Russian Fleet. Sixty-five thousand tons, thirty fixed-wing aircraft, ten or so helicopters. Escorting her were the cruisers Slava and Marshal Ustinov, plus what looked like one Sovremenny- and two Udaloy-class destroyers. They were coming east in a compressed tactical formation, and were two hundred forty miles behind the TR battle group. Half a day back, Robby thought, or half an hour, depending on how you looked at it.
“We give ’em a flyby?” Walters asked.
“Nope, why piss ’em off?”
“Looks like they’re in a hurry,” the RIO said, looking through a pair of binoculars. “I’d say about twenty-five knots.”
“Maybe they’re just trying to clear the strait as quick as they can.”
“I doubt that, skipper. What do you suppose they’re here for?”
“Same as us, according to intel. Train, show the flag, make friends and influence people.”
“Didn’t you have a run-in once ... ?”
“Yeah, a Forger put a heat-seeker up my ass a few years back. Got my Tom back all right, though.” Robby paused for a moment. “They said it was an accident, supposedly the pilot was punished.”
“Believe it?”
Jackson gave the Russian battle group a last look. “Yeah, as a matter of fact.”
“First time I saw a picture of that thing I said to myself, there’s a Navy Cross that hasn’t happened yet.”
“Chill out, Shredder. Okay, we seen ’em. Let’s head back.” Robby moved the stick to turn back east. This he did in a leisurely maneuver rather than the hard-bank-and-pull a younger fighter jock might try. Why stress the airframe unnecessarily? Jackson would have thought if he’d bothered to think about it. In the backseat, Lieutenant Henry “Shredder” Walters thought the CAG was just turning into an old guy.
Not that old. Captain Jackson was as alert as ever. His seat was jacked up about as far as it would go, because Robby was on the short side. This gave him a good field of view. His eyes swept in a constant pattern left-right, up-down, and in to look at his instruments about once a minute. His main concern was commercial air traffic, and also private planes, since this was a weekend, and people liked to orbit the Rock to take pictures. A civilian in a Learjet, Robby thought, could be more dangerous than a loose Sidewinder....
“Jesus! Coming up at nine!”
Captain Jackson’s head snapped to the left. Fifty feet away was a MiG-29 Fulcrum-N, the new naval variant of the Russian air-superiority fighter. The visored face of the pilot was staring at him. Robby saw that four missiles were hanging on the wings. The Tomcat had only two at the moment.
“Came up from underneath,” Shredder reported.
“Clever of him.” Robby took the news with equanimity. The Russian pilot waved. Robby returned the gesture.