The Cardinal of the Kremlin

by Tom Clancy

  “You call this evidence?” General Yevgeniy Ignat’yev was in charge of the counterespionage office of the GRU, the Soviet military’s own intelligence arm. “To these tired old eyes it looks as though your people have jumped onto thin ice looking for a fish.”

  Vatutin was amazed—and furious—that the KGB Chairman had sent this man into his office to review his case.

  “If you can find a plausible explanation for the film, the camera, and the diary, perhaps you would be so kind as to share it with me, Comrade.”

  “You say you took it from his hand, not the woman’s.” A statement, not a question.

  “A mistake on my part for which I make no excuses,” Vatutin said with dignity, which struck both men as slightly odd.

  “And the camera?”

  “It was found attached magnetically to the inside of the service panel on his refrigerator.”

  “You didn’t find it the first time you searched the apartment, I see. And it had no fingerprints on it. And your visual record of Filitov does not show him using it. So if he tells me that you planted both the film and the camera on him, how am I supposed to convince the Minister that he’s the one doing the lying?”

  Vatutin was surprised by the tone of the question. “You believe that he is a spy after all?”

  “What I believe is of no importance. I find the existence of the diary troubling, but you would not believe the breaches of security I have to deal with, especially at the higher levels. The more important people become, the less important they think the rules are. You know who Filitov is. He’s more than just a hero, Comrade. He is famous throughout the Soviet Union—Old Misha, the Hero of Stalingrad. He fought at Minsk, at Vyasma, outside Moscow when we stopped the fascists, the Kharkov disaster, then the fighting retreat to Stalingrad, then the counterattack—”

  “I have read his file,” Vatutin said neutrally.

  “He is a symbol to the entire Army. You cannot execute a symbol on evidence as equivocal as this, Vatutin. All you have are these photographic frames, with no objective evidence that he shot them.”

  “We have not yet interrogated him.”

  “And you think that will be easy?” Ignat’yev rolled his eyes. His laugh was a harsh bark. “Do you know how tough this man is? This man killed Germans while he was on fire! This man looked at death a thousand times and pissed on it!”

  “I can get what I want out of him,” Vatutin insisted quietly.

  “Torture, is it? Are you mad? Keep in mind that the Taman Guards Motor-Rifle Division is based a few kilometers from here. You think the Red Army will sit still while you torture one of its heroes? Stalin is dead, Comrade Colonel, and so is Beriya.”

  “We can extract the information without doing physical harm,” Vatutin said. That was one of KGB’s most closely guarded secrets.

  “Rubbish!”

  “In that case, General, what do you recommend?” Vatutin asked, knowing the answer.

  “Let me take over the case. We’ll see to it that he never betrays the Rodina again, you can be sure of that,” Ignat’yev promised.

  “And save the Army the embarrassment, of course.”

  “We would save embarrassment for everyone, not the least you, Comrade Colonel, for fucking up this so-called investigation.”

  Well, that’s about what I expected. A little bluster and a few threats, mixed with a little sympathy and comradeliness. Vatutin saw that he had a way out, but that the safety it promised also promised to end his advancement. The handwritten message from the Chairman had made that clear enough. He was trapped between two enemies, and though he could still win the approval of one, the largest goal involved the largest risk. He could retreat from the true objective of the investigation, and stay a colonel the rest of his life, or he could do what he’d hoped to do when he began—without any political motives, Vatutin remembered bleakly—and risk disgrace. The decision was paradoxically an easy one. Vatutin was a “Two” man—

  “It is my case. The Chairman has given it to me to run, and I will run it in my way. Thank you for your advice, Comrade General.”

  Ignat’yev appraised the man and the statement. It wasn’t often that he encountered integrity, and it saddened him in a vague, distant way that he could not congratulate the man who demonstrated this rarest of qualities. But loyalty to the Soviet Army came first.

  “As you wish. I expect to be kept informed of all your activities.” Ignat’yev left without another word.

  Vatutin sat at his desk for a few minutes, appraising his own position. Then he called for his car. Twenty minutes later he was at Lefortovo.

  “Impossible,” the doctor told him before he had even asked the question.

  “What?”

  “You want to put this man into the sensory-deprivation tank, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “It would probably kill him. I don’t think you want to do that, and I am sure that I will not risk my project on something like this.”

  “It’s my case, and I’ll run it—”

  “Comrade Colonel, the man in question is over seventy years old. I have his medical file here. He has all the symptoms of moderate cardiovascular disease—normal at this age, of course—and a history of respiratory problems. The onset of the first anxiety period would explode his heart like a balloon. I can almost guarantee it.”

  “What do you mean—explode his heart—”

  “Excuse me—it’s difficult to explain medical terms to the layman. His coronary arteries are coated with moderate amounts of plaque. It happens to all of us; it comes from the food we eat. His arteries are more blocked than yours or mine because of his age, and also, because of his age, the arteries are less flexible than those of a younger person. If his heart rate goes too high, the plaque deposits will dislodge and cause a blockage. That’s what a heart attack is, Colonel, a blockage of a coronary artery. Part of the heart muscle dies, the heart stops entirely or becomes arrhythmic; in either case it ceases to pump blood, and the whole patient dies. Is that clear? Use of the tank will almost certainly induce a heart attack in the subject, and that attack will almost certainly be fatal. If not a heart attack, there is the somewhat lesser probability of a massive stroke—or both could happen. No, Comrade Colonel, we cannot use the tank for this man. I do not think that you wish to kill him before you get your information.”

  “What about other physical measures?” Vatutin asked quietly. My God, what if I can’t ... ?

  “If you’re certain that he’s guilty, you can shoot him at once and be done with it,” the physician observed. “But any gross physical abuse is likely to kill the patient.”

  And all because of a goddamned door lock, Colonel Vatutin told himself.

  It was an ugly rocket, the sort of thing that a child might draw or a fireworks company might build, though either would know better than to put it on top of an airplane instead of its proper place, underneath. But it was atop the airplane, as the runway’s perimeter lights showed in the darkness.

  The airplane was the famous SR-71 Blackbird, Lockheed’s Mach-three reconnaissance aircraft. This one had been flown in from Kadena Air Force Base on the western rim of the Pacific two days before. It rolled down the runway at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, before the twin flames of its afterburning engines. Fuel that leaked from the SR-71’s tanks—the Blackbird leaked a lot—was ignited by the heat, much to the entertainment of the tower crew. The pilot pulled back on the stick at the appropriate time, and the Blackbird’s nose came up. He held the stick back for longer than usual, pointing the bird into a steep forty-five-degree climb on full burner, and in a moment all that was left on the ground was a thundering memory. The last view the people had was of the twin angry dots of the engines, and soon these disappeared through the clouds that wafted by at ten thousand feet.

  The Blackbird kept going up. The air-traffic controllers at Las Vegas noted the blip on their screens, saw that it was barely moving laterally, though its altitude readout was changing
as rapidly as the wheels of the slot machines on the airport concourse. They shared a took—another Air Force hot dog—then they went back to work.

  The Blackbird was now passing through sixty thousand feet, and leveled off to head southeast toward the White Sands Missile Range. The pilot checked his fuel—there was plenty—and relaxed after the exhilarating climb. The engineers had been right. The missile sitting on the aircraft’s back hadn’t mattered at all. By the time he’d gotten to fly the Blackbird, the purpose of the back mount had been overtaken by events. Designed to hold a single-engine photoreconnaissance drone, the fittings had been removed from nearly all the SR-71s, but not this one, for reasons that were not clear from the aircraft’s maintenance book. The drone had originally been designed to go places the Blackbird could not, but it had become redundant on discovery of the fact that there was nowhere the SR-71 could not go in safety, as the pilot regularly proved on flights from Kadena. The only limit on the aircraft was fuel, and that didn’t play today.

  “Juliet Whiskey, this is Control. Do you read, over,” the sergeant said into the headset.

  “Control, this is Juliet Whiskey. All systems go. We are nominal to profile.”

  “Roger. Commence launch sequence on my mark. Five, four, three, two, one: mark!”

  A hundred miles away, the pilot punched burners again and hauled back on the stick. The Blackbird performed as beautifully as always, standing on her tail and rocketing into the sky before nearly a hundred thousand pounds of thrust. The pilot’s eyes were locked on his instruments as the altimeter spun around like a maddened clock. His speed was now thirteen hundred miles per hour and increasing, while the SR-71 showed her contempt for gravity.

  “Separation in twenty seconds,” the systems operator in the back seat told the pilot. The Blackbird was now passing through a hundred thousand feet. The target was one-twenty. The controls were already mushy. There wasn’t enough air up here to control the aircraft properly, and the pilot was being even more careful than usual. He watched his speed hit nineteen hundred several seconds early, then:

  “Standby for separation ... breakaway, breakaway!” the man in back called. The pilot dropped the nose and started a gentle turn to the left that would take him right across New Mexico before heading back to Nellis. This was much easier than flying along the Soviet border—and, occasionally, across it.... The pilot wondered if he could drive down to Vegas to catch a show after he landed.

  The target kept going up for a few more seconds, but surprisingly did not ignite its rocket motor. It was now a ballistic object, traveling in obedience to the laws of physics. Its oversized fins provided enough aerodynamic drag to keep it pointed in the proper direction as gravity began to reclaim the object for its own. The rocket tipped over at one hundred thirty thousand feet, reluctantly pointing its nose at the earth.

  Then its motor fired. The solid-fuel engine burned for only four seconds, but that was enough to accelerate its conical nose to a speed that would have terrified the Blackbird’s pilot.

  “Okay,” an Army officer said. The point-defense radar went from standby to active. It immediately saw the inbound. The target rocket was pushing itself down through the atmosphere at roughly the same speed as an ICBM warhead. He didn’t have to give a command. The system was fully automated. Two hundred yards away a fiberglass cover exploded off a concrete hole drilled in the gypsum flats, and a FLAGE erupted skyward. The Flexible Lightweight Agile Guided Experiment looked more like a lance than a rocket, and was nearly that simple. Millimeter-wave radar tracked the inbound, and the data was processed through an onboard microcomputer. The remarkable part of this was that all the parts had been taken off the shelf from existing high-tech weaponry.

  Outside, men watched from behind a protective earthen berm. They saw the upward streak of yellow light and heard the roar of the solid rocket motor, then nothing for several seconds.

  The FLAGE homed in on its target, maneuvering a few fractions of degrees with tiny attitude-control rockets. The nosecap blew off, and what unfolded would have looked to an outsider like a collapsing umbrella’s framework, perhaps ten yards across ...

  It looked just like a Fourth of July rocket, but without the noise. A few people cheered. Though both the target and the FLAGE “warhead” were totally inert, the energy of the collision converted metal and ceramic to incandescent vapor.

  “Four for four,” Gregory said. He tried not to yawn. He’d seen fireworks before.

  “You’re not going to get all the boosters, Major,” General Parks chided the younger man. “We still need the midcourse systems, and the terminal-defense ones.”

  “Yes, sir, but you don’t need me here. It works.”

  For the first three tests, the target rocket had been fired from a Phantom fighter, and people in Washington had claimed that the test series had underestimated the difficulty of intercepting the inbound warheads. Using the SR-71 as the launch platform had been Parks’s idea. Launching the drone from higher altitude, and with a higher initial speed, had made for a much faster reentry target. This test had actually made things slightly harder than was expected, and the FLAGE hadn’t cared a bit. Parks had been a little worried about the missile-guidance software, but, as Gregory had noted, it worked.

  “Al,” Parks said, “I’m starting to think that this whole program is going to work.”

  “Sure. Why not?” If those Agency pukes can get us the plans for the Russian laser ...

  CARDINAL sat alone in a bare cell, one and a half meters wide, two and a half meters long. There was a bare light bulb overhead, a wooden cot with a bucket underneath, but not a window except the spy hole in the rusted iron door. The walls were solid concrete, and there was no sound at all. He couldn’t hear the pacing of the corridor guard, nor even the rumble of traffic on the street outside the prison. They’d taken his uniform blouse, and belt, and his polished boots, replacing the last with cheap slippers. The cell was in the basement. That was all he knew, and he could tell from the damp air. It was cold.

  But not so cold as his heart. The enormity of his crime came to him as it never had. Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, three times Hero of the Soviet Union, was alone with his treason. He thought of the magnificent, broad land in which he lived, whose distant horizons and endless vistas were peopled with his fellow Russians. He’d served them all his life with pride and honor, and with his own blood, as the scars on his body proclaimed. He remembered the men with whom he’d served, so many of whom had died under his command. And how they had died, defiantly cursing the German tanks and guns as they burned alive in T-34s, retreating only when forced to, preferring to attack even when they knew it to be doomed. He remembered leading his troops in a hundred engagements, the frantic exhilaration that accompanied the roar of the diesel engines, the reeking clouds of smoke, the determination even unto the death that he had cheated so many times.

  And he’d betrayed it all.

  What would my men say of me now? He stared at the blank concrete wall opposite his cot.

  What would Romanov say?

  I think we both need a drink, my Captain, the voice chimed in. Only Romanov could be both serious and amused at the same time. Such thoughts are more easily considered with vodka or Samogan.

  Do you know why? Misha asked.

  You’ve never told us why, my Captain. And so Misha did. It took but a brief flicker of time.

  Both your sons, and your wife. Tell me, Comrade Captain, for what did we die?

  Misha didn’t know that. Even during the shooting he hadn’t known. He’d been a soldier, and when a soldier’s country is invaded, the soldier fights to repel the enemy. So much the easier when the enemy is as brutal as the Germans were ...

  We fought for the Soviet Union, Corporal.

  Did we, now? I seem to remember fighting for Mother Russia, but mainly I remember fighting for you, Comrade Captain.

  But—

  A soldier fights for his comrades, my Captain. I fought for my family. You an
d our troop, they were my only family. I suppose you also fought for your family, the big one and the little one. I always envied you that, my Captain, and I was proud that you made me part of both in the way that you did.

  But I killed you. I shouldn’t have—

  We all have our destiny, Comrade Captain. Mine was to die young at Vyasma without a wife, without children, but even so I did not die without a family.

  I avenged you, Romanov. I got the Mark-IV that killed you.

  I know. You avenged all the dead of your family. Why do you think we loved you? Why do you think we died for you?

  You understand? Misha asked in surprise.

  The workers and peasants may not, but your men will. We understand destiny now, as you cannot.

  But what shall I do?

  Captains do not ask such questions of corporals. Romanov laughed. You had all the answers to our questions.

  Filitov’s head jerked up as the latch slipped on the door of his cell.

  Vatutin expected to find a broken man. The isolation of the cell, the prisoner stripped of identity and alone with his fears and his crimes, always had the proper effect. But while he looked at a tired, crippled old man, he saw the eyes and mouth change.

  Thank you, Romanov.

  “Good morning, Sir Basil,” Ryan said as he reached for the man’s bags.

  “Hello, Jack! I didn’t know they were using you as a gofer.”

  “Depends on who I’m going-fer, as they say. The car’s over this way.” He waved. It was parked fifty yards away.

  “Constance sends her love. How is the family?” Sir Basil Charleston asked.

  “Fine, thanks. How’s London?”

  “Surely you haven’t forgotten our winters already.”

  “No.” Jack laughed as he wrenched open the door. “I remember the beer, too.” A moment later both doors were closed and locked.