The Tashkent Crisis

by William Craig

  The Extraordinary Committee rose from the brightly polished table in the Cabinet Room. Riordan went to a phone.

  At 10 A.M., President Stark walked into the press room that had been built over Franklin Roosevelt’s old swimming pool during the Nixon Administration. He nodded to three reporters sitting there. He recognized Morris Farber of The New York Times and called to him, “Slow day, eh, Morris?” The reporter laughed and asked when the President was going to forget the cares and woes of office and leave for the Maine White House in Bar Harbor. Stark grinned back, “My wife knows all the details. You’d better ask her.” Then he waved and turned back into the Executive Wing. Farber and the others resumed their gin rummy game.

  At Langley, Virginia, an IBM sorting machine whirred busily as thirty-seven cards were fed into it. Six fell into a slot beneath, and an attendant took them upstairs to a file-lined office. There he extracted six bulging folders from a cabinet and walked briskly to a waiting car in the parking lot.

  Gerald Weinroth led the group back into the Cabinet Room. He had not been able to eat because of his ulcer. The professor sipped a glass of milk while he read The Washington Post account of plans for a mass demonstration against birth control scheduled for the capital the next day, Thursday. Weinroth smiled ruefully as he folded the newspaper and went back to discussing the possible end of the world.

  Sam Riordan had six folders in front of him. He and Charlie Tarrant had quickly absorbed their contents and placed two of them slightly apart from the others. Manson, Randall, and Roarke took their seats and waited for Stark to arrive. He came in huffing and apologized: “I had to say hello to a Boy Scout delegation from Iowa. I didn’t want anyone to think it wasn’t business as usual today. How does it look?”

  “Out of six probables, Charlie and I think these two could do the job best. I’ll read you a little about them. Peter Kirov, thirty-two, former lieutenant in a Soviet tank division, fluent in German, French, English, and, of course, Russian. He can even speak in the dialect of the Tashkent region. Three trips into Eastern Europe, including one parachute drop by night near Kiev, to set up cells of resistance. He’s never failed yet.”

  Riordan picked up the other folder. “Interestingly enough, this one is a woman, Luba Spitkovsky, a Russian Jew, three members of her family in Siberia for ‘intellectual provocations’ against the government. Luba is a born killer. Twice she has gone in to assassinate agents in East Germany and performed beautifully. Her home for the first twenty of her twenty-eight years was the town of Chirchiz, about twenty miles northeast of Tashkent. Luba’s home was no more than ten miles from our laser.”

  Robert Randall whistled appreciatively. Riordan seemed pleased with his choices.

  “Both of these people could go on a moment’s notice. But they will need more help, I’m afraid. Perhaps General Roarke can take care of that.” Roarke asked for a telephone and called the Pentagon. He spoke briefly with the Office of Counterinsurgency, explaining what he wanted. The party on the other end promised to call back within fifteen minutes.

  Stark said, “What about the details of their mission? Sam, you and the Pentagon better sit down on this in a hurry. Why don’t you get going now? And Steve, you should get back to your office on this, too. When you have a plan and the team made up, let me have everything on it. Gerald, get your group together and give us all possible information on their laser and how it compares with ours. Let’s have a final meeting at, say 2:30 P.M., in my sitting room. Say nothing to reporters, nothing to your wives, and above all nothing to your secretaries.”

  Robert Randall laughed sickly at the reference. Stark walked briskly out of the room and went down a corridor past the beautiful Rose Garden. His footsteps echoed loudly as he turned a corner and disappeared.

  Martin Manson got up slowly and reached absently for his briefcase on the chair beside him. Randall said to no one in particular, “Do you think we can pull it off?”

  Weinroth answered brusquely, “God help us if we don’t.”

  In late summer, heat wraps the North Carolina countryside in a moist blanket of humidity. By noon, clothes are wrinkled and stained by the cloying dampness, which robs the body of vitality. On the outskirts of Fort Bragg, a column of ten men ignored these conditions and ran at double time toward their barracks. They were singing at the top of their voices. The men wore jungle camouflage fatigues and carried a variety of weapons over their shoulders. All had black smudge on their faces. In the midst of a quadrangle, the lead man shouted an order, and the column stopped. He issued another command, and they broke and disappeared at a trot into a long white barracks. The leader strode briskly away toward a line of houses in the distance. He was an impressive figure at six feet three and one hundred eighty pounds of taut muscle. His hair was closely cropped and blond. His eyes were a cold blue through the lampblack on his face. His chin was strong, thrust out jauntily.

  By 1 P.M., the officer had entered one of the homes on Officers Row and gone upstairs immediately to the bathroom. He took off his sweaty clothes and stepped into a cold shower. He began to sing “Home on the Range” in a loud baritone.

  In the hallway outside, a woman laughed softly at the noise and went on into the master bedroom at the end of the corridor.

  In a few moments, the singing stopped, and the shower was turned off. The man emerged from the bathroom with a towel around his middle. He walked into the bedroom and saw his wife looking out the window into a play yard. She turned as he entered and said, “Joe, Tommy is really having a great time out there with the Jackson kids. He’s running around like nothing ever happened to him.” Joe Safcek stepped up behind his wife and put his arms around her. He looked past her to where his ten-year-old son was throwing a baseball with a neighbor’s child. Joe felt a surge of paternal pride.

  “Martha, the doctor said to let him do all these things. As far as he could determine, the skull fracture has healed perfectly, and he’s as normal as any kid in town.”

  Martha turned into his arms, and he kissed her softly. He felt her arms tighten around his neck. “Aren’t we lucky,” she said. “He could have died in that accident.”

  Joe hugged her closer. Outside, the shouts of Tommy and his friends echoed through the screen.

  At 2:15 P.M., the phone rang in the Safcek home. Martha answered in the kitchen. She came running upstairs and shook her sleeping husband gently. “Joe, it’s Washington calling.”

  He roused himself slowly and reached for the receiver. “Yes.”

  “Colonel, this is Dave Thompson at the Pentagon. We need you here for a special assignment right away. A plane is ready to fly you to Andrews within a half hour.”

  “Should I pack any special gear?”

  “Everything will be provided for.”

  “Is this a repeat of the last time?”

  “Negative, Joe. That’s all I can tell you. See you shortly.”

  Joe Safcek sat for a moment, then shouted, “Martha, get some things together. I have to go away on a trip.”

  She stood against the sink, absorbing this news, and her lips began to tremble. “God, not again!” The dark night of loneliness, the nameless dread she always had that he would never come back from these trips. Martha began to pack his clothes.

  Twenty minutes later an army car pulled up outside the house, and Joe went to his wife and Tommy to say good-bye. He reached down and tousled the boy’s hair, then impulsively kissed him on the cheek. “Take care of Mother, Tiger, while I’m away, understand?”

  “Yes, Dad, don’t worry.”

  Joe was having trouble with his voice.

  He kissed Martha once, then again hard. “I love you very much,” he said, and went out the door to the automobile. Martha waved to him and called: “We’ll be waiting.”

  He turned at the end of the walk and looked at his family for a moment, then grinned and saluted his son. Tommy’s right hand went to his forehead as his father drove away.

  The ultimatum was fifteen hours old, with fif
ty-seven hours left before deadline. The wheels of the United States Government were meshing. Stark had given his subordinates orders which were being carried out with great speed and diligence. Specialists in guerrilla warfare had gathered at the Pentagon to plan an attack against the Soviet laser. They sat in an underground room and distilled years of experience in the art of clandestine warfare. In three hours they had arrived at a considered approach. At 3 P.M., the results lay on a White House desk.

  President William Stark had napped for two hours. His fifty-seven-year-old body was rebelling against the fatigue and tension of the past hours, and Stark, helpless for the moment to alter events, had succumbed to sleep. Pamela Stark had not intruded on him. She had sensed all day that something grave had occurred in the world and did not attempt to bother her husband with any more questions about Bar Harbor. In his own good time, she knew, he would tell her what was troubling him.

  Stark was in the Cabinet Room when the rest of the special committee entered. He greeted them curtly and asked Riordan if he had the details of the projected strike worked out. Riordan handed him a manila envelope, and Stark pulled out one typewritten page. He read aloud:

  OPERATION SCRATCH

  A thrust at the Soviet laser works twelve miles north of Tashkent.

  Personnel: four-man team led by Colonel Joseph Safcek, U.S. Army, Green Berets.

  Team will be transported by helicopter from Peshawar, Pakistan, across mountains of Afghanistan by night into Soviet territory east of Tashkent. Helicopter will fly through mountain passes at three hundred feet altitude to avoid detection by radar; at lower altitude over the desert. Personnel will be dressed in Red Army clothing.

  Team will carry complement of handguns and automatic rifles; also demolition charges (plastique) for use if they gain access to actual site. Otherwise, team will be provided with one atomic bomb, yield in ten-kiloton range for use in case access to immediate area of laser denied. Bomb is sophisticated to point where single agent can carry and trigger.

  Helicopter pickup of personnel arranged for twenty-four hours after drop at same site.

  Signed:

  Bowles, Chief, Office of

  Counterinsurgency

  “Jesus,” exclaimed William Stark, “we’d be sending those people to their deaths, no question about it. How can that helicopter possibly get through their radar?”

  “We have two things going for us.” Sam Riordan replied. “We’ve taped all their radar installations in the area. We know when they operate and have mapped the route to evade them. Secondly, the Hindu Kush Mountains are the most formidable natural barrier in the world—next to the Himalayas—and create the best possible interference to radar reception. That, with the chopper hugging the valley floors, will make it very difficult for anybody to pick them up. In the long run, we just have to hope that no one would think of looking for intruders coming through the Hindu Kush.”

  “Okay, and what about this bomb?” Stark asked. “Can they actually walk it in and still get away safely?”

  “No problem there, Mr. President. We’ve sophisticated these weapons to the point where we could slip one into the American embassy in Moscow disguised as a can of tomato soup, set a timer on it, and get out long before the end.”

  Martin Manson shook his head. “Do they know the risks yet?”

  Riordan answered, “The Russian agents won’t be briefed until they arrive in Peshawar. Safcek is being told at the Pentagon. He’ll go. The man has an amazing record in this field. He went into China two years ago to work with anti-Mao forces, and then another time he spent a week in Hanoi right under Ho’s police trying to sabotage a waterworks that the bombers had trouble knocking out. He blew the plant sky high. Safcek is of Czech background with definite Slavic features. He speaks a passable Russian, enough to get by any ordinary situation. Safcek can work well with the group we have going in with him. They’ll follow him because he makes people believe in him. The fourth man, from the CIA, is Boris Gorlov, who defected from the KGB three years ago and helped us clean up a whole network of Red spies in Western Europe. Gorlov has had plastic surgery, so no one will spot him in Russia. We doubt they’d be looking for him there anyway. They’d be more apt to expect to see him in a Mayflower Coffee Shop right here in Washington.”

  Stark bit his lower lip thoughtfully, then asked: “Has anyone come up with a fresh idea?”

  General Stephen Roarke tried one last time to stress the efficiency of a single bomber strike. “These people won’t make it, I tell you. The bomber will.”

  Sam Riordan interrupted: “General, our Samos camera satellites show the Soviets have, in the past ten hours, moved sixteen mobile SAM antimissile and bomber batteries around the laser works. The Samos has spotted them being deployed. So perhaps your bomber would never make it anyway. And if it did, we’d have the same problem of a possible all-out nuclear war staring us right in the face.”

  William Stark was tired of the constant reference to a third world war. Roarke’s one-track mind annoyed him, and he was tempted to tell the general to go to hell. The President tapped his fingers impatiently. “Enough of this argument. If the team succeeds, the Russians will probably be so stunned that they’ll forget all their big ideas. The bomber riding through their skies would most likely bring a counter-strike at us. So let’s go with the less obvious and hope for a simple explosion on the ground which might take them weeks to figure out. By then, they’ll have lost their hold on us.”

  Robert Randall said, “Great! It’s the best thing to do.”

  Sam Riordan nodded through his pipe smoke.

  Roarke stared straight ahead.

  Stark asked one last question: “Sam, when would Safcek leave for Pakistan?”

  “At 6 P.M., out of Andrews.”

  “Would you please ask him to drop by here on the way to the airport? I’d like to wish him luck.”

  Stark thanked the committee members for their help and dismissed them. Robert Randall went up to him and put out his hand. “Mr. President, it’ll be all right. I’m sure it will.”

  Stark took his aide’s hand and smiled sadly, “Bob, you once told me this is where the action is. But tonight I wish I was back in good old Pittsburgh, P.A., doing a crossword puzzle. Maybe I’m getting paid back for being too eager for power.”

  Randall did not reply.

  Joe Safcek wanted desperately to call his wife. When he had heard the briefing officer at the Pentagon outline Operation Scratch, Joe was appalled. Always before he had been given tasks with acceptable risks but not this time. And no one at the Pentagon offered him any false hope. The men sending him into the Soviet Union were too professional in their field to attempt to deceive another professional about the odds on coming back. Safcek never thought of backing out. He could have. When Dave Thompson finished his instructions, he looked into Safcek’s eyes and said, “You don’t have to go, Joe, it’s purely voluntary.”

  Safcek tried to grin but could not. “Dave, I’m your man. Have a brigadier’s star waiting for me when I get back.”

  Thompson was glum as the two shook hands. “The President wants to see you on your way to Andrews. The chopper will take you to the White House first.”

  Safcek was stunned and asked why.

  Thomson shrugged, “Maybe you’re getting the star tonight.”

  Safcek gathered his orders and went out to meet the Commander-in-Chief.

  Stark met him at the door to the Oval Room. He shook the colonel’s hand warmly and showed him to a seat in front of the massive desk. The President went to his chair and was framed against the famous window looking out on the South Lawn, where Safcek’s helicopter now waited.

  President Stark did not know quite what to say. He asked, “Well, Colonel, I suppose you’ve had all your questions answered across the river?”

  Safcek assured him that he had. The President asked where he was from and Safcek told him McKeesport, Pennsylvania.

  “Well now, that makes us neighbors. I’m from Pitts
burgh.”

  Safcek said he knew that and that he had voted for Stark when he ran for governor of Pennsylvania. The President smiled and said, “Then I guess I can blame you a little for putting me in this chair tonight.”

  In turn, Joe Safcek did not know quite what to say. He was overwhelmed by the man who controlled the destiny of the world. The accumulated centuries of tradition in which the office was steeped left the colonel speechless.

  President Stark wished at that moment that he had never invited Safcek to his office. It was an ordeal to look at this soldier, whom he was sending to a questionable fate. Stark hated to think of him with a wife named Martha and a son named Tommy. He would have preferred Safcek faceless, anonymous, just a name.

  Joe Safcek noticed the deep furrows on the President’s forehead and the baggy black pouches under his eyes. He felt a great sorrow for him and wanted to console the man behind the desk.

  Stark roused himself from his depression. “Colonel, I know you have to get going. I just wanted to meet you and shake your hand. This country will owe very much to you shortly.”

  Stark had come around from his chair to stand in front of the Green Beret officer. He added, “God be with you” and stopped suddenly. Safcek mumbled, “Thank you, sir.” They shook hands.

  The President noticed that Safcek’s grip was very strong, as he expected it would be. The colonel left the Oval Room while the President wandered back to the window and stared out at the Washington Monument. Stark saw a young officer counting the bodies of his friends on a hillside in Korea. Each corpse had Joe Safcek’s face.

  In a small waiting room at Andrews Air Force Base, northeast of Washington, Colonel Safcek met Boris Gorlov, the CIA man accompanying him. Gorlov, a squat, heavy-browed agent with a distinct Russian accent, smiled easily when Safcek said hello. The colonel observed how catlike Gorlov was in his movements. He had come out of the secret police jungle not long before and still retained the animal-like instincts that helped him to stay alive there. As a trained agent for the KGB, he had worked in Western Europe, infiltrating foreign espionage networks and exposing operatives marked for assassination. Gorlov had one day walked into the American Embassy in Bonn and offered his knowledge to the American government. He said he was tired of the Communist system, its corruption and narrow-minded insistence on world domination. His suspicious interrogators were astounded when he casually named one hundred and seventeen Soviet agents working with covers in Allied governments. His information was startlingly correct and led to the dissolution of clandestine Soviet activities in Europe for nearly a year. For that, his former employers had marked him for death. Plastic surgery had given him a new identity, but he lived always in great fear that somehow, somewhere, the Soviet government would reach out for him and snuff out his life. He often thought of Leon Trotsky whom Stalin never forgot and finally crushed, a pickaxe through the skull. Gorlov fought against his fears and the sickly debilitation that frequently invaded the minds of defectors. These people had rejected their heritage, their friends, their customs. For them life in America was a difficult adjustment. After the initial impact of leaving their homeland and the past, the defectors tried to settle down in obscure suburbs. Their names changed, their careers altered, their original lives erased by a master hand, which carved for them a fictitious birthright, they foundered in loneliness. Though protected from retribution, they had to live twenty-four hours a day in a limbo of artificial serenity, still pretending, as they had in their former clandestine lives, to be something other than they really were. It got to most of them. Gorlov was no exception. When the CIA was approached by the Pentagon for Operation Scratch, Sam Riordan had brought Gorlov forth for two reasons: he knew the man could be an invaluable guide and expert on Russia; secondly, he believed that the summons to duty would make him feel wanted. As therapy, it would be the best possible treatment for a man Sam Riordan knew was vegetating behind his false facade of security.