"Mister, you're trying my patience."
"All I want is in, son."
"There ain't no in, I told you that." Andy stepped out onto the porch. "Look, what does it take to get you moving?"
"Can't rightly say. They haven't invented it yet."
"Do tell?" Andy smiled. "You sure are one salty old man. I hope I get to be that salty when I'm your age."
"If you live to be my age," the Indian said calmly.
Andy chuckled and shook his head. He reached out to take the Indian by the arm. He intended no violence. He wanted only to help the old man down the stairs. His fingers barely touched the Indian's sleeve, and then he was in the air, flying. Trained in the arts, he knew as he flew that he had been thrown harai tsurikomi ashi. He twisted in the air, landed lightly, and came charging back up the stairs.
"Kiai!" the old man shouted. He dropped his left shoulder and moved his left arm. Andy went flying again. This time he did not land lightly, and after he landed he lay without moving.
The Indian turned to Billings, who stood in the doorway staring in disbelief. "It was Colonel Parker that I wanted. See about it, will you?"
Billings gulped, nodded, and slammed the door shut. He grabbed the telephone, punched buttons frantically, and got through to the colonel. He tried to keep his voice calm.
"Colonel, sir, this is Billings, on the gate? Sir, I know this sounds crazy, but I've got an Indian outside who insists on seeing you." "Did you say an Indian?"
"Yes, sir, a very old Indian. At first we thought maybe he was trying to steal our horses, but—"
"Our what?"
"Well, anyway, he may not be no horse thief, but he just beat the crap out of Andy Washington."
"An Indian? An old Indian?"
"Yes, sir."
"And he took Andy Washington?"
"Andy's just a-laying there."
There was a moment of silence. Then the colonel said slowly, "Oh, my God." He hung up.
A moment later he came racing down the corridor, brushed past Billings, and opened the door. His eyes took in first the weatherbeaten face before him, then shifted down to Andy's body, still lying motionless. His eyes came back to the Indian. He did not look happy.
"Howdy, Fred," the old man said. "That's a good boy you have there. I had to throw him twice."
"Tom. Tom Crowfoot."
"In the flesh, what's left of it. Piss-poor sort of welcome you hand out here."
Behind him, the colonel heard Billings stir with indignation at the familiarity. Billings was unaware that he was standing in the presence of a living legend, not to mention the one man who could always make Frederick Parker feel like an erring schoolboy.
Thomas Crowfoot, a full-blooded Oglala Sioux, was a name spoken of with awe in intelligence circles. No one knew his actual age, but he was an ancient who had spent more than forty years with U.S. Army Intelligence, then the Office of Strategic Services, and finally the Agency. It was he who had flatly told John Kennedy that the Bay of Pigs was a doomed operation. It was he who had arranged the exchange of the Russian spy Rudolf Abel for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. The fine touch of his hand had been felt in covert operations in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and a dozen other global hot spots. Long past retirement age, he held no rank and needed none. Wherever he went, Thomas Crowfoot was in charge, and anyone who disagreed could be easily convinced by a single telephone call to the White House. Not that anyone had ever disagreed.
Parker stammered, "I—we—that is, we weren't expecting you, Tom."
"So it seems. Probably thought I was dead by now."
"Oh, no, of course not."
"Bullcacky. You'd dance on my grave. Reckon I should be dead, at that. But I'm not, and you're stuck with me. Do I get in, or do I have to throw somebody else down the stairs?"
"No, no. I mean, yes, come in." He turned to Billings. "Have Andy taken care of and put another man on the gate."
The colonel led the way to his office. Once on familiar ground behind his desk, he was able to compose himself into the model of a proper senior officer. He squared his shoulders and said, "Now, Tom, what can we do for you here?"
Crowfoot, slouched in a chair opposite, smiled faintly. "You can start by saving us both some time. Eddie Mancuso has got you in the buffalo dung up to your nose. I'm here to get you out of it."
The colonel's composure vanished. Hesitantly, he asked, "Are you relieving me?"
"Hell, no, I don't want your job. I just want to clean up the mess."
"Langley sent you?" The colonel received a cold stare for an answer. "All right, I'm not questioning your authority. It's a mess, all right. Have you been briefed?"
"I've read the dayreps and the KGB intercepts."
"How about CYBER?"
"Your machine says that Mancuso is doing the impossible. That doesn't make me eager to read printouts."
"But CYBER doesn't lie."
"I've heard that holy writ before. Sure, CYBER doesn't lie, but no computer is any better than its input."
"I'll vouch for our programming all the way down the line."
"I'm sure you would. That's why Mancuso has you by the old shorties. Do you know what computer people say about this kind of programming? Garbage in, garbage out. That's what they say."
"Are you calling my programming garbage?"
Crowfoot said firmly, "I am. You people with your blind faith in machines. CYBER says that Mancuso is out to destroy the O Group, so when three of your people get the axe you automatically assume that Mancuso did it."
"Certainly I assume it. It's only logical." The colonel's voice changed. "I mean . . . it is logical, isn't it?"
"Maybe to you, but not to me. Garbage in, garbage out. Eddie Mancuso isn't killing your people, Freddy."
"He isn't?" The colonel's voice rose to a wail. "Then who is?"
"Vasily Borgneff."
"You were frightened," said Vasily.
"Out of my wits," Eddie agreed.
"You panicked."
"Like a pregnant schoolgirl."
"You ran."
"Like a turpentined cat."
"And you've probably compromised the entire operation. We're finished."
"I don't think so. I think we can still pull it off. But I guarantee you one thing. No matter what else happens, I'm not going back to Mother Russia."
They sat in the sala of the house in San Miguel. The house seemed strange to them after weeks away from it. The maids had been dismissed, the furniture was draped with dust covers, and, more important, the absence of Chalice robbed each room of dimension.
"At first I couldn't believe your cable," said Vasily. "I was so close to success—only two more to go. Then you panicked and ran, and I had to run too."
Eddie whipped a cover from an armchair and sank into it, sighing. "What did you expect me to do? I was blown. Durin made me. Maybe he told the others and maybe he didn't, but I wasn't going to hang around to find out."
"The answer is obvious. He told no one. If he had, you never would have made it to the airport."
"That's easy to say now, but I didn't know it then." Eddie hesitated, obviously seeking approval of his actions. "What would you have done? Would you have stayed in Moscow?"
Vasily frowned. "The question is unfair to both of us. I'm Russian, I could have gone underground for a while. You couldn't." He shook his head. "I suppose you had no choice."
Eddie breathed deeply in relief. "Then we're still partners?"
"For what it's worth, yes. But I don't see what can be done. So much of the operation depended on timing, on speed, on catching them off balance. And now the timing is gone."
"But we're more than halfway home. We've each got only two more to eliminate. We can't stop now."
Vasily smiled sadly. "We may have to. Don't you see, with the element of timing gone they've probably figured out by now that we're working together."
"Of course they're working together," said Crowfoot. "Our KGB intercepts tell us that the dach
niki have lost Krasin, Suvarov, and Durin. In the same space of time you've lost Kelly, Erikson, and Rakow. It's obvious what's been happening. Mancuso and Borgneff have swapped assignments. You've been set up to bushwhack little Eddie, and all the while the Russian has been operating right under your nose."
Parker chewed the back of his hand. "Are you sure of this?"
"Do bears crap in the Kremlin?"
"Makes me look like a fool, doesn't it?" The colonel started on a knuckle.
"Don't worry about that part of it. Langley doesn't expect miracles from you."
"But they do from you?"
"Hell, I'm just an old Injun scout with a good sense of smell. Even I don't have the whole thing figured out yet. For instance, how did Borgneff and Mancuso get together in the first place? Be interesting to know, wouldn't it?"
"It certainly would," said Parker with a bit of force in his voice.
Crowfoot looked at him speculatively. "We'll find out, eventually. Right now we've got bigger bones on our plate than that. We've got to get a counteroperation going."
"Do you have any plans?" The appeal was pathetically apparent in his voice.
"Hell, no, Freddy. A few ideas, maybe, but no plans." Crowfoot stood up and stretched. "If you feel like being helpful, you can show me where your teletype room is. I want to have a chat with our friends at Zhukovka."
The colonel's voice went up a notch. "You want to talk to the Russians?"
"Why not? Let's see what that old dry-gulcher and bushwhacker Comrade Colonel Fist has to say about all this."
"Tom . . . are we allowed to do that?"
Crowfoot looked at him pityingly. "I can see why you're still a colonel, son. At a certain level there's always communication between opposite numbers. There has to be. Tell you the truth, old Fisty and I get along real fine, always have. The man knows a thing or two about enjoying life. One time in Budapest—ah, hell, that was a long time ago. You just tell your man to get Fist on the teletype circuit for me."
"Tom, I wouldn't even know how to go about it."
"Tell him to patch it through the blue line at Langley. They'll know how to handle it."
"Let's assume that they know we're working together," said Eddie. "I think we can still do it."
"We'd have to give up our original plans."
"Damn right. They'd be waiting for you in Williamsburg, and like I said, I'm not going back to Moscow. So we make new plans."
Vasily looked at him skeptically. "It took us weeks to develop the original mission."
"I've already got something in mind for Fist and Marchenko. The Americans would be your problem."
The silent house had been too depressing for them, and now they walked through the fields behind the sheep pen, heads down and hands in pockets, shoes kicking tufts of grass. They were both sharply aware of Chalice's absence, although so far neither had spoken of her.
"Check me out on this," said Eddie. "Do you remember when we compiled the dossier on Fist?"
. . . that's about all I can tell you about Colonel Fist, Eddie, except that he's a tennis nut. He and Marchenko play several times a week on his private court at the dacha.
Nothing unusual about that.
Only one thing. Like most Russians, he refuses to play with Soviet-made balls. He claims they have no bounce. The ball he prefers is a Wilson. As a matter offact, it's become something of a joke at Zhukovka.
You mean his tennis is that bad?
No, I mean the balls. Everybody at the dacha knows of his preference for Wilson balls. It's become a standard routine for agents returning from a tour of duty in the West. They always bring him a can of Wilson tennis balls as a gift. It's illegal to import them, of course, but the Customs never check KGB luggage.
"Yes, I remember that," said Vasily. "The colonel's balls. An old joke at the dacha. What did you have in mind?"
"You know all the KGB station heads in Western Europe. Could you work out who's the next one due to go home on rotation?"
"Certainly, but why?" And then, "Oh."
"That's right, a switch. I prepare a can of tennis balls, and one of his own men brings it home to him."
Vasily stopped, and leaned against a fence rail. He pulled a blade of grass from the earth and chewed on it thoughtfully. "It's all right as far as it goes, but there's no guarantee that Fist would be the one to open the can."
"You're right," Eddie said ruefully. "We'll have to think of something else."
"No, let's not give up on it so quickly. Actually, there's an idea I've had for some time that might fit in with this. I'd like to show you my notes on it."
They went back to the laboratory. Inside the shed, Vasily took a thick notebook from the shelf, paged through it, and extracted a sheaf of papers. He handed them to Eddie. "Tell me what you think," he said.
Eddie went through the notes carefully. They were covered with equations and diagrams. When he had gone through them the first time he looked at Vasily sharply, then went back and started again at the beginning. The second time through, he checked random equations with a pocket calculator. Finished again, he folded the notes and gave them back to Vasily.
"I'm not going to insult you by asking if it's really possible," he said. "But I never dreamed you could make one that small."
"It's a question of ratios," Vasily said, and launched into a complex explanation. Eddie nodded as each point was made. At the end, he held up his hands in surrender.
"Enough," he said. "I believe you. Anyone else, I would have said he was nuts. But not you."
"Thank you." Vasily said it solemnly, but he was close to laughing with boyish pleasure. "As nuclear devices go, it's nothing fancy. It's atomic, it's primitive, and it's low-yield. But we could fit it into a can of tennis balls, and it could do the job. No matter who opened the can, it would take out the entire dacha stone by stone."
"Not to mention parts of Moscow," Eddie said drily. "It could also start World War Three."
"I take it that you're not in favor of the project?" "I'm not in favor of wiping out a few thousand innocent civilians, if that's what you mean."
"Ah, well." Vasily sighed, and returned the notes to the shelf. "Let's keep it on the back burner for a while and concentrate on the Americans first."
XXXXXRTE424+4L WMBG VIA LANG TO ZKA VIA MOSC.
CLEAR ALL. READY TO SEND.
ZKA VIA MOSC.
READY TO RECEIVE. GO.
CROWFOOT TO FIST.
RED CHIEF SENDS GREETINGS TO CHIEF RED.
FIST TO CROWFOOT.
HOWDY, INJUN. STATE REASON FOR POWWOW.
OUR MUTUAL PROBLEM. MANCUSO AND BORGNEFF.
UGH!
OUR REACTION ALSO. AGENCY ASSUMES THEM IN CAHOOTS AGAINST BOTH OUR TRIBES.
KGB RELUCTANTLY AGREES. RECENT EVENTS CONFIRM THEORY.
AGENCY SUGGESTS THAT TRIBES JOIN FORCES. CUT THEM OFF AT THE PASS.
WOULD PREFER TO CUT THEM OFF ELSEWHERE, BUT THE PASS WILL DO.
DO YOU AGREE TO JOINT WAR PARTY?
AFFIRMATIVE. RED CHIEF SPEAKS WISDOM. WHAT DOES CYBER SAY?
WE ARE BYPASSING CYBER FOR NOW. SUGGEST YOU DO SAME.
GLADLY. CYBER SPEAKS WITH CROOKED TAPE. WILL YOU BUY IT BACK?
NEGATIVE. AGENCY SUGGESTS GRAND POWWOW SOONEST FOR STRATEGY. IF AGREEABLE, WHERE AND WHEN?
MY WIGWAM IS YOUR WIGWAM. ONE WEEK FROM TODAY AT ZHUKOVKA?
AGREED. LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING. PLEASE STOCK ONLY FRENCH COGNAC AND IRANIAN BELUGA. NO CHEAP DOMESTIC STUFF.
ONLY DOMESTIC STUFF WILL BE PRIMA BALLERINA, KIEV STATE BALLET COMPANY, WHO STILL MENTIONS RED CHIEF FONDLY.
THIS TRANSMISSION IS BEING MONITORED. PLEASE OBSERVE CONVENTIONAL USAGE.
SORRY. SEE YOU NEXT WEEK. CHIEF RED OUT.
RED CHIEF OUT.
XXXXXRTE424+4L WMBG TO ZKA.
TRANSMISSION ENDS.
"Assuming that we decide to send the tennis balls to Zhukovka," said Vasily. "And assuming that it works, that still leaves us Par
ker and Arteaga."
"That's your department. I've done enough work for today. Let's eat, I'm starving."
With the maids gone, Vasily had taken over the kitchen and had spent the afternoon happily banging pots and pans. Now, in the evening, they sat down to a meal of linguine with clam sauce, salad, and garlic bread. Eddie wrapped some of thz pasta around his fork and tasted it gingerly. Then he smiled.
"Hey, that's good linguine," he said. "Just like my mother used to make. What did you put in the sauce?"
"Nothing special," Vasily said hastily, and changed the subject. "As far as the Americans go, I can see only one method of operation open to us. We'll have to try a lure."
Eddie nodded, chewing. He swallowed, and said, "It's risky. One of us surfaces, and they go after him. The other one hangs back and picks them off. Very risky. There's a dozen ways it could go wrong." He dug into his dish again. "This clam sauce is terrific. Very tasty, very Italian. What did you say you put in it?"
"I didn't." Vasily looked away. "I agree that it's dangerous, but what else can we do? The only way we can get Parker and Arteaga out of Williamsburg is to lure them out. It's like big-game fishing. One of us has to be the fisherman, and the other one has to be the bait."
Eddie looked at him suspiciously. "I don't like the way this conversation is going."
"Please! I only thought that considering how expert you are at scuba diving—"
Eddie stopped chewing, a forkful of pasta poised in midair. "I thought you didn't have any plans."
"It's not really a plan, just a glimmer of an idea."
"Yeah, sure. You've got me set up on the end of a hook, that's the idea. All right, let's hear the rest of it."
Vasily said casually, "No need to go into details now. We can discuss it on the plane down to Cozumel."
"Cozumel, huh?" Eddie went back to chewing linguine, determined to be just as cool. "It's just the glimmer of an idea, but we're going to Cozumel. To go diving, no doubt."
THE DEATH FREAK -- An Eddie Mancuso Thriller (Eddie Mancuso And Vasily Borgneff Book 1) Page 18
