by Tom Clancy
But what do I do now? he’d asked himself. The Red Army hadn’t taught him how to approach an artist. This wasn’t some farm girl who was bored enough by work on the kolkhoz to offer herself to anyone—especially a young Army officer who might take her away from it all. Misha still remembered the shame of his youth—not that he’d thought it shameful at the time—when he’d used his officer’s shoulder boards to bed any girl who’d caught his eye.
But I don’t even know her name, he’d told himself. What do I do? What he’d done, of course, was to treat the matter as a military exercise. As soon as the performance had ended, he’d fought his way into the rest room and washed hands and face. Some grease that still remained under his fingernails was removed with a pocketknife. His short hair was wetted down into place, and he inspected his uniform as strictly as a general officer might, brushing off dust and picking off lint, stepping back from the mirror to make sure his boots gleamed as a soldier’s should. He hadn’t noticed at the time that other men in the men’s room were watching him with barely suppressed grins, having guessed what the drill was for, and wishing him luck, touched with a bit of envy. Satisfied with his appearance, Misha had left the theater and asked the doorman where the artists’ door was. That had cost him a ruble, and with the knowledge, he’d walked around the block to the stage entrance, where he found another doorman, this one a bearded old man whose greatcoat bore ribbons for service in the revolution. Misha had expected special courtesy from the doorman, one soldier to another, only to learn that he regarded all the female dancers as his own daughters—not wenches to be thrown at the feet of soldiers, certainly! Misha had considered offering money, but had the good sense not to imply the man was a pimp. Instead, he’d spoken quietly and reasonably—and truthfully—that he was smitten with a single dancer whose name he didn’t know, and merely wanted to meet her.
“Why?” the old doorman had asked coldly.
“Grandfather, she smiled at me,” Misha had answered in the awed voice of a little boy.
“And you are in love.” The reply was harsh, but in a moment the doorman’s face turned wistful. “But you don’t know which?”
“She was in—the line, not one of the important ones, I mean. What do they call that?—I will remember her face until the day I die.” Already he’d known that.
The doorman looked him over and saw that his uniform was properly turned out, and his back straight. This was not a swaggering pig of an NKVD officer whose arrogant breath stank of vodka. This was a soldier, and a handsome young one at that. “Comrade Lieutenant, you are a lucky man. Do you know why? You are lucky because I was once young, and old as I am, I still remember. They will start to come out in ten minutes or so. Stand over there, and make not a sound.”
It had taken thirty minutes. They came out in twos and threes. Misha had seen the male members of the troupe and thought them—what any soldier would think of a man in a ballet company. His manhood had been offended that they held hands with such pretty girls, but he’d set that aside. When the door opened, his vision was damaged by the sudden glare of yellow-white light against the near blackness of the unlit alley, and he’d almost missed her, so different she looked without the makeup.
He saw the face, and tried to decide if she were the right one, approaching his objective more carefully than he would ever do under the fire of German guns.
“You were in seat number twelve,” she’d said before he could summon the courage to speak. She had a voice!
“Yes, Comrade Artist,” his reply had stammered out.
“Did you enjoy the performance, Comrade Lieutenant?” A shy, but somehow beckoning smile.
“It was wonderful!” Of course.
“It is not often that we see handsome young officers in the front row,” she observed.
“I was given the ticket as a reward for performance in my unit. I am a tanker,” he said proudly. She called me handsome!
“Does the Comrade Tanker Lieutenant have a name?”
“I am Lieutenant Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov.”
“I am Elena Ivanova Makarova.”
“It is too cold tonight for one so thin, Comrade Artist. Is there a restaurant nearby?”
“Restaurant?” She’d laughed. “How often do you come to Moscow?”
“My division is based thirty kilometers from here, but I do not often come to the city,” he’d admitted.
“Comrade Lieutenant, there are few restaurants even in Moscow. Can you come to my apartment?”
“Why—yes,” his reply had stuttered out as the stage door opened again.
“Marta,” Elena said to the girl who was just coming out. “We have a military escort home!”
“Tania and Resa are coming,” Marta said.
Misha had actually been relieved by that. The walk to the apartment had taken thirty minutes—the Moscow subway hadn’t yet been completed, and it was better to walk than to wait for a tram this late at night.
She was far prettier without her makeup, Misha remembered. The cold winter air gave her cheeks all the color they ever needed. Her walk was as graceful as ten years of intensive training could make it. She’d glided along the street like an apparition, while he gallumped along in his heavy boots. He felt himself a tank, rolling next to a thoroughbred horse, and was careful not to go too close, lest he trample her. He hadn’t yet learned of the strength that was so well hidden by her grace.
The night had never before seemed so fine, though for—what was it?—twenty years there had been many such nights, then none for the past thirty. My God, he thought, we would have been married fifty years this ... July 14th. My God. Unconsciously he dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief.
Thirty years, however, was the number that occupied his mind.
The thought boiled within his breast, and his fingers were pale around the pen. It still surprised him that love and hate were emotions so finely matched. Misha returned to his diary ...
An hour later he rose from the desk and walked to the bedroom closet. He donned the uniform of a colonel of tank troops. Technically he was on the retired list, and had been so before people on the current colonel’s list had been born. But work in the Ministry of Defense carried its own perks, and Misha was on the personal staff of the Minister. That was one reason. The other three reasons were on his uniform blouse, three gold stars that depended from claret-colored ribbons. Filitov was the only soldier in the history of the Soviet Army who’d won the decoration of Hero of the Soviet Union three times on the field of battle, for personal bravery in the face of the enemy. There were others with such medals, but so often these were political awards, the Colonel knew. He was aesthetically offended by that. This was not a medal to be granted for staff work, and certainly not for one Party member to give to another as a gaudy lapel decoration. Hero of the Soviet Union was an award that ought to be limited to men like himself, who had risked death, who’d bled—and all too often, died—for the Rodina. He was reminded of this every time he put his uniform on. Beneath his undershirt were the plastic-looking scars from his last gold star, when a German 88 round had lanced through the armor of his tank, setting the ammo racks afire while he’d brought his 76mm gun around for one last shot and extinguished that Kraut gun crew while his clothing burned. The injury had left him with only fifty percent use of his right arm, but despite it, he’d led what was left of his regiment nearly two more days in the Kursk Bulge. If he’d bailed out with the rest of his crew—or been evacuated from the area at once as his regimental surgeon had recommended—perhaps he would have recovered fully, but, no, he knew that he could not have not fired back, could not have abandoned his men in the face of battle. And so he’d shot, and burned. But for that Misha might have made General, perhaps even Marshal, he thought. Would it have made a difference? Filitov was too much a man of the real, practical world to dwell on that thought for long. Had he fought in many more campaigns, he might have been killed. As it was, he’d been given more time with Elena than could otherwise h
ave been the case. She’d come nearly every day to the burn institute in Moscow; at first horrified by the extent of his wounds, she’d later become as proud of them as Misha was. No one could question that her man had done his duty for the Rodina.
But now, he did his duty for his Elena.
Filitov walked out of the apartment to the elevator, a leather briefcase dangling from his right hand. It was about all that side of his body was good for. The babushka who operated the elevator greeted him as always. They were of an age, she the widow of a sergeant who’d been in Misha’s regiment, who also had the gold star, pinned on his breast by this very man.
“Your new granddaughter?” the Colonel asked.
“An angel,” was her reply.
Filitov smiled, partly in agreement—was there any such thing as an ugly infant?—and partly because terms like “angel” had survived seventy years of “scientific socialism.”
The car was waiting for him. The driver was a new draftee, fresh from sergeant school and driving school. He saluted his Colonel severely, the door held open in his other hand.
“Good morning, Comrade Colonel.”
“So it is, Sergeant Zhdanov,” Filitov replied. Most officers would have done little more than grunt, but Filitov was a combat soldier whose success on the battlefield had resulted from his devotion to the welfare of his men. A lesson that few officers ever understood, he reminded himself. Too bad.
The car was comfortably warm, the heater had been turned all the way up fifteen minutes ago. Filitov was becoming ever more sensitive to cold, a sure sign of age. He’d just been hospitalized again for pneumonia, the third time in the past five years. One of these times, he knew, would be the last. Filitov dismissed the thought. He’d cheated death too many times to fear it. Life came and went at a constant rate. One brief second at a time. When the last second came, he wondered, would he notice? Would he care?
The driver pulled the car up to the Defense Ministry before the Colonel could answer that question.
Ryan was sure that he’d been in government service too long. He had come to—well, not actually to like flying, but at least to appreciate the convenience of it. He was only four hours from Washington, flown by an Air Force C-21 Learjet whose female pilot, a captain, had looked like a high-school sophomore.
Getting old, Jack, he told himself. The flight from the airfield to the mountaintop had been by helicopter, no easy feat at this altitude. Ryan had never been to New Mexico before. The high mountains were bare of trees, the air thin enough that he was breathing abnormally, but the sky was so clear that for a moment he imagined himself an astronaut looking at the unblinking stars on this cloudless, frigid night.
“Coffee, sir?” a sergeant asked. He handed Ryan a thermos cup, and the hot liquid steamed into the night, barely illuminated by a sliver of new moon.
“Thanks.” Ryan sipped at it and looked around. There were few lights to be seen. There might have been a housing development behind the next set of ridges; he could see the halolike glow of Santa Fe, but there was no way to guess how far off it might be. He knew that the rock he stood on was eleven thousand feet above sea level (the nearest level sea was hundreds of miles away), and there is no way to judge distance at night. It was altogether beautiful, except for the cold. His fingers were stiff around the plastic cup. He’d mistakenly left his gloves at home.
“Seventeen minutes,” somebody announced. “All systems are nominal. Trackers on automatic. AOS in eight minutes.”
“AOS?” Ryan asked. He realized that he sounded a little funny. It was so cold that his cheeks were stiff.
“Acquisition of Signal,” the Major explained.
“You live around here?”
“Forty miles that way.” He pointed vaguely. “Practically next door by local standards.” The officer’s Brooklyn accent explained the comment.
He’s the one with the doctorate from State University of New York at Stony Brook, Ryan reminded himself. At only twenty-nine years old, the Major didn’t look like a soldier, even less like a field-grade officer. In Switzerland he’d be called a gnome, barely over five-seven, and cadaverously thin, acne on his angular face. Right now, his deep-set eyes were locked on the sector of horizon where the space shuttle Discovery would appear. Ryan thought back to the documents he’d read on the way out and knew that this major probably couldn’t tell him the color of the paint on his living-room wall. He really lived at Los Alamos National Laboratory, known locally as the Hill. Number one in his class at West Point, and a doctorate in high-energy physics only two years after that. His doctor’s dissertation was classified Top Secret. Jack had read it, and didn’t understand why they had bothered—despite a doctorate of his own, the two-hundred-page document might as well have been written in Kurdish. Alan Gregory was already being talked of in the same breath as Cambridge’s Stephen Hawking, or Princeton’s Freeman Dyson. Except that few people knew his name. Jack wondered if anyone had thought of classifying that.
“Major Gregory, all ready?” an Air Force lieutenant general asked. Jack noted his respectful tone. Gregory was no ordinary major.
A nervous smile. “Yes, sir.” The Major wiped sweaty hands—despite a temperature of fifteen below zero—on the pants of his uniform. It was good to see that the kid had emotions.
“You married?” Ryan asked. The file hadn’t covered that.
“Engaged, sir. She’s a doctor in laser optics, on the Hill. We get married June the third.” The kid’s voice had become as brittle as glass.
“Congratulations. Keeping it in the family, eh?” Jack chuckled.
“Yes, sir.” Major Gregory was still staring at the southwest horizon.
“AOS!” someone announced behind them. “We have signal.”
“Goggles!” The call came over the metal speakers. “Everyone put on their eye-protection.”
Jack blew on his hands before taking the plastic goggles from his pocket. He’d been told to stash them there to keep them warm. They were still cold enough on his face that he noticed the difference. Once in place, however, Ryan was effectively blinded. The stars and moon were gone.
“Tracking! We have lock. Discovery has established the downlink. All systems are nominal.”
“Target acquisition!” another voice announced. “Initiate interrogation sequencing ... first target is locked ... auto firing circuits enabled.”
There was no sound to indicate what had happened. Ryan didn’t see anything—or did I? he asked himself. There had been the fleeting impression of ... what? Did I imagine it? Next to him he felt the Major’s breath come out slowly.
“Exercise concluded,” the speaker said. Jack tore off his goggles.
“That’s all?” What had he just seen? What had they just done? Was he so far out of date that even after being briefed he didn’t understand what was happening before his eyes?
“The laser light is almost impossible to see,” Major Gregory explained. “This high up, there isn’t much dust or humidity in the air to reflect it.”
“Then why the goggles?”
The young officer smiled as he took his off. “Well, if a bird flies over at the wrong time, the impact might be, well, kind of spectacular. That could hurt your eyes some.”
Two hundred miles over their heads, Discovery continued toward the horizon. The shuttle would stay in orbit another three days, conducting its “routine scientific mission,” mainly oceanographical studies this time, the press was told, something secret for the Navy. The papers had been speculating on the mission for weeks. It had something to do, they said, with tracking missile submarines from orbit. There was no better way to keep a secret than to use another “secret” to conceal it. Every time someone asked about the mission, a Navy public-affairs officer would do the “no comments.”
“Did it work?” Jack asked. He looked up, but he couldn’t pick out the dot of light that denoted the billion-dollar space plane.
“We have to see.” The Major turned and walked to the camouflage-p
ainted truck van parked a few yards away. The three-star General followed him, with Ryan trailing behind.
Inside the van, where the temperature might have been merely at freezing, a chief warrant officer was rewinding a videotape.
“Where were the targets?” Jack asked. “That wasn’t in the briefing papers.”
“About forty-five south, thirty west,” the General replied. Major Gregory was perched in front of the TV screen.
“That’s around the Falklands, isn’t it? Why there?”
“Closer to South Georgia, actually,” the General replied. “It’s a nice, quiet, out-of-the-way sort of place, and the distance is about right.”
And the Soviets had no known intelligence-gathering assets within three thousand miles, Ryan knew. The Tea Clipper test had been timed precisely for a moment when all Soviet spy satellites were under the visible horizon. Finally, the shooting distance was exactly the same as the distance to the Soviet ballistic missile fields arrayed along the country’s main east-west railway.
“Ready!” the warrant officer said.
The video picture wasn’t all that great, taken from sea level, specifically the deck of the Observation Island, a range-instrumentation ship returning from Trident missile tests in the Indian Ocean. Next to the first TV screen was another. This one showed the picture from the ship’s “Cobra Judy” missile-tracking radar. Both screens showed four objects, spaced in a slightly uneven line. A timer box in the lower right-hand corner was changing numbers as though in an Alpine ski race, with three digits to the right of the decimal point.
