by Tom Clancy
“Comrade, I take no pleasure in bringing pain to people, but if my job requires it, I will give the order without hesitation. You cannot resist what we will do to you. No one can. No matter how brave you may be, your body has its limits. So does mine. So does anyone’s. It is only a matter of time. Time is important to us only for the next few hours, you see. After that, we can take all the time we wish. A man with a hammer can break the hardest stone. Save yourself the pain, Comrade. Save your life,” the voice concluded, and the eyes, which were oddly sad and determined at the same time, stared into the courier’s.
The interrogator saw that he’d won. You could always tell from the eyes. The defiant ones, the hard ones, didn’t shift their eyes. They might stare straight into yours, or more often at a fixed point of the wall behind you, but the hard ones would fix to a single place and draw their strength from it. Not this one. His eyes flickered around the room, searching for strength and finding none. Well, he’d expected this one to be easy. Perhaps one more gesture...
“Would you like a smoke?” The interrogator fished out a pack and shook one loose on the table.
The courier picked it up, and the white paper of the cigarette was his flag of surrender.
10.
Damage Assessment
“WHAT do we know?” Judge Moore asked. It was a little after six in the morning at Langley, before dawn, and the view outside the windows matched the gloom that the Director and his two principal subordinates felt.
“Somebody was trailing cutout number four,” Ritter said. The Deputy Director for Operations riffled through the papers in his hand. “He spotted the tail just before the pass was made and waved the guy off. The tail probably didn’t see his face, and took off after the cutout. Foley said he looked clumsy—that’s pretty strange, but he went with his instincts, and Ed’s pretty good at that. He put an officer on the street to catch the shake-off signal from our agent, but it wasn’t put up. We have to assume that he’s been burned, and we have to assume that the film is in their hands, too, until we can prove otherwise. Foley has broken the chain. CARDINAL will be notified never to use his pickup man again. I’m going to tell Ed to use the routine data-lost signal, not the emergency one.”
“Why?” Admiral Greer asked. Judge Moore answered.
“The information he had en route is pretty important, James. If we give him the scramble signal, he may—hell, we’ve told him that if that happens he’s to destroy everything that might be incriminating. What if he can’t re-create the information? We need it.”
“Besides, Ivan has to do a lot to get back to him,” Ritter went on. “I want Foley to get the data restored and out, and then—then I want to bust CARDINAL out once and for all. He’s paid his dues. After we get the data, then we’ll give him the emergency signal, and if we’re lucky it’ll scare him enough that we can get him to come out.”
“How do you want to do it?” Moore asked.
“The wet way, up north,” the DDO answered.
“Opinions, James?” Moore asked the DDI.
“Makes sense. Take a little time to set up. Ten to fourteen days.”
“Then let’s do that today. You call the Pentagon and make the request. Make sure they give us a good one.”
“Right.” Greer nodded, then smiled. “I know which one to ask for.”
“As soon as we know which, I’ll send our man to her. We’ll use Mr. Clark,” Ritter said. Heads nodded. Clark was a minor legend in the Operations Directorate. If anybody could do it, he could.
“Okay, get the message off to Foley,” the Judge said. “I’ll have to brief the President on this.” He wasn’t looking forward to that.
“Nobody lasts forever. CARDINAL’s beat the odds three times over,” Ritter said. “Make sure you tell him that, too.”
“Yeah. Okay, gentlemen, let’s get to it.”
Admiral Greer went immediately to his office. It was just before seven, and he called the Pentagon, OP-02, the office of the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (Undersea Warfare). After identifying himself, he asked his first question: “What’s Dallas up to?”
Captain Mancuso was already at work, too. His last deployment on USS Dallas would begin in five hours. She’d sail on the tide. Aft, the engineers were already bringing the nuclear reactor on line. While his executive officer was running things, the Captain was going over the mission orders again. He was heading “up north” one last time. In the U.S. and Royal navies, up north meant the Barents Sea, the Soviet Navy’s backyard. Once there, he’d conduct what the Navy officially termed oceanographic research, which in the case of USS Dallas meant that she’d spend all the time possible trailing Soviet missile submarines. It wasn’t easy work, but Mancuso was an expert at it, and he had, in fact, once gotten a closer look at a Russian “boomer” than any other American sub skipper. He couldn’t discuss that with anyone, of course, not even a fellow skipper. His second Distinguished Service Medal, awarded for that mission, was classified and he couldn’t wear it; though its existence did show in the confidential section of his personnel file, the actual citation was missing. But that was behind him, and Mancuso was a man who always looked forward. If he had to make one final deployment, it might as well be up north. His phone rang.
“Captain speaking,” he answered.
“Bart, Mike Williamson,” said the Submarine Group Two commander. “I need you here, right now.”
“On the way, sir.” Mancuso hung up in surprise. Within a minute he was up the ladder, off the boat, and walking along the blacktopped quay in the Thames, where the Admiral’s car was waiting. He was in the Group Two office four minutes after that.
“Change in orders,” Rear Admiral Williamson announced as soon as the door was closed.
“What’s up?”
“You’re making a high-speed run for Faslane. Some people will be meeting you there. That’s all I know, but the orders originated at OP-02 and came through SUBLANT in about thirty seconds.” Williamson didn’t have to say anything else. Something very hot was up. Hot ones came to Dallas quite often. Actually, they came to Mancuso, but then, he was Dallas.
“My sonar department’s still a little thin,” the Captain said. “I’ve got some good young ones, but my new chief’s in the hospital. If this is going to be especially hairy...”
“What do you need?” Admiral Williamson asked, and got his answer.
“Okay, I’ll get to work on that. You have five days to Scotland, and I can work something out on this end. Drive her hard, Bart.”
“Aye aye, sir.” He’d find out what was happening when he got to Faslane.
“How are you, Russian?” the Archer asked.
He was better. The previous two days, he’d been sure that he’d die. Now he wasn’t so sure. False hope or not, it was something he hadn’t had before. Churkin wondered now if there might really be a future in his life, and if it were something he might have to fear. Fear. He’d forgotten that. He’d faced death twice in a small expanse of time. Once in a falling, burning airplane, hitting the ground and seeing the instant when his life ended; then waking up from death to find an Afghan bandit over him with a knife, and seeing death yet again, only to have it stop and leave. Why? This bandit, the one with the strange eyes, both hard and soft, pitiless and compassionate, wanted him to live. Why? Churkin had the time and energy to ask the question now, but they didn’t give him an answer.
He was riding in something. Churkin realized that he was lying on a steel deck. A truck? No, there was a flat surface overhead, and that, too, was steel. Where am I? It had to be dark outside. No light came through the gunports in the side of—he was in an armored personnel carrier! Where did the bandits get one of those? Where were they—
They were taking him to Pakistan! They would turn him over to ... Americans? And hope changed yet again to despair. He coughed again, and fresh blood erupted from his mouth.
For his part, the Archer felt lucky. His group had met up with another, taking two Soviet BTR-60 infantr
y carriers out to Pakistan, and they were only too happy to carry the wounded of his band out with them. The Archer was famous, and it could not hurt to have a SAM-shooter protect them if Russian helicopters showed up. But there was little danger of that. The nights were long, the weather had turned foul, and they averaged almost fifteen kilometers per hour on the flat places, and no less than five on the rocky ones. They’d be to the border in an hour, and this segment was held by the mudjaheddin. The guerrillas were starting to relax. Soon they’d have a week of relative peace, and the Americans always paid handsomely for Soviet hardware. This one had night-vision devices that the driver was using to pick his way up the mountain road. For that they could expect rockets, mortar shells, a few machine guns, and medical supplies.
Things were going well for the mudjaheddin. There was talk that the Russians might actually withdraw. Their troops no longer craved close combat with the Afghans. Mainly the Russians used their infantry to achieve contact, then called in artillery and air support. Aside from a few vicious bands of paratroopers and the hated Spetznaz forces, the Afghans felt that they had achieved moral ascendancy on the battlefield—due, of course, to their holy cause. Some of their leaders actually talked about winning, and the talk had gotten to the individual fighters. They, too, now had hope of something other than continued holy war.
The two infantry carriers reached the border at midnight. From there the going was easier. The road down into Pakistan was now guarded by their own forces. The APC drivers were able to speed up and actually enjoy what they were doing. They reached Miram Shah three hours later. The Archer got out first, taking with him the Russian prisoner and his wounded.
He found Emilio Ortiz waiting for him with a can of apple juice. The man’s eyes nearly bugged out when he realized that the man the Archer was carrying was a Russian.
“My friend, what have you brought me?”
“He is badly hurt, but here is what he is.” The Archer handed over one of the man’s shoulder boards, then a briefcase. “And this is what he was carrying.”
“Son of a bitch!” Ortiz blurted in English. He saw the crusted blood around the man’s mouth and realized that his medical condition was not promising, but... what a catch this was! It took another minute of following the wounded to the field hospital before the next question came to the case officer: What the hell do we do with him?
The medical team here, too, was composed mainly of Frenchmen, with a leavening of Italians and a few Swedes. Ortiz knew most of them, and suspected that many of them reported to the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence agency. What mattered, however, was that there were some pretty good doctors and nurses here. The Afghans knew that, too, and protected them as they might have protected the person of Allah. The surgeon who had triage duty put the Russian third on the operating schedule. A nurse medicated him, and the Archer left Abdul to keep an eye on things. He hadn’t brought the Russian this far to have him killed. He and Ortiz went off to talk.
“I heard what happened at Ghazni,” the CIA officer said.
“God’s will. This Russian, he lost a son. I could not—perhaps I had killed enough for one day.” The Archer let out a long breath. “Will he be useful?”
“These are.” Ortiz was already riffling through the documents. “My friend, you do not know what you have done. Well, shall we talk about the last two weeks?”
The debrief took until dawn. The Archer took out his diary and went over everything he’d done, pausing only while Ortiz changed tapes in his recorder.
“That light you saw in the sky.”
“Yes... it seemed very strange,” the Archer said, rubbing his eyes.
“The man you brought out was going there. Here is the base diagram.”
“Where is it, exactly—and what is it?”
“I don’t know, but it’s only about a hundred kilometers from the Afghan border. I can show you on the map. How long will you be staying on this side?”
“Perhaps a week,” the Archer answered.
“I must report this to my superiors. They may want to see you. My friend, you will be greatly rewarded. Make a list of what you need. A long list.”
“And the Russian?”
“We will talk to him, too. If he lives.”
The courier walked down Lazovskiy Pereulok, waiting for his contact. His own hopes were both high and low. He actually believed his interrogator, and by later afternoon he’d taken the chalk that he used and made the proper mark in the proper place. He knew that he’d done so five hours later than he was supposed to, but hoped that his controller would put that off to the evasion process. He hadn’t made the false mark, the one that would warn the CIA officer that he’d been turned. No, he was playing too dangerous a game now. So he walked along the dreary sidewalk, waiting for his handler to show up for the clandestine meet.
What he didn’t know was that his handler was sitting in his office at the American Embassy, and would not travel to this part of Moscow for several weeks. There were no plans to contact the courier for at least that long. The CARDINAL line was gone. So far as CIA was concerned, it might never have existed.
“I think we’re wasting our time,” the interrogator said. He and another senior officer of the Second Directorate sat by the window of an apartment. At the next window was another “Two” man with a camera. He and the other senior officer had learned this morning what Bright Star was, and the General who commanded the Second Chief Directorate had given this case the highest possible priority. A leak of colossal proportions had been uncovered by that broken-down war-horse from “One.”
“You think he lied to you?”
“No. This one was easy to break—and, no, it was not too easy. He broke,” the interrogator said confidently. “I think we failed to get him back on the street quickly enough. I think they know, and I think they’ve broken off the line.”
“But what went wrong—I mean from their point of view, it might have been routine.”
“Da.” The interrogator nodded agreement. “But we know that the information is highly sensitive. So, too, must be its source. They have therefore taken extraordinary measures to protect it. We cannot do things the easy way now.”
“Bring him in, then?”
“Yes.” A car drove up to the man. They watched him get in before they walked to their own vehicle.
Within thirty minutes they were all back in Lefortovo Prison. The interrogator’s face was sad.
“Tell me, why is it I think that you have lied to me?” the man asked.
“But I have not! I did everything I was supposed to do. Perhaps I was late, but I told you that.”
“And the signal you left, was it the one to tell them that we had you?”
“No!” The courier nearly panicked. “I explained all of that, too.”
“The problem, you see, is that we cannot tell the difference between one chalk mark and another. If you are being clever, you may have deceived us.” The interrogator leaned forward. “Comrade, you can deceive us. Anyone can—for a time. But not a very long time.” He paused to let that thought hover in the air for a minute. It was so easy, interrogating the weak ones. Give hope, then take it away; restore it, and remove it yet again. Take their spirits up and down until they no longer knew which was which—and, lacking a measure of their own feelings, those feelings became yours to use.
“We begin again. The woman you meet on the train—who is she?”
“I do not know her name. She is over thirty, but young for her age. Fair hair, slim and pretty. She is always dressed well, like a foreigner, but she is not a foreigner.”
“Dressed like a foreigner—how?”
“Her coat is usually Western. You can tell from the cut and the cloth. She is pretty, as I have said, and she—”
“Go on,” the interrogator said.
“The signal is that I put my hand on her rump. She likes it, I think. Often she presses back against my hand.”
The interrogator hadn’t heard that detail bef
ore, but he immediately deemed it the truth. Details like that one were never made up, and it fitted the profile. The female contact was an adventuress. She was not a true professional, not if she reacted like that. And that probably—almost certainly—made her a Russian.
“How many times have you met her like this?”
“Only five. Never the same day of the week, and not on a regular schedule, but always on the second car of the same train.”
“And the man you pass it to?”
“I never see his face, not all of it, I mean. He is always standing with his hand on the bar, and he moves his face to keep his arm between it and me. I have seen some of it, but not all. He is foreign, I think, but I don’t know what nationality.”
“Five times, and you have never seen his face!” the voice boomed, and a fist slammed down on the table. “Do you take me for a fool!”
The courier cringed, then spoke rapidly. “He wears glasses; they are Western, I am sure of it. He usually wears a hat. Also, he has a paper folded, Izvestia, always Izvestia. Between that and his arm, you cannot see more than a quarter of his face. His go-ahead signal is to turn the paper slightly, as though to follow a story, then he turns away to shield his face.”
“How is the pass made, again!”
“As the train stops, he comes forward, as though to get ready to leave at the next station. I have the thing in my hand, and he takes it from behind as I start to leave.”
