by Stuart Woods
“No.”
“Well, I reckon it’s like this; if he’s been in your bed, they might have some heavy breathing and some conversation. If you’ve been in his bed, you’re okay, because their bug wasn’t working. You know the people directly across the street from your house?”
“Yes. Elderly couple, been there for twenty, thirty years.”
“Well, there’s a shot from their top floor window with an infra-red camera and a long lens, but only if you didn’t pull the shade. Impossible at your friend’s house; the angles are wrong.”
She felt vastly relieved. Will had never been in her bed, and what she had said at his house hadn’t been overheard… “Well, thanks, Danny; what do I owe you?”
“Oh, a couple hundred, I guess. Tell you what, you let me put you in a good alarm system here for, say, eighteen hundred—and believe me, that’s cheap—and I’ll thrown in the sweeps. That’ll make it tougher for them to bug you again, too.”
“Oh, yeah? How’d they bug the other house, then?”
“One of two ways,” Burgis replied with confidence. Either they had the code, which is unlikely, or your friend didn’t bother to arm the system one day, and they got lucky.“
“The second one, I think. He’s like that. Sure, Danny, do me a system.” She went to a desk drawer in the entrance hall and gave him a key. “At your convenience,” she said. “I’m at the office all day, every day.
“Right you are, Katie,” he said, pocketing the key. “I’ll try to get to it this week some time. Do the work myself. Uh, listen, there’s one other thing you can do about all this.”
“What’s that?”
“Let me tail you for a few days. I’ll pick up whoever’s on you and have a little talk with him.”
She thought about that for a moment. “No, not yet, anyway. I don’t want the kettle to boil any faster. I’ll let you know if I change my mind, though.”
“You do that. I’d sorta like to chat with him.”
“Thanks, Danny.” She let him out of the house and leaned on the door. She felt better with him around. But who the hell was following her and bugging her house? She trudged up the stairs, drying her hair with the towel, wondering.
24
HELDER awoke instantly, afraid to move. A noise had done it, a boat’s engines. His cheek was sweaty against the plastic seat cover; he kept his head down as his bed rocked and bumped against its moorings, then settled as the engines faded into the distance. He sat up. The interior of the little boathouse was dimly lit from the outside. He checked his wristwatch; just past six o’clock, local time. But six in the morning or in the evening? Evening, he decided, of the same day he had begun his mission.
He felt a need to get somewhere else, quickly; he shouldn’t be in this boathouse. He unzipped the plastic pouch and got at his nylon duffel. Since it was evening, he chose the darker outfit—navy blue jacket with brass buttons, gray worsted slacks, black loafers, white buttoned-down shirt, striped necktie. He felt clean enough from his swim, but he needed a shave. Not here, though. He cracked the door of the boathouse and looked carefully about. There were lights on in the nearby house, but nobody around outside. He walked quickly away from the boathouse along the shore, through an opening in a high hedge. Another house greeted him, perhaps twenty meters away. There must be a road, he thought, and it must be at the back of the houses. He walked along the hedge, keeping an eye open for company. He heard the sounds of a tennis ball striking rackets and laughter, then he saw the court emerge from behind the house and a young couple at play. If they saw him, they took no notice.
He came to a tarmac road and looked in both directions. Did it matter? He checked the position of the sun and walked toward it. Stockholm would be west, and he wanted Stockholm, where he could blend in among thousands. He walked quickly, but not hurriedly, a man who knew where he was going but was not in a panic. Perhaps a kilometer along, he came to a crossroads and a bus stop with a little shelter alongside. He checked the framed schedule; a bus for Stockholm in twenty minutes’ time. Good. He looked up and down the road. Two cars passed in rapid succession but no pedestrians were in sight. He sat down in the shelter, opened his bag, and began sorting through it, marshaling his assets.
He had eighteen hundred Swedish kroner, a hundred and seventy dollars, and a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, which he had already signed in the name of Carl Swenson. He had a wallet, a Visa card, and an American Express card, all suitably worn, but current; he had an American passport stamped for entry into Sweden that day and an unused return ticket from Stockholm to New York on Scandinavian Air Systems. He had another change of clothes, a toilet kit, and his sketch pad; he had a map of the city of Stockholm and a guidebook to Sweden, he had a 9mm automatic pistol and two clips of ammunition. He put all these things into his pockets except the pistol and ammunition. He didn’t want them; they seemed foreign to his other possessions. He had no intention of shooting his way out of Sweden, anyway. He put them back into the bag; he would get rid of them at the first opportunity. He took a small, batteryoperated electric shaver from his kit and ran it quickly over his face, then combed his hair carefully. His reflection in the mirror in the shaver’s cap showed a surprisingly normal person looking back at him.
The bus came, and he climbed aboard. “Stockholm?” he asked the driver.
The man nodded. “Sixteen kroner,” he said in English.
Helder gave him a fifty-kroner note and took the change, pleased that the driver would automatically speak English to him. He took a seat near the back of the bus. There were only half a dozen people on board. He was ravenously hungry, but he tried to put it out of his mind. He unfolded his map of Stockholm and went over it carefully, then turned to the guidebook. His concerns were food, shelter, and the docks. Satisfied that he had his bearings in the city, he gave in to fatigue and napped, surprisingly at peace with his circumstances.
He woke in the outskirts of Stockholm and watched, fascinated, as the buildings went past. Everything was so different from Soviet cities. The buildings were neat, clean, and in good repair, whereas in Moscow or Leningrad, only the public buildings were well kept, and not all of them. There were many more trees than he had expected. In Russia, city trees had been cut for firewood during the Great Patriotic War, and they had been only sparsely replanted. The great number of shops impressed him, too, and even though the streets were filled with people, there were no queues outside the shops. Traffic was heavy with private cars, and there were no military vehicles to be seen.
At the central bus station he found a taxi and asked to be taken to the old city. He got out near the royal palace and walked into the narrow streets of the old town, which dated, he knew, to the fourteenth century. Almost immediately, he came to a small hotel called the Lord Nelson. There was no room available, but the young woman in reception offered to telephone to an associated hotel around the corner. “You are lucky,” she said. “They have had a cancellation of a single room. Normally, we are very full this time of the year.” She gave him a card with the hotel’s name, the Lady Hamilton, and directions. In a few minutes he was housed in a tiny, but very handsome room, hardly bigger than a ship’s cabin. He hung up his clothes and wondered what to do with the gun. In opening cupboards and drawers, he found a tiny refrigerator stocked with beer and spirits. He removed them and repacked the icebox, with the pistol and ammunition at the rear. He couldn’t imagine that the Swedes routinely searched the hotel rooms of American tourists. At the desk, they hadn’t even asked for his passport.
He left the hotel and found a restaurant, where he wolfed down four courses and a bottle of wine. Then, sated and exhausted, he dragged himself back to his room and into bed, too tired to think of anything but rest. Helder’s first night in the free world passed dreamlessly.
25
RULE overslept and had to hurry to reach the agency in time for an EXCOM TWO meeting. The conference room was already in darkness as she tiptoed in and took her seat. Pegram from Imag
ery Analysis had a satshot on the screen and was droning on about it.
“You see here the Lenin Aircraft Fabrication plant at Pskov, in western Russia, near the Estonian and Latvian borders. Construction began on the plant four years ago, and it has been in use for more than two years, though greatly underutilized, by our best estimates. The building is nearly a mile in length and a quarter-mile wide, making it big enough for the manufacture of the largest troop transports. The plant was to have been used for just that purpose, but due to a cutback in the building of such large aircraft, it has been used only for developmental work, which brings us to this.” Pegram changed slides from an overall view to a closer view of one end of the building. The nose and a portion of the port wing of a large aircraft protruded from the building.
“Anybody care to guess what this might be?” he asked, laconicly.
“Looks like a big, fat troop transport or cargo plane,” a voice said from the dark.
“Anybody do better than that? Notice anything unusual about it?”
Rule spoke up. “Well, from what we see of it here, the wings look too short to give it enough lift to fly.” She was getting an uncomfortable feeling.
“Pretty good, Rule. Now take a look at this.” Pegram changed slides again. This time, the whole aircraft could be seen flying at a low altitude over what looked like water.
“Jesus, Pegram,” Rule said. “It’s not a WIG, is it?”
“A WIG it is, Rule. Tell us what you know about WIGS.”
“Well, they said it couldn’t be done, or rather, we said it couldn’t be done, we and the British. The Soviets have been working on the idea since the fifties—we get a rumor now and then—but I sure didn’t know they had one up and running.”
“Come on, guys,” another voice from the dark complained, “What’s a WIG?”
“WIG is short for wing-in-ground effect,” Pegram replied.
“Oh,” the voice said. “Oh, that. Sure.”
Pegram continued. “It works on the principle that an aircraft of a certain size flying at a low level, say under a hundred feet, builds up a cushion of air that might allow it to carry a payload of up to five hundred times greater than normal. Nobody on our side believed it would ever work; that’s why we have no WIG program—not even on the drawing board.”
“So what do we know about this one on the screen?” Rule asked. “What will it do?”
“Well,” said Pegram, “the people at the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research have just pronounced on that, and here’s what they say.” He read from a sheet of paper on the lighted lectern. “The wing-in-ground effect aircraft pictured here is approximately two hundred feet in length, with a wingspan of only one hundred feet. It seems to be powered by two gas turbine engines, whose exhaust can be directed under the wings to provide additional lift, combined with a contrarotating airscrew mounted on the forward edge of the tail assembly. The nose of the aircraft seems to be hinged about fifteen feet behind the cockpit, leading us to believe that the entire forward section of the plane can be lifted for rapid loading and unloading. We estimated that the aircraft could ferry up to four hundred troops or several armored vehicles over a range of one thousand miles at speeds in excess of three hundred knots at altitudes of under one hundred feet over water and lowlying land masses. It could take off and land at airstrips of under moderate length and could be adapted to do so on water, as well. The aircraft in the photograph appears to be carrying two SS N 22 missiles, similar to the French Exocet, one under each wing.”
The room had become perfectly silent.
“Gentlemen,” Pegram intoned, “what you are looking at is, if it works—and it appears that it does—nothing less than a quantum leap forward in amphibious warfare. The Soviets have two up and running—we’ve got satshots of them both. They’ve been testing them on a huge lake northwest of Pskov. What’s more, they appear to have been up and running for at least two years. And we ain’t got one.”
There was a long silence in the room. Finally, a voice spoke. “I was just trying to think where they might use it against us.”
The room broke up into half a dozen conversations on this subject. Finally, Rule spoke into the hubub. “Pegram, how do we know there are two of these things flying?”
“Like I said, Rule, we’ve got satshots of them both. They have different numbers.”
“Yeah, you said that, but what you’ve shown us is a milelong aircraft factory built in a hurry, and you’re saying that they’re only using a couple of hundred yards of it to build two WIGs? Has any analysis of the materials being hauled into Pskov been done?”
“What’re you getting at, Rule?”
“What I’m getting at is, what if they’re using the whole mile to build WIGs, but they’re only using two different numbers on the fuselages when they test them?”
It had become very quiet again in the room. Pegram could be seen, even by the lectern light, to redden. He shuffled the papers before him. “Don’t you think we’d back this up with HUMINT?” he asked, rhetorically.
Jesus, I hope so, Rule thought. A little human intelligence on the ground would be very comforting in the circumstances.
The meeting broke up, and as Rule left the conference room, a voice close behind her said, “Kate, you believe he’s got HUMINT to back up that assessment?”
Rule turned, surprised to find Ed Rawls back at the Agency so soon. He must have handed Malakhov off to a settlement team, she thought. “No,” she said.
“Neither do I,” Rawls replied.
“Ed, from what he said about the capabilities of that thing, wouldn’t the Baltic be a good theater of operations for it?”
“Ideal, I’d say. See you around, Kate.” He turned and walked away down the hall.
Rule was deep in thought and almost to her office when she absentmindedly ran head on into a man coming around a corner.
“Kate, how are you?”
Rule tried to reorganize her thoughts. “Jim Gill! I thought you were still in Rome. What are you doing here?”
Gill, a tall, stringy fellow with a pronounced southern accent, looked questioningly back at her. “Sure I’m still in Rome; I’m just back for a couple of days for a meeting. Listen, I was just looking for you in your office. I didn’t get an answer to my cable last week. Have you lost interest in Appicella?”
It took Rule a moment to register the name. “Appicella? Of course I’m still interested. I didn’t get any cable from you; I haven’t heard anything about Appicella since your original report.” Emilio Appicella was the Italian computer pirate, who, with his bragging about his visits with Majorov, had set this whole thing in motion.
Gill shrugged. “Well, shoot, I guess communications screwed up. I wondered why I hadn’t heard from you.”
Rule resisted taking him by the lapels. “What’s happening with Appicella?”
“Well, ol’ Emilio has got himself another invitation to go east.”
“Invitation? From Majorov, you mean?”
“That’s what he says. I sent you all this stuff, you know; cabled it last week. Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it in crypto or something.”
The hell they hadn’t decoded it, Rule thought. Somebody was screening her traffic. Somebody had stopped that cable. “Tell me, now, Jim.”
“Emilio’s flying to Vienna on—Jesus, what day is this, Monday?—Wednesday, he’s connecting in Vienna with a Leningrad flight. I asked for instructions, Kate. Didn’t hear from you, didn’t hear from ops. The station’s been a madhouse the last couple of weeks, and when I didn’t hear, I just thought I’d take it up when I got back here.”
“Has anybody in the Rome station dealt with Appicella besides you?”
“Nope, he’s mine, all mine.”
“When are you going back to Rome?”
“A week or so.”
“Come on back to my office for a minute, will you, Jim?” She led him back down the corridor and closed the door behind them.”
“Li
sten, Jim, have you talked with anybody in ops about this, yet?”
“Nope, I just got in this morning. Haven’t even been up there, yet.”
“Jim, I’ve got to talk with Appicella before he leaves for Vienna. Can you get in touch with him directly, without going through the Rome station?”
Gill produced a notebook. “Got his phone number right here. He works at home.”
“It’s extremely important that I talk to him, and I’m going to have to short-circuit the system just a little to do it. Will you wait until you’re back at your hotel, then call him and ask him to see me?”
Gill looked thoughtful. “I guess you wouldn’t want me to mention this to ops, huh?”
“I’d rather not. They’d only screw it up. You know how they are.”
“You just want to talk with him, then?”
“That’s it. Just call him for me, and give me his number.”
“Well, hell, all right. If I wait until tonight to call, I’ll wake him up. You don’t want me to call from here, huh?” he grinned.
“I’d rather you didn’t. Just tell him to expect a call from me, and tell him it’s important.”
“Okay, Kate, I’ll hand him off to you. I’ll tell him what a great looking broad you are, and he’ll be dying to meet you. He’s a real ladies’ man.”
“Tell him anything—well, almost anything. Just get him to agree to talk to me.”
“Okay, I’ll call him.”
“I owe you one, Jim.”
“And one of these days I’ll collect, you count on it.” He wrote down the phone number and opened the door. “I’m due in ops. See you.”
