by Dean Ing
"Depends on how wide we share it," Ullmer said darkly, looking down at his feet.
Randolph, with a sad smile: "Still need-to-know only, but don't worry that the Soviets will find out about it." He paused.
It was Dar Weston who dropped the bomb: "They already have, Mr. Ullmer."
"Hell and damnation! How could we leak?" The pain on Ben's face was so real he seemed in danger of bursting into tears. "And what the GOD-damned hell do we do now?"
"We've already talked that over. Had to," Foy said ruefully, "after a man died placing a copy of the new Sov shopping list in Mr. Weston's hands. CIA saw that the Other Side is uncommonly interested in something CIA itself was unaware of, until we told them; something called Black Stealth aircraft. Sovs even know it's not CIA, or Lockheed or Northrop—but they don't know any of its technical tricks. They just figure that if it's stealth they must have it."
"And they'll keep coming after it until they have one for themselves," Foy ended.
"Like our side felt about that MiG that Belenko stole," Ben said. "Yeah, I know how it works. So what do we do about it?"
Randolph looked at Foy, who looked at Sheppard, who said, "Uhm, well," and took a breath. "Well, Ben, we have to convince them to go back to sleep; to quit sniffing around. In short, to relax."
Ben shifted his cigar, bit it hard, and snarled, "I wish I had the foggiest fuckin' idea how we might manage that, by God I do."
"Simplest thing in the world," Sheppard said gently. "We let the Sovs steal Black Stealth One."
THREE
Ben Ullmer caught most of his cigar before it hit the floor, glaring speechless at NSA's top cryptographer. He removed a wet mass from his mouth, the part of the stogie he'd bitten off, and crammed the fragments into a pocket. Then his features began to relax. "That is the dirtiest joke I have ever heard," he said, hoping someone would smile to endorse the idea.
"You understand," said Sheppard, "that the joke will be on the other side. We will let them have Blue Sky Three, suitably fudged with a dummy flight log. You mentioned that we might be able to spot it? Believe me, Ben: we can. So, they can have it. Instead of having KGB people seeking the real thing, we'd much rather lull them to sleep by letting them steal the sacrifice. If they don't know what Black Stealth One can do, they won't know we're delivering a substitute."
"This decision is already cast in concrete, I suppose," Ullmer growled.
Charles Foy: "I'm afraid so. This is damage control, cutting something adrift to save the crucial bits. It would be hard to overstate the tremendous loss this country would suffer if the other side ferreted out the facts of the real Black Stealth One. Their next strategic bomber wouldn't have to be fast, or heavily armored."
"No shit," said Ullmer, whose political sense seemed to have shattered in the shock wave of this thunderbolt his superiors had trained on him. "We couldn't spot a hellbug any easier than they could."
"I'm afraid you're right," Sheppard admitted, staring away at nothing, "though it can be spotted, Ben."
"Maybe, but it'd be a two-ton brindle bitch of a job," Ullmer insisted. He saw Mal Aldrich gazing heavenward at this colorful metaphor and did not give a shit. Might as well dive headlong into matters for which his need to know might be arguable, so he did. "However you work this out, too damn many people in the intelligence community will know about it. One little leak and the Russkis will have Blue Sky Three AND an itch for the hellbug."
Dar Weston had been leading Greeks near Khalkidiki in 'forty-four, behind German lines, at the age of nineteen. He had mastered the use of voice tones before he could vote. Ullmer, of course, was not in his agency, so the CIA man's timbre carried both firm assurance and persuasion. "Mr. Ullmer, eight men on earth know what we intend to do, including you and the President. It will be nine when your pilot is told—or ten if he declines the mission. Without prejudice, I might add. We will simply have one of our people train in the airplanes so that he can steal them."
Weston stopped because Ben was shaking his head. "Them? He only has to steal Blue Sky Three, you said."
"The scenario is for that one to be flown to a location near the exchange site, after it's agreed, and soon. Our man really will take Black Stealth One, when the time comes. He'll just land and make a switch before he meets the Sovs with their ransom money," Weston explained.
Ben scuffed one brogan at a hard coin of chewing gum some idiot had dropped on his clean floor. "Why take the hellbug at all?"
Charles Foy, with the abused patience of a man who was justifying something he didn't like himself, answered brusquely. "Ullmer, this operation has to ring true, else the other side won't buy it. You know the Sovs listen in to everything, and if they hear every weekend warrior on the hunt, in addition to the Coast Guard, FBI, Air Force, and God knows who else, we think they'll be persuaded that something genuine—and very big—is going down."
"But why not just say the thing has been stolen," Ullmer still protested. "You could press the alarm anyway. If it's invisible who can tell it's not up there?"
"Three reasons," Foy said, and he turned to Sheppard. Foy knew that if Ullmer trusted anyone to have Black Stealth's best interests at heart, it was Sheppard.
"First, Ben," said Sheppard, "we have to move her anyway. This whole gambit will expose Snake Pit, so we have to put the craft elsewhere. Second, we don't think we can fake the theft convincingly if we never actually put her in the air. If she's actually up there, there wilt be some fleeting sightings, but of course no one will catch her—which will make her seem all the bigger prize to the Sovs. And, third, Ben, what better way to test your handiwork than to see how she does with the whole Air Force after her?"
"Where are you going to bring her?" Ullmer asked grimly.
"Let's say, the southwest," Sheppard answered. "Of course she'll never go anywhere near the border."
A long moment of silence; then Ben sighed. He began to smile, a hard rictus that was not benign, as he added, "I know how far I am down the scrotum pole, gents, but I can tell you this: if it doesn't work, you have my resignation. I love the Snake Pit, and I'll do everything in my power to make this work. But if it doesn't, gentlemen"—the smile fading as he looked at each of his visitors in turn— "I'm out of here."
"An emotional decision, Ben," said Aldrich, with what seemed to be real concern.
"Damn right," Ben replied. "But if you think I'm emotional now, try me if this operation goes down the tubes."
"Well"—Dar Weston sighed—"we'll just have to see that you stay employed." His hand on Ben's shoulder was gentle.
"That means you'll be shuttling back to Meade during the coming weeks," Sheppard said, nodding at Ben. "Lots of details to work out, beginning with how much we can tell Medina, and when we tell him."
Ben dry-washed his face and grimaced. "There's gotta be an extra man in this. The guy who contacts those fuckin' thieves to make the deal."
"No extra man," said Randolph. "It's got to be the same man who flies the plane."
"He's expendable," said Ben, stating it as a fact, hoping for a denial.
The reply was silence.
FOUR
"Jesu Maria, I think my arm's asleep," said Medina. He shifted his weight, his forehead pressing against the Toyota's headrest.
"That's not all that's asleep," was the reply into his right ear. Not angry, but philosophical.
He longed to tell her that if, instead of getting philosophical, she would get busy, maybe all his parts would stay awake; but he didn't. For one thing, it had been her languid grace that attracted him a year before, and the other word for languid was lazy. Most times, that didn't bother him but these times weren't most times. For another thing, you didn't get just a whole lot of mileage out of criticizing her or even hinting at criticism. For a third, it really wouldn't have made much difference what she did, he was so chingada preoccupied with that chingada business in the Snake Pit, he was in no mood to ching.
It suddenly occurred to Raoul Medina that he was getting a
cramp, suspended dickless above someone else's wife while he silently listed good reasons why. A moment later he said, "I guess this just wasn't the night for it, Arlene. Maybe I'm getting a cold," he added quickly, attaching the blame to himself.
She sighed and turned her head so that she could deliver one of those long, deep, languid kisses that were easily the best things she did. "Then I'll have it too," she said. Arlene had a great throaty voice. She could give you a hand job over the phone.
He managed to wriggle back across the shift lever without tearing his chinos, which tended to rip because he liked to wear them tight to show off his butt, still taut and lean, especially for a man in his forties. She took his right hand and they lay silent in their reclined bucket seats for a few minutes, watching clouds drift across a bomber's moon through the Toyota's open sunroof. After flying RB-66 recon, then U-2's for the Company, and now for fifteen years one of NSA's elves, even a well-conditioned macho in his forties should know better than to play the games he'd been playing. But those games heightened his awareness, made him greet each day with a tingle. And were now beginning to steal perfectly good, serviceable erections. Well, too late to back out now.
"Peso for your thoughts," Arlene said at last, and listened to him laugh.
Medina wasn't laughing for the reason she thought; if women liked his latin looks, why tease him about them? He was laughing because a peso was worth a hell of a lot less than a penny, and his thoughts were worth—well—at least five million dollars' worth of Swiss francs. Or so Dar Weston had told him, a week before when they'd made their pitch and he'd said yes. Not that CIA intended him to get anywhere near the money, much less spend any of it, but that's the kind of price the KGB would expect him to negotiate. And Dar Weston, whose hobby was spy-catching above and beyond his normal duties, had studied a lot of spy-for-profit cases.
Why the hell had he agreed to do it? Maybe to prove he still could, including that jazzy SCUBA stuff they wanted him to use. And maybe CIA had discovered his own hidden agenda, maybe they were trying to see if he'd "go private," the spook phrase for an employee who made himself disappear. If so, they'd be ready for it—might even have a couple of bozos staked out with a starlight scope on the Toyota right this minute. So the only sensible thing was to keep up ordinary appearances, but with this kind of pressure there was at least one thing he could not keep up. Mierda ... "I was just thinking," he improvised, "our anniversary was last week and I plain forgot."
"You mean," said Arlene with a nice hand squeeze, "you forgot that you didn't forget. We celebrated me raw, darling, on the couch in your living room." Pause. Then, genuinely mystified: "What was that thing with all the rivets in it that looked like Darth Vader's armor? You never did say."
He chuckled, returning the squeeze. "Now I remember. Bless that couch. The thing you call armor was a piece of ducting. Six-oh-six-one alloy.
Just something for the house," he lied. Actually it was the new boundary-layer duct for the Mini-Imp, a single-place sportplane with the potential to outrun anything in its class and land like dandelion fluff, given the mods he'd sketched for Kyle Corbett four years ago in the Snake Pit library. Arlene had never seen the little screamer under those tarps in his garage, and would never see it until he'd towed the finished product to Ithaca and bolted the wings on for test flights. Maybe not then, either. He and Corbett had barely begun the extracurricular project, starting to cobble the whole thing together in Medina's garage two nights a week, before Corbett's accident.
For a long time now, Medina had wondered if it was an accident. It could've been an on-purpose. A deliberate bug-out. If so, it was just possible that CIA knew, meaning Weston. And now, of course, there was no way to find out what had really happened to Corbett. Long ago, he had given Medina the number of that post office box in Depew, near Buffalo, but two months after the accident Medina had driven to Depew. Through the little window Medina had seen that the only letter in that post office box had been the one he'd sent, with no return address. It had been there three months later, too. Corbett had never picked it up, so the chances were the man was dead. If only there were some way to send a message without being obvious!
Arlene sighed, a sound full of contentment. Nice girl, really, with a sharp mind that belied the impression she gave of being always half asleep. "Why don't I come to your place again next week, Raoul? I could park in your garage," she said. "God knows who might spot my car, everybody in Elmira knows George."
She couldn't know it, but there was no room in that garage for a car. "Oh, I almost forgot," he said; "The company's sending me down south next week, honey. Something about floppy-disk drives, pain in the ass but I'll be back in ten days. Less, maybe." The good people of Elmira still bought the legend that the Snake Pit manufactured components for home computers. And yes, he was going south, all right! All the way to the decommissioned strip near Regocijo, in Mexico's state of Durango. The people in the Bulgarian trade mission, Weston had assured him, were a direct pipeline to the KGB; and of the three swap sites he would offer in Mexico, no matter which one they chose, he could get there from Regocijo in one hop. Which was why he would be flying Blue Sky Three down there as soon as she was all gussied up to masquerade as Black Stealth One. Pretty sharp thinking on somebody's part to have the craft in place two months ahead of time, even before he had anything worked out with the so-called Bulgarians.
His flight in the hellbug to the secure hangar near Los Alamos in New Mexico would take several days, of course, slow as these birds were. Plenty of time to think this all over. Presently he sat up, yawning, and they racked the seats upright, Arlene touching up her face and hair as he drove her back to the Mart parking lot. She stroked his neck, both to tease and to remind him, but was careful not to do anything dumb as he dropped her off because, as she often said, you never knew who might be watching. Man, if she only knew!
Medina got back home before the Carson show, turning the audio up so he could hear it in the garage. The Imp was practically ready for trials, lacking only the boundary-layer ducts and it would fly fine without those, but with them it could take off at a speed hardly faster than a man could run—maybe. Staring at his handiwork from the doorway, he realized that he'd been putting off those final touches. He should rent hangar space at Ithaca or Binghamton and trailer the little sucker up there right away, clean out the garage, give Arlene a place to park.
Because when he got into this Bulgarian bullshit, sure as hell someone would be sniffing around his house. He didn't want Ben Ullmer to know he'd been shaving the Imp's hardware so close to outright Snake Pit specs. And it was important to remember that Ben was NSA, whatever else he might be. If Medina ever had to go private, an Imp that could take off on a dime might just be his only hole card. Keeping it here, with spooks flitting around, would be like sending them an open signal.
It was at that moment when Medina realized what he had to do. Not much time to compose the message, and it had to say exactly the right things without saying too much, and it might not be taken seriously even if it was received. It would take a while, the delay was built in, but perhaps he could force a delay in the preparation of those wet wings for the hellbug. Screw it up when the work was half done, maybe; buy a week or so that way. It would be easy enough to do, everybody pulled a fumducker now and then, even a master A and P mechanic. But there was another word for doing it deliberately, especially when CIA folks were breathing down his neck.
The word was sabotage.
FIVE
"From any other source," Pyotr Karotkin muttered, "I should discount this as a ruse. In some ways, Sasha is a complete shavki. "The term meant "shit-eating dog," and was reserved in the KGB for low-level incompetents. It was true that few professionals would send vital intelligence by way of embassy groundskeepers. As Karotkin spoke, he nodded toward the object on his desk, and a pale reflection of the overhead fluorescents gleamed from the skin stretched like rawhide over his hairless skull.
Leonid Suslov, watching the
rawhide gleam, hated those fluorescents. Perhaps, he thought, Karotkin hated them too. But no one in Washington's Soviet Embassy harbored more suspicions of windows than Karotkin, rezident for the KGB's Intelligence Directorate. This windowless room had been Karotkin's own choice, between other rooms crammed with data collection equipment.
Suslov, rezident for Directorate "T" which handled scientific data collection, greatly preferred the view from his own office. From there he could see down Massachusetts Avenue with the White House and other sensitive buildings clearly visible in the near distance. Since the Americans had been such idiots as to permit the new embassy compound to be built on high ground, they should have expected thickets of Suslov's electronic ears to sprout from the embassy roof.
But Sasha's bombshell had not trickled in by coaxial cable from the roof. It had come, as always, over the wall; the act of a shavki, indeed; but an astonishingly successful one. Suslov reached for the object, which lay in a sealed bag on Karotkin's desk, and shifted his bifocals to study it closely. Suslov ran field-grade agents to satisfy the shopping list, but he did not run Sasha. Sasha ran himself, and did it in a manner unique in Suslov's experience.
"In any case, this is not ours to discount, Pyotr Borisovitch," Suslov replied, noting that Sasha had not sprayed crimson paint evenly over the object in the bag. Enough to be seen, however, in daylight, though crimson looked black at night. It was perfectly round, of high-impact plastic, with the appearance of a borscht jar lid. Its center portion, unlike Sasha's earlier missiles of information, was hinged. "I see Sasha has gone high-tech."
"It is called a Flutterbird," Karotkin said, "a new device which does not shatter when struck by shotgun pellets as clay targets do. Instead, its center pops open and it falls." A sigh. "Readily obtained at sporting shops." Karotkin's fingers danced as if anxious to pluck the object back, yet he remained polite. He could well afford to, while the little devices continued to sail anonymously over embassy walls with startling messages. So long as Sasha operated without contacts, Karotkin's directorate would remain Sasha's pipeline to Dzerzhinski Square in Moscow. And Sasha's pipeline pumped in only one direction.
