Agent Orange

by Langford, Stephen

  As Daniels managed to get into and start the van, Keeton reached into the booth and pulled the telephone cord from its socket. He ran back to the van and climbed in behind the wheel. “Mind if I drive?”

  “Be my guest,” Daniels whispered, exhausted and nearly succumbing again to the shock and exertion.

  Keeton put the van in gear and gunned it through the checkpoint, smashing the brittle gate into pieces as the pale Daniels closed his eyes and drifted into unconsciousness.

  ***

  “If this had been about any other two agents, I would’ve said you were a damned liar,” Morrison said from behind his desk at the Fort. Bernie Williams was sitting before him, having just brought in a decoded Teletype from Vogel in West Berlin.

  “Shot their way out of the factory and made it back to the safe house and then stowed the stolen van in a repair shop to convert it over for us—anyway, the body count was nine down,” Williams said as he glanced back through the report.

  “And two friendlies,” Morrison said thoughtfully. “The female informant and the Frenchman. SDECE won’t be happy about that, and neither am I. Bleudot was a good man; I worked with him—he went by Travert way back then. Hell, that might’ve even been his real name, who knows? Here’s to him and to the girl.” He touched his glass of whiskey to Williams’s and drank it back.

  “Keeton’s idea about burning Junger is pretty good,” Williams commented. “He thinks it’s worth a try, since there weren’t any witnesses left to back up Junger’s story about their escape. And he intentionally left that dart on Junger, hoping they’d find it on him. Float the story that our guys made it back home thanks to a double agent high up in the Ministry of State Security, someone involved in the interrogation, who staged the breakout.”

  “Agreed,” Morrison answered. “Let’s see if we can fake a dead drop to Junger that’ll be caught, or maybe have ten thousand dollars show up conspicuously in his apartment. There’s something else. A request from Department 10.” He tapped a folder that had sat quietly on his desk while they talked about their own operation. The special signal intelligence unit known as Department 10 developed field-based electronics that gave the CIA advantages over their spy-world adversaries. Normally they had their own agents running their own SIGINT missions.

  “The Whiz Kids?” Williams asked with a scowl, using the colloquial name for the group. “What do they want from us?”

  “Keeton,” Morrison answered dryly. “Well, his hands anyway. They’re ready to install some kind of radio antenna in EB. Two-man job, apparently, and Keeton’s still over there.”

  “Can’t they send their own help?”

  Morrison shook his head. “They’ve been told to cool their heels in WB for a while and to not bring anyone else across the wall. Roy and Philippe are already back, and I’m not keen to test our luck right now. So that only leaves Keeton. According to his own report, he’s fit for duty. Who else would you rather have on the mission?”

  “Yeah, I know. It stinks, though,” Williams pronounced. “But first things first, boss. How are we going to get Daniels out of EB? It’s been ten days, and it’s plenty hot there now—the commies are hopping mad and looking for a man with a busted face and shoulder.”

  “I agree we can’t wait long,” Morrison answered. “Daniels, with his injuries…how about we set up a pensioner or worker travel visa? Get him a disguise of some kind.”

  Williams nodded. “I’ll have Vogel check. He’s got some good assets over there. Between him and Eichel, I think they can do it. Say, what about the last part of the message, from Daniels?” Williams refilled both their tumblers.

  Morrison took a drink, sighed, and thought about it for a dozen seconds. “Yeah, well that’ll be up to Daniels. He went through a lot of shit with Junger and his goons. Eichel managed to get him some first-class medical for the shoulder—which was a top-drawer feat, by the way, under the circumstances—but as far as what’s between his ears, he needs to be back here with a clear head before he decides to quit.”

  Williams drank and nodded. “OK, Don, he’s my man, but you call the shots on how we do it.”

  Morrison nodded his assent. Williams rattled the ice in his glass and finished what liquor remained, and then he stood and left the office. The director pulled a pad of paper from the desk and drafted up the plan to get John Daniels out of East Berlin and back to the States. He buzzed for Betty, who came in and took the handwritten instructions back to her Selectric to transform them into official Cavalry orders.

  Morrison basked in Betty’s doting nature, gently attending to his moods while never showing disapproval for the victory cigars or the morning “worry whiskeys” that were part of surviving his job. For his part, he bore none of the marks of the corporate office tyrant or the skirt-chasing lecherous lout. He imagined that her husband—who would never be told the details of her real job—must have enjoyed the same nurturing, patient, feminine genius who had raised five children earlier in life. Morrison, a widower, thought of himself as a sort of second, platonic husband. The secrets they shared in defense of their country were supplemented by only one additional private matter: the wager about which of them would retire first. The victor would receive a prize that remained locked in the safe in his office wall. No way you’re getting it, Betty, he had thought more than once when he needed motivation to soldier through a difficult circumstance.

  But now he felt the impending weight of two converging emergencies on his watch. Agent Red had been captured and tortured and was showing understandable signs of having been spent, emotionally and spiritually. Would he quit? And if he did not, should Morrison pull him off the board nonetheless? Did Daniels give up anything to the East Germans? The attacks on Keeton in London and Berlin demanded a careful response as well. Morrison was set to order him behind enemy lines for another mission, a gadget show that was decidedly not within the Cavalry’s normal purview.

  Sorry, Andrew, he thought. But you’re probably safer on that side of the wall, anyway.

  Chapter 9. The Elephant

  “I’m Jimmy Morel.”

  Keeton reached out and shook the man’s hand. He was younger than Keeton and a bit shorter, with sandy blond hair. Could picture him on a beach on the West Coast with a surfboard under his arm. Damned kid. “Keeton in real life. But for right now I’m Althaus. Don’t get them mixed up.”

  “I’ll try my best,” Morel said with a smile. “Well, I asked for field work, and I got it big, I guess.”

  “Looks that way,” Keeton answered, looking around the second-floor flat of the alternate East Berlin safe house. His ribs were still tender. Once ensconced in this new location, he had taken it very slowly. The couple that owned the house and lived on the ground floor were part of Vogel’s network of collaborators and had taken care of Keeton since his arrival. Eichel had been put in charge of seeing that John Daniels—using the cover of an aged pensioner—was able to get to the West. They had crossed over at Checkpoint Charlie two days earlier. Morel had just arrived from his own briefing in West Berlin.

  “I saw them,” Morel said, indicating the escaped agents. “They made it across just fine. Eichel said we should continue to watch both the dead drops, and we’re to use them as well, if we need to. Said he’ll come back as soon as the dust settles.”

  “Does the dust ever settle?” Keeton asked as he sipped a vodka. “You want a drink?”

  “If you think I’m old enough.” Morel grinned. “I know it’s what you’re thinking. But sure, I’ll take a glass of the blue strangler.”

  Keeton poured the drinks, and they sat in the living room to share introductions. Morel’s cover was a disaffected student from a wealthy American family, who had left Princeton to explore the socialist world. Keeton shared that he had been in both East and West Berlin many times and in Russia twice. It was his practice not to give away too much.

  “Tell me about this gadget and what it does,” Keeton said. “I know more about languages than electronics. But I can a
ssemble a foxhole radio, if I have the parts.”

  Morel laughed. “You’re halfway there. Here goes. The system is officially called the ultra-shortwave modulating transceiver. I know, catchy. My pet name for it is the Elephant.”

  “Because it never forgets,” Keeton suggested.

  “No, because of the big ears, as a listening device. Anyway, it’s designed to use rail tracks as a special kind of antenna. The spacing between the rails is perfect for setting up an induction field between them. Once the field is stabilized, electronic signals from communications in the city can be detected. The network of rails around East Berlin makes the device into a giant butterfly net for catching these signals.”

  “A big radio antenna,” Keeton said.

  “Yes, but it can be more,” Morel said. “Because of the frequency of the fields we’re using, we can detect the small magnetic impulses traveling within nearby phone lines. A converter can essentially then decode these impulses into sound—the conversations between the parties, just like the receiver on a normal telephone.”

  Keeton swirled his glass out of habit and took a long sip. “If the rail network is so big, how in the world can you narrow the Elephant down to one phone line? Seems like you’d be trying to listen in on a hundred phone conversations all at once.”

  “Good question,” Morel said. “You’re right in principle. But we can use our power supplies to focus on very specific locations. Imagine a water hose with an air bubble in it—we can put pressure on either end to push the air bubble one way or the other and even compress or enlarge it. The air bubble is our induction field—the big ear that we can move around East Berlin where we want.”

  “That’s enough science for me,” Keeton said, shaking his head. “I can see why they call you the Whiz Kids.”

  “Thanks,” Morel answered. “Some of the equipment is in the crawl space under this house. There’s a trap door to get to it. Anything else will be in the truck that’s been secured for us. Should be parked nearby in the morning. I have two more pieces of gear arriving this evening at a dead drop, and then we can install it.”

  “OK, what’s your plan for that?” Keeton asked.

  “Well, I have a couple ideas, but I was hoping you’d help me figure it out.” Morel finished his drink and waved off Keeton’s offer for a refill. “We have a vehicle and uniforms for our cover as rail maintenance. This would work for daytime, but our IDs will need to pass muster if we’re challenged. Or we can do the installation at night, but of course getting caught would most likely be certain disaster. So I think daytime—count on our covers and your experience.”

  “You need my help?” Keeton said with a smile. “Sounds like you’ve got the picture down pretty well. I agree with your assessment.”

  “Done then,” Morel said. He picked up a folded cloth and opened it onto the coffee table in front of them. It was a map. “OK, here’s the basic setup for what we have to do. The two rail systems in the city are the S-Bahn, the electrified aboveground transit, and the underground U-Bahn. The S-Bahn will be the energized receiver of the signals. We already have the Elephant hooked up to it, and now we need a transmitter to beam the detected signals over to our listening post in WB. That’s what the U-Bahn will be used for—its rail is nearly entirely underground except for a two-mile stretch between these two stations, here. This makes it into an insulated antenna with one transmission point that’ll be easy for the boys in WB to pick up. Once the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn are connected through a special converter, the Elephant will be operational. The ideal connection point will be the station that the two routes share at Friedrichstraße.”

  “How long will it take to connect them?” Keeton asked.

  “That’s up to you,” Morel said with a smile. “The Dep-10 team was pulled into WB to set up the listening post. Now they’re sequestered over there due to the recent, let us say, excitement that you caused. You and I are what’s left over here to do the last step.”

  “Why didn’t you stay across with the others?” Keeton asked.

  “Someone had to be here in case the Elephant didn’t work and needed adjustments.”

  “You designed the Elephant, didn’t you?” Keeton asked him.

  “I was part of the team.”

  “No, you designed it,” Keeton declared congenially.

  Morel nodded and checked his watch. “You got me—it’s my baby. OK, I’m going to check the dead drops for the rest of our stuff. Should be back in a couple hours, and we’ll cover exactly what you’ll need to do at Friedrichstraße. We’ll head there in the morning.”

  Keeton checked the street from the front window as Morel left the house and turned north on his way to the dead drop locations. Seems capable enough. I wonder how much real danger he’s been in. How many times has he been shot at? More importantly, how many men has he had to shoot?

  ***

  Morel returned without incident at about eight o’clock. The Hellers had made them a robust dinner of sausages and sauerkraut, with bread from the local cooperative bakery. Keeton savored the homemade meal but noticed that Morel ate with a rather mechanical apathy. He imagined the intellectual agent mentally calculating the energy content of the food and comparing it to his exertions. In truth, Keeton himself was trained to do the same thing—in the event that he was captured and starved. It reminded him that he hadn’t done any physical training during his recovery and had begun to worry about his fitness.

  The owners had also managed to secure a bottle of decent champagne, which they’d chilled to serve with the food. “Shouldn’t we wait to pop the cork until after the mission?” Morel suggested.

  “No, let’s drink it now,” Keeton answered with some gravity. Frau Heller, with a glance, seemed to agree with Keeton.

  “You don’t trust the technology?”

  “It’s not that, Jimmy,” Keeton said. “It’s just that…enjoy the good stuff now.”

  “Listen to your friend here,” Herr Heller said as he divided up the champagne among the four glasses. “I was a young man when the first big war started. I enlisted, and we all celebrated”—he tapped the bottle—“the good stuff. But nothing we were told about fighting prepared us for what we saw. Young men—boys, my friends—some lasted a few months, some a few moments. Bullets, bombs, tanks, chemicals. As for me, I don’t know if my shots ever found an enemy. But there was one fight…out of ammunition, at night…one man…with my knife. Well, after the Americans joined the war, we were doomed. After that we suffered almost two decades of humiliation. I became a mathematics teacher. Then with Hitler we rose up and celebrated again, with the good stuff. You want me to say I hated him, hated the National Socialists? No, I can’t do that. We felt strong again, for a few years at least…”

  Keeton was momentarily taken back to his own war experience, to the Korean spy, to the chase, and to the interrogation that ended in Keeton shooting a man. Should’ve gotten me kicked out of the program, if there had been anyone around to give a damn about a dead Korean.

  Heller cleared his throat with emotion. “We had two sons. Good boys. Strong, smart. Then the youth program took them away from us. Then the war came and devoured them like a dragon, on different battlefields, on the same day. It was my penance for killing that man in the trench with my knife.” Frau Heller placed her hand delicately over her husband’s. “Later that year, miraculously, Agathe gave birth to a daughter. What a blessing. A second chance for us at happiness. A girl, so no more soldiers to be taken from us. We drank the good stuff again. Then Hitler was revealed to be a beast, and we were back to being humiliated—not by our enemy but by ourselves. The Americans returned, but this time they let the Russians share the spoils, and before we knew it there was a wall, and we ended up on the wrong side of it. Doris, our daughter…she became involved in a resistance group. We warned her not to cause trouble. I suppose she had a bit of her father’s stubbornness. So she resisted—and the socialist monsters, these inhuman puppets of the Russians…they killed her. No fune
ral, no grave, just a letter from some low-level state office worker. So I don’t love the Americans; I just hate the communists more.”

  Keeton and Morel looked down into their empty glasses. Then Heller tapped his plate with his fork. “Thank you for listening to an old man who’s seen too much misery. You each work in a profession of danger. Enjoy what pleasures you can, while you can—which I see you’ve done!” He suddenly smiled broadly and turned to his wife. “Die Zigarren bitte, mein Liebchen.”

  A minute later the men were smoking Herr Heller’s secret stash of fine cigars. Keeton knew they were probably part of the payment from the CIA for his and his wife’s service, but he took the old man’s advice and enjoyed them all the more. Then the Hellers retired for the night, and the two agents began preparing for their mission.

  ***

  In the next several hours, Keeton learned where and how to connect the two parts of Morel’s Elephant system. Morel was a good teacher who had a knack for making his technical marvel available even to Keeton, with his limited knowledge of the science. However, it would clearly take Keeton’s training in cover identities and covert operations to be successful. After three complete practice runs in the house, they turned in for a restless sleep. In the morning Frau Heller cooked a “sehr big American break-the-fast,” and the three men finished it off with a shot of vodka to toast their efforts. Keeton and Morel then suited up in their covers as rail maintenance workers and walked out of the house, tool boxes in tow. Halfway down the block, they found the work truck waiting for them. It had been delivered that morning by another of Vogel’s informants.

  Morel had memorized the street map, and he drove. The first test of the mission was to make it into the station using their ID cards. Morel drove boldly toward the gate that admitted the employees of the BVG (Ost).