Agent Orange

by Langford, Stephen

  “Wait!” Keeton called. Morel slammed on the brakes, and the truck jerked to a stop. “You speak German, right? It was nothing but English last night, even with the Hellers.”

  Morel gave Keeton a sarcastic grin. “I grew up in a small town in Minnesota that German settlers founded a hundred years ago. You’re damned right I speak it. Now let’s go.”

  At the gate he handed over both their ID cards and a forged work order for them to check an electrical panel that was acting up.

  “Should only take an hour,” Morel told the attendant guard. “But if it takes two and then we go to lunch, I won’t complain.” The guard scowled a bit, so Morel continued. “I’m sorry, comrade. We’re not lazy workers. In fact, we consider it a real honor to maintain a system that makes the trains in the West look like toys. The fact of the matter is, me and Althaus here had very successful dates last night, with two beautiful girls—cousins, they were. I think it’s safe to assume they weren’t so keen to get on with work today, either.”

  Keeton watched the guard as Morel told his story. The younger agent’s German was excellent, as good as his own. He thought he discerned the slightest trace of a smile on the guard’s face. “Yes, comrade, Morel is correct. But understand, we are looking for good, strong wives to give the state the next generation of loyal, hard-working citizens.”

  The guard tilted his head sideways to peer in at Keeton and held his gaze for several seconds. “You’re trying to bullshit me with that story, aren’t you?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Had he misread the man?

  Morel reacted. “What Althaus meant, of course, is that…well, both of us, we…we’re trying to—”

  “You’re not at all interested in good, strong wives,” the guard interrupted. “Just sex. I was single once, too.” The smile that Keeton had detected widened a bit. “But hear me, you should work hard for the state; that’s the only way you’ll ever get a decent girl—if it’s a decent one you’re looking for!” Now he flashed a full grin, happy with his own wit. “Move on!”

  The agents thanked the guard. Morel pulled into the small parking lot and backed into the last remaining open space. “He’s still watching us,” Keeton whispered without moving his lips as they pulled the toolboxes from the back of the Barkus flatbed. The men moved deliberately, feigning smiles and conversation, until they rounded the corner of the building and approached the employee entrance.

  They stepped inside to encounter a desk manned by two uniformed security guards and an armed soldier seated next to the passage into the station. Once again Morel took the lead, but this time he used a more straightforward demeanor—IDs, work order, estimated one hour to check the electrical, thank you, we know the route. It got them past the checkpoint and into the building. Within a minute they had worked out their bearings.

  “Down this hallway and up the stairs,” Morel said, recalling the route they had planned from the schematic provided by Vogel. “First left, then walk three quarters of the way to the next turn. Should see the door to the electrical closet on your right. We’ll split up at the top of the stairs.”

  “Right,” Keeton answered. He looked at his watch. “Nine twenty-seven, mark. Target is eleven hundred to complete the mission.”

  “Got it,” Morel said. “That’ll give you about ninety minutes for the connection. I’ll be back at the truck awaiting the power-on signal. Then we’ll know the Elephant is working.” At the top of the stairs, yet another uniformed officer guarded the door into the U-Bahn’s pedestrian walkway. He gave the IDs a cursory look and nodded them past.

  The corridor in the U-Bahn station was very busy and very noisy. Fine by me, Keeton thought. The more people-watching there is to do, the less anyone will care about a couple of repairmen.

  “I didn’t expect that much firepower back there, but I guess it makes sense,” Morel said, handing over a small key. “I’ve got a guarantee from Vogel that this will get you into that room. Eleven hundred. Good luck.”

  Keeton nodded and turned in the direction of the electrical closet. He scanned ahead to see mostly innocuous East Berliners making their way to the next train. Occasionally a man in a suit would make eye contact and hold it for a moment, leaving Keeton to wonder if he was in the spy business, too. Twice he passed pairs of armed men who self-importantly watched out for troublemakers or pretty girls. Finally he arrived at the door to the electrical room, unmistakably marked with a cartoon lightning bolt and the words Hochspannung, Lebensgefahr!

  He got close and pushed the key into the lock and tried turning it. It wouldn’t budge. He tried again with no luck. He turned the key over, which only resulted in his almost getting the damned thing stuck. He jiggled the key, wrenched the knob, and shook the door. Nothing worked. Damn Vogel’s so-called network, anyway, he thought. He dug into the toolbox and fashioned two wires into picks and began to work the lock. Ninety minutes could evaporate quickly if there were any more delays. The pins were giving in to his trained and nimble touch, until…

  “What are you doing there?” a gruff voice called from behind him. Older, confident, authoritative. Keeton, whose body hid what he was doing, carefully extracted the wires and slid them up into his sleeve. He turned to face a tall, lean uniformed officer with sharp gray eyes and a face bronzed and wrinkled by experience. He carried only a sidearm on his hip but gave the impression that in case of trouble it would be enough. Keeton gave him the nickname Tough Guy.

  “It doesn’t fit,” Keeton said helplessly, holding up the key. “They gave me the wrong key.”

  Tough Guy looked into Keeton’s eyes, down to the toolbox on the floor, and back up again. “Identification.”

  Keeton shrugged and gave an impatient eye roll but took the forged card from his shirt pocket and handed it over. Tough Guy scrutinized the picture and the name for a few moments, then handed it back.

  “What are you doing here?” Tough Guy asked.

  “Paperwork says there were a few electrical surges,” Keeton explained. “I need to check out the power conduit for the line to keep it running. Then they gave me a key that doesn’t fit.”

  Tough Guy took the key and looked it over, then shrugged. “I can’t help you.”

  “Nobody can,” Keeton complained bitterly. “I’m going to be late on this job, and I’ll probably get written up.”

  “It could be worse,” Tough Guy growled. “You have a job and the privilege of working on an important part of Berlin’s transportation. You should perform your assigned tasks with diligence and pride.”

  Keeton nodded sheepishly and waited for Tough Guy to move on, but he didn’t. After several uncertain seconds, Keeton picked up the toolbox and began to move away, complaining underneath his breath so that Tough Guy could hear his grumbling. At the next corner, Keeton turned right and walked the forty-foot length of this smaller hallway. When he made the next right, there was another door with the same electrical warning sign.

  Son of a bitch, he thought. Could it be? He tried the key in the lock, and the bolt slid open immediately. Once he had stepped into the dark room and locked the door, he snapped on a small headlamp retrieved from his pocket. The narrow room looked like a mirror image of the map, which explained why forty feet away was the door that the key didn’t open. He disregarded his annoyance at the operational error and focused on the next phase, which was locating the signal wires that Morel’s boys supposedly had run from the S-Bahn rails to this room.

  Take a look around. Think mirror image. OK, there’s the vertical air duct—I’ll get to that. Along the wall, between those two columns, conduits that control power to the two rail systems. Now, where are those signal wires?

  Where the thick insulated conduits fed into the ceiling, between the two support columns, he saw the pair of wires in question, dangling inconspicuously in plain sight. His job was to extend the wiring through an electronic switching box, down to the U-Bahn rails.

  The ceiling was twelve feet high, and Keeton would have to reach it using the cli
mbing technique known as stemming, his right hand and foot against one column face, and his left hand and foot against the other column. Somewhere in the distant past he had been trained to do this. He pulled the switch box and a spool of wire from the toolbox and put them in the cargo pockets of his uniform, then he donned a pair of leather gloves and began the climb.

  Not nearly as tall as the obstacle course tower in Virginia, he thought as he carefully went up one step at a time, alternating right foot, left foot and the same with his hands. At the top he needed to hold himself up with just the tension of his legs pushing against the columns, as he worked to connect the electronics. By the time he had completed the connections, his legs had begun to burn. Halfway back down he let himself drop to the floor. Now the wires led all the way down to the unwinding spool in his hand.

  According to Morel, the ductwork originated at a vent near the track and ran horizontally for sixty feet and then turned and extended up through the electrical room and all the way to the roof, providing a way for heat to be exhausted from the station. Back to the toolbox, Keeton took out a pair of tin snips and began to work on the duct, cutting an entire three-foot length from it, as close to the floor as he could, and setting it aside.

  He peered down into the air duct with the headlamp and saw the elbow that led to the track. The trick would be to lower the spool of wire down to the bend so that he could reach it from the vent at the track level. He affixed the spool of wire to a long steel ribbon and fed it down the duct, through the corner of the elbow, and all the way to the vent grate by the tracks. He cut the metal ribbon with the snips and unwound about eighty feet of the wire from the spool, cutting it, too. Finally, he tied the pieces of wire and ribbon together and carefully dropped the combination down into the air duct. If all went well, once he found the grate down by the track, he would be able to retrieve the wire and finish the connection to the rails. His watch read ten fifteen—only forty-five minutes to go before Morel would be looking for the signal from the Elephant.

  Before leaving the electrical room, he replaced the section of the ductwork and repaired it with tape. He thought it ugly work, but no one was likely to see this as anything other than an aging train station with a lot of makeshift bandages holding it together. Once Morel verified that the Elephant was working, he would return and hide all the wiring.

  This had been the easy part. The rest of the mission would need to be conducted in front of the East German police.

  ***

  It was ten thirty. As expected, there were many West Berliners already queuing up for the next train—and only West Berliners. Like the city itself, the U-Bahn had been severed in half; however, the U6 line still ran through both sides. While they were in East Berlin the trains were only allowed to stop here, at Friedrichstraße, and only for the purpose of transporting Westerners into or out of East Berlin. The other stations along the U6 route—the so-called ghost stations—had remained closed for three years. All of this meant that not only were Westerners constantly riding through hostile territory but that any East Germans who might have access to this U6 platform would need to be watched to avoid defection—which was the reason the two soldiers now stood together staring as Keeton opened the toolbox and assembled the yellow-and-red caution sign. His forged paperwork had gotten him to the platform, albeit with the armed escort. Fortunately no one associated with the station knew that his explanation about “grounding static-prone transistors” was a complete fabrication. At 10:35 a.m. a U-Bahn train rolled up to the platform. With efficiency driven by a desire to return to a free country, the mass of humanity packed itself quickly into the cars, and the train left.

  Twelve minutes to the next train, he thought, having checked the posted timetable. Be done by quarter to eleven. He stepped down on the track and knelt at the ventilation shaft that led up to the electrical room. The grate was held in place by six screws. He set up the banner and went to work on the grate with a screwdriver. It was slow and tedious work since the grate was held in place by six heavily rusted screws.

  Inside the duct, among a pool of dust and grime accumulated over two decades, he found the ribbon and began to pull it, winding it around one hand until he came to the wires tied to it. He cut the wire from the ribbon and fixed one wire to each of the rails, taking care to thread them underneath the track so the train wheels would not cut them.

  Hopefully Morel just got a signal, he thought after he had made the final connections. At that moment he felt a tremor on one of the tracks. The next train was coming, and with it the anticipatory crowd on the platform. The best he could do with the grate was to bend it back into place and secure it with one of the screws.

  “Better hurry, comrade,” one of the young soldiers called as he checked the clock on the tile wall.

  “Almost done, comrade,” Keeton said back to him with a smile. He was indeed finished and happily packed up the sign, the grimy ribbon, and his tools and turned with the soldiers to the checkpoint that led back into East Berlin. A minute later the train screeched to a stop. For just a moment, he thought he saw the slightest flicker of doubt and jealousy and hope in the eyes of the two soldiers as the doors to the train slid open to welcome the next wave of free citizens.

  You could be with them, he thought viciously. If only those other guards weren’t watching you watch me. He imagined what might occur if all eight soldiers decided en masse to jump through the rapidly closing doors. Certainly the train could be intercepted at one of the ghost stations before it crossed back over the East-West divide. Would it be? Would anyone who witnessed it call the authorities? What if they all went, all at once?

  “You again!” a familiar voice pulled him out of his reverie. It was Tough Guy, who had approached the trio from a doorway that only the uniformed men could traverse. “You were working upstairs before. What did you say you were doing, anyway?”

  “I told you—there were electrical surges on the U-Bahn line,” Keeton explained. “I was checking to make sure the tracks were functioning properly.”

  “I thought the key didn’t work upstairs,” Tough Guy asked.

  “It did work, on the door on the other side. Lucky for me,” Keeton said firmly.

  “I see,” Tough Guy answered slowly. “I’ll take him from here,” he ordered the soldiers who had been Keeton’s minders for the last twenty minutes. They saluted and walked off in the other direction, no doubt happy to be done with what had seemed a boring assignment but which had suddenly become filled with tension.

  “Through that door,” he directed Keeton sharply.

  Keeton controlled his breathing as Tough Guy walked him back through the internal checkpoint. He had been trained to know that good interrogators would spot the telltale signs of anxiety: the blinking eyes and the pulsing carotid. He did not take the danger lightly, but he had faced it many times and knew not to panic either. He also knew that the best interrogators looked for defiance and indignation in the honest subjects, believing that only the guilty become passive and apologetic. It all eventually became a stew of cat-and-mouse ploys and reverse and double-reverse psychology. Twice he gently floated the idea that he just wanted to get back to his crummy job before he was late and in trouble. Tough Guy would have none of it.

  “You might have nothing to worry about,” Tough Guy said as he followed Keeton. “But there’s something not quite right about you. The U-Bahn isn’t even an electric line.”

  “Of course not,” Keeton answered with exasperation. “The power from up above feeds the station itself, not the tracks.”

  “I was a demolitions man in the war,” Tough Guy announced. “I know how to wire things up. You can show me what you were up to in that room.”

  “Demolitions?” Keeton asked, slowing and turning back toward the soldier. “I…I’m just an electrician doing my job; that’s all.”

  Tough Guy gave him a rough shove forward. “Keep going and don’t turn around, understand?”

  Keeton nodded, but he had been turned long
enough to see that Tough Guy still had his pistol holstered. Back on the S-Bahn level, they approached the second door to the electrical room.

  “OK, show me the key,” Tough Guy ordered, pointing Keeton to the door. “Open it.”

  Keeton complied and stepped in, noting how Tough Guy had drawn close up behind him to avoid any bolting and attempt to escape. Tough Guy flipped the light switch on and pushed Keeton again. “Show me exactly what you were doing.”

  “This way,” Keeton said, stepping forward. “You see that those wires are grounded to the main power conduit.” Look for your chance. “My job was to connect them to the tracks; they’re the best grounding.”

  “What’s that thing up there?” Tough Guy asked, pointing up to the switching box Keeton had installed himself.

  “Oh, that keeps everything at the right frequency,” Keeton said with confidence. “Absolutely critical to stabilize everything.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Tough Guy said as he gave Keeton a sharp eye.

  Keeton looked back up at the switching box. “Oh, sure it does. You see…” He heard the snap on Tough Guy’s leather holster and knew he needed to act. He spun around and rushed the officer just as the Makarov pistol came up. The two men hit the wall behind Tough Guy, and the gun fired into the ceiling. Keeton drove his knee up into the East German’s side—the soldier winced but barely leaned over from the blow. Then Tough Guy returned the favor, and Keeton nearly fell from the driving force to his still-tender ribs.

  Keeton attempted to use their momentum to drive them backward into a monkey flip. Tough Guy countered, and Keeton ended up on his back with Tough Guy on top of him. Above his head, they were still wrestling for the Makarov with both hands. A second shot went into the wall, the echo reverberating in the narrow room. A sharp head butt from Tough Guy made Keeton see stars. The agent suddenly felt like he could very well die fighting in this dirty little closet. He needed to do something to turn things around.