Assignment - Suicide

by Edward S. Aarons

  Chapter One

  IT WAS COLD in the plane, and Durell could see nothing. Land, sea and sky were all the same, bleak and empty, and the night was darker than the dark anxiety inside him. The DC-3 quartered crabwise into the stiff wind, laboring like the sturdy old workhorse that she was. There were no stars and no moon, and as he sat beside the pilot in the dim glow of reflected light from the instrument panel, Durell had the feeling he was isolated from all the rest of the world. The pilot’s compartment was like an island suspended in dark space, a fragmentary bubble illusively balanced in the cold emptiness and liable to burst at any moment and plunge into the void all around him.

  He sat quietly in the bucket seat beside the pilot and Watched the chronometer. The pilot was young and capable, and Durell, knowing his business, was content to let this part of it remain in the pilot's hands without interference. Not that you could stop any of it now, any more than you could stop time by smashing the clock in front of you. The machinery would go on with its maze of men and plans and ambitions, whether you were here or not, even if time stopped for you personally. Somebody else would take your place, that was all.

  “They haven't started shooting yet," Durell said.

  The pilot was a Texas youngster with straw hair and a ready grin to hide his nervousness. “We’re a good ten minutes ahead of the regularly scheduled SAS plane. Operations gave me a plot of their course.” The pilot grinned quickly, but his blue eyes were pale stones in the bubble of light around them. He wore battered cowboy boots with his flying gear. The plane bucked, bounced and settled. “Same flight pattern as the Swedes. The radar will figure the Stockholm people are a smitch ahead of time, is all. We hope. I hope. My kids and Susie hopes. But you can’t ever tell. Give ’em credit; they’ve got the coast tied up so a mosquito couldn’t get through without their knowing it. Are you about ready, tovarich?”

  “Yes. I’m ready,” Durell said.

  "You count sixty, then bounce out."

  “Say hello to Susie for me. Kiss the kids.” He liked the Texan. He hoped the pilot made it on his expected transfer back home, two weeks from now. “When do I start counting?”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  The pilot had a picture of his wife taped up over the instrument panel, and the pilot’s eyes turned as soft as a summer lake as he looked up at the pleasant, happily smiling face of the girl he had married.

  ‘Start now," the pilot said. “Happy landing. And I don’t envy you.”

  “Keep a candle in the window,” Durell said.

  The numbers began to tick off in his mind as he left the bucket seat and worked back through the stripped fuselage lot the DC-3. The parachute pack bumped and kicked at the backs of his thighs. The muscles of his legs felt tight and knotted. had come a long way in a hurry: from Washington, Paris, and the airfield in West Germany. R.S.F.S.R., here we come. The trip can end faster than it began. Through the port, he saw a glow of light on the far horizon ahead. His German Watch read 8:32. The Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland were behind them. Leningrad was just over the edge of the arctic world. Even in April, the weather would be bitter. But it was only the first stop—it there were any others to follow his landing. He didn’t push that thought too far. You go one step at a time, like an animal prowling a jungle, and that was how you hoped to stay alive—with care and patience and luck. You always needed luck.

  His counting ended.

  Durell pushed his right shoulder against the escape hatch, felt the thrust of an icy slip stream, and tumbled into space. Rain struck his cheek in a shower of piercing, silvery splinters. Sky and land and black night engulfed him, and he fell like a mote in the frozen emptiness. Patches of snow, dark hummocks, B glint of light swung and slid and revolved under him. He counted again, pulled the cord, felt the snap of the pilot chute, felt the chest and groin-jarring jolt as the black nylon canopy opened overhead.

  Briefly, there was peaceful, swaying silence except for the wind in the parachute rigging. Two thousand feet of empty night dangled under his feet. He twisted, looked for the plane, saw the exhaust spitting orange from the twin engines, heard the throaty bellowing of it as it banked now in a long sweep for the safety of international waters and home. Radar blips on green screens below would be registering the unexpected maneuver of what had been thought to be the regularly scheduled commercial SAS plane. Perhaps he, too, was a blip on the screens down there, hidden in the dark void, a dot of green light on scopes where inimical eyes watched his descent.

  He checked everything again as he watched the plane and remembered the picture of the pilot’s Susie. The DC-3 banked and fled for the safety of the sea. Check and check again. His cheap gray topcoat, his suit of stiffly cut blue serge, tailored Russian-style, just shabby enough; his slightly frayed white shirt; his rather flashy silk tie; the black, square-toed shoes. McFee had made him shave off his mustache, back at 20 Annapolis Street, in Washington. Washington, where the cherry blossoms bloomed. McFee had handed him papers and credentials, the cards stamped and sealed and oily-fingered for age, all of which made him into Igor Vanlivov, lieutenant, MVD, military section. What better camouflage when entering the bears den than to appear as one of the bear’s cubs? So McFee reasoned, and McFee was usually right. Language was no barrier. Durell spoke Russian with a Muscovite accent. He had been here before, but not more recently than three years ago, when he was pulled out of the field and given the desk job at the anonymous headquarters of CIA at 20 Annapolis Street. And for three years you chafed at the mountains of correlations, deductions, charts, graphs, reports, analyses and syntheses of other men’s work. You ask again and again for field assignments, and then a man is suddenly hit by a car in front of your apartment house and he’s found dying on your doorstep, asking for you. And you get it. And away you go, as the comedian says.

  A long way from home—home being the hot, dark bayous below New Orleans, and old Grandpa Jonathan, and a Cajun boyhood. Home was Deirdre, with her tears as bright as the April Iain, telling you she loved you and couldn’t help loving you always; but damn it, how could she marry a. man and not have a honeymoon at all? Home was the last kiss, and the agreement to disagree. Deirdre did not know where he was now, and Durell hoped she no longer cared.

  It had been a warm day in Washington. Durell had been in the hospital room since two o‘clock in the morning, and it was now nine. The man was dead. Outside, a robin hopped back and forth on the budding branches of a dogwood tree that grew on the lawn of the hospital, near the window. The hiss and murmur of traffic on the avenue nearby was muted. Durell had been listening to the rasp and rattle of Arkady Sukinin’s breathing, and now that it stopped, he became aware of other sounds around him.

  Fred Shannon came in and looked at the dead man on the bed and looked at Durell and shrugged. “Gone, Sam?”

  “A minute ago.”

  “Nothing else out of him?”

  “No,” Durell said. “Did you send the recordings over?"

  “Sure,” Shannon said. “It‘s a kick in the ribs.”

  “Where is General McFee?" Durell asked.

  “Yelling for you, Sam. You look beat, pal. McFee’s been over to the Pentagon to the Joint Chiefs and he’s been to the White House and he had to talk to Senator Hugo, too. Red, white and blue tape. The boss leaves it all up to the little guy. And the little guy leaves it to you.”

  “Something’s got to be done,” Durell said.

  “Crazy accident drops a hot bomb in your lap, hey?”

  “This Sukinin didn‘t think it was an accident,” Durell said. His eyes felt gritty from lack of sleep, and he was aware of a weariness that went into his bones. His frustration didn't help. “Keep Jones and Isaacs on it, Fred. And let McLarnin sit on his duff here in
the corridor. Not that anybody would be interested in what we've got left here now.”

  “Roger,” Shannon said. “Maybe McFee will keep you on it.”

  “Fat chance,” Durell said.

  He left the hospital room, nodded to McLarnin lounging near the floor nurse’s cubicle, and rode the elevator down to the ground floor. He kept hearing the dead man’s strangled, pink-frothed words whispering in the back of his mind as he reached the street. He wanted to shower and shave and have breakfast with Deirdre, and then he remembered that Deirdre was gone and he wouldn‘t see her again, and that was for the best, even though he already missed her with an ache that would take a long time going away. The hell with it. You ought to go home to Grandpa Jonathan, he told himself. Do some fishing and play poker in the Blue Belle in the French Quarter for a few weeks.

  He went to 20 Annapolis Street. . . .

  Durell was a tall man, well over six feet, with heavy shoulders and a lean waist and the delicate, long-fingered hands of a born gambler. His hair was thick and dark, and his eyes were a deep blue that sometimes looked black when he was angry or contemplating something dangerous. He had a small, neatly trimmed, thin mustache. His Cajun blood made him hot-tempered and gave him a tendency toward independent action that McFee often deplored. There was an air of competence and alertness and self-sufficiency in the way he moved and walked. He knew all about the strength of organized effort, but he also knew that in his business, a spy died fast if he waited for and depended on others. It made the difference between the quick and the dead.

  No. 20 Annapolis Street was a gray stone building with a facade indicating a routine business enterprise, and behind the cover activities in the steno pool offices on the ground floor the real business was conducted, behind steel doors and soundproofed corridors. Durell nodded to Alex, on the elevator that took him up to Dickinson McFee’s little room.

  General McFee was in charge of this branch of the CIA. He was a small man with thick gray hair and impersonal eyes and a brain like an electronic computer. His office was unadorned, and he told Durell to sit down without ceremony and pushed a manila envelope across his big desk. “That’s yours. Passport, papers, plane tickets to Paris. Youngman will carry you on from there. You’ll get your clothes in Germany.”

  “Am I going somewhere?" Durell asked.

  “Luke Marshall asked for you, didn’t he?”

  “If Sukinin was telling the truth.”

  “We can’t afford to ignore it, truth or lie. You wanted to get out of your office, didn‘t you?"

  “Sure,” Durell said. “Did you get the tapes I sent over from the hospital?"

  “I heard it all. So did the boss, and Senator Hugo and an assortment of generals and admirals. The consensus is that it‘s all hogwash. Nobody has an ICBM ready yet.”

  “Sukinin said they have it.”

  McFee’s mouth was like a small trap, and he laughed without mirth. “The Pentagon brass is running around like decapitated chickens. Their pride is injured. They've squabbled between themselves so long, with each branch jealously fighting for appropriations to carry on their private researches, that they can’t face the fact that a centralized organization working on the one project without competition might have beaten us to it.”

  “Are the Russians ahead of us, then?”

  “Nobody is admitting that.”

  “What do you think, General?”

  “I don’t know. Too much bluster and bellow here to tell. All I got was a lecture on the complexity of defense against an ICBM. All about dealing with a weapon going at a speed and altitude probably above mach twenty—that‘s twelve thousand to fifteen thousand miles per hour—and above five hundred miles in height. And the time for defense is measured in seconds.” McFee shook his head. “Maybe we’ve got it, too. Maybe not. But it’s for sure we’re not pushing any buttons. And Sukinin says they will, while they’ve got the chance and think they're ahead."

  Durell lit a cigarette and waited. McFee snapped on a switch that started the air conditioner. He hated smoking, but he did not verbally object to Durell’s.

  “Brief me on Sukinin,“ McFee said. “I know I heard it on the tapes. Let‘s have it filtered through that Cajun mind of yours, Sam."

  Durell blew smoke toward the humming ventilator. The dead man’s whispering went around and around in the back of his mind. “It boils down to a simple thing. Luke Marshall, our man over there, made contact with an underground—that’s what Sukinin said. Hell, we’ve never had an inkling of organized opposition in Moscow’s home territory before. But Sukinin says it’s so. And Luke has their missile bases down on a plot map. And Luke is either sick or wounded or dying. Immobile anyway, trapped in Leningrad. Watched, fettered, and can’t move.”

  Durell stood up, walked to the door, walked back again. He felt lumpy. “Sukinin is an MVD man, but he’s also one of the underground. He says the organization has been opposed to someone in the Politburo who wants to punch a button, Just one, on May Day—and an intercontinental ballistic missile takes off with an H-bomb Warhead and lands somewhere on this side of the world. Not enough to knock us out; they know that. But enough to start us retaliating. Then they send the rest of the ICBMS over. It’s one man’s idea, Sukinin said. A neo-Stalinist gimmick to do away with their ‘collective leadership’ and put one man in the saddle again. A man Sukinin identified only as ‘Z’. Nothing more and nothing less."

  “We’ve gone through their known hierarchy. We didn't find anybody with that initial,” McFee said.

  “I know that, too."

  “Joint Chiefs doesn't believe they have the missile yet.“

  Durell shrugged. “Pay your money and take your choice. Is this a guessing game were in? A game of button-button, or patty-cake?” He felt very angry. “Sukinin knew enough about Luke‘s job over there to convince me. He has a contact all set up for one of us to go over and get Luke out. And help this underground, or whatever it is, to stop Z from punching the button on May Day."

  “Eight days from now,“ McFee said quietly. He was very still, a gray shadow in a gray, windowless room. “I got all the data on the way we contact Luke, from Sukinin’s tapes. Sukinin knew all about you, too. Where did he get it?”

  “From Luke Marshall,” Durell said. “No one else.”

  “Then Sukinin isn‘t lying?”

  “Not for my money."

  McFee said: “Put out that damned cigarette. And go home and shave off the mustache.”

  “There’s one thing,” Durell said.

  “Yes?”

  “Was Sukinin’s auto accident just an accident?”

  “No,” McFee said. “They were watching your place. We’ve already found the ear that killed him. Stolen and ditched. No prints. They were watching for Sukinin to try to reach you. The poor bastard was caught between the devil and the deep, no question about it. Working against us, hiding from the FBI, dropping the mission he was assigned to just to reach you with Luke’s message. Cross and double-cross. It’s all in the day’s work, Sam."

  “It means they’ll expect somebody to go over and reach Luke."

  “That‘s right,” McFee said.

  “They‘ll be waiting for the pigeon."

  “Does it frighten you, Sam?“

  “Sure,” Durell said. “I‘d be a fool if it didn’t."

  McFee nodded. “You’ve got it straight. Sam? Sukinin said there are two factions over there, both illegal. One, headed by Z, wants immediate war because they think they’ve got the jump on us with their ICBM. The other faction—Sukinin’s people—is protecting Luke and opposed to one-man rule again, and war. Both are operating outside the law. You get to Luke and get what he knows. If you can’t get out with it, go to Moscow and reach Alex Holbrook, our man at the Embassy. The code name is Operation Dart. If the thing is authentic, Alex will blow the news to the world. Publicity might stop it. But it’s a devil‘s brew. God help you, Sam.”

  Durell went to the door. “I’ve been tired of my desk for
a long time now, General."

  “I’ll keep it clear for you,” McFee said. “Until after May Day, anyway."

  Durell floated earthward under the black canopy of his chute.

  There came a streak of flame like a sudden orange scar across the black skin of the sky. And there came a scream like that of a thousand banshees and a thunderclap that shook the Russian heavens. It happened very fast. The patrol jet came from nowhere, howled away into the cold night, and except for the light echoing thump that carne to Durell like an afterthought, the thud-thud-thud of its cannon burst, it might never have been.

  Helpless with rage, Durell watched. The DC-3 that had dropped him had completed its swing and was pointed toward the sea. Pointed down now, spilling flame like a gutted barnyard animal.

  Durell twisted in the shrouds of his black parachute, sick anger swelling in him, a coppery taste in his throat. There was nothing he could do. The plane was down at the horizon, still emitting great gouts of fire, and then it crashed into the sea and the flame was snuffed out as if a giant thumb had tweaked the flame of a guttering candle. No more husband for Susie, no more father for the Texas twins.

  The dark sky was silent again.

  New they’ll be waiting for you, Durell told himself. The careful plan was already in jeopardy down there as alert changed to alarm and then search. Nobody would mention the DC-3. It wouldn’t make headlines in the papers back borne. The Soviets wouldn’t mention it either, or do anything to disturb the new era of smiling, friendly enmity.

  But they would look for the foreign spy now, putting two and two together to add up to a manhunt for him. And hack home, McFee would never know what had happened. . . .

  The earth swung under his feet and rushed up to meet him. Here and there through the cold rain he glimpsed a light against the dark loom of fiat dunes and marshland. A dim ribbon went twisting through bunched darkness that had to be trees. He looked for the landmark on which he had been briefed: a crossroad near the electric rail line that took Leningrad’s workers to the seashore resorts, and a dacha set back in a triangular grove near a small stream. He didn’t see any of it. The ground lifted faster now, threatening him. The jet plane was gone. Off on the horizon, a searchlight suddenly stabbed a white finger into the sky and wove a pattern against the low overcast. It was joined by several others. He looked to the left and to the right. A light winked briefly, tiny and feeble against the dunes and fields and woodland. The light went out. He saw the high-speed electric line, the stream, the crossroad. He judged it to be about two miles away.