Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “Thank you, Diego,” she said, pleased. She picked up the photographs and placed them together in the same envelope. “You've been a tremendous help.”

  Diego shrugged. “No problem,” he said. He looked at the materials Lauren was packing. “What else you got?” he asked.

  “That’s pretty much all,” Lauren answered. “Do you have anything else that might interest me?

  Diego thought about it, then offered an unconvincing, “No.” His eyes settled on the other file in Lauren’s lap.

  “What’s in the other envelope?” he asked. “Better not be a legal paper.”

  Lauren switched back to English. “Gruesome stuff. Death scene in Maryland. Car crash.”

  “Can I look?”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? I’m curious. And I want to make sure you don’t have a legal paper to tack to my door because if you do I might shoot you.”

  He glanced at the shotgun.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t be that way,” she said. “I’m being honest with you.”

  “Then show me.”

  “Oka,” she said.

  “Good. That’s smart,” he said. “You’re a smart girl.”

  She opened the envelope. She pulled out the car crash pictures from Maryland. Ramirez looked at them with no more than a slight wince. He had surely seen worse on battlefields in South Vietnam. Then, “Oh, what the hell? I get it,” he said.

  “Get what?”

  “The defector. Shit! This is what finally happened to him?”

  “What defector?” Lauren asked.

  “The one that David Charles was coddling,” Ramirez said. “The Russian Lukashenko. They announced that he’d been sent back to the Soviet Union. I knew better, although I don’t think Mr. Rudawski ever knew about it. They froze Rudawski out after David Charles left.

  “Diego,” Lauren asked in a low, astonished voice. “What are you telling me? The man who was killed in this car crash was the defector? Lukashenko?”

  “That's Lukashenko,” said Ramirez, putting a thick finger on the bloody headshot. “That's the guy David Charles was trying to get to the United States.” He paused. “What happened? Who offed him? Someone run him off the road? Russians? The Commies kill him?” He joked: “A sourpuss ex-wife back in Leningrad?”

  Several seconds of stunned silence passed. Ramirez filled it by reaching for his smokes and setting one on fire. Lauren spoke again. “We don’t know,” Lauren said. “But we’d like to.”

  “Be careful, mi amiga. It never turns out good, these things, does it?” Diego asked.

  “No,” Lauren answered. “Not usually.”

  “People get killed in funny ways,” Diego warned.

  Lauren nodded. Then, by waiting a moment, she broke through the final barrier.

  “Okay, look,” Diego said. “This defector was hiding somewhere in Paris. CIA safehouse, I guess. Everybody made a big fuss that he’d been hauled back to Moscow and shot. Well, I heard different. Lance Corporal Underground: the other Marines in security. They knew stuff and they told me. Some poor bastard got hauled back to Moscow in his place. The CIA set it up and then some Agency guys arrived from Langley. Couple of condescending bastards. Real pricks. I was assigned to be their driver. First thing they did was start barking orders at me. I wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone other than them. They told me to get a real sidearm and load it. If anyone stopped our car I was supposed to use the gun. This was ‘top table’ stuff, they said, puffing themselves up a few notches. We drove around and made sure we were clean. There was a crash car in front of us. French police had a plain car following us, also. Black Citroen like de Gaulle used. Right on my rear bumper: it was on us like ugly on an ape,” he said.

  Lauren tried to make notes but gave up. Ramirez was explaining too rapidly.

  “We went to this safe house in an expensive neighborhood near the Arc of Triumph. I stayed at the wheel. The CIA guys hustled into this brick building. Holding their guns at their side, really expecting heavy trouble. They come quick-stepping out with Lukashenko, acting like all hell is going to break loose. The Agency guys handcuffed him to a special bar in the car. He couldn’t jump out and no one could pull him out. They told me to drive to the airport. Fast! I started south toward Orly and the two CIA pricks yelled at me. They said, ‘No! No, the military airport, you spic jerkoff!’ How was I supposed to know? I said, ‘What the fuck? I didn’t know there was a US military airport!’ They said there wasn’t one: we were going to a French air force base southwest of Paris. ‘Where the hell’s that?” I asked. They yelled the directions at me, as if they’re the experts and I’m the dumb hired help. I drove them out to their air base.”

  “Do you remember the name of it?”

  “Vivvy Very Something. I don’t know. All the French sounded the same to me, like names of cheeses.”

  “Okay, good. Go on,” Lauren said.

  “All these noisy Mirage fighters were flying in and out,” Ramirez resumed. “It was a kick, the aircraft, but I should have had me some earplugs. There was an unmarked Air America 727 there. That’s the CIA airline. Any fool knew that. No logo on the silver bird but you could tell by the numbers on the tail rudder. I was told to drive right up on the tarmac. I did. Some French military police waved us through, expecting us. The two suits hustled Lukashenko out of the car, threw an overcoat over him, two more security hoods bracket him. Big stupid Polish guys with shitty haircuts. They hustled him up the ramp. Last time I ever saw Lukashenko until now when I see these pictures of him with his head bashed in. The CIA guys told me never to talk about this while I still wore a Marine uniform. It never happened. I said, sure. I didn’t see nothing. I’m just a dumbfuck Latino, right? Get it, guys? I’m barely smart enough to swim to Miami from San Juan. Just leave me alone. They got all warm and cuddly then and tried to apologize, kept saying it was top drawer stuff. I just said, sure, sure. Hey, screw ‘em!” he said.

  He paused.

  “Air Fucking America. Excuse my language. But I knew this Russian guy must have been someone important to rate that.”

  “Was it a small plane? A large plane?”

  “Big one. I figured they were going to Washington. He paused as if decided whether to add something. “Know what else?” he asked.

  “What else, Diego?”

  “At the top of the steps to the airplane, waiting for Lukashenko, David Charles. Right there in the flesh. Hand extended, greeting the Russian. Puts his arm around him and takes him aboard the plane.”

  Lauren gazed upon her witness and felt a surge of goose bumps.

  “You’re kidding me,” she finally muttered.

  “Nope. I wouldn’t do that,” Diego said.

  She looked at the photograph again.

  “What else?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “That’s all of it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Seguro, Señora Lauren Richie. Es todo.”

  She stood to leave. “Thank you again,” she said.

  “May God smile upon your family,” he said.

  “And yours also.” They exchanged hands. Then, when that wasn’t enough, a hug. She walked toward the door. Then, “Hey!” he called after her. She turned. “I’m glad I didn’t have to shoot you,” he said.

  “That makes two of us.”

  *****

  She walked back to the car where Cooper waited. His pistol was across his lap, a just-in-case position. The windows were down first to admit a breeze through the car, second so that he could hear.

  “How did you do?” he asked.

  “First admit that Spanish is a useful language,” she said.

  “You win.”

  “Bueno,” she said. “As for Diego, muchas informaciónes interesantes.”

  Lauren related what Diego Ramirez had told her as they drove back to New York.

  “If Lukashenko actually got to the United States,” Lauren
said, “that whole interplay of who trusted Nosenko and who didn’t perhaps explains itself.”

  “Maybe,” Cooper said. “Maybe. I want to look at the timing.” He paused. “Jesus,” he said. “What would I do without you? You just struck gold, you know.”

  “I know,” she said.

  After a moment, “I guess I should take Spanish lessons,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  Chapter 70

  The next morning Cooper phoned Topher Wilson in New York, doing what he could to authenticate Ramirez’s story. Cooper asked Topher to run as much as he could against the files in Lou’s mainframe computer. “And do me a favor, Topher,” Cooper said. “When you call me back, do it from a phone booth.”

  When Topher phoned back, he was in a noisy booth at a Hamburger Heaven at 44th Street and Lexington Avenue. With the clatter and rattle of midday crowds in the background, the details of Ramirez’s story stumbled into place.

  All of them.

  “Vivvy Very Something. I don’t know. All the French sounded the same to me, like names of cheeses,” the former Marine had said.

  Even that worked. The Vélizy–Villacoublay Air Base, “Vivvy Very Something” in Diego’s word, was the biggest and most secure French military base near Paris. It was located two miles southeast of the town of Vélizy-Villacoublay, about eight miles southwest of Paris.

  Southeast by southwest: in context, even that made sense. And so did the two Agency visitors that Ramirez had described. A solid straightforward working guy, Ramirez had held the same qualified opinion of the type that Rudawski, the intellectual, had held: mulish and obnoxious but never in doubt.

  Cooper listened to what Topher related on French military and intelligence security of the mid-1960s. Vélizy-Villacoublay had been captured by the Nazis in 1940. It had been used as a Luftwaffe military airfield during World War Two. American bombers had attacked it on several occasions during 1943 and early 1944. Then it was captured by Allied ground forces on August 27th, 1944 as the long bloody endgame took shape in Western Europe.

  Immediately, American forces began cleared the base of mines. They destroyed Luftwaffe aircraft, and Vélizy-Villacoublay became a USAAF Ninth Air Force combat base only a few days after its capture from German forces.

  After the war ended, Villacoublay remained under American control. It was rebuilt under the Marshall Plan with Yankee dollars and was in use as a U.S. Air Force transport base until August 31, 1946 when the Americans returned to the French Air Force. Air America, the CIA’s private line, had been the prime tenant ever since, mostly as a venue for transportations that were too dicey for normal commercial aircraft or even military carriers.

  In every way, Cooper concluded, Diego’s account of Lukashenko’s travel to the United States made perfect sense. Why it had ended as it had was the new enigma.

  Topher rang off. Cooper and Lauren began with the most burning question: where in the world was David Charles?

  Then, as they prepared to return to the city, Topher phoned again from New York. Jim Hubbell, the widow of the slain woman in Fort Myers, had phoned in.

  “Investigative reporters earn their chops on ‘out of the blue’ calls,” Cooper said to Lauren. “Know what Walter Winchell used to say? He said, ‘Most of the stuff I print is stuff that someone once told me to keep secret.’”

  She grinned. Lesson learned.

  Cooper returned the call immediately to Jim Hubbell. “Yes, Jim?” Cooper said, not knowing what to expect. “How are things down there on the hot, muggy peninsula?”

  “Well, things are fine in Florida, sir,” Hubbell said. “But I been doing some thinking about some of the stuff you told me about,” Hubbell said. “You got kind of a point.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cooper asked.

  “Can't really tell you on the phone,” Hubbell said. “But my Peggy had all these theories, you know. Like we talked about, you and me. You know, she read all this stuff I was showing you. I thought she was just playing around with the theories. Guess not,” he said.

  “Jim, where are you?” Cooper asked with growing interest. “Do you remember what we talked about? About telephones?”

  “Yes, sir. I remember,” he said. “I remember real well.”

  He had taken several precautions, he explained. He had sent his daughter to stay with his sister in Alabama on a remote farm. He had taken up residence with an old army buddy in Bradenton. And he'd taken to driving to work each day with pair of loaded police revolvers in the car with him, weapons he also kept on his person when he worked, one on his belt, the companion piece on his ankle. It was the perfect metaphor, Cooper thought idly, for business in the mid-1960s: firepower ready always. But then again, this wasn't ordinary business.

  Hubbell had also taken the most basic precaution. He was in a phone booth at a doughnut shop owned by a friend. And though he was jittery about talking anywhere he could say a little. “I got some stuff I might like to show you, Mr. Cooper,” Hubbell said. “That's if you could fly down again.”

  “We can drive down, Jim,” Cooper said. “That keeps us under everyone’s radar. And we’re already in South Carolina. Just convince me over the phone that it's worth my time. Is it?”

  “My Peggy, I think she was fussing around with something crazy,” Hubbell said. He paused. Then, “Ever heard of something called 'Project Brontosaurus'?”

  Chapter 71

  In Enid, Oklahoma, George Wallace was on one of his final campaign swings.

  Before a tepid crowd of about three thousand Wallace was having trouble getting some fireworks going. He spotted, however, a group a several hundred well behaved young men and women in one area. Some had long hair. They carried signed with Biblical quotations, such as such as, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a flowing stream. Wash out Wallace."

  The ex-governor turned on them. He pointed to them and likened them to the “hippies who fly the Viet Cong flag and raise blood and funds for communist forces in the Viet Nam war.” He continually singled them out and tried to provoke them.

  They wouldn’t react.

  “Who the hell were those smug little brats?” he asked later as he headed to the airport to catch a plane to Detroit. It turned out they were students at Phillips University, a private institution in Enid, Oklahoma that trained minsters for the First Christian Church, a conservative, fundamentalist denomination.

  In Detroit that night at Cobo Hall, however, Wallace got what he wanted.

  Brawling broke out even before Wallace arrived. Another fistfight began during the playing of the National Anthem. While some in the audience were singing, “And the home of the brave,” other Wallace supporters started to pummel a group of demonstrators and tear their signs. Police used a chemical spray to break up the melee.

  As it began, it continued. Wallace was only twenty-five seconds into his speech, the part in which he introduces a group of Alabama labor figures traveling with him, when he unleashed his first taunt at the hecklers. As soon as he began, however, another flurry of fist fights broke out on the arena floor. Wallace supporters and some of several thousand hecklers met like a pair of ragtag armies, initially with the fists and then with folding chairs and placard standards.

  Police arrested a dozen hecklers. Wallace supporters struck handcuffed detainees as they were being led away by police, who did not interfere. One plainclothes policeman, using a pair of handcuffs as brass knuckles, cut the face of a heckler who shoved him.

  Reporters circulating in the crowd ran into frequent encounters with Wallace supporters, but police - both uniform and plainclothes - were always close by. Marty Friedkin was jostled several times and shoved to the floor once. By now he was getting used to it. Stepping away from the press area as the rally concluded, he was sucker punched from behind and stunned.

  He fell.

  For a minute, he lost consciousness. He was aware of being helped by police and two people in civilian clothes. But he was dazed and
unable to speak, pain thumping in the back of his head.

  “You okay?” a cop asked.

  “I think so. Maybe.” He reached to the back of his head. “Am I bleeding?” he asked.

  The policeman shook his head.

  “Anyone see who hit me?”

  The policeman shook his head again. Friedkin remained on the convention floor.

  “You got what you deserved, Hymie,” a passer-by said. The cops shooed the man away.

  Then a man in a jacket and khakis crouched down next to Friedkin. The man took Friedkin’s press credential in his hand, read it, and released it.

  “New York Eagle, huh?” the man asked.

  “Correct,” Friedkin answered.

  “Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Friedkin? You can get some ice and sit for a little. How’s that sound?”

  The man had an accent of the Old Confederacy.

  “Okay,” Friedkin said, still mildly dazed. “That sounds good. Thank you.”

  “I’m Deke Moreland,” the man said. “I’m with Governor Wallace.”

  “You work for him?”

  “No. I’m with him.”

  The police officer and Moreland helped Friedkin to his feet.

  “Terrible when things like this happen,” Moreland said. “Folks get all excited.”

  “Maybe your guy shouldn’t whip them up like that, then,” Friedkin suggested.

  “Not the governor’s fault. People are angry with what’s happening in America.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  Friedkin’s skull pounded. “I’m upset with what’s happening in this country, too, but I don’t go around punching and kicking people,” he said.

  “Come along,” Moreland said kindly. “Some ice and some sit-down will do you good.”

  Police moved in. The auditorium floor bordered on chaos. Security advised Wallace to leave. Wallace made a hurried conclusion to his remarks. Police whisked him away from the podium and other police tried to separate the battling groups in attendance.