Rockets' Red Glare

by Greg Dinallo

  “No, Boulton the CIA honch,” McKendrick snapped facetiously, not disappointing him. “It goes to the company, Drew, not the country club.” He paused and added sharply, “ ‘To be sent under anonymous cover in the event I croak under suspicious circumstances.’ That’s a quote, and it’s all I know.”

  “Geezus,” Andrew exclaimed. He hadn’t anticipated the second half of McKendrick’s reply.

  “My sentiments, exactly,” McKendrick said. He winced, thinking Churcher would ream his ass if he wasn’t dead and ever found out McKendrick told Andrew about the package.

  The two men held a look. Andrew broke it off.

  McKendrick fell into a chair, flicking the card key against his thumbnail.

  The exchange had shaken Andrew from his lethargy. He paced anxiously and circled to the desk where he straightened the phone—as if adjusting its position might cause it to ring.

  * * * * * *

  Prior to closing the book on his years in Cuba, GRU agent Valery Gorodin had one last task to carry out. The assignment came directly from the office of the Soviet premier. And Gorodin knew it was undoubtedly the most important of his career—the one that could put him back on the road to membership in nomenklatura.

  For years, direct travel between Cuba and the United States had been indefinitely suspended. Gorodin had been routed through Mexico City, arriving there just after midnight. He spent the evening at the Soviet Embassy on Calzada Tacubaya, securing his cover.

  This meant he had to become familiar with an elaborate new identity—personal history, career background, and reasons for travel—and he had barely eight hours to do it. Memorizing “the legend” was much like cramming for a final exam, and Gordin was a quick study; but using the cover biography, in the offhanded manner of a person who has lived it, was infinitely more difficult.

  To sharpen Gorodin’s responses, GRU personnel who had been acting as his tutors became his interrogators. They grilled him for hours, asking the same questions repeatedly. They forced him into traps, discrepancies, and incriminating silences until the answers came automatically and seemed natural. It was the most intensive eight hours Gorodin had ever spent.

  The following morning, a colleague led him into the bowels of the Embassy and introduced him to the “dry cleaner"—a network of tunnels that branches out from a basement storeroom, providing concealed access to surrounding streets and vice-versa.

  “The Company keeps us under constant movements analysis,” the colleague warned. “They know about these tunnels, too; but the station chief doesn’t have the personnel to monitor each terminus round-the-clock. Let’s hope we picked one he’s not watching today.”

  Gorodin hurried anxiously down the damp narrow passageway. It led to a rickety staircase that came up in an alley behind a bordello on Calle San Jacinta. Gorodin opened the door a crack and peered into the alley. An Embassy driver was waiting in a cab to take him to the airport. A bleary-eyed prostitute was leaning against the door, propositioning the driver. Hooker or CIA case officer? Gorodin wondered. He waited until the driver got rid of her, then pushed aside the sheet metal door and hurried to the taxi.

  The second leg of his journey took Gorodin over the Mexican Gulf. The route reminded him that seven miles below, search and rescue teams were scouring the waters for Theodor Churcher and his helicopter.

  The tires of Mexicana Airlines Flight 730 added their black stripes to runway 37N at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and taxied to the terminal directly.

  The time was 11:40 A.M. when the mechanized boarding ramp swung into position and bit into the side of the jet’s fuselage.

  The passengers spilled into the customs area, gathering around baggage conveyors. A few with canyons proceeded directly to counters where uniformed United States customs agents waited.

  Gorodin was in this group. Time was his adversary now, and he was pleased to have arrived early.

  In sunglasses, white shirt, tie, and rumpled beige suit, he looked every bit the travel-weary businessman. But it had been years since he had operated in the field, alone and undercover.

  A wave of apprehension broke over him as he approached the customs agent. His mouth turned to cotton. A wetness broke out behind his knees.

  Gorodin fought to overcome his anxiety, and nonchalantly tossed his two-suiter onto the counter. He presented a bona fide French passport—one that had been surreptitiously procured, and then washed by GRU counterfeiters.

  The customs agent, a skittish young woman with close-cropped hair, saw “Republique Francais” embossed in gold on the deep maroon cover. “Parlez vous, Anglaise, monsieur?” she asked haltingly.

  “Mais oui, madame,” replied Gorodin. “When in Rome—” he added jovially in English. He was fully prepared to converse in fluent French but gladly accommodated her.

  “Great,” she drawled, “because my French is—” she paused and waggled a hand, then opened his passport and matched face to photo.

  “Where you coming from Mister—Coudray?” she asked, quickly adding, “I say that right?”

  Gorodin nodded amiably, and leaned on the counter.

  “Mexico City,” he replied.

  “City of embarkation was Paris?”

  Gorodin nodded again.

  “And you’re going to?”

  “Dallas, New York, Paris.”

  “Business?”

  “Oui, madame,” he replied, purposely slipping into French.

  “Okay,” she drawled, tapping his bag. “Would you open that for me, please?”

  Gorodin popped the latches of the two-suiter. His hands were sweaty, and his fingers left smudges on the chrome. He split the halves of the bag and dried his palms in his pockets.

  The agent poked through the clothing, seemingly disinterested. But her eyes alertly recorded the labels of French manufacturers on most of the garments. She paused and fingered one curiously.

  Gorodin’s heart quickened. His mind leapt to all the disastrous possibilities: Had the label been improperly sewn? Had he been given a shirt much too small for him? Had she spotted some silly oversight that had cast suspicion on him?

  “Cardin. Great stuff,” she said. “Bought the same shirt for my husband. He loves it.” She smiled and flipped the bag closed.

  Gorodin nodded, and felt somewhat relieved. He was thinking that the hours at the Embassy in Mexico City had been well spent when she made an offhanded observation that threatened to unnerve him. “Your accent, if you don’t mind me saying it,” she remarked, “sure doesn’t sound French.”

  She’s right! Gorodin thought. Despite his language skills, the years in Cuba had imparted a decidedly Latin flavor to his English. Even his Russian had been slightly tainted.

  “I am a Basque,” he replied proudly, as if he’d been saying it all his life. He snapped the latches on the suitcase closed, punctuating his reply.

  The agent stamped his passport and returned it.

  “Have a nice day, Mr. Coudray,” she said in a singsong cadence. Gorodin slipped the passport into a pocket, and forced a smile in response to her rhyme. Then, he slid his bag from the counter, and walked quickly into the long tunnel that led to the terminal.

  There was a new confidence in Gorodin’s stride. Yes, yes, it was good to be back, he thought—back closer to the edge, thinking on his feet, winging it resourcefully. He was hurrying past a newsstand when he noticed headlines proclaiming—"CHURCHER STILL MISSING IN GULF.”

  Outside, he threw his bag into a dusty Chevy wagon on the arrivals ramp and jumped in next to the GRU driver, a powerfully built young agent named Vanik.

  The car pulled away immediately, heading south for U.S. 45, the arrow-straight freeway that connects Dallas, Houston, and Galveston.

  The drive to Houston would take approximately four and one half hours. Gorodin would have preferred to fly. But no connecting flight meant no record of M. Coudray ever having gone to Houston. And Gorodin wanted this last task to be as clean as po
ssible.

  “Everything’s being arranged,” Vanik said.

  “Good,” Gorodin replied. “We have to move fast.”

  They spoke in Russian.

  The long drive ended at an abandoned ranch in desolate country outside Houston. They immediately entered a ramshackle barn where a third man was painting a mobile cherry picker to resemble a Houston County Gas & Electric service truck. That evening Gorodin pored over the photographs of Churcher’s estate Vanik had taken from the Piper, and began solidifying the plan to break into the underground museum.

  * * * * * *

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dinh Tran Xuyen and his family lived in a steel Quonset hut, one of thousands of makeshift structures dotting the countless islands and estuaries along the Gulf coast of southeastern Louisiana where colonies of homesteaders had sprung up. Most were immigrant fishermen from Southeast Asia who found that the climate and ecological makeup of the area closely resembled the land they had left behind.

  Dinh had come to the United States in the mid-seventies with the members of his family who’d survived the war. They started a fishing business and made a living netting menhaden—the yellow-finned members of the herring family which run in large schools in Gulf waters, and are more commonly known as bony fish.

  But Dinh wasn’t fishing this night. The deck of his forty-two-foot trawler was piled high with discarded refrigerators, bathtubs, and assorted car parts as he headed out into the Gulf. Dinh, his brother-in-law, and their teenage sons ferried the junk into the Gulf and heaved it over the side, marking the spot with an inexpensive navigation device. The submerged Lorans unit emitted a radio signal that would guide them to precisely the same spot with their next load. Indeed, they weren’t scuttling junk, but rather building a reef on which vegetation and inert sea life that would attract fish would grow.

  Dinh and his family were hoisting the dismantled carcass of a Volkswagen over the side when the fog bank suddenly shifted. The search-light of a cruising Coast Guard patrol boat pierced the darkness and found them.

  “Shut down your engines and prepare to be boarded,” the captain barked over the loudspeaker.

  Dinh flicked a look to the others and shook no sharply.

  This had always been his fear, and he made a habit of working under the cover of darkness and fog to avoid it. Dumping wasn’t illegal—dumping without a permit was. And like most Gulf fisherman, Dinh didn’t file for one because the precise location of his reef would be marked on charts of local waters, an open invitation to poachers who’d rather fish someone else’s reef than build their own.

  Dinh and the others quickly muscled the old VW over the side. The instant it hit the water, he punched the boat’s throttles home and headed for another fog bank about a mile away.

  The cutter accelerated and pursued.

  But Dinh’s boat disappeared in the dense haze before the cutter could catch it. The captain watched the blip on his radar screen, and decided the fog was too thick to continue pursuit safely.

  Dinh kept his throttles to the wall to put as much water between the two vessels as possible. The boat had raced a few miles through the fog when Dinh spotted something dead ahead in the water. He turned the wheel hard, putting the boat into a sharp high-speed turn.

  Thirty-six hours had passed since Churcher had climbed onto the piece of floating debris from his helicopter. He’d been carried northward by the South Equatorial current, finally catching the curling flow of the Mississippi River that spun him inland toward the Louisiana coast.

  The sharply turning vessel sideswiped the piece of debris, knocking Churcher into the water. Then the stern whipped around right over him, and the propeller bit into his left arm, severing it just below the elbow. He was suffering from exposure and dehydration, and hovered on the edge of consciousness, but he let out a long, piercing scream nonetheless.

  Dinh heard it and throttled back the engines, circling the boat while his brother-in-law panned a searchlight across the choppy surface. They quickly found Churcher and plucked him from the water.

  Dinh reacted instinctively the instant he saw Churcher’s wound. After the bombings, booby traps, and napalm of the Vietnam War, this wasn’t the first severed limb he’d seen.

  “Get the first-aid kit,” he shouted to one of his sons; then, turning to his brother-in-law, ordered, “Head for home, wide open!”

  Dinh ripped open the plastic case his son brought from the cabin, removed a length of rubber tubing, tied it tightly around Churcher’s bicep, stemming the flow of blood; then went about bandaging the stump. All the while his brother-in-law had the boat at full throttle heading for the village where they lived.

  It was close to midnight when the boat pulled up to a swaybacked dock built on angled stilts that marched into the placid Delta waters.

  Dinh’s wife ran from the Quonset hut to greet them. She was stunned to see the two men lifting Churcher’s lifeless form out of the boat.

  “What happened? Is he alive?” she asked as she helped them.

  “Barely,” Dinh replied. “Propeller.”

  “I’ll get the pickup,” she said, assuming they would take him to the hospital.

  Apprehensive looks flicked between the two men. But there was no need for discussion. Neither wanted to deal with the authorities who would want to know where they were and what they were doing when the accident occurred.

  “No!” Dinh shouted, grasping his wife’s arm to stop her. “Get Doctor Phan.”

  Giang Phan had been a fully accredited physician in Vietnam, and served as a battlefield surgeon. The immigrant families trusted him. He knew their customs, spoke their language, and cared for them. But he had not yet been licensed to practice in Louisiana.

  Churcher lay pale and unconscious on a mattress on the floor of the Quonset hut as Doctor Phan examined him.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said. “He needs a transfusion. He’ll die without it. And I don’t even have the equipment to type his blood, let alone access to supplies to replenish it.”

  “We can’t take him to the hospital,” Dinh said forcefully. “We can’t. Besides, he might die there anyway. Just do your best.”

  The doctor let out a weary breath. “I’ll need a dish or a plate,” he said to Dinh’s wife. “Line up over here,” he ordered the assembled group when she returned with it. Then, pricking the forefinger of each, he “field typed” Churcher’s blood—mixing samples from the potential donors with a drop of Churcher’s blood on the plate until he found one that blended smoothly and didn’t clump, which meant they were the same type.

  A direct, donor-to-patient transfusion was made.

  Then Dr. Phan turned his attention to Churcher’s crudely severed forearm. “I don’t know,” he said dismayed at the state of it. “I just don’t know.”

  * * * * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  Four days had passed since Gisela Pomerantz rattled President Hilliard and Keating with her query about the Soviet Heron missile system.

  Following the NATO luncheon, Keating and Hilliard discussed the subject in the limousine on the way to Capitol Hill. The President was scheduled to meet with auto industry leaders who had been pressing for import quotas, and he was in a testy mood. The three CEOs were averaging just under six million dollars a year, each, in compensation. For that kind of money, Hilliard thought, they should solve their own problems.

  “Talk to me, Phil,” he ordered curtly.

  “I don’t know what to say. According to the NIE, the Heron was tested, failed, and never deployed,” Keating replied, citing the National Intelligence Estimate, a top secret evaluation of the military and economic status of all foreign nations.

  “When was all that?” the President shot back.

  “Last test monitored—July of seventy-five. We’ve seen nothing of it since.”

  “Not like the Russians to scrap an entire missile system, Phil,” Hilliard pressed. “I mean, I’ve waded through more NIEs than I can count
. The bottom line is, they just can’t afford it.”

  “Maybe they had no choice.”

  “Come on, Phil,” Hilliard admonished.

  “I know, I know. No maybes,” Keating responded defensively. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Goose Jake,” Hilliard instructed. “It’s Langley’s responsibility. Set something up. Saturday. Oval office. Afternoon. Clear it with Cathleen.”

  Now, President Hilliard and Chief Negotiator Keating sat in the Oval Office in the White House awaiting the arrival of Jake Boulton, director of Central Intelligence.

  The President kicked back in his chair, put a foot against the desk, and propelled himself toward the window that overlooks the Rose Garden. When the chair stopped rolling, Hilliard swiveled, stood, and studied the bulletproof panes for a moment. The temperature outside was so cold that the inside surfaces of the five-and-one-half-inch-thick glass were lightly dusted with frost. Hilliard drew a face on one of the green-tinged panes with a fingertip—a circle for the head, three dots for the eyes and nose. He was about to draw the mouth when he took his finger from the glass and turned to Keating. “Before Jake gets here, run down the last couple of days for me, will you?”

  “Well, it’s gone pretty much as we anticipated,” Keating replied. “All the NATO folks are eager as hell to get out of the deployment game, that’s for sure. But they want assurances. Thatcher still has daily antinuke marches in front of Ten Downing. Same for the Italian’s over the cruise installation in Sicily.”

  “I know,” Hilliard said. “It’s been giving Minister Borsa grief since the day he approved it.”

  “He’s been up against more than protestors lately.”

  The President nodded knowingly. “I saw the antiterrorist memorandum. Far as I’m concerned, NATO can’t tighten the security screws enough. Anything else?”

  “Well, the Belgians have been breathing easy since we’ve postponed. But they’re still terrified the talks’ll fail, and they’ll be forced to deploy. Ditto for the Norwegians, and Dutch who are both—”