“Bow planes to zero, level out.”
“Planes to zero, Captain ... zero angle on the boat.”
Had there been enough overhead room, Dubinin would have leaped off his feet. He’d just done what no other Soviet submarine commander—and if his intelligence information was right, only a handful of Americans—had ever done. He’d established contact with and tracked an American Ohio-class fleet ballistic-missile submarine. In a war situation he’d be able to fire off ranging pings with his active sonar and launch torpedoes. He’d stalked the world’s most elusive game, and was close enough for a killing shot. His skin tingled from the excitement of the moment. Nothing in the world could match this feeling. Nothing at all.
“Ryl nepravo,” he said next. “Right rudder, new course three-zero-zero. Increase speed slowly to ten knots.”
“But, Captain ...” his Starpom—executive officer—said.
“We’re breaking contact. He’ll continue this drill for at least thirty minutes. It is very unlikely that we can evade counterdetection when he concludes it. Better to leave now. We do not want him to know what we have done. We will meet this one again. In any case our mission is accomplished. We have tracked him, and we got close enough to launch our attack. At Petropavlovsk, men, there will be much drinking, and your captain will do the buying! Now let’s clear the area quietly so that he will not know that we were ever here.”
Captain Robert Jefferson Jackson wished he was younger, wished that his hair was still completely black, that he could again be a young “nugget” fresh from Pensacola, ready to take his first hop in one of the forbidding fighter aircraft that sat like enormous birds of prey along the flight line at Oceana Naval Air Station. That all twenty-four of the F-14D Tomcats in the immediate area were his was not as satisfying as the knowledge that one was his and his alone. Instead, as Commander Air Group, he “owned” two Tomcat squadrons, two more of F/A- 18 Hornets, one of A-6E Intruder medium-attack aircraft, another of S-3 submarine hunters, and finally the less glamorous tankers, electronic-warfare Prowlers, and rescue/ASW helicopters. A total of seventy-eight birds with an aggregate value of ... what? A billion dollars? Much more if you considered replacement cost. Then there were the three thousand men who flew and serviced the aircraft, each of whom was beyond price, of course. He was responsible for all of it. It was much more fun to be a new fighter pilot who drove his personal airplane and left the worrying to management. Robby was now management, the guy the kids talked about in their cabins on the ship. They didn’t want to be called into his office, because that was like going to see the Principal. They didn’t really like flying with him, because (A) he was too old to be good at it anymore (they thought), and (B) he’d tell them whatever he thought they were doing wrong (fighter pilots do not often admit mistakes, except among themselves).
There was a certain irony to it. His previous job had been in the Pentagon, pushing papers. He’d prayed and lusted for release from that job, whose main excitement every day was finding a decent parking spot. Then he’d gotten command of his air wing—and been stuck with more admin crap than he’d ever faced in his life. At least he got to fly twice a week—if he was lucky. Today was such a day. His command master chief petty officer gave him a grin on the way out the door.
“Mind the store, Master Chief.”
“Roger that, skipper. It’ll be here when you get back.”
Jackson stopped in his tracks. “You can have someone steal all the paperwork.”
“I’ll see what I can do, sir.”
A staff car took him to the flight line. Jackson was already in his Nomex flight suit, an old smelly one whose olive-drab color was faded from many washings, and threadbare at the elbows and seat from years of use. He could and should have gotten a new one, but pilots are superstitious creatures; Robby and this flight suit had been through a lot together.
“Hey, skipper!” called one of his squadron commanders.
Commander Bud Sanchez was shorter than Jackson. His olive skin and Bismarck mustache accentuated bright eyes and a grin right out of a toothpaste commercial. Sanchez, Commanding Officer of VF-1, would fly Jackson’s wing today. They’d flown together when Jackson had commanded VF-41 off the John F. Kennedy. “Your bird is all dialed in. Ready to kick a little ass?”
“Who’s the opposition today?”
“Some jarheads out of Cherry Point in -18-Deltas. We got a Hummer already orbiting a hundred miles out, and the exercise is BARCAP against low-level intruders.” BARCAP meant Barrier Combat Air Patrol. The mission was to prevent attacking aircraft from crossing a line that they were not supposed to cross. “Up to some heavy ACM? Those Marines sounded a little cocky over the phone.”
“The Marine I can’t take ain’t been born yet,” Robby said as he pulled his helmet off the rack. It bore his call sign, Spade.
“Hey, you RIOs,” Sanchez called, “quit holdin’ hands and let’s get it on!”
“On the way, Bud.” Michael “Lobo” Alexander came from around the lockers, followed by Jackson’s radar-intercept officer, Henry “Shredder” Walters. Both were under thirty, both lieutenants. In the locker room, people talked by call sign rather than rank. Robby loved the fellowship of squadron life as much as he loved his country.
Outside, the plane captains—petty officers—who were responsible for maintaining the aircraft walked the officers to their respective birds and helped them aboard. (On the dangerous area of a carrier flight deck, pilots are led virtually by the hand by enlisted men, lest they get lost or hurt.) Jackson’s bird had a double-zero ID number on the nose. Under the cockpit was painted “CAPT R.J. Jackson ‘SPADE’ ” to make sure that everyone knew that this was the CAG’s bird. Under that was a flag representing a MiG-29 fighter aircraft that an Iraqi had mistakenly flown too close to Jackson’s Tomcat not so long before. There hadn’t been much to it—the other pilot had forgotten, once, to check his “six” and paid the price—but a kill was a kill, and kills were what fighter pilots lived for.
Five minutes later, all four men were strapped in, and engines were turning.
“How are you this morning, Shredder?” Jackson asked over his intercom.
“Ready to waste some Marines, skipper. Lookin’ good back here. Is this thing gonna fly today?”
“Guess it’s time to find out.” Jackson switched to radio. “Bud, this is Spade, ready here.”
“Roger, Spade, you have the lead.” Both pilots looked around, got an all-clear from their plane captains, and looked around again.
“Spade has the lead.” Jackson tripped his brakes. “Rolling now.”
“Hello, mein Schatz,” Manfred Fromm said to his wife.
Traudl rushed forward to embrace him. “Where have you been?”
“That I cannot say,” Fromm replied with a knowing twinkle in his eye. He hummed a few bars from Lloyd Webber’s “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”
“I knew you would see,” Traudl beamed at him.
“You must not talk of this.” To confirm her suspicion he handed her a wad of banknotes, five packets of ten thousand D-Marks each. That should keep the mercenary bitch quiet and happy, Manfred Fromm told himself. “And I will only be here overnight. I had some business to do, and of course—”
“Of course, Manfred.” She hugged him again, the money in her hands. “If only you had called!”
Arrangements had been absurdly easy to make. A ship outbound for Latakia, Syria, was sailing from Rotterdam in seventy hours. He and Bock had arranged for a commercial trucking company to load the machine tools into a small cargo container which would be loaded on the ship and unloaded onto a Syrian dock in six more days. It would have been faster to send the tools by air, or even by rail to a Greek or Italian port for faster transshipment by sea, but Rotterdam was the world’s busiest port, with overworked customs officials whose main task was searching for drug shipments. Sniffer dogs could go over that particular container to their hearts’ content.
Fromm let his wife go into the kit
chen to make coffee. It would take a few minutes, and that was all he needed. He walked down into his basement. In the corner, as far from the water heater as was possible, was an orderly pile of lumber, on top of which were four black metal boxes. Each weighed about ten kilograms, about twenty-five pounds. Fromm carried one at a time—on the second trip, he got a pair of gloves from his bureau drawer to protect his hands—and placed them in the trunk of his rented BMW. By the time the coffee was ready, his task was complete.
“You have a fine tan,” Traudl observed, carrying the tray out from the kitchen. In her mind she’d already spent about a quarter of the money her husband had given her. So Manfred had seen the light. She’d known he would, sooner or later. Better that it should be sooner. She’d be especially nice to him tonight.
“Günther?”
Bock didn’t like leaving Fromm to his own devices, but he also had a task to perform. This was a far greater risk. It was, he told himself, a high-risk operational concept, even if the real dangers were in the planning stage, which was both an oddity and a relief.
Erwin Keitel lived on a pension, and not an especially comfortable one at that. Its necessity came from two facts. First, he was a former Lieutenant Colonel in the East German Stasi, the intelligence and counterintelligence arm of the defunct German Democratic Republic; second, he had liked his work of thirty-two years. Whereas most of his former colleagues had acknowledged the changes in their country and for the most part put their German identity ahead of whatever ideology they’d once held—and told literally everything they knew to the Bundesnachrichtendienst—Keitel had decided that he was not going to work for capitalists. That made him one of the “politically unemployed” citizens of the united Germany. His pension was a matter of convenience. The new German government honored, after a fashion, pre-existing government obligations. It was at the least politically expedient, and what Germany now was, was a matter of daily struggling with facts that were not and could not be reconciled. It was easier to give Keitel a pension than to leave him on the official dole, which was deemed more demeaning than a pension. By the government, that is. Keitel didn’t see things quite that way. If the world made any sense at all, he thought, he would have been executed or exiled—exactly where he might have been exiled to, Keitel didn’t know. He’d begun to consider going over to the Russians—he’d had good contacts in the KGB—but that thought had died a quick death. The Soviets had washed their hands of everything to do with the DDR, fearing treachery from people whose allegiance to world socialism—or whatever the hell the Russians stood for now, Keitel had no idea—was somewhat less than their allegiance to their new country. Keitel took his seat beside Bock’s in the corner booth of a quiet Gasthaus in what had formerly been East Berlin.
“This is very dangerous, my friend.”
“I am aware of that, Erwin.” Bock waved for two liter glasses of beer. Service was quicker than it had been a few years before, but both men ignored that.
“I cannot tell you how I feel about what they did to Petra,” Keitel said after the girl left them.
“Do you know exactly what happened?” Bock asked in a level and emotionless voice.
“The detective who ran the case visited her in prison—he did so quite often—not for interrogation. They made a conscious effort to push her over the edge. You must understand, Günther, courage in a man or a woman is a finite quality. It was not weakness on her part. Anyone can break. It is simply a matter of time. They watched her die,” the retired colonel said.
“Oh?” Bock’s face didn’t change, but his knuckles went white on the stein handle.
“There was a television camera hidden in her cell. They have her suicide on videotape. They watched her do it, and did nothing to stop her.”
Bock didn’t say anything, and the room was too dim to see how pale his face went. It was as though a hot blast from a furnace swept over him, followed by one from the North Pole. He closed his eyes for a brief second to get control of himself. Petra would not have wished him to be governed by emotion at a time like this. He opened his eyes to look at his friend.
“Is that a fact?”
“I know the name of the detective. I know his address. I still have friends,” Keitel assured Bock.
“Yes, Erwin, I am sure you do. I need your help to do something.”
“Anything.”
“You know, of course, what brought us to this.”
“That depends on how you mean it,” Keitel said. “The people disappointed me in the way they allowed themselves to be seduced, but the common people always lack the discipline to know what is good for them. The real cause of our national misfortune....”
“Precisely—the Americans and the Russians.”
“Mein lieber Günther, even a united Germany cannot—”
“Yes, it can. If we are to remake the world into our image, Erwin, both of our oppressors must be damaged severely.”
“But how?”
“There is a way. Can you believe me that much, just for now?”
Keitel drained his beer and sat back. He’d helped train Bock. At fifty-six, it was too late for him to change his ideas of the world, and he was still a fine judge of character. Bock was a man such as himself. Günther had been a careful, ruthless, and very effective clandestine operator.
“What of our detective friend?”
Bock shook his head. “As much satisfaction as that might give me, no. This is not a time for personal revenge. We have a movement and a country to save.” More than one, in fact, Bock thought, but this was not the time for that. What was taking shape in his mind was a grand stroke, a breathtaking maneuver that might—he was too intellectually honest to say would, even to himself—change the world into a more malleable shape. Exactly what would happen after that, who could say? That would not matter at all if he and his friends were unable to take the first bold step.
“How long have we known each other—fifteen years, twenty?” Keitel smiled. “Aber natürlich. Of course I can trust you.”
“How many others can we trust?”
“How many do we need?”
“No more than ten, but we will need a total of ten.”
Keitel’s face went blank. Eight men we can trust absolutely ...?
“That is too many for safety, Günther. What sort of men?” Bock told him. “I know where to start. It should be possible ... men of my age ... and some younger, of your age. The physical skills you require are not difficult to obtain, but remember that much of this is beyond our control.”
“As some of my friends say, that is in God’s hands,” Günther said with a smirk.
“Barbarians,” Keitel snorted. “I have never liked them.”
“Ja, doch, they don’t even let a man have a beer.” Bock smiled. “But they are strong, Erwin, they are determined, and they are faithful to the cause.”
“Whose cause is that?”
“One we both share at the moment. How much time do you need?”
“Two weeks. I can be reached—”
“No.” Bock shook his head. “Too risky. Can you travel, are you being watched?”
“Watch me? All of my subordinates have changed allegiance, and the BND knows that the KGB will have nothing to do with me. They would not waste the assets to watch me. I am a gelding, you see?”
“Some gelding, Erwin.” Bock handed over some cash. “We will meet in Cyprus in two weeks. Make sure you are not followed.”
“I will—I do. I have not forgotten how, my friend.”
Fromm awoke at dawn. He dressed at leisure, trying not to wake Traudl. She’d been more of a wife in the past twelve hours than in the preceding twelve months, and his conscience told him that their nearly failed marriage had not been entirely her fault. He was surprised to find breakfast waiting on the table for him.
“When will you be back?”
“I’m not sure. Probably several months.”
“That long?”
“Mein Schatz, the reason I am t
here is that they need what I know, and I am being well paid.” He made a mental note to have Qati send additional funds. So long as money kept coming in, she’d not be nervous.
“It is not possible for me to join you?” Traudl asked, showing real affection for her man.
“It is no place for a woman.” Which was honest enough that his conscience allowed itself to relax a little. He finished his coffee. “I must be off.”
“Hurry back.”
Manfred Fromm kissed his wife and walked out the door. The BMW was not affected in the least by the fifty kilos of weight in the trunk. He waved to Traudl one last time before driving off. He gave the house a final look in the mirror, thinking, correctly, that he might not see it again.
His next stop was the Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute. The single-story buildings were already showing their neglect, and it surprised him that vandals had not broken windows. The truck was already there. Fromm used his keys to let himself into the machine shop. The tools were still there, still in hermetically sealed crates, and the crates were still marked Astrophysical Instruments. It was just a matter of signing some forms he’d typed up the previous afternoon. The truck driver knew how to operate the propane-fueled forklift, and drove each crate into the container. Fromm took the batteries from the trunk of his car and set them in a final, small box, which was loaded on last. It took the driver an additional half hour to chain things down in place, and then he drove off. He and “Herr Professor Fromm” would meet again outside Rotterdam.
Fromm rendezvoused with Bock in Greifswald. They drove west in the latter’s car—Bock was a better driver.
“How was home?”
“Traudl liked the money a great deal,” Fromm reported.
“We’ll send her more, at regular intervals ... every two weeks, I think.”
“Good. I was going to ask Qati about that.”
“We take care of our friends,” Bock observed as they passed over what had once been a border crossing. Now it was merely green.