Without Remorse

  Grishanov didn’t like what he saw now. This was a skillful man, and a courageous one, who had fought to establish missile-hunting specialists the Americans called Wild Weasels. It was a term a Russian might have used for the mission, named for vicious little predators who chased their prey into their very dens. This prisoner had flown eighty-nine such missions, if the Vietnamese had recovered the right pieces from the right aircraft—like Russians, Americans kept a record of their accomplishments on their aircraft—this was exactly the man he needed to talk to. Perhaps that was a lesson he would write about, Grishanov thought. Such pride told your enemies whom they had captured, and much of what he knew. But that was the way of fighter pilots, and Grishanov would himself have balked at the concealment of his deeds against his country’s enemies. The Russian also tried to tell himself that he was sparing harm to the man across the table. Probably Zacharias had killed many Vietnamese—and not simple peasants, but skilled, Russian-trained missile technicians—and this country’s government would want to punish him for that. But that was not his concern, and he didn’t want to allow political feelings to get in the way of his professional obligations. His was one of the most scientific and certainly the most complex aspects of national defense. It was his duty to plan for an attack of hundreds of aircraft, each of which had a crew of highly trained specialists. The way they thought, their tactical doctrine, was as important as their plans. And as far as he was concerned, the Americans could kill all of the bastards they wanted. The nasty little fascists had as much to do with his country’s political philosophy as cannibals did with gourmet cooking.

  “Colonel, I do know better than that,” Grishanov said patiently. He laid the most recently arrived document on the table. “I read this last night. It’s excellent work.”

  The Russian’s eyes never left Colonel Zacharias. The American’s physical reaction was remarkable. Though something of an intelligence officer himself, he had never dreamed that someone in Vietnam could get word to Moscow, then have Americans under their control find something like this. His face proclaimed what he was thinking: How could they know so much about me? How could they have reached that far back into his past? Who possibly could have done it? Was anyone that good, that professional? The Vietnamese were such fools! Like many Russian officers, Grishanov was a serious and thorough student of military history. He’d read all manner of arcane documents while sitting in regimental ready rooms. From one he’d never forget, he learned how the Luftwaffe had interrogated captured airmen, and that lesson was one he would try to apply here. While physical abuse had only hardened this man’s resolve, he had just been shaken to his soul by a mere sheaf of paper. Every man had strengths and every man had weaknesses. It took a person of intelligence to recognize the differences.

  “How is it that this was never classified?” Grishanov asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “It’s just theoretical physics,” Zacharias said, shrugging his thin shoulders, recovering enough that he tried to conceal his despair. “The telephone company was more interested than anybody else.”

  Grishanov tapped the thesis with his finger. “Well, I tell you, I learned several things from that last night. Predicting false echoes from topographical maps, modeling the blind spots mathematically! You can plan an approach route that way, plot maneuvers from one such point to another. Brilliant! Tell me, what sort of place is Berkeley?”

  “Just a school, California style,” Zacharias replied before catching himself. He was talking. He wasn’t supposed to talk. He was trained not to talk. He was trained on what to expect, and what he could safely do, how to evade and disguise. But that training never quite anticipated this. And, dear God, was he tired, and scared, and sick of living up to a code of conduct that didn’t count for beans to anyone else.

  “I know little of your country—except professional matters, of course. Are there great regional differences? You come from Utah. What sort of place is it?”

  “Zacharias, Robin G. Colonel—”

  Grishanov raised his hands. “Please. Colonel. I know all that. I also know your place of birth in addition to the date. There is no base of your air force near Salt Lake City. All I know is from maps. I will probably never visit this part—any part of your country. In this Berkeley part of California, it is green, yes? I was told once they grow wine grapes there. But I know nothing of Utah. There is a large lake there, but it’s called Salt Lake, yes? It’s salty?”

  “Yes, that’s why—”

  “How can it be salty? The ocean is a thousand kilometers away, with mountains in between, yes?” He didn’t give the American time to reply. “I know the Caspian Sea quite well. I was stationed at a base there once. It isn’t salty. But this place is? How strange.” He stubbed out his cigarette.

  The man’s head jerked up a little. “Not sure, I’m not a geologist. Something left over from another time, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps so. There are mountains there, too, yes?”

  “Wasatch Mountains,” Zacharias confirmed somewhat drunkenly.

  One clever thing about the Vietnamese, Grishanov thought, the way they fed their prisoners, food a hog would eat only from necessity. He wondered if it were a deliberate and thought-out diet or something fortuitously resulting from mere barbarity. Political prisoners in the Gulag ate better, but the diet of these Americans lowered their resistance to disease, debilitated them to the point that the act of escape would be doomed by inadequate stamina. Rather like what the fascisti did to Soviet prisoners, distasteful or not, it was useful to Grishanov. Resistance, physical and mental, required energy, and you could watch these men lose their strength during the hours of interrogation, watch their courage wane as their physical needs drew more and more upon their supply of psychological resolve. He was learning how to do this. It was time-consuming, but it was a diverting process, learning to pick apart the brains of men not unlike himself.

  “The skiing, is it good?”

  Zacharias’s eyes blinked, as though the question took him away to a different time and place. “Yeah, it is.”

  “That is something one will never do here, Colonel. I like cross-country skiing for exercise, and to get away from things. I had wooden skis, but in my last regiment my maintenance officer made me steel skis from aircraft parts.”

  “Steel?”

  “Stainless steel, heavier than aluminum but more flexible. I prefer it. From a wing panel on our new interceptor, project E-266.”

  “What’s that?” Zacharias knew nothing of the new MiG- 25.

  “Your people now call it Foxbat. Very fast, designed to catch one of your B-70 bombers.”

  “But we stopped that project,” Zacharias objected.

  “Yes, I know that. But your project got me a wonderfully fast fighter to fly. When I return home, I will command the first regiment of them.”

  “Fighter planes made of steel? Why?”

  “It resists aerodynamic heating much better than aluminum,” Grishanov explained. “And you can make good skis from discarded parts.” Zacharias was very confused now. “So how well do you think we would do with my steel fighters and your aluminum bombers?”

  “I guess that depends on—” Zacharias started to say, then stopped himself cold. His eyes looked across the table, first with confusion at what he’d almost said, then with resolve.

  Too soon, Grishanov told himself with disappointment. He’d pushed a little too soon. This one had courage. Enough to take his Wild Weasel “downtown,” the phrase the Americans used, over eighty times. Enough to resist for a long time. But Grishanov had plenty of time.

  12

  Outfitters

  63 VW, LOW MLGE, RAD, HTR....

  Kelly dropped a dime in the pay phone and called the number. It was a blazing hot Saturday, temperature and humidity in a neck-and-neck race for triple digits while Kelly fumed at his own stupidity. Some things were so blatantly obvious that you didn’t see them until your nose split open and started bleeding.

  “Hello?
I’m calling about the ad for the car ... that’s right,” Kelly said. “Right now if you want ... Okay, say about fifteen minutes? Fine, thank you, ma‘am. I’ll be right there. ’Bye.” He hung up. At least something had gone right. Kelly grimaced at the inside of the phone booth. Springer was tied up in a guest slip at one of the marinas on the Potomac. He had to buy a new car, but how did you get to where the new car was? If you drove there, then you could drive the new car back, but what about the one you took? It was funny enough that he started laughing at himself. Then fate intervened, and an empty cab went driving past the marina’s entrance, allowing him to keep his promise to a little old lady.

  “The 4500 block, Essex Avenue,” he told the driver.

  “Where’s that, man?”

  “Chevy Chase.”

  “Gonna cost extra, man,” the driver pointed out, turning north.

  Kelly handed a ten-dollar bill across. “Another one if you get me there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Cool.” And the acceleration dropped Kelly back in his seat. The taxi avoided Wisconsin Avenue most of the way. At a red light the driver found Essex Avenue on his map, and he ended up collecting the extra ten with about twenty seconds to spare.

  It was an upscale residential neighborhood, and the house was easy to spot. There it was, a VW Beetle, an awful peanut-butter color speckled with a little body rust. It could not have been much better. Kelly hopped up the four wooden front steps and knocked on the door.

  “Hello?” It was a face to match the voice. She had to be eighty or so, small and frail, but with fey green eyes that hinted at what had been, enlarged by the thick glasses she wore. Her hair still had some yellow in the gray.

  “Mrs. Boyd? I called a little while ago about the car.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bill Murphy, ma’am.” Kelly smiled benignly. “Awful hot, isn’t it?”

  “T’rble,” she said, meaning terrible. “Wait a minute.” Gloria Boyd disappeared and then came back a moment later with the keys. She even came out to walk him to the car. Kelly took her arm to help her down the steps.

  “Thank you, young man.”

  “My pleasure, ma’am,” he replied gallantly.

  “We got the car for my granddaughter. When she went to college, then Ken used it,” she said, expecting Kelly to know who Ken was.

  “Excuse me?”

  “My husband,” Gloria said without turning. “He died a month ago.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, ma’am.”

  “He was sick a long time,” said the woman, not yet recovered from the shock of her loss but accepting the fact of it. She handed him the keys. “Here, take a look.”

  Kelly unlocked the door. It looked like the car used by a college student and then by an elderly man. The seats were well worn, and one had a long slash in it, probably by a packing box of clothes or books. He turned the key in the lock and the engine started immediately. There was even a full tank of gas. The ad hadn’t lied about the mileage, only 52,000 miles on the odometer. He asked for and got permission to take it around the block. The car was mechanically sound, he decided, bringing it back to the waiting owner.

  “Where did all the rust come from?” he asked her, giving the keys back.

  “She went to school in Chicago, at Northwestern, all that terrible snow and salt.”

  “That’s a good school. Let’s get you back inside.” Kelly took her arm and directed her back to the house. It smelled like an old person’s house, the air heavy with dust that she was too tired to wipe, and stale food, for the meals she still fixed were for two, not one.

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “Yes, ma’am, thank you. Water will be just fine.” Kelly looked around while she went to the kitchen. There was a photo on the wall, a man in a high-necked uniform and Sam Browne belt, holding the arm of a young woman in a very tight, almost cylindrical, white wedding dress. Other photos cataloged the married life of Kenneth and Gloria Boyd. Two daughters and a son, a trip to the ocean, an old car, grandchildren, all the things earned in a full and useful life.

  “Here you go.” She handed over a glass.

  “Thank you. What did your husband do?”

  “He worked for the Commerce Department for forty-two years. We were going to move to Florida, but then he got sick so now I’m going alone. My sister lives in Fort Pierce, she’s a widow too, her husband was a policeman ...” Her voice trailed off as the cat came in to examine the new visitor. That seemed to invigorate Mrs. Boyd. “I’m moving down there next week. The house is already sold, have to get out next Thursday. I sold it to a nice young doctor.”

  “I hope you like it down there, ma’am. How much do you want for the car?”

  “I can’t drive anymore because of my eyes, cataracts. People have to drive me everywhere I go. My grandson says it’s worth one thousand five hundred dollars.”

  Your grandson must be a lawyer to be that greedy, Kelly thought. “How about twelve hundred? I can pay cash.”

  “Cash?” Her eyes became fey again.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then you can have the car.” She held out her hand and Kelly took it carefully.

  “Do you have the paperwork?” It made Kelly feel guilty that she had to get up again, this time heading upstairs, slowly, holding on to the banister while Kelly took out his wallet and counted off twelve crisp bills.

  It should have taken only another ten minutes, but instead it was thirty. Kelly had already checked up on how to do the mechanics of a title transfer, and besides, he wasn’t going to do all of that. The auto-insurance policy was tucked into the same cardboard envelope as the title, in the name of Kenneth W. Boyd. Kelly promised to take care of that for her, and the tags, too, of course. But it turned out that all the cash made Mrs. Boyd nervous, and so Kelly helped her fill out a deposit ticket, and then drove her to her bank, where she could drop it into the night depository. Then he stopped off at the supermarket for milk and cat food before bringing her home and walking her to the door again.

  “Thank you for the car, Mrs. Boyd,” he said in parting.

  “What are you going to use it for?”

  “Business.” Kelly smiled and left.

  At quarter of nine that night, two cars pulled into the service area on Interstate 95. The one in front was a Dodge Dart and the one behind it a red Plymouth Roadrunner. Roughly fifty feet apart, they picked a half-full area north of Maryland House, a rest stop set in the median of the John F. Kennedy Highway, offering full restaurant services along with gas and oil—good coffee, but, understandably, no alcoholic beverages. The Dart took a few meandering turns in the parking lot, finally stopping three spaces from a white Oldsmobile with Pennsylvania tags and a brown vinyl top. The Roadrunner took a space in the next row. A woman got out and walked towards the brick restaurant, a path that took her past the Olds.

  “Hey, baby,” a man said. The woman stopped and took a few steps towards the vinyl-topped automobile. The man was Caucasian, with long but neatly combed black hair and an open-necked white shirt.

  “Henry sent me,” she said.

  “I know.” He reached out to stroke her face, a gesture which she did not resist. He looked around a little before moving his hand downwards. “You have what I want, baby?”

  “Yes.” She smiled. It was a forced, uneasy smile, frightened but not embarrassed. Doris was months beyond embarrassment.

  “Nice tits,” the man said with no emotional content at all in his voice. “Get the stuff.”

  Doris walked back to her car, as though she’d forgotten something. She returned with a large purse, almost a small duffel, really. As she walked past the Olds, the man’s hand reached out and took it. Doris proceeded into the building, returning a minute later holding a can of soda, her eyes on the Roadrunner, hoping that she’d done everything right. The Olds had its motor running, and the driver blew her a kiss, to which she responded with a wan smile.

  “That was easy enough,” Henry Tucker s
aid, fifty yards away, at the outdoor eating area on the other side of the building.

  “Good stuff?” another man asked Tony Piaggi. The three of them sat at the same table, “enjoying” the sultry evening while the majority of the patrons were inside with the air conditioning.

  “The best. Same as the sample we gave you two weeks ago. Same shipment and everything,” Piaggi assured him.

  “And if the mule gets burned?” the man from Philadelphia asked.

  “She won’t talk,” Tucker assured him. “They’ve all seen what happens to bad girls.” As they watched, a man got out of the Roadrunner and got into the Dart’s driver’s seat.

  “Very good,” Rick told Doris.

  “Can we go now?” she asked him, shaking now that the job was over, sipping nervously at her soda.

  “Sure, baby, I know what you want.” Rick smiled and started the car. “Be nice, now. Show me something.”

  “There’s people around,” Doris said.

  “So?”

  Without another word, Doris unbuttoned her shirt—it was a man’s shirt—leaving it tucked into her faded shorts. Rick reached in and smiled, turning the wheel with his left hand. It could have been worse, Doris told herself, closing her eyes, pretending that she was someone else in some other place, wondering how long before her life would end too, hoping it wouldn’t be long.

  “The money?” Piaggi asked.