"No German ever did that work! A carpenter could do better." The doctor filled out the admission form rapidly.
"What are you telling me?"
"He has poor dental work. Strange. He is very fit. Dressed well. Jewish. But he has miserable dental work." The doctor sat down. "We see many strange things, of course."
"Where are his personal effects?" The lieutenant was a naturally curious type, one reason he"d become a policeman after his service in the Bundeswehr. The doctor walked the officer to a room where the personal effects were inventoried for secure storage by a hospital employee.
They found the clothing neatly arranged, with the jacket and s.h.i.+rt separate so that their bloodstains would not damage anything else. Pocket change, a set of keys, and a large envelope were set aside for cataloging. The orderly was filling out a form, looking up to list exactly what had come in with the patient.
The policeman lifted the manila envelope. It had been mailed from Stuttgart yesterday evening. A ten-mark stamp. On an impulse he pulled out a pocketknife and slit the top of the envelope open. Neither the doctor nor the orderly objected. This was a police officer, after all.
A large and two smaller envelopes were inside. He opened the large one first and extracted the contents. First he saw a diagram. It looked ordinary enough until he saw that it was a photocopy of a German Army doc.u.ment stamped Geheim. Secret. Then the name: Lammersdorf. He was holding a map of a NATO communications headquarters not thirty kilometers from where he stood. The police lieutenant was a captain in the German Army Reserves, and held an intelligence billet. Who was Siegfried Baum? He opened the other envelopes. Next he went to a phone.
ROTA, SPAIN.
The transport jet arrived right on time. A fair breeze greeted them from the sea as Toland emerged from the cargo door. A pair of sailors was there to direct the arrivals. Toland was pointed to a helicopter a hundred yards away, its rotor already turning. He walked quickly toward it, along with four other men. Five minutes later he was airborne, his first visit to Spain having lasted exactly eleven minutes. No one attempted conversation. Toland looked out one of the small windows available. They were over a patch of blue water, evidently flying southwest. They were aboard a Sea King antisubmarine helicopter. The crew chief was also a sonar operator, and he was fiddling with his gear, evidently running some sort of test. The interior walls of the aircraft were bare. Aft was the son.o.buoy storage, and the dipping sonar transducer was caged in its compartment in the floor. For all that, the aircraft was crowded, most of its s.p.a.ce occupied by weapon and sensor instrumentation. They"d been in the air for half an hour when the helo started circling. Two minutes later, they landed on USS Nimitz.
The flight deck was hot, noisy, and stank of jet fuel. A deck crewman motioned them toward a ladder which led down to the catwalk surrounding the deck, and into a pa.s.sageway beneath it. Here they encountered air conditioning and relative quiet, sheltered from the flight operations going on overhead.
"Lieutenant Commander Toland?" a yeoman called out.
"Here."
"Please come with me, sir."
Toland followed the sailor through the rabbit warren of compartments below the flight deck, and was finally pointed to an open door.
"You must be Toland," observed a somewhat frazzled officer.
"Must be-unless the time zone changes did something."
"You want the good news or the bad news?"
"Bad."
"Okay, you"ll have to hot-bunk. Not enough berths for all of us intel types. Shouldn"t matter much, though. I haven"t slept for three days-one of the reasons you"re here. The good news is that you just got another half a stripe. Welcome aboard, Commander. I"m Chip Bennett." The officer handed Toland a telex sheet. "Looks as though CINCLANT likes you. Nice to have friends in high places."
The message announced tersely that Lieutenant Commander Robert A. Toland, III, USNR, had been "frocked" as a commander, USNR, which gave him the right to wear the three gold stripes of a commander, but not to collect a commander"s pay just yet. It was like a kiss from one"s sister. Well, he reflected, maybe a cousin.
"I guess it"s a step in the right direction. What am I going to be doing here?"
"Theoretically you"re supposed to a.s.sist me, but we"re so friggin" overwhelmed with information at the moment that we"re divvying the territory up some. I"m going to let you handle the morning and evening briefs to the battle group commander. We do that at 0700 and 2000. Rear Admiral Samuel B. Baker, Jr. Son of a B. He"s an ex-nuc. Likes it quick and clean, with footnotes and sources on the writeup to read afterward. He almost never sleeps. Your battle station will be in the CIC with the group tactical warfare officer." Walker rubbed his eyes. "So what the h.e.l.l is happening in this crazy world?"
"What"s it look like?" Toland answered.
"Yeah. Something new just came in. The s.p.a.ce shuttle Atlantis was pulled off the pad at Kennedy today, supposedly for a computer glitch, right? Three newspapers just broke a story that she was taken down for payload replacement. They were supposed to loft three or four commercial communications birds. Instead, the payload is reconnaissance satellites."
"I guess people are starting to take this seriously."
AACHEN, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY.
"Siegfried Baum" awoke six hours later to see three men wearing surgical garb. The effect of the anesthesia still heavy on him, his eyes could not focus properly.
"How are you feeling?" one asked. In Russian.
"What happened to me?" The major answered in Russian.
Ach so. "You were struck by a car and you are now in a military hospital," the man lied. They were still in Aachen, near the German-Belgian frontier.
"What . . . I was just coming out to-" The major"s voice was that of a drunken man, but it stopped abruptly. His eyes tried to focus properly.
"It is all finished for you, my friend." Now the speaker switched to German. "We know you are a Soviet officer, and you were found in possession of cla.s.sified government doc.u.ments. Tell me, what is your interest in Lammersdorf?"
"I have nothing to say," replied "Baum" in German.
"A little late for that," the interrogator chided, switching back to Russian. "But we"ll make it easy for you. The surgeon tells us that it is now safe to try a new, ah, medication for you, and you will tell us everything you know. Be serious. No one can resist this form of questioning. You might also wish to consider your position," the man said more harshly. "You are an officer in the army of a foreign government, here in the Federal Republic illegally, traveling with false papers, and in possession of secret doc.u.ments. At the least, we can imprison you for life. But, given what your government is doing at the moment, we are not concerned with "least" measures. If you cooperate you will live, and probably be exchanged back to the Soviet Union at a later date for a German agent. We will even say that we got all our information due to the use of drugs; no harm could possibly come to you from this. If you do not cooperate, you will die of injuries received in a motor accident."
"I have a family," Major Andre Chernyavin said quietly, trying to remember his duty. The combination of fear and drug-induced haze made a hash of his emotions. He couldn"t tell there was a vial of sodium pentothol dripping into his IV line, and already impairing his higher brain functions. Soon he would be unable to consider the long-term consequences of his action. Only the here and now would matter.
"They will come to no harm," Colonel Weber promised. An Army officer a.s.signed to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, he had interrogated many Soviet agents. "Do you think they punish the family of every spy we catch? Soon no one would ever come here to spy on us at all." Weber allowed his voice to soften. The drugs were beginning to take effect, and as the stranger"s mind became hazy he would be gentle, cajoling the information from him. The funny part, he mused, was that he"d been instructed on how to do this by a psychiatrist. Despite the many movies about brutal German interrogators, he hadn"t had the least training in forceful extraction of information. Too bad, he thought. If there was ever a time I need it, it is now. Most of the colonel"s family lived outside Kulmbach, only a few kilometers from the border.
KIEV, THE UKRAINE.
"Captain Ivan Mikhailovich Sergetov reporting as ordered, Comrade General."
"Be seated, Comrade Captain." The resemblance to his father was remarkable, Alekseyev thought. Short and stocky. The same proud eyes, the same intelligence. Another young man on his way up. "Your father tells me that you are an honor student in Middle East languages."
"This is correct, Comrade General."
"Have you also studied the people who speak them?"
"That is an integral part of the curriculum, Comrade." The younger Sergetov smiled. "We"ve even had to read through the Koran. It is the only book most of them have ever read, and therefore an important factor in understanding the savages."
"You do not like the Arabs, then?"
"Not particularly. But our country must do business with them. I get along with them well enough. My cla.s.s will occasionally meet with diplomats from politically acceptable countries to practice our language skills. Mainly Libya, and occasionally people from Yemen and Syria."
"You have three years in tanks. Can we defeat the Arabs in battle?"
"The Israelis have done so with ease, and they don"t have a fraction of our resources. The Arab soldier is an illiterate peasant, poorly trained and led by incompetent officers."
A young man with all the answers. And perhaps you will explain Afghanistan to me? Alekseyev thought. "Comrade Captain, you will be attached to my personal staff for the forthcoming operation against the Persian Gulf states. I will lean on you for linguistic work, and to support our intelligence estimates. I understand that you are training to be a diplomat. That is useful to me. I always like to have a second opinion of the intelligence data that KGB and GRU send us. Not that I distrust our comrades in the intelligence arms, you understand. I simply like to have someone who thinks "Army" to review the data. The fact that you"ve served in tanks is doubly valuable to me. One more question. How are the reservists reacting to the mobilization?"
"With enthusiasm, of course," the captain replied.
"Ivan Mikhailovich, I presume your father told you about me. I listen attentively to the words of our Party, but soldiers preparing for battle need to know the unvarnished truth so that we can bring about the Party"s wishes."
Captain Sergetov noted how carefully that had been phrased. "Our people are angry, Comrade General. They are enraged over the incident in the Kremlin, the murder of the children. I think "enthusiasm" is not a great exaggeration."
"And you, Ivan Mikhailovich?"
"Comrade General, my father told me that you would ask this question. He told me to a.s.sure you that he had no prior knowledge of it, and that the important thing is to safeguard our country so that similar tragedies will never again be necessary."
Alekseyev did not reply at once. He was chilled by the knowledge that Sergetov had read his mind three days before, and dumbfounded that he had confided so enormous a secret to his son. But it was good to know that he had not misread the Politburo man. He was a man to be trusted. Perhaps his son also? Mikhail Eduardovich evidently thought so.
"Comrade Captain, these are things to be forgotten. We have enough to occupy us already. You will work down the hall in room twenty-two. There is work waiting for you. Dismissed."
BONN, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY.
"It"s all a sham," Weber reported to the Chancellor four hours later. The helicopter he"d flown to Bonn hadn"t even left the ground yet. "The whole bomb-plot business is all a cruel and deliberate sham."
"We know that, Colonel," the Chancellor replied testily. He"d been awake for two days straight now, trying to come to grips with the sudden German-Russian crisis.
"Herr Kanzler, the man we now have in the hospital is Major Andre Ilych Chernyavin. He entered the country over the Czech border two weeks ago with a separate set of false papers. He is an officer in the Soviet Spetznaz forces, their elite Sturmtruppen. He was badly injured in an auto accident-the fool stepped right in front of an automobile without looking-and was carrying a complete diagram for the NATO communications base at Lammersdorf. The station"s security posts were just relocated a month ago. This doc.u.ment is only two weeks old. He also has the watch schedule and a roster of watch officers-and that is only three days old! He and a team of ten men came over the Czech border, and only just got their operational orders. His current orders are to attack the base exactly at midnight, the day after receipt of his alert signal. There is also a cancellation signal should plans change. We have them both."
"He came into Germany long before-" The Chancellor was surprised in spite of himself. The entire affair was so unreal.
"Exactly. It all fits, Herr Kanzler. For whatever reason, Ivan is coming to attack Germany. Everything to this point was a sham, all designed to put us to sleep. Here is a full transcript of our interview with Chernyavin. He has knowledge of four other Spetznaz operations, all of them consistent with a full-scale a.s.sault across our borders. He is now at our military hospital in Koblenz under heavy guard. We also have a videotape of his admission."
"What of the chance that this is all some sort of Russian provocation? Why weren"t these doc.u.ments brought over when they crossed the border?"
"The reconstruction of the Lammersdorf installation meant that they needed correct information. As you know, we"ve been upgrading the security measures at our NATO communications stations since last summer, and our Russian friends must have been updating their a.s.sault plans as well. The fact that they have these doc.u.ments at all-just days old, some of them-is most frightening. As for how we happened to get hold of this man-" Weber explained the circ.u.mstances of the accident. "We have every reason to believe that it was a genuine accident, not a provocation. The driver, a Madame Anne-Marie LeCourte, is a fas.h.i.+on agent-she sells dresses for some Paris designer or other; not a likely cover for a Soviet spy. And why do such a thing? Do they expect us to launch an attack into the DDR based on this? First they accuse of us of bombing the Kremlin, then try to provoke us? It"s not logical. What we have here is a man whose mission is to prepare the way for a Soviet invasion of Germany by paralyzing NATO communication links immediately before hostilities commence."
"But to do such a thing-even if such an attack is planned...."
"The Soviets are intoxicated with "special operations" groups, a lesson from Afghanistan. These men are highly trained, very dangerous. And it"s a cunning plan. The Jewish identification, for example. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds play on our sensitivity with the Jews, no? If he is stopped by a police officer, he can make a casual remark about how Germans treat Jews, and what would a young policeman do, eh? Probably apologize and send him on his way." Weber smiled grimly. That had been a carefully thought-out touch. He had to admire it. "What they could not allow for was the unexpected. We"ve been lucky. We should now make use of this luck. Herr Kanzler, this data must go to NATO high command immediately. For the moment we have their safe house under observation. We may wish to a.s.sault it. GSG-9 is ready for the mission, but perhaps it should be a NATO operation."
"I must meet with my cabinet first. Then I will speak with the President of the United States on the telephone and the other NATO chiefs of government."
"Forgive me, Chancellor, but there is no time for that. With your permission, within the hour I will give a copy of the videotape to the CIA liaison officer, and also to the British and French. The Russians are going to attack us. Better to alert the intelligence services first, which will lay the groundwork for your talk with the President and others. We must move at once, Herr Kanzler. This is a life-and-death situation."
The Chancellor stared down at his desk. "Agreed, Colonel. What do you propose to do with this Chernyavin?"
Weber had already moved on that score. "He died of injuries sustained in the auto accident. It will appear on the television news this evening, and in the newspapers. Of course he will be made available to our allies for further interrogation. I am certain the CIA and others will wish to see him before midnight."
The Chancellor of the German Federal Republic stared out the windows of his Bonn office. He remembered his armed service forty years before: a frightened teenager with a helmet that nearly covered his eyes. "It"s happening again." How many will die this time?
"Ja." Dear G.o.d, what will it be like?
LENINGRAD, R.S.F.S.R.
The captain looked out over the port side of his s.h.i.+p from the bridge wing. Tugs pushed the last barge onto the aft elevator, then backed away. The elevator rose a few meters, and the barge settled into place on the trolleys already set on the fore-and-aft tracks. Julius Fucik"s first officer supervised the loading process from the winch-control station aft, communicating by portable radio to other men scattered about the afterpart of the s.h.i.+p. The elevator matched levels with that of the third cargo deck, and the access door opened to expose the vast cargo deck. Crewmen strung cables onto the trolleys and bolted them rapidly into place.
Winches pulled the barge forward into the third, lowermost, cargo deck of the Seabee-for Seagoing Barge Carrier-s.h.i.+p. As soon as the trolleys were over their painted marks, the watertight door closed and lights came on to allow the crew to secure the barge firmly in place. Neatly done, the first officer thought. The whole loading process had been completed in only eleven hours, almost a record. He supervised the process of securing the after-portion of the s.h.i.+p for sea.
"The last barge will be fully secured in thirty minutes," the bosun reported to the first officer, who forwarded the information to the bridge.
Captain Kherov switched b.u.t.tons on his phone to talk to the engineering s.p.a.ces. "You will be ready to answer bells in thirty minutes."
"Very well. Thirty minutes." The engineer hung up.
On the bridge, the captain turned to his most senior pa.s.senger, a general of paratroops wearing the blue jacket of a s.h.i.+p"s officer. "How are your men?"
"Some are seasick already." General Andreyev laughed. They had been brought aboard inside the sealed barges-except for the General, of course-along with tons of military cargo. "Thank you for allowing my men to walk around the lower decks."
"I run a s.h.i.+p, not a prison. Just so they don"t tamper with anything."
"They"ve been told," Andreyev a.s.sured him.