The Devil's Alternative

JUST AFTER TEN in the morning of a wet and rainy Au­gust 1, an aging but comfortable four-jet VC-10 of the Royal Air Force Strike Command lifted out of Lyneham base in Wiltshire and headed west for Ireland and the Atlantic. It carried a small enough passenger complement: one air chief marshal who had been informed the night before that this of all days was the best for him to visit the Pentagon in Wash­ington to discuss the forthcoming USAF-RAF tactical bom­ber exercises, and a civilian in a shabby mackintosh.

The air chief marshal had introduced himself to the unex­pected civilian, and learned in reply that his companion was a Mr. Barrett of the Foreign Office who had business with the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue and had been in­structed to take advantage of the VC-10 flight to save the taxpayer the cost of a two-way air ticket. The Air Force of­ficer never learned that the purpose of the RAF plane’s flight was in fact the other way around.

On another track south of the VC-10, a Boeing jumbo jet of British Airways left Heathrow, bound for New York. Among its three hundred-plus passengers it bore Azamat Krim, alias Arthur Crimmins, Canadian citizen, heading west on a buying mission, with a back pocket full of money.

Eight hours later, the VC-10 landed perfectly at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, ten miles southeast of Washing­ton. As it closed down its engines on the apron, a Pentagon staff car swept up to the foot of the steps and disgorged a two-star general of the USAF. Two Air Force Security Police snapped to attention as the air chief marshal came down the steps to his welcoming committee. Within five minutes the ceremonies were all over; the Pentagon limousine drove away to Washington, the police “snowdrops” marched off, and the idle and curious of the air base went back to their duties.

No one noticed the modest sedan with nonofficial plates that drove to the parked VC-10 ten minutes later—no one, that is, with enough sophistication to note the odd-shaped aerial on the roof that betrayed a CIA car. No one bothered with the rumpled civilian who trotted down the steps and straight into the car moments later, and no one saw the car leave the air base.

The Company man in the U.S. Embassy on Grosvenor Square, London, had been alerted the night before, and his coded signal to Langley had caused the car to appear. The driver was in civilian clothes, a low-level staffer, but the man in the back who welcomed the guest from London was the chief of the Western European Division, one of the regional subordinates of the Deputy Director for Operations. He had been chosen to meet the Englishman because, having once headed the CIA operation in London, he knew him well. No one likes substitutions.

“Nigel, good to see you again,” he said after confirming to himself that the arrival was indeed the man they expected.

“How good of you to come to meet me, Lance,” responded Sir Nigel Irvine, well aware there was nothing good about it; it was a duty. The talk in the car was of London, family, the weather. No question of “What are you doing here?” The car swept along the Capital Beltway to the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and headed west into Vir­ginia.

On the outskirts of Alexandria the driver pulled right into the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which fringes the whole western bank of the river. As they cruised past the Na­tional Airport and Arlington Cemetery, Sir Nigel Irvine glanced out to his right at the skyline of Washington, where years before he had been the SIS liaison man with the CIA, based in the British Embassy. Those had been tough days, in the wake of the Philby affair, when even the state of the weather was classified information so far as the English were concerned. He thought of what he carried in his briefcase and permitted himself a small smile.

After thirty minutes’ cruising they pulled off the main highway, swung over it again, and headed into the forest. He remembered the small notice saying simply BPR-CIA and wondered again why they had to signpost the place. You either knew where it was or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, you weren’t invited, anyway.

At the security gate in the great seven-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounds Langley, they halted while Lance showed his pass, then drove on and turned left past the awful conference center known as “the Igloo” because that is just what it resembles.

The Company’s headquarters consists of five blocks, one in the center and one at each corner of the center block, like a rough St. Andrews cross. The Igloo is stuck onto the corner block nearest the main gate. Passing the recessed center block, Sir Nigel noticed the imposing main doorway and the great seal of the United States paved in terrazzo into the ground in front of it. But he knew this front entrance was for congressmen, senators, and other undesirables. The car swept on, past the complex, then pulled to the right and drove around to the back.

Here there is a short ramp, protected by a steel portcullis, running down one floor to the first basement level. At the bottom is a select garage for no more than ten cars. The black sedan came to a halt, and the man called Lance handed Sir Nigel over to his superior, Cubarles (“Chip”) Allen, the Deputy Director for Operations. They, too, knew each other well.

Set in the back wall of the garage is a small elevator, guarded by steel doors and two armed men. Chip Allen iden­tified his guest, signed for him, and used a plastic card to open the elevator doors. The elevator hummed its way quietly seven floors up to the Director’s suite. Another magnetized plastic card got them both out of the elevator, into a lobby faced by three doors. Chip Allen knocked on the center one, and it was Bob Benson himself who, alerted from below, wel­comed the British visitor into his suite.

Benson led him past the big desk to the lounge area in front of the beige marble fireplace. In winter Benson liked a crackling log fire to burn here, but Washington in August is no place for fires and the air conditioning was working over­time. Benson pulled the rice-paper screen across the room to separate the lounge from the office and sat back opposite his guest. Coffee was ordered, and when they were alone, Benson finally asked, “What brings you to Langley, Nigel?”

Sir Nigel sipped and sat back.

“We have,” he said undramatically, “obtained the services of a new asset.”

He spoke for almost ten minutes before the Director of Central Intelligence interrupted him.

“Inside the Politburo?” he queried. “You mean, right in­side?”

“Let us just say, with access to Politburo meeting tran­scripts,” said Sir Nigel.

“Would you mind if I called Chip Allen and Ben Kahn in on this?”

“Not at all, Bob. They’ll have to know within an hour or so, anyway. Prevents repetition.”

Bob Benson rose, crossed to a telephone on a coffee table, and made a call to his private secretary. When he had fin­ished he stared out of the picture window at the great green forest. “Jesus H. Christ,” he breathed.

Sir Nigel Irvine was not displeased that his two old con­tacts in the CIA should be in on the ground floor of his briefing. All pure intelligence agencies—as opposed to intelli­gence-secret police forces like the KGB—have two main arms. One is Operations, covering the business of actually ob­taining information; the other is Intelligence, covering the business of collating, cross-referencing, interpreting, and an­alyzing the great mass of raw, unprocessed information that is gathered in.

Both have to be good. If the information is faulty, the best analysis in the world will only come up with nonsense; if the analysis is inept, all the efforts of the information gatherers are wasted. Statesmen need to know what other nations, friends or potential foes, are doing and, if possible, what they intend to do. What they are doing is nowadays often observ­able; what they intend to do is not. Which is why all the space cameras in the world will never supplant a brilliant an­alyst working with material from inside another’s secret councils.

In the CIA the two men who hold sway under the Director of Central Intelligence, who may be a political appointee, are the Deputy Director (Operations), or DDO, and the Deputy Director (Intelligence), or DDI. It is Operations that inspires the thriller writers; Intelligence is back-room work, tedious, slow, methodical, and, paradoxically, often most valuable when most boring.

Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the DDO and the DDI have to work hand in hand and they have to trust each other. Benson, as a political appointee, was lucky. His DDO was Chip Allen, WASP and former football player; his DDI was Ben Kahn, Jewish chess master; they fitted together like a pair of gloves. In five minutes both were sitting with Benson and Irvine in the lounge area. Coffee was forgotten.

The British spymaster talked for almost an hour. He was uninterrupted. Then the three Americans read the Night­ingale transcript and watched the tape recording in its poly­ethylene bag with something like hunger. When Irvine had finished, there was a short silence. Chip Allen broke it.

“Roll over, Penkovsky,” he said.

“You’ll want to check it all,” said Sir Nigel evenly. No one dissented. Friends are friends, but ... “It took us ten days, but we can’t fault it. The voiceprints check out, every one. We’ve already exchanged cables about the bustup in the So­viet Agriculture Ministry. And of course you have your Con­dor photographs. Oh, one last thing ...”

From his bag he produced a small polyethylene sack with a sprig of young wheat inside it.

“One of our chaps swiped this from a field outside Len­ingrad.”

“I’ll have our Agriculture Department check it out as well,” said Benson. “Anything else, Nigel?”

“Oh, not really,” said Sir Nigel. “Well, perhaps a couple of small points ...”

“Spit it out.”

Sir Nigel drew a breath.

“The Russian buildup in Afghanistan. We think they may be mounting a move toward Pakistan and India through the passes. That we regard as our patch. Now, if you could ask Condor to have a look ...”

“You’ve got it,” said Benson without hesitation.

“And then,” resumed Sir Nigel, “that Soviet defector you brought out of Geneva two weeks ago. He seems to know quite a bit about Soviet assets in our trade-union movement.”

“We sent you transcripts of that,” said Allen hastily.

“We’d like direct access,” said Sir Nigel.

Allen looked at Kahn. Kahn shrugged.

“Okay,” said Benson. “Can we have access to the Night­ingale?”

“Sorry, no,” said Sir Nigel. “That’s different. The Night­ingale’s too damn delicate, right out in the cold. I don’t want to disturb the fish just yet in case of a change of heart. You’ll get everything we get, as soon as we get it. But no moving in. I’m trying to speed up the delivery and volume, but it’s going to take time and a lot of care.”

“When’s your next delivery slated for?” asked Allen.

“A week from today. At least, that’s the meet. I hope there’ll be a handover.”

Sir Nigel Irvine spent the night at a CIA safe house in the Virginia countryside, and the next day “Mr. Barrett” flew back to London with the air chief marshal.

It was three days later that Azamat Krim sailed from Pier 49 in New York harbor aboard the elderly Queen Elizabeth 2 for Southampton. He had decided to sail rather than fly be­cause he felt there was a better chance his main luggage would escape X-ray examination if he went by sea.

His purchases were complete. One of his pieces of luggage was a standard aluminum shoulder case such as professional photographers use to protect their cameras and lenses. As such, it could not be X-rayed but would have to be hand-examined. The molded plastic sponge inside that held the cameras and lenses from banging against each other was glued to the bottom of the case, but ended two niches short of the real bottom. In the cavity were two handguns with am­munition clips.

Another piece of luggage, deep in the heart of a small trunk full of clothes, was an aluminum tube with a screw top, containing what looked like a long, cylindrical camera lens, some four inches in diameter. He calculated that if it were examined, it would pass in the eyes of all but the most suspicious of customs officers as the sort of lens that camera freaks use for very long range photography, and a collection of books of bird photographs and wildlife pictures lying next to the lens inside the trunk was designed to corrob­orate the explanation.

In fact, the lens was an image intensifier, also called a night-sight, of the kind that may be commercially bought without a permit in the United States but not in Britain.

It was boiling hot that Sunday, August 8, in Moscow, and those who could not get to the beaches crowded instead to the numerous swimming pools of the city, especially the new complex built for the 1980 Olympics. But the British Em­bassy staff, along with those of a dozen other legations, were at the beach on the Moscow River upstream from Uspenskoye Bridge. Adam Munro was among them.

He tried to appear as carefree as the others, but it was hard. He checked his watch too many times, and finally got dressed.

“Oh, Adam, you’re not going back already? There’s ages of daylight left,” one of the secretaries called to him.

He forced a rueful grin.

“Duty calls, or rather the plans for the Manchester Cham­ber of Commerce visit call,” he shouted back to her.

He walked through the woods to his car, dropped his bath­ing things, had a covert look to see if anyone was interested, and locked the car. There were too many men in sandals, slacks, and open shirts for one extra to be of notice, and he thanked his stars the KGB never seemed to take their jackets off. There was no one looking remotely like the Opposition within sight of him. He set off through the trees to the north.

Valentina was waiting for him, standing back in the shade of the trees. His stomach was tight, knotted, for all that he was pleased to see her. She was no expert at spotting a tail and might have been followed. If she had, his diplomatic cover would save him from worse than expulsion, but the re­percussions would be enormous. Even that was not his worry; it was what they would do to her if she were ever caught. Whatever the motives, the term for what she was doing was high treason.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. She kissed him back and trembled in his arms.

“Are you frightened?” he asked her.

“A bit.” She nodded. “You listened to the tape recording?”

“Yes, I did. Before I handed it over. I suppose I should not have done, but I did.”

“Then you know about the famine that faces us. Adam, when I was a girl I saw the famine in this country just after the war. It was bad, but it was caused by the war, by Ger­mans. We could take it. Our leaders were on our side, they would make things get better.”

“Perhaps they can sort things out this time,” said Munro lamely.

Valentina shook her head angrily.

“They’re not even trying,” she burst out. “I sit there listen­ing to their voices, typing the transcripts. They are just bick­ering, trying to save their own skins.”

“And your uncle, Marshal Kerensky?” he asked gently.

“He’s as bad as the rest. When I married my husband, Uncle Nikolai was at the wedding. I thought he was so jolly, so kindly. Of course, that was his private life. Now I listen to him in his public life; he’s like all of them, ruthless and cyni­cal. They just jockey for advantage over each other, for power, and to hell with the people. I suppose I should be one of them, but I can’t be. Not now, not anymore.”

Munro looked across the clearing at the pines but saw ol­ive trees and heard a boy in uniform shouting. “You don’t own me!” Strange, he mused, how establishments with all their power sometimes went too far and lost control of their own servants through sheer excess. Not always, not often, but sometimes.

“I could get you out of here, Valentina,” he said. “It would mean my leaving the diplomatic corps, but it’s been done be­fore. Sasha is young enough to grow up somewhere else.”

“No, Adam, no, it’s tempting but I can’t. Whatever the outcome, I am part of Russia, I have to stay. Perhaps, one day ... I don’t know.”

They sat in silence for a while, holding hands. She broke the quiet at last.

“Did your ... intelligence people pass the tape recording on to London?”

“I think so. I handed it to the man I believe represents the Secret Service in the embassy. He asked me if there would be another one.”

She nodded at her shoulder bag.

“It’s just the transcript. I can’t get the tape recordings any­more. They’re kept in a safe after the transcriptions, and I don’t have the key. The papers in there are of the following Politburo meeting.”

“How do you get them out, Valentina?” he asked.

“After the meetings,” she told him, “the tapes and the sten­ographic notes are brought under guard to the Central Com­mittee building. There is a locked department there where we work, five other women and I. With one man in charge. When the transcripts are finished, the tapes are locked away.”

“Then how did you get the first one?”

She shrugged.

“The man in charge is new, since last month. The other one, before him, was more lax. There is a tape studio next door where the tapes are copied once before being locked in the safe. I was alone in there last month, long enough to steal the second tape and substitute a dummy.”

“A dummy?” exclaimed Munro. “They’ll spot the substitu­tion if ever they play them back.”

“It’s unlikely,” she said. “The transcripts form the archives once they have been checked against the tapes for accuracy. I was lucky with that tape; I brought it out in a shopping bag under the groceries I had bought in the Central Committee commissary.”

“Aren’t you searched?”

“Hardly ever. We are trusted, Adam, the elite of the New Russia. The papers are easier. At work I wear an old-fash­ioned girdle. I copied the last meeting of June on the machine, but ran off one extra copy, then switched the num­ber control back by one figure. The extra copy I stuck inside my girdle. It made no noticeable bulge.” Munro’s stomach turned at the risk she was taking. “What do they talk about in this meeting?” he asked, ges­turing toward the shoulder bag.

“The consequences,” she said. “What will happen when the famine breaks. What the people of Russia will do to them. But Adam ... there’s been one since. Early in July. I couldn’t copy it; I was on leave. I couldn’t refuse my leave; it would have been too obvious. But when I got back, I met one of the girls who had transcribed it. She was white-faced and wouldn’t describe it.”

“Can you get it?” asked Munro.

“I can try. I’ll have to wait until the office is empty and use the copying machine. I can reset it afterward so it will not show it has been used. But not until early next month; I shall not be on the late shift when I can work alone until then.”

“We shouldn’t meet here again,” Munro told her. “Patterns are dangerous.”

He spent another hour describing the sort of tradecraft she would need to know if they were to go on meeting. Finally he gave her a pad of closely typed sheets he had tucked in his waistband under his loose shirt.

“It’s all in there, my darling. Memorize it and burn it. Flush the ashes down the can.”

Five minutes later she gave him a wad of flimsy paper sheets covered with neat, typed Cyrillic script from her bag and slipped away through the forest to her car on a sandy track half a mile away.

Munro retreated into the darkness of the main arch above the church’s recessed side door. He produced a roll of tape from his pocket, slipped his pants to his knees, and taped the batch of sheets to his thigh. With the trousers back up again and belted, he could feel the paper snug against his thigh as he walked, but under the baggy, Russian-made trousers, they did not show.

By midnight, in the silence of his flat, he had read them all a dozen times. The next Wednesday, they went in the Mes­senger’s wrist-chained briefcase to London, wax-sealed in a stout envelope and coded for the SIS liaison man at the For­eign Office only.

The glass doors leading to the Rose Garden were tightly shut, and only the whir of the air conditioner broke the silence in the Oval Office of the White House. The balmy days of June were long gone, and the steamy heat of a Washington August forbade open doors and windows.

Around the building on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, the tourists, damp and hot, admired the familiar aspect of the White House front entrance, with its pillars, flag, and curved driveway, or queued for the guided tour of this most holy of American holies. None of them would penetrate to the tiny West Wing building where President Matthews sat in conclave with his advisers.

In front of his desk were Stanislaw Poklewski and Robert Benson. They had been joined by the Secretary of State, David Lawrence, a Boston lawyer and pillar of the East Coast establishment.

President Matthews flicked the file in front of him closed. He had long since devoured the first Politburo transcript, translated into English; what he had just finished reading was his experts’ evaluation of it.

“Bob, you were remarkably close with your estimate of a shortfall of thirty million tons,” he said. “Now it appears they are going to be fifty to fifty-five million tons short this fall. And you have no doubt this transcript comes right from in­side the Politburo?”

“Mr. President, we’ve checked it out every way. The voices are real; the traces of excessive lindane in the root of the wheat plant are real; the hatchet job inside the Soviet Agri­culture Ministry is real. We don’t believe there is room for any substantive doubt that tape recording was of the Polit­buro in session.”

“We have to handle this right,” mused the President. “There must be no way we make a miscalculation on this one. There has never been an opportunity like it.”

“Mr. President,” said Poklewski, “this means the Soviets are not facing severe shortages, as we supposed when you invoked the Shannon Act last month. They are facing a famine.

Unknowingly he was echoing the words of Petrov in the Kremlin two months earlier in his aside to Ivanenko, which had not been on the tape. President Matthews nodded slowly.

“We can’t disagree with that, Stan. The question is, what do we do about it?”

“Let them have their famine,” said Poklewski. “This is the biggest mistake they have made since Stalin refused to believe Western warnings about the Nazi buildup on his frontier in the spring of 1941. This time, the enemy is within. So let them work it out in their own way.”

“David?” asked the President of his Secretary of State.

Lawrence shook his head. The differences of opinion be­tween the arch-hawk Poklewski and the cautious Bostonian were legendary.

“I disagree, Mr. President,” he said at length. “Firstly, I don’t think we have examined deeply enough the possible permutations of what might happen if the Soviet Union were plunged into chaos next spring. As I see it, it is more than simply a question of letting the Soviets stew in their own juice. There are massive implications on a worldwide basis consequent on such a phenomenon.”

“Bob?” asked President Matthews. His Director of Central Intelligence was lost in thought.

“We have the time, Mr. President,” he said. “They know you invoked the Shannon Act last month. They know that if they want the grain, they have to come to you. As David says, we really should examine the perspectives consequent upon a famine across the Soviet Union. We can do that as of now. Sooner or later, the Kremlin has to make a play. When they do, we have all the cards. We know how bad their pre­dicament is; they don’t know we know. We have the wheat, we have the Condors, we have the Nightingale, and we have the time. We hold all the aces this time. No need to decide yet which way to play them.”

Lawrence nodded and regarded Benson with new respect. Poklewski shrugged.

President Matthews made up his mind.

“Stan, as of now I want you to put together an ad hoc group within the National Security Council. I want it small, and absolutely secret. You, Bob, and David here. The Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of Defense, the Treasury, and Agriculture. I want to know what will happen, worldwide, if the Soviet Union starves. I need to know, and soon.”

One of the telephones on his desk rang. It was the direct line to the State Department. President Matthews looked in­quiringly at David Lawrence.

“Are you calling me, David?” he asked with a smile.

The Secretary of State rose and took the machine off its hook. He listened for several minutes, then replaced the re­ceiver.

“Mr. President, the pace is speeding up. Two hours ago in Moscow, Foreign Minister Rykov summoned Ambassador Donaldson to the Foreign Ministry. On behalf of the Soviet government he has proposed the sale by the United States to the Soviet Union by next spring of fifty-five million tons of mixed cereal grains.”

For several moments only the ormolu carriage clock above the marble fireplace could be heard in the Oval Office.

“What did Ambassador Donaldson reply?” asked the President.

“Of course, that the request would be passed on to Wash­ington for consideration,” said Lawrence, “and that no doubt your answer would be forthcoming in due course.”

“Gentlemen,” said the President, “I need those answers, and I need them fast. I can hold my answer for four weeks at the outside, but by September fifteenth at the latest I shall have to reply. When I do, I shall want to know what we are handling here. Every possibility.”

“Mr. President, within a few days we may be receiving a second package of information from the Nightingale. That could give an indication of the way the Kremlin sees the same problem.”

President Matthews nodded. “Bob, if and when it comes, I would like it decoded and on my desk immediately.”

As the presidential meeting broke up in the dusk of Washing­ton, it was already long after dark in Britain. Police records later showed that scores of burglaries and break-ins had taken place during the night of August 11, but down in Somerset the one that most disturbed the police was the theft from a sporting-gun shop in the pleasant country town of Taunton.

The thieves had evidently visited the shop in the daylight hours during the previous day or so, for the alarm had been neatly cut by someone who had spotted where the cable ran. With the alarm system out of commission, the thieves had used powerful bolt cutters on the window grille in the back alley that ran behind the shop.

The place had not been ransacked, and the usual haul, shotguns for the holding up of banks, had not been taken. What was missing, the proprietor confirmed, was a single hunting rifle, one of his finest, a Finnish-made Sako Hornet .22, a highly accurate precision piece. Also gone were two boxes of shells for the rifle, soft-nosed 45-grain hollow-point Remingtons, capable of high velocity, great penetration, and considerable distortion on impact.

In his flat in Bayswater, Andrew Drake sat with Miroslav Kaminsky and Azamat Krim and gazed at their haul laid out on the sitting-room table; it consisted of two handguns, each with two magazines fully loaded, the rifle with two boxes of shells, and the image intensifier.

There are two basic types of night-sight, the infrared scope and the intensifier. Men who shoot by night tend to prefer the latter, and Krim, with his Western Canadian hunting background and three years with the Canadian paratroopers, had chosen well.

The infrared sight is based on the principle of sending a beam of infrared light down the line of fire to illuminate the target, which appears in the sight as a greenish outline. But because it emits light, even a light invisible to the naked eye, the infrared sight requires a power source. The image in­tensifier works on the principle of gathering all those tiny ele­ments of light that are present in a “dark” environment, and concentrating them, as the gigantic retina of a barn owl’s eye can concentrate what little light there is and see a moving mouse where a human eye would detect nothing. It needs no power source.

Originally developed for military purposes, the small, hand-held image intensifiers had by the late seventies come to interest the vast American security industry and were of use to factory guards and others. Soon they were sold commer­cially. By the early eighties the larger versions, capable of being mounted atop a rifle barrel, were also purchasable in America for cash across the counter. It was one of these that Azamat Krim had bought.

The rifle already had grooves along the upper side of its barrel to take a telescopic sight for target practice. Working with a file and a vise screwed to the edge of the kitchen table, Krim began to convert the clips of the image intensifier to fit into these grooves.

While Krim was working, Barry Ferndale paid a visit to the United States Embassy, a mile away in Grosvenor Square. By prearrangement he was visiting the head of the CIA oper­ation in London, who was ostensibly a diplomat attached to his country’s embassy staff.

The meeting was brief and cordial. Ferndale removed from his briefcase a wad of papers and handed them over.

“Fresh from the presses, my dear fellow,” he told the American. “Rather a lot, I’m afraid. These Russians do tend to talk, don’t they? Anyway, best of luck.”

The papers were the Nightingale’s second delivery, and al­ready in translation into English. The American knew he would have to encode them himself, and send them himself. No one else would see them. He thanked Ferndale and settled down to a long night of hard work.

He was not the only man who slept little that night. Far away in the city of Ternopol in the Ukraine, a plainclothes agent of the KGB left the noncommissioned officers club and com­missary beside the KGB barracks and began to walk home. He was not of the rank to rate a staff car, and his own pri­vate vehicle was parked near his house. He did not mind; it was a warm and pleasant night, and he had had a convivial evening with his colleagues in the club.

Which was probably why he failed to notice the two figures in the doorway across the street who seemed to be watching the club entrance and who nodded to each other.

It was after midnight, and Ternopol, even in a warm Au­gust, has no nightlife to speak of. The secret policeman’s path took him away from the main streets and into the sprawl of Shevchenko Park, where the trees in full leaf almost covered the narrow pathways. It was the longest shortcut he ever took. Halfway across the park there was a scuttling of feet behind him; he half turned, took the blow from the blackjack that had been aimed at the back of his head on the temple, and went down in a heap.

It was nearly dawn before he recovered. He had been dragged into a tangle of bushes and robbed of his wallet, money, keys, ration card, and I.D. card. Police and KGB inquires continued for several weeks into this most unaccus­tomed mugging, but no culprits were discovered. In fact, both assailants had been on the first dawn train out of Ternopol and were back in their homes in Lvov.

President Matthews chaired the meeting of the ad hoc com­mittee that considered the Nightingale’s second package, and it was a subdued meeting.

“My analysts have already come up with some possibilities consequent upon a famine in the Soviet Union next winter and spring,” Benson told the seven men in the Oval Office, “but I don’t think any one of them would have dared go as far as the Politburo themselves have done in predicting a pandemic breakdown of law and order. It’s unheard of in the Soviet Union.”

“That’s true of my people, too,” agreed David Lawrence of the State Department. “They’re talking here about the KGB’s not being able to hold the line. I don’t think we could have gone that far in our prognosis.”

“So what answer do I give Maxim Rudin to his request to purchase fifty-five million tons of grain?” asked the President.

“Mr. President, tell him ‘No,’ ” urged Poklewski. “We have here an opportunity that has never occurred before and may never occur again. You have Maxim Rudin and the whole Politburo in the palm of your hand. For two decades successive administrations have bailed the Soviets out every time they have gotten into problems with their economy. Ev­ery time, they have come back more aggressive than ever. Every time they have responded by pushing further with their involvement in Africa, Asia, Latin America. Every time, the Third World has been encouraged to believe the Soviets have recovered from their setbacks through their own efforts, that the Marxist economic system works. This time, the world can be shown beyond a doubt that the Marxist economic system does not work and never will. This time, I urge you to screw the lid down tight, real tight. You can demand a concession for every ton of wheat. You can require them to get out of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. And if Rudin won’t, you can bring him down.”

“Would this”—President Matthews tapped the Nightingale report in front of him—“bring Rudin down?”

David Lawrence answered, and no one disagreed with him.

“If what is described in here by the members of the Politburo themselves actually happened inside the Soviet Union, yes, Rudin would fall in disgrace, as Khrushchev fell,” he said.

“Then use the power,” urged Poklewski. “Use it. Rudin has run out of options. He has no alternative but to agree to your terms. If he won’t, topple him.”

“And the successor—” began the President.

“Will have seen what happened to Rudin, and will learn his lesson from that. Any successor will have to agree to the terms we lay down.”

President Matthews sought the views of the rest of the meeting. All but Lawrence and Benson agreed with Pok­lewski. President Matthews made his decision; the hawks had won.

The Soviet Foreign Ministry is one of seven near-identical buildings of the wedding-cake architectural style that Stalin favored: neo-Gothic as put together by a mad patissier in brown sandstone, and standing on Smolensky Boulevard, on the corner of Arbat.

On the penultimate day of the month, the Fleetwood Brougham Cadillac of the American Ambassador to Moscow hissed into the parking bay before the main doors, and Myron Donaldson was escorted to the plush fourth-floor office of Dmitri Rykov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. They knew each other well; before coming to Moscow, Ambassador Don­aldson had done a spell at the United Nations, where Dmitri Rykov was a well-known figure. Frequently they had drunk friendly toasts there together, and here in Moscow also. But today’s meeting was formal. Donaldson was attended by his deputy chief of mission, and Rykov by five senior officials.

Donaldson read his message carefully, word for word, in its original English. Rykov understood and spoke English well, but an aide did a rapid running translation into his right ear.

President Matthew’s message made no reference to his knowledge of the disaster that had struck the Soviet wheat crop, and it expressed no surprise at the Soviet request of ear­lier in the month for the staggering purchase of fifty-five mil­lion tons of grain. In measured terms it expressed regret that the United States of America would not be in a position to make a sale to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the requested tonnage of wheat.

With hardly a pause, Ambassador Donaldson read on, into the second part of the message. This, seemingly unconnected with the first, though following without a break, regretted the lack of success of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks known as SALT III, concluded in the winter of 1980, in lessening world tension, and expressed the hope that SALT IV, scheduled for preliminary discussion that coming autumn and winter, would achieve more, and enable the world to make genuine steps along the road to a just and lasting peace. That was all.

Ambassador Donaldson laid the full text of the message on Rykov’s desk, received the formal, straight-faced thanks of the gray-haired, gray-visaged Soviet Foreign Minister, and left.

Andrew Drake spent most of that day poring over books. Azamat Krim, he knew, was somewhere in the hills of Wales fire-testing the hunting rifle with its new sight mounted above the barrel. Miroslav Kaminsky was still working at his stead­ily improving English. For Drake, the problems centered on the south Ukrainian port of Odessa.

His first work of reference was the red-covered Lloyd’s Loading List, a weekly guide to ships loading in European ports for destinations all over the world. From this he learned that there was no regular service from Northern Europe to Odessa, but there was a small, independent, inter-Mediter­ranean service that also called at several Black Sea ports. It was named the Salonika Line, and listed two vessels.

From there he went to the blue-covered Lloyd’s Shipping Index and scoured the columns until he came to the vessels in question. He smiled. The supposed owners of each vessel trading in the Salonika Line were one-ship companies regis­tered in Panama, which meant beyond much of a doubt that the owning “company” in each case was a single brass plate attached to the wall of a lawyer’s office in Panama City, and no more.

From his third work of reference, a book called the Greek Shipping Directory, he ascertained that the managing agents were listed as a Greek firm and that their offices were in Pi­raeus, the port of Athens. He knew what that meant. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, when one talks to the managing agents of a Panama-flag ship and they are Greek, one is in effect talking to the ship’s owners. They masquerade as “agents only” in order to take advantage of the fact that agents cannot be held legally responsible for the peccadilloes of their principals. Some of these peccadilloes include inferior rates of pay and conditions for the crew, unseaworthy vessels and ill-defined safety standards but well-defined valuations for “total-loss” insurance, and occasionally some very careless habits with crude-oil spillages.

For all that, Drake began to like the Salonika Line for one reason: a Greek-registered vessel would inevitably be allowed to employ only Greek senior officers, but could employ a cos­mopolitan crew with or without official seaman’s books; pass­ports alone would be sufficient And her ships visited Odessa regularly.

Maxim Rudin leaned forward, lay the Russian translation of President Matthews’s negative message as delivered by Am­bassador Donaldson on his coffee table, and surveyed his three guests. It was dark outside, and he liked to keep the lights low in his private study at the north end of the Arsenal Building in the Kremlin.

“Blackmail,” said Petrov angrily.

“Of course,” said Rudin. “What were you expecting? Sym­pathy?”

“That damned Poklewski is behind this,” said Rykov. “But this cannot be Matthews’s final answer. Their own Con­dors and our offer to buy fifty-five million tons of grain must have told them what position we are in.”

“Will they talk eventually? Will they negotiate after all?” asked Ivanenko.

“Oh, yes, they’ll talk eventually,” said Rykov. “But they’ll delay as long as they can, spin things out, wait until the fam­ine begins to bite, then trade the grain against humiliating concessions.”

“Not too humiliating, I hope,” murmured Ivanenko. “We have only a seven-to-six majority in the Politburo, and I for one would like to hold onto it.”

“That is precisely my problem,” growled Rudin. “Sooner or later I have to send Dmitri Rykov into the negotiating chamber to fight for us, and I don’t have a single damned weapon to give him.”

On the last day of the month, Andrew Drake flew from Lon­don to Athens to begin his search for a ship heading toward Odessa.

The same day, a small van, converted into a two-bunk mo­bile home such as students like to use for a roving Continen­tal holiday, left London for Dover on the Channel coast, and thence to France and Athens by road. Concealed beneath the floor were the guns, ammunition, and image intensifier. For­tunately, most drug consignments head the other way, from the Balkans toward France and Britain. Customs checks were perfunctory at Dover and Calais.

At the wheel was Azamat Krim with his Canadian passport and international driving license. Beside him, with new, albeit not quite regular, British papers, was Miroslav Kaminsky.