The Ransom of Black Stealth One

FIVE

“From any other source,” Pyotr Karotkin muttered, “I should discount this as a ruse. In some ways, Sasha is a complete shavki. “The term meant “shit-eating dog,” and was reserved in the KGB for low-level incompetents. It was true that few professionals would send vital intelligence by way of embassy groundskeepers. As Karotkin spoke, he nodded toward the object on his desk, and a pale reflection of the overhead fluorescents gleamed from the skin stretched like rawhide over his hairless skull.

Leonid Suslov, watching the rawhide gleam, hated those fluorescents. Perhaps, he thought, Karotkin hated them too. But no one in Washington’s Soviet Embassy harbored more suspicions of windows than Karotkin, rezident for the KGB’s Intelligence Directorate. This windowless room had been Karotkin’s own choice, between other rooms crammed with data collection equipment.

Suslov, rezident for Directorate “T” which handled scientific data collection, greatly preferred the view from his own office. From there he could see down Massachusetts Avenue with the White House and other sensitive buildings clearly visible in the near distance. Since the Americans had been such idiots as to permit the new embassy compound to be built on high ground, they should have expected thickets of Suslov’s electronic ears to sprout from the embassy roof.

But Sasha’s bombshell had not trickled in by coaxial cable from the roof. It had come, as always, over the wall; the act of a shavki, indeed; but an astonishingly successful one. Suslov reached for the object, which lay in a sealed bag on Karotkin’s desk, and shifted his bifocals to study it closely. Suslov ran field-grade agents to satisfy the shopping list, but he did not run Sasha. Sasha ran himself, and did it in a manner unique in Suslov’s experience.

“In any case, this is not ours to discount, Pyotr Borisovitch,” Suslov replied, noting that Sasha had not sprayed crimson paint evenly over the object in the bag. Enough to be seen, however, in daylight, though crimson looked black at night. It was perfectly round, of high-impact plastic, with the appearance of a borscht jar lid. Its center portion, unlike Sasha’s earlier missiles of information, was hinged. “I see Sasha has gone high-tech.”

“It is called a Flutterbird,” Karotkin said, “a new device which does not shatter when struck by shotgun pellets as clay targets do. Instead, its center pops open and it falls.” A sigh. “Readily obtained at sporting shops.” Karotkin’s fingers danced as if anxious to pluck the object back, yet he remained polite. He could well afford to, while the little devices continued to sail anonymously over embassy walls with startling messages. So long as Sasha operated without contacts, Karotkin’s directorate would remain Sasha’s pipeline to Dzerzhinski Square in Moscow. And Sasha’s pipeline pumped in only one direction.

“One day we shall trace him,” Suslov said wistfully.

“If we did, Lenya, I would not be able to tell you.” Karotkin rarely used diminutive forms of address, and never before to Suslov. It suggested— not friendship, for Karotkin avoided closeness— perhaps something akin to pity for a fellow rezident denied his fondest desire.

Suslov nodded without rancor. The rigid constraints on exactly who may know what was even more strict in Soviet intelligence agencies—KGB, GRU, and the party secretariat’s own spooks as well—than in those of the United States. No one above field-grade operatives gave it a moment’s thought; it had always been thus, and would only intensify in the future. Suslov passed a hand through his curly black hair, dyed assiduously to maintain his youthful appearance, and laid down the bag with care. He would know, in any case, that Sasha had not been smoked out so long as his clay pigeons kept sailing in every year or so. Once the KGB was running him, Sasha would damned well report when, how, and on what he was told.

Karotkin had not bothered to hide the stack of three-by-five cards, his favored method of arranging pieces of a puzzle, that lay on his blotter. His habit was to sit erect, shuffling and arranging the cards feverishly with fingers that scuttled like white tarantulas, as he pondered the meanings hidden in each set of cards, like a blind man with a tarot deck. This deck was pink, with dates scribbled on upper right-hand corners. The top card, Suslov saw, read “99” because he was reading it upside down. Therefore, ‘sixty-six. The year of their first message from Sasha. Suslov could infer the data his colleague had scribbled on those cards.

In 1966, Leonid Suslov had been in Moscow when Sasha’s first clay pigeon soared onto the old embassy grounds in Washington, to be found by a guard. According to the printed message in clear English, CIA was coordinating data from new American spy aircraft and ferret satellites for early missile warnings. If true, this could give Americans an edge so tempting that they might grow more bellicose, more reckless in their demands. Once they knew where to focus their antennae, Soviet science had found it was true. The USSR had taken certain steps to equalize that situation. Suslov still did not know exactly what steps.

1967: Sasha had warned of CIA-run “Phoenix” recon teams in Vietnam, small hit teams of boyevaya as murderous as the GRU’s. Sasha said they were targeting Viet Cong nurses and doctors for assassination. Destabilizing, and true again.

1971: CIA stealth aircraft had progressed far beyond the Helio Courier, the Windecker Eagle, and Lockheed’s Quietships, said Sasha. The long-winged, turbojet “Cope” had no pilot and could find its way home after a full day of mapping at high altitudes. The shopping list had brought confirmation, finally, with photographed blueprints from a paid schpick, a rank novice.

1974: According to Sasha, NSA found unexpected success in Wisconsin with a low-frequency antenna rig that could permit direct communication between submerged Poseidon subs and command locations. Some American hawks were already whispering that this provided a first-strike advantage that should be used before the Soviets equalized the situation. The most stabilizing response, Sasha added, would be a crash program by the Soviets in the same technology.

1977: A secret Nevada air base was soon to receive its first production-type stealth aircraft from Lockheed’s supersecret “Skunk Works” in Bur-bank. If they could be refueled in flight—and they could, Sasha warned—such aircraft could blind radars or lay a nuclear weapon on any given acre in Libya, China, or the Soviet Union with relatively low danger of detection. It must have been a tremendous temptation for Americans, who might think they could vaporize a Soviet nuclear power plant undetected and then offer regrets about the nuclear “accident.”

1981: Sasha claimed that, with NSA equipment and CIA operational help, Americans were tapping Soviet undersea cables to verify the accuracy of Soviet test missiles. Such knowledge generated a dangerous power imbalance. An American traitor named Pelton said so, too. This problem was remedied immediately by the Soviet Navy.

1984: A devilish device built by NSA and airdropped by CIA near East German air bases looked exactly like shrubs, said Sasha. But they recorded and eventually transmitted MiG radar signals, until a counterintelligence team found and destroyed this fake foliage.

1988: Similar shrubbery had been airdropped near the Nicaraguan coast, which gave warning when Ortega’s people tried to ship arms to certain other communist forces. With such precise information, an unidentified aircraft had sunk two boatloads of arms. It was very possible that the aircraft in question was some new experimental stealth model, one of the so-called “black,” or unmentionable, U.S. programs.

Eight clay pigeons. Eight crucial messages, all accurate as far as could be determined. And now another, the longest yet, in some ways the most detailed. And easily the most galvanizing, if Moscow reacted as Suslov knew they would.

Tapping those pink cards on his blotter, Karotkin said, “I am even more certain, now, that Sasha is either CIA in a middle-echelon technical post, or NSA. If he is NSA, he could be in a minor position.”

“Or somewhere above,” Suslov said. “But you had concluded that already.” He gave his colleague a thoughtful glance. “If CIA, be glad that their man Weston is only a few years from retirement. The technical man could be on his staff, and Weston has shut down two efforts to penetrate CIA already.”

Karotkin’s shrug suggested that James D. Weston was not all that unbeatable, and the pursing of his lips said he was considering a new idea. “Weston’s tendency to play spy-catcher, when his job lies in other areas, has bought him some enemies among his counterintelligence colleagues,” Karotkin said dreamily. “No matter how adept, a man with too many enemies—” He gestured as if to say the outcome was predictable. In the KGB, it certainly was. “Like their spy-catcher Angleton, in the old days,” he added, “ultimately forced to resign. We could help Weston make more enemies, perhaps.”

Suslov put his head back and laughed. “An exquisite irony! Anonymous tips from us, which let him unmask a low-level schpick or two of ours. More long faces and new enemies for Weston in his own agency, eh? Eh?” Suslov was nodding as he asked.

“A man can be too successful for his own good,” was Karotkin’s only response, but the heavy-lidded smile endorsed Suslov’s guess. Even at the rezident level, KGB colleagues were wise to avoid brainstorming freely even in matters of mutual concern. Both men knew and accepted the rules. You sought subtle colleagues with a creative bent, and you swapped ideas as necessary, but you did not divulge your decisions beyond gestures and innuendo.

As their smiles faded, Karotkin snapped a finger against the crimson Flutterbird in its bag. “It was necessary to pass the message across my desk before you saw it. If I can be of use—”

“We’re turning up the heat to verify it,” Suslov said, “and I suspect a major covert operation will be demanded from your people by Moscow’s papakhas.” The word meant “big hats,” and implied only faint disdain between equals for the top decision-makers.

“Then you believe Moscow will want us to make a deal with this turncoat who contacted the Bulgarians,” said Karotkin. His colleague’s unchanged expression was as good as a nod and Karotkin continued, “Which implies that Moscow believes it is possible to build a truly undetectable aircraft. I had hoped that was an exaggeration.”

“Perhaps it is. The first that we knew of it, we learned from a few moments of conversation by two NSA men when the window laser scrambler failed in their limousine. Almost any price would not be too steep for such a craft.” It was a veiled query: how high was that price? Karotkin would reply if he could. Suslov went on, “If they alone have it, the thing could upset delicate balances of force, worldwide.” In this, Soviet spymasters agreed with their counterparts in the West. Men who failed to understand delicate balances failed to rise very far. Of course, each side viewed proper balance as a slight slope in its favor. Even a small fleet of truly undetectable aircraft would tend to shift that slope against the player who relied most on secrecy.

“I cannot divulge the turncoat pilot’s asking price,” Karotkin said. But he pointed at the ceiling.

“If it is high enough, it could tempt good men into a high jump.” Suslov’s phrase for an agent who took his booty and disappeared had its counterpart among U.S. agents. A Soviet agent took the high jump; an American agent went private. Each side knew the other’s jargon, with a few exceptions. There was no jargon phrase in Russian for the hidden packet, including a great sum of money, some agents kept in readiness for the day when they might, for personal reasons, opt for abrupt retirement. Alcoholics had supplied the word when hiding that emergency pint of booze: it was called a “spooker.” Perhaps no phrase in spookspeak had ever been borrowed more appropriately.

“The man who steals a stealth aircraft,” said Karotkin darkly, “is a fool if he asks for less than enough for a lifetime in, say, Paraguay.”

Suslov checked the Omega on his wrist. “He is a fool anyway. Moscow would never give your people the sanction to offer such a price without some means of getting it back,” he said, getting up with a sigh. “We rely too much on ideology, and not enough on the charm of money.”

Karotkin stood companionably, toying with his cards, walking with Suslov toward the door. “Ask yourself, Lenya, how they would get it back, and what damp sanctions they would have. My people may not get the entire task.”

Suslov nodded and walked out. The simplest way to avoid payment was to kill the American turncoat pilot—wet work, in Soviet parlance. And that meant the job would probably go not to KGB, but to the violent men of GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence.

Suslov was not a man who believed in unnecessary violence. Like Karotkin, he felt that wet work only escalated until the boyevayas on both sides had turned the world’s great cities into travesties of dusty streets in Wild West movies. It had happened in Vienna, for a time.

And wherever the turncoat pilot chose to deliver that stealth aircraft, he could not be so stupid as to forget that—for a sufficiently high price—the West could get wild again.