“Sounds good,” said Hood. “Tell TAS and the rest of your team they’ve done an incredible job.”
“Thanks, I will,” said Rodgers. He picked up the globe paperweight and began turning it over in his hand. “Paul, there’s something else that’s been going on. It’s another reason the Pentagon wanted to put on a little show with the Mosquito.”
Hood looked up at Rodgers. “A show?”
Rodgers nodded. “Two of the four Russian motorized rifle divisions on the Turkestan front have been pulled off and sent to Ukraine,” he said. “Kosigan took a tank division from the Ninth Army on the Transbaikal front and an airmobile brigade from the Far East front. If fighting breaks out with Poland and more forces are withdrawn from the Chinese border, there’s a good chance Beijing will decide to make trouble. The Chinese recently put General Wu De in command of the Eleventh Group Army in Lanzhou. If you read Liz’s report, you’ll know that this guy is certifiable.”
“I have read it,” Hood said. “He was an astronaut in their aborted space program.”
“Right,” Rodgers said. “Now, we’ve run war simulations along these lines, so none of this is that far afield. In fact, the President has just asked the Pentagon to send them over. If the Chinese put their five Border Guard divisions on alert to threaten Russia with a second front, the Russians will not back down. Never have, never will. Skirmishes will break out, and war will follow unless a cool head-in this case, Zhanin-prevails. Our policy in that situation is to back the pacifist, but to do so we will have to align ourselves with Zhanin and perhaps even support him militarily-”
“Breaking our agreement with Grozny,” Hood said. “Helluva situation. We help keep Beijing and Moscow apart and get peppered with terrorist strikes for our efforts. ”
“It’s a real possibility,” Rodgers said. “Which is why our aerial ‘sneak attack’ wing of other Stealth aircraft becomes real important. The longer we can be involved in the situation without Grozny finding out, the better off we’ll be.”
The phone beeped. Hood looked at the digital code on the LED band at the bottom. It was Stephen Viens at NRO.
Hood picked up the receiver. “What’s doing, Stephen?”
“Paul? I thought you were on vacation.”
“I’m back,” Hood said. “What kind of intelligence organization are you running, anyway?”
“Funny,” Viens said. “Bob wanted us to watch that Trans-Siberian train, and there’s been a change.”
“What kind?”
Viens said, “Not a good one. Have a look at your monitor. I’ll send the image over.”
FOURTY-TWO
Tuesday, 9:13 A.M., Seoul
The windows of the hangar at the base outside of Seoul were bulletproof and painted black. The doors were locked, sentries were posted at each of them, and no one other than members of the Air Force’s M-Team were allowed near the structure. The Mosquito unit was under the command of General Donald Robertson, a sixty-four-yearold dynamo who had discovered bungee jumping when he was sixty and did it once a day before breakfast.
Inside, the twenty-soldier team had run this drill dozens of times with a plastic and wood prototype. Now that the emergency and the cargo were real, they moved with even greater speed and precision, exhilarated by necessity, handling the surprisingly light, matte-black components confidently, silently. They had rehearsed loading it onto various aircraft, from the Sikorsky S-64 helicopter for missions under 250 miles to cargo planes ranging from the StarLifter to the RAF’s old Short Belfast for runs of 5,000 miles or more. For the 750-mile trip to Hokkaido, General Milton A. Warden had okayed the use of a Lockheed C-130E. It had the largest cargo bay of any aircraft presently in South Korea, and the rear access to the main cargo hold, with its hydraulically operated ramp, made the process of getting in and out rel atively easy. As Mike Rodgers had told Warden, speed would be desperately important once the Hercules landed in Japan.
While the M-Tearn loaded the cargo, the pilot, copilot, and navigator were reviewing the flight plan, checking the four Allison T-56-A-1A turboprop engines, and obtaining clearances from the tower at the secret U.S. air base midway between Otaru, on the coast, and the prefecture capital of Sapporo. The base had been established early in the Cold War as a staging area for missions into eastern Russia, and had been the home of between ten and fifteen U.S. spy planes until satellites rendered them relatively obsolete in the early 1980s. Now the troops stationed there called themselves “birdwatchers,” keeping a radar eye and radio ear on Russian comings and goings.
But with two heavy transports on the way and the need for precise weather and geographical information, the bird-watchers were getting back into the flight game. And as the Hercules was rolled from the hangar in Seoul, the troops in Hokkaido were making preparations to help target, launch, and guide a vehicle that would leave the Russians wondering what had hit them.
FOURTY-THREE
Tuesday, 4:05 A.M., the Gulf ofFinland
The smell inside the midget submarine was terrible. The forced air was dry and stale. But for Peggy James, that wasn’t the worst of it. She hated the total sense of disorientation. The submarine was constantly caught in currents, rocking from side to side or bobbing to and fro. The helmsman used the ship’s rudders to adjust their course, which, for a moment, made the gentle hobbyhorse become a bucking bronco.
She was also having trouble seeing and hearing. To begin with, they were whispering. And the thickness of the hull and the surrounding water muted the sounds even more. Apart from the faint radiance given off by the control panel, the only light came from the small, hooded flashlight they were allowed to use. Its dull yellow light-not to mention the long hours she’d been awake, and the sleep-inducing warmth of the cabinmade it difficult to keep her eyes open. After just two hours underwater, she was keenly anticipating surfacing at the halfway point some four hours from now.
The good news was, David George had picked up the Russian phrases fairly quickly, which reminded her never to judge a person by his drawl or to mistake wide eyed eagerness for naivet. George was smart and savvy, with a boyish enthusiasm that infused whatever he seemed to be doing. Even though he was no less a landlubber than she was, George didn’t seem to mind the ride.
Peggy and George spent time reviewing maps of St. Petersburg and blueprints showing the layout of the Hermitage. She agreed with the D16 analysts, who believed that any spy activities would be an adjunct to the new TV studio, and that Fields-Hutton was probably correct about the studio being located in the basement. Not only was the studio a perfect cover for the equipment the Russians would need and the kinds of signals they’d be sending, but the basement would put them far from the western side of the second floor. That was where the museum’s numismatic collection was kept, and the metal in the coins might affect sensitive instruments.
Wherever it was located in the museum, the facility would need communications cables. And if they found those, she and Private George would be able to discover what was going on inside. Moreover, if the Center was underground, chances were good that the cables would be located in or near adjoining air ducts. Not only was it easier to run them through preexisting passageways, it was easier to get to them for repairs or upgrades. The question was, would they have to wait until dark to do their electronic search, or could they find someplace in the museum to use the equipment she’d brought?
Her eyes growing heavy in the dim light, Peggy asked George if they could finish later. He admitted he was getting tired also and could use a break. She shut her eyes and snuggled down in her seat, not thinking about the submarine but imagining that she was on a swing outside a cottage in Tregaron, Wales. It was where she had grown up and had vacationed so often with Keith, in a Cold War world that was strangely less dangerous and more predictable than the new, post-Communist order ….
FOURTY-FOUR
Tuesday, 6:30 A.M., St. Petersburg
“General,” Radio Officer Marev said over the telephone, “Zilash said you wanted to know about communications between General Kosigan and Minister Dogin. There is one taking place now, scrambled, Code Milky Way.”
General Orlov shot upright in his office chair. “Thank you, Titev. Put it on the computer.”
Milky Way was the most complex code employed by the Russian military. It was used on open lines and not only scrambled the communication electronically, but scattered it over numerous wavelengths-across the heavens, as it were-so that a listener without a descrambler would need literally dozens of receivers tuned to different channels to catch every piece of it. Both the Minister’s office and Kosigan’s command center had the proper descrambler. So did Titev.