Well, he thought, you’re tired, and it’s too late for that sort of deep thinking. He’d finish up this report with the data from Bondarenko’s final draft, photograph it, and get the film to his cutout.
8.
Document
Transfer
IT was almost dawn when the Archer found the wreckage of the airplane. He had ten men with him, plus Abdul. They’d have to move fast. As soon as the sun rose over the mountains the Russians would come. He surveyed the wreck from a knoll. Both wings had been sheered off at the initial impact, and the fuselage had rocketed forward, up a gentle slope, tumbling and breaking apart until only the tail was recognizable. He had no way of knowing that it had taken a brilliant pilot to accomplish this much, that getting the airplane down under any kind of control was a near miracle. He gestured to his men, and moved quickly toward the main body of wreckage. He told them to look for weapons, then any kind of documents. The Archer and Abdul went to what was left of the tail.
As usual, the scene of the crash was a contradiction. Some of the bodies were torn apart, while others were superficially intact, their deaths caused by internal trauma. These bodies looked strangely at peace, stiff but not yet frozen by the low temperature. He counted six who’d been in the after section of the aircraft. All, he saw, were Russians, all in uniform. One wore the uniform of a KGB captain and was still strapped in his seat. There was a pink froth around his lips. He must have lived a little after the crash and coughed up blood, the Archer thought. He kicked the body over and saw that handcuffed to the man’s left hand was a briefcase. That was promising. The Archer bent down to see if the handcuff could be taken off easily, but he wasn’t that lucky. Shrugging, he took out his knife. He’d just have to cut it off the body’s wrist. He twisted the hand around and started—
—when the arm jerked and a high-pitched scream made the Archer leap to his feet. Was this one alive? He bent down to the man’s face and was rewarded by a coughing spray of blood. The blue eyes were now open, wide with shock and pain. The mouth worked, but nothing intelligible came out.
“Check to see if any more are still living,” the Archer ordered his assistant. He turned back to the KGB officer and spoke in Pashtu: “Hello, Russian.” He waved his knife within a few centimeters of the man’s eyes.
The Captain started coughing again. The man was fully awake now, and in considerable pain. The Archer searched him for weapons. As his hands moved, the body writhed in agony. Broken ribs at the least, though his limbs seemed intact. He spoke a few tortured words. The Archer knew some Russian but had trouble making them out. It should not have been hard—the message the officer was trying to convey was the obvious one, though it took the Archer nearly half a minute to recognize it.
“Don’t kill me . . .”
Once the Archer understood it, he continued his search. He removed the Captain’s wallet and flipped through its contents. It was the photographs that stopped him. The man had a wife. She was short, with dark hair and a round face. She was not beautiful, except for the smile. It was the smile a woman saved for the man she loved, and it lit up her face in a way that the Archer himself had once known. But what got his attention were the next two. The man had a son. The first photo had been taken at age two perhaps, a young boy with tousled hair and an impish smile. You could not hate a child, even the Russian child of a KGB officer. The next picture of him was so different that it was difficult to connect the two. His hair was gone, his skin tightly drawn across the face . . . and transparent like the pages of an old Koran. The child was dying. Three now, maybe four? he wondered. A dying child whose face wore a smile of courage and pain and love. Why must Allah visit his anger on the little ones? He turned the photo to the officer’s face.
“Your son?” he asked in Russian.
“Dead. Cancer,” the man explained, then saw that this bandit didn’t understand. “Sickness. Long sickness.” For the briefest moment his face cleared of pain and showed only grief. That saved his life. He was amazed to see the bandit sheathe his knife, but too deeply in pain to react in a visible way.
No. I will not visit another death upon this woman. The decision also amazed the Archer. It was as though the voice of Allah Himself reminded him that mercy is second only to faith in the human virtues. That was not enough by itself— his fellow guerrillas would not be persuaded by a verse of scripture—but next the Archer found a key ring in the man’s pants pocket. He used one key to unlock the handcuffs and the other to open the briefcase. It was full of document folders, each of which was bordered in multicolored tape and stamped with some version of SECRET. That was one Russian word he knew.
“My friend,” the Archer said in Pashtu, “you are going to visit a friend of mine. If you live long enough,” he added.
“How serious is this?” the President asked.
“Potentially very serious,” Judge Moore answered. “I want to bring some people over to brief you.”
“Don’t you have Ryan doing the evaluation?”
“He’ll be one of them. Another’s this Major Gregory you’ve heard about.”
The President flipped open his desk calendar. “I can give you forty-five minutes. Be here at eleven.”
“We’ll be there, sir.” Moore hung up the phone. He buzzed his secretary next. “Send Dr. Ryan in here.”
Jack came through the door a minute later. He didn’t even have time to sit down.
“We’re going in to see The Man at eleven. How ready is your material?”
“I’m the wrong guy to talk about the physics, but I guess Gregory can handle that end. He’s talking to the Admiral and Mr. Ritter right now. General Parks coming, too?” Jack asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. How much imagery do you want me to get together?”
Judge Moore thought that one over for a moment. “We don’t want to razzle-dazzle him. A couple of background shots and a good diagram. You really think it’s important, too?”
“It’s not any immediate threat to us by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a development we could have done without. The effect on the arms-control talks is hard to gauge. I don’t think there’s a direct connec—”
“There isn’t, we’re certain of that.” The DCI paused for a grimace. “Well, we think we’re certain.”
“Judge, there is data on this issue floating around here that I haven’t seen yet.”
Moore smiled benignly. “And how do you know that, son?”
“I spent most of last Friday going over old files on the Soviet missile-defense program. Back in ’81 they ran a major test out of the Sary Shagan site. We knew an awful lot about it—for example, we knew that the mission parameters had been changed from within the Defense Ministry. Those orders were sealed in Moscow and hand-delivered to the skipper of the missile sub that fired the birds—Marko Ramius. He told me the other side of the story. With that and a few other pieces I’ve come across, it makes me think that we have a man inside that place, and pretty high up.”
“What other pieces?” the Judge wanted to know.
Jack hesitated for a moment, but decided to go ahead with his guesses. “When Red October defected, you showed me a report that had to come from deep inside, also from the Defense Ministry; the code name on the file was WILLOW, as I recall. I’ve only seen one other file with that name, on a different subject entirely, but also defense-related. That makes me think there’s a source with a rapidly changing code-name cycle. You’d only do that with a very sensitive source, and if it’s something I’m not cleared for, well, I can only conclude that it’s something closely held. Just two weeks ago you told me that Gregory’s assessment of the Dushanbe site was confirmed through ‘other assets,’ sir.” Jack smiled. “You pay me to see connections, Judge. I don’t mind being cut out of things I don’t need to know, but I’m starting to think that there’s something going on that’s part of what I’m trying to do. If you want me to brief the President, sir, I should go in with the right information.”
“Sit down, Dr. Ryan.” Moore didn’t bother asking if Jack had discussed this with anyone. Was it time to add a new member to the Δ fraternity? After a moment he delivered his own sly smile.