He was riding in something. Churkin realized that he was lying on a steel deck. A truck? No, there was a flat surface overhead, and that, too, was steel. Where am I? It had to be dark outside. No light came through the gunports in the side of—he was in an armored personnel carrier! Where did the bandits get one of those? Where were they—
They were taking him to Pakistan! They would turn him over to . . . Americans? And hope changed yet again to despair. He coughed again, and fresh blood erupted from his mouth.
For his part, the Archer felt lucky. His group had met up with another, taking two Soviet BTR-60 infantry carriers out to Pakistan, and they were only too happy to carry the wounded of his band out with them. The Archer was famous, and it could not hurt to have a SAM-shooter protect them if Russian helicopters showed up. But there was little danger of that. The nights were long, the weather had turned foul, and they averaged almost fifteen kilometers per hour on the flat places, and no less than five on the rocky ones. They’d be to the border in an hour, and this segment was held by the mudjaheddin. The guerrillas were starting to relax. Soon they’d have a week of relative peace, and the Americans always paid handsomely for Soviet hardware. This one had night-vision devices that the driver was using to pick his way up the mountain road. For that they could expect rockets, mortar shells, a few machine guns, and medical supplies.
Things were going well for the mudjaheddin. There was talk that the Russians might actually withdraw. Their troops no longer craved close combat with the Afghans. Mainly the Russians used their infantry to achieve contact, then called in artillery and air support. Aside from a few vicious bands of paratroopers and the hated Spetznaz forces, the Afghans felt that they had achieved moral ascendancy on the battlefield—due, of course, to their holy cause. Some of their leaders actually talked about winning, and the talk had gotten to the individual fighters. They, too, now had hope of something other than continued holy war.
The two infantry carriers reached the border at midnight. From there the going was easier. The road down into Pakistan was now guarded by their own forces. The APC drivers were able to speed up and actually enjoy what they were doing. They reached Miram Shah three hours later. The Archer got out first, taking with him the Russian prisoner and his wounded.
He found Emilio Ortiz waiting for him with a can of apple juice. The man’s eyes nearly bugged out when he realized that the man the Archer was carrying was a Russian.
“My friend, what have you brought me?”
“He is badly hurt, but here is what he is.” The Archer handed over one of the man’s shoulder boards, then a briefcase. “And this is what he was carrying.”
“Son of a bitch!” Ortiz blurted in English. He saw the crusted blood around the man’s mouth and realized that his medical condition was not promising, but . . . what a catch this was! It took another minute of following the wounded to the field hospital before the next question came to the case officer: What the hell do we do with him?
The medical team here, too, was composed mainly of Frenchmen, with a leavening of Italians and a few Swedes. Ortiz knew most of them, and suspected that many of them reported to the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence agency. What mattered, however, was that there were some pretty good doctors and nurses here. The Afghans knew that, too, and protected them as they might have protected the person of Allah. The surgeon who had triage duty put the Russian third on the operating schedule. A nurse medicated him, and the Archer left Abdul to keep an eye on things. He hadn’t brought the Russian this far to have him killed. He and Ortiz went off to talk.
“I heard what happened at Ghazni,” the CIA officer said, “God’s will. This Russian, he lost a son. I could not—perhaps I had killed enough for one day.” The Archer let out a long breath. “Will he be useful?”
“These are.” Ortiz was already riffling through the documents. “My friend, you do not know what you have done. Well, shall we talk about the last two weeks?”
The debrief took until dawn. The Archer took out his diary and went over everything he’d done, pausing only while Ortiz changed tapes in his recorder.
“That light you saw in the sky.”
“Yes . . . it seemed very strange,” the Archer said, rubbing his eyes.
“The man you brought out was going there. Here is the base diagram.”
“Where is it, exactly—and what is it?”
“I don’t know, but it’s only about a hundred kilometers from the Afghan border. I can show you on the map. How long will you be staying on this side?”
“Perhaps a week,” the Archer answered.
“I must report this to my superiors. They may want to see you. My friend, you will be greatly rewarded. Make a list of what you need. A long list.”
“And the Russian?”
“We will talk to him, too. If he lives.”
The courier walked down Lazovskiy Pereulok, waiting for his contact. His own hopes were both high and low. He actually believed his interrogator, and by later afternoon he’d taken the chalk that he used and made the proper mark in the proper place. He knew that he’d done so five hours later than he was supposed to, but hoped that his controller would put that off to the evasion process. He hadn’t made the false mark, the one that would warn the CIA officer that he’d been turned. No, he was playing too dangerous a game now. So he walked along the dreary sidewalk, waiting for his handler to show up for the clandestine meet.
What he didn’t know was that his handler was sitting in his office at the American Embassy, and would not travel to this part of Moscow for several weeks. There were no plans to contact the courier for at least that long. The CARDINAL line was gone. So far as CIA was concerned, it might never have existed.
“I think we’re wasting our time,” the interrogator said. He and another senior officer of the Second Directorate sat by the window of an apartment. At the next window was another “Two” man with a camera. He and the other senior officer had learned this morning what Bright Star was, and the General who commanded the Second Chief Directorate had given this case the highest possible priority. A leak of colossal proportions had been uncovered by that broken-down war-horse from “One.”
“You think he lied to you?”
“No. This one was easy to break—and, no, it was not too easy. He broke,” the interrogator said confidently. “I think we failed to get him back on the street quickly enough. I think they know, and I think they’ve broken off the line.”
“But what went wrong—I mean from their point of view, it might have been routine.”
“Da.” The interrogator nodded agreement. “But we know that the information is highly sensitive. So, too, must be its source. They have therefore taken extraordinary measures to protect it. We cannot do things the easy way now.”
“Bring him in, then?”
“Yes.” A car drove up to the man. They watched him get in before they walked to their own vehicle.
Within thirty minutes they were all back in Lefortovo Prison. The interrogator’s face was sad.
“Tell me, why is it I think that you have lied to me?” the man asked. “But I have not! I did everything I was supposed to do.
Perhaps I was late, but I told you that.” “And the signal you left, was it the one to tell them that we had you?”
“No!” The courier nearly panicked. “I explained all of that, too.”
“The problem, you see, is that we cannot tell the difference between one chalk mark and another. If you are being clever, you may have deceived us.” The interrogator leaned forward. “Comrade, you can deceive us. Anyone can—for a time. But not a very long time.” He paused to let that thought hover in the air for a minute. It was so easy, interrogating the weak ones. Give hope, then take it away; restore it, and remove it yet again. Take their spirits up and down until they no longer knew which was which—and, lacking a measure of their own feelings, those feelings became yours to use.
“We begin again. The woman you meet on the train—who is she?”
“I do not know her name. She is over thirty, but young for her age. Fair hair, slim and pretty. She is always dressed well, like a foreigner, but she is not a foreigner.”