“I knew a guy with a tattoo like that. Officer—he’s with Team-Six now.”
“Once upon a time, Captain. I’m not supposed to talk about that, sir.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Sir, your mission orders will—”
“Humor me.” Mancuso smiled out the order. “They just took in the brow.”
“It involves making a pickup.”
My God. Mancuso nodded impassively. “Will you need any additional support?”
“No, sir. Solo shot. Just me and my gear.”
“Okay. We can go over it in detail after we sail. You’ll eat in the wardroom. Right down the ladder outside, then a few feet aft, on the starboard side. One other thing: is time a problem?”
“Shouldn’t be, unless you mind waiting. Part of this is still up in the air—and that’s all I can say for now, Captain. Sorry, but I have my orders, too.”
“Fair enough. You take the top bunk. Get some sleep if you need it.”
“Thank you, sir.” Clark watched the Captain leave, but didn’t smile until the door closed. He’d never been on a Los Angeles-class submarine before. Most intelligence missions were conducted by the smaller, more maneuverable Sturgeons. He always slept in the same place, always in the upper bunk in the engineer’s stateroom, the only spare bed on the ship. There was the usual problem stowing his gear, but “Clark” had done it enough to know all the tricks. When he’d finished that, he climbed up into the bunk. He was tired from the flight and needed a few hours to relax. The bunk was always the same, hard against the curved hull of the submarine. It was like being in a coffin with the lid half-open.
“One must admire the Americans for their cleverness,” Morozov said. It had been a busy several weeks at Dushanbe. Immediately after the test—more precisely, immediately after their visitor from Moscow had left—two of the six lasers had been defrosted and disassembled for service, and it was found that their optics had been badly scorched. So there was still a problem with the optical coating, after all. More likely quality-control, his section chief had observed, dismissing the problem to another team of engineers. What they had now was far more exciting. Here was the American mirror design that they’d heard about for years.
“The idea came from an astronomer. He wanted a way to make stellar photographs that didn’t suffer from ‘twinkling.’ Nobody bothered to tell him that it was impossible, so he went ahead and did it. I knew the rough idea, but not the details. You are right, young man. This is very clever. Too clever for us,” the man growled briefly as he flipped to the page on computer specifications. “We don’t have anything that can duplicate this performance. Just building the actuators—I don’t know if we can even do that.”
“The Americans are building the telescope—”
“Yes, at Hawaii. I know. But the one at Hawaii is far behind this one, technically speaking. The Americans have made a breakthrough that has not yet found its way into the general scientific community. Note the date on the diagram. They may actually have this one operating now.” He shook his head. “They’re ahead of us.”
“You have to leave.”
“Yes. Thank you for protecting me this long.” Eduard Vassilyevich Altunin’s gratitude was genuine. He’d had a floor on which to sleep, and several warm meals to sustain him while he made his plans.
Or attempted to. He couldn’t even appreciate the disadvantages under which he labored. In the West he could easily have obtained new clothing, a wig to disguise his hair, even a theatrical makeup kit that came with instructions on how to alter his features. In the West he could hide in the back seat of a car, and be driven two hundred miles in under four hours. In Moscow he had none of those options. The KGB would have searched his flat by now, and determined what clothing he wore. They’d know his face and hair color. The only thing they evidently did not know was his small circle of friends from military service in Afghanistan. He’d never talked to anyone about them.
They offered him a different sort of coat, but it didn’t fit, and he had no wish to endanger these people further. He already had his cover story down: he’d hidden out with a criminal group a few blocks away. One fact about Moscow little known in the West was its crime situation, which was bad and getting worse. Though Moscow had not yet caught up with American cities of comparable size, there were districts where the prudent did not walk alone at night. But since foreigners didn’t often visit such areas, and since the street criminals rarely troubled foreigners—doing so guaranteed a vigorous response from the Moscow Militia—the story was slow getting out.
He walked out onto Trofimovo, a dingy thoroughfare near the river. Altunin marveled at his stupidity. He’d always told himself that if he needed to escape from the city, he’d do so on a cargo barge. His father had worked on them all his life, and Eduard knew hiding places that no one could find—but the river was frozen, and barge traffic was at a stop, and he hadn’t thought of it! Altunin raged at himself.
There was no sense worrying about that now, he told himself. There had to be another way. He knew that the Moskvich auto plant was only a kilometer away, and the trains ran year round. He’d try to catch one going south, perhaps hide in a freight car filled with auto parts. With luck he’d make it to Soviet Georgia, where no one would inspect his new papers all that closely. People could disappear in the Soviet Union. After all, it was a country of 280,000,000, he told himself. People were always losing or damaging their papers. He wondered how many of these thoughts were realistic and how many were simply an attempt to cheer himself up.
But he couldn’t stop now. It had started in Afghanistan and he wondered if it would ever stop.
He’d been able to shut it out at first. A corporal in an ordnance company, he worked with what the Soviet military euphemistically referred to as “counterterrorist devices.” These were distributed by air, or most often by Soviet soldiers completing a sweep through a village. Some were the prototypical Russian matryoshka dolls, a bandanaed figure with a roly-poly bottom; or a truck; or a fountain pen. Adults learned fast, but children were cursed both with curiosity and the inability to learn from the mistakes of others. Soon it was learned that children would pick up anything, and the number of doll-bombs distributed was reduced. But one thing remained constant: when picked up, a hundred grams of explosive would go off. His job had been assembling the bombs and teaching the soldiers how to use them properly.
Altunin hadn’t thought about it much at first. It had been his job, the orders for which came from on high; Russians are neither inclined by temperament nor conditioned by education to question orders from on high. Besides, it had been a safe, easy job. He hadn’t had to carry a rifle and go walking in the bandit country. The only dangers to him had been in the bazaars of Kabul, and he’d always been careful to walk about in groups of five or more. But on one such trip he’d seen a young child—boy or girl, he didn’t know—whose right hand was now a claw, and whose mother stared at him and his comrades in a way he would never forget. He’d known the stories, how the Afghan bandits took particular delight in flaying captured Soviet pilots alive, how their women often handled the matter entirely. He’d thought it clear evidence of the barbarism of these primitive people—but a child wasn’t primitive. Marxism said that. Take any child, give it proper schooling and leadership, and you’d have a communist for life. Not that child. He remembered it, that cold November day two years ago. The wound was fully healed, and the child had actually been smiling, too young to understand that its disfigurement would last forever, But the mother knew, and knew how and why her child had been punished for being. . . born. And after that, the safe, easy job hadn’t been quite the same. Every time he screwed the explosives section onto the mechanism, he saw a small, pudgy child’s hand. He started seeing them in his sleep. Drink, and even an experiment with hashish hadn’t driven the images away. Speaking with his fellow technicians hadn’t helped—though it had earned him the wrathful attention of his company zampolit. It was a hard thing he had to do, the political officer had explained, but necessary to prevent greater loss of life, you see. Complaining about it would not change matters, unless Corporal Altunin wanted transfer to a rifle company, where he might see for himself why such harsh measures were necessary.