WW III

had explained, it was all downhill to Munich.

Being stationed at Alfa, therefore, was an awesome responsibility for young men, and their commander, Lieutenant General Sutherland, never tired of telling them that their greatest danger lay not in the “bean count,” the two-to-one numerical superiority of the Russians and Warsaw Pack armies in men, tanks, and aircraft, a count used to get U.S. congressmen to vote for better, more sophisticated weapons, but in the very dullness of the Alfa routine, the general constantly lecturing them on the need to be ready. When they had heard of the NKA invasion, however, and the continuing debacle of American arms in South Korea, General Sutherland said no more. The sight of their flag burning on jubilant East German television was enough.

For Hans Meir the threat was more pronounced, for while his parents lived in West Germany, in Frankfurt, only seventy miles southwest of the Fulda Gap, his sister, her husband, and two children whom he had never met still lived in East Berlin, a hundred miles northeast of Fulda. Meir knew that if war ever did break out, the vast sea of the Soviet-WP armies would immediately close the lonely, narrow one-hundred-mile-long corridor that ran from West Germany to the “island” of West Berlin. Hunkered down in the most forward machine-gun post by the lonely, cream-colored watchtower overlooking the pleasant, rolling countryside beyond Fulda Gap, Hans Meir prayed, though he was not sure whether he believed in God or not, that the Korea-Sache— “Korean business,” as they were calling it-would soon be over, that tempers would cool, logic applied. As darkness descended over the “trace,” he saw the lights of East German farms come on like tiny stars in another universe.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A long, shiny black Zil swept out of Sheremetyevo Airport in a gray dawn, heading south through the Green Belt before reaching Moscow’s outer ring, passing through the flickering sunlight of the Garden Ring Road, arriving a half hour later in Dzerzhinsky Square outside the Children’s World. The route was a small variation in Director Chernko’s routine, for normally the head of the six-hundred-thousand-man KGB would have been driven either to the front of, or behind, the ocher-colored facade of Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. Chernko preferred the older seven- story All-Russian Insurance Company building fronting on Lubyanka Prison rather than the ugly, modern headquarters in the suburbs. Chernko did not intend to make any mistakes, and small changes in his arrival routine were part of his plan to keep any potential assassin off balance. He knew that to confound madmen wanting to kill you was a difficult thing even in the USSR, but there was no point in helping them. Besides, it was a good example to set for those of his agents still in training. Variation in standard procedure was the most difficult thing to imbue a good agent with. After all, they’d been brought up in a world of apparatchiks, “bureaucrats,” for whom conformity to the rigid system was safety. And there was another good reason for obeying strict procedure: Orthodoxy, in terms of chain of command and basic trade craft, was essential if the First Directorate’s one hundred thousand agents abroad were to function with any discipline. But now, summoned home for an “extraordinary” meeting of the Politburo when the Korean War broke while he was attending a high-level USSR-U.S. “peace study group” in Zurich, Chernko knew that if his supposition about what the Politburo meeting would be about was correct, then the agents he wanted now would be the most unorthodox, the most willing to adapt to quickly changing circumstances. Indeed, the first order the tall, ascetic-looking Chernko gave his aide, upon reaching his seventh-floor office, was to bring the files of all operatives in CANUS — Canada and the United States — who had been “disciplined” in the last two years for exceeding their authority and/or violating “operational procedure.” As the major went to “Records” on the fourth floor, Chernko pressed the buzzer for tea. The Swiss could make superb coffee, but their tea — it was as weak as a congressman’s principles. Chernko liked his tea “so dark,” he had told his staff, that “I can fill my fountain pen with it.” When it arrived on a silver salver, he took a cube of hard sugar, placed it between tobacco-stained teeth, and sipped the steaming brew, glad to be home, looking out over the square.

The breezes blowing softly down from the Lenin Hills to the west carried a smell that for Chernko was as nostalgic as watching the shivering leaves of beech in the last golden light. It brought a sense of sadness, of time lost, never to be recovered, of long summer days when he and the other privileged nachalstvo— the “establishment”—enjoyed their cool dachas at Uspenskoye by the Moscow River. Yet as well as nostalgia for the past, the smell of autumn carried with it the feeling of hope-that the Americans would see all the signals; the idea of the volunteer force released by the Politburo and quickly picked up by the Western media; the presence of the Eastern Fleet in the China Sea; the maneuvers off Cam Rahn Bay. “Amphibious maneuvers,” the phrase that had been suggested by Colonel Marchenko, had precisely the right tone, telling the Americans that if the Soviet Union wanted to land on the Korean peninsula in force, it could.

Chernko’s aide returned with the list of agents. There were seventy-three who’d been cited for infractions, the most common being excessively high expense accounts.

“Back when the American President Carter proposed a tax on the two-martini lunch,” Chernko told the major, “it raised more hackles with our Washington head of station than with the capitalists on Wall Street.”

The major said he was surprised by the number of infractions.

“It’s the American air,” Chernko said, half-jokingly. “It encourages rebellion against rules.” The major gave a noncommittal nod. Sipping his tea, Chernko ignored the cases of inflated expense accounts and odd “unadvised” liaisons with street women. Finally he had ticked off fourteen names, eleven men, three women, who had been singled out for uprostit’ delo— “cutting comers”—a phrase that meant that in these cases the agent had, upon encountering unexpected difficulties, violated strict precautionary measures, a series of obsessionally followed multiple checks against entrapment or enemy surveillance.

“These are the ones,” Chernko said. “Arrange special meets,” he instructed the major. “No code transmits. No pouch. By hand. Vancouver the point of entry. Advisories to Toronto and New York.”

“Yes, sir. Special couriers?”

“No. We’ll use our two best Izvestia people to take the instructions. Journalistic cover.” Chernko thought for a minute, picking up another cube of sugar. “Travel pieces—’This Land Is Your Land — East To West.’ That sort of thing.” He saw the major didn’t get the play on words of the popular American folk tune. He toyed with the sugar cube as he looked down the list, tapping the yellow paper. “Vancouver is sister city to Odessa, isn’t it?”

The major was embarrassed — he didn’t know. “Ah — we have a consulate there.”

“Yes, it is,” said Chernko, answering his own question. “Odessa and Vancouver in the fall. A nice travel piece.”

CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, had Montreal and Toronto pretty well bottled up, and the CIA, of course, had New York well covered. But Vancouver was known within the First Directorate as not only an easy entry point to the United States but also as one of the most beautiful cities in North America, which would make the journalist cover more convincing.

“How many agents will be going through?” asked the major. “I’ll start preparing the paperwork.”

Chernko drank his tea until the sugar cube crumbled under the pressure. “None,” he answered the major. “No, we don’t want to start putting in new people now, Major.” He gave an enigmatic smile. “It would upset the CIA!” He glanced up at the clock below the mounted emblem of the gold shield and sword. “I have to meet with the premier in half an hour. Two cars.”

“Yes, sir,” answered the major, picking up the phone to order the cars while deducing that if delivery of the Directorate’s message necessitated the Directorate using two of their top journalist agents in Izvestia and not even entrusting it to top secret code traffic between Moscow and the Soviet Embassy in Washington, then the message must be one of the most important Moscow center had sent in years.

It was.

As the Zil picked up speed across the square, the twin flashing red lights on either side of the Spassky Gate changed to green, the guards coming to attention and saluting. Chernko looked across at the major.

“Major, do you remember Rust?”

The major thought hard — was he one of the agents in place, a sleeper in America — or was it Canada?

“The German hooligan,” said Chernko. “He landed a plane in Red Square. Here!”