Asian Front

“I’d like to take the muzzle off that bear,” young Alex had confessed to his father at the circus. “Osvobodit—set him free.”

“Ha!” his fattier had laughed, “you are the first he’d kill — bite your head off.” But if that’s what his father had said, Lenin had told every younger generation, “Bud’smel. Bud’terpeliv”—Be brave. Be patient — yes, the party had made serious mistakes, but at heart the party was still right.

Lenin was gone now, reviled by some as some atheists reviled Christ, but Alex had not deserted the party, nor had the other members of his “sleeper” cell, as firm as ever in their conviction that capitalism was at heart evil — that its enemies were their friends.

This wintry afternoon, Alex’s returning again to the park seemed propitious. Presently he was joined by a short, stout man, Mike Ricardo. Parks had always been a favorite meeting place for the Soviets, and still were in what was now the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS. Last time they met they had set Operation Kirov’s Ballet in action, knocking out Con Ed’s Indian Point plant, poisoning the city’s water supply at Hillsview Reservoir with one Thermos of PCBs, and taking out the cesium clock in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, the pacemaker clock for all the computers in the country, including the Pentagon’s.

“What d’you think?” Mike asked, walking up, helping himself to a chestnut from the packet Alex was holding, tossing the nut from hand to hand, blowing on it, his breath short, coming in sharp puffs of mist in the chilly air. “You think the Chinese’ll cross?”

“They always have.”

“Yeah, I know, but I mean all along the line?”

“Who knows?” Alex replied. “I can’t even figure out how they do embroidery.”

“Embroidery?”

“Double-sided stuff. They’ll do a picture on a silk screen. You swing it around — same picture on the other side but no knots, stitch marks, or loose thread. Beats me where they hide the ends. Must go blind.”

“Time,” Mike explained, peeling the chestnut, its steaming wisp in the air joining that of his own breath. “Chinks are in no hurry, Alex. They’re building up their strength.”

“Chinese can’t wait forever or Freeman might cross the line.”

Mike rolled up the Post he’d been carrying and stuck it under his arm, hands thrust deep in his topcoat pockets. “What’s in it for us?”

“Novosibirsk wants us to give Beijing as much help as we can. Beijing can’t start sending their operatives into New York. ‘Frisco maybe but not here. So we do our job and turn this thing around we’ll be on top. Chinks’ll make a deal with us on the disputed border areas along the Amur.”

“The Black Dragon,” Mike said.

“The Amur,” Alex said. “Anyway, this way Novosibirsk stays out of it — ostensibly — but if we do our job, shut things down here, hit Con Ed again, slow up the sea lift resupply, sow panic in the population, we’ll have Beijing’s IOU.”

Mike took one of the chestnuts from the bag, noticed it was too sooty, pulled out another, and saw a squirrel keeping pace with them in short, quick dashes by the snow-dusted path leading down past the puppet house toward the dairy.

“Son of a bitch is with the CIA.” He threw the husk at the squirrel. “You sure we’ll pull it off?”

“Look, we did Con Ed okay,” Alex reminded him tartly. “If we do this thing right — Christ knows we’ve been training for it long enough — Washington’ll shit its pants. Americans don’t have the stomach for it. You know that.”

“We Americans are tougher than you think,” Mike said.

Alex didn’t like the “we” but figured it was probably a good sign. Mike always got right into the part. Mike pointed out that some of the others, though neither he nor Alex met them very often, had gone a bit soft — not on the strategy, but they’d been waiting so long they’d started going to seed. “Donut guts!” Alex called them. They liked the blue-collar affluence they enjoyed — plumbers eighty bucks an hour! But if they’d gone soft it didn’t mean they’d gone over. Anyway, most still had at least one parent back in the CIS republics, and grandparents, even brothers and sisters — whatever Siberian Intelligence’s KGB Chief Chernko had decided he needed to keep everyone committed to the semya—family.

One of them had gone off the rails completely — started playing around with street women, spending most of his time screwing and spending. Paid out more at the track than he made on his job as subcontractor for New York Port Authority’s HERT, the harbor emergency response team. They’d found him, a floater, in the East River off the South Street Seaport, blood alcohol count of 1.6 and his testicles sewn in his mouth.

The Post had run a story that the man, a diver for HERT, had been humping one of the mob’s tarts. It had shaken everybody up except Alex, who, Mike thought, might have done it. The thing was, you never knew who was Chernko’s iceman in New York or anywhere else. Before the war, the rezidents in the U.N., UNICEF, or in the embassy in Washington would have handled it. Now you never knew who it was. Alex said it didn’t matter who whacked the big spender, that the Americans would do the same to any one of their people who started screwing anything in sight. You couldn’t afford the risk of who they’d blab to when they’d gone that far off the rails.

“Oh yeah?” Mike said in an accent as flawlessly American as Alex’s. “What about Kennedy? He screwed anything in a skirt.”

“And they whacked him,” Alex said.

Mike got the message, though he’d never bought the idea of a conspiracy theory — some big organizational plan to get Kennedy — even though he did think for one man to get away three shots at a moving target in a few seconds was tough to do. He, Alex, and every other “apprentice” at Spets training school in Novosibirsk had tried it. Alex had been the fastest and most accurate, blowing Kennedy’s head off three times in a row. But that wasn’t why he’d been chosen as the “foreman,” nor had he been chosen because he could do a floater if needed. No — Alex’s outstanding quality was his ability to sustain the long view, to bide his time through all the Gorbachev-Yeltsin turbulence and to hold the others to it.

Whoever shot the floater, Alex told Mike, was unimportant. The point was, he couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants and he paid for it. “Drew too much attention to himself. Put everybody at risk.”

They saw Stefan, a wiry man well over six feet with what the doctors had told him was poor posture — stooped “from ducking doorways,” Mike joked. Stefan was a tradesman, too, an electrician from upstate, but he always wore a jacket and tie that made him look like a small businessman. He was standing by the monkey cage watching one of the animals sitting high on the loops, the monkey ignoring them, peering down into his crotch, grooming himself. Alex could smell Stefan’s breath as he approached him and tried not to make a face. Here Stefan was, living in the most advanced industrial country on earth, the home of the brave and dental floss, and he wouldn’t take care of his teeth. But it was a subject that Alex, for all his hard-nosed Spets training, couldn’t bring himself to broach, though he did move around Mike so that he was upwind as they stood either side of Stefan.

“Look at his red ass!” Stefan said.

“Yeah,” Mike said. “He’s a party monkey.”

“How big’s the park?” Alex asked flatly, and he wasn’t smiling at Mike’s little joke. Stefan, immediately sensing Alex was in his usual all-business mood, answered, “Eight hundred and forty-three acres.” Then Stefan asked his question. “How many blocks?”

Despite being upwind, Alex had to turn away from Stefan’s bad breath before answering. “Fifty-one blocks.”

Chernko in Novosibirsk, obsessed by the possibility of infiltration, insisted that every cell go through the formality of such a preset exchange after an American look-alike years ago had penetrated the Walker ring in Vienna on appearance alone.

The formality over, Alex suggested the three of them walk down to the reservoir.

“Christ, if I’d known that,” Stefan complained, adjusting the porkpie corduroy hat that made him look strangely elfish despite his height, “I could have met you at Eighty-fourth Street.”

“I like to walk,” Alex said, and offered Stefan a chestnut — maybe that’d help his breath.

“No thanks — makes my throat itchy. Listen, I know this is it, but which one do we take care of? Eeny, meeny, miney, mo?”

“What do you care?” Alex asked, unsmiling. “All you need to know is how to work your end.”

“Don’t worry about me, Alexi,” Stefan said. “Could do it with my eyes closed. Just like to know how many are