strengths and every man had weaknesses. It took a person of intelligence to recognize the differences.
'How is it that this was never classified?' Grishanov asked, lighting a cigarette.
'It's just theoretical physics,' Zacharias said, shrugging his thin shoulders, recovering enough that he tried to conceal his despair. 'The telephone company was more interested than anybody else.'
Grishanov tapped the thesis with his finger. 'Well, I tell you, I learned several things from that last night. Predicting false echoes from topographical maps, modeling the blind spots mathematically! You can plan an approach route that way, plot maneuvers from one such point to another. Brilliant! Tell me, what sort of place is Berkeley?'
'Just a school, California style,' Zacharias replied before catching himself. He was talking. He wasn't supposed to talk. He was trained not to talk. He was trained on what to expect, and what he could safely do, how to evade and disguise. But that training never quite anticipated this. And, dear God, was he tired, and scared, and sick of living up to a code of conduct that didn't count for beans to anyone else.
'I know little of your country - except professional matters, of course. Are there great regional differences? You come from Utah. What sort of place is it?'
'Zacharias, Robin G. Colonel -'
Grishanov raised his hands. 'Please, Colonel I know all that. I also know your place of birth in addition to the date. There is no base of your air force near Salt Lake City. All I know is from maps. I will probably never visit this part - any part of your country. In this Berkeley part of California, it is green, yes? I was told once they grow wine grapes there. But I know nothing of Utah. There is a large lake there, but it's called Salt Lake, yes? It's salty?'
'Yes, that's why -'
'How can it be salty? The ocean is a thousand kilometers away, with mountains in between, yes?' He didn't give the American time to reply. 'I know the Caspian Sea quite well. I was stationed at a base there once. It isn't salty. But this place is? How strange.' He stubbed out his cigarette.
The man's head jerked up a little. 'Not sure, I'm not a geologist. Something left over from another time, I suppose.'
'Perhaps so. There are mountains there, too, yes?'
'Wasatch Mountains,' Zacharias confirmed somewhat drunkenly.
One clever thing about the Vietnamese, Grishanov thought, the way they fed their prisoners, food a hog would eat only from necessity. He wondered if it were a deliberate and thought-out diet or something fortuitously resulting from mere barbarity. Political prisoners in the Gulag ate better, but the diet of these Americans lowered their resistance to disease, debilitated them to the point that the act of escape would be doomed by inadequate stamina. Rather like what the fascisti did to Soviet prisoners, distasteful or not, it was useful to Grishanov. Resistance, physical and mental, required energy, and you could watch these men lose their strength during the hours of interrogation, watch their courage wane as their physical needs drew more and more upon their supply of psychological resolve. He was learning how to do this. It was time-consuming, but it was a diverting process, learning to pick apart the brains of men not unlike himself.
'The skiing, is it good?'
Zacharias's eyes blinked, as though the question took him away to a different time and place. 'Yeah, it is.'
'That is something one will never do here, Colonel. I like cross-country skiing for exercise, and to get away from things. I had wooden skis, but in my last regiment my maintenance officer made me steel skis from aircraft parts.'
'Steel?'
'Stainless steel, heavier than aluminum but more flexible. I prefer it. From, a wing panel on our new interceptor, project E-266.'
'What's that?' Zacharias knew nothing of the new MiG-25.
'Your people now call it Foxbat. Very fast, designed to catch one of your B-70 bombers.'
'But we stopped that project,' Zacharias objected.
'Yes, I know that. But your project got me a wonderfully fast fighter to fly. When I return home, I will command the first regiment of them.'
'Fighter planes made of steel? Why?'
'It resists aerodynamic heating much better than aluminum,' Grishanov explained. 'And you can make good skis from discarded parts.' Zacharias was very confused now. 'So how well do you think we would do with my steel fighters and your aluminum bombers?'
'I guess that depends on -' Zacharias started to say, then stopped himself cold. His eyes looked across the table, first with confusion at what he'd almost said, then with resolve.
Too soon, Grishanov told himself with disappointment. He'd pushed a little too soon. This one had courage. Enough to take his Wild Weasel 'downtown,' the phrase the Americans used, over eighty times. Enough to resist for a long time. But Grishanov had plenty of time.
CHAPTER 12
Outfitters
Kelly dropped a dime in the pay phone and called the number. It was a blazing hot Saturday, temperature and humidity in a neck-and-neck race for triple digits while Kelly fumed at his own stupidity. Some things were so blatantly obvious that you didn't see them until your nose split open and started bleeding.
'Hello? I'm calling about the ad for the car... that's right,' Kelly said. 'Right now if you want... Okay, say about fifteen minutes? Fine, thank you, ma'am. I'll be right there. 'Bye.' He hung up. At least something had gone right. Kelly grimaced at the inside of the phone booth. Springer was tied up in a guest slip at one of the marinas on the Potomac. He had to buy a new car, but how did you get to where the new car was? If you drove there, then you could drive the new car back, but what about the one you took? It was funny enough that he started laughing at himself. Then fate intervened, and an empty cab went driving past the manna's entrance, allowing him to keep his promise to a little old lady.
'The 4500 block, Essex Avenue,' he told the driver.
'Where's that, man?'
'Bethesda.'
'Gonna cost extra, man,' the driver pointed out, turning north.
Kelly handed a ten-dollar bill across. 'Another one if you get me there in fifteen minutes.'
'Cool.' And the acceleration dropped Kelly back in his seat. The taxi avoided Wisconsin Avenue most of the way. At a red light the driver found Essex Avenue on his map, and he ended up collecting the extra ten with about twenty seconds to spare.
It was an upscale residential neighborhood, and the house was easy to spot. There it was, a VW Beetle, an awful peanut-butter color speckled with a little body rust. It could not have been much better. Kelly hopped up the four wooden front steps and knocked on the door.
'Hello?' It was a face to match the voice. She had to be eighty or so, small and frail, but with fey green eyes that hinted at what had been, enlarged by the thick glasses she wore. Her hair still had some yellow in the gray.
'Mrs Boyd? I called a little while ago about the car.'
'What's your name?'
'Bill Murphy, ma'am.' Kelly smiled benignly. 'Awful hot, isn't it?'
'T'rble,' she said, meaning terrible. 'Wait a minute.' Gloria Boyd disappeared and then came back a moment later with the keys. She even came out to walk him to the car. Kelly took her arm to help her down the steps.
'Thank you, young man.'
