'Bingo!'
It had been expected that the safe house would be isolated. The geography of the area easily lent itself to that. As soon as the site was identified, an RF-4C Phantom of the 67th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing lifted off from Bergstrom Air Force Base in Texas. The two-man crew of the aircraft thought it was all something of a joke, but they didn't mind the trip, which took less than an hour. As a mission, it was simple enough that anyone could have done it. The Phantom made a total of four high-altitude passes over the area, and after shooting several hundred feet of film through its multiple camera systems, the Phantom landed at Kirtland Air Force Base, just outside Albuquerque. A cargo plane had brought additional ground crew and equipment a few hours earlier. While the pilot shut down his engines, two groundcrewmen removed the film canister and drove it to the trailer that served as an air-portable photolab. Automatic processing equipment delivered the damp frames to the photointerpreters half an hour after the plane had stopped moving.
'There you go,' the pilot said when the right frame came up. 'Good conditions for it: clear, cold, low humidity, good sun angle. We didn't even leave any contrails.'
'Thank you, Major,' the sergeant said as she examined the film from the KA-91 panoramic camera. 'Looks like we have a dirt road coming off this highway here, snakes over the little ridge? and looks like a house trailer, car parked about fifty yards-another one, covered up some. Two cars, then. Okay, what else??'
'Wait a minute-I don't see the second car,' an FBI agent said.
'Here, sir. The sun's reflecting off something, and it's too big to be a Coke bottle. Car windshield, probably. Maybe a back window, but I think it's the front end.'
'Why?' the agent asked. He just had to know.
She didn't look up. 'Well, sir, if it was me, and I was hiding a car, like, I'd back it in so's I could get out quick, y'know?'
It was all the man could do not to laugh. 'That's all right, Sarge.'
She cranked to a new frame. 'There we go-here's a flash off the bumper, and that's probably the grille, too. See how they covered it up? Look by the trailer. That might be a man there in the shadows?' She went to the next frame. 'Yep, that's a person.' The man was about six feet, athletic, with dark hair and a shadow on his face suggesting that he'd neglected to shave today. No gun was visible.
There were thirty usable frames of the site, eight of which were blown up to poster size. These went to the hangar with the UH-1N. Gus Werner was there. He didn't like rush jobs any more than the people in that trailer did, but his choices were as limited as theirs had been.
'So, Colonel Filitov, we now have you to 1976.'
'Dmitri Fedorovich brought me with him when he became Defense Minister. It simplified things, of course.'
'And increased your opportunities,' Vatutin observed.
'Yes, it did.'
There were no recriminations now, no accusations, no comments on the nature of the crime that Misha had committed. They were past that for the moment. The admission had come first as it always did, and that was always hard, but after that, once they'd been broken or tricked into confessing, then came the easy part. It could last for weeks, and Vatutin had no idea where this one would end. The initial phase was aimed at outlining what he'd done. The detailed examination of each episode would follow, but the two-phase nature of the interrogation was crucial to establishing a cross-referencing index, lest the subject later try to change or deny particular things. Even this phase, glossing over the details as they went, horrified Vatutin and his men. Specifications for every tank and gun in the Soviet Army, including the variations never sent to the Arabs-which was as good as giving them to the Israelis, therefore as good as giving them to the Americans-or even the other Warsaw Pact countries, had gone out to the West even before the design prototypes had entered full production. Aircraft specifications. Performance on both conventional and nuclear warheads of every description. Reliability figures for strategic missiles. Inside squabbling in the Defense Ministry, and now, entering the time when Ustinov had become a full voting member of the Politburo, political disputes at the highest level. Most damaging of all, Filitov had given the West everything he knew of Soviet strategy-and he knew all there was to know. As sounding board and confidant for Dmitri Ustinov, and in his capacity as a legendary combat soldier, he'd been the bureaucrat's eyepiece onto the world of actual war-fighting.
And so, Misha, what do you think of this?? Ustinov must have asked that same question a thousand times, Vatutin realized, but he'd never suspected
'What sort of man was Ustinov?' the Colonel of 'Two' asked.
'Brilliant,' Filitov said at once. 'His administrative talents were unparalleled. His instincts for manufacturing processes, for example, were like nothing I've seen before or since. He could smell a factory and tell if it was doing proper work or not. He could see five years in the future and determine which weapons would be needed and which would not. His only weakness was in understanding how they were actually used in combat, and as a result we fought occasionally when I tried to change things to make them easier to use. I mean, he looked for easier manufacturing methods to speed production while I looked at the ease with which the end product could be used on the battlefield. Usually I won him over, but sometimes not.'
Amazing, Vatutin thought as he made a few notes. Misha never stopped fighting to make the weapons better even though he was giving every thing to the West? why? But he couldn't ask that now, nor for a very long time. He couldn't let Misha see himself as a patriot again until all of his treason was fully documented. The details of this confession, he knew now, would take months.
'What time is it in Washington?' Ryan asked Candela.
'Coming up on ten in the morning. You had a short session today.'
'Yeah. The other side wanted an early recess for something or other. Any word from D.C. on the Gregory matter?'
'Nothing,' Candela replied gloomily.
'You told us they would put their defense systems on the table,' Narmonov said to his KGB chief. The Foreign Minister had just reported otherwise. They'd actually learned that the day before, but now they were totally sure that it wasn't mere gamesmanship. The Soviets had hinted at reneging on the verification section of the proposal that had already been settled in principle, hoping this would shake the Americans loose, even a little, on the SDI question. That gambit had met a stone wall.
'It would seem that our source was incorrect,' Gerasimov admitted. 'Or perhaps the expected concession will take more time.'
'They have not changed their position, nor will they change it. You've been misinformed, Nikolay Borissoyich,' the Foreign Minister said, defining his position to be in firm alliance with the Party's General Secretary.
'Is this possible?' Alexandrov inquired.
'One of the problems gathering intelligence on the Americans is that they themselves often do not know what their position is. Our information came from a well-placed source, and this report coincided with that from another agent. Perhaps Alien wished to do this, but was forbidden to.'
'That is possible,' the Foreign Minister allowed, unwilling to push Gerasimov too hard. 'I've long felt that he has his own thoughts on the issue. But that does not matter now. We will have to change our approach somewhat. Might this signal that the Americans have made another technical breakthrough?'
'Possibly. We're working on that right now. I have a team trying to bring out some rather sensitive material.' Gerasimov didn't dare to go further. His operation to snatch the American Major was more desperate than Ryan himself guessed. If it became public, he'd stand accused within the Politburo of trying to destroy important negotiations-and to have done so without first consulting his peers. Even Politburo members were supposed to discuss what they did, but he couldn't do that. His ally Alexandrov would want to know why, and Gerasimov could not risk revealing his entrapment to anyone. On the other hand, he was certain that the Americans would not do anything to reveal the kidnapping. For them to do so would run an almost identical risk-political elements in Washington would try to accuse conservatives of using the incident to scuttle the talks for reasons of their own. The game was as grand as it had ever been, and the risks Gerasimov was running, though grave, merely added spice to the contest. It was too late to be careful. He was beyond that, and even though his own life was on the line, the scope of the contest was worthy of its goal.
'We don't know that he's there, do we?' Paulson asked. He was the senior rifleman on the Hostage Rescue Team. A member of the Bureau's 'Quarter-Inch Club,' he could place three aimed shots within a circle less than half
