“I’ll call Washington and see if you and I still have jobs.”
“We had an airborne warning and command craft in the area, and we did see one side of the confrontation, Marvin.” Vitaly Sheremetevo did not tell Brackman of his jealousy concerning the MakoShark aerospace craft. Watching the radar tapes, seeing four darting blips chasing nothing at all, then watching nothing at all shoot down two high-technology German fighters, had been an exercise in frustration.
Even for an observer.
An observer who had found himself unexpectedly rooting for an American.
Heresy.
“It is disconcerting, isn’t it, Vitaly? I saw our own tapes.”
“The important thing,” Sheremetevo said, “is that we have achieved a new phase.”
“Direct hostilities, Yes.”
“And with no concurrent admission or announcement from Bonn.”
“It gets ‘curiouser and curiouser.’ That’s a quote, Vitaly”
“From whom?”
“I’ll send you a copy of the book.”
“What do your Joint Chiefs of Staff have to say about this?”
“They’re discussing it with the SecDef. Secretary of Defense. I imagine that he’ll then discuss it with the President and the National Security Advisor. It may be weeks before I hear from them again.” Brackman’s laugh did not sound very amused.
“On this side, Marvin, I have had to confer with a small defense committee of the Politburo. As you say, discussions are under way.”
“In the meantime, Vitaly, I’m finalizing the objective I would like to see.”
“Which is?”
“I want to take those wells out of commission. For two reasons. I want to reduce the threat of war, and I want to eliminate the threat to the environment.”
“I can agree with that,” Sheremetevo said. “Yes, I will support the position. How do we do that?”
“That’s the hell of it. I’m not certain how we go about it. There’s got to be a weak link somewhere.”
“The transmission cables would be my preference.”
“That’s my preference, too, Vitaly. We just can’t find the damned things.”
Amy Pearson worked at her desk in her office. On two of the screens, she had called up copies of telexes that had been forwarded to Themis.
The first one was half amazing, less in its contents than in its correspondents.
CLASSIFICATION TOP SECRET
Decode: 06/17/0841
TO: DIR, CIA
FROM: CHMN, KGB
SUBJ: PEENEMUNDE FACILITY
1) AGREE FACILITY IS LAUNCH COMPLEX.
2) SOURCES INDICATE PRESENCE OF GERMAN NATIONAL EXPERTS IN PHYSICS, AERONAUTICS, ENGINEERING,
COMPUTING. PERSONNEL COMPLEMENT APPROXIMATELY SIXTY PROFESSIONAL STAFF THREE HUNDRED SUPPORT STAFF.
3) LOCAL POPULACE BELIEVES FACILITY EXPERIMENTAL LABORATORY.
4) AGENT INTERVIEWED TWO SITE WORKERS — COOK, ALLOYS TECHNICIAN, OBTAINED FREEHAND DRAWING SIMILAR TO USSR SRF-32 MULTIPURPOSE LAUNCH VEHICLE. (PARTIAL SPECIFICATIONS MAY BE PROVIDED UPON EXECUTIVE REQUEST.)
5) AGENT OBSERVED COL. ALBERT N. WEISMANN, CMDR, 20TH SPECIAL AIR GROUP AT SITE.
Pearson thought that communications between the chairman of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency were extremely rare. The original of this message might go for big bucks at a Sotheby auction fifty years from now.
On content, she was highly interested in the apparent connection of Weismann with the launch complex. That put the 20th Special Air Group, already identified with the geothermal wells, into some kind of relationship with a rocket launch facility.
Reading between the lines of item four, she thought that the KGB suspected that the German rocket was a copy of one of their own. There was very likely an in-depth search for spies taking place at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Tyuratam. A “multipurpose launch vehicle” didn’t tell her much. Intercontinental Ballistics Missile? Space entry vehicle? Or both?
She turned to her keyboard at the third screen and quickly typed a request memo to Gen. David Thorpe, copy to General Overton, asking for a follow-up on item four, a listing of specifications for the Soviet Rocket Forces SRF-32, over the President’s signature. She felt that knowing the capability of the SRF-32 was suddenly important.
On screen two was a copy of an extract from another telex, directed to the CIA’s European division in the Intelligence Directorate from an unknown agent or asset in the field. The agent apparently kept a vigil over the High Command’s headquarters in Bonn and one of his entries for the current morning read:
1116 HOURS:
GEN. FELIX EISENACH, COL. MAXIMILLIAN OBERLIN, COL. ALBERT WEISMANN DEPART HC HDQTRS TOGETHER.
NOTE: EISENACH CURRENT ASSIGN AS SPCL ASST TO MARSHAL HOCH. OBERLIN AIDE TO EISENACH. WEISMANN
CMDER 20TH SAG.
Thorpe, or someone assigned to the task in the CIA, had extracted the entry and forwarded it, she was certain, because of the reference to Albert Weismann.
The man was showing up everywhere. At New Amsterdam, at Peenemünde, and now with importance enough to be present at the High Command’s headquarters in Bonn.
She reached forward and tapped an intercom button, “Communications, IO.”
“Sergeant Arguento, Colonel.”
“Would you set up a link with the CIA’s database right away, please.”
“Two minutes, Colonel.”
Anyone who reached flag rank in the German military rated a complete file, and after a quick scan, Pearson found Eisenach’s. She dumped the file to the station’s mainframe memory, then took her time going through it, deleting innocuous and duplicated data, and coming up with a brief word-picture of the man.
She didn’t like the picture.
Old-line military aristocracy. Pampered, complete education. Lots of family money. Long-term marriage. Career on hold for a long time, until Germany reunified.
And in the background of the snapshot, the items that agents and researchers had uncovered over the years. As a legislative liaison, the general had been known as an inveterate manipulator. It was suspected that he held blackmail files on a number of influential people. He had had twelve extended extramarital affairs, and all twelve of the women had, at one time or another, been severely beaten. One of the women had vanished a few months after Eisenach had learned that she was Jewish.
That was a recurrent theme. On the professional side, in every position he had ever held, or every office over which he had authority, the researchers suspected that he had weeded out every Jew or minority and fired or reassigned them.
Pearson didn’t like the man, and she had only just met him on paper.
She composed messages for CIA and DIA, asking for details of Eisenach’s assignment as an assistant to Marshal Hoch, then as an afterthought, requested additional personal data for Oberlin and Weismann.
Then she transmitted copies of her file to Overton’s and McKenna’s offices, where they would be queued in the correspondence file behind the rest of their daily messages.
She figured McKenna would never get to his.
Mac Zeigman had a photocopy of a picture taken by a New York Times photographer. It had been shot through the windshield of a car east of Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado and showed the barely discernible shape of what the reporter purported to be a MakoShark taking off from the base.
The reporter had been right.
“That is it,” Zeigman said.
He handed the photocopy back across the desk to his commanding officer.
Weismann took it, dropped it on the blotter, and then leaned back in his wooden swivel chair. The chair squeaked. The backs of his hands were reddened with his skin rash and from scratching them. Zeigman wondered if the man had ever seen a doctor about his problem.