He paced across the floor to the bed. Jesse hadn’t moved. He glanced at his watch. A couple more days. One way or another, in a couple days this job would be through.
“Did you read the bulletin we sent out a couple days ago about the Ukrainian named Morozov?” Buddy Spencer asked.
Lt Col Oliver Tray didn’t answer as he concentrated on the ball. He checked his back foot alignment and tried once again to relax his grip. Align. Align. Back foot slightly forward. Knees slightly bent. Check displacement from the ball…
“It’s weird,” Buddy cut in once again. “For six years the guy was a ghost. Absolutely invisible. Now suddenly, it’s like he’s everywhere. I’m telling you, once we started to track him, he showed up all over the freakin’ world.”
Left arm straight. Head down. Eyes on the ball. Slow, controlled back swing….
“Have you seen any of the bulletin traffic? It’s pretty interesting. You ought to take a look at it if you get a chance.”
Tray let it go. The ball sailed off over the trees, cutting the par four dog-leg at a near perfect angle. He squinted into the hazy, early winter sun and watched the ball just clear the last stand of pines and drop out of view. Good shot, he smiled to himself. No… great shot. Good distance, no hook or slice, right over the left edge of fairway. It was perfect. He lifted his driver onto his right shoulder and turned back to Spencer. “Just like on the tour,” he instructed proudly. “You concentrate. You learn to ignore the distractions. There will always be jerks in the crowd.”
Spencer laughed and prepared to tee up. It was only the fifth hole and he was already down by three strokes. It was time for combat rules. Next time he would stand so that his shadow fell over Ollie’s tee and dance around the box to distract him.
Tray stood in silence while his friend teed off, placing his ball down the middle of the fairway, a nice but conservative shot.
“You’re not going to beat me with balls like that,” Oliver prodded. “When you’re behind to a master, you’ve got to play a little more aggressively. Haven’t you learned that by now?”
“Yeah, yeah, teach me, Oh Master,” Buddy lifted his arms over his head in mock adoration. “Let me walk in your footsteps, Oh Great One. So long as you’re buying the beer.”
Oliver smiled, picked up his clubs, and began to stride down the fairway.
Oliver Tray and Buddy Spencer had been playing golf together for more than three years. They met at the Bolling golf course every other Wednesday afternoon; rain or shine, heat or sleet, if the course was open, then they played. In that time, Spencer had beaten Oliver only three times, but he no longer let it bother him. He had accepted the obvious fact that, unlike his friend, he would never be a scratch golfer.
Besides, the game was not the main reason he and Tray liked to spend a couple of afternoons a month together.
Passing the ladies’ marker, they strolled down a small hill toward Buddy’s ball which lay two hundred yards in the distance, a tiny- speck of white peeking above the tightly cut grass. “Judging from your ball, it’s pretty obvious you weren’t listening to me,” Buddy observed. “So I’ll ask you again. Did you read the general bulletin? It was sent toward the end of last week.”
Tray thought for a moment. He remembered something about it, but so many things had been happening the past few days, it wasn’t something that stuck in his mind. “Yeah, I saw it in our morning message traffic a couple days back. Didn’t pay much attention to it. Something you’re working on, Buddy?”
“Me and about three hundred other guys. It’s really got the CIA rocking. This guy Morozov has developed a fairly large gathering over the past year or so.” Spencer paused as he kicked his way through a small clump of wiregrass and cattails that lined the left edge of the fair-way, looking for lost balls as he went. “And there’s a little more to it than it would first appear,” he continued. Oliver nodded with understanding. There always was.
Buddy Spencer, a big man with piercing gray eyes and a large Roman nose, was an intelligence analyst at the CIA; however, for the past five years he had been on loan to the staff of the National Security Office at the White House. Specifically, he headed the Office of CounterIntelligence and Threat Analysis/European Theatre, or CIT N Europe, as it was called. His department was responsible for advising the National Security Advisor, and thus the President, of the suspected covert/counterintelligence operations ongoing within Europe. It was CITA/Europe’ s responsibility to glean, pool, sort, and organize all of the unrelated bits of intelligence information about suspected covert operations, speculate and draw conclusions to determine the threat, then present their observations to the President in a timely and accurate daily analysis. Given the sheer volume of work this involved, anyone with any real knowledge of their operation recognized that it was a hopeless task. The crushing mass of information was nearly overwhelming, and to sort through it all and bring it together on a daily basis was much like sticking a high-pressure firehose down your throat in order to get a drink.
This was one of the reasons Buddy Spencer so much enjoyed his time with Lt Col Tray. Their bimonthly games provided him with an outlet; someone to talk to with a different perspective, someone who could relate to the pressures he worked under, someone who understood the subtleties of the intelligence culture. With both men sharing the same interest, as well as a TOP SECRET clearance, it was only normal that their conversations would center on shop.
“So, who is this guy?” Ollie wondered. Instinctively, he looked around them to make certain no one was within hearing distance. They were alone. Not a soul within three hundred yards. That was the beauty of golf.
“Ivan Morozov. He recruits and trains the guys that you’re after. Spies. Traitors. That sort of thing. But his real specialty was deep-seeded moles. Young Pioneers, really just young children, were brought into his organization then trained and provided a cover that would allow them to operate undetected within various Western countries until they were needed. He was the head of the Sicherheit until the Soviet Union broke up. Then he more or less disappeared.
“Until last spring. I guess it was about April when we first started to see him around. Now we see him regularly going into and out of Golubev’s presidential palace and-”
“Golubev? Yevgeni Oskol Golubev… the Ukrainian prime minister?”
“Yes. Yes. See, Morozov-and I didn’t know this until fairly recently-but he’s Ukrainian. In fact, both of his parents, along with about two million other Ukrainians, were deported by Stalin to Siberia after World War Two, after they were accused of being German sympathizers. I guess the old man figured the whole of Ukraine was a bunch of Nazi bums, and you know Stalin-never afraid of a little overkill. Fact was, of the two million Ukrainians, maybe one percent of them were actual Nazi collaborators.
“Anyway, apparently nothing could have been further from the truth in the Morozov family, for Ivan Morozov has proven a loyal socialist his whole life through. Now he is home, apparently doing much the same thing he has done in the past.”
“Interesting… I guess,” Oliver replied. “But there must be dozens of guys like him out there. So what is it about this fellow that’s driving you all so crazy?”
They were approaching Spencer’s ball, and Oliver stepped to one side to watch him take his shot. Spencer stared at the flag that fluttered lightly in the even breeze and measured the distance, then pulled out a six iron and stepped over his ball. Without much further consideration, he pulled back and whacked it toward the rolling green. The ball bounced twice then disappeared into a steep bunker. Spencer swore. Oliver handed him his bag of clubs and the two men set out to Oliver’s ball, which lay a hundred and twenty yards short of the green.