The two men took a walkaround of the finished product. Lubinin allowed himself a smile. "Everything appears to be in order, Comrade. I trust the measurements are precise."
"Precise," responded Vostov, "and well ahead of schedule, as you might imagine."
Lubinin's head, situated on top of his oxlike neck, nodded approvingly. "Very well, Comrade. Just get us up there, and we will bring down that American shuttle for you."
If a Harvard Business School professor ever had the inclination to investigate the management styles of Politburo members, it wold make a fascinating study, to be sure; for in exercising their power, this small cabal of fifteen men used arcane techniques that were something to behold. Many Politburo members used the fear-and-intimidation management style. A couple led by example. One tried to be benevolent, while another passed out cartons of American cigarettes as a reward for excellent performance by subordinates.
But the distinctive management style utilized and embraced by the Foreign Minister was that of humiliation. At every opportunity he would berate, ridicule, belittle, insult, or impugn his subordinates, and impress upon them how utterly unfit they were to serve in the glorious Foreign Ministry. No position paper, no report, no drafted cablegram was ever worth more than the paper upon which it was written, as far as the Foreign Minister was concerned. And he seized every opportunity to point out these failings to his underlings. "If you presented the Foreign Minister with Michelangelo's David," lamented one staffer, "he would ream you out for wasting a perfectly good piece of marble."
Now understand, whenever the Foreign Minister dealt with his own superiors he would turn into supplication itself. But with subordinates, the octogenarian minister would remind them over and over and over again that their station in life was just slightly below the level of whale shit on the bottom of the ocean.
The reason subordinates put up with such humiliation was because the Foreign Minister held the key to that juiciest of plums — a posting outside the Soviet Union. Assignments abroad — particularly in Western Europe or North America-were the most coveted jewels in all of Soviet society; and if you had to wallow in the whale shit to grab one of those foreign jewels, well, that's what you did — as long as you eventually landed in Rome, Madrid, or Ottawa.
Aleksandr Kulikov, aide-de-camp to the Foreign Minister, had been wallowing in the whale shit for a very long time indeed. The willowy, almost delicate Kulikov possessed features that were somewhat androgynous, which seemed to accentuate his forlornness. Early in his career he had been blessed with a delightful three-year posting in Paris, where he fell in love with cognac, French food, French architecture, French women (all of them); took weekend trips to the Loire Valley; and earned high marks for his performance from the Russian ambassador. It appeared his star was rising in the ministry, for upon his return to Moscow he was awarded with what seemed to be a prestigious position, one that would greatly enhance his career. He was selected as aide-de-camp to the Foreign Minister himself. Kulikov figured he would have the position for a "year or two, then be rotated back to Paris or some other choice Western capital.
He was wrong.
Because he was a very efficient aide, the Foreign Minister had kept Kulikov enslaved in the same position for the last ten years, subjecting him to a daily regimen of insults, contempt, degradation, abuse, and humiliation. Despite Kulikov's constant entreaties for reassignment, the Foreign Minister refused to let him go, and kept him on such a short leash that the poor wretch was scarcely allowed to go to the water closet by himself.
After enduring seven hellish years of insults, contempt, degradation, abuse, and humiliation from his superior, Kulikov snapped. Utterly snapped. Like a dry twig. At the end of work one day he picked up and ran to the apartment of an old friend stationed at the French embassy and begged — literally begged— to become a spy. Kulikov's hatred for the Foreign Minister had blinded and engulfed him. His once promising career had turned to ashes. France had blessed him with the only happiness he'd ever known in his life. Spying gave him the means to strike back at his aged superior, while serving his beloved surrogate country.
Kulikov's Gallic friend was sympathetic, and made the necessary arrangements.
The Foreign Minister had already left for his Black Sea dacha at Vilkovo, and Kulikov was walking through the giant GUM department store on his Friday-afternoon lunch break. He took his time, pretending to window-shop here and there, then made his way outside and walked up to Karl Marx Prospeckt with a copy of Pravda tucked underneath his arm. He pulled his gray wool coat close around him and was grateful for the fox-fur hat on his head. The snow was still falling, and the pedestrians-like all Moscow pedestrians — were walking briskly, with eyes to the front. No one took notice of Kulikov when he stopped, dropped his Pravda in a trash can, and put his foot up on a sidewalk bench to tie his shoelace. After the bow was redone he sauntered back down the Prospekt, leaving the newspaper behind.
A few moments later a stranger walked by, and he, too, was afflicted with the same malady of the shoelace. After retying the strings, the stranger retrieved the copy of Pravda from the trash can and continued his stroll.
Inside the paper was an exposed strip of Minox film.
Spread over eleven hundred acres of beautiful rolling Maryland countryside was a complex of twenty-nine buildings that was, in essence, the Cheyenne Mountain of America's civilian and scientific space effort. Named after Robert H. Goddard, the founding father of rocketry science, the Goddard Space Flight Center controlled a panoply of satellites orbiting the earth. Satellites that pursued exotic scientific knowledge — such as measuring solar winds, tracing magnetospheric particles, sampling a comet's tail, calibrating crustal dynamics, and pointing an X-ray telescope at a neutron star. While Cape Canaveral and Houston Mission Control might be the arms, eyes, and ears of NASA, Goddard and its 8,600 employees — many of them leading scientists — were the brains.
The flagship of Goddard's scientific efforts was an instrument hailed as the greatest leap forward in astronomy since Galileo first turned his telescope on the heavens. This instrument was the Hubble orbiting space telescope, which enabled astronomers to see distant galaxies above the veil of earth's polluted atmosphere. It was controlled by a special team at Goddard, twenty-four hours a day, and it was the personal pet project of Dr. Percival Leeds, Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The very idea of SPACECOM's tampering with Leeds's sacred ikon had the feel of rape about it. He was pacing up and down the Hubble control room like a wounded rhino.
"This is an outrage! This telescope, my telescope, is being perverted by those space goons, those soldier boys. Wait until Senator McGillacudy hears about this!"
The telescope controller — who was also a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University — had the phone to one ear and his finger in the other trying to block out Leeds's bellowing. Sir Isaac from Cheyenne Mountain was on the other end of the line.
"Now do you understand what we're trying to do?" asked Sir Isaac.
"Well, yes, I think so," said the controller cautiously. "But we've never done anything like this before. We can give it a try, but I'm afraid it will use up the fuel pretty fast."