Chapter Thirty:
The Ultimate Spy
At the end of the last war, John Cairncross had been posted to the Royal Treasury. From his position there he could do all sorts of favors for his Soviet masters. In case you didn’t recognize his name he had been accused of being the fifth member of the “Cambridge Five” Soviet spy-ring and, indeed he was. The Cambridge Five have so far caused all manner of security breaches throughout British MI-5 and MI-6. Incredible amounts of information made its way right to the Kremlin and into the small hands of its resident spy master, Lavrenti Beria.
This time Cairncross acted on his own without a mission assignment from his Soviet handler. It was rather effortless for him to redirect into storage Britain’s supply of VT fuses for the 3.7-inch anti-aircraft munitions. Not every fuse of course as each battery retained a couple of hours’ worth of fuses, but until the Soviet Army attacked on May 2nd, 1946, the majority of the fuses had been in storage. This occurred about six months ago.
It was Cairncross who first laid eyes on the paper concerning the problem with the VT fuse becoming damaged by damp conditions. This was significant enough. Added to this, is the astounding fact that it could be jammed. He passed this information on to his spy master and promptly forgot about it. Then, weeks later he happened to overhear a co-worker in the Royal Treasury mention the transporting and storage of all this AA ammunition and what a pain it was. A tiny bell went off in his head and he remembered the study he’d seen.
After gaining access to the invoices he noticed that it was only for the transportation of the fuses. The fuses weren’t identified by type nor were any specific handling instructions included. He simply altered the final destination of these shipments that night to the enormous storage units in the dampest part of Britain, near the live-fire area of Okehampton. It made perfect sense that if you were going to use the shells for live-fire practice, you would store them near the live-fire area so that no alarms should go off.
By having these fuses stored in damp conditions for over six months they could be degraded by a good thirty percent. Added to the twenty to thirty percent factory failure rate documented in that same report this meant that the VT shells in the current British inventory should fail a good fifty to sixty percent of the time.
In his twisted mind this would greatly assist the Communist cause in overthrowing the capitalist pigs currently in power in Britain and cement his place in history. Never mind the thousands of fellow Britons who would be killed and maimed as a result of his misguided deeds. It was all for the cause, and sacrifices had to be made. In the end, more people will be better off under communism than under the current corrupt system.
Who knows, there may be some reward from a future and grateful communist British government when they finally obtained power, perhaps even some kind of leadership role. After all, he is putting his life on the line for the cause. That should be worth some kind of reward above and beyond the privilege of living in a workers’ paradise. Maybe he should learn to speak Russian…
July 28th, 1946
The spy known as DELMAR had made it to the border of Canada, near Roseau, Minnesota. This crossing was never guarded and depended on the honor system. It might not do George any good to get into Canada but it was the only thing that he could think of to do. Canada had already discovered and jailed many Soviet spies, but he was hoping that they would somehow overlook him.
The problem was that he had inhaled some of his own poison in the form of polonium. Somewhere along the way between setting the tiny bombs off in Oak Ridge and Dayton, some polonium had made it into his lungs. He was dying a horrible death, much like the one he had imposed on his former co-workers, their families and anyone else who they came in contact with. Tens of thousands have died or are deathly-ill because of his actions. On the other hand, possibly hundreds of thousands of his countrymen were saved the horrible death of an atomic bomb.
The photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had sickened him and had steeled his resolve to do what he had done. Now it looked like he would pay the ultimate price. He hoped that he would be remembered for the lives he saved, instead of the ones he took. He fell out of bed in such a powerful coughing fit that it seemed to break off a piece of his lung. For all he knew, it actually might have. Polonium rotted you from the inside out.
He guessed it was time to take matters in his own hands, and end it with the help of the Colt .45 he had stashed in his luggage. Fast, painless… he had heard, but how would anyone know that was still alive. His whole body ached especially his chest and breathing was incredibly difficult. Yes, it would end today. End with a very loud bang. It would be an extremely loud in this tiny room they called a suite. Well what did he expect so near the Canadian border in a town of 300 or so. He was lucky to find anything, much less a small hotel.
One last meal at the truck stop… his final meal. Maybe he should stand up and announce that he was the man responsible for stopping the production of the U.S. atomic bomb. Maybe someone would shoot him and put him out of his misery. That would solve two problems… his death, and his legacy. He imagined that he would crawl up on the lunch counter and shout it out in a booming voice how he was the man who stopped the atomic bomb. He would proudly declare how he had saved hundreds of thousands of lives. For the sake of posterity he would state that his name was George Koval and that he had stopped the potential murder of millions. George Koval, the hero of the Soviet People, whose name will reverberate throughout the halls of heroes for generations. A name for you to remember you citizens of Roseau, Minnesota! Your town will become famous, for the death of the infamous George Koval!
Then the coughing started again and as far as he knew, it never stopped. In the middle of his last cough, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain, probably weakened by the Polonium and killed him. He was dead almost instantly. When the maid came to clean the room there he was dressed in his underwear, half on and half off the bed, his bowels and bladder had let loose, as they usually do when death occurs. His head was hanging down and whatever he had in his stomach had drooled out in a puddle with a sticky, frozen waterfall of spit leading to and still attached to the pile of half digested…
It was neither a pretty nor a heroic sight. George Koval, who we now know as the Soviet spy Delmar, did not have any identification on him. There was nothing for the County Sheriff to lead him to his identity and he was buried in a lonely grave near the Canadian border outside of Roseau, Minnesota, one of the last places on earth you would want to be buried and not remembered. In a last bit of irony that summarized his life and his marked his death, he did get a U.S. flag placed on his grave every Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day as the cemetery made a clerical error and had him identified as a U.S. Army veteran of the First World War.