Stark was tempted to agree and move on to something more promising. But Sam Riordan was suddenly alert. “General, you just reminded me. In Germany we do have a group of men who love us more than Lenin. They’re members of the NTS, an expatriate outfit which spends its time fighting the system back in Russia. We’ve been working these people through the Curtain for years.”
Riordan waited for some reaction. Stark’s was immediate. “How many of them would be able to do such a job as we have in mind?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll find out within an hour or two.”
“Then see what you have and we’ll break for some coffee in the meantime.”
The Extraordinary Committee rose from the brightly polished table in the Cabinet Room. Riordan went to a phone.
At 10 A.M., President Stark walked into the press room that had been built over Franklin Roosevelt’s old swimming pool during the Nixon Administration. He nodded to three reporters sitting there. He recognized Morris Farber of The New York Times and called to him, “Slow day, eh, Morris?” The reporter laughed and asked when the President was going to forget the cares and woes of office and leave for the Maine White House in Bar Harbor. Stark grinned back, “My wife knows all the details. You’d better ask her.” Then he waved and turned back into the Executive Wing. Farber and the others resumed their gin rummy game.
At Langley, Virginia, an IBM sorting machine whirred busily as thirty-seven cards were fed into it. Six fell into a slot beneath, and an attendant took them upstairs to a file-lined office. There he extracted six bulging folders from a cabinet and walked briskly to a waiting car in the parking lot.
Gerald Weinroth led the group back into the Cabinet Room. He had not been able to eat because of his ulcer. The professor sipped a glass of milk while he read The Washington Post account of plans for a mass demonstration against birth control scheduled for the capital the next day, Thursday. Weinroth smiled ruefully as he folded the newspaper and went back to discussing the possible end of the world.
Sam Riordan had six folders in front of him. He and Charlie Tarrant had quickly absorbed their contents and placed two of them slightly apart from the others. Manson, Randall, and Roarke took their seats and waited for Stark to arrive. He came in huffing and apologized: “I had to say hello to a Boy Scout delegation from Iowa. I didn’t want anyone to think it wasn’t business as usual today. How does it look?”
“Out of six probables, Charlie and I think these two could do the job best. I’ll read you a little about them. Peter Kirov, thirty-two, former lieutenant in a Soviet tank division, fluent in German, French, English, and, of course, Russian. He can even speak in the dialect of the Tashkent region. Three trips into Eastern Europe, including one parachute drop by night near Kiev, to set up cells of resistance. He’s never failed yet.”
Riordan picked up the other folder. “Interestingly enough, this one is a woman, Luba Spitkovsky, a Russian Jew, three members of her family in Siberia for ‘intellectual provocations’ against the government. Luba is a born killer. Twice she has gone in to assassinate agents in East Germany and performed beautifully. Her home for the first twenty of her twenty-eight years was the town of Chirchiz, about twenty miles northeast of Tashkent. Luba’s home was no more than ten miles from our laser.”
Robert Randall whistled appreciatively. Riordan seemed pleased with his choices.
“Both of these people could go on a moment’s notice. But they will need more help, I’m afraid. Perhaps General Roarke can take care of that.” Roarke asked for a telephone and called the Pentagon. He spoke briefly with the Office of Counterinsurgency, explaining what he wanted. The party on the other end promised to call back within fifteen minutes.
Stark said, “What about the details of their mission? Sam, you and the Pentagon better sit down on this in a hurry. Why don’t you get going now? And Steve, you should get back to your office on this, too. When you have a plan and the team made up, let me have everything on it. Gerald, get your group together and give us all possible information on their laser and how it compares with ours. Let’s have a final meeting at, say 2:30 P.M., in my sitting room. Say nothing to reporters, nothing to your wives, and above all nothing to your secretaries.”
Robert Randall laughed sickly at the reference. Stark walked briskly out of the room and went down a corridor past the beautiful Rose Garden. His footsteps echoed loudly as he turned a corner and disappeared.
Martin Manson got up slowly and reached absently for his briefcase on the chair beside him. Randall said to no one in particular, “Do you think we can pull it off?”
Weinroth answered brusquely, “God help us if we don’t.”
In late summer, heat wraps the North Carolina countryside in a moist blanket of humidity. By noon, clothes are wrinkled and stained by the cloying dampness, which robs the body of vitality. On the outskirts of Fort Bragg, a column of ten men ignored these conditions and ran at double time toward their barracks. They were singing at the top of their voices. The men wore jungle camouflage fatigues and carried a variety of weapons over their shoulders. All had black smudge on their faces. In the midst of a quadrangle, the lead man shouted an order, and the column stopped. He issued another command, and they broke and disappeared at a trot into a long white barracks. The leader strode briskly away toward a line of houses in the distance. He was an impressive figure at six feet three and one hundred eighty pounds of taut muscle. His hair was closely cropped and blond. His eyes were a cold blue through the lampblack on his face. His chin was strong, thrust out jauntily.
By 1 P.M., the officer had entered one of the homes on Officers Row and gone upstairs immediately to the bathroom. He took off his sweaty clothes and stepped into a cold shower. He began to sing “Home on the Range” in a loud baritone.
In the hallway outside, a woman laughed softly at the noise and went on into the master bedroom at the end of the corridor.
In a few moments, the singing stopped, and the shower was turned off. The man emerged from the bathroom with a towel around his middle. He walked into the bedroom and saw his wife looking out the window into a play yard. She turned as he entered and said, “Joe, Tommy is really having a great time out there with the Jackson kids. He’s running around like nothing ever happened to him.” Joe Safcek stepped up behind his wife and put his arms around her. He looked past her to where his ten-year-old son was throwing a baseball with a neighbor’s child. Joe felt a surge of paternal pride.
“Martha, the doctor said to let him do all these things. As far as he could determine, the skull fracture has healed perfectly, and he’s as normal as any kid in town.”
Martha turned into his arms, and he kissed her softly. He felt her arms tighten around his neck. “Aren’t we lucky,” she said. “He could have died in that accident.”
Joe hugged her closer. Outside, the shouts of Tommy and his friends echoed through the screen.