At 2:15 P.M., the phone rang in the Safcek home. Martha answered in the kitchen. She came running upstairs and shook her sleeping husband gently. “Joe, it’s Washington calling.”
He roused himself slowly and reached for the receiver. “Yes.”
“Colonel, this is Dave Thompson at the Pentagon. We need you here for a special assignment right away. A plane is ready to fly you to Andrews within a half hour.”
“Should I pack any special gear?”
“Everything will be provided for.”
“Is this a repeat of the last time?”
“Negative, Joe. That’s all I can tell you. See you shortly.”
Joe Safcek sat for a moment, then shouted, “Martha, get some things together. I have to go away on a trip.”
She stood against the sink, absorbing this news, and her lips began to tremble. “God, not again!” The dark night of loneliness, the nameless dread she always had that he would never come back from these trips. Martha began to pack his clothes.
Twenty minutes later an army car pulled up outside the house, and Joe went to his wife and Tommy to say good-bye. He reached down and tousled the boy’s hair, then impulsively kissed him on the cheek. “Take care of Mother, Tiger, while I’m away, understand?”
“Yes, Dad, don’t worry.”
Joe was having trouble with his voice.
He kissed Martha once, then again hard. “I love you very much,” he said, and went out the door to the automobile. Martha waved to him and called: “We’ll be waiting.”
He turned at the end of the walk and looked at his family for a moment, then grinned and saluted his son. Tommy’s right hand went to his forehead as his father drove away.
The ultimatum was fifteen hours old, with fifty-seven hours left before deadline. The wheels of the United States Government were meshing. Stark had given his subordinates orders which were being carried out with great speed and diligence. Specialists in guerrilla warfare had gathered at the Pentagon to plan an attack against the Soviet laser. They sat in an underground room and distilled years of experience in the art of clandestine warfare. In three hours they had arrived at a considered approach. At 3 P.M., the results lay on a White House desk.
President William Stark had napped for two hours. His fifty-seven-year-old body was rebelling against the fatigue and tension of the past hours, and Stark, helpless for the moment to alter events, had succumbed to sleep. Pamela Stark had not intruded on him. She had sensed all day that something grave had occurred in the world and did not attempt to bother her husband with any more questions about Bar Harbor. In his own good time, she knew, he would tell her what was troubling him.
Stark was in the Cabinet Room when the rest of the special committee entered. He greeted them curtly and asked Riordan if he had the details of the projected strike worked out. Riordan handed him a manila envelope, and Stark pulled out one typewritten page. He read aloud:
A thrust at the Soviet laser works twelve miles north of Tashkent.
Personneclass="underline" four-man team led by Colonel Joseph Safcek, U.S. Army, Green Berets.
Team will be transported by helicopter from Peshawar, Pakistan, across mountains of Afghanistan by night into Soviet territory east of Tashkent. Helicopter will fly through mountain passes at three hundred feet altitude to avoid detection by radar; at lower altitude over the desert. Personnel will be dressed in Red Army clothing.
Team will carry complement of handguns and automatic rifles; also demolition charges (plastique) for use if they gain access to actual site. Otherwise, team will be provided with one atomic bomb, yield in ten-kiloton range for use in case access to immediate area of laser denied. Bomb is sophisticated to point where single agent can carry and trigger.
Helicopter pickup of personnel arranged for twenty-four hours after drop at same site.
“Jesus,” exclaimed William Stark, “we’d be sending those people to their deaths, no question about it. How can that helicopter possibly get through their radar?”
“We have two things going for us.” Sam Riordan replied. “We’ve taped all their radar installations in the area. We know when they operate and have mapped the route to evade them. Secondly, the Hindu Kush Mountains are the most formidable natural barrier in the world — next to the Himalayas — and create the best possible interference to radar reception. That, with the chopper hugging the valley floors, will make it very difficult for anybody to pick them up. In the long run, we just have to hope that no one would think of looking for intruders coming through the Hindu Kush.”
“Okay, and what about this bomb?” Stark asked. “Can they actually walk it in and still get away safely?”
“No problem there, Mr. President. We’ve sophisticated these weapons to the point where we could slip one into the American embassy in Moscow disguised as a can of tomato soup, set a timer on it, and get out long before the end.”
Martin Manson shook his head. “Do they know the risks yet?”
Riordan answered, “The Russian agents won’t be briefed until they arrive in Peshawar. Safcek is being told at the Pentagon. He’ll go. The man has an amazing record in this field. He went into China two years ago to work with anti-Mao forces, and then another time he spent a week in Hanoi right under Ho’s police trying to sabotage a waterworks that the bombers had trouble knocking out. He blew the plant sky high. Safcek is of Czech background with definite Slavic features. He speaks a passable Russian, enough to get by any ordinary situation. Safcek can work well with the group we have going in with him. They’ll follow him because he makes people believe in him. The fourth man, from the CIA, is Boris Gorlov, who defected from the KGB three years ago and helped us clean up a whole network of Red spies in Western Europe. Gorlov has had plastic surgery, so no one will spot him in Russia. We doubt they’d be looking for him there anyway. They’d be more apt to expect to see him in a Mayflower Coffee Shop right here in Washington.”
Stark bit his lower lip thoughtfully, then asked: “Has anyone come up with a fresh idea?”
General Stephen Roarke tried one last time to stress the efficiency of a single bomber strike. “These people won’t make it, I tell you. The bomber will.”
Sam Riordan interrupted: “General, our Samos camera satellites show the Soviets have, in the past ten hours, moved sixteen mobile SAM antimissile and bomber batteries around the laser works. The Samos has spotted them being deployed. So perhaps your bomber would never make it anyway. And if it did, we’d have the same problem of a possible all-out nuclear war staring us right in the face.”
William Stark was tired of the constant reference to a third world war. Roarke’s one-track mind annoyed him, and he was tempted to tell the general to go to hell. The President tapped his fingers impatiently. “Enough of this argument. If the team succeeds, the Russians will probably be so stunned that they’ll forget all their big ideas. The bomber riding through their skies would most likely bring a counter-strike at us. So let’s go with the less obvious and hope for a simple explosion on the ground which might take them weeks to figure out. By then, they’ll have lost their hold on us.”
Robert Randall said, “Great! It’s the best thing to do.”
Sam Riordan nodded through his pipe smoke.
Roarke stared straight ahead.
Stark asked one last question: “Sam, when would Safcek leave for Pakistan?”
“At 6 P.M., out of Andrews.”
“Would you please ask him to drop by here on the way to the airport? I’d like to wish him luck.”