Stark thanked the committee members for their help and dismissed them. Robert Randall went up to him and put out his hand. “Mr. President, it’ll be all right. I’m sure it will.”
Stark took his aide’s hand and smiled sadly, “Bob, you once told me this is where the action is. But tonight I wish I was back in good old Pittsburgh, P.A., doing a crossword puzzle. Maybe I’m getting paid back for being too eager for power.”
Randall did not reply.
Joe Safcek wanted desperately to call his wife. When he had heard the briefing officer at the Pentagon outline Operation Scratch, Joe was appalled. Always before he had been given tasks with acceptable risks but not this time. And no one at the Pentagon offered him any false hope. The men sending him into the Soviet Union were too professional in their field to attempt to deceive another professional about the odds on coming back. Safcek never thought of backing out. He could have. When Dave Thompson finished his instructions, he looked into Safcek’s eyes and said, “You don’t have to go, Joe, it’s purely voluntary.”
Safcek tried to grin but could not. “Dave, I’m your man. Have a brigadier’s star waiting for me when I get back.”
Thompson was glum as the two shook hands. “The President wants to see you on your way to Andrews. The chopper will take you to the White House first.”
Safcek was stunned and asked why.
Thomson shrugged, “Maybe you’re getting the star tonight.”
Safcek gathered his orders and went out to meet the Commander-in-Chief.
Stark met him at the door to the Oval Room. He shook the colonel’s hand warmly and showed him to a seat in front of the massive desk. The President went to his chair and was framed against the famous window looking out on the South Lawn, where Safcek’s helicopter now waited.
President Stark did not know quite what to say. He asked, “Well, Colonel, I suppose you’ve had all your questions answered across the river?”
Safcek assured him that he had. The President asked where he was from and Safcek told him McKeesport, Pennsylvania.
“Well now, that makes us neighbors. I’m from Pittsburgh.”
Safcek said he knew that and that he had voted for Stark when he ran for governor of Pennsylvania. The President smiled and said, “Then I guess I can blame you a little for putting me in this chair tonight.”
In turn, Joe Safcek did not know quite what to say. He was overwhelmed by the man who controlled the destiny of the world. The accumulated centuries of tradition in which the office was steeped left the colonel speechless.
President Stark wished at that moment that he had never invited Safcek to his office. It was an ordeal to look at this soldier, whom he was sending to a questionable fate. Stark hated to think of him with a wife named Martha and a son named Tommy. He would have preferred Safcek faceless, anonymous, just a name.
Joe Safcek noticed the deep furrows on the President’s forehead and the baggy black pouches under his eyes. He felt a great sorrow for him and wanted to console the man behind the desk.
Stark roused himself from his depression. “Colonel, I know you have to get going. I just wanted to meet you and shake your hand. This country will owe very much to you shortly.”
Stark had come around from his chair to stand in front of the Green Beret officer. He added, “God be with you” and stopped suddenly. Safcek mumbled, “Thank you, sir.” They shook hands.
The President noticed that Safcek’s grip was very strong, as he expected it would be. The colonel left the Oval Room while the President wandered back to the window and stared out at the Washington Monument. Stark saw a young officer counting the bodies of his friends on a hillside in Korea. Each corpse had Joe Safcek’s face.
In a small waiting room at Andrews Air Force Base, northeast of Washington, Colonel Safcek met Boris Gorlov, the CIA man accompanying him. Gorlov, a squat, heavy-browed agent with a distinct Russian accent, smiled easily when Safcek said hello. The colonel observed how catlike Gorlov was in his movements. He had come out of the secret police jungle not long before and still retained the animal-like instincts that helped him to stay alive there. As a trained agent for the KGB, he had worked in Western Europe, infiltrating foreign espionage networks and exposing operatives marked for assassination. Gorlov had one day walked into the American Embassy in Bonn and offered his knowledge to the American government. He said he was tired of the Communist system, its corruption and narrow-minded insistence on world domination. His suspicious interrogators were astounded when he casually named one hundred and seventeen Soviet agents working with covers in Allied governments. His information was startlingly correct and led to the dissolution of clandestine Soviet activities in Europe for nearly a year. For that, his former employers had marked him for death. Plastic surgery had given him a new identity, but he lived always in great fear that somehow, somewhere, the Soviet government would reach out for him and snuff out his life. He often thought of Leon Trotsky whom Stalin never forgot and finally crushed, a pickaxe through the skull. Gorlov fought against his fears and the sickly debilitation that frequently invaded the minds of defectors. These people had rejected their heritage, their friends, their customs. For them life in America was a difficult adjustment. After the initial impact of leaving their homeland and the past, the defectors tried to settle down in obscure suburbs. Their names changed, their careers altered, their original lives erased by a master hand, which carved for them a fictitious birthright, they foundered in loneliness. Though protected from retribution, they had to live twenty-four hours a day in a limbo of artificial serenity, still pretending, as they had in their former clandestine lives, to be something other than they really were. It got to most of them. Gorlov was no exception. When the CIA was approached by the Pentagon for Operation Scratch, Sam Riordan had brought Gorlov forth for two reasons: he knew the man could be an invaluable guide and expert on Russia; secondly, he believed that the summons to duty would make him feel wanted. As therapy, it would be the best possible treatment for a man Sam Riordan knew was vegetating behind his false facade of security.
Safcek liked him immediately. They talked for a brief moment or two before an Air Force lieutenant came into the room and announced departure time. As the two men left the waiting room, Joe Safcek glanced one last time at a pay telephone in the corner. At the other end could be his wife, Martha, whose voice would be warm and reassuring. Safcek looked at the phone for a long moment, then said: “Let’s go, Boris.” They went by jeep along a runway, past administration buildings. Safcek saw a huge jet transport looming up at the far end of the field. When the jeep stopped, Safcek and Gorlov jumped out and ascended a ramp.
As they entered the aircraft, a voice called, “Welcome to the Pakistan Express.” Out of the shadows stepped Karl Richter. As soon as they were all settled in their seats, the engines cut in, and the aircraft moved off into the late-afternoon light. At 6:04 P.M., the C-135 lifted off the ground, and Operation Scratch was under way.
In the inner sanctum of the New York Times Building just west of Times Square, the managing editor, Duane Brewster, sat in his book-lined office, his hand resting on the phone he had just hung up. On the other end of the line had been Daniel F. Michaels, the newspaper’s bureau chief in Tel Aviv, where it was now well past midnight. Michaels had just returned from a highly privileged visit to the Israeli atomic test center, and he had an unbelievable story. Something had obliterated the complex, and the Israelis were at a total loss to pinpoint the source. The cabinet had been in almost continuous session for eighteen hours, and orders had been given to all army, naval, and air units to be on full alert. But strangely enough, Israel’s natural enemies, the Arab states, were not even in a limited war condition. Michaels intimated that the Israelis were seeking advice and counsel from friendly powers. He thought the story was hot and wanted to know if the paper would keep a hole open on page one for him for the first edition. If so, he would file 1,500 words right away.