In Moscow, it was a little after midnight, and Mikhail Ivanovich Darubin had retired for the night. A dispatch from the Soviet Embassy in Washington had reached him shortly before, telling of riot conditions in the enemy capital. Darubin had called Marshal Moskanko to tell him the good news, but the defense minister had given word to his secretary that he was asleep to all callers. Mikhail Darubin’s last official act for the night was to order a cable sent to the embassy in Washington over Premier Krylov’s name. The timetable called for it.
In his Kremlin apartment Premier Vladimir Krylov, however, was not asleep. He had put on a bathrobe and kissed his wife good night before going into the sitting room to do some paperwork. Krylov pulled a small box down from a bookshelf and took out a long-stemmed clay pipe and a compact mound of a brown substance. He flaked off several pieces of the mound with a knife and put them into the bowl of the pipe. Then he lighted it and lay down on a sofa to relax. As he sucked on the stem, inhaling deeply, Krylov began to feel light-headed. The room swam drowsily around him. The lamplight turned into a kaleidoscope playing in his head. He felt suddenly twice his normal size, and he was accepting the plaudits of a crowd in Red Square. They were waving their hands up at him, and he was acknowledging their adulation with sober dignity. To Krylov, the Presidium members standing beside him were midgets, obsequious and fawning. He did not like them.
The euphoric Krylov inhaled steadily on the pipe, and the sweetish aroma wafted through the room. His eyes glazed, and the pipe drooped in his fingers. Atop Lenin’s tomb in his reverie, Vladimir Nikolaievich Krylov did not notice when the pipe filled with hashish fell to the sofa and from there to the floor.
Mounted policemen had taken over Pennsylvania Avenue. The clouds of tear gas had been dissipated among the trees of Lafayette Park. For two blocks around the seat of government, men with guns barricaded all approaches to William Stark. Casualties had been taken to the hospital. Fourteen policemen had been badly beaten. One was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. Henry Fuller had helped pick up some of the marchers. The priest who had earlier defied trim had been found in a gutter, his skull fractured by a horse’s hoof. At least fifty men and women had shed blood. Hundreds were gassed into violent sickness. A depressed Fuller had urged his people to go home and forget their crusade for the time being. Most laughed at him, but they wandered away from the arena, cursing the man behind the draperies in the Executive Wing. For his part, William Stark cursed their gullibility.
It had brought the wrath of millions down on him. Telegrams were flooding into the White House from irate Americans, condemning him for allowing the marchers to be beaten and demanding the truth about the pamphlet. The president of France had called, seeking Washington’s position. So had London and Bonn. The premier of Japan had cabled for clarification.
At 4:27 P.M., four men emerged from the White House and were accosted by reporters. They were the leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives. Representative Jonas Ingram spoke for the group and said the President had assured them that the pamphlet was the work of cranks, intent on spoiling the march. His face grave, Ingram refused to say any more. The white-haired statesman did not mention the awesome news he and the others had been told in the Oval Room. William Stark had shown them the Soviet ultimatum and explained the desperate mission Colonel Safcek had been sent on. Stark had told them the pamphlet was undoubtedly the work of Soviet intelligence trying to paralyze both the country and Stark. Jonas Ingram and the Congressional delegation went away from the besieging reporters with heavy hearts.
The chopper was out of the mountain passes and scudding low over a vast plain, almost desert, which rimmed the southern part of the Soviet Union. Here, in the cradle of ancient civilization, where Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had ruled for centuries with dripping swords, the pilot had no worry about flying into a natural obstacle. Though now at 150 feet altitude, he was more concerned about possible detection from nearby fighter bases. The radar operator tuned to frequencies supplied earlier by National Security Agency tapes. The frequencies were quiet. Only static filled the cabin of the helicopter. No lights appeared beneath the helicopter. The course had been plotted to avoid any settlements in the barren landscape. If a nomadic herdsman heard the rumble of the chopper it did not matter to the crew or Joe Safcek and his team in back.
The pilot checked his instruments, then his watch, and called: “Twenty-five minutes to landing zone, sir.” Safcek checked his own watch and grunted in satisfaction. He leaned over to Peter Kirov and signaled. The Russians followed him to the rear.
At 5 P.M., in Washington, a cablegram was transmitted into the Soviet Embassy on 16th Street NW. Behind the Tudor facade of the mansion, which fronted almost directly on the bustling street, a code clerk rushed upstairs with it to Ambassador Tolypin, who examined it and issued terse orders. Within minutes, the entire staff had dropped their ordinary chores and began packing embassy property into huge cartons. Behind the building, men scurried to limousines to ready them for service. In the basement, several women threw documents into a vast incinerator roaring with flame. One of the packages tossed to the fire contained the last of the pamphlets bearing William Stark’s bogus signature.
In an office building across the street, FBI agents noticed unusual activity as three employees of the embassy hurried out and trundled away lawn-cutting machines from the grounds. The FBI agent in charge trained his binoculars on the windows, usually heavily curtained but now wide open to his gaze.
At Fort Meade, Maryland, a cryptographer was handed the coded text of the Soviet cablegram received minutes earlier by a listening post. He stared at it and grinned: “Christ, this one’s easy. We broke this baby five years ago, and they haven’t used it since. They must be kidding.”
In fifteen minutes he had the answer before him and, shaken, called for his supervisor on the double. The supervisor took one look at the text and called the White House. Robert Randall answered. He wrote down the message and asked for confirmation immediately by courier. Then he took the elevator to the new swimming pool in the basement, where Stark was doing the Australian crawl in solitary splendor. When Randall came to the edge of the pool, Stark asked; “What now?” Randall wasted no time on preliminaries. Glancing at the sheet of yellow paper he carried, he gave Stark the bad news. “NSA has intercepted this.”
EVACUATE EMBASSY WITHIN NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. MOVE HEADQUARTERS TO UN MISSION. DESTROY ALL UNNECESSARY MATERIAL. BEYOND TIME PERIOD CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR SAFETY.
The chopper was just two minutes from the landing zone. In the cockpit, the pilot threw a switch and a brilliant light beamed down to the ground from one hundred feet. A ribbon of road was caught in the glare. No car headlights were visible in either direction. The light was doused immediately. Engine power was reduced, and the craft settled lower in the sky. At 3:47 A.M., Central Asian time, the pilot felt the wheels touch and landing lights flashed in the cabin. He raised his right hand and shoved his thumb upward. In the rear, Joe Safcek turned a key and backed a Russian Army car out the lowered rear ramp. Once clear of the large craft, he pulled up beside the cockpit and raised his left arm out the driver’s window. Then he drove off a hundred yards to avoid the whirlwind of the chopper rotors. In thirty seconds, the craft vaulted into the sky and swung away to the southeast. Safcek wheeled the car onto the main road fifty feet away and headed for Tashkent, sixty miles to the west. Behind him the desert was empty of all life. In the sky, two twinkling red lights glowed for a moment, then were lost to view.