The tension of being out in the midst of an enemy host gripped Safcek, but he remembered his days in Hanoi. He had survived that encounter, he told himself, and could survive this one. He reached his hand out to Luba and squeezed her arm softly. “Act like a tourist, young lady.” For the first time in hours, she smiled back at him.
The streets were suddenly congested with vehicular traffic. The old Tashkent and the new Soviet society blended swiftly into a blurred montage of incredible Oriental beauty and stark modern architecture. Citizens mingled in western and eastern dress. From the desert, men and women in flowing robes and burnooses brushed against their countrymen from European Russia. Safcek maneuvered through this mainstream, calculating from memory the route he had been given at Peshawar. He kept watching for Soviet Army roadblocks or checkpoints, but guessed that in the bustling center of Tashkent he would not have to pass any inspections or close scrutiny. He was right. In thirty minutes, Safcek had gone through the city and reached the northern highway leading to the laser works and beyond.
Six miles southwest of Washington, D.C., a station wagon drove slowly through the dead of night along a side road. Inside, a man dressed in coveralls was using a pencil flashlight to read a map. He spoke rapidly to the driver: “Frank, according to this, we should stop about fifty feet ahead.”
The driver nodded and edged to the side of the road near a clump of trees. The men stomped through tall grass until they came to a dip in the ground. “Here we are, Frank.” The flashlight roved over the map one last time as he made sure. “Put the stuff right in the middle of the hollow.”
Frank bent down and dug into the soil with a spade. He scooped out a hole eighteen inches deep and placed a satchel charge in it.
The men went on in a straight line another fifty feet, and Frank dug again. He put another satchel in the second hole. Then the two men walked casually back to the station wagon. They drove toward Washington until the driver spoke: “Mr. Markle, we’re far enough away now.” Herbert Markle, the Commissioner of Natural Gas Utilities, pulled a small black box out from under the seat, checked it for a moment and then pressed a red button. Behind them the sky filled with fire, and in seconds, the sound of an awesome explosion rocked the car. More explosions, bigger than the first, followed with triphammer velocity. The night was suddenly daylight around them.
The commissioner growled: “Hurry, Frank. I have to go home and check in with the boss.”
The desert still surrounded the Operation Scratch team, but the flat plain had given way somewhat to grassy rolling hills dotted with occasional trees and patches of wildflowers. Joe Safcek watched the mileage gauge carefully, and from time to time he glanced through the right side of the windshield. Eleven miles north of Tashkent, Boris Gorlov pointed suddenly and exclaimed: “Off there in the valley.” Then they all saw the cluster of brick buildings nestled between two low hills that nearly shielded it from a casual passerby.
Safcek drove on until a following car passed him. With the road clear in both directions, he suddenly pulled over, jumped out, and shouted: “Follow me, Luba.” Nodding to Boris, the colonel added: “Make it look good, fellas,” and he plunged down the embankment to a culvert beside the road. He made a mental note of it as a good place to leave the car that night.
Peter Kirov immediately went to the right rear tire, knelt down, and unscrewed the air-pressure covering. Then he put the eraser end of a pencil against the valve and held it there while the tire slowly flattened.
Boris opened the trunk and took out a spare, jack, and nut remover. He put them down beside Peter and sank onto the grass to have a cigarette. Peter looked up and down the road once more, saw no one approaching, and joined his partner.
Safcek and Luba had reached a low hillock two hundred yards in from the highway. They lay side by side inches from the crest. The colonel peered over. “Give me my glasses, Luba.” She reached into a bag and pulled out a pair of field binoculars, which Safcek trained on the valley floor a mile and a half away. The laser complex leaped up at him.
While Luba wrote furiously on a small pad, Safcek analyzed the enemy before him.
“The main road circles up to the gate from my left. The gate itself has three men on it, all armed with AK-47s. There’s a fence maybe ten feet high running around the camp on all sides. Probably electrically charged judging from the wires on the top. Let’s see.” Safcek shifted his gaze. “The big building has forty or fifty soldiers walking their posts. To the left are a row of homes, the scientists’, Richter figured. It looks pretty peaceful in that section at least.”
The colonel focused away from the camp to find further security measures. Under a clump of trees he saw two trucks with SAM surface-to-air missiles on their backs. In front of the gate, he noticed a gully running perhaps two hundred yards out toward the highway. It was the bed of an old stream, dried up years before. Safcek examined the gully for several minutes, noting the natural cover it seemed to afford anyone approaching the installation. Then he whispered: “Luba, they have dogs out on patrol.” He was following a guard walking carefully along the gully floor while holding a hound of indeterminate extraction on a leash. The guard stopped finally, turned, and went back up the gully toward the main gate. Luba grabbed Safcek’s arm and pointed.
The roof of the big building was swinging back from its moorings. A siren began to moan in the distance. In two minutes the black interior of the laser works was exposed, but Safcek could not see clearly into the depths. As he cursed his luck, the enormous barrel of the secret weapon emerged and probed the sky. At least fifty feet of it was naked to the colonel’s inspection and he scanned it carefully. “There’s a line of concentric rings spaced a foot apart all the way down. The gun is made of some sort of silver metal. And the aperture at the front is approximately fifty feet in diameter.”
The siren sounded again, and the laser slowly retreated into its lair. The roof slid back into place, and Joe Safcek was finished with his observations. “That’s a dress rehearsal for tomorrow’s firing, I imagine.” They dropped back from the crest and started toward the car.
Boris and Peter were hard at work. Seeing a car bearing down on them from the north, they had begun fixing the tire. Peter was unscrewing the nuts from the wheel, while Boris stared diffidently at the automobile, which slowed and suddenly pulled over to the opposite side of the road. Two policemen got out; one was unbuttoning his hip holster.
Boris looked up at the visitors who came straight to the side of the car.
“Trouble, Lieutenant?” one asked.
“Just a damn flat. My friend here is the mechanic.”
Peter smiled at the strangers.
“May we see your papers, please.”
“Of course.” Boris and Peter handed their forged documents to the officers, who read them carefully.
Joe Safcek and Luba were only fifty feet away and in the culvert when they heard the voices. They fell to the ground immediately and listened as Boris talked with the police.
“Can you tell us where we can get something to eat farther on?”
One of his inquisitors frowned over the documents and then smiled: “In Leninskoye, you’ll find a great little restaurant called Vanya. And it’s cheap, too.” He handed back the papers, saluted, and walked back to his car with the other policeman. Boris waved once as the auto sped down the highway toward Tashkent.