Tolypin picked up his notes, thanked the newsmen for coming, and walked out the door. Behind him he left frantic men fighting for precious phones.
Hands on hips, Joe Safcek stared down at his prisoner. Kirov was stirring, trying to breathe through his mutilated nose. Seeing Safcek over him, he shrank back. Safcek grabbed a fistful of Kirov’s hair and yanked him upright.
“Kirov, this is your last chance. Answer my questions now, or I’ll start breaking you up into little pieces. What is your organization?”
Kirov’s lips tried to form a word but failed. Safcek asked him again. Kirov was silent.
Safcek was getting desperate. He looked at Luba, who showed no emotion.
Joe Safcek took Kirov’s left arm, bent it over his own knee, and began to wrench excruciatingly.
“Talk, Kirov!” he snarled.
Kirov cried out: “KGB. I’m a captain!” Safcek eased the pressure.
Safcek nodded. “And you infiltrated the NTS in Germany?” Kirov had slipped into the dirt. “Yes, to spy… report back to Moscow.”
“What about this trip?”
Kirov lay quiet for a moment. He was slipping to the brink of unconsciousness, yet he struggled to answer.
“No idea,” he snorted through his swollen nostrils. “No idea until Pakistan.”
“Did you tell anyone there or since then?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Who?”
“Earlier at the laser place. The policemen who stopped us.”
“How did you tell?”
“When Gorlov… talking, I wrote on my papers… warned police not to try to take us there… we’d be back.”
Joe Safcek wanted to rush at Kirov and hit him again, but he controlled himself and asked: “What does K-422 mean?”
“My number… organization.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes, yes.”
Safcek was suddenly very tired. Sick of looking at the evidence of his savagery, he turned away from Kirov.
“Luba, I can’t tell if he’s lying or not. I suppose he could have slipped something to those policemen this afternoon.”
He suddenly whirled on Kirov.
“What else did you tell those men?”
Kirov pulled his face out of the dirt. “Just said spies… coming back tonight.”
Joe Safcek walked away.
A light summer rain beat against the Soviet army car as it sped toward Vnukovo Airport in the Moscow suburbs. In the back seat Marshal Moskanko, ignoring the presence of the chauffeur, spoke forcefully to his companion, Marshal Bakunin.
“Just keep a grip on your emotions, Pavel Andreievich, and in twenty-four hours, you will congratulate me for being a genius. When you get to the laser works, keep in close touch, and I will inform you of the American reactions right away. With Parchuk a traitor, I want you down there to make sure my orders are carried out with precision and dispatch.”
The thin-faced Bakunin nodded glumly as he watched the rain streak the window in the dark. “You will give the Americans enough time to surrender before you use the laser?”
“Of course I will. But we will hear from them long before we have to use it. Stark will collapse well within the eleven and a half hours remaining.”
Bakunin took out a handkerchief and wiped some mud off his boots. “Remember, Viktor Semyonovich, what I said about rats. They are vicious when all is lost.”
The car had stopped in front of the terminal. Bakunin slipped out, and Moskanko called after him. “Why don’t you think of Stark as a koala bear instead? When faced with disaster, they curl up and die of fright.”
Bakunin went through the glass doors without a word.
Moskanko picked up the car phone and put through a call to Marshal Fedoseyev, commander of Soviet land forces, in the Defense Ministry. “He is on his way,” Moskanko said. “No, he did not complain. And we can keep him out of the way until it is over. Maybe I should have given him some books to read to keep him occupied.” Moskanko chuckled as he hung up and ordered the driver to take him back to the city.
The bone in Peter Kirov’s nose had fractured in three places, blocking both nostrils. He was forced to gulp great drafts of air into his mouth while he watched Luba furtively. His left arm hung limply beside him, and the pain in his body brought tears to his eyes. Luba hung menacingly over him. There was no question that she would kill him on a word from Safcek. Whenever Kirov shifted to get into a more comfortable position, she brought the rifle up and fingered the trigger.
Kirov knew his situation was hopeless. Safcek could neither take him along on the mission nor leave him behind alive. Kirov’s own training in the KGB denied him any further attempt at optimism. He was a dead man, but his hasty fabrication about the police might still stop the mission. He regretted having been unable to warn his superiors about this operation inside the Soviet Union. The fact that he was able to mention Tashkent in his radio dispatch did not pinpoint the peril. If he had succeeded, he could have asked for and been reassigned to some safe post in the Communist bloc and allowed to pursue a more reasonable life. Peter’s solitary existence as an agent behind enemy lines had never given him time to form any permanent attachments. Now he was glad that he had no worries about leaving someone behind. His family had been among the 25 million in the Soviet Union killed by the Germans, and his dedication in life was to the Party and the system, which had neither time nor heart to mourn him.
He groaned, and Luba hissed: “Suffer, Kirov, for what you did to Gorlov. I’d like to cut your throat myself.”
Kirov wiped his bloody face with his right hand and sniffed through the bubbles in his nostrils. When Joe Safcek approached him and looked down, he tensed.
“Luba, we haven’t much time left, and it’s pointless to try and beat anything more out of him. I’m not sure he told the other side anything, and even if he did, we have to go ahead.”
Safcek had regained his composure. But he was increasingly disgusted with himself for brutalizing the Russian lying in the dirt and wanted no more of what was to follow.
“So eliminate him.”
Kirov received the words almost as if he, too, were being given instructions.
Safcek did not look at Kirov again. He strode to the stairway and called back to Luba: “Only don’t use a gun. It might attract some attention.”
She nodded and put the automatic rifle up against a wall. Then she came to Peter Kirov, who suddenly twisted away from her reaching hands.
Luba seized him by the throat, and Kirov felt her thumbs pressing in on his windpipe. She just looked at him and relentlessly forced his life away. Kirov was conscious of a terrible pain in his lungs, and his head exploded in lights and black circles that whirled and whirled him into darkness. He fell back into the dirt of the ancient mosque.
Luba went to find Safcek, who was packing equipment in the trunk of the car and did not look up as she approached.
“It’s done, Colonel,” she said softly, and he continued arranging the supplies. At his feet was the box containing the atomic bomb. He carefully put it in a corner away from the handguns and other paraphernalia.
“Let’s take care of the bodies in there.”
Inside the gloomy mosque, the dead Boris Gorlov lay on his back. In the candlelight, Safcek saw Gorlov’s open mouth and glaring eyes. Luba stared at the remains of the KGB man who had defected to the West.
“He must have known it would happen someday,” she murmured.
Safcek knelt down and went through Gorlov’s pockets. He found forged papers and a few rubles. “There’s nothing else, I guess. I thought perhaps he might have something more personal we could bring back with us.” Safcek looked up at Luba.
“It’s not much, is it, for a man to leave behind?” The colonel seemed to be searching her face for an answer, a reaction to his question.