He turned away from the window finally, went back into the drawing room, poured himself a stiff shot of the Glenlivet he had been drinking most of the night, and sat down on the couch with a cigarette.
He closed his eyes. Larissa. Where was this all heading?
ASHES TO ASHES
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes — or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two — is gone.
It was late, and Michael McCandless was dead tired. He had worked through the afternoon and into the evening on the latest batch of field reports on the Argentine situation. The aftermath of the Falkland Islands debacle still lingered; would for years. Some of the reports were in the form of raw data, while several large boxes contained asessment and analysis files; all of them bulky and dull.
For the last few weeks he had been expecting either the President to call, or the DCI to come down on him over the way he had handled the Soviet crop forecast. But no one had called, and nothing had been said.
On the positive side, however, neither had anyone interfered with McCandless’ continuing work on what he was calling the Emerging Soviet Agrarian Threat.
The CIA’S SPEC satellites continued watching the Soviet fields, and DiRenzo continued sending up his reports. McCandless continued collating them with the others, digesting and then filing them.
The Soviet farm fields had been plowed into furrows, dragged to pull up the rocks, and finally disked and planted. Corn and wheat mostly, in a wide variety of hybrids. If the crops came to maturity, and if they were harvested, the Soviet Union would not only become food self-sufficient (something it had been unable to manage for several decades), it would have mammoth surpluses. Which would, McCandless firmly believed, have far-reaching political consequences.
But no one would listen, he thought, looking up from his Argentine reports. Hardly an hour went by when he did not think about it. Yet he knew he was getting nowhere.
He had thought about going to the President again, or at least forcing the situation to a head through General Lycoming. But in the end he had decided against it. He had alerted the White House. He had done what his job demanded of him; he had provided hard intelligence to the President. Whatever became of that intelligence was totally outside his purview.
Swiveling around in his chair, McCandless stared out his third-floor window down at the woods behind the agency complex and let his mind drift, just as the SPEC–IV satellite was at this moment drifting over the Soviet continent.
His worry was very probably moot, he told himself. Most estimates from meteorology were for an early winter… possibly too early for a decent harvest over there. If that was the case, all the acres planted would amount to naught.
Yet, as much as he wanted to comfort himself with such thoughts, he could not. It simply would not work.
In the morning, he would telephone Curtis Lundgren, the Secretary of Agriculture, and find out if the President had indeed passed the first report and photographs along. If he hadn’t, McCandless decided, he would personally meet with Lundgren and lay it all out.
Meanwhile, what would happen next would be up to mother nature and the Soviet farmer.
7
The dying sun was just touching the western horizon, its light reflecting deep red off the upper windows of the skyscrapers in downtown Buenos Aires, when Carlos stepped out of his hovel in the villa miseria. He was a short man, something under five foot five, but his dark-skinned, youthful body was muscular from his constant workouts and field training.
He looked nervously to the left and right, unconsciously fingering a long scar on his side. He proudly carried his training scars from the PLO camp he had attended two years ago outside of Beirut, as well as the slightly misshapen left arm which had been broken during training in one of Colonel Qaddafi’s schools for terrorists in Libya.
Behind the tin-and-cardboard shack where he had lived for the past few months, he pulled aside a filthy piece of canvas, uncovering the only possession, besides his training, of which he was proud: a small Honda 125 motorcycle. He pushed the bike back around to the narrow dirt track at the front of the shack, kicked it to a start, and took off toward the city, several miles distant.
It was still warm, although the South American winter had officially begun. Before the cold came, however, he and the others would be long gone from here. Probably back to Libya for asylum, now that the Israelis had overrun Beirut. Perhaps even to Iran.
As Juan Carlos drove, he found that now that he was actually on his way, now that the months of planning were finally coming to an end, he was nervous. His stomach seemed empty, and the muscles at the back of his legs were tense, as if he had just run ten miles.
Their instructor in Libya had been sympathetic when he had displayed the same problems during the live-fire exercises.
“There is no shame in feeling fear, comrade. The only shame is in allowing your fear to control you.”
Juan Carlos was frightened now. At the same time he was proud of going ahead.
Within fifteen minutes he had made it downtown to the Plaza del Congreso, alive with pigeons and old ladies and children, occasional lovers strolling arm in arm, and cars, motorcycles, and bicycles everywhere.
He threaded his way through the early-evening traffic around to the rear of the fountains, just across the avenue from the slim-domed capitol building, spotting Teva Cernades seated at the edge of the pool.
She jumped up as he pulled to the curb and nervously scanned the area behind and to the left and right of her. There was no one watching them.
“Did you have any trouble getting away?” he asked as she came up to him.
She pecked him on the cheek. “None whatsoever,” she said climbing onto the motorcycle behind him. “You?” Her eyes were bright, and there was a smile on her delicate face. She wore designer jeans, a sweatshirt, sandals, and a bright red bandana to contain her long, light-brown hair.
“I circled around and came up from the university,” he said. “Have you heard from Eugenio?”
“Not today. But he’ll be there, don’t worry about it.”
“I worry about him.”
“You worry about everything, Juan. Perhaps you worry too much.”
Juan Carlos looked over his shoulder at her. She was very slim, almost emaciated, but he had seen her in action in the training camps, and they had been lovers for thirteen months now. He knew that her slender body was powerful and well muscled. She could outshoot, outfight, and certainly outlast most men in the field. Besides his work in the camps, and his motorbike, he was most proud of Teva. “Too much?” he asked. “Someone must be concerned. I do not want to throw my life away uselessly.”
“Nor I, estúpido,” the young woman flared. “But you know what the man told us.”
“No, refresh my memory, my little dove,” Juan Carlos said sarcastically. She hated being called his “little dove.”
“The plan is a good one. It will work. We will see to it.”
“The plan is a good one, because it is my plan. And without concern for detail, even the little man could never make it work.”
Teva’s nostrils flared, but she looked the other way, across at the capitol. “Pigs,” she said half under her breath.