Gregor swallowed. His mouth was awfully dry. If there were going to be a nuclear detonation, wouldn’t it be wiser to get out of there now, while there was still time? Shouldn’t they be evacuating?
“Gregor, do you know where there’s a bomb floating around?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gregor said.
“Now, that’s not what I hear. In fact, we work real hard at covering your place, and we know the rumors just about as well as you do. We believe there’s a one-kiloton nuclear device in the Soviet Embassy. It’s there under strict GRU control, in case push ever comes to shove and the word goes out for a decapitation mission. That would cut reaction time to the seconds it took some brave boy to walk over to it and push a button.”
Gregor held his breath. The rumors had always been dark, a sort of bleak Slavic joke, horrible black rumors, unbelievable. But they were persistent and had lingered for years.
“See, in the old days,” Mahoney explained, “a bomb weighed a couple of tons. No way anybody was going to smuggle one in. But now we’ve got something called Special Atomic Demolition Munition, weighs one hundred sixty pounds. Delivery system, the big book says, is one strong soldier with a backpack. Now, we figure there’s just such a sweetheart somewhere on Sixteenth Street, four blocks from the White House. What do you think of this, old Greg? Anybody in that building dumb enough to pull the switch on himself?”
Gregor suddenly understood. Now it was clear. Now it made sense.
“Yes, I know such a man. His name is Klimov,” said Gregor. “He is the Deputy Rezident, GRU apparatus, protégé and nephew to Pashin.”
The agent nodded.
“Probably another member of Pamyat.”
“It’s worse,” Gregor said. “The bomb would be downstairs. In the code cell, what we call the Wine Cellar. It’s the most secure point in the embassy. Last night my friend Magda Goshgarian was on cipher watch. If Klimov wanted to detonate this bomb, poor Magda alone could not stop him.”
“Yes. They wanted to launch early this morning. But they ran into an eighteen-hour delay. In fact, this morning Pashin sent a short burst of raw noise over the silo radio out into the great beyond to anybody who has a sophisticated radio transmission and receiving system. Like at your embassy. We figure it was some kind of signal to whoever is going to push the button, to tell him to hold off for further instructions. Tonight the show is set for around midnight. If we don’t break in, Pashin will send another signal to whoever it is and — well, the button gets pushed. The bomb in Washington and the missile to Moscow must go off near simultaneously.”
“Yes,” said Gregor. “And now I know why they tried to kill me. They planned so far ahead that they had it set up that this afternoon Klimov tries to kill me with a Spetsnaz ballistic knife. Because with me dead, cipher duty reverts to the previous night’s officer. To Magda. Again Magda is in the Wine Cellar, and Klimov will have no problem with poor Magda. Oh, Magda. Oh, poor Magda, what have I done to you?”
“She’s there now?”
“Yes. I called her, asked her to take my duty. Jesus, it’s the same thing, I gave him the same thing. She’ll die without a whisper. And the little piglet will do it, laughing at history and his own glorious importance.”
The two men were silent.
Finally, Gregor said, “This must not happen. You must stop it. Invade the embassy, no? With police, go in and stop Klimov.”
“The embassy is your territory.”
“But the rules, they can’t mean much now.”
“Gregor, old goat. You got KGB with AKs set at full auto, and kamikaze orders, shoot the hell out of anybody who comes over the wall. And when the ruckus starts, your friend Klimov goes downstairs a few minutes early, and pop goes the weasel. Listen good to your pal Nick, your long-lost best buddy. The only scenario that plays is the following. We need a guy — a good, brave guy, a guy with no nerves, and balls the size of Cadillac hubcaps, a tough, smart, shrewd guy, a James Bond guy, but Russian — to get into the basement and stop this Klimov. That’s the best shot, really the only shot. We got eight hundred commandos in the mountains; here in Washington we’ve got room for only one. You dig?”
“Where you going to find this guy?” asked Gregor, still wondering how he could assist. He figured now they needed help with the floor plans, with the layout, the entry protocols, the Wine Cellar arrangements, maybe with the documents that would get the American agent past the KGB door guards, and …
And then he noticed Mahoney looking at him. God in heaven, they were all looking at him. Molly was looking at him, her big, stupid cow eyes hot and moist and radiant.
“Oh, Gweggy,” she said, “how much better if we had a Green Beret, a policeman, a federal agent. But we don’t, dear Gweggy.”
And then Gregor grasped it.
“We have only you, Greg,” said Mahoney. “Time to be a hero type. Time to join the Green Berets, Gregor old pal.”
2200
Now the data was pouring in: the FBI had located the farm rented six months earlier by one “Isaac Smith” on the border of South Mountain from which the Spetsnaz operation was mounted: there the feds found piles of ammunition crating hidden in the barn, a variety of cars, trucks, and buses by which the men had assembled over the past month by a multitude of soft routes down through Canada or up from Mexico, as well as plans, schedules, a food dump, maps, and an informal barracks — all beds made. And they found a few sheets of what appeared to be chemically impregnated white canvas — four, to be exact. The Bureau guessed that these were some sort of crude Stealth technology for defeating South Mountain’s Doppler radar, and reckoned that they were left behind, unused, by the four men who took down Hummel’s house that morning.
The Pentagon, the CIA, and the DIA had further information on Spetsnaz history and theory. Spetsnaz people were said to be either the very best, or the very worst, as the case might be: highly motivated, extremely competent, utterly ruthless commando units that had operated most furiously in Afghanistan, where they were thought to be responsible for a number of village atrocities.
Going back through the years, it was clear that wherever the Soviets needed quick, deadly strikes, they used Spetsnaz units: the Prague airport, for example, thought to have been seized by airborne troops in the spring of 1968, when the Russians closed down the Czechoslovakian revolution under Dubcek, was actually taken by a crack Spetsnaz seizure team. And it was a Spetsnaz wet squad that aced the Afghanistan president Hafizullah Amin in his Kabul palace in December 1979. Spetsnaz personnel routinely formed the training cadres that the Russians circulated in the third world, having operated in such varied climes as the Peruvian mountains, the Iraqi mountains, the Malay peninsula, the Asian mainland, the paddies of Vietnam, and the highlands of Salvador.
“They’re very good people,” said Skazy, “but we can dust them.”
“The worst part of the operation,” Puller said, “will be the rappel. Sliding down that rope into the darkness. You know they’ll be firing up at you. You’ll put your grenades and maybe a good dose of C-4 down the shaft first, but then there’ll come a moment when the first men of your team have to slide those ropes down into the darkness. And you know enough of the Spetsnaz tunnel defense team will recover to be firing on you as you descend. It’ll be pretty bad, Frank. You figure out yet who’ll be the first man on the ropes?”
Skazy laughed, showing strong white teeth. He was West Point, ’68, and in those days had loved to bus to Princeton, the closest Ivy League school, on weekends, and lounge around in his ludicrous plebe uniform and white sidewall haircut, and just dare the punks to make a comment. He loved to fight. He dreamed of fighting all the time. He burned to test himself in the most fiery of all possible crucibles.