Now it was only a matter of seconds.
He saw the defenses were disintegrating, that he could not fight an enemy on two fronts, he was flanked, his complex scheme of drawing the frontal into the trenches had come undone. Now the job was simply to get the tunnel defense team down, and devil take the rest.
Yasotay fired a burst at the rushing figures from the right, but like the brilliant troops they were, they came low and hard, with disciplined fire and movement. He could see them now at the far end of the trench, firing their M-16s from the hip, long, raking bursts into his troops, while others broke off and hit his trenches from the side. More and more of them were coming, and as they came, they killed without mercy.
It sickened Yasotay that men so good should die so fast.
Yasotay pulled his whistle out and bleated two brief blasts, waited a second, and then bleated two more.
He watched as his soldiers rose in a scurry from their positions, first the Red Platoon, then the Blue Platoon, each putting out a covering fire as the troopers from Delta closed in from the right and the infantry poured over the main trench at the front. He saw the choppers landing and still more men pouring out and scrambling toward him; then it was time to run himself.
Turning, he slithered through the fire back to the ruined structure that housed the elevator shaft access. Time was short; flares hung in the sky, hissing and popping; everywhere tracers arced through the atmosphere, and where they struck they kicked up blossoms of dust. It all had a terrible slow-motion sensation to it, the desperate run to the elevator shaft, the insistent bullets taking his men down.
He made it.
“Tunnel team inside.”
Fifteen men, the maximum, wedged their way into the car; with the fifteen below, that would give him thirty.
“The gun?” his sergeant major yelled.
The gun? Here it was. Yasotay had to face it, the hardest choice. He had one heavy automatic left. He thought of the mad, fat American standing out in the snowy meadow firing the M-60 from the shoulder as their own fire splashed around him. Before he died, goddamn him, his bullets had shattered the breach of Yasotay’s H&K-21. Now he had one belt-fed weapon, the M-60; if he took it, he doomed the boys up top. They wouldn’t have the fire to hold the Americans off. Yet if the Americans got into the tunnel, he’d need the damned thing.
“Major Yasotay,” the sergeant major shouted again. “The gun?”
Yasotay hated himself.
“In the elevator,” he said. “It has to go down.”
“Gun forward,” yelled the sergeant major, and the weapon was passed through the crowd until it reached the elevator.
“You boys, God bless you,” Yasotay called. “You hold them. You hold them till hell freezes. It’s for the motherland and your children will love you for it.”
“We’ll hold the bastards till Gorbachev comes to accept their surrender,” said a voice in the darkness, sheer bravado, for now it was very late, Yasotay could tell.
He bent quickly to the computer terminal still mounted in the seared metal side of the elevator shaft.
He typed ACCESS.
The prompt came:
ENTER PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK
He typed in the twelve numbers the general had made him memorize, pressed the command key, and the thing winked at him.
OK
He stepped inside the elevator, and the door closed with a pneumatic whoosh, sealing him in for the journey down and sealing out the vision of night combat left behind.
2300
“And where have you been, dear Comrade Arbatov?” asked the KGB man Gorshenin. “The alert for a possible defection went out at seven P.M. when you failed to arrive for your communications duty.”
“I was detained, comrade,” said Arbatov, blinking, wondering why Magda hadn’t alibied for him. Like some idiotic spy melodrama, the lamp in the KGB security office on the third floor had been turned so that it broadcast a steady, irritating beam in his eyes. So stupid! “On a mission. As I explained to Magda Goshgarian, who agreed to stand in for me.”
“The notification of your defection comes from your own unit commander, Comrade Klimov.”
“Comrade Klimov is mistaken.”
“Hmmm. Comrade Klimov is not the sort to be mistaken.”
“Yes, well, this once, he’s mistaken. Look, would I have come back to finish up my night duty if I were trying to flee the coop? Wouldn’t I be at some FBI estate eating steak and squeezing the bottoms of tarts?”
Gorshenin, a humorless youngster of thirty-two with a brightly lit bald head and two dim little technocrat’s eyes behind his glasses, looked at him without emotion. These young ones never showed emotion: they were machines.
“Explain please your whereabouts today.”
“Ah, comrade, you know that GRU operations are off limits to KGB, no? I can’t inform you, it’s the rules. Both units operate here by strictly enforced rules. Or would you prefer the Washington station be entirely staffed by GRU and all you KGB lads could go on to some interesting city like Djakarta or Kabul?”
“Attempts at levity are not appreciated, comrade. This is serious business.”
“But, comrade, that’s just it, it isn’t serious.” Gregor was using all his charm, making sly eye movements at the young prick, smiling with sophisticated wisdom and slavish eyelash flutters. “Frankly, this young Klimov and I don’t get along. I’m old school, orthodox, hardworking, play by the rules. Klimov is all this modern business, he wants corners cut, this sort of thing. So we are locked in struggle, you know. This is just a little business to embarrass me.”
Gorshenin eyed him coolly. He touched his finger to his lips.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Yes, yes, I know how such things can happen in a unit.”
“So it’s merely personal, you see. Not professional. That’s all. A misunderstanding between the generations.”
Gorshenin licked at the bait. Went away. Came back, licked some more. Then bit.
“So, there seems to be a morale problem in GRU?” he said.
“Oh, it’s nothing. We’ll work it out amongst ourselves. Most of our chaps are good fellows, but sometimes one bad apple can — well, you know the saying. Why, only yesterday Magda was saying to me—”
But Gorshenin was no longer listening. His eyes were locked in an abstract of calculus. He whirled through his calculations.
“Ah, say, old fox, do you know what would be the wonderful solution to your problems?”
“Eh? Why, the only solution is that I’ll just wait it out.”
“Now, Gregor Ivanovich, don’t be hasty. You know how excitable young Klimov is. Suppose he were to really fly off the handle? It could be the Gulag for you, no?”
Arbatov shivered.
“Now, Gregor Ivanovich, consider. A transfer to KGB!”
“What! Why, that’s pre—”
“Now, wait. Stop and consider. I could get you in, at the same posting. A man of your experience and contacts. Why, you’d be invaluable.”
Gregor made as if to study the proposition.
“It could be a very profitable move for you. Very comfortable too. None of this backbiting, this snipping and nipping like two hungry pups in a crate.”
Gregor nodded, the temptation showing like a fever on his fattish face.
“Yes, it sounds interesting.”
“Now, of course, I’d have to have something to take to Moscow. You know, I couldn’t just say, we want this man, we must have this man. I’d have to have something, do you know?”