“Then you believe Moscow will want us to make a deal with this turncoat who contacted the Bulgarians,” said Karotkin. His colleague’s unchanged expression was as good as a nod and Karotkin continued, “Which implies that Moscow believes it is possible to build a truly undetectable aircraft. I had hoped that was an exaggeration.”
“Perhaps it is. The first that we knew of it, we learned from a few moments of conversation by two NSA men when the window laser scrambler failed in their limousine. Almost any price would not be too steep for such a craft.” It was a veiled query: how high was that price? Karotkin would reply if he could. Suslov went on, “If they alone have it, the thing could upset delicate balances of force, worldwide.” In this, Soviet spymasters agreed with their counterparts in the West. Men who failed to understand delicate balances failed to rise very far. Of course, each side viewed proper balance as a slight slope in its favor. Even a small fleet of truly undetectable aircraft would tend to shift that slope against the player who relied most on secrecy.
“I cannot divulge the turncoat pilot’s asking price,” Karotkin said. But he pointed at the ceiling.
“If it is high enough, it could tempt good men into a high jump.” Suslov’s phrase for an agent who took his booty and disappeared had its counterpart among U.S. agents. A Soviet agent took the high jump; an American agent went private. Each side knew the other’s jargon, with a few exceptions. There was no jargon phrase in Russian for the hidden packet, including a great sum of money, some agents kept in readiness for the day when they might, for personal reasons, opt for abrupt retirement. Alcoholics had supplied the word when hiding that emergency pint of booze: it was called a “spooker.” Perhaps no phrase in spookspeak had ever been borrowed more appropriately.
“The man who steals a stealth aircraft,” said Karotkin darkly, “is a fool if he asks for less than enough for a lifetime in, say, Paraguay.”
Suslov checked the Omega on his wrist. “He is a fool anyway. Moscow would never give your people the sanction to offer such a price without some means of getting it back,” he said, getting up with a sigh. “We rely too much on ideology, and not enough on the charm of money.”
Karotkin stood companionably, toying with his cards, walking with Suslov toward the door. “Ask yourself, Lenya, how they would get it back, and what damp sanctions they would have. My people may not get the entire task.”
Suslov nodded and walked out. The simplest way to avoid payment was to kill the American turncoat pilotwet work, in Soviet parlance. And that meant the job would probably go not to KGB, but to the violent men of GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence.
Suslov was not a man who believed in unnecessary violence. Like Karotkin, he felt that wet work only escalated until the boyevayas on both sides had turned the world’s great cities into travesties of dusty streets in Wild West movies. It had happened in Vienna, for a time.
And wherever the turncoat pilot chose to deliver that stealth aircraft, he could not be so stupid as to forget thatfor a sufficiently high pricethe West could get wild again.
SIX
On a late spring afternoon in the mile-high altitude of San Luis Potosi, the Mexican sun is fierce enough to fade paint, and the windburned man in stained coveralls found a triangular blotch of shadow near Morales’s rickety hangar. He fingered a pack of Alas from a breast pocket and lit one, idly watching the tail of a Mexicana jet shimmer as it taxied to the distant terminal. The yanqui tourists on that plane were only a mile away. And a world apart. He had almost ceased envying them.
The Mexican youth finished buttoning the cowl on the AgriCat, still one of the best craft around for crop dusting, and shuffled toward that triangle of shade. The older man, whose dark hair was sun-blotched and graying, wished he had some of the kid’s Indio blood, maybe some of his youth, too, to help fight the ravages of sun and wind in the central highlands of Mexico. Evidently this was going to be one of those days when envy drove him early to a cantina. Well, no hay problema, no problem. The Negro Modelo was cold and cheap, and better than Dos Equis. At least he could afford a few of the finer things in life. Good beer, a restored Borgward coupe, and a small whitewashed place with a patio near town, yes; safe travel and young bones, no.
He offered the pack to the youth, who shook his head. “Tomato, Enrique,” the older man insisted, but the youth was already lighting a Winston. He pocketed the pack, thinking the kid was right, the little unfiltered Alas were strong as dynamite fuse and burned just about as fast. Winstons were a luxury. He felt good, knowing Enrique could afford them.
He squinted at the reflection off Morales’s AgriCat, glad that they’d finished the overhaul early because a man could fry petrified eggs on that aluminum by now. Morales, a man who knew how to keep good help, would probably spring for a bonus, and the middle-aged mechanic would share it with Enrique because that kid already had two kids of his own.
The windburned mechanic would have gladly traded his bonus for a chance to test-hop the AgriCat, or for that matter anything else with enough power to make a cinch of a hammerhead stall, but knew Morales would never allow it. The rancher, a better than average pilot with several aircraft in addition to the AgriCat, had good reason for his view. He’d seen his mechanic flying his own fabric-winged MX, an ultralight that was half hang glider and half go-kart which had been sold cheap to Morales and which the rancher had sold more cheaply still. Some pilots were deadly mechanics, some mechanics deadly pilots. Morales watched his excellent mechanic falling around the sky in that damned MX and then, good man that he was, tried to buy it back at a higher price. He’d rather have a live mechanic, he’d said, than a dead pilot. But Mexicans, even rich ones, know how to let a man go to hell as he likes and Morales hadn’t insisted.
It evidently never occurred to the rancher that it took an exceptional pilot to make an ultralight flounder like that, year after year, with never a bent spar. So Morales helped spread the legend: fine mechanic, awful pilot.
Enrique was idly flipping the pages of a new copy of Sport Aviation magazine which Morales subscribed to, though the text was in English and the youth could understand only the pictures. Knowing the older mechanic always kept them, Enrique borrowed it first. The semiofficial magazine of the Experimental Aircraft Association, Sport Aviation’s tattered remnants could be found in hangars all over the world. Presently the youth finished, handing it silently to his companion, and strolled off to douse his head in tepid water. The older man spent ten minutes on a first cursory survey of the articles, which might save lives, and then turned to the Marketplace section which could only lose him in further hopeless envy.
Well, this was a day for it. A Long-EZ with all the trick stuff in the cockpit, only $14,000; a steal, but not on his pay. One of Molt Taylor’s little Imps, half completed; he noted the seller’s address and forgot it. And, near the bottom of the ultralight category, felt gooseflesh in hundred-degree heat, sliding his backside down the hangar wall to squat, his knees trembling.
DEPEW Humongouscomplete. ITS SPEEDY. URGENT, must sacrifice but no foreign sale, please! (607) 734-5137 eves.
His hands did not tremble, but they sweated as he checked the instructions for classified ads. That ad had been placed only two months before, but a lot can happen in sixty days. He did not doubt for a millisecond that the ad was intended to be read by a dead man, but by now the man who had that telephone number might be dead, too; dead, or turned. If so, the ad was as neat a trap as a man could devise.